ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
SIXTY-THREE MINUTES after the expiry of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany on September 3, 1939, a British Blenheim reconnaissance bomber flew from Wyton airfield to photograph German shipping north of Wilhelmshaven. It was the Allied Bomber Command’s first sortie of the Second World War.
The same day eighteen Hampden and nine Wellington aircraft searched for but found no German warships in the North Sea. That night Whitley bombers dropped 5.4 million propaganda leaflets over Hamburg, Bremen, and nine cities in the Ruhr valley. The next day, twenty-nine Blenheim and Wellington bombers returned to Wilhelmshaven to attack the battleship Admiral Von Scheer and the cruiser Emden. A quarter of the aircraft were lost, and Bomber Command recorded its first casualties of the war. It was nearly six weeks before German bombers made their first attack on British territory, damaging two cruisers in Scotland’s Firth of Forth.
The opening months of the war in western Europe were in stark contrast to the violent clashes of arms that had taken place twenty-five years before. In 1914 Anglo-French forces had faced an immediate German invasion, so they struck eastward with great force; they were repulsed with heavy casualties. In fall 1939 and early 1940 the French and English Allies moved cautiously up to the Westwall (the German border fortifications) and then retreated to the dubious safety of the Maginot Line. What followed were months of relative inactivity—a period dubbed by the Germans “Sitzkrieg” and by American journalists the “Phony War.”
On the ground, operational activity consisted of building defences from scratch between the end of the existing Maginot Line on the Belgian border, northwest towards the North Sea. This kept the Allied defenders busy, but out of combat, in the autumn and winter. However, there was one weapon with which the Allies could strike directly at Germany—the bomber.
During the Phony War between September 3, 1939, and April 8, 1940, RAF Bomber Command continued to conduct reconnaissance, dropped more leaflets and seventy-one tons of bombs, and attacked Germany’s North Sea shipping and a number of its seaplane bases. The pilots made 996 daylight sorties and 531 night sorties. Sixty-two aircraft were lost, which represented 4 percent of RAF Bomber Command’s engaging aircraft. However, that figure does not reflect the air crew casualties—pilots, navigators, wireless operators, and gunners. They numbered in the hundreds, in just seven months of hit-and-run air warfare.
One survivor of those first thousand Bomber Command sorties was a young Canadian RAF pilot officer. During the late 1930s, when the RCAF offered very few opportunities for aspiring military pilots, W.J. “Mike” Lewis, from Welcome, Ontario, managed to get to Britain via a program that offered short-service commissions for Canadians in the RAF. Just as the war broke out, Lewis completed his training as a bomber pilot and was immediately posted to No. 44 RAF Squadron at Waddington in Lincolnshire.
“I flew one of the first Hampden missions against German shipping,” Lewis recalled. “But it was extremely frustrating. The British government wouldn’t let us drop bombs on Germany, only targets at sea.”
Pilot Officer Lewis’s impatience to “get on with it” was shared by most RAF air crew. Along with the general excitement, Lewis recalled the tireless efforts of his commander early in the war. Newly appointed RAF Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris was a constant presence at No. 5 Group Bomber Command stations involved in the early action. The two met, and Mike Lewis, far from family and home in Canada, was invited to the Harrises’ home for Christmas dinner in 1939.
“It was a social occasion,” Lewis said. “Very little talk of the war. But the frustration was obvious to all of us.”
The orders not to bomb German land targets seemed all the more unreasonable when British Air Ministry officials assembled all the air crew at Lewis’s station for an announcement about the potential severity of the war. Lewis remembered the ministry representative saying that “if Britain went beyond the Phony War to a full war, [the ministry] expected that Bomber Command in strength would be wiped out twelve times during the first year of hostilities.” In other words, Lewis was told, “You’ve got a month to live.”
The escalation in the number of sorties, the rising fatality statistics, and the harsh realities recognized by the Air Ministry were further proof that as the air war intensified, qualified air crew would be desperately needed. And if seven months of bomber and air crew losses and a plea from British officials were not enough to strengthen the resolve of the BCATP organizers, then an incident in the skies over England certainly was.
At the time, Jack Meadows, an RAF flying instructor, was teaching prospective fighter pilots on North American-built Harvards. “At No. 15 Service Flying Training School at Kidlington, just outside Oxford,” Meadows said, “[we were] insulated from the battle and [knew] little more than we read in the papers. We had our own job to do, teaching the pilots to replace the casualties. We got on with it, vaguely aware that if an invasion ever happened we would be trying to strafe the beaches in our 150-mph Harvard advanced trainers, with one fixed forward .303 Browning gun and eight small bombs hung on external racks.
“A pupil in an Anson, on his first night solo from our satellite airfield, [was] shot at by an intruding Junkers 88 and, almost certainly accidentally, collided with it. The episode became worked up into a case of a gallant deliberate ramming by the unarmed RAF pilot. . . . Enemy activity often stopped night flying.”
It was tough enough for young trainees to keep their attention focused on cockpit instruments without having to scan the night sky for intruders looking for quarry. It was tougher still for an instructor to build student confidence in the air when his classes were constantly grounded by the threat of Luftwaffe attack. The death of the Anson pilot trainee and others like him underscored the need to get Canada’s fledgling air training plan and its nucleus of experienced instructors off the ground.
Canada was 3,000 miles from the front; instructors there could coax their novice students into the air without fear of enemy intrusion. Flying conditions were ideal. Canada was situated centrally in the Commonwealth and strategically close to the largest industrial power outside Europe—the United States. All the plan needed were updated facilities and aircraft and enough instructors qualified to operate them.
The first military experience of many Canadians who went on to become those much-needed instructors was Manning Depot (or Manning Pool). One of the recruits was Livingston Foster, who turned twenty a couple of weeks after Canada declared war on Germany. His first experience of flying had occurred on the Niagara escarpment west of his family’s farm near Grimsby, Ontario, in 1934. On a lazy afternoon late that spring, he and a bunch of his school chums saw an odd-looking contraption come down and land in a field. The pilot of this Pitcairn Autogiro—a forerunner of the helicopter—was barnstormer Walt Leavens, of the Leavens Brothers outfit at Barker Field in Toronto. Leavens was willing to offer rides. Foster and his chums were game, until the moment they entered the machine.
“Cap” Foster, as he was known (named after his godfather, Captain Livingston, a veteran of the First World War), didn’t want to appear frightened. “The apprehension inside me bordered on sheer terror,” Foster later wrote. “Even though I was shaking in my boots, I wasn’t going to let my friends see it. I was going up, come hell or high water. The strange part of it, though, was that once we got airborne, the most wonderful feeling came over me—sublime enjoyment—and it lingered long after my flight was over.” (Leavens later recorded in his makeshift log—a spiral notebook—that on “6 June 1934 . . . one little chap went up in the Giro. He had been weeding onions to pay for his ride—ten cents a long row. I gave him as long a ride as possible.”)