Joey Jacobson's War

by Peter J. Usher

  Then the Blitz suddenly ended. Hitler had concluded, correctly, that the Blitz was not having the desired effect on civilian morale in Britain. As the world would learn six weeks later, he was planning to use his aircraft to better effect elsewhere. The recently arrived Canadian airmen had found out what it was like to live through on the ground what they were being trained to inflict from the air. They were inspired by how London’s people carried on during the Blitz, enduring blackouts, food rationing, sleepless nights in cramped and malodorous air raid shelters, bombed-out homes, and fires in the streets. The new arrivals bolstered the morale of Britons who had endured half a year of bombing. In every pub, restaurant, train, and theatre, civilians looked to the boys in air force blue to give the Germans hell. Airmen were quickly imbued with the rightness and urgency of their coming task. But it would be a long time before they were able to deliver the same devastating attacks on German cities that the Luftwaffe had brought to London that spring.

  Britain had survived the threat of invasion, as well as what its people most feared when the war began: the bombing of the civilian population. Nonetheless it was still under threat of strangulation by blockade, and the shortages and rationing that would soon restrict every aspect of life were already beginning when the first BCATP graduates arrived.

  After so many months of arduous training, the Canadian boys had hoped to maintain their brotherhood in arms into operational squadrons. Beneath the novelty and excitement of arriving in Britain, however, lay a hard fact whose implications would become more evident over the next few months. Upon leaving Canada, they had been attached to the Royal Air Force. Almost all of Joe’s classmates were destined to fly in Bomber Command, but they soon learned that they would be split up and assigned to various RAF stations around Britain.

  Splitting from old Hell hooter pals … going to #25 O.T.U. [Operational Training Unit] with a couple of others from other classes – impossible to keep together from now on – can only hope for reunions – saw boys off & left soon after – arrived at FINNINGLEY near Doncaster – well received & treated in serg mess – looks like a good set up.

  (JJD 4 May 1941)

  Discovered Roger Rousseau & Stevie Stevenson on same station … station well organized – less red tape than in Canada – everybody knows their job – waaf 2 – (women) prominent around the station – and in most places – women playing a key part in war – filling in as equals all over & supplying the needed incentive & dash to keep the men on their toes … (JJD 5 May 1941)

  Joe reported to the Pony Club:

  we have all been split up. The policy here seems to be to break up the “colonial” groups and more or less surround them with peaceful living blokes – you guessed it – Englishmen. We spent two nights in London binging before we were split up – Art and I were then sent to different parts of the country. (JJL 14 May 1941)

  we are taking a hosing financially – we pay 16s – 6d per week income tax – we have protested – beefed etc. We are still R.C.A.F. – never signed up for the RAF, but they are hosing us good and proper.3

  (JJL 25 May 1941)

  Canadian airmen were effectively cut loose from the force they had originally joined. For all practical purposes, they had become members of another country’s air force, even if it was that of the “mother country.” The RAF would determine their postings, their discipline, their promotions and decorations, and their eventual repatriation. In 1941 the RCAF had no input in these matters as they affected its men at the unit level. It was unrepresented at RAF stations or even in Group commands, and indeed it was unable to tell Canadians at home where their sons had been posted. Those early arrivals had become the orphans of the RCAF.

  Prime Minister King thought he had got what he wanted out of the negotiations that had established the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in December 1939. Article 15 of the agreement called for Canadian graduates of the training plan to be organized in RCAF units and formations overseas. Canada understood this to mean that most, if not all, Canadians trained under the plan would be posted to RCAF squadrons in Britain. For politicians in Ottawa, the achievements of those squadrons would be recognized at home and abroad as Canada’s glory and the nation’s contribution to the war effort, beyond the skill and bravery of its individual airmen. In this war, Canada would not just say “ready, aye, ready” and offer its sons to the mother country. Canada would be an independent member nation of a wartime alliance.

  But that is not how Britain’s Air Ministry saw it. How and when would these squadrons be formed? How many were really required? Were they to be manned by Canadian airmen only, or also by Canadian ground crews? If the latter, how would these ground crews materialize, as they were already going flat out in Canada to operate the training program? And wouldn’t all this entail unnecessary and unaffordable operational and administrative difficulties at that stage of the war? The situation in Europe in the summer of 1940, as training was ramping up in Canada, was definitely not as anticipated in the previous winter when the agreement had been signed. The Air Ministry had never been sympathetic to what it regarded as Canadian political posturing, and by 1941 was even less inclined to indulge it. It saw the training program in Canada as a vital feeder for the RAF, and that would be that. It would be nearly two years before Canadian bomber squadrons were established and unified as a separate operating group. Without them, the RAF saw no obligation and made no effort to keep the Canadian arrivals together. In the meantime, Canada’s air force would be a colonial one from Britain’s perspective.

