The Aerodrome of Democracy.
That is what Canada was called during the Second World War.
An apt name because tens of thousands of recruits came to The Great White North to become Knights of the Sky.
They trained as pilots, mechanics, navigators, wireless operators and more.
But when these soldiers arrived for training, they were as green as could be and by the time they graduated, they were some of the best in the world.
They helped the Allies conquer the air and push back the Germans to turn the tide in their favor.
And it all began with the idea of using Canada’s vast space and resources as a training ground for the Commonwealth.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today we are taking to the skies with the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan!
As a cold wind blew in from the Atlantic Ocean, on Feb. 23, 1909, Douglas McCurdy sat down in a leather seat.
He was surrounded by an aircraft made of steel tube, bamboo, wire and wood.
The wings stretched out on either side of him and were covered with a silver balloon cloth made of rubber that gave the aircraft its name.
The Silver Dart.
McCurdy, Glenn Curtiss and Alexander Graham Bell created it.
Yes…that Alexander Graham Bell.
As the propeller turned, the flimsy aircraft moved along the ice of Baddeck Bay, Nova Scotia.
Then…With a hop, skip and a bit of a jump, the Silver Dart took to the skies.
The aircraft flew for 800 metres, nine metres off the ground, at a speed of 65 kilometre per hour.
It was the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to fly in Canada.
Over the next five months, the Silver Dart flew 200 times until it crashed on Aug. 2, 1909, never to fly again.
The end may have come for the Silver Dart, but this was just the beginning for Canadian aviation.
During the First World War, 2,500 Canadian pilots were trained for combat at two flying schools in Ontario and British Columbia.
They quickly emerged as some of the best in the war.
Of the top 10 flying aces, in terms of aerial victories, three were from Canada.
In 1924, the Royal Canadian Air Force was formed. Not the TV show.
Recruitment was incredibly slow throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1931, only 25 pilots graduated and due to budget constraints, only one was given an active appointment.
Three years later the RCAF consisted of 99 officers, 629 men and a lot of outdated aircraft mostly used for forest fire spotting, aerial photography and exploring air-mail routes.
But war was once again on the horizon, and Canada was about to see a massive expansion in its air force.
Across the pond, the British government was very aware that the Germans were building up their air force.
There was hope that war could be avoided, but just in case Britain wanted to be ready in case Germany decided to once again take the world into conflict.
The British government would set up seven training schools in the Commonwealth, with one of them in Trenton, Ontario.
Under this Trained in Canada Scheme, as it was called, 15 candidate pilots were to be selected by the Royal Canadian Air Force and trained according to Royal Air Force standards.
Captain Robert Leckie, a Canadian pilot serving under British command believed that the training school would benefit from the close proximity to England, at least compared to India or Australia.
Canada had a lot of air space and was near the United States and its huge industrial complex which could manufacture everything needed.
While Captain Leckie thought the idea was great, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King did not.
He shot down the proposal immediately and didn’t want Canada to be a training ground for British pilots, or for Canadians to then join the Royal Air Force.
The British made repeated proposals to King, but he refused each time.
He believed that Canada could have its own training centres, run by Canadians, where British pilots could train, under the control of his government.
King also didn’t want anything that committed Canada to a future European war.
This scheme could make him the prime minister that led the country into another war and that could divide the country.
Two decades earlier, conscription was implemented by the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden, and it deeply divided the country along linguistic lines.
English Canada supported it, but Quebec did not.
French Canadians did not want to be involved in European wars, and did not want their fathers, brothers and sons being forced to fight.
The conscription crisis of 1917 decimated Conservative support in Quebec for decades.
King, the Liberal leader, wanted to avoid a similar fate.
Negotiations over the training plan continued into 1939, and some progress was made.
Training in Canada would be done in three stages and would take 16 weeks to complete each one.
Initial training, or Elementary Flying Training, would be conducted by eight civilian flying clubs.
33 Canadian students entered elementary flying schools at civilian airfields. Of those 27 received their flying badges by the summer of 1939.
