1. Halifax Morning Chronicle, August 8, 1914, quoted in Michael L. Hadley and Roger Sarty, Tin-Pots and Pirate Ships: Canadian Naval Forces and German Sea Raiders 1880–1918 (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 80.
2. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 45.
3. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 46.
4. For a detailed study of the coastal defenses around Sydney harbor and its role as a shipping and naval port in the war, see Brian Douglas Tennyson and Roger Sarty, Guardian of the Gulf: Sydney, Cape Breton, and the Atlantic Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 113–88.
5. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 48.
6. Quoted in Hadley and Sarty, 155–56.
7. Regarded as one of the founders of the Royal Canadian Navy, Hose went on to succeed Kingsmill as Director of the RCN (redesignated Chief of the Naval Staff in 1928), serving from 1921 to 1934.
8. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 38.
9. Roger Sarty, “Hard Luck Flotilla: The RCN’s Atlantic Coast Patrol, 1914–18,” in The RCN in Transition 1910–1985, ed. W. A. B. Douglas (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1988), 105.
10. He was badly injured in the Halifax explosion in December 1917. See also Lambert Griffith, “Letters from Halifax: Reliving the Halifax Explosion through the Eyes of My Grandfather, a Sailor in the Royal Canadian Navy,” ed. John Griffith Armstrong, The Northern Mariner, 8, no. 4 (October 1998): 55–74; and John Griffin Armstrong, The Halifax Explosion and the Royal Canadian Navy: Inquiry and Intrigue. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002.
11. After the war, he moved to the United States and operated Undercliff Boatworks in Edgewater, New Jersey. In 1939 he bought the Cape Cod Shipbuilding Company in Wareham, Massachusetts, which built tugboats during the Second World War and later pioneered fiberglass sailboat construction.
12. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 46.
13. Sarty, “Hard Luck,” 111.
14. Sarty, “Hard Luck,” 107.
15. Sarty, “Hard Luck,” 108.
16. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 49.
17. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 50–51. William Oswald Story (1859–1938) was born in Ireland and pursued a career in the Royal Navy. He retired in 1911 with the rank of Rear Admiral but in 1911 was appointed superintendent of the Esquimalt naval dockyard in British Columbia. In 1914 he was appointed Senior Naval Officer West Coast. Three years later, he was promoted to Vice Admiral and superintendent of the Halifax naval dockyard, where he remained until the end of the war.
18. After the war, U-86’s captain, Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, and two of his lieutenants were charged with war crimes in what became known as the Leipzig trials. Brümmer-Patzig escaped justice by fleeing the country. The two lieutenants were convicted and sentenced to four years in prison but served only about four months before managing to escape.
19. Roger Sarty, Maritime Defence, 69, cited in Milner, Canada’s Navy, 51.
20. Gilbert Tucker, The Naval Service of Canada: Its Official History. Vol. 1. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1952.
21. D. F. Kealy and E. C. Russell, A History of Canadian Naval Aviation 1918–1962 (Ottawa: The Naval Historical Section Canadian Forces Headquarters Department of National Defence, 1965), 5.
22. That vessel, the Mackay-Bennett, was the first to arrive on the scene to recover bodies after the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. It retrieved 306 of the 328 bodies found from the 1,517 who died. The popular Canadian author Thomas Raddall based some of his short stories on his experiences as a wireless operator on the Mackay-Bennett.
23. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 54.
24. Sydney Daily Post, August 28, 1918.
25. S. F. Wise, Canadian Airmen and the First World War: The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 604. The four aircraft provided by the Admiralty in 1917 were no longer available because when Admiral Kingsmill discovered them in storage in September 1917 he rather oddly had them sent to the U.S. Naval Reserve Flying Corps.
26. Kealy and Russell, 6.
27. Kealy and Russell, 3.
28. Quoted in Kealy and Russell, 4.
29. Kealy and Russell, 5.
30. Kealy and Russell, 4.
31. Kealy and Russell, 7.
32. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 56.
33. Sarty “Hard Luck,” 125.
34. Milner, Canada’s Navy, 39.
35. Kealy and Russell, 9.
Chapter 13
The War in the Air
It was the mud, I think, that made me take to flying. . . . The mud, on a certain day in July 1915, changed my whole career in the war.
—W. A. “Billy” Bishop[1]
Canada did not have an air force in 1914, but it almost did. In a bizarre episode which remains somewhat murky even a hundred years later, Sam Hughes—who has been described as the only Canadian politician who “had the faintest glimmering of the potentialities of aviation”[2]—seems to have personally but informally authorized the creation of an air force in August 1914. Not much is known about this episode, but what we think we know is this.
During the initial mobilization of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, which Hughes was attempting to manage personally, he cabled Lord Kitchener, saying that “many Canadians and Americans” were offering their services as pilots in the war, and asking what should be done. The War Office, clearly showing restrained enthusiasm, responded that it would accept six qualified men now and possibly more in future.[3]
Then, when Hughes went to Valcartier, the mobilization camp for the first contingent, a fast-talking entrepreneurial man called Ernest Lloyd Janney secured a meeting with him and offered to organize an air service that would be attached to the CEF. Hughes accepted the offer, unofficially commissioned Janney as a captain, and gave him $5,000 to buy an airplane in the United States. Thus was born the Canadian Aviation Corps with Janney as its commander. Typically, Hughes had neither consulted nor informed either the prime minister or the chief of the general staff, and he neglected to have Janney’s commission gazetted.
