story behind Bill Hunt’s new book on the Royal Flying Corps’ astonishing
training establishment in southern Ontario during the First World War
originated from this long-time history buff’s interest in rum-running between
Canada and the prohibition-era U.S.
research put him in touch with a number of Canadians with parallel historical
interests, including wartime RCAF airman Al Smith of Trenton, who’d been
interviewing local folk about the First World War training station at nearby
Deseronto, and prevailed on Hunt to write this story.
took a look at the material and soon became fascinated by the subject of
RFC/RAF training in Canada, expanding his research to the other stations used
in this work: Beamsville, Leaside, Camp Borden, Rathbun, North Toronto and
Mohawk. In the course of about 30 years’ part-time research, he and his brother
read around 3,000 old newspapers and reviewed many other documents and
articles. The long-time high school history teacher even found some of the old
airfields. The result was his book Dancing
In The Sky: The Royal Flying Corps in Canada (Dundurn Press, 2009).
said an interesting point at which to start is with a historical question: why
did Canada, unlike other self-governing dominions, like New Zealand and
Australia, did not have its own independent air force during the First World
War — despite having had a tiny, ramshackle “Canadian Air Corps” led by the
quixotic Capt. Ernest Janney in 1914-15?
said the answer lies in the emphasis the Canadian government of the day put in
creating a Canadian Expeditionary Corps of a half-million men for the land war
in Western Europe.
heavy casualties among aviators in 1916 caused the British government to
approach Canada for the training of additional Canadian airmen. The British
officer sent to Canada in early 1917 to handle this project was an inspired
choice: Lt. Col. R.G. Hoare was personable, yet determined, intelligent and
persuasive. He also had certain contempt for bureaucracies; his attitude seemed
to be that “the best thing to do with bureaucracies was to ignore them; they
don’t care what gets done if nobody takes responsibility.”
weeks of the arrival of Hoare and his small party, contracts were being let for
the construction of aircraft, airfields and camps. Senior Canadian military
officers, noting how enlistments into the CEF’s units had slowed as the war
dragged on, were pessimistic about the ability of Hoare to attract recruits and
the tradesmen needed to operate the aircraft and the camps. But the “romance”
then attached to aviation drew in substantial numbers of men — and women, too,
for substantial numbers of women worked as nurses, clerks, drivers and
mechanical workers. At Mohawk, for example, no fewer than 600 women were
employed, earning the same wages as men doing the same work.
noted that a substantial number of Americans came north to enlist, especially
in the period before their own country entered the war and its aviation war
effort became organized. Hoare was able to follow this up by going Washington
in 1917 and striking a deal under which RFC cadets would be transported to
camps in Texas to train in winter, when flying in Canada would have been
disrupted by cold weather and storms. (Imagine the cadets’ surprise when their
arrival in Texas was greeted by a snowstorm!) So persuasive was Hoare that he
not only got the Americans to accept this novel approach, but to pay much of
the cost. “They were happy to do it because they were able to take all the
plans and develop their own air fore,” Hunt said.
was not the only legacy of Hoare’s work. The University of Toronto was highly
supportive of Hoare’s work and set up a school of aviation to train cadets in
the theory of flight. The need for training aircraft led to the manufacture in Toronto
of 2,800 examples of the JN-4(Can) Canuck, a slightly modified adaptation of
the American-designed Curtiss JN-4 Jenny. There was a less-successful attempt
to manufacture a large military flying boat for the U.S. Navy near the end of
the war, but an important technical hurdle had been cleared: this led to the
construction of other aircraft types in Canada during the 1920s, and also
created a large pool of surplus Canucks that were sold to Canadian
entrepreneurs for fledgling aviation companies in 1919 and 1920.
is a measure of the danger of First World War flying that of the 15 members of
one class from mid-1917 that Hunt traced, the end of that year found that five
members had been killed, three seriously wounded, three were missing in action
and only two were still flying.
aside the dangers of air war against a tough and clever enemy, Hunt said that
an obvious problem was inadequacies in the flying training syllabus used in
Canada. The RFC was of the attitude that a pilot could solo after only six
hours of instruction; the American armed services came to believe that 10 hours
flying was more reasonable. That led to heavy casualties typified by a report
in an Orillia newspaper that found one day’s flying at nearby Camp Borden
brought no fewer than seven crashes, with one man killed and five in hospital.
A well-known photograph of an instructor stretched out over the upper fuselage
of his Canuck in mid-air emphasized how casual the rules were. And the OX-5
engine used in the Canuck was generally reliable (if it went through drive
shafts and bearings quickly), it had an unfortunate habit of “coughing “ a few
times when pilots applied power during landings.
research even turned up some intriguing anecdotes, like the officer who was
stunting over his family’s farm, lost control and crash-landed and escaped by
claiming that his engine had failed. There were also the two airmen, rivals for
the affections of a young woman, who crashed their aircraft head-on within view
of her rural home. And there was Vernon Castle, who, with his wife, were
ballroom dancing stars – though he apparently had plans to divorce her and
marry a Belleville woman whom he’d met while training at Deseronto. Alas, he
was killed in a plane crash in Texas in early 1918.
training casualties came down with experience, there still is an annual
memorial service at Deseronto to salute eight cadets killed in training and
buried there — a tangible tribute all of those cadets and their instructors.
have a really vibrant aviation history,” said Hunt. “I wasn’t really an
aviation history buff until about a few years ago. I’d say we’ve got more
aviation history than just about any other nation of comparable size.’’