This initial test group proved that the program could work.
But time was running out.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland.
Two days later Britain declared war on Germany, and a week later Canada followed suit.
The new training plan had to put pedal to the metal…war was here, and pilots were needed.
On Sept. 10, 1939, discussions were held between Royal Canadian Air Force officials and the British Air Ministry about a new training plan.
Everyone was quite happy with initial training results from that and were surprised by how well civilian flying clubs did with elementary training.
The British Air Ministry believed that to counteract the German air threat, members of the Commonwealth needed to have four times as many pilots and air crews as they did in 1939.
On Sept. 13, Canadian high commissioner and future Governor General of Canada, Vincent Massey, spoke with Australian high commissioner Stanley Bruce about the issue.
They spoke with Captain A.E. Godfrey of the RCAF about their proposal to use Canada as the main training ground for all pilots in the Commonwealth.
Under this plan, all planes would also be built in Canada.
UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was briefed on the plan, and he immediately sent a telegram to Canadian Prime Minister King urging him to approve it.
Upon reading the plan, King realized it provided him with the perfect solution to Canadian involvement in the war and issues that would arise between English and French Canada.
It would be a major contribution to the war effort and would limit Canadian deaths in Europe, and eliminate, or at least delay, the need for conscription.
He took the plan to his cabinet on Sept. 28 and wired Chamberlain Canada’s conditional approval pending future discussions.
First negotiations began in October 1939 when Lord Riverdale arrived in Ottawa and proposed training 29,000 air crew every year, with a series of schools set up across the country.
He estimated that 5,000 training aircraft would be needed, with 54,000 air force support personnel.
In all, it would cost $1 billion, with Canada, Australia and New Zealand paying 75 percent of it.
King was fine with most of the parts of the plan, but the price tag was a major sticking point.
Eventually, the cost was brought down to $607 million.
Canada would contribute $287 million a larger percentage than the other two nations and it was a massive expense considering, the entire federal government expenditures were $680 million.
Nonetheless, the agreement was signed on Dec. 17, 1939.
Canada would build three initial training schools, 13 elementary flying training schools, 16 service flying schools, 10 air observer schools, 10 bombing and gunnery schools, two air navigation schools and four wireless schools.
King went to the airwaves to inform Canadians that night. quote
“In making provisions for this vast undertaking, the government has done so knowing that nothing can be left to haste or to chance. The intricate machine must be perfect. In every phase of their work, the men must be trained by the highest skill and under the best conditions it is possible for the country to provide.”
Canada was now in the pilot training business.
The recruits entering the Air Training Plan followed a certain path.
First, they had to go through the Aircrew Selection Board.
Made up of two or three RCAF officers, who reviewed the recruit’s medical and personal history, educational background and scores on the RCAF aptitude test.
If t accepted, they would enter a four-week posting to a Manning Depot for basic military training were given boots, a cap, three pairs of socks, two pairs of underwear, a tunic, fatigue pants and were paid $1.30 per day.
Once they knew what was expected of them as soldiers, they entered Initial Training School where they learned aerodynamics and navigation, along with other subjects including mathematics.
Those results would influence where they went next.
Nearly everyone wanted to be a pilot, as it was the most glamorous position, but mechanics, navigators, wireless operators, bomber crews and more were also needed.
Some students went on to flight training, while those who may not have had the chops for flying were sent to navigation and wireless schools.
From here, it was to Elementary Training Schools where pilots and air crews logged at least 50 hours of flying. Training typically took eight weeks and if successful trainees went on to Service Flying Schools for advanced instruction.
These courses were much longer, lasting 10 to 16 weeks, depending on requirements.
Fighter pilots were trained in Harvard fighter planes, while other pilot candidates were trained for bomber, coastal and transport operations.
From start to finish, at least half a year was spent training pilots before they were shipped off to fight in Europe t, other graduates went to schools to become trainers or remain in Canada for home defence.
