My father’s own reaction to Munich was recorded in a letter he wrote at the time: “There’s no use kidding ourselves. We are in for a war and this Chamberlain thing has only postponed it. War is coming. I dread the thought but we are going to have to prepare for it quickly. My guess is that it is less than a year away.”
He now devoted all of his time to air force matters. One outgrowth of his anxiety was an impulsive scheme that turned out to have great foresight. He was convinced that Canada’s earliest and most important role in case of war would be to provide aircrew material—and unlimited space in which to train additional airmen. An essential part of this effort, he realized, would be U.S. citizens—like the Lafayette Escadrille of World War I.
My father telephoned a former war pilot, Clayton Knight, who since the war had become a noted illustrator. Clayton was dining in Cleveland at the house of an old comrade-in-arms, Thomas J. “Tommy”Herbert, who had become the Attorney General of Ohio. After Knight was summoned to the telephone, he returned to the table shaking his head in bewilderment.
“That was Billy Bishop,” he told Herbert. “He wants me to help him in a plan to smuggle pilots up to Canada if war starts.”
Herbert almost choked on the food he was chewing. “As Attorney General I should be the last to know about this,” he complained. “It’s illegal to solicit an American citizen to fight in a foreign war if America is neutral.”
My father set about trying to make it legal. On March 27, 1939, he visited the White House to discuss plans for enlisting American flyers in the RCAF with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And as an indirect result, the Clayton Knight Committee was set up to handle voluntary enlistments. Offices were established in centres throughout the United States. As a memoir of his visit, Roosevelt gave him a picture autographed “To my great friend Air Marshal Bishop.”
The next day when Knight telephoned the U.S. State Department to confirm the arrangements, the voice that answered said: “This is the German Embassy.”
“Brother!” Clayton said afterwards. “That was the wrongest wrong number in history.”
During that summer I accompanied my father and the defence minister on a tour of Canadian air force stations from coast to coast. In five years the activity of the RCAF had trebled. Britain had sent over new planes, including a squadron of the latest Hurricanes. By now the total strength was four thousand men. But more training planes were needed, and it was far easier for enemy observers to detect American breaches of neutrality in the matter of airplanes than of men. So my father devised a method of bringing United States’ training planes into Canada. They landed at airports that straddled the border between the two countries, and were left “unattended” on the American side a few feet from the border. Whereupon Canadian aircraftmen lassoed them and dragged them across the boundary line, without the military personnel of either nation “violating” the border of the other.
As the crisis in Europe mounted, the silver RCAF Grumman amphibian assigned to my father appeared more and more frequently over the Burden family’s summer place in the Muskoka Lakes near Windermere to take him to Ottawa for conferences. Perhaps a little ironically, the Grumman’s route was the same as that flown by the ill-fated Bishop-Barker airline. Every time the aircraft arrived, everyone in the area was sure it was a signal that war had started.
TWENTY-THREE
CALL TO
THE COLOURS
CANADA was not prepared when the war finally came. In the fall of 1939 an understaffed and under-equipped RCAF was numerically and physically incapable of handling the number of volunteers that lined up to enlist. In any case there weren’t enough instructors to train aircrews. Thousands had to be turned away. But in December, 1939, the Canadian government agreed to a proposal by Great Britain that Canada become the training centre of the Commonwealth, and overnight my father’s part-time job became a second full-time air force career. Men from England, New Zealand and Australia as well as Canada would be trained by the RCAF. The nation was to become a nursery of aircrews—its most important early contribution to the Allied cause, and a dream that my father had long nurtured and publicly predicted.
Now his hopes were realized, and on January 23, 1940, he became director of recruiting. In this job he had a completely free hand. His first step was to inject colour, drama and excitement into the quest for air force volunteers. He believed in bands, parades and lots of publicity. The fact that he himself was the focus of most of the publicity did not faze him. It was in a good cause.
