Canada's Fighting Pilots

193 Pages·2003·1.66 MB·English

by  Edmund Cosgrove

C ’ F P
ANADA S IGHTING ILOTS
Copyright © 2003 by Edmund Cosgrove; Introduction, notes and new format Brick Billing and The Golden
Dog Press; photographs copyright by owners.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication—other than in brief form for review or scholarly purposes—
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Cosgrove, Edmund, 1926
Canada’s Fighting Pilots/Edmund Cosgrove.—Rev. ed.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-919614-97-3
1. World War, 1939-1945—Aerial operations, Canadian.
2. World War, 1914-1918—Aerial operations, Canadian.
3. Air pilots, Military—Canada—History.
I. Title.
UG635.C2C62003 940.54’4971’0922 C2003-900767-7
Cover design and layout by gordongroup, Ottawa, Canada.
Printed in Canada.
Published by:
The Golden Dog Press, an imprint of Haymax Inc.
P.O. Box 393—Kemptville, Ontario, Canada K0G 1J0
The Golden Dog Press wishes to express its gratitude to the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and
the Millennium Bureau of Canada for past support extended to its publishing projects.
Edmund Cosgrove
Canada’s
FIGHTING
PILOTS
With an introduction by Brick Billing
Acknowledgements
The publishers and the editor would like to thank the following
people for their help in the preparation of this book; Chris
Carruthers of TextAlchemy, Inc. for his assistance in OCR
scanning; John Lund of the London Free Press and DND for their
help in obtaining photographs (and with cutline information).
Every effort has been made to trace ownership and copyright. The
publishers would welcome any information that would help with
these acknowledgements.
Contents
The Air Wars in Context
Acknowledgements
Preface
The Background
“The Greatest of Them All”
Four Canadians Named “Mac”
The Duellist
The Black Flight
Black Mike
Winged Warfare
The King of the Pathfinders
The Loner
Epilogue
Glossary
Bibliography
The Air Wars in Context
The history of the Twentieth century has been profoundly affected by its two
great wars, and this fact is reflected in the literature of the time. Our oftentimes
horrified fascination with war, and with emotions and responses of those caught
up in it, has been a fertile source for both fiction and non-fiction. In the
Canadian context of the First World War, for example, the motivations of a
generation which felt itself compelled to enlist and fight in what was essentially
a foreign war, has long been rich grist for the mill of novelists. Canadian writers
such as Timothy Findlay (The Wars), Hugh McClennan (Barometer Rising), and
Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) have attempted to explore and
contextualize these feelings. they move their narratives in effect, beyond mere
facts, and instead attempt to recapture some piece of the human event itself.
Novelists, however, are free to manipulate plots, as well as to create a
contextualing setting against which they develop their characters actions.
Ironically, no such contextualing information surrounds recollections of actual
historical events. The appeal of fiction lies in its ability to answer all our
questions as it moves to a dramatically definable climax. It is not necessary to
understand the conditions under which soldiers fought and all to often died to
enjoy a work of fiction. The novelist will provide us with the necessary clues
and additional information we need.
The historian, on the other hand, is doubly hampered. First, he or she can
only report the truth, as determined by the examination of the evidence, coupled
with interviews and reports. Secondly, he or she must attempt to convey the
surrounding context against which these events played themselves out. In the
case of the air war fought in the First and Second World Wars, this task becomes
Herculean.
The years that separate us from these two wars have seen a virtual explosion
of technology. Aircraft today that fly at great altitudes are routinely pressurized,
and even the most frequent flyer has little inkling of what it felt like to fly and
fight in the aircraft of the World Wars. As such, it is often as difficult for us to
imagine fighting a war from the wicker seat of a Great war biplane, or the noisy
cold inside a second World War bomber, as it is to imagine fighting alongside
Wolf at Quebec, or against Perry on Lake Erie. In fact, given the recent
popularity of re-enactment societies, as well as the resurgence of interest in ‘Tall
ships’, the average person is far more likely to have a nodding acquaintance with
these events than with the aerial battles of the first and second World Wars.
It is precisely for these reasons that a book such as Canada’s Fighting Pilots
is so useful. Edmond Cosgrove has written an eloquent testimony to the