Norman Shrive attended a training school in Goderich in 1942. He said,
“The eight weeks that began on an August evening when Milt Sills and I arrived at the little flying school on the edge of Lake Huron were, I am positive, the happiest of our lives.”
Canada was required to recruit 1,536 men every four weeks which represented 80 percent of the recruits in the program.
Under the agreement, 136 pilots, 34 navigators and 58 operators and gunners who graduated from each program were allowed to serve in the in squadrons located in Canada.
Meanwhile what was once a place for riders and horses now became a domain for pilots. A secret Royal Canadian Air Force research facility was established in what was the Toronto Hunt Club in 1843.
Established by British officers stationed at Fort York the club continued as a place for equestrian enthusiasts.
By 1919, their location on Avenue Road north of Eglinton housed a polo arena, clubhouse and other facilities but the Great Depression decimated the popularity of polo, and the club suffered severe financial difficulties. By 1939 the property would be the perfect training ground and, the federal government stepped in and purchased it.
It became the RCAF No. 1 Initial Training School.
Within that facility, Sir Frederick Banting, who co-discovered insulin, and Wilbur R. Franks, the inventor of the anti-gravity suit, worked on inventions to help pilots stay safe in the sky.
It was also the place where 166 fresh faced recruits arrived to become the first class of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan on April 29, 1940.
The Ottawa Citizen wrote,
“The vanguard of a legion of blue-clad warriors of the air reports for duty at the initial training school operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force on the site of the Eglinton Hunt Club in North Toronto.”
Seventy-five days later on Nov. 5, 1940, 34 of those men received their wings but they would not be overseas.
They would become instructors and staff pilots in the training plan they had just graduated from.
Duty called and it needed teachers.
Originally, the program was going to be built up through a gradual expansion.
That changed on June 22, 1940, when France officially fell to Germany, requiring the program to be accelerated.
With more pilots in training schools, more instructors were needed.
The Royal Air Force began to transfer staff from its own aircrew schools in Britain to Canada to train pilots.
Despite this, there was still an immediate need for 33,000 military personnel and 6,000 civilians to serve as teachers, office and maintenance staff.
But next door our neighbour was on the sidelines with plenty of resources.
At the time, the United States was still neutral, but they had a lot of good pilots who could become good teachers.
To convince them to come to Canada, the government looked to Hell’s Handmaiden himself, Billy Bishop.
Billy Bishop was, and is, a legend.
Born in Owen Sound in 1894, he was fascinated with flight from an early age.
In 1910, when he was 16, he attempted to build a glider out of bed sheets, wooden crates, cardboard and twine.
His first test flight was off the roof of the family’s three storey house.
He leapt and swiftly plummeted back down to Earth like Icarus on a sunny day.
Bishop was dug out of the wreckage by his sister who agreed to hide the evidence from their parents if he did her a favour.
That favour was to take her friend Margaret Burdon out on a date.
He did and seven years later they married.
Margaret was also the granddaughter of Eaton’s founder Timothy Eaton.
Everything in Canadian history is connected and you can learn all about her father in my episode about Eaton’s from the summer of 2024.
During the First World War, Bishop became the top pilot in the British Empire with 72 confirmed kills in the air.
His skill inspired fear in every German pilot he engaged in a dog fight. They gave him the epic nickname… Hell’s Handmaiden.
Hell’s Handmaiden earned a lot of hardware to pin on his chest.
Along with the highest medal in the British Empire, the Victoria Cross, he received the Distinguished Service Order twice, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Military Cross.
By the time the Second World War began, Bishop held the rank of air marshal with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
And his mission, which he chose to accept, was to recruit Americans to be part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
Clayton Knight, an American living in New York, was an aviation artist and First World War pilot.
He was also a close friend of Billy Bishop who convinced him to help recruit Americans.
While the US government was firmly neutral in the war, at least until Pearl Harbor in December 1941, many Americans wanted to fight against the Germans.
Joining the Royal Canadian Air Force was the best path.
