Operational flying, or combat flying, was the objective for nearly all young pilots joining the RCAF in fall 1939. They didn’t have to read the editorial columns in the Globe and Mail or listen to Lorne Greene’s “Voice of Doom” on CBC Radio news broadcasts to realize that RCAF-trained fighter and bomber pilots would soon be on their way to Britain in support of the Royal Air Force and the British Expeditionary Force in Europe.
Bush pilot Russ Bannock wanted to be a fighter pilot. Medical student Fred Macdonell wanted to be posted overseas as his father had been in the Great War. Saskatoon Aero Club pilot Frank Montgomery had grown up listening to stories of First World War combat from his neighbour, former RFC/RAF fighter pilot Vic Graham, and he longed for the same kind of adventure. And Don Rogers figured a short stint teaching PPOs elementary flying was a sure stepping stone to an operational posting.
It wasn’t to be. The irony was that their experience and eagerness to enter the RCAF worked against these ambitions. Because they were so quick to enter the air force, which was now committed to producing nearly 20,000 qualified air crew a year, their dream of flying combat missions at the controls of Hurricanes or Spitfires could not be realized. For many of the qualified pilots who joined the RCAF in 1939 as provisional pilot officers or civilian instructors, there was a much less heroic and yet more crucial role to play.
The RCAF dragnet for pilots qualified to teach caught a former Winnipeg barnstormer named Wess McIntosh just as he’d made up his mind to fly in the air force. Six years before, his grandmother had died and left him $500, and he’d convinced his father to let him invest the money in flying lessons at the Northwest Aeromarine flying school in Winnipeg. Within a year he had earned his certificate of competency. His first flying job was with the flying club in Winnipeg, doing test flights of various aircraft. By 1935 he was barnstorming, taking up thirty to forty customers on a good day at $1.50 per ride.
“Sometimes, I would go into factories and sell tickets for 25 cents each,” McIntosh recalled. “Then as soon as I sold a dollar-and-a-half’s worth, I’d put the names in a hat and draw out the name of the guy who’d won the airplane ride. He’d come out to Stevenson field and he’d get a flight over Winnipeg and back. We didn’t play around at all. No aerobatics . . . I didn’t know how to, anyway.”
By 1939 McIntosh had 407 hours’ flying time. But try as he might to get more substantial work with Connie Johansen’s air chartering company or Punch Dickins’s Western Canada Airways at Stevenson Airport in Winnipeg, it never worked out. McIntosh joined the Canadian Naval Reserves, who were looking for volunteers to ship out overseas to take delivery of a destroyer that the Canadian government had purchased. If all else failed, McIntosh figured he might get an interview in Britain with Imperial Airways, who were hiring Canadians.
“Just as I got to Halifax, war was declared,” McIntosh continued. “So they shut the gates on us. We sat there for the seven days it took Canada to declare war on Germany.” McIntosh believed that the Canadian government deliberately declared war on Germany a week later to allow its two destroyers—the St. Laurent and the Fraser— to steam from the Pacific through the American-controlled Panama Canal to the Atlantic without jeopardizing American neutrality. While in Halifax, McIntosh got permission to transfer to the air force.
“The air force said they’d take me on as a sergeant pilot, if I got released. (I didn’t know it at the time, but they’d already sent a pilot’s commission to my home.) So, I got paraded before my Navy CO, who said, ‘We need you here. Why do you want to leave for the air force?’ I showed him my logbooks and explained that I’d get an air force commission if I joined, and he said, ‘Permission granted.’
“I was discharged from the navy on the twenty-ninth of September, 1939. And it’s a good thing, because if I had shipped out on the destroyer Fraser, I wouldn’t be here.” (On that trip, the Fraser was rammed and sunk.)
Within two weeks, instead of being at the bottom of the Atlantic, Wess McIntosh was 5,000 feet in the air—a student again—flying as many training aircraft as the air force could scrape together—Fleet Finches, Harvards, and Airspeed Oxfords.
In the instructors’ cockpits, at the second set of controls, were the best civilian and military flying instructors the RCAF could find. During those first weeks at the Borden and Trenton air force stations, McIntosh took instruction from Canadian bush pilot Johnny Fauquier (later decorated for his “pathfinder” operational flights over targets in Europe) and then from a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant named Dick Waterhouse.
“Dick was an Englishman,” McIntosh said. “He’d been in the RAF quite a while and he was just good, that’s all. In theory, we were flying with an officer. But after the first salute in the morning, that was it. He was the instructor, I was the student. But we didn’t have to salute and stand at attention all the time. He treated me well. Dick had a dog called Pluto, a beautiful black lab. This dog could come into the mess and pick up a glass of beer in its mouth and take it to Waterhouse.”
For McIntosh’s course of civilian students, unnecessary saluting was a waste of effort, and time for beer in the mess was limited. Zero Day was fast approaching, and the quota of fully trained flying instructors seemed unattainable. When McIntosh completed the elementary program at Borden there was no ceremony to mark the beginning of his advanced flying at Trenton. The RCAF wartime agenda overlooked the graduation of his class and McIntosh’s Category C instructor’s designation.
“They realized we hadn’t had our wings [graduation],” McIntosh said. “I think they had actually forgotten. So they had a quick wings parade. There weren’t many of us. They just lined us up in a hurry in a hangar and sort of said, ‘Here, you’re a military pilot now.’”
On March 18, 1940, McIntosh conducted a familiarization, or introductory, flight with his first student, a pilot officer named Rhodes. Rhodes was the first of more than 500 students McIntosh would teach in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. His official blue RCAF Pilot’s Flying Log Book eventually recorded more than 3,000 hours of instruction flying.
“The strange part,” McIntosh remembered, “was that I was still a sergeant pilot. Here I’m an instructor. Here’s my first student— a pilot officer. We had been in the air force before them, but we were junior to them. They were all provisional pilot officers. But there wasn’t time to worry about it.
“I had six students at a time. I used to fly six times a day, day in and day out [because] the big push was on. It looked like they would need every pilot they could get their hands on in England.”
It would be another eight months before the first BCATP graduates arrived in Liverpool, England, for posting to operational units. A great deal more planning needed to be done. There were aerodrome sites to be selected, as the RCAF had only five of its own at the beginning of the war. Barracks, hangars, and other station buildings had to be designed and built. Supply systems to support the operation of more than a hundred planned air training stations—everything from hot and cold running water to parachute packing to mail delivery and laundry facilities—had to be organized.
Because the air force owned only a few dozen of the projected 3,500 training aircraft it would need, Tiger Moths, Fleet Finches, North American Harvards, Avro Ansons, and Fairey Battles had to be procured for the millions of instructional hours that lay ahead. The recruiting system itself had to be streamlined; indeed, in November 1939, recruiting had to be suspended to allow overworked officers at the recruiting centres to take stock. And more qualified instructors were always needed. Fortunately, though, for Wess McIntosh, his fellow instructors, and the RCAF, an accident of history gave the BCATP—newborn in December 1939—time to mature and deliver its first offspring to the war effort before it was too late.
* Because much of the BCATP training would be done in winter, there was also a sudden demand for aircraft skis on elementary