upper right, awaits its wings. FRED HOTSON VIA DHC
Even after the company’s leap into high-performance aircraft with the 1934 Comet racer, an ancestor of the World War II Mosquito, old habits died hard. In retrospect, Hiscocks saw in the distrust of scientific credentials and the supremacy of the shop floor at Hatfield a style of aircraft design and manufacture that would cause problems for the company’s Canadian branch when it became involved in high-volume production of Mosquitoes during the war.
Installing a 120-hp Gipsy III inverted air-cooled engine in one of the 1,553 Tiger Moth trainers assembled by DHC from 1937 to 1945. Here, Jerome McNamie (left). Ed Loveday and an unidentified worker unite a Gipsy engine with its airframe. FRED HOTSON VIA DHC
Canada’s potential to contribute aircraft to the war effort was recognized in Britain. Most of Canada’s aircraft companies were branch-plants of British armament concerns, such as Vickers. (America’s aviation industry was preoccupied with expanding by leaps and bounds to meet contracts placed by the British Purchasing Commission.) But most of Canada’s industry—and especially the branch-plants of British concerns—was hopelessly behind the times, assembling aircraft that were patently obsolete under licences from foreign manufacturers.8
Canadian Vickers, in Montreal, was building stately but slow biplane Stranraer flying-boats, which, though all-metal, were ten years out-of-date in concept. Boeing of Canada, in Vancouver, was building biplane Blackburn Shark torpedo-bombers even as its parent company in Seattle, 120 miles south, was turning out what was then the most advanced heavy bomber in the world, the B-17 Flying Fortress. A consortium of six subcontractors was organized as Canadian Associated Aircraft Ltd. to build the Handley-Page Hampden twin-engine bomber. Hardly the zenith of aircraft design at the time, it was an instructive all-metal structure, useful for bomber crew training. Associated was having trouble building them satisfactorily.
How de Havilland Canada, among the smallest and most technically outdated aircraft manufacturers in a country that was then an airplane-building backwater, became the biggest in Canada, with 7,000-odd employees who managed to build more than 1,130 400-mph Mosquito fighter-bombers, is by itself an impressive chapter in the annals of Canadian industry.
DHC’S growth in size and sophistication was one of those miracles that were routinely accomplished as part of the war effort. But if the word miracle accurately describes the overall wartime picture at Downsview, that wondrous outcome was accomplished by down-to-earth means: equal parts of hardnosed management and the heartbreak that often results from it; a gathering of talent from all over Canada, indeed the world; and exactly the right product. The Mosquito was an aircraft that DHC was uniquely qualified to produce. Among the first of those talented new additions from around the world was W. J. Jakimiuk of Warsaw, Poland.
Barely ten years after having helped found the PZL organization to advance the science of aircraft construction, Jaki Jakimiuk found himself quickly appointed chief engineer of a concern that was building flimsy Tiger Moth biplanes—a huge leap backward technologically.
DHC’s contract from the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1937 for twenty-six DH.82 Tiger Moth trainers was “a rather small piece of the business in a country verging on war,” writes Fred Hotson in The de Havilland Canada Story, “but everyone at Downsview believed an additional contract would follow in due course... but by the time the last Tiger was delivered on April 12, 1939, no new order had appeared.”9 Layoffs would have occurred at this most unlikely time—on the eve of a world war—if not for an order from the British parent company for 200 Tiger Moth fuselages.
These orders kept DHC alive during the prewar hiatus between the loss of North America’s illusion of immunity from the unpleasantness brewing in Europe and the flood of orders that was about to transform the continent within months into the arsenal of democracy. However mundane, the Tiger Moth work was a tribute to the persistent salesmanship of the company’s new managing director.
Phil Garratt flew himself to Ottawa almost every week in his personal DH.87 Hornet Moth to drum up business with RCAF procurement officers who as yet had no budget for training aircraft. The Hornet Moth was a true salesman’s airplane, the first DH design with a fully enclosed cabin and side-by-side rather than tandem seating for pilot and passenger.10
It seems that Jakimiuk consistently saw eye-to-eye with Phil Garratt, who had been involved with de Havilland Canada since 1928, when Garratt volunteered for hazardous work as a test and aircraft delivery pilot “just for the pleasure of it.”11 Like Jakimiuk, Garratt was one of his country’s aviation pioneers.
He had been one of the original student pilots at Canada’s first flying academy, the Curtiss Flying School, Toronto, in 1915.12 He soloed in a Curtiss Jenny, received his wings with the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and spent that summer and fall as a fighter pilot with 70 Squadron. Garratt must have been an accomplished pilot; he was posted as an instructor to the noted Gosport School of Flying for the duration of the war. Like so many First War pilots, he became a barnstormer after he returned to Canada in 1919—in his case, with the Bishop Barker Flying Company.
Despite the cachet of its partners’ combined 122 victories in the skies over France (and the Victoria Cross each had been awarded), the company soon collapsed, leaving Garratt clear eyed about aviation’s immediate commercial possibilities.13 He managed his own chemical company from 1923 until 1936, when the enthusiastic part-timer was offered the general manager’s post at DHC. This was an opportunity to become the first Canadian to run the company.14 By then, it was beginning to look as if assembling airplanes might finally become a profitable business in Canada.
Garratt, pilot, salesman and manager, and Jakimiuk, the engineer’s engineer, had a lot in common, including outsized appetites for life. They looked on things from the same six-foot-plus viewpoint. Both were driven by big hearts. Each was, in his way, an aviation pioneer. Both recognized talent and appreciated the value of allowing young engineers free rein.
On December 17, 1939, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was launched in Ottawa, and by the following mid-March the first trainees were being taken on strength. Within a year there were sixty-seven training bases and ten advanced flying schools in Canada. The BCATP has been called Canada’s most important contribution to the war effort. As a central commitment around which a vast industrial complex had to be built, the air training plan generated activity far beyond the training of aircrew.
At these schools the most numerous aircraft types were the single-engine Harvard fighter trainer being built by Noorduyn near Montreal under licence from North American of Inglewood, California, and the twin-engine Avro Anson, in which bomber crews would be trained.15 The Anson was the Royal Air Force’s first monoplane aircraft with retractable landing gear when it was introduced in March 1936. While it was a total failure as an operational combat aircraft early in the war, it used mainly non-strategic materials in its construction and was widely available.16
DHC’S experience with the Anson started with the assembly of a used Anson 1 that arrived from England February 25, 1940, complete with gun turret and camouflage paint.17 A total of 264 second-hand