Knight and Bishop arranged for thousands of young Americans to cross the border and enlist with the RCAF.
Some of those Americans were experienced pilots and air crews who then trained new recruits in the training program.
After Pearl Harbor, RCAF recruiting in the United States ended and 1,759 Americans in the RCAF transferred to the United States armed forces.
The infrastructure of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was immense.
With so much construction work required, 1.75 million blueprints were made, 33,000 drawings selected and nearly 8,300 structures built along with storage facilities for 120,000 cubic metres of fuel.
Over 480 kilometres of water mains, and the same amount of sewer mains, were constructed necessitating the removal of 1.5 million cubic metres of earth.
Add in 4,000 kilometres of power cables, and you have one of the biggest construction projects in Canadian history to that point.
For the towns selected to be training centres, the sounds of hammers hitting, and backhoes was music to their ears.
The Great Depression had been hard as crops failed due to drought, and unemployment rampant, most towns across the country couldn’t pay for infrastructure. Finances were depleted and municipality staff were either laid off or suffered severe pay decreases.
Air base meant construction jobs meant work and once built, trainees and staff arrived with money to burn and they were spending it in town, boosting the local economy.
Towns lobbied the federal government for an air base, but only a few were selected. Many were in the Prairies where the flat spaces and wide-open skies provided the perfect training grounds.
And when a community was selected, it was cause for big celebrations.
Anyone living in Regina in early July 1941 had a few things to celebrate at the start of the month.
On July 1, the city celebrated Dominion Day, what we now call Canada Day and the next day, two trains full of airmen arrived in the city ready to train.
Greeting the men at the station was Lt. Governor A.P. McNab, Mayor James Grassick and the officers of the No. 2 Initial Training School.
The crowd gathered at the train station gave the men several cheers, and then the recruits were transported to their school.
Along the way, the Regina Boys’ Pipe Band marched behind them and preparations were made at the Regina College for a large banquet in their honour.
The boom to the local economy and the celebrations held to welcome the hopeful pilots was repeated across Canada.
In Vulcan, Alberta, east of Calgary, the economic boom began with the arrival of an air training school.
On Oct. 24, 1941, the Lethbridge Herald reported,
“Vulcan booming as air station development brings big payroll.”
For those towns, the war brought worry, but also prosperity the likes of which had never been seen before.
Each month, thousands of pilots graduated from flying schools, and headed to new schools for further training, or overseas.
Despite the breakneck pace of training, the recruits were reminded that they were representing the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force.
The government wanted good pilots, not pilots who took unnecessary risks or didn’t pay attention in class.
Ronny Jacques, writing for Macleans stated,
“In an initial training school, I saw alert youngsters going about their duties with the mark of the soldier in every move. Even there, with only a week or two of service behind them, you could see the surprising influence that military life can have both on rookie’s character and carriage.”
By 1942, the war had changed.
The Blitz had mostly ended in May 1941, and the war in the sky was shifting from one of dog fights to carpet bombings.
The original agreement was also due to end on March 31, 1942.
While Prime Minister King wanted to expand the plan and include the Americans, the British wanted to keep everything within the Commonwealth.
Despite a conference on the issue the Americans were left out when a new agreement was signed on June 5.
The quotas for each country were recalculated in the new plan, with Canada providing 34,600 trainers every year, half the total number of recruits needed annually.
Charles Gavan Power, the Minister of National Defence of Air, told the House of Commons,
“I wish to warn the people of Canada, that as long as this war lasts, we of the Royal Canadian Air Force have an open-ended commitment to our allies and associates for aircrew, requiring a special type of manpower, and these must come in a steady stream every month.”
What became known as Phase One of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan ended on June 30, 1942. The second phase began on July 1 and would continue until March 31, 1945.
There were so many people in the program at the beginning of 1943, that there was a large reserve of air crews and pilots waiting to head overseas.
The success of the program was not going unnoticed.
