the sea of astonished faces around him, “I did. I said it!”
Charlie Konvalinka had never flown a combat mission in his life. Yet he had accumulated more than 1,850 hours of flying time; he was expert at the controls of every aircraft used for training service pilots in the Allied arsenal—aircraft such as two-seater Harvards, twin-engine Ansons, Lockheeds, Cessna Cranes, Airspeed Oxfords, and even biplane trainers such as Tiger Moths and Fleet Finches. At the age of twenty-six, Konvalinka was considered old by a fighting air force whose combat pilots were mostly nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one.
Before he received his overseas posting, Konvalinka had been an RCAF flying instructor. In four years of service in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, he had taught perhaps a hundred other young men to fly. He’d shown some of them how to dodge and weave and throw a fighter aircraft around the sky to elude an enemy closing in for the kill. He’d instructed others how to bring a multi-engine aircraft home on just one engine. In short, he’d taught them how to survive.
Some of his students, now on operations, had flown fighter cover in the campaign to retake North Africa. Others in Bomber Command had completed full tours—thirty missions or more—over Brest, Hamburg, and Berlin. Still others of his students—Australians and New Zealanders—had gone home to squadrons in the South Pacific and were flying operations into Burma, over Singapore and even hit-and-run bombing raids on the Imperial Japanese Navy. And yet here it was, the beginning of 1944, and RCAF Flight Lieutenant Charlie Konvalinka had never fired a shot in anger, had experienced no combat duty.
From the beginning Konvalinka had had his heart set on becoming a fighter pilot. He had the physique of a fighter pilot—a short, compact build—a legacy of his days as a sprinter competing for Canada on the international track and field circuit. He had the right attitude too. Anything his taller friends could do, he could do better. And it was only half in jest that he claimed: “I’m the best pilot I ever saw.” But all he really wanted to do was get his hands on the control column of a Spitfire and put it through its paces.
He had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force early enough, a few months after Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939. When he’d taken his school documentation and a couple of letters of recommendation to the RCAF recruiting centre on York Street in Toronto, it was the time of the “Phony War.” The Germans had invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia (including Bohemia, the birthplace of his great grandfather). The Low Countries had fallen before the Blitzkrieg, and most people thought France would need lots of pilots to fend off the Germans. So there would still be plenty of time for Konvalinka to get into the thick of it. Still lots of Spitfire time to log.
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