Early in 1940 the Bishops moved to Sandy Hill, in Ottawa. It was a compact little operation he ran there. His aide-de-camp was Paul Rodier, another World War I pilot from Montreal. His secretary was Margaret Northwood, a strikingly beautiful girl from Winnipeg who had also been his secretary in his civilian job. The faithful but long-suffering Leffo enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was granted the rank of flight sergeant in order to become my father’s chauffeur, batman and, as he himself put it, “his bloody wet nurse.”
To complete the entourage, along with my mother, my sister and myself, there was always a couple of pairs of chows, a breed of dogs my father favoured because he considered them much maligned. “People call them vicious,” he would say, “but actually there are no more intelligent and tractable dogs than chows.”
Members of his entourage just had to adjust themselves to his habits. Once he decided that because of gasoline rationing everyone must learn to ride bicycles. There was no argument, for he immediately went out and bought four.
His decisions to take off on recruiting trips were often made on impulse, at a moment’s notice, and invariably resulted in a domestic uproar. Lethbridge particularly bore the brunt, packing clothes and other travelling gear, particularly the large leather hatbox which was the sole relic of grandfather Eleazar Bishop’s leather-making career. My father had had it converted into an ingenious carryall with compartments for an ice-bucket, glasses, bottles of tonic water and club soda, plus assorted liquors. “It’s the only good use that has ever been made of it,”my father used to say.
This active period was undoubtedly the happiest of his life since World War I days. Not only did it soothe his restless soul to be constantly on the move, but it kept him in touch with the important people of the day—Churchill, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, Edouard Beness of Czechoslovakia, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, Alexander de Seversky, the aircraft designer, and many more, all of whom were guests at our house.
In September 1940 my father crossed the Atlantic on the flying boat Clyde at the invitation of the British Air Ministry for a conference on the Commonwealth air training plan, an ambitious program that had been given top priority with the fall of France, the evacuation of the British expeditionary force from Dunkirk, and the massive air assault against Britain launched by Goering’s Luftwaffe.
No. 1 RCAF Squadron, formed partly of Sunday fliers, was already in action. The month my father spent in England gave him full confirmation that his celebrity was firmly established. He was pictured, full-page, in the magazine Sketch, under the caption, “Seventy-Plane Bishop Comes Home.” He and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were photographed in the garden of the Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street as bombers droned overhead and anti-aircraft guns barked. Of that memorable moment he recalled that “we had a most welcome drink of scotch and soda first, and Churchill said ‘I suppose we better look like we’re talking about something. But what will we talk about?’” Actually they had talked of my father’s promise that the RCAF would send over a thousand trained airmen almost immediately.
He was received by King George VI in the room at Buckingham Palace where His Majesty had been sitting when the palace was bombed. The King pointed out the damage. “I told him,”my father recorded, “that I thought the bombing was a good thing. He was very startled at this and said ‘Oh you do, do you?’ I replied ‘Yes Sir, I certainly do, the bombing of the
civilians has made everyone angry, but this puts the cap on it.’ He laughed and said that I might not have been so cheerful if I had been there at the time.”
In other ways it was a sentimental journey. Nostalgia flooded his sentimental soul on a visit to his old haunts at Northholt, where he arrived just as the pilots of No. 1 RCAF landed their Hurricane fighters after a scramble against German raiders in which two German Dornier bombers had been brought down. Part of the tail of one of them was later retrieved and given to my father as a souvenir.
My father’s visit was climaxed by a solemn ceremony at which he unfurled the RCAF flag for the first time on English soil, the blue ensign with the maple leaf in the centre of the roundel, an insignia that theoretically came into existence in 1918 when he had been named the first commanding officer of the Canadian Wing of the RAF. When he returned to Canada he said “I felt like a Victorian in a bustle watching a modern bathing beauty.”
In 1941, the Wings Parade became a familiar part of the Canadian wartime scene. At these colourful ceremonies held throughout the country that year, fourteen thousand Allied airmen marched proudly forward to have the shiny emblem of training aircrews pinned to their tunics—their “wings.”
