Sniper of the Skies: The Story of George Frederick 'Screwball' Beurling, DSO, DFC, DFM

by Nick Thomas

  Returning to the UK, Beurling was sent to become a gunnery instructor before achieving his dream of becoming a member of the RCAF. However, the Service didn’t have a clue as to how to handle an ace in his prime and Beurling’s talents were squandered in two pointless postings to Squadrons on the ‘bus run’, flying mass formations of fighters as escorts to bombing raids. Beurling would later claim that he flew fifty sorties without seeing an enemy aircraft and, although the figures were exaggerated, the sentiment was true.

  As exceptional a pilot and marksman as he was, Beurling seems to have developed a low boredom threshold when it came to any non-combat flying.

  While on a gunnery course post-Malta, he is said to have carried out drogue-firing while flying upside down. On another occasion, he was hauled up for low flying, which wouldn’t have been quite so bad on its own, however Beurling was hedge-hopping while flying inverted. When reprimanded, Beurling answered his CO’s criticism, claiming that it was actually far safer to hedge-hop a Spitfire upside down than right side up. His explanation was frighteningly logical: hedgehopping right side up, he pointed out, had one serious drawback as the Spitfire had a major blind spot area immediately beneath the engine. Flying inverted, there was no physical barrier to impair the view, ‘This, of course, allows you to cut the grass much closer.’

  Beurling needed the excitement of combat and so the drudgery of mass formation escorts must have been intolerable. He soon began to show his displeasure, and was repeatedly reprimanded for low flying and unauthorised aerobatics.

  Eventually, he was sent back to Canada and put on ferrying, only being allowed to fly as co-pilot. Consequently, he resigned his commission in a manner which today would be recognised as constructive dismissal.

  Beurling became as reckless in his civilian life as he was in the Service. He married in haste and began, what would later become, an affair during his honeymoon. A string of bush flying jobs took him around Canada, never staying in one place more than a few months. He purchased his own aircraft, but got into trouble with the authorities for stunt-flying and for flying once his licence had expired.

  In 1948 Beurling found another war. He left Canada for the last time bound for Israel, but died in a tragic air accident in Rome. Within a generation his name had been almost forgotten to all but those who had served alongside him in Malta. Over the last few decades, the heroes of the Second World War have witnessed a renaissance of interest and Beurling has been seen in a new light, as one of the greatest, but most misreported and misunderstood of all the Allied aces of the Second World War.

  As Bruce West, a reporter and long-term friend of Beurling, wrote shortly after his death, ‘[He] wanted to be the best fighter pilot in the world. He never gave much thought to becoming the oldest fighter pilot in the world.’

  Chapter One

  To the Stars the Hard Way

  George Frederick Beurling was born on 6 December 1921, in Verdun (now a suburb of Montreal), Quebec, the third of five children (Gladys, Elsie, George, Richard, and the youngest, David). His Swedish father, Frederick Gustav Beurling, was a commercial artist with the Claude Neon Company. George’s mother, Hetty Florence Gibbs, was born in the Montreal suburb of Pointe St Charles, but was of English descent. Frederick’s father had brought his family to Canada at the turn of the century, settling in the Miramichi Valley, New Brunswick. In order to anglicise the family name, he dropped the ‘k’ from Beurlingk.

  George came from a very religious family. His parents, Hetty and Frederick, had met through the Presbyterian Church, and their early courtship had revolved around church meetings and events. However, some time after the couple married, Frederick became a member of the Plymouth Brethren, an Evangelical sect.

  Hetty played the piano, and George learned his way around the keyboard at an early age and had a good singing voice. In adult life, his tone was compared favourably with that of Bing Crosby. Once old enough to select his own repertoire, and no longer restricted to hymns, Beurling would entertain himself, family and friends by singing contemporary ‘hits,’ which he picked up from the movies.

  The young George Beurling enjoyed investigating the countryside around the family home, playing along the nearby creek, and walking the rolling hills and open fields. George and his cousin, David Murphy, used to idle away the hours along the Lachine Canal. Their favourite games included the cinema-inspired ‘cowboys and Indians,’ something which met with his parents’ (but not his aunt Dolly’s) disapproval on religious grounds. George and David used to swim in the creek, while George perfected his diving in Verdun’s public swimming baths, the Natatorium.

