The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Canada Helped Win the Battle of Britain in WWII

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

The Battle of Britain was one of the hardest fought in the Second World War. In "Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in Their Finest Hour," historian Ted Barris details how Canadian flyers were vital in the battle and helped win it alongside their British counterparts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you are a history buff of a certain age, you will remember this quote. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said that about a relatively small number of Royal Air Force fighter pilots who pushed back the best the Nazis had to offer in one of the most important battles of World War II. And, as he so often does, author Ted Beres chronicles the Canadians who fought in his new book, Battle of Britain, Canadian Airmen in their finest hour. And we're delighted to welcome Ted Beres back to TVO. How you doing, my friend? It's a pleasure to be back with you.

Thank you. Okay. What number is this? That's my first question for you every time you come here. What number? 22. This is your for you every time you come here. What number? 22. It's your 22nd book. You are insane.

But I'm glad. It's a good insanity. It is. It's an incredible journey into lives of great Canadians whom we've forgotten. Amen. Well, let's not forget them during the next 20 minutes or so of this conversation. We're going to start with the basics. The Battle of Britain took part when?

July the 10th, 1940 to October the 31st, Halloween 1940, 113 days. Why did it happen? Well, Hitler, by the spring of 1940, occupies all of Northwestern Europe. Poland has fallen in 39, Norway and Denmark early in 40. The defeat of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the fall of France in June sets the stage

for his final domino to fall, the invasion of England. He plans on or about September the 15th, 1940. But before that happens, he says to Hermann Göring, clear the sky over Britain and the RAF, erase it before we invade with 260,000 German troops, 30,000 vehicles and 60,000 horses, and occupy London within three days. That's the plan.

And it's the job of the RAF and some of the Canadians in it to thwart that. How many British RAF fighters took part in the Battle of Britain? British 2,500. There were 147 Poles. There were 101 New Zealanders. There were 87 Czechs, seven Americans, and 300 Canadians.

300 Canadians. Why were they there? Well, they got there by circuitous routes at different times in the 1930s. A little more context. In Canada, after the Great War, the war to end all wars, Canada began to trim back on Air Force. In fact one of the ministers in Borden's government post World War I says there's no need for aviation in

peacetime, that's a wartime thing. And in contrast to Canada's trimming back our Air Force, essentially dismissing, demobilizing airmen who'd fought wonderfully in the First World War Canadian Airmen in the Royal Flying Corps and eliminating budget and so on, civilian aviation is taking off. Everybody wants to have that romance of flight like Amelia Earhart or Charles Lindbergh. All those names were iconic. And if you could fly on your own on a weekend or whatever, everybody wanted a private pilot's license in Canada.

So there was that kind of ground swell, grassroots thing going on. And the trimming back of the official Air Force. And while we were trimming back, the RAF was recognizing in the early 30s, war is coming again and they need pilots. So they hang that carrot out there across the Commonwealth and they say if you're a young man, you have a

private pilot's license, why don't you try to join the RAF, make your own way here, we'll test you and we'll give you a direct entry scheme into the RAF, become an officer in mid 1930s. Who wouldn't take that? So some of them were RAF fighters but not all of them were RAF fighters, but not all of them, right? There was another group that came later. That's right. Who were our guys?

Finally, after, let's just finish the guys who straggled in on their own. About 118 Canadians took that carrot, jumped on cattle boats with those private pilot's licenses, get the direct entry scheme, and become commissioned officers. And in return, they have to give six years service. We'll do the math.

You arrive in 35 by 1939, your front lines. Now with the war breaking out in 39, King has the convenience, Prime Minister McKenzie King, has the convenience of saying, we're going to be training aircrew in Canada because it's safe. No conscription, no casualties. We're not interested in sending squadrons. But by the time the war breaks out, the RAF is desperate.

