Nobody could have foreseen the plan’s success in 1939.
Even though a confederation of four Canadian provinces had negotiated national independence from its colonial parent in 1867, and had grown politically to nine provinces and geographically from the Atlantic to the Pacific by the twentieth century, Great Britain maintained a strong military presence in Canadian air space.
Even though the first controlled flight in the British Empire had been recorded by a Canadian in Canada in 1909, it went down in history as the achievement of a British subject, John McCurdy.
Even though Canada had trained and sent 2,500 pilots overseas to serve the Allies in the First World War, Canadian airmen never flew in combat in a Canadian flying service. Ten of the twenty-seven leading Allied air aces were Canadian, but even W.A. “Billy” Bishop, the most decorated Canadian airman in the First World War, flew missions against the Germans as a member of the Royal Flying Corps.
Even though by 1915 pilot training was being carried out at two flying schools in Canada—at Curtiss Aviation in Toronto and the Aero Club of British Columbia—the instruction and graduation of military pilots and air observers remained under British authority. Instructors and students were duty-bound solely to the War Office in London, England. The entry qualifications, the training syllabus, and the graduation standard (or awarding of “wings”) were all set by the Royal Naval Air Service or the Royal Flying Corps (amalgamated in April 1918 as the Royal Air Force).
At the Armistice, Canada’s air strength consisted of 110 airplanes, twelve airships, six kite balloons, some camera equipment donated by the British government, and about 1,700 air crew returning from the European war. That number declined in the peacetime years that followed. In 1920, under the jurisdiction of a Canadian government air board, Camp Borden opened an air training facility, offering a combination of ground school and flying instruction aboard either SE5a fighters or de Havilland 9a bombers. Service in Canada’s nonpermanent air force consisted of no more than four weeks’ training every two years. Moreover, its objectives were largely non-military— to license pilots for civil aviation, to conduct government air operations (forestry and fish patrols and photographic surveys), and finally, should the need arise, to defend Canada.
Encouraging recruits to enlist was not a priority, so young men did not flock to join Canada’s ad hoc air force. Even though the Canadian Air Force gained permanent status from the government in 1923 and, in 1924, permission from the King to be called the Royal Canadian Air Force, in 1931 the RCAF graduated only twenty-five pilots—and because of restricted budgets granted only one of them an active appointment. Canadians were still given an option to join the RAF; each year, Britain reserved permanent commissions for two Canadian university graduates. However, during the general prosperity and relative peace of the 1920s and then the depression of the 1930s, Canadians did not rush to train and serve in the RAF.
An emphasis on air training re-emerged in the late 1930s. The British government, aware of the renaissance of the German air force, planned the construction of seven air training schools. One would be located in Canada. It also launched an RAF recruiting program in the Dominions; under its Trained in Canada Scheme, fifteen candidates for the RAF would be selected by the RCAF, sent to the facilities being built at Trenton, Ontario, and trained according to the RAF regimen.
Group Captain Robert Leckie, a Canadian member of the RAF, was among the first to promote the advantages of permanently establishing military flight training in Canada. His service as a distinguished flying-boat pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service during the First World War and his postwar appointment as Superintendent of RAF Reserves gave him plenty of credibility. His “Proposal to Establish a Flying Training School in Canada” had three selling points: first, Canada was fairly close to the United Kingdom; second, it was close to a highly industrialized United States; and third, revitalized training in Canada would increase the flow of air crew into the RAF.
The proposal was shot down by Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who disapproved of the use of Canadian territory to train British airmen. Throughout 1938, despite repeated pitches by British industrialist J.G. Weir and the British high commissioner in Ottawa, Sir Francis Floud, King maintained that Canadians were “prepared to have our own establishments here and to give in those establishments facilities to British pilots to come and train here. But they must come and train in establishments which are under the control of the government of Canada.” King also refused to make any decision that committed Canada to enter any future European war on the British side. He felt that by siding with Britain, he ran the risk of angering the French-speaking Quebec electorate.
The prime minister’s outwardly staunch Canadian nationalism signalled his commitment to keep any training scheme in Canada Canadian-controlled and his determination to be personally involved in its orchestration. Thus began the political give and take. In July 1938, Mackenzie King invited another British delegation to negotiate an acceptable air training program. The British secretary of state for air responded by sending Group Captain J.M. Robb, commandant of the Central Flying School of the RAF, to discuss training facilities in Canada.
This move did not bring the two sides any closer together. Britain still wanted Britons and Canadians trained in Canada for the RAF; King still would not commit Canada to training pilots for Britain. The prime minister also felt that the proposed scheme undermined Canada’s own defence requirements and—if the RCAF were required to recruit for the RAF—the autonomy of the RCAF. (Even though the RCAF came into being on April 1, 1924, as a successor to the Canadian Air Force, it remained under the control of the Canadian Army until December 13, 1938.)
By January 1939, the two sides were back where they had started. All they had to show for many months of negotiation was a lot more misunderstanding and thirteen new military pilots (graduates of the Trained in Canada Scheme) trained by the RCAF under the RAF syllabus for RAF service. Two months of renewed negotiation followed, resulting in an agreement to jointly train fifty British pilots for the RAF and seventy-five Canadians for the RCAF.
These negotiations resulted in alterations to the RCAF training organization. Instead of the existing RCAF ten-month pilot training course, pilots would now be trained in three stages of sixteen weeks each, according to a revised RAF syllabus. The most innovative feature of the joint training plan was that the elementary training would be contracted out to eight civilian flying clubs across Canada. This was the idea of another Royal Flying Corps veteran of the First World War, Major Murton Seymour. A Canadian, Seymour had trained in Vancouver at one of Canada’s first two civilian schools; that connection would help establish civilian leadership in what became the Elementary Flying Training Schools of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
This first attempt at joint air training never really came to fruition. Of thirty-three Canadian student flyers who entered elementary flying at the civilian aero clubs, twenty-seven were due to receive their RCAF pilot’s flying badges when war broke out in September 1939. Meanwhile, the fifty British pilot trainees who were destined for service training in Canada never left England. In late 1939, they finished their training at home and were immediately posted to RAF operations against Germany.
However, the 1939 bilateral pilot training proposal capitalized on the strengths of both the RAF and the RCAF training traditions to develop a common training approach. Both sides had discussed requirements and the availability of training aircraft. Civilian flying schools had proved their worth in sharing the training load with both air forces. Canada had come to understand Britain’s anxiety over the growing air power of Germany. And the RAF had come to understand the RCAF’s aspirations for autonomy in air crew training in Canada.
Partly as a statement of national autonomy, the Canadian Parliament made its own declaration of war on Germany a week after Britain. On that day, September 10, 1939, discussions between the British Air Ministry and Canadian air force officials began in London to build upon the RAF-RCAF joint training experiment of the previous twelve months. British Air Ministry officials calculated the number of pilots each Commonwealth dominion might contribute to the war effort. All agreed that three or four