At his own insistence my father frequently officiated at these parades. He knew how much the moment meant to every man who graduated. He would try to put each man at ease as he presented him with his wings. How did he like the service? How many hours had he flown? (It was about 150 hours compared to his own 18½ when Bishop got his own wings). Then—“the best of luck!”
At a graduation for observers, my father, for the first time since 1916, wore his own “O” with the outstretched wing in place of his pilot’s wings, as a tribute to the men “who take enormous risks and seldom get any of the glory.”
In his speeches to graduating classes of airmen and on other “patriotic occasions” in which he was continually asked to participate, he used all the dramatic tricks he had learned, first in the officers’ mess speech-making game with Jack Scott at Filescamp, later on his fundraising tour of Canada in 1917, and finally in his brief but spectacular tour of the United States as a professional lecturer.
Oratory is not one of the more enduring art forms, unless it happens to be Churchillian. So my father’s speeches that the newspapers described as, among other things, “the closest approach to great poetry,”may not quite stand up to that billing when removed from the emotional context of Canada’s war effort in the critical days of World War II. An example was a speech he delivered at a tri-services rally in Toronto in November, 1941:
I have seen you go by and my heart is full and very proud. I have seen you lads of the Navy march past today as the lads of the British Navy have marched past the parade grounds of a very eventful history and have stood by their stations in angry waters. And I have watched you Air Force men go by. Yours it is and will be to blaze the trails of combat and of conquest amid the sounding battle-clouds. It is upon these that the freedom of mankind rests—the victorious squadrons of our indomitable youth. Yes—my gallant cloud crusaders—this is your hour. And you—the Army on feet and on wheels—a member of which I was for so many happy years of my life—I have seen you march by—proud and strong and stalwart—with shoulders squared and resolute eyes fixed fearlessly on the far objective—which is the salvation of men. Yours is the less glamorous and spectacular task, but yours is the more abiding duty. I know you of old, I think. I watched your forebears surging across death-ridden soil to gain precious yards for freedom. I watched their matchless gallantry from whilom hideouts in the skies. God speed you. God speed you in the skies, or upon the seas, or across unknown acres where, on the edge of destiny, you may test your strength.
As a relief from this type of expected eloquence, my father made himself the butt of his own wry wit when he accepted an honorary Doctor of Laws Degree at the University of Toronto: “As an airman I know no law and as a Bishop I know less theology. Memories of my own academic career force me to the conclusion that I would have a very hard time attaining a degree by legitimate means in this seat of learning. Every question was a potential nose-dive.”
By now my father had such confidence in himself as a speaker and performer that when in 1942 Warner Brothers of Hollywood produced a film on the RCAF, Captains of the Clouds, and asked him to play a part, he readily accepted. The story concerned three bush pilots (played by Jimmy Cagney, Alan Hale and Dennis Morgan) who enlisted in the RCAF. Hale and Cagney were discharged for misconduct, and in retaliation they decided to dive on a Wings Parade at which Bishop was officiating.
The scene was faked, of course. No planes left the ground when Michael Curtiz photographed the episode at Uplands Flying School, near Ottawa. The graduation ceremony was produced in detail and required little rehearsal. My father talked to the graduates as at any bona fide ceremony. His only display of uneasiness was when makeup was applied to his face in full view of the airmen lined up in front of him. But the part in which Cagney and Hale were to buzz the field caused much anxiety, delay and tension. My father, standing rigidly at attention, was to appear startled and annoyed, yet to maintain military aplomb, as he watched two aircraft dive down, sweep across the field, and climb up.
The trouble was there were no aircraft to look at—only a stagehand holding a red flag running along an elevated ramp in front of him at a height above eye level. The man with the flag sometimes ran too fast, sometimes not fast enough and once he nearly fell off the ramp. The scene had to be shot over and over, until at the end of the warm day the exasperated Curtiz exclaimed, “This is the last take positively if I have to take an airplane up myself.”