In March 1943, two years before the war ended, Joseph Goebbels, German propaganda minister, wrote in his diary,
“It drives one mad to think that some Canadian boor, who probably can’t even find Europe on the globe, flies here from a country glutted with natural resources, which his people don’t know how to exploit, to bombard a continent with a crowded population.”
Goebbels may have hated the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, but the Allies loved it.
On Jan. 1, 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt sent a letter of goodwill to his friend William Lyon Mackenzie King, in which he called Canada, the Aerodrome of Democracy.
It was a nice letter.
King, a man who craved acceptance by other world leaders, wrote in his diary,
“I received an exceedingly friendly letter from the President.”
The letter wasn’t quite from the President. He had given the task of writing to King to his staff. They in turn passed it down the line to the Canadian embassy and the job fell to the second-in-command. A young bowtie wearing diplomat by the name of Lester B. Pearson, future prime minister of Canada.
Pearson said,
“On January 1, 1943, the Prime Minister of Canada received a very impressive letter lauding Canada as the aerodrome of democracy, drafted by me but signed by the President of the United States.”
When the war ended in May 1945, the need for pilots immediately dried up.
But the success of the program could not be disputed.
By the end, 131,533 pilots, navigators and other air crew personnel had graduated as pilots and air crews.
While the four founding partner nations accounted for most of the graduates, there were air crews from German-occupied countries like Czechoslovakia, Norway, Poland and the Netherlands.
73,000 Canadians trained at bases, and then went on to provide crews for 40 RCAF home defence and 45 overseas RCAF squadrons.
Almost half of the aircrew personnel who served in Commonwealth operations during the war were graduates of the program.
But not everyone who trained… survived….856 participants lost their lives over the course of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan from 1939 to 1945, And in the end it cost Canada $1.6 billion, two-thirds of the total cost, to implement and manage the plan.
The end of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan was bittersweet. For half a decade, Canadians had come to know the participants, trainers and had grown accustomed to the sound of planes flying over their homes.
While the war came to an end in 1945, the need for pilots was already decreasing in 1944 and schools began to close.
It was sad, but also hopeful because it was a sign that the war was coming to an end.
Many community leaders thought that they would still have the constructed infrastructure, but they were sorely mistaken.
Most of the bases were completely dismantled.
The government spent billions on the war, and they wanted to recoup some of those costs.
The contents of the bases were sold, while airplanes were either sold or scrapped at junkyards.
In larger communities, some of the runways and airports remained and formed the basis for many airports that exist to this day.
At RCAF Station Edmonton, the small Blachford airport was turned into a busy military base.
Hangars were built, facilities were expanded, for thousands of pilots and crews to train.
When the war ended, those buildings became the Edmonton City Centre Airport that operated until 2013.
Along with the Commonwealth Air Training Plan’s impact on Canadian communities, it did something else.
It saved a lot of Canadian lives.
When William Lyon Mackenzie King agreed to the plan, he hoped it would limit Canadians serving overseas.
And that is exactly what it did.
About 250,000 Canadians served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, but only 94,000 went to Europe.
The rest stayed in Canada where they defended the country, trained other pilots, or worked as support staff.
One young man who enlisted at the start of the war, never went abroad.
John Bryant was a 19-year-old from Swan River, Manitoba. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force on Sept. 16, 1939. For the next five years, he trained at Canadian bases, working his way up to becoming a bombing instructor. By the time he was only a few training flights away from flying in bombers over Europe, Germany surrendered.
Throughout this episode, I talked a lot about men taking to the air. I don’t want to give the impression that it was all men serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force or training in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
40,000 women served in the Canadian Armed Forces during the war, 16,000 served with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Women who learned to fly became legends like Marion Orr and Violet Milstead, who later became pioneers in aviation in Canada.
Many women were so proficient at the new technology of radar that they were brought in as instructors to teach others.
Women worked as mechanics on aircraft, as support staff in RCAF offices and built the very planes that Canadians were training to fly in.
From the raw recruits who dreamed of being pilots, to the air crews who kept planes running, the Allied victory in the Second World War owes a lot to Canada and the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
