Pan, and his father fell sick with influenza. He died four days later. Fred had intended to follow in his father’s footsteps, to become a doctor. But the declaration of war in September 1939 changed his plans too. Once they signed him up, the air force sent him for basic flying instruction to the Halifax Flying Club and then on to Camp Borden early in 1940.
“I trained on Anson Is,” Macdonell explained. “They were pretty primitive. The brakes worked on air pressure, so they had to fill up tanks [with compressed air] so you had brakes when you landed. And each time you used the brakes, the pressure would go down.
“I remember I had my first solo at the island airport in Toronto. It was a really tiny runway for an airplane like an Anson. And with those funny air brakes in the Anson, I had visions of going off the end of the runway. I thought I wasn’t going to land without going into the water. It wasn’t really frightening. You were young and you sort of took it in stride. You were more on an edge then.”
Frank Montgomery was quite used to “primitive” aircraft. His family had farmed near Vanda, Saskatchewan, where he was born in 1916, but a series of crop failures forced them to move to Saskatoon. There he discovered the Saskatoon Aero Club and started flying, financing his lessons by doing odd jobs—painting houses and picking rocks from farmers’ fields. He flew a Gipsy Moth and a Waco 10. He took his flight test for his private pilot’s licence in an old Avian, while the district inspector, who’d travelled up from Winnipeg, watched from a deck chair on the Saskatoon airfield.
Montgomery was working on his commercial licence when he received his telegram from National Defence on November 3, 1939. He got on the train in Saskatoon and arrived at Camp Borden three days later.
“They put me right into a Harvard,” Montgomery said. “Now, I’d flown nothing but Gipsy Moths and that old Waco. Well, it didn’t make any difference [to them]. You were supposed to be able to fly. If I’d had more experience, I might have said, ‘Hey, what about a check flight?’ But in those days, if you could hack it, you were in. If you couldn’t, you were gone.”
Experience in the air was a rare commodity in Canada. Even a few extra hours and a slightly higher designation made all the difference to an individual’s prospects. For example, twenty-three-year-old Don Rogers had his civilian instructor’s licence from the Hamilton Aero Club, so when the RCAF contacted him in August 1939, he was offered a special course at Camp Borden. Rogers was checked out and quickly reassigned back to the Hamilton Aero Club, where “in mid-September we received the first four of a year-long series of PPOs to train to the equivalent of private pilot’s qualifications.”
Another seasoned flyer pressed into early military service was Len Trippe. Like Peter Troup and Babe Woollett (who had left the RAF in England to fly bush runs along the lower St. Lawrence and north into Quebec), Trippe left the Air Force Reserve in England, arrived in Canada, and joined the Ontario Provincial Air Service based in Sudbury. He did his first bush piloting in flying boats in 1924. In the late 1920s he began instructing at various southern Ontario flying schools. When times got tougher and flying students fewer in the 1930s he barnstormed to boost business. Trippe and his colleagues dreamed up “death-defying” acts, including parachute jumps and wing-walking, and improvised stunts such as the one they used to entertain a crowd at a Victoria Day celebration at Port Dalhousie on Lake Ontario. “We tied an inner tube to the undercarriage of the Moth,” Trippe recalled. “Then once we were in the air over the water [parachutist George Bennett] crawled out of the cockpit, hooked his legs through the inner tube and hung head down, no parachute or anything. George couldn’t even swim a stroke.”
By the late 1930s Trippe found himself at one of the busiest private airfields in southern Ontario—Barker Field, in what was then northwest Toronto. Three aviation firms ran businesses there: Patterson and Hill, Fred Gillies Flying Service, and Leavens Brothers, where Trippe found work instructing. President Clare Leavens toured the countryside with a sound truck selling flying lessons and passenger flights at a cent a pound. On any given Sunday there’d be twenty-four or more aircraft taxiing around Barker Field, taking off and landing without the aid of air traffic control. There was never an accident.
“In 1939, the government came to Leavens Brothers,” Trippe said, “and asked if Leavens could gather up all the private pilots they could possibly find that were interested in becoming instructors for the RCAF. These pilots [the provisional pilot officers] were given a living-out allowance, AC2 [Aircraftman 2nd Class] pay, and their flying free—a hundred hours with us—still in civilian clothes.
“So we gathered up a bunch of pilots, including private pilots from the States. We bought six Tiger Moths and the RCAF gave us six Fleet Finches. All we had to do was supply the gas and oil and service our own aircraft. We had about fifteen students there at a time. And we rushed them through.”
“For us as instructors,” Don Rogers added, “there were the few minutes of nervous tension, watching your student’s first solo, and the extended period of tension, waiting for him to return safely from his first solo cross-country flight. Yet we knew we were performing an essential task for the war effort. It seemed like a relatively lowly first step to operational flying.”
Operational flying, or combat flying, was the objective for nearly all young pilots joining the RCAF in fall 1939. They didn’t have to read the editorial columns in the Globe and Mail or listen to Lorne Greene’s “Voice of Doom” on CBC Radio news broadcasts to realize that RCAF-trained fighter and bomber pilots would soon be on their way to Britain in support of the Royal Air Force and the British Expeditionary Force in Europe.
Bush pilot Russ Bannock wanted to be a fighter pilot. Medical student Fred Macdonell wanted to be posted overseas as his father had been in the Great War. Saskatoon Aero Club pilot Frank Montgomery had grown up listening to stories of First World War combat from his neighbour, former RFC/RAF fighter pilot Vic Graham, and he longed for the same kind of adventure. And Don Rogers figured a short stint teaching PPOs elementary flying was a sure stepping stone to an operational posting.
It wasn’t to be. The irony was that their experience and eagerness to enter the RCAF worked against these ambitions. Because they were so quick to enter the air force, which was now committed to producing nearly 20,000 qualified air crew a year, their dream of flying combat missions at the controls of Hurricanes or Spitfires could not be realized. For many of the qualified pilots who joined the RCAF in 1939 as provisional pilot officers or civilian instructors, there was a much less heroic and yet more crucial role to play.
The RCAF dragnet for pilots qualified to teach caught a former Winnipeg barnstormer named Wess McIntosh just as he’d made up his mind to fly in the air force. Six years before, his grandmother had died and left him $500, and he’d convinced his father to let him invest the money in flying lessons at the Northwest Aeromarine flying school in Winnipeg. Within a year he had earned his certificate of competency. His first flying job was with the flying club in Winnipeg, doing test flights of various aircraft. By 1935 he was barnstorming, taking up thirty to forty customers on a good day at $1.50 per ride.
“Sometimes, I would go into factories and sell tickets for 25 cents each,” McIntosh recalled. “Then as soon as I sold a dollar-and-a-half’s worth, I’d put the names in a hat and draw out the name of the guy who’d won the airplane ride. He’d come out to Stevenson field and he’d get a flight over Winnipeg and back. We didn’t play around at all. No aerobatics . . . I didn’t know how to, anyway.”
By 1939 McIntosh had 407 hours’ flying time. But try as he might to get more substantial work with Connie Johansen’s air chartering company or Punch Dickins’s Western Canada Airways at Stevenson Airport in Winnipeg, it never worked out. McIntosh joined the Canadian Naval Reserves, who were looking for volunteers to ship out overseas to take delivery of a destroyer that the Canadian government had purchased. If all else failed, McIntosh figured he might get an interview in