  Dolly Murphy, George’s aunt, did not approve of Frederick’s strictness when it came to her nephew’s upbringing. Consequently, she turned a blind-eye to George reading comics and going to the Saturday ‘flicks’ with David.

  While other kids relished playing with trains, fire engines, and other similar amusements, young Beurling’s toys consisted mostly of airplanes of every description and manufactured out of all sorts of materials.

  When interviewed many years later, Beurling confessed that there wasn’t ever a time he could recall when, ‘airplanes and to get up in them’, hadn’t been the be all and end all of his dreams and ambitions.

  Beurling was certainly bitten by the flying bug early. By the age of about nine he was spending all of his free time at the old Lasalle Road Airport, roughly three miles from his home as the crow flies. Here, he watched the airplanes belonging to, amongst others, the Montreal Light Aeroplane Club:

  ‘flying was an obsession with me. From the first day I watched a [Tiger] Moth disappear beyond the St Lawrence, I knew I was going to be a pilot.’

  Very soon, lessons at Bannatyne School for ‘Buzzy’, as he was known, became boring compared to the lure of the airfield and Beurling began playing truant:

  ‘I’d climb the fence and try to get near the planes, hoping I’d maybe even get a chance to talk to a pilot.’

  In the evenings, instead of homework, Beurling would spend his hours building the, ‘newest model aircraft hidden in the bedroom cupboard.’

  In 1930, the Lasalle Road Airport closed and air traffic was transferred to the Cartierville airfield close to Mount Royal, home to the Curtiss-Reid Flying School. This was too great a daily journey for the 9-year-old Beurling and he had to content himself to visiting on Saturdays only, or whenever he could save the money for the streetcar:

  ‘I’d be at the field whenever I could, just hanging around, watching and hoping. Then, all of a sudden, the dream came true.’

  Beurling must have been noticed by the staff and pilots at Cartierville, but no-one challenged him and asked why he wasn’t at school, and why he was hanging around all the time. In fact, no-one ever spoke to him until a chance encounter during the summer holidays when he was 10-years-old.

  He was at Cartierville airfield when a thunderstorm began and he was seen by one of the pilots, Ted Hogan, huddled against a wall, sheltering from the worst of the rain. A bush pilot and instructor, Hogan took pity on Beurling and called him into the dry. Ted must have seen the youngster about the airfield before, and the two soon began talking about airplanes and flying. With the storm passed, it was time for Ted to get back to work. As Beurling departed, Ted promised to take him up some time, but only if he could get his mother’s permission first.

  Racing back home, the excited Beurling had to wait for his moment to ask his mother if he could go flying. His mother believed that the story was wishful thinking on Beurling’s behalf, and so she said yes.

  Beurling was waiting outside the hangar early the following morning, long before any of the aircraft were out on the apron. Within minutes of Ted’s arrival, he had gone through his pre-flight checks and the pair were airborne:

  ‘and I was a flier for the rest of my time, no matter what happened. From now on the world would never be the same again!’

  Seeing that George might have potential as a pilot, Ted found him odd jobs to do around
the hangars; everything from cleaning the airplanes, to pumping aviation fuel. His reward was time in the second seat. Gradually, he built up his hours as a passenger in Ted’s Rambler, observing how he coaxed the aircraft through even the trickiest manoeuvres and, by his twelfth birthday, Beurling had ‘felt the controls.’

  In late 1935, when he was fourteen, George began scraping money together for flying lessons, by selling newspapers and making model airplanes, which he sold to local children. Once he had raised the $10 it cost for an hour’s dual-control, Beurling would head for the airfield and one of the instructors, ‘Fizzy’ Champagne. In the meantime, Ted Hogan would give Beurling free lessons whenever he had the time, and it was under dual instruction with Ted that he first learned to perform rolls, side-slips and a few stunts.