And so Canada sends its first RCAF, Number One Fighter Squadron, about 100 pilots and about 200 ground crew into the battle. Did they do that because Prime Minister Churchill asked Prime Minister King for them? No, because when Churchill asks King initially for the assistance and endorses the idea of training aircrew here at the British Commonwealth Air Training Clan, about which I wrote a book thirty years ago, it's a great story, and I preface it a little bit in the early chapters. While we were doing the training thing, the Battle of Britain begins and King says, are you okay? Are you going to manage? And Churchill says,

we will manage. We have enough pilots here now. You keep that training plan pumping out top line pilots, flight engineers, navigators, radio operators, gunners, riggers, fitters, instrument technicians. And they clog the pipeline to Britain and ultimately, in Churchill's words, become the decisive factor in determining the war. But the Battle of Britain is the first last stand. The first last stand. You gave the numbers a few moments ago. There is no way in the world this relatively small number of RAF fighters and RCAF fighters

and the others who participated. There's no way they should have prevailed in this war against overwhelming odds and German soldiers. You're exactly right. So how did they? A number of things. It's funny as I've begun to talk to you and others about this after the writing of the book, I have a real sense that Canadians left a very deep impression on this battle. All those guys who went into the RAF were sort of being shoehorned into RAF models.

They all look the same with the spiffy caps and the ribbons and the wings and the sharp aviation suits and so on. But the Canadians brought to the picnic something different. They'd come from Saskatchewan, or they'd been doing barnstorming, or mail delivery, or things that were really rudimentary and were the origin of where they came from.

So they come to this battle. Let me give you a quick example. Ernie McNabb comes from a roster in Saskatchewan, goes to Sunday school one day wearing a kilt, because he's a McNabb and his parents want him to wear the kilt and he takes taunting until he punches a guy with one punch flattens him and that was the end of the taunting. Ernie stays in the Air Force actually evolves with the in spite of all the cuts I've referred to emerges as the squadron leader of RCF number one but

on the way he's given the job of heading up the RCAF aerobatics team. And in the summer of 1934 or 5, somewhere in there, CNE, Canadian National Exhibition, says, hey, we've invited the Americans in there, Curtis Hawks, to do all kinds of aerobatics over the shoreline and over Toronto. Is the RCA interested in participating?

Ernie says, you bet we are. And they come up with this weird stunt. They take SISCAN aircraft, biplanes, which were then fighter aircraft, leading edge, and they take them up about 8,000 or 10,000 feet and together in three formation, these three guys, guy named Harding, McEwen, and McNabb, throw their planes into uncontrollable downward spins.

Together! And then about 4,000 or 5,000 feet, they come out of the spins together, reform, and it's a great stunt. That kind of stunting, that kind of skill, that kind of inherent understanding of wearing an aircraft, I'm sure served Ernie McNabb well in the dogfights. And he became the squadron leader that we celebrate in helping to win that battle.

So these little things were the things that made the difference. The other thing, of course, was from the top down. and he became the squadron leader that we celebrate in helping to win that battle. So these little things were the things that made the difference. The other thing, of course, was from the top down. Hugh Dowding was the chief marshal of the Royal Air Force Fighter Command. His job was to keep the fighters away from the German fighters. He didn't want a battle of attrition. You get one, we get one. You get one, we get one. Because they were outnumbered three to one, the RAF was. The trick was to go after the bombers and

and doubting once the fighters to do that, knock as many of them down. We can't knock them all down, bombers will always get through, he says. But the idea was to concentrate on the bombers, not be drawn away by the Messerschmitts and so on, and win the battle by destroying the Luftwaffe bombers, which they ultimately do. I'm going to give you another name here. Duncan Hewitt. He was the first Canadian casualty in the Battle of Britain. What do we know about how he died? Well, he, like the Ernie McNabb I just described to you, falls in love with flying as a kid in St. John, New Brunswick. And there's a little community on the edge of St. John known as Milledgeville.

