At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, September 3, 1939, the telephone rang at Murton Seymour’s home in St. Catharines. Wing Commander George Howsam of the RCAF in Ottawa was on the line. “The balloon’s up,” he said. “Come to Ottawa immediately.” Seymour spent the next twenty-four hours sending and receiving telegrams. By Monday morning, the remaining fourteen CFCA members were ready to assume responsibility for the elementary stage of flying training of pilots for the RCAF.
The training given by the clubs formed the basis of the Elementary Flying Training Schools of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Before the official inauguration of the BCATP, civilian-run EFTSs had trained more than 500 provisional pilot officers and leading aircraftmen; by the end of the war the number totalled 41,000. That spring afternoon in Ottawa, when Chubby Power presented the McKee Trophy to Murton Seymour, Seymour’s brainchild—a nationwide system of elementary flying training schools—was already giving shape to the RCAF’s amorphous air training plan.
In the muddy fields on the outskirts of St. Catharines, Seymour’s own aero club hired its first manager and chief flying instructor. Until that spring, Fred Pattison had been working for $18 a week as a mechanic at Frank Murphy’s garage in downtown St. Catharines; when he took the manager’s job his salary jumped to $40 a week. Meanwhile, the club put the call out across southwestern Ontario for flying instructors to teach the first batch of RCAF provisional pilot officers. A twenty-seven-year-old commercial pilot named George Dunbar drove down from London and applied.
“Hell, I didn’t think I had enough experience,” Dunbar admitted, “I didn’t even know where St. Catharines was, and had a devil of a time finding it. But they hired me on the spot—$50 a week and $2 an hour for every hour I flew.”
Dunbar had logged many flying hours by spring 1940. As a kid growing up near London, he had wheedled his way into becoming a sort of roustabout at Lambeth airfield. He served an apprenticeship as an aircraft engineer and in the mid-1930s had learned to fly, earning his commercial pilot’s licence in less than two years. George’s mentor was the London Flying Club’s chief flying instructor, Captain Tom Williams, who, although he had started his career in the cavalry, claimed to have flown in 500 dogfights as a Royal Flying Corps fighter pilot during the First World War. As a bush pilot he took only the toughest contracts; he hauled nitroglycerin into northern mining camps (where even the ground crews would vacate the airstrip until Williams had safely landed and shut down his Waco freighter).
“Tommy had the same sort of cavalier approach to teaching,” Dunbar remembered. “I know I soloed before I ever did a spin in an airplane. People were talking about spinning, and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. So he says ‘Okay, get your helmet and let’s go.’ And away we’d go. He’d spin to the left and spin to the right. And he’d say, ‘Now you do them.’ And I did them. And that was that. I guess that’s what I learned from him. It didn’t take me long to know exactly when [a student] was ready to do something in the air.”
As ready as George Dunbar was to instruct, as eager as Defence Minister Chubby Power was for success, as desperate as RCAF Wing Commander George Howsam was for pilots, and as confident as Murton Seymour was in the entire aero club plan, the scheme experienced early growing pains. The day before St. Catharines EFTS got its first manager, a windstorm blew in from the northwest and flipped two of the club’s aircraft on their backs, damaged the club hangars, and brought down another of the club’s aircraft in downtown St. Catharines, killing both the pilot and his passenger.
“The school just wasn’t ready,” George Dunbar said. “Where the airport was situated was quite low—it’s only a foot or two above the waterline of the lake so it was very difficult to fly. You’d smash airplanes up quite easily, because they’d get stuck in the mud and go over on their backs.” Even after the staff sent photographs of the muddy field to Ottawa, asking the government to macadamize the runways, there were problems. “Overnight the construction crews would dig a hole for a sewer and leave it unmarked. And next morning we’d be watching an aircraft coming in after a flight and all of a sudden it would fall into one of these holes, break a prop or a wingtip, and there’d be another airplane out of commission.”
Nevertheless, flyers from all parts of Canada, eager to fly in the RCAF, responded to the military emergency. Some accepted their provisional pilot officer status and went back to flying school. Flyers such as Frank Montgomery, who had hopped the train in Saskatoon when National Defence telegraphed him, and Wess McIntosh, whom fate had snatched from the RCN destroyer Fraser before she sank, got their PPO commissions and took preliminary training at Camp Borden and the main RCAF station at Trenton. PPO Russ Bannock from Edmonton went to the Aero Club of British Columbia, and PPO Fred Macdonell took elementary flying at the Halifax Flying Club. By the middle of 1940, all four of them were informed that they would not be sent to operational training units overseas; the system was so desperately short of flying instructors that they would be ploughed back into the program as the first crop of BCATP flying instructors.
Shortly after it began accepting its first trainees, St. Catharines welcomed ten former RCAF ground crewmen to their club hangar. At their home station, Trenton, the ten recruits had been standard tradesmen assigned to general duties, but when they heard about the flying club schools, they had requested permission to remuster as air crew and qualify as pilots. J. A. Sully, their commanding officer at Trenton, granted them ten days’ leave. They pooled what money they had; one of them contributed the money he’d made by auctioning off a car he’d won in a raffle. Dunbar remembered them “trickling in one Sunday afternoon after hitchhiking to St. Catharines. They didn’t have enough money for lodging . . . and the first night made arrangements to sleep in the hangar. Next day, Fred Pattison and some of the boys scrounged some tents and helped rig them up at a tourist camp a couple of miles from the field. We thought everything was okay, but a couple of days later, another instructor overheard that they were not all getting three squares a day because of insufficient funds. [Pattison] took the problem to local clubs, whose members immediately agreed to provide dinner for the group every day.
“They were an enthusiastic gang; they had to get through the course in so short a time. They were so enthusiastic that when they didn’t have any studying to do at night, they would come back and help the ground crew service the aircraft they were flying.” By the end of the course, seven of the ten had qualified for pilot licences.
Nearly all of those who graduated from the aero clubs’ elementary flying training advanced to become RCAF pilots or air crew and served under the RAF in the early days of the war, some in Operation Dynamo (the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk) or the Battle of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940. Of the seven Trenton tradesmen who qualified at St. Catharines, three were reported missing-in-action, one became a prisoner of war, and one won the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Meanwhile, events in Hitler’s Weser plan were accelerating. In February 1940, General von Falkenhorst had assumed command of the German expedition to invade Norway. In March, the French and British planned the mining of Norwegian waters. And on April 7, the RAF spotted German ships steaming north towards Narvik and Trondheim.
Thirty-seven-year-old Fridtjov Loberg was stationed at Trondheim air base with the Royal Norwegian Air Force. Loberg had joined the air force when he was twenty and had learned to fly in a Farman aircraft, which he remembered looking like “a scaffold with an engine sitting in the middle of it”; he and his fellow cadets were not issued parachutes because “the air force was afraid we might run out of them.” When the Germans invaded six of Norway’s seaports on April 9, 1940, Loberg and his colleagues at Trondheim were still ill equipped.
“We got a phone call at the airfield,” Loberg remembered, “that there was a four-engine plane coming in our direction. We had two eighteen-year-old Fokker aircraft and quickly sent them up. But when the German aircraft