periods of boredom interspersed with a few seconds of sheer terror.”)
All his experiences seemed to flash before him, however, when he was called a coward in a Bournemouth movie theatre.
Konvalinka and the orientation officer were hustled from the theatre and into the office of the station commander for an explanation. His years as a flight instructor and a flight commander told Konvalinka how to deal with this kind of confrontation. He described the theatre incident as “a difference of opinion between two officers of equal rank.” Apparently, the station commander didn’t see the need to discipline either man for his outburst. The issue was dropped. Charlie Konvalinka advanced to operational training and eventually realized his dream to fly Spitfires.
But the question remained: who had taught this pilot and nearly 50,000 other Allied military pilots to fly? Who had trained the nearly 150,000 qualified navigators, wireless operators, bomb-aimers, airgunners, and ground crew who were poised for the invasion of France, Italy, and Japanese-occupied Asia? Who had turned the tide of the air war after the retreat from Dunkirk, near-defeat in the Battle of Britain, the devastation of the Blitz, and the air routs at Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong? In short, who had transformed the Allied air forces into the most powerful weapon in the world? The answer: Konvalinka and hundreds of instructors like him in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
Rooted in the First World War, when thousands of airmen were recruited and trained for the Royal Flying Corps (later the Royal Air Force) in Canada and the United States, and then formally planted in Canada with much greater Canadian control at the outbreak of war in 1939, the BCATP (or JATP for Joint Air Training Plan, or EATS for Empire Air Training Scheme) was a program to standardize the training of air crew for military service.
In its five-and-a-half-year lifespan—from December 1939 to September 1945—the BCATP would expend about $2 billion in the training of air crew from nearly every nation of the free world. It would ultimately deliver air superiority to the Allied war effort. The product of its training—nearly a quarter of a million air and ground crew—would spearhead the major land and sea operations to take back Europe, North Africa, and much of the Pacific. It would supply RAF Bomber Command with the trained airmen for a third of a million sorties. It would produce some of Canada’s 160 fighter aces who accounted for more than a thousand victories in the Second World War. It would help sustain the flow of bomber and fighter aircraft to the European theatre of war by supplying trained pilots and navigators to Ferry Command. And it would ensure the success of military operations on all fronts with the qualified airmen of Transport Command and Coastal Command. It would, in Winston Churchill’s words, be “one of the major factors, and possibly the decisive factor of the war.” And it happened almost entirely in Canada.
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
