of Czechoslo vakia himself, when the latter was a guest at our house.THOUGH THE WAR CLOUDS over Europe had considerably darkened by the mid-thirties, they were still almost totally ignored. But more people were more active in preparing for war—limited though that activity was—than was generally known at the time. In Canada my father was one of them. Circumstances brought this about.
Shortly after the Liberal government came to power in Canada under William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1935 my father was created an Air Vice-Marshal of the RCAF. He became close friends with the new Minister of National Defence, a tall, burly Scot, Ian Mackenzie. They were a strangely assorted pair. My father was short, no more than five feet seven inches, and by now quite portly. Mackenzie, lean and standing well over six feet tall, towered over him. They differed more seriously in another respect. Mackenzie firmly believed that the air force should be assigned primarily to the protection of Canada’s shores. My father insisted that it should be an offensive weapon, on the ground that defence could best start at the battle line. Both agreed, however, that the air force should be expanded as rapidly as possible.
This was the reason, or at any rate one of the reasons, for the appointment of my father as Honorary Air Vice-Marshal, with full powers to assist the government in the appropriation of more funds for the air force by wooing public support. As an honorary, non-serving officer he was not restricted by military dictates, and the prestige of his high rank and his own fame gave authority to his propaganda activities.
Not all the newspapers agreed with the theme he kept repeating in speeches across the country . . .“We cannot close our eyes to the possibility of war, in which event our most valuable contribution would be a trained air force. I plead with the government to devote more adequate funds to the expansion of the Royal Canadian Air Force. . . .”For more than a year speeches like that made him a controversial figure. But in March, 1936, the need for preparation was clearly spelled out when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland in violation of the peace treaty. In England Churchill warned: “All this means that the Nazi regime has gained a new prestige in Germany and in all the neighbouring countries. But more than that, Germany is now fortifying the Rhine Zone.”
At this time not by any means all of my father’s time was taken up with air force matters. They were, after all, extracurricular (and without pay) and the business of making a living as an oil company executive came first. His employers recognized, though, that his role as a World War I hero and crusader for air power increased his value to the company, and they gave him all the time off his secondary role required.
A typical entry in his diary in those mid-thirties days read:
Very tired tonight. Rode on Mount Royal this morning then walked to the office because it was clear. At noon sat for Jongers for an hour. Portrait coming along well. Lunch at the Ritz. Ross Malcom tells me Sladen leads the market. I bought another four hundred shares. Phoned Ian Mackenzie about my Ottawa speech. Sent him a copy. This afternoon played golf with Paul Rodier at Laval. It rained and I played atrociously. Later at the club saw a Mr. O’Brien who wants to write some sort of book about me for American school-children. Margaret and I had cocktails at the Bells then dined at home. I spent two hours at the piano practising. Phoned Ian again about changes in my speech. At 11 p.m. George and Fiorenza Drew came in and stayed until 3 a.m. It was hilarious.
This typical entry indicated that he was still busily engaged in proving himself. For example, he learned to play the piano in three months and played surprisingly well. But he practised as much as four hours a day. He did the same thing with table tennis, in which at that time he became keenly interested. For many weeks we lived with the Ping-Pong table in the living room so that he could practise at any time the mood came upon him.
This relentlessness concealed and to a great extent overcame his inner frustrations and anxieties. This is the impression he made on Quentin Reynolds who wrote:
It is very disappointing to meet ex-champions twenty years after. They are fat and dull and they are living in the past—looking at the present through the glamour of the past. Bishop was different. Bishop lives in the present and the past to him is merely a record of time—a record that he is too busy to look back upon.
He is an intelligent, cultured gentleman, a bon vivant, and extraordinary host and one of the keenest businessmen in Canada. But to me he’s the toughest man in the world—the only living person to whom one can point and say “There is a man without fear.”
On one point Reynolds was entirely right—my father was an extraordinary host. He entertained lavishly, and everything was done correctly—up to a point. Beyond that point his ingenuity—and often his eccentricity—took over. At one party he had the entire meal served backwards—coffee first, then dessert, entree and then soup, followed by cocktails. Leffo entered into the spirit of things by entering the room backwards to serve the meal. On one St. Patrick’s Day he held a party patterned on an old “rag” at the mess in France. He even poured champagne into the piano and danced on it. For another party he rounded up all the organ grinders in Montreal, so that guests were greeted in the apartment foyer by a dozen grubby organ grinders (some complete with monkey) all churning out different tunes.
But on another point Quentin Reynolds was dead wrong. Bishop was far from being the most fearless of men. For one thing, he was terrified of the very element of flight—altitude. Once he pointed to a window a few floors above the street and told me with a shudder: “If I leaned out of that window, I’d faint.”