And that's where the one hangar, one gypsy moth operation flying school was. And Duncan falls in love with flying, gets enough money to get lessons. And he qualifies really, really well with his pilot's license. He's one of the first. He went to Ross State Collegiate in St. John. And he's the first kid to Ross State Collegiate in St. John and he's the first

kid in Ross State Collegiate to get a private pilot's license in about 19, I don't know, maybe 32 or 33. And he's drawn into this idea of going overseas. Gets a direct entry commission, ends up with 501 squadron. He's early in the war because he joins many of the RAF advanced air striking force defending France before the Battle of Britain. And he has his greatest day on May the 26th when he shoots down a Messerschmitt 110. London Illustrated News catches him when they're retreating out of France, gets the story. Pathé makes a bit of film about him.

The film arrives back and St. John and suddenly he's a hero, right? And all that heroics, really, but he's very realistic about it. He says, you know, this is a long haul. I don't know what's going to happen to me. If I'm captured or killed, Air Ministry will be in touch with me, he says to his folks, and his folks see the Pathé film in St. John and realize what a hero he is. But ultimately, the numbers catch up. And on July the 12th, in a dogfight over the Channel,

now defending Britain as they all were at that point, he shot down and he wasn't killed in the destruction of his hurricane, he ends up in the Channel. And the British had not ramped up sufficiently their ability to retrieve airmen who'd been shot down over the Channel. And Hewitt's body is is found later he died of exposure for those

who are listening to us or watching us in northwestern Ontario you've got to tell us about the contribution made by what today we call Thunder Bay back then it was Fort William the contribution they made to the successful prosecution of the Battle of Britain I wouldn't have thought this had happened in a million years, but it's a great story. Because the Hawker Hurricane, which is the principal fight, I mean, so was the Spitfire. But the hurricane principally is in such great demand.

And because Lord Beaverbrook, who we may get to later, wants as many factories, not just in Britain, but elsewhere to be building these things, the Air Ministry gives Canadian Car and Foundry, a manufacturing plant at Fort William, they're making buses and train cars and tractors and stuff, they get a contract to build 40 hurricanes in Fort William. So they ship the parts over.

And who rises to the top of the pile of engineers to assume the control of the building of these things, but a woman named Elsie McGill. She's from Vancouver, she's the first woman at the control of the building of these things, but a woman named Elsie McGill. She's from Vancouver. She's the first woman at the University of Toronto to get an electronic engineering degree, the first woman in North America to get an aeronautical engineering degree from the University of Michigan

after battling polio. She goes to fair show. Keep going. There's one more. First woman postdoctoral at MIT. That's right. I mean, she's brilliant. She is.

She is brilliant. And the engineering industry recognizes her. And so does Canadian Car. And so they get her to come up and head the crew that's assembling the aircraft. And she's savvy. She knows aircraft. She knows performance and design.

And she speaks about it. Shadalane magazine, big magazine in those years, interviews her. And she's got a platform to talk about women in aviation and this critical job of getting hurricanes to Britain, which she does. They're shipped over, the same as those guys, on the 7th of June the Duchess of Athol leaves Halifax with Elsie's 40 hurricanes contained and they arrive in time for the Battle of Britain. Fantastic. Lord Beaverbrook, let's come back to him. He's a Canadian in the British government.

What's his job? He's a sticky character, as you, I'm sure, know from your research and interviews elsewhere. His motto was, organization is the enemy of improvisation. He was one of those people who was an industrialist to the nth degree, demanded the most of everybody he had in his employ. Whether you were working in a newspaper, as was his first interest in New Brunswick, he had a whole chain of newspapers. He moves to Britain in 1910, gets elected as an independent MP.