  After nearly two years of flying as and when he could, Beurling was able to persuade his father to finance the few lessons that would see him to his next landmark. With snow on the ground, the Rambler had been fitted with skis, making for smoother take-offs and landings on frozen soil. Beurling’s first solo flight was made in 1938. He followed his instructions and took off, before making two circuits and, after a clean approach, made a safe landing.

  Beurling was always ambitious and, not surprisingly, he didn’t wait too long before trying his hand at solo aerobatics. During his fourth flight, with only one-and-a-half solo hours on a Rambler under his belt, Beurling pulled off some rolls and loops:

  ‘Yanking the stick hard back and kicking on full rudder to throw the little crate over in a flick roll.’

  Not only had Beurling let his exuberance get the better of him, but he had committed the cardinal sin of doing so within sight of the aerodrome. One of the flying school instructors was waiting for him on landing and Beurling was told, in no uncertain terms, that any repetition would be his last flight in one of the flying school’s aircraft.

  From then on Beurling made sure he flew well out of sight before performing some of the aerobatics he’d mastered under Ted Hogan’s tuition; on one occasion making a spin in the Rambler from 2,500 to 1,000ft while over Lake St Louis:

  ‘I closed the throttle and started to ease the control column back. As the nose came up over the horizon, and the flying speed began to fall away to almost nothing, I kicked on right rudder and over we fell.’

  Beurling followed Ted’s instructions and centred the controls to bring the aircraft out of the right-hand spin. Meanwhile, the ground was getting ever closer:

  ‘so to help her along, I gave her a bit of opposite rudder, and out she came.’

  Growing in confidence, Beurling now tried his luck with a loop in the slow-flying Rambler:

  ‘[I] shoved the nose down and dived until I had built up a speed of 160 miles an hour. Then I yanked the stick back into my stomach and around we went.’

  The aircraft was a less than willing partner in the manoeuvre, straining under the G-Force, but it just about pulled through without anything separating.

  Struggling to regularly raise the $10 needed to build up sufficient flyingtime to gain his private pilot’s certificate, Beurling resolved that he would leave Verdun High School and find a job. Naturally Beurling’s parents had his future already planned for him. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, his father a commercial artist. But for Beurling, there was only ever going to be flying.

  Beurling’s focus at school had been mathematics, at which he excelled, along with geography and meteorology. All were disciplines which had to be mastered by an aviator. Having completed the ninth grade, struggling through his exams with an average of fifty-seven per cent, Beurling decided to opt out.

  Eventually his parents relented and he found employment with the RCA-Victor radio factory in Montreal, receiving a wage of 28 cents an hour. It had been an uneasy struggle and, not long after leaving school, Beurling moved out of his parent’s house, renting a room close to the plant for $1.50 a week. Basic living expenses amounted to a further $1.75, leaving Beurling about $10 a week, the cost of an hour’s flying. Every now and then Beurling managed to find work at the airfield to add to his flying hours, while Ted Hogan continued to help in whatever way he could.

  Beurling continued to work at the radio factory until February 1939, by which time he had begun to get very frustrated; it seemed as though he would never qualify for his certificate simply because he couldn’t achieve the required hours flying time.

  Ted Hogan suggested that he travel to a place called Gravenhurst in Ontario, where he had a contact, called Smith Langley, who ran a freight contract flying Curtiss Robins (a three-seat cabin monoplane) into the Rouyn goldfields. Langley needed a second pilot, so Hogan made a call and put in a good word for Beurling; if he could make his way out to Gravenhurst, then the job was his. Beurling couldn’t afford a rail ticket and so decided to ‘ride the rails’. He flew the Curtiss Robin on the Gravenhurst-Rouyn run for a full six weeks, putting in enough hours to earn his permit, which he gained on 16 April 1939; the equivalent to gaining his private pilot’s licence.

  When the work in Gravenhurst dried up, Beurling made his way to Toronto and then onto Merrit, British Columbia, to visit his maternal uncle. Beurling had set himself the goal of going to America to join a group of fliers, known as the 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Army, bound for action in China’s armed struggle against Japan. His uncle, impressed by Beurling’s commitment, gave him the financial support he needed. Beurling left with a cheque for $500, which he decided to use to help build up his flying time in order to make his log book look more impressive.

