The Battle of Britain has particular significance for me because my Scottish mother lived through the entire Second World War in London working at a munitions factory. One spark could blow up the entire factory, and in fact that killed her cousin who worked nearby in a different munitions factory. She lived through the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the continued German bombing, including the V1’s and V2’s, sleeping in the underground for shelter. My Canadian father enlisted in the Tank Corps in 1943 from Saskatchewan and was pulled off the parade ground in London, on the way to active service in the Italian Campaign, and made into an instructor on all types of artillery, from anti-aircraft guns, to tanks, grenades, and rifles. He served on a base near London for the duration of the war and had occasional weekend passes to London, very nearly missing annihilation from German bombs one weekend when he arrived at his usual rooming house and the entire block had just been blown up. According to the author of The Battle of Britain, Ted Barris, many Londoners stopped going to the shelters during the bombing runs and my father observed this firsthand on a weekend pass. He was sitting in a pub by the window when the air raid siren went off as the German bombers entered London airspace. Nobody in the pub moved as the bombs fell all around them, while the windows vibrated and the bombs rumbled and crashed. My dad thought that as he was the only Canadian soldier in the pub he sure as hell wasn’t running to the shelter, so he sat out the air raid with the rest of the Englishmen and women and drank his beer.
For 113 days, from July 10 to October 31, 1940, a battle raged over the skies of Britain, which determined the freedom of the British Isles, possibly the freedom of Europe. Hitler sent waves of his huge and powerful Luftwaffe to destroy Britain’s Air Defenses day after day after day. Pending a Luftwaffe air victory, 2000 barges, ships, and tugboats were ready and waiting from Antwerp to Le Havre to send 260,000 German soldiers to invade England. Hitler had named his invasion Operation Sea Lion. But thanks to the courageous airmen of the Royal Air Force (RAF), which included a contingent of one hundred Canadian pilots, and two hundred Canadian ground crew, that day never happened.
Ted Barris has written an engaging and detailed account of the Battle of Britain from the perspective of the Canadian airmen who enlisted, often through devious means, to fight as pilots in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War. These men flew Spitfires and Hurricanes, among the best fighting machines in the world. Although the men tended to be older than the average age of the other RAF pilots, who were about twenty, they were fierce fighting men who racked up admirable records while suffering terrible losses.
Douglas Bader, a legendary ace, took over as Acting Squadron Leader for the No.242 Canadian Squadron, which was all the more remarkable because Bader had lost both his legs in a flying accident and used artificial limbs. On the first day of the German bombing Blitz, Bader commanded three squadrons who took out more than twenty enemy aircraft. Johnny Kent, another Canadian pilot from No.242, noticed his friend Hilly Brown’s plane burning, just before he bailed out. Kent stayed circling above the pilot in the English Channel so that he could be rescued quickly. Kent was promoted to command the Polish pilots, who became a crack fighter squadron. In one sortie, another Canadian legend, Willie McKnight, was outnumbered in a dogfight and gunned down two enemy aircraft, despite taking hits to the wing of his plane. The book is full of detailed stories about other Canadians, their sorties and their successes, including interesting anecdotes about Winston Churchill, Buckingham Palace, and the German High Command.
Barris takes the reader through the critical four months of the Battle of Britain explaining that an allied victory was by no means a given. Planes were being shot down and pilots were dying at an incredible rate. As an example, in August, 1940, RAF Fighter Command lost 426 fighter planes, 40% of that month’s supply of 1,061, whereas the Luftwaffe, much better equipped, lost more aircraft, 774, but that was only 18% of its fighter planes. On Sept.2, Fighter Command’s pilot loss rate was 125 per week. “The RAF was losing the battle”. But Hermann Goring, in charge of the Luftwaffe, was unable to defeat the RAF in a four day war as he had promised Hitler, and decided instead to destroy London. On September 7, Hitler began a massive bombing attack on the civilian population of London, called the Blitz, for a period of fifty-seven straight days and nights. The new German bombing formations called for a new RAF strategy. Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park devised a strategy of sequential attacks by different RAF squadrons, including the Canadian No. 242, to take on the Messerschmitt fighter planes protecting the German bombers. The RAF fighter pilots would take out some Messerschmitts and use up the fuel of others in non-stop air engagements forcing the German fighters to turn back to their home base to refuel just as they reached London. Park’s strategy left the German bombers unprotected and vulnerable to attack and was the turning point of the battle. On September 15, the day of a major air engagement, it was reported that for every seven Luftwaffe pilots shot, there was only one RAF pilot killed. Douglas Bader, who commanded the Canadian No.242 squadron, said “There has never been a snappier, more determined crowd of fighter pilots.”
Just before the beginning of the Battle of Britain, Canadian Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, was appointed Minister of Aircraft Production in the British Cabinet, and played an important part by swiftly recognizing that more Spitfires and Hurricanes needed to be manufactured and fast. Beaverbrook multiplied the manufacturing capacity of Spitfire production and setup a speedy system for the repair and refurbishment of damaged Spitfires. In Canada Elsie MacGill, a pioneering aeronautics engineer, who worked at Can-Car in Fort William, Ontario, retooled her plant and stepped up production of Hurricanes. Without these two extraordinary efforts the battle couldn’t have been maintained.
Barris made the point that the Luftwaffe had not been defeated but had suffered “unacceptable losses” resulting in Hitler’s inability to mount an invasion of Britain, which also alerted the Americans to the possibility that by supporting Britain the war might be won. In this well-researched book, Barris has written an interesting and fact-based account of the Battle of Britain highlighting RAF leadership and the courage and skill of Canadian airmen.
