being expanded to handle the cars of 2,400 employees, and a new cafeteria had replaced the circus tent in which workers had been lunching. By the end of 1942 DHC’s employees had more than doubled once more.4 Hotson remembers that it seemed at the time that no amount of new square footage would be enough.
Managing that kind of growth requires creativity and the ability to adjust, but as the company grew it became less and less the kind of place where the top banana could walk the production lines every day, let alone know all the employees’ names. The organization chart was being revised monthly. It was no longer a family-type operation. Garratt deserves credit for overseeing such explosive growth, which brought with it new requirements for internal communication, personnel and, above all else, training. But a gentleman with the personal touch is not necessarily the right guy to push production hard.
Lee Murray, Garratt’s predecessor as DHC managing director, who had since become GM at Hatfield, arrived at Downsview at the end of July 1941 to cast his sympathetic eye over the Canadian outfit’s production potential and requirements. “A mound of drawings” is Hotsor’s aptly vague characterization of the Mosquito production materials that soon arrived from the English plant that had run less by modern methods than by its employees’ skills and memories. There would also be shipments of vital parts for twenty-five aircraft and a completed Mosquito Mk.iv to show how it all went together.
Murray’s report led to orders a month later from the British Ministry of Aircraft Production for 400 Canadian-built Mosquitoes. These would soon be designated Mk.XX—an equivalent of the Mk.IV bomber version, powered by the American-built Rolls-Royce Merlin V-12, the Packard Merlin 31.
Soon after, Doug Hunter and Harry Povey arrived from Hatfield after a trans-Atlantic flight that was, for that time, a marvel of time management. “[They had left] England on Thursday and begun work in Toronto on Saturday” is how Fred Hotson summarizes their then-amazing experience. After that, however, flying across the Atlantic lost much of its charm for Hunter. He may have thought his luck couldn’t hold out indefinitely, or perhaps he changed his mind once ocean voyages became less stressful with the demise of the U-boat threat.
Hunter immediately became chief engineer of DHC, a position fully equal to chief design engineer Jakimiuk’s—and, at that moment, more valuable to the company. Hunter was regarded as a typical product of the parent de Havilland company.
“He was a well-educated man. Hunter was not a deep technical engineer but he was a very practical one,” in Dick Hiscocks’s estimation. “He had mastered the art of getting people to work together. During wartime, things were turbulent and nerves were jangled, and he had a very soothing influence on the more temperamental characters in the engineering department. And, like Garratt, he was a very humane man.”
Hunter had begun as a draftsman with one of the original British aircraft companies, the Grahame-White Aviation Co., forerunner of the great Bristol Aeroplane Co., de Havilland’s only British rival as a combined engine and airframe producer. George White acquired the land for the U.K.’s post-World War I display flying centre and today’s RAF Museum, at Hendon. Hotson remembers Hunter as “always immaculately dressed, spoke quietly, flicked his cigarette ashes over his shoulder, and punctuated every conversation with ‘Quite!’”
Hunter’s travelling companion, Harry Povey, who had been with de Havilland a year longer than Hunter, was slicked-back and rotund to Hunter’s grey-haired and aristocratic spareness. Povey has been described as “an aircraft production engineer without peer.” His first move at DHC was to ask for a new plant to build Mosquito fuselages.
The fuselages were formed in halves over concrete forms, using heat-treatment in huge autoclaves to shape the seven-sixteenths-inch-thick plywood left and right sides. Stiffeners and equipment were added before the halves were joined along the top and bottom.
DHC’s wing subcontractor was the farm-equipment manufacturer Massey-Harris of Weston, which had supplied Anson wings to Downsview. R. B. (Bob) McIntyre began his long association with the DHC engineering department as chief engineer of Massey-Harris, one of the most reliable suppliers the wartime DHC had.5 Their record of delivering Anson wings made Massey-Harris de Havilland’s first choice for Mosquito wings. They delivered the first set May 9, 1942. Always ahead of schedule, McIntyre and his workers became victims of their own efficiency when changes to the specifications of aircraft on the production line obliged Massey-Harris to modify wings already built but waiting in storage at their plant. McIntyre, who was with DHC by 1944, was a first-rate thinker who became a talent magnet for the company, recruiting, among others, Fred Buller.
Aside from the problem-free wings, the Downsview Mosquito program’s early setbacks were all too prophetic. A consistent 2 per cent loss rate for important drawings shipped from England was only the beginning. They arrived as microfilm, which had to be translated into full-size profiles and thence to huge sheets of plywood on the lofting-shop floor in mid-October. Lofting, the process of transferring full-scale drawings to raw materials from which the first parts are made, was a normal part of building any new airplane. It was just that DHC had never done that before. The Mk.IV pattern aircraft, RAF serial DK 287, shipped in mid-September, was delayed and damaged en route. But a fuselage jig did appear from England two weeks before Christmas of 1942, allowing a first fuselage shell and a duplicate jig to be available by mid-March.6
By May 5, 1942, Phil Garratt was on his way to meetings in England with a contract for an additional 1,100 Mosquitoes, financed by the U.S. Lend-Lease program. As the Mosquito’s impressive speed and load-carrying capacities became known, a bidding process began to assert itself for the ones being built at Hatfield, and later at Leavesden and Standard Motors at Coventry. The pressure to expand production was unrelenting. Every air arm that didn’t have Mosquitoes wanted them—even the Luftwaffe. Goering’s insistence on a night-fighter with equal performance led to an impressive German rwin-engine fighter, built largely of wood, called the Focke-Wulf Ta 154 Moskito. Only thirty were built.7
Hap Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Force, wanted hundreds of Mosquitoes and was prepared to trade P-51 Mustangs for them. In fact, the Americans were underwriting Downsview production with a view to siphoning off Mosquitoes built to U.S. specifications for themselves. To meet all these demands, the Mosquito became a jack-of-all-trades: fighter-bomber, photo-reconnaissance aircraft, night fighter, Pathfinder target-marking aircraft. Leonard Cheshire, VC, commander of 617 Squadron, the famous Dambusters, wanted a pair to mark targets for his precision-bombing Lancaster colleagues.
With the first Downsview example near completion, Garratt left his meetings committed to turning out eight more Mosquitoes during the rest of 1942, and to reaching a production tempo of fifty per month in a year’s time.
Despite the close proximity of its serial number to that of the first Canadian-built Mosquito, KB336 is an indication of how quickly models changed on the DHC assembly-line. This B. Mk.20 was part of the fourth batch, and approximately the 265th Mosquito built at Downsview. It is preserved at Canada’s National Aviation Museum, Ottawa. PETER M. BOWERS
KA 117 was one of 338 solid-nosed, eight-gun FB.26s built at Downsview. These versatile machines could also carry 2,000 Ib of bombs. By early 1945 many Canadian-built Mosquitos had logged 50 sorties over Europe. Photographed in England in November 1945, KA 117 had been converted to