Camm Ship, a Warner Brothers executive, testified, “Bishop is a very remarkable man. He had a long speech to deliver and he did it splendidly without much time to learn it. It was all the more remarkable because we had to take the shots of the same thing several times over, and he has been better than our professional actors.”
My father’s liaison with Hollywood continued in a coast-to-coast tour with the film star Anna Neagle to raise funds for the Air Cadet League, of which he was honorary president. He had supported the League even before the war started, as one of the best sources of future aircrews.
In December, 1941, Prime Minister Churchill came to America for the first time since the outbreak of war. This journey eventually brought him to Ottawa and at his own behest to the Bishop residence in Sandy Hill.
The impromptu visit was arranged at the house of the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, where my father was a guest at a dinner for Churchill, who remarked, “I understand your house is just across the street, Bishop.”
My father assured him that it was less than two minutes ’walk.
“Right,” Churchill said. “After dinner we’ll stroll over.”
He stayed for an hour. Nothing among my father’s souvenirs escaped the Prime Minister’s searching gaze. But it was a china piece in the drawing room that intrigued him most—a group of hungry piglets all trying to suckle on the same sow.
“It reminds me,” Churchill reminisced, “of a time when all my ministers came to me with demands. All wanted men or monies or priorities or equipment. I could only tell them,‘Gentlemen, the old sow has only so many teats and there are not enough to go around.’”
The china piece was christened “Winston” from that day on.
On December 7, 1941, the pattern of American interest in Canada’s war effort changed abruptly. After Pearl Harbor the United States entered into the war. On balance the Allies benefited immensely, of course, by gaining as an open ally the most powerful nation on earth, but the transfer of American volunteers to the ranks of their own armed forces posed a formidable problem. Early in 1942, for example, my father was called to London to help in the reorganization made necessary by the transfer of most of the seven thousand American citizens in the RCAF to their own air force.
Interviewed in New York on his way to London, he remarked that although it cost Can
ada $30,000 to train each pilot, the investment had been amply repaid because the Americans had helped build up the training plan quickly. The advantage now enjoyed by the United States in being able to secure flyers at no cost he described as “casting bread on the waters and getting back frosted cake.”
The United States began to pour men and aircraft into England. The Eagle Squadrons of the Royal Air Force, composed of United States volunteers, became squadrons of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Canada by 1943 had trained twenty-five thousand aircrews for the Royal Air Force and in addition had twenty-four squadrons of her own in action. Vast changes in command and organization became necessary with the planning of two new major operations—the landings in North Africa and the joint British-American round-the-clock bombing of Germany.
My father found London a different place from the beleaguered city he had left two years before, during the Battle of Britain. The drone of attacking German bombers had been replaced by the roar of Allied aircraft on their way across the Channel into the enemy’s territory. Fighter pilots, instead of defending against the invaders, now made sweeps over northern France to St. Omer, Cambrai, Ypres, Arras, Lille—his old hunting ground.
My father found many of his old comrades were serving again. Elliott Springs was back in the uniform of the United States Army Air Corps. Grid Caldwell was back in the air force, as were William Fry and Frank “Mongoose” Soden. And Larry Callahan, now a lieutenant-colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps in charge of intelligence for the planned North African landings, was a frequent visitor to my father’s suite at London’s fashionable hotel, Claridges.
Together they visited their old 85 Squadron, the Flying Foxes, which then was flying night fighters. In the office of the commanding officer, Wing Commander G. I.Raphael of Quebec City, they browsed through the squadron scrapbook to look at pictures of themselves in their fighting days. My father was a weekend guest at Prime Minister Churchill’s country residence, Chequers. He reported,“Winston is in terrific form. But he stays up too late and kept everyone else up until three or four in the morning.”
The Courage of the Early Morning Page 23