torque of one rotor was cancelled out by the other. Without the need to siphon off power to a vertical tail rotor to keep them on course, Piasecki’s machines could devote more of their available power to carrying payloads. The Piasecki organization eventually became the Boeing Airplane Company’s Vertol helicopter division.
The cooperation between DHC and the National Research Council on the Anson v project was typical of Downsview’s practical approach to research and development. Before the war they had jointly developed streamlined ski landing gear for the Rapide. The Englist company naturally had little interest in equipping its aircraft with skis, so that was the kind of project DHC interested itself in. But with the coming of war, small experimental undertakings only got in the way of the company’s mass-production goals.
The answer was to set up Central Aircraft Ltd. in London, Ontario. With the arrival of Jakimiuk and the other Polish engineers at Downsview, Francis Hyde-Beadle was freed to do the work he liked best. Phil Garratt’s executive assistant, John McDonough, a former mail and bush pilot who had tested the first Noorduyn Norseman and who was at loose ends after supervising the plant expansion at Downsview, became manager.26
It was by joining Central Aircraft in 1943 that Fred H. Buller first stepped into DHC’S orbit. Buller, who succeeded Hyde-Beadle as chief engineer of Central Aircraft on the latter’s death late that year, had a lot in common with the Englishman. Buller [was a pure designer who preferred doing original engineering and was brilliant at it.
The team that would design and manufacture the Beaver was now almost complete. First, though they had a war to win. Doing so would involve near-cataclysmic changes at DHC. There were Mosquitoes to be built—Mosquitoes to interfere with Adolf Hitler’s speeches, Mosquitoes to make Hermann Goering wish for Mosquitoes of his own.
Chapter Four One thousand mosquitoes
Facing page, top: The US government paid for Mosquito production at Downsview under for Mosquito production at Downsview under Lend-Lease, partly to have a claim on some of them as photo reconnaissance machine. They were known to the U.S. Army Air Force ax F-8s, Downsview built thirty-nine F-8s. Bottom: The first Downsview Mosquito, B. MkVII (B (or Bomber) KB300, the first of twenty-four of that model built there. It flew for the first time September 23, 1942. Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. demonstrated it in Washington and San Diego. BOTH PHOTOS: PETER M. BOWERS
The de Havilland Canada that had started the war building Tiger Moths and reassembling used and crated Avro Anson trainers was not the same company that built 1, 33 topics of the world’s first operational 400-mile-per-hour combat aircraft, the DH.98 Mosquito.1
The first DHC was a near-cottage industry that had congratulated itself on designing and fabricating streamlined landing-gear skis for the Rapide and a sliding cockpit canopy for the Tiger Moth. It was a small outfit with a managing director, Phil Garratt, who didn’t much care for titles and who knew the name of everyone else in the company.
The second DHC was a fully-integrated industrial organization, primed with government financing, embracing its own subsidiaries, subcontractors and satellite facilities, and even an elected local of the United Auto Workers. Several key engineers from Hartfield had joined the Canadian company, including the chief technical engineer since 1925, W.D. (Doug) Hunter, professionalizing DHC’s production methods. It was this second DHC that, by the end of the war, was fully capable of designing and manufacturing the line of Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) aircraft that began with the Beaver.
Yet the changes that made the company more capable came at a huge price. In wartime, human costs are secondary to the overall objective. By the time DHC had expanded five-fold and was making its contribution to Canada’s war effort, there was no Phil Garratt at Downsview. He was sent into exile by the company’s new government taskmasters. A number of other company luminaries also left.
The only quibble about Garratt’s management style from those who worked for him is that it was a thing of the past. In his eye-to-eye meetings along the production line, which he toured every day, Garratt treated everyone as an equal—at least as much of an equal as anyone facing a man of his size and bearing could feel. He cultivated the wives of his workers, since they were his allies in getting the best out his work force. Phil was a pretty good listener, and by listening carefully he enlisted everyone in the plant in his personal quest to elevate DHC’s engineering and manufacturing capabilities. And yet, a management style that depends upon daily personal contact is better suited to a smaller company addressing a market niche with carefully conceived products than to the far-flung industry DHC became during the war.
“Phil Garratt didn’t believe in formal organization,” aerodynamicist Dick Hiscocks recalls. “He didn’t like titles. He said, ‘You know what you’re here for. Go and do it.’” Hiscocks remembers appealing to him at one point after the war for more of an organization chart in engineering. “He said, ‘Your job is to be where you’re needed.’”2
“He gave us a lot of freedom. We never punched time-clocks. People came in late and stayed later. We didn’t ask for time off. Of course, you’d come in on Sunday, too.
“Jakimuk encouraged people to come forward with their ideas—like Fred Buller. I wasn’t used to that in a senior man. It was a very co-operative, friendly atmosphere.”
A family is the term many oldtimers use to describe the pre-Mosquito DHC. In fact, a lot of de Havilland was families. There were, among many others, the Burlison brothers, George and Bill, who, with their father, had worked for Canadian Vickers ever since they were building varnished mahogany-planked Vedette flying boats. Or John and George Neal and their sister Kay, each a pioneer there. John was the first Neal to work at DHC, a distinction in itself. George float-certified the Beaver and took the Otter up for its first flight. Kay Neal’s career at DHC personifies the wartime growth of the company. Originally a seamstress, she rose from Betty McNicoll’s dope shop, where she fitted snug fabric skins to stick-and-wire biplanes and painted them with dope to form a tough, slick surface, to fabricating bulletproof rubber fuel tank liners for Mosquitoes in a shop filled with potentially explosive fumes. (No wonder Kay eventually became secretary-treasurer of de Havilland Local 112 of the Canadian Auto Workers in 1949.) Phil knew them all before the wartime surge in employment made knowing every employee’s name out of the question.
The transition from one type of organization to the other was an intense, painful sidelight to one of the most glorious chapters in aviation history: the often-told story of the DH.98 Mosquito’s secret development in an old mansion, Salisbury Hall. How the project persevered despite the determination of British aircraft production czar Lord Beaverbrook to kill it—Beaverbrook is said to have ordered it closed down three times. How the company’s test pilots, including Geoffrey de Havilland Jr., overcame with spectacular flight demonstrations the Royal Air Force’s early reluctance to embrace the cheeky speedster that would soon interrupt speeches by Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels in Berlin, in broad daylight, five hours apart on the same day.3 Mixed emotions remain with the Downsview veterans from the company’s difficult metamorphosis into a prime contractor for what was, until the last year of the wat, the Allies’ fastest aircraft.
Garratt masterminded this growth. In the year leading up to the decision to build
