In July 1933, pioneering Italian aviator General Italo Balbo launched his historic Second Atlantic Aeronautica—a six-week mass transatlantic flight of seaplanes from Orbetello, Italy, to Chicago and back. Balbo wanted to commemorate the first decade of fascism in Italy and to impress his superior, Benito Mussolini. About noon on Saturday, July 15, Balbo’s aerial armada of twenty-four Savoia Marchetti seaplanes (en route from Montreal to Chicago, where a huge reception awaited them) passed the southern edge of Georgian Bay, right over Charlie Krause’s home town. “I always wanted to fly,” Krause recalled, “I guess because for a country kid growing up on the farm, airplanes were fascinating. But the day that Italian outfit flew over town, that sort of sealed it.” Eight years later Krause would join the RCAF, serve several years as a pilot instructor in the BCATP, and still make it overseas in time to fly night operations in Mosquitoes and survive the war.
Young Charley Fox of Guelph, Ontario, used to listen to his father’s war stories. Thomas “Will” Fox had fought in the Boer War, serving with the British cavalry in the 10th Hussars, the same regiment as Lord Baden-Powell. As a result, Will Fox raised his sons, Ted and Charley, in a pretty strict fashion. But Charley’s decision to join the war effort had much more to do with a summer day in 1934 when the RAF paid an unexpected visit.
“I never was one to make airplane models, or even think of getting up in the air,” Fox said. “In fact, one time when they offered me a flight over the fair in Hamilton, I said, ‘No. I’m afraid I’ll be sick.’ But that year there was a flight of Hawker Furys visiting from No. 1 Squadron of the Royal Air Force. I had read about them. They were silver-coloured fighter biplanes. They were doing demonstrations over Ontario and Quebec. And all of a sudden one day I hear this roar. Five silver airplanes came zooming from over the top of College Hill, glinting in the sunlight. Then swoosh . . . they were gone. But I never forgot it.” By the time No. 1 RAF Squadron was in full combat back in Britain in 1940, Fox had enlisted in the RCAF. Before he went overseas in 1943 to fly Spitfires, he taught scores of BCATP trainees how to prepare themselves for the toughest flying assignments of their lives.
Others caught the aviation bug in more casual ways. Alan Stirton, the third son of six children in a Saskatchewan farm family, was smitten by flying entirely by accident. Each weekday he would hitch up the family pony, Fanny, to a buggy and head out for the Petrolia schoolhouse near Moose Jaw.
“One day in the fall of 1930, luck was with me. I was driving home from school, and a small airplane landed in our neighbour’s stubble field. We hustled old Fanny into the barn and ran across the fields to admire this wonderful machine. Lo and behold, if the pilot didn’t offer me a ride. What a thrill. I was only twelve at the time. But from then on I dreamed of becoming a pilot.” Stirton did learn to fly, but getting his pilot’s licence was a painful experience.
In spite of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s assurance from Hitler in September 1938 that there would be “peace in our time,” the Canadian government prepared for war by offering private flying clubs a $100 grant for every student pilot who received a licence. Dick Ryan, a First World War fighter pilot who managed the Moose Jaw Flying Club, placed ads in local newspapers offering to split the grant with any aspiring pilots.
“One free ride to assess your ability to become a pilot,” Ryan promised, and offered a private pilot’s licence if the trainee passed the tests after twenty hours of flying time. Total cost to the student: $150. The ad attracted a local RCMP constable, a couple of auto-mechanics, and a few others, including Al Stirton, who admitted, “I didn’t know a rudder from an aileron.” But it didn’t take him long to scrape the cash together, and by October 1 he was airborne in a ten-year-old Gipsy Moth with Ryan himself. After seven and a half hours of dual instruction, Stirton did his first solo flight. And on November 14, 1938, he took his private pilot’s test from an examiner visiting Moose Jaw from Edmonton.
“In those days,” Stirton remembered, “no examiner dared risk his life by riding in the airplane with a student, but stayed on the ground and ‘observed’ the flight from the seat of his car. I was instructed to climb above the aerodrome, do a medium turn to the left, then one to the right, followed by a steep turn each way; then put the aircraft into a spin and recover; then fly to Ross Collegiate about one and a half miles distant and back; then circle the water tower in figure-eight turns; then do a spot landing back at the aerodrome.
“The examiner had positioned a square canvas sheet with a red X on the field. When I was downwind, he would wave a white flag and I was to close the throttle, glide down, land, and stop within fifty feet of the spot. All went well. And I stopped with the spot under the right wing.”
At that point, Stirton noticed the instructor, Bob Eddie, speeding towards the Gipsy Moth in his car. Eddie leapt out of the driver’s seat and proceeded to tear a strip off the pilot trainee.
“What did you do that for?”
“Do what for?” Stirton asked.
“I’ll give you credit for getting down to the spot,” Eddie fumed, “but you were turning at too low a height. You know you can’t turn below 400 feet. Go up again, and if you’re too high, side-slip off some height. But for God’s sake don’t turn so close to the ground!”
“A side-slip,” Stirton repeated. “Okay.” And off he went.
Unfortunately, Stirton had never been taught how to side-slip. On the second approach to the field, he throttled back, turned the Gipsy Moth to line up with the examiner’s canvas sheet, noticed he had a bit too much height and lowered his left wing to slip sideways down closer to the ground.
“Suddenly, the aircraft stalled and sank like a brick,” Stirton recalled. “I had forgotten to lower the nose to maintain flying speed as I came out of the side-slip, and the poor Gipsy Moth hit the ground so hard that the undercarriage was punched up into the fuselage. The wings drooped down onto the grass. And I cracked three ribs.”
The crash of Gipsy Moth CF-ADI nearly put an end to Stirton’s flying ambitions. But by January 18, 1939, the aircraft had been repaired and was flying again, and Bob Eddie’s blood pressure was back to normal. Al Stirton passed and received his pilot’s licence. In May, he had accumulated seventy hours on airplanes at the Moose Jaw Flying Club, and earned his commercial licence. But flying jobs were few and far between that summer, so he just took friends for rides to build up his hours.
If he had stopped flying after that crash landing, Stirton might never have been invited to join the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. He wouldn’t have taught the basic principles of flying to hundreds of young military pilot trainees at St. Catharines Elementary Flying Training School or flown any anti-submarine patrols in Sunderland flying boats with No. 423 RCAF Squadron over the North Atlantic.
In fall 1939 the Blitzkrieg against Poland began in Europe. Britain declared war on Germany on September 3. A week later Canada did the same. And that’s when the war came looking for Al Stirton. The day after Canada declared war—September 11—Stirton received a telegram from the minister of national defence inviting him to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Naturally, he answered yes, “thinking that I’d become a hero as a fighter pilot.”
Similar missives arrived on the desks of flying clubs and private aviation companies from Halifax to Vancouver to Yellowknife. Just about everyone who was anyone in the commercial flying business in Canada received a telegram.
Wilfrid “Wop” May received one in Edmonton. A former Royal Flying Corps pilot, May had returned from the First World War a hero with a DFC and twelve enemy aircraft to his credit. The following year he had launched the first air service at Edmonton’s Blatchford Field. May is credited with the first commercial flight from Edmonton, the first freighting flight for Imperial Oil into the Northwest Territories, and the first commercial passenger flights into the Peace River district of Alberta. May’s mercy mission of flying diphtheria vaccine in an open cockpit Avro