  Travelling by rail to Vancouver, Beurling made straight for the Sea Island Airport and the Len Foggen Flying School. Here he purchased fifty hours of flying time and, by the end of June 1939, he had amassed 120 solo hours.

  In an attempt to join the 1st American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Army (otherwise known as the Flying Tigers) and fight against the Japanese, Beurling illegally crossed the border into America, resulting in his arrest in Seattle by the US immigration authorities. Held in custody for two months, Beurling was released and put onboard a train bound for Montreal on 1 September, the day Hitler’s forces invaded Poland.

  With the outbreak of war, Beurling tried to enlist into the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), but his lack of academic qualifications led to his rejection. He then tried to join the Finnish Air Force, which was fighting the Soviets in the Winter War. He gained an interview with the consul who, having studied his log book, confirmed that he would be welcomed into their air force, but he was a little too young and could not persuade his parents to sign the consent form.

  However, his father relented and agreed to go with him to the RCAF Recruiting Centre in Montreal, where he sat in on an informal interview with a more senior officer, who confirmed that the Service was bound by its regulations and that they stipulated the minimum educational requirements. Beurling’s flying certificate and well over 100 hours solo made no difference.

  In truth, the RCAF at that time was too small and was unable to accept the numbers of volunteers that were coming forward. To be enlisted for training as a fighter pilot, a recruit had to be amongst the very elite.

  A disconsolate Beurling returned to RCA-Victor while he tried to work out his next move, paying a visit to his friend, Ted Hogan, to look for advice. Ted reasoned that the war would be a long one of attrition and that Beurling’s time would come.

  With Ted Hogan’s assistance, Beurling began a fairly intensive programme to sharpen up his flying skills and push himself to a new level. Together, they worked on his weaknesses, while Ted supported him in catching up on missed schooling.

  By the following spring, George had 250 solo flying hours and had studied all of the aviation textbooks that he could access. Enthusiasm once again got the better of Beurling and, in May 1940, he was caught flying aerobatics and received a one month ban from Cartierville.

  Meanwhile, his uncle, Gus Beurling, recalled that, knowing he was going to be an air fighter, Beurling and a
friend had gained some experience firing an old Vickers machine gun. Beurling studied the bullet’s trajectory, getting a ‘feel’ for how they were deflected by the prevailing wind and by the forces of gravity. He followed the arch of his fire and was able to adjust his aim accordingly.

  Beurling was still itching to enlist. He read in a local newspaper that the RAF were looking for experienced pilots and decided, on the spur of the moment, to make his way across the Atlantic. He talked his way into the crew of a Swedish vessel, the Valparaiso, a munitions ship heading in convoy for Glasgow.

  Steaming down the St Lawrence, they waited at anchor at an east coast port until the convoy had assembled. Seventy merchantmen set sail line astern, flanked by their escort, on a voyage which would take a full eighteen days before they reached their final destination. Nearing Ireland, however, they came under attack by German U-boats, losing seven ships torpedoed in a frantic action which lasted only ten minutes:

  ‘The rest of us made the Clyde right side up and the Valparaiso tied up in the Queen’s Dock.’

  Having persuaded the Captain to sub him a pound against his $30 a month wages (with $75 War Risk pay), Beurling gathered his things together and jumped ship. The first person he encountered as he reached the end of the gangplank was a policeman, whom he asked for directions. A brisk walk and a ‘streetcar’ away, Beurling found himself outside the RAF Recruitment Centre in Glasgow.

  Beurling was able to gain an interview which went well and he was on the verge of being signed up. The friendly flight lieutenant listening to his story said:

  ‘Splendid, splendid. Now let me see your papers.’

  Beurling explained how last-minute his decision to sail had been and that he would send for his civilian log book.

  ‘Oh, it’s not the log book that worries me old chap,’ was the reply, ‘but your birth certificate. What about your birth certificate?’