Janney bought a second-hand plane in Massachusetts and flew it to Valcartier, where he seconded two recruits, William Sharpe and Harry Farr, from among the CEF volunteers. All three, with their dismantled airplane, sailed to England in October with the first contingent. In due course, Janney presented General Alderson with the plan he had drawn up for an air force consisting of four airplanes, pilots, and support staff. Alderson was understandably dumbfounded because he had no idea who Janney was and no one had told him that the CEF was supposed to have its own air support.
Alderson logically cabled Militia Headquarters asking for an explanation and was told—presumably at the dictation of General Gwatkin—that there was no intention of forming an air unit and that Janney’s connection with the CEF was being severed. Janney returned to Canada in January 1915 and appears to have pursued other speculative schemes, including an abortive attempt to set up a flying school. Sharpe joined the Royal Flying Corps, and Farr was discharged from the CEF for unknown reasons in May 1915. So much for the first incarnation of a Canadian air force.
Despite this fiasco, there was considerable interest among young Canadian men—and Americans as well—in serving overseas in an air force. Until the spring of 1918, there were two British flying services: the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), which supported the army, and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), which supported the Royal Navy. In time, things got a little more complicated when the RNAS posted squadrons to the Western Front and elsewhere, alongside the RFC, and eventually they merged to form the Royal Air Force.
Both services quickly became interested in attracting volunteers from Canada and the other Dominions, but they didn’t provide much encouragement. Candidates had to be of “pure European descent,” had to have already earned a basic flying license from a private flying school, and had to get to England at their own expense in order to enlist. The cost of a flying course was $400, a large sum at the time. As a result, only candidates who c
ould afford the significant costs involved were recruited into the RFC or RNAS in the early part of the war, although both services did rebate $375 of the tuition to those whom they accepted.
There were very few flying schools in Canada at this time. The best-known one was at Long Branch, a community west of Toronto (now part of the city of Mississauga) and was operated by J. A. D. McCurdy, one of Canada’s most prominent pioneers of early flight. McCurdy had worked with Alexander Graham Bell on his aerial research in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and had piloted the Silver Dart in its flight over the Bras d’Or Lake in February 1909—the first powered flight anywhere in the British Empire. A year later he was the first Canadian to receive a pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale of Paris through the Aero Club of America.
McCurdy’s school was associated with the Curtiss Aeroplane Company of Hammondsport, New York—founded by Glenn Curtiss, one of the leading flight pioneers in the United States—and used Curtiss aircraft with mostly American instructors. The first Canadians to graduate from McCurdy’s flying school in July 1915 were Frank Homer Smith of Sarnia, Ontario, and Arthur Strachan Ince of Toronto, both of whom joined the RNAS.[4]
Early in 1915, the War Office suggested to all the Dominions that they consider raising air units for service with the RFC. South Africa had already done so, contributing a squadron, and Australia now formed the four-squadron Australian Flying Corps. Borden showed little interest, however, and both Gwatkin and Lieutenant Colonel E. A. Stanton, the governor general’s military secretary, opposed the idea. Hughes, perhaps because of the Janney affair, quickly agreed with them.
The government did allow the RFC and RNAS to recruit men in Canada through the governor general’s office, agreeing that the Militia Department would attest volunteers and send them to England (at British expense). This decision had the merit of being “an expedient that satisfied British military requirements and yet averted the creation of a Canadian air force.”[5] S. F. Wise, the official historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, describes this as “the single most important development in Canadian air history to that point” because Canadians, “under British tutelage, were now to be trained for the air war, and for the air age to come, not in hundreds but in thousands.”[6]
It has been estimated that about 700 men were recruited for the RFC and RNAS during 1915–16, more than half of them being trained at the McCurdy school at Long Branch. The rest took their training in the United States, either at the Curtiss school in Hammondsport or elsewhere.[7] Indeed, so many Canadians sought flying training in the United States in 1915–16 because it was not widely available in Canada that more than half of the pilot certificates issued by the Aero Club of America went to Canadians.[8]
Meanwhile, the Canadian government’s attitude toward the air services began to change in 1916, primarily because of Borden’s serious concern about the huge amounts being spent by the British government in the United States for war materiel. Borden applied a great deal of pressure on the British to shift more of that production to Canada, and even lent the British government $1 million so that it could acquire the assets of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company in Toronto. A new company, Canadian Aeroplanes Ltd., was then created under the control of the Imperial Munitions Board, which employed hundreds of workers and “achieved—and with notable efficiency—the first mass production and large-scale export of aircraft in the history of Canadian aviation.”[9]
The government may have been influenced by the public fascination with the romanticized image of airmen as knights of the air and the publicity given to the exploits of British fighter pilots. It may also have been influenced by its awareness that an increasing number of those British pilots were actually Canadians. It has been calculated, for example, that 240 Canadian pilots participated in the extended battle of the Somme, and 63 of them were killed.[10]
The government was undoubtedly influenced by the campaign organized by Colonel William Hamilton-Merritt. A prominent mining engineer with a distinguished military career, Hamilton-Merritt had become convinced that aircraft were the new cavalry and were critical to modern warfare. He and other like-minded men therefore established the Canadian Aviation Fund, which organized public meetings, planted stories in newspapers across the country, and lobbied the government.