  Another hard fact that would become evident in the next few months was that many of the new arrivals would not long survive. A week after he arrived, Joe wrote in his diary: “learnt that only 12 of first 30 observers still alive – lot of good men gone. …” What Joe heard about the first air observer class was not far from the truth. Thirty-seven of its graduates had disembarked in Britain in late November 1940. They were sent to squadron duty without delay, and many were on operations within days of arrival. Pilot Officer Lawrence Stanley Hill was a promising and highly recommended geology student from Saskatchewan, just graduated from McGill University, who had ranked second in his air observer course. He was posted to a Coastal Command squadron in northern Scotland within days, where he would be the observer in a four-man torpedo bomber crew. On 28 December he was briefed for his first operational assignment – to attack a German tanker off Trondheim, Norway. The Beaufort aircraft took off in the dim mid-winter light of the northern noon, and was last seen near the Shetlands. It never returned. Hill became the first Canadian-trained air observer to be killed in action. Over half of his class would meet the same fate before the end of 1941.

  Twelve

  England

  The newly arrived graduates of the Air Training Program still had much to learn before going into battle. First, they would need to master operating the bombers they would fly over Germany, which were larger, faster, and more complex than the trainers they had flown in Canada. They would have to learn to act together as a crew – the basic unit of battle – while carrying out their individual tasks under duress. They would be drilled in the means of dealing with emergencies in the air and how to abandon their aircraft if need be. They would have to familiarize themselves with European weather and flying conditions, and with the hazards of battle they would encounter over Germany. Their first postings in Britain were to Operational Training Units (OTUs), which would provide the necessary instruction and ensure that what was new would become routine. OTUs served as finishing schools for those qualified to fly in bomber aircraft but not yet to take them into battle.

  The Canadian airmen would undertake this next step in a new country, among unfamiliar people, far from the comforts and security of home, and now separated from most of the fellows with whom they had trained in Canada. The confidence, swagger, and sense of entitlement they carried overseas from Canada would be challenged and tested, but would see them through. There would be many grumbles about their new si
tuation in England, but their enthusiasm and resilience would prevail.

  Their leaders were neither surprised nor amused by the grumbling, which ranged from their training and treatment in the Royal Air Force, their disconnection from the RCAF, their reception by the civilian population, their living conditions in wartime England, and delays and thefts in overseas mail and parcel service. Both British and Canadian authorities relied on information provided by Britain’s wartime postal censorship system to monitor the discipline, morale, and welfare of their fighting men. Shortly after the arrival of the April troop convoy from Halifax, British Air Intelligence began assembling a series of thematic summaries gleaned from the extracts it was receiving of Canadian airmen’s mail. It routinely forwarded these summaries, along with individual letter extracts, to RCAF Headquarters in London, where they raised concerns well beyond those of “loose lips sink ships.” Air Commodore L. F. Stevenson, air officer commanding the RCAF in Great Britain, told the censorship authorities that the main issue was “the effect on Canadian opinion irrespective of the justness or otherwise of the complaint so please do not hesitate to cut or stop letters wherever it appears to you advisable.”

  Such complaints, Stevenson added, could undermine both the willingness of Canadians to volunteer, in the absence of conscription, and the morale of servicemen’s families at home. He recommended that “the Chief Censor be instructed to delete from the letters of all members of the R.C.A.F. serving overseas any passages which might disturb the minds of people in Canada.”1

  Joe Jacobson was posted to No. 25 Operational Training Unit at RAF Finningley in south Yorkshire, along with four other air observers with whom he had trained in Canada. Finningley, a recent addition to the training system, had taken in its first batch of trainees only two months before. The attendant pattern of cobbling things together and making do was familiar enough to the Canadian arrivals.

  The week before, aircrew trainees had been moved out of barracks at the aerodrome to Rossington Hall, the mansion of an enormous estate that the RAF had requisitioned early in the war. The Hall itself, two miles from base, was a three-storey red brick Victorian building, with over twenty bedrooms now jammed full of airmen, several reception rooms, a billiards room, a conservatory, and a grand staircase leading down to the main entrance hall. The grounds included a circular stable, lawns, flower gardens, and several playing fields.

  Joe’s chief grumbles were about pay and mail. The most obvious consequence of being attached to the RAF occurred on the very first payday. To avoid friction among serving men, the two countries had agreed that Canadians serving in Britain would receive the British rate while there, but the RCAF would top up their salaries to Canadian rates. The difference would accrue in Canada, and could be assigned to a family member or kept in a Canadian bank account. Joe assigned what amounted to $23 each month to his mother. The combination of lower pay, higher taxes, and higher costs was an unpleasant surprise, as Joe complained to the Pony Club:

  we don’t get enough money any more to move around as we please – we rake in 15 per week instead of $25 which the boys get back home and everything is expensive – especially liquor which is hard to get here.

  (JJL 25 May 1941)

  Another shock was the weather. Many of the newly arrived Canadians were surprised by the cold and damp, inside and out, and May 1941 was unusually cold in Britain. Joe claimed to have been warmer in Iceland the month before.

