to Halifax, war was declared,” McIntosh continued. “So they shut the gates on us. We sat there for the seven days it took Canada to declare war on Germany.” McIntosh believed that the Canadian government deliberately declared war on Germany a week later to allow its two destroyers—the St. Laurent and the Fraser— to steam from the Pacific through the American-controlled Panama Canal to the Atlantic without jeopardizing American neutrality. While in Halifax, McIntosh got permission to transfer to the air force.
“The air force said they’d take me on as a sergeant pilot, if I got released. (I didn’t know it at the time, but they’d already sent a pilot’s commission to my home.) So, I got paraded before my Navy CO, who said, ‘We need you here. Why do you want to leave for the air force?’ I showed him my logbooks and explained that I’d get an air force commission if I joined, and he said, ‘Permission granted.’
“I was discharged from the navy on the twenty-ninth of September, 1939. And it’s a good thing, because if I had shipped out on the destroyer Fraser, I wouldn’t be here.” (On that trip, the Fraser was rammed and sunk.)
Within two weeks, instead of being at the bottom of the Atlantic, Wess McIntosh was 5,000 feet in the air—a student again—flying as many training aircraft as the air force could scrape together—Fleet Finches, Harvards, and Airspeed Oxfords.
In the instructors’ cockpits, at the second set of controls, were the best civilian and military flying instructors the RCAF could find. During those first weeks at the Borden and Trenton air force stations, McIntosh took instruction from Canadian bush pilot Johnny Fauquier (later decorated for his “pathfinder” operational flights over targets in Europe) and then from a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant named Dick Waterhouse.
“Dick was an Englishman,” McIntosh said. “He’d been in the RAF quite a while and he was just good, that’s all. In theory, we were flying with an officer. But after the first salute in the morning, that was it. He was the instructor, I was the student. But we didn’t have to salute and stand at attention all the time. He treated me well. Dick had a dog called Pluto, a beautiful black lab. This dog could come into the mess and pick up a glass of beer in its mouth and take it to Waterhouse.”
For McIntosh’s course of civilian students, unnecessary saluting was a waste of effort, and time for beer in the mess was limited. Zero Day was fast approaching, and the quota of fully trained flying instructors seemed unattainable. When McIntosh completed the elementary program at Borden there was no ceremony to mark the beginning of his advanced flying at Trenton. The RCAF wartime agenda overlooked the graduation of his class and McIntosh’s Category C instructor’s designation.
“They realized we hadn’t had our wings [graduation],” McIntosh said. “I think they had actually forgotten. So they had a quick wings parade. There weren’t many of us. They just lined us up in a hurry in a hangar and sort of said, ‘Here, you’re a military pilot now.’”
On March 18, 1940, McIntosh conducted a familiarization, or introductory, flight with his first student, a pilot officer named Rhodes. Rhodes was the first of more than 500 students McIntosh would teach in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. His official blue RCAF Pilot’s Flying Log Book eventually recorded more than 3,000 hours of instruction flying.
“The strange part,” McIntosh remembered, “was that I was still a sergeant pilot. Here I’m an instructor. Here’s my first student— a pilot officer. We had been in the air force before them, but we were junior to them. They were all provisional pilot officers. But there wasn’t time to worry about it.
“I had six students at a time. I used to fly six times a day, day in and day out [because] the big push was on. It looked like they would need every pilot they could get their hands on in England.”
It would be another eight months before the first BCATP graduates arrived in Liverpool, England, for posting to operational units. A great deal more planning needed to be done. There were aerodrome sites to be selected, as the RCAF had only five of its own at the beginning of the war. Barracks, hangars, and other station buildings had to be designed and built. Supply systems to support the operation of more than a hundred planned air training stations—everything from hot and cold running water to parachute packing to mail delivery and laundry facilities—had to be organized.
Because the air force owned only a few dozen of the projected 3,500 training aircraft it would need, Tiger Moths, Fleet Finches, North American Harvards, Avro Ansons, and Fairey Battles had to be procured for the millions of instructional hours that lay ahead. The recruiting system itself had to be streamlined; indeed, in November 1939, recruiting had to be suspended to allow overworked officers at the recruiting centres to take stock. And more qualified instructors were always needed. Fortunately, though, for Wess McIntosh, his fellow instructors, and the RCAF, an accident of history gave the BCATP—newborn in December 1939—time to mature and deliver its first offspring to the war effort before it was too late.
* Because much of the BCATP training would be done in winter, there was also a sudden demand for aircraft skis on elementary training aircraft. Coincidentally, in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, boat builders Warner and Carmen Elliott had perfected a wood lamination process in the manufacture of aircraft skis for legendary bush pilot Harold “Doc” Oaks and for Admiral Richard Byrd’s three Antarctic expeditions in the 1930s. When BCATP authorities found out about their work, the Elliott brothers were astonished to receive orders from de Havilland for 400 sets of skis; local service station operator, Bill Fuller, converted his service bays into an assembly line and the ski orders were met.
ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
SIXTY-THREE MINUTES after the expiry of Britain’s ultimatum to Germany on September 3, 1939, a British Blenheim reconnaissance bomber flew from Wyton airfield to photograph German shipping north of Wilhelmshaven. It was the Allied Bomber Command’s first sortie of the Second World War.
The same day eighteen Hampden and nine Wellington aircraft searched for but found no German warships in the North Sea. That night Whitley bombers dropped 5.4 million propaganda leaflets over Hamburg, Bremen, and nine cities in the Ruhr valley. The next day, twenty-nine Blenheim and Wellington bombers returned to Wilhelmshaven to attack the battleship Admiral Von Scheer and the cruiser Emden. A quarter of the aircraft were lost, and Bomber Command recorded its first casualties of the war. It was nearly six weeks before German bombers made their first attack on British territory, damaging two cruisers in Scotland’s Firth of Forth.
The opening months of the war in western Europe were in stark contrast to the violent clashes of arms that had taken place twenty-five years before. In 1914 Anglo-French forces had faced an immediate German invasion, so they struck eastward with great force; they were repulsed with heavy casualties. In fall 1939 and early 1940 the French and English Allies moved cautiously up to the Westwall (the German border fortifications) and then retreated to the dubious safety of the Maginot Line. What followed were months of relative inactivity—a period dubbed by the Germans “Sitzkrieg” and by American journalists the “Phony War.”
On the ground, operational activity consisted of building defences from scratch between the end of the existing Maginot Line on the Belgian border, northwest towards the North Sea. This kept the Allied defenders busy, but out of combat, in the autumn and winter. However, there was one weapon with which the Allies could strike directly at Germany—the bomber.
During the Phony War between September 3, 1939, and April 8, 1940, RAF Bomber Command continued to conduct reconnaissance, dropped more leaflets and seventy-one tons of bombs, and attacked Germany’s