Churchill realizes his skill as an industrialist and gives him the job of being the minister of aircraft production. So, Spitfires and hurricanes have to be the top priority and we're leading up to the Battle of Britain in the middle of 1940. All of the projected numbers of Spitfires and hurricanes, somewhere around 200 a month, are never being met. When he takes over in May, instead of producing 200 Spitfires and hurricanes in May, they produce 300, the factories that he's controlling. Instead of 300, they produce

400. And so the flow of aircraft from this man, this industrialist with his Canadian background, it turns the tide. And then the other thing he does is, not just having the regular obvious factories, which were of course targets for the Luftwaffe to bomb, build these Spitfires and hurricanes, he creates a network of shadow factories hidden in the hinterland of Britain and little old Fort William way off in Canada to help supply the aircraft from unexpected sources and they're called shadow factories. He was a brilliant, brilliant statistician and very demanding and I loved Churchill's line about him when he was sort of,

after the war they were still fast friends. And Churchill said, most people take drugs, I take Max. His real name was Max Aitken. Yeah. Here's a quote from your book. Okay, let's bring this up, shall we, Sheldon? This is Johnny Kent, quoted in the Battle of Britain. The extraordinary difference, he said,

between the First World War and this one, Kent wrote, was that in the first, you had to fight like hell to keep out of it, while in this one, you had to fight like hell to get into it. What does that mean? Well, in the First World War, if you could dodge a bullet by keeping your head down and out of trouble and out of the front line, that's what he's alluding to.

But he had a circuitous route. He's one of the 118 who make their way into the RAF through disparate means, gets his private pilot's license in Winnipeg with thanks to a guy named Connie Johansen who was a first-world-war pilot instructs him, gets his private pilot's license, gets on a cattle boat, gets to England, Johnny Kent does, gets his commission and then they ship him off doing all kinds of odds and ends he wants to fight but they send him to the Royal Aircraft Establishment, which means he's a Test pilot and he's told to test the efficiency of barrage balloons These are large dirgibles lined up along the coast of Britain, tethered to block low-level

attacks of potential German bombing in the early part of the war. You have to test them, they say. Well, how do you test them but crash into them? He does 300 controlled successful collisions with barrage balloons and gets an Air Force cross, goes to Buckingham Palace, George VI pins it on his chest and then he says, you're on your way. Well, then they send him off to do photo reconnaissance in a Spitfire that's been stripped down, it's got no metal plating around the cockpit, the radio's not in this one, the guns are gone so it's lighter and can get to

high altitudes and Kent does the first photography of the German movement towards Poland in 1939 and brings that back. But he wants to fight. So finally, as the Battle of Britain begins, they send him off to his first combat position as flight commander of number 303 RAF, all Polish fighter squadron. All Polish airmen who've fled from Poland, they don't speak any English. And he's been given the job of training these guys.

Now, the poles aren't stupid. It's not that they can't fly. It's that they can't fly British aircraft yet. They were used to using liters and kilometers in Britain, or in Europe. In Britain, it's miles and gallons. And if you don't know the number of gallons you got in your plane, you're in trouble.

But the poles had real trouble with retractable undercarriage. When Spitfire Hurricane takes off the wheels come up into the belly and of course in reverse when you're company Well the Poles kept landing them on their but they forgot to deploy the landing gear So Kent's given the job of training these guys not to kill because they had already that Inert skill from the battles they'd fought over Poland in 1939. They just had to do it in Spitfires and Hurricanes and he does it. And his growing into the Polish mindset helps Kent become an ace in the Battle of Britain and also gives him a stronger understanding of what the Poles lost and what the Canadians had to learn.

The Poles got screwed at the end of this war, Ted. They did. They lost 29 fighters. They were significant to the successful prosecution of the— 126 enemy aircraft shot down in 42 days. And what happened at the end of the war when it came time for a celebration to be planned? They weren't invited.