remarkable heroism displayed by Canadian pilots in both the First and Second
World Wars. Gathering together the stories of some of Canada’s greatest pilots,
it is a classic in its field, and takes us directly into the world of aerial combat in
the two world wars.
Canada’s Fighting Pilots outlines the exploits of such legendary figures as:
William “Billy” Bishop; whose daring, solo dawn raid on a German airfield won
him the Victoria Cross; William Barker; who fought single-handedly an entire
squadron of enemy aircraft; George “Buzz” Beurling, the ace of Malta who
achieved a remarkable score of victories fighting from an island under siege;
Andrew Mynarski, whose attempts to save the life of a trapped comrade, high
over Germany, ultimately cost him his own. The original author, a longtime
CBC broadcaster, has written the book in a winning and entertaining manner that
is still clear to the non-aviation enthusiast.
This latest treatment preserves all of Cosgrove’s style and attention to detail.
What it hopes to add is information about these times and events that would no
longer be common knowledge to the average reader. As a former pilot with
intimate knowledge of these now vintage aircraft, I know firsthand how difficult
it is to fly and maintain them. Even relatively sophisticated aircraft such as the
Spitfire Vc’s that George Beurling flew over Malta, would seem hopelessly
outdated by today’s standards.
Also, most people have no experience with the tactics and maneuvers
necessary in aerial combat. Aviation has advanced so much that even modern
military pilots would be unfamiliar with combat as it was fought in 1918, or
even 1944. Changes in technology, aircraft speed and strength, even something
as mundane as the clothing issued to pilots, all contributed to how these air
battles were fought.
Great War aerial combat
It is hardly an understatement that the Western Front of World War I was unlike
anything seen before or since. Years of unremitting trench warfare had effected a
profound change on not only the physical landscape, but on the social one as
well. Just as the countryside of France and Belgium had been devastated by the
largest bombardments in history, so too had traditional views of warfare been
exploded. The earlier enthusiasm that had led such people as Arthur Lowe, a
prominent, contemporary Canadian social historian to declare a few years earlier
that “A nice little war would be just what the country needed to cap its
development and give it a sense of corporate unity” had been tempered by years
of casualty lists. Instead, a grim sense of purpose, a feeling to make whatever
sacrifices were necessary to end the bloody conflict, prevailed. By the end of the
first year of the war, no one was under the illusion that warfare could be
considered to be anything other than what it really was: dirty, unglamorous,
uncomfortable, and extremely dangerous.
The air war grew out of this world-view. While historians have to a certain
extent mythologized Great War pilots as “gallant Knights of the skies,” the
reality was far different. Films and popular fiction have portrayed World War I
pilots as silk-scarved daredevils, clear of eye and firm of spirit. Here, in a
particularly egregious example from a post-war biography of Manfred Von
Richtofen-the famed ‘Red Baron’- this mythologized image can be clearly seen:
[i]nto this grisly story of World War I there came a refreshing gleam of the chivalry of old,
when the pick of the flower of youth on both sides carried the conflict into the skies. Into that
Knighthood of the Blue, Richtofen has been given a place of highest merit by those he fought
with and against.
His life and death, his victories and defeats, his loves, his hopes, his fears bring a new
record to the halls of that same Valhalla in which rests the spirit of . . . many others who fought
aloft and died below with hearts that held emotions other than hate.
young blood, hot and daring, raced through their veins, even as the winged steeds they rode
raced on the wind to conquest or disaster With keen young eyes, glinting along the barrels of
their jibbering machine guns, they looked at close range into one another’s souls as they
pressed the triggers that sent one another tumbling down to death.
Clearly, the reality of the life of a service pilot would seem hopelessly
pedestrian in comparison to such overblown descriptions. In actuality, aircraft
are quite difficult to spot while flying, being reduced to mere specks from only a
mile away. When clouds, haze, and other meteorological phenomena are
factored in, it is a little known fact that relatively few patrols in either war
resulted in combat.
Second World War air combat
In the Second World War many of the lessons from the Great War had to be