He never got over the memory of a pathological fear of ground fire. And while he seemed to seek out enemy planes with an eagerness far beyond the call of duty, he once confided to me that every time he sighted an enemy plane his heart pounded and his throat went dry.
Even the confident, almost aggressive air he assumed as a businessman sometimes masked black moods of depression. Once he terrified my mother by telling her, “There are so many things buzzing around in my mind I sometimes wish I could stop them by blowing them out with a bullet.” But it is doubtful that he ever seriously considered suicide. He was too interested in the “things buzzing around” in his head.
The thirties were drawing to a close, and so was peace in Europe. Hitlerism cast its shadow over Czechoslovakia, and in England Prime Minister Chamberlain was timorously advancing the view that war could be averted through compromise. Churchill continued to thunder warnings of danger. His was the only strong voice that cried out and for the most part it was tragically ignored. In Canada my father’s voice became an echo of Churchill’s, and for the most part it too was ignored.
But progress was made. Defence Minister Ian Mackenzie persuaded the Canadian government to increase its expenditure for building the air force. On August 10, 1938, he appointed my father Honorary Air Marshal, the highest rank in the country at the time. He also became head of the Air Advisory Committee, made up of a group of Canadian war pilots including his brother-in-law Hank Burden.
Ian Mackenzie and my father still pretended that they were at odds on the role of air power. “I’m making an Imperialist out of Ian,”my father boasted. And the Defence Minister retorted, “I am making an isolationist out of Bishop.”
At the end of September came the brief false respite of Munich. What happened next is history, but the Bishop family had a private view of it from the exiled President Edouard of Czechoslo vakia himself, when the latter was a guest at our house.
“If I had been allowed to fight I could have beaten Hitler. Hitler was bluffing and wasn’t prepared for war!” declared.
My father’s own reaction to Munich was recorded in a letter he wrote at the time: “There’s no use kidding ourselves. We are in for a war and this Chamberlain thing has only postponed it. War is coming. I dread the thought but we are going to have to prepare for it quickly. My guess is that it is less than a year away.”
He now devoted all of his time to air force matters. One outgrowth of his anxiety was an impulsive scheme that turned out to have great foresight. He was convinced that Canada’s earliest and most important role in case of war would be to provide aircrew material—and unlimited space in which to train additional airmen. An essential part of this effort, he realized, would be U.S. citizens—like the Lafayette Escadrille of World War I.
My father telephoned a former war pilot, Clayton Knight, who since the war had become a noted illustrator. Clayton was dining in Cleveland at the house of an old comrade-in-arms, Thomas J. “Tommy”Herbert, who had become the Attorney General of Ohio. After Knight was summoned to the telephone, he returned to the table shaking his head in bewilderment.
“That was Billy Bishop,” he told Herbert. “He wants me to help him in a plan to smuggle pilots up to Canada if war starts.”
Herbert almost choked on the food he was chewing. “As Attorney General I should be the last to know about this,” he complained. “It’s illegal to solicit an American citizen to fight in a foreign war if America is neutral.”
My father set about trying to make it legal. On March 27, 1939, he visited the White House to discuss plans for enlisting American flyers in the RCAF with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And as an indirect result, the Clayton Knight Committee was set up to handle voluntary enlistments. Offices were established in centres throughout the United States. As a memoir of his visit, Roosevelt gave him a picture autographed “To my great friend Air Marshal Bishop.”
The next day when Knight telephoned the U.S. State Department to confirm the arrangements, the voice that answered said: “This is the German Embassy.”
“Brother!” Clayton said afterwards. “That was the wrongest wrong number in history.”
During that summer I accompanied my father and the defence minister on a tour of Canadian air force stations from coast to coast. In five years the activity of the RCAF had trebled. Britain had sent over new planes, including a squadron of the latest Hurricanes. By now the total strength was four thousand men. But more training planes were needed, and it was far easier for enemy observers to detect American breaches of neutrality in the matter of airplanes than of men. So my father devised a method of bringing United States’ training planes into Canada. They landed at airports that straddled the border between the two countries, and were left “unattended” on the American side a few feet from the border. Whereupon Canadian aircraftmen lassoed them and dragged them across the boundary line, without the military personnel of either nation “violating” the border of the other.
As the crisis in Europe mounted, the silver RCAF Grumman amphibian assigned to my father appeared more and more frequently over the Burden family’s summer place in the Muskoka Lakes near Windermere to take him to Ottawa for conferences. Perhaps a little ironically, the Grumman’s route was the same as that flown by the ill-fated Bishop-Barker airline. Every time the aircraft arrived, everyone in the area was sure it was a signal that war had started.