Why not? The then Prime Minister Atlee has just negotiated with Joseph Stalin at the end of the Second World War to take Poland into the Soviet Union. So Poland is literally occupied again and he doesn't, Atlee doesn't want to offend Stalin so he doesn't invite the Poles to the victory parade on May the 8th 1946. The Canadians, the Brits, the New Zealanders, Australians, all the Commonwealth aircrew who've fought the battle alongside, shoulder to shoulder with the Poles, say,

if the Poles don't march, we don't march. Atlee changes his mind, offers 25 invitations, the Poles decline, and the march goes ahead. But it's a typical example of our condescending way of dealing with the Colonials, the non-Britz, and that was a horrible attitude that persisted right through to the victory parade. Let's go back up to 35,000 feet and talk

about the consequences for Germany not winning the Battle of Britain. They had everything going their way from 1939 to this battle in 1940. It looked like they were going to be able to take England easily given the overwhelming odds they had in their favor, but they lost the Battle of Britain. What did that do in terms of Germany's ability to fight the rest of the war? Well there wasn't really, it wasn't a bad publicity for them because they already occupied

Europe. Göring simply got the job after he failed in his attempt to wipe the RAF off the map. He was given the new job of invading Russia. That didn't go too well either. Nor did it. In 1941, right through to Stalingrad, all that stuff. But I think the more important aspect of the defense of Britain

by this few group that we've been talking about is that they allowed Churchill to run the war from his cabinet war rooms under London. He didn't have to do it from Canada because if the Germans had invaded Churchill would have been Ottawa. It allowed the merchant navy around Britain to recover and the Battle of the Atlantic to be won which I talked about in my last book. You talked about in my last book. And it also gave that tremendous buildup. There was an operation which was constant through the war of building up American resources once the Americans came into the war and to prepare Britain to be the launch pad for D-Day in 1944. So all of that was... Richard Holmes, who's a

British military historian, and I read a lot of his stuff, he said if it weren't for the Battle of Britain, D-Day would never have happened. Here's, I mean, here are some of the numbers. 57 straight days London was bombed. September 7th to the end of the year in 1940, more than 13,000 dead civilians, 18,000 more wounded. And the question becomes, how in heaven's name did they get through all that?

That's where we brag about the Brits, that stiff upper lip and all that stuff. They grinned and bore it. They did it. And thank you for raising that, because it's a really important thing. I could be up there in the 35,000 foot range forever in this book, but I knew that I had to come back

to ground to find out what was going on there. And I found three Canadians, three women, who went through the blitz and tell very different stories about the evolution of the war on the ground and the damage it did to their homes, their lives, their families. A woman just down on St. Clair, a woman named Dorothy Marshall,

her single name was Firth, still with us, 102. She told me what it was like to be a fire watcher. These are the people, the women, who went out and she described how horrible the uniforms were. They were these surge blue jackets and the helmets and the gas masks and the Lyle stocking. She hated them. But every night at 10 o'clock she went to the fire station and was taught how to be a fire watcher

with a bucket of sand, a shovel, and a stirrup pump. Now we're talking about 13,000 incendiaries the Germans dropped on London on the first night, September the 7th. And for 57 days after 10 o'clock at night she's gotta go out with a bucket of sand, a shovel, and a stirrup pump, like the ones we used to pump up our bicycle tires with

to put out these fires. When they burned, those incendiaries burned up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit and tore apart neighborhoods, her job was to try to put them out, which she did for 57 days. Maybe that's why she's 102. She had a whole lot of guts then and does now. Okay, we can't talk about the Battle of Britain without giving this guy his due. Sheldon, I think we have a clip of Winston Churchill standing by. Let's roll it, please. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lost for a thousand years,

men will still say, this was their finest hour. Twenty-two books later, would you say this is Britain's finest hour? It certainly was the most important first one. There are lots of finest hours. That's the other funny thing about this story, because it happened so early in 1940. There's a whole lot of war yet to go, but another 1,700 days. And so it drifts into the rear view mirror,

bit by bit by bit, and so did a few. So I like to suggest that this certainly was Canada's first finest hour with these young men doing what they did. Men and women, Elsie and so on. They're an extraordinary generation as we've been taught to say. But this is evidence, this is proof that they stepped up, the Brits with their stiff upper lip, and the Canadians with that imprint on this battle that's unique. Beautiful. You've done it again, sir.

Thank you. Well done. Battle of Britain, Canadian Airmen in their finest hour. That's Ted Berris. Thanks, Ted. Pleasure.