  Mail from Canada was crucial for the morale of those now far from home, but there were kinks in the delivery system. Airmail service, new that summer on a space-available basis, took at least two weeks. Even cables were subject to long delays. One sent from Montreal on 6 May arrived in Joe’s hands on the 27th. Two weeks later he received twelve letters from Canada all at once (including letters sent to him at Debert), and then another bunch of nine. In Montreal, Percy speculated that Joe’s letters had “gone down to Davey Jones Locker,” while in England the newspapers reported the loss of overseas mail due to enemy action. It appears from Joe’s surviving correspondence that most of the letters he wrote home during his first month in England – at least three letters to the Pony Club and another three to his family – never arrived in Canada.2 Yet once the flow began, few, if any, letters went missing. The eagerly awaited parcels of food, cigarettes, clothing, and magazines from home for the most part arrived more regularly than personal letters.

  Joe quickly took a liking to the other Dominion airmen he met, although less so to the English. He told the Pony Club that there were

  half a dozen Canucks on our station – half a dozen New Zealanders – someday we hope to get attached to Canadian & N.Z. bombing squadrons – we miss the old sing songs and rowdyism. The English blokes are okay when you get to know them personally. But English are English and they never go out of their way to get to know you and they are for the most part orderly and quiet – reserved and aloof … all Empire men are tops mentally & physically but take a while to get used to the restrictions and lower standard of living forced on them here …

  (JJL 25 May 1941).

  Canadians once over here have lots of pride but lack the community spirit of far off N.Z. & Australia. We are all alike though – independent – informal, fair – boisterous – frank. (JJD 29 May 1941)

  Sports were the common currency of all those newly arrived young men, who were soon teaching each other their own brands of football, rugby, baseball, and cricket. Sports did much to take the edges off of national differences and build Empire solidarity. He wrote home that he had had

  a great game of football last night with our gang and we practically killed one another with NZ, Cdns, English, Irish and Scotch each trying to show the other how hard he could tackle – since I taught them our game I was at a distinct advantage – I am at least able to crawl around … give me a few good pals a bit of space to run around in – a few fellows to run around with and I don’t kick too much.

  (JJL 10 June 1941)

  Half an hour north of Finningley by bus lay Doncaster, a grim coal-mining and industrial city. Its blandishments – pubs, dance halls, music halls, cinemas, and dog tracks – held little appeal for Joe, and he found its inhabitants inhospitable, unfriendly, and tight-fisted. Nor was he attracted to its women who, he told the Pony Club, were a “poor calibre of babes,” not classy enough for his tastes. Jack McIntyre, one of Joe’s Canadian pals at Finningley, wrote home:

  I’ve been in England for eight weeks now, and as yet I’ve never been inside the door of an English house. I’ve been in hotels and stores, but never has anyone even asked me up for tea. They don’t know what hospitality means.3

  Yet Joe enjoyed the South Yorkshire countryside and villages. So in his usual way, he surrounded himself with an expanding circle of new friends and old, who explored the pubs of Doncaster and nearby rural villages on Saturday nights or when flying was washed out. The village pubs were novel venues for Canadians, the easy camaraderie, cozy atmosphere, and relaxed liquor laws quite unlike the beer parlours at home. Joe, Jack, and the other Canadians soon encountered intriguing characters, from ex-convicts to ex-prizefighters.

  Spent the night getting roary eyed with McIntyre – hit on the Smiths at the Greyhound Pub – gave us cigars – sandwiches – they had been to Canada & were as drunk as we were – good sing song in the Black Bull – had Tuffy – a DFM Gunner with us & we pulled down a few signs before leaving – (JJD 30 May 1941)

  Supping in the Mount Pleasant hotel – Gt. N. Road Doncaster – pleasant, peaceful, calm – air fresh – hard to realize we are besieged with our backs to the wall. Had a good meal in a quiet English roadside hotel – our Canada badges got us extra pie & a package of cigarettes which are scarce now – you can still get a fair meal here. (JJD 4 June 1941)

  Our station compared with others rates well – we get along fine with everybody … enjoy ourselves – lovely walking thru winding country lanes near here – (JJD 7 June 1941)

  Went for a long bike ride over peacefu
l English countryside with Roger Rousseau. It was quiet & we chatted long & pleasantly – decided to quit binges – to get back into 1st class shape – started by doing exercises at 12:30 AM. (JJD 16 June 1941)

  Had a sing song in Doncaster with Dave Davis – a Welsh pal who is a real good head – I seem to have lots of luck with my pals –

  (JJD 30 June 1941)

  Had a real good binge with Dick Davis my Welsh pal – we both like each other’s company better than any of the fluzies around here – so we down a few pints & knock the town silly with our raucous singing – … – Dave is in my inner circle.4 (JJD 9 July 1941)

  Life at Rossington Hall was turning out to be another summer camp experience for Joe, rather like Initial Training School the year before. He kept in touch by mail with many of his RCAF friends now elsewhere in Britain, and in June he and Jack McIntyre visited their friends at No. 16 OTU in Oxfordshire on a weekend leave.

  3 AM – resting & eating in a roadhouse with Jack McIntyre & a couple of truck drivers. Arrived in London 5 AM – slept a couple of hours at the Union Jack Club – took the train to Oxford & hitched to Upper Heyford. G.P. was fine – had a jump from 200 [feet] in which the other jumper was killed – cracked up again yesterday and was nearly burnt alive – Hunter fine – got really stinko – the boys don’t like their station – I guess we are well off. (JJD 7 June 1941)