Charlie Konvalinka had not joined the air force because he wanted to kill Nazis. At a pivotal moment in his training, late in 1940, while the Battle of Britain escalated between Churchill’s “few” and Göring’s mighty Luftwaffe, Konvalinka had been interviewed about his wartime aspirations. He could have given the patriotic answer (“To go fight for the King and to shoot down Nazis”), but he didn’t. He was honest enough to say he’d joined because his passion was to fly. And he was marked high for his honesty. However, the one thing Konvalinka had learned even in the first months of his training: the air force sent you where it wanted, not where you wanted.
And so, in late 1940, when Charlie Konvalinka graduated with a “distinguished pass” at No. 2 Service Flying Training School at Uplands, near Ottawa, and received his wings, he wasn’t posted to an operational training unit and sent overseas to shoot down Messer-schmitts. The RCAF sent him to Central Flying School (CFS) in Trenton, Ontario, to become a military flying instructor.
As an instructor he had worked at CFS, then in Moncton, New Brunswick, Stanley, Nova Scotia, and Souris and Gimli in Manitoba, from the middle of 1941 until July 1944. Perhaps to alleviate the initial disappointment of not being sent overseas himself, he referred to the scores of pilots he’d trained as his “calling cards for Hitler.”
Charlie Konvalinka had never expected any reward for being an RCAF instructor. The DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) and the DSO (Distinguished Service Order) were the recognition reserved for successful combat pilots and crew. And only a few instructors were ever decorated with the AFC (the Air Force Cross) for outstanding service in Training Command at home. Nor was there ever in Konvalinka’s mind a sense that teaching young men to fly military aircraft was as heroic as getting shot at on a fighter sortie or bombing mission over Europe. He did, however, believe himself to be a professional. And he had proved it the very first time he got into trouble in a Harvard trainer during the summer of 1941.
“I had just begun instructing at Trenton [RCAF Central Flying School]. A sergeant pilot named Charlton was my very first student. I was training him to be an instructor,” Konvalinka said.
“We’d gone up this one day to do the sequence on spins. The little red patter book says that you’re supposed to climb to around 6,000 or 7,000 feet. And you go through the patter—the instructional jargon that we used. And right from the book Charlton recites: ‘I will now do a spin to the right and the recovery.’ So he throttles back, pulls the nose up until just above stalling speed, then applies full rudder to the right, and the Harvard falls into a spin.
“Now, a Harvard spin is a bone-shattering experience under normal conditions. It bounces and jumbles its way around when it spins.
But this one didn’t. It was like a knife cutting through butter. And it was new to me. I’d never experienced anything like it.
“I guess we were down around 4,000 feet and I got on the intercom tube and said ‘That’s good. Take her out now.’ And I hear this shaky voice from the rear cockpit say, ‘I’m trying . . .’
“I said, ‘I have control’ [and took control via the dual controls in the front cockpit].
“The standard recovery for a spin to the right is to kick on full opposite rudder—in this case the left rudder—push it down all the way, and centre the control column laterally. The Harvard will then kick out to the left. And as soon as it does, you centralize the rudder pedals, stand on them, hold them straight, and let the airplane find its way out of the spin . . .
“Well, I did all this. Nothing happened. It just didn’t work. But I knew there were secondary things you could do. Use the engine. When it’s spinning you’ve got the power off. So I put the power on. No good. I tried everything: put the flaps down, then up. Nothing. Then finally a combination of flaps and using the engine, and it started to come out, awfully damn low. There was no way we could have bailed out and made it. We were below a thousand feet and coming down fast.”
When Konvalinka returned to the station and reported the Harvard’s extraordinary spin conditions to the Trenton aircraft riggers, they concluded that the wing had been “out of rig” (that is, improperly aligned). This resulted in an aerodynamic instability, which produced the nearly uncorrectable spin. In other words, the wing could easily have torn itself right off and the Harvard would certainly have crashed, taking both Konvalinka and his student to their deaths.
So although Konvalinka couldn’t yet claim to have faced the cannon and guns of a Messerschmitt 109 in a dogfight, nor to have steered an eighteen-ton Lancaster bomber through a sea of exploding flak, he’d faced death in the cockpit of a Harvard trainer.
“In that emergency,” Konvalinka said, “I had gone cold. The emotions were entirely deadened. The brain took over.”
On the day his son was born in a mission hospital in Gimli, Manitoba, in July 1944, Flight Lieutenant Charlie Konvalinka got the news he’d been waiting for. At long last the air force had posted him overseas to operational duty (or “ops” as it was familiarly called). He would see England and prepare himself for what he called “the most dramatic and traumatic event of a lifetime.” (Other combat pilots described ops as “long periods of boredom interspersed with a few seconds of sheer terror.”)
All his experiences seemed to flash before him, however, when he was called a coward in a Bournemouth movie theatre.
Konvalinka and the orientation officer were hustled from the theatre and into the office of the station commander for an explanation. His years as a flight instructor and a flight commander told Konvalinka how to deal with this kind of confrontation. He described the theatre incident as “a difference of opinion between two officers of equal rank.” Apparently, the station commander didn’t see the need to discipline either man for his outburst. The issue was dropped. Charlie Konvalinka advanced to operational training and eventually realized his dream to fly Spitfires.
But the question remained: who had taught this pilot and nearly 50,000 other Allied military pilots to fly? Who had trained the nearly 150,000 qualified navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers, airgunners, and ground crew who were poised for the invasion of France, Italy, and Japanese-occupied Asia? Who had turned the tide of the air war after the retreat from Dunkirk, near-defeat in the Battle of Britain, the devastation of the Blitz, and the air routs at Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong? In short, who had transformed the Allied air forces into the most powerful weapon in the world? The answer: Konvalinka and hundreds of instructors like him in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
Rooted in the First World War, when thousands of airmen were recruited and trained for the Royal Flying Corps (later the Royal Air Force) in Canada and the United States, and then formally planted in Canada with much greater Canadian control at the outbreak of war in 1939, the BCATP (or JATP for Joint Air Training Plan, or EATS for Empire Air Training Scheme) was a program to standardize the training of air crew for military service.
In its five-and-a-half-year lifespan—from December 1939 to September 1945—the BCATP would expend about $2 billion in the training of air crew from nearly every nation of the free world. It would ultimately deliver air superiority to the Allied war effort. The product of its training—nearly a quarter of a million air and ground crew—would spearhead the major land and sea operations to take back Europe, North Africa, and much of the Pacific. It would supply RAF Bomber Command with the trained airmen for a third of a million sorties. It would produce some of Canada’s 160 fighter aces who accounted for more than a thousand victories in the Second World War. It would help sustain the flow of bomber and fighter aircraft to the European theatre of war by supplying trained pilots and navigators to Ferry Command. And it would