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Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen In Their Finest Hour
Ted Barris
Sutherland House
“I had my lucky charm put on my aircraft the other day,” Pilot Officer Duncan Hewitt wrote his family more than 80 years ago. “It consists of a white circle, six inches in diameter, with an Indian head painted on it.”
It was 1940, the war was heating up, and this young New Brunswicker and his RAF 501 squadron were on convoy patrol over the English Channel. “Please don’t worry if a letter doesn’t come for three weeks or more,” he had written earlier. “If I am killed or taken prisoner of war, you will be notified by the Air Ministry immediately.”
On July 12, one day after Hewitt had reported the successful downing of a German aircraft, his Hurricane fighter went in pursuit of an enemy bomber. Because of bad visibility, Hewitt resorted to low-level attacks and fatally hit the water.
He was only 20. His squadron’s motto: “Fear nothing.”
Military historian Ted Barris considers Duncan Hewitt to be the first Canadian casualty of the Battle of Britain. And, as is repeatedly the case with Barris’s new book on a seminal event of the Second World War, the Hewitt story brings a more personal dimension to an epic drama.
“I thought my style of writing — which seeks to bring people to the surface, to the front line of the story — might apply quite well here because these young Canadians were so distinctive,” Barris says. Duncan Hewitt, whose high school yearbook celebrated him as one of the youngest people in Canada ever to secure a pilot’s license, is one among many in Barris’s gallery of heroes. However, it’s characteristic of this meticulously researched book that it also explains why Hewitt would not survive his watery crash. The RAF’s air-sea rescue system only had 18 boats along the entire south coast of England. Fighter planes were not even equipped with inflatable dinghies.
“The Germans were much better prepared in retrieving downed aircrews over the channel,” Barris tells Postmedia. “Their flight suits were bright colours, they had ships that could pick their guys up. The RAF hadn’t even planned on that — and you would think that with their maritime mindset, they would have. Instead, they had to learn by losing scores of pilots who would be lost at sea because they didn’t even have survival gear.”
So yes, grievous mistakes were made. Nevertheless, the 113 days constituting the Battle of Britain were a miracle — a triumph over the odds. In the summer of 1940, the RAF Fighter Command’s 768 fighter aircraft would successfully defend the skies against an attacking enemy force of more than 2,200.
Barris’s latest work, Battle of Britain, arrives in the Royal Canadian Air Force’s centenary year and carries the subtitle: Canadian Airmen In Their Finest Hour. He hopes it will bring the reader closer to these young warriors as individual human beings.
“All these guys had tremendous personalities,” he emphasizes. “And no one so far had delved deeply into their stories at any length.” That neglect extends to the dedicated Canadian groundcrews who are also celebrated in these pages.
Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, would speak eloquently of the “few” who thwarted Adolf Hitler’s plan to destroy the country’s air defences. And on paper, Canadian pilots might seem among the fewest of the few — 105 out of a total roster of 3,000 dominated by approximately 2,500 British flyers. But they consistently punched above their weight.
“I think what surprised me in my researches was how much of the Canadian personality was imprinted on this battle,” Barris says. This reality is in contrast to the formality of official accounts of the Second World War’s air conflicts, particularly those originating with the RAF. “Everybody ‘looked’ the same. You had to do everything by the book, everything by the processes that were expected. That was the nature of the Royal Air Force.”
But then the young Canadians blew in. “They come from places like Saskatchewan, little towns in B.C. and New Brunswick — men from very different backgrounds who all love flying — and they all bring with them, a character that’s very different, a background that’s very different, a sensibility that’s very different. These guys didn’t come in as swashbuckling fighter pilots to begin with. They came from very simple backgrounds and brought along what skills they knew — skills that would be valuable in battle.”
For example, a young Canadian who had flown as a bush pilot back home would have a distinct advantage over his British counterparts.
“If you could go into Canada’s Arctic in a bush plane, where your references were just snow and trees, and could get back safely through god only knows what kind of storm, you were already a pretty damn good pilot,” Barris says.
He cites the example of a young Winnipegger named Johnny Kent — “kind of ham-handed initially because he didn’t have all the skills.” But because Kent “had really learned things by the seat of his pants in Manitoba” he had developed a remarkable agility and awareness of surroundings. “So sending him do reconnaissance at high levels over Germany, where there were wide-open spaces, wasn’t particularly foreign to him.”
Kent was then assigned to test the effectiveness of the barrage balloons tethered along the coastline to detect low-level attacks by bombers. “The only way he could do that was to collide with them,” Barris says admiringly. “And in the course of maybe a year, he did some 300 controlled collisions. He survived without a mishap and was awarded an Air Force Cross.”
Among the Canadians who battled in the skies, 46 were pilots from Canada’s own RCAF No. 1 Fighter Squadron. Others, a number of whom had arrived in England before the outbreak of war and joined up under a special entry program, were serving with RAF fighter squadrons — including 44 in the famous 242 Fighter Squadron under the leadership of legless flying ace Douglas Bader.
Bader was a controversial figure, often at loggerheads with the RAF establishment, but his Canadian pilots flourished under his command. One of them was a troubled young Albertan named Willie McKnight, who was credited with 17 kills before his death in combat on Jan. 12, 1941. War gave McKnight a purpose in life, and Barris sees a striking contrast between the young Canadian’s personality and that of his dynamic leader.
“Willie McKnight was a lost young man. He lost a parent in childhood, was brought up in not the best conditions with very little discipline. He enters medical school at the University of Alberta, clowns around and gets thrown out. He ends up going to England, joins the RAF under its direct-entry scheme, and writes home about how happy he is and how they will beat the Germans. He was much like Bader with the same defiant, holier-than-thou kind of attitude.”
A boulevard in Calgary commemorates McKnight’s heroism. But of course, his sacrifice was only one among many; Barris has no interest in jingoism. There’s an elegiac texture to this book, which is why it fittingly turns at one point to the words of revered RAF ace Peter Townsend and his own memoir, Duel Of Eagles:
“Death was always present. We knew that if we did die, we would be alone, smashed to pieces or burnt alive, or drowned. We seemed already to be living in another world, separate and exalted, where the gulf between life and death had closed and was no longer forbidding.”