The government responded by agreeing to the RFC’s request to be allowed to establish a major pilot training program in Canada, a decision which Wise describes as “the single most important development in Canadian air history to that point.”[11] Controlled entirely by the RFC, which sent over a senior officer to organize and manage it, the creation of what became known as RFC Canada meant, in effect, that Canada had placed itself in a “posture of colonial dependency in the field of aviation” and “became host once again to an imperial military presence, on a scale the Cabinet could hardly have anticipated.”[12]
The contrast with Canadian policy regarding the CEF was striking, in view of Borden’s strongly held views on Canada’s evolving status as an autonomous nation. But, as we shall see, it was only the first of several major compromises made necessary by Canada’s unpreparedness for participation in a global war and its focus on the CEF. In the government’s defense, it can at least be said that by the end of the war Canadians had come to dominate RFC Canada. Canadians commanded two of the three wings and twelve of the sixteen training squadrons, as well as the School of Aerial Fighting and each of its four squadrons, the Cadet Wing, and the Mechanical Transport Section. About 70% of all flying appointments were held by Canadians. It seems likely, however, that this transformation did not so much reflect a Canadianization policy but a shortage of RFC personnel. About a third of the flying instructors in the training squadrons were Americans.[13]
One of the Canadians was Harold Hartney of Saskatoon, who, after serving overseas in the RFC, was brought home and seconded to the U.S. Air Service to command and train 27 Aero Squadron. He later commanded the five-squadron 1st Pursuit Group, which has been described as “the finest air combat force put into the field by the fledgling U.S. Air Service,”[14] and earned the American Distinguished Service Cross, the French Légion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre, and the Italian Medaglia d’argento al valore militare.[15]
RFC Canada operated training stations at the former McCurdy school at Long Branch and others at Camp Borden, Desoronto, Beamsville, Hamilton, and North Toronto (Armour Heights and Leaside), all in southern Ontario. At the end of May 1917, shortly after the United States entered the war, Brigadier General George O. Squier,[16] Chief Signal Officer, U.S. Army, who commanded the American air service, visited Camp Borden and while there agreed that RFC Canada could open a recruiting office in New York City. We might well ask why he would agree to allow potential recruits for his own air service to be “poached” by the RFC. “The answer, in all probability,” according to Sebastian Cox, is that Squier “knew his own training organization was inadequate and thought it better to have Americans trained to fight with the British than not to fight at all.”[17]
Brigadier General C. D. Hoare, who headed RFC Canada, worked closely with the British-Canadian Recruiting Mission in 1917–18 and, while ostensibly seeking British citizens living in the U.S., in fact recruited American citizens. Indeed, by late September 1917 half of his cadet intake was American, and it was not until February 1918 that the U.S. State Department realized what he was doing and ordered him to stop.[18] Wise describes it as “a remarkable enterprise. Under the nose of the Canadian government, but apparently without its knowledge, a British officer, with the knowledge and consent of his superiors, had conducted from Canada a quasi-diplomatic operation utterly at variance with Canadian policy and, furthermore, had got away with it.”[19] By the time the New York office was closed, Canadians were enlisting in the RFC in greater numbers and the recruiting crisis had passed, so the need for clandestine measures had ended.
American military leaders, anxious to promote military cooperation, had not only condoned this
recruiting venture but had also assured Hoare that there would be no interference with the supply of aircraft engines to Canadian Aeroplanes Ltd. In return, they were anxious to learn from RFC training methods. Lieutenant General John B. Bennett, Chief of the Aviation Section, and Major Benjamin D. Foulois,[20] later General Pershing’s Chief of Air Service, visited Toronto and Camp Borden to study RFC Canada’s organizational structure. They were followed by Major Hiram Bingham,[21] who was responsible for setting up a ground training program and later opened military flying schools patterned after the Canadian schools at six American universities.[22]
Meanwhile, Hoare was looking for a place to carry out winter training because it was generally thought that this could not be done in Canada. Squier offered an ideal solution by making available the military flying schools about to open in the U.S., which were short of instructors, if RFC Canada would train the American cadets in Canada during the summer months. As remarkable as this arrangement was, it appears to have been agreed without consulting or even informing the Canadian government, which was not aware “that the first substantial lodgement of American forces upon Canadian soil since 1814 was about to take place.”[23] This program quickly expanded to the point that RFC Canada trained enough air and ground personnel to organize ten squadrons, which received further training from the RFC in France.
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