WOMEN AND THE WAR IN THE AIR
On July 2, 1941, the Canadian Women’s Auxiliary Air Force was officially created. Similar to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, its British counterpart, the Canadian service was intended to bring women into the RCAF to meet the growing labour demands of the war. The first group of 150 recruits was selected from more than 2,000 respondents, and they began their training in October 1941 under the leadership of Flight Officer Kathleen Oonah Walker, from the Red Cross, and Squadron Leader Dr. Jean Flatt Davey, a physician from Women’s College Hospital in Toronto. Women from across Canada were trained to serve in a variety of roles: In the beginning these were traditionally female jobs such as administrative assistants, cooks, and wireless operators, but soon the trades open to them expanded to include occupations such as mechanics and meteorologists. By January 1945, nearly 1,500 members of the renamed RCAF Women’s Division were serving overseas with RCAF 6 Group, and a total of 17,038 women served in the Women’s Division by the end of the war. Author and historian Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail wrote in a 2017 article for Legion magazine that “the air force — and the rest of society — should have had no doubt that women could equal their male counterparts as aircrew, ground support and ‘total war’ aviation workers.” She highlighted the stories of Canadians like Margaret Littlewood, the first woman in Canada to instruct student pilots on a Link trainer (the original flight simulator); Moretta (Molly) Beall, a non-commissioned officer who would use her Women’s Division experience as a photographer to launch her postwar flying career; and Flight Lieutenant Margaret Parkin, who worked on armament and airworthiness research in Cold Lake, Alberta. Despite the restrictions on women’s participation in the war, some women did manage to find a seat in the cockpit of an aircraft. Marion Orr attained her private pilot’s license in 1940, and, after working as an aircraft inspector and assistant air traffic controller, she made her way to England with fellow Canadian pilot Violet Milstead. Together they joined the civilian Air Transport Auxiliary, logging hundreds of hours bringing aircraft from factories to airfields. Orr and Milstead were both inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, and Orr’s story was recognized in a Heritage Minutes film in 1997. It would take until 1980 for the RCAF to allow female pilots to enter military service. Captain Leah Mosher, Captain Nora Bottomley, and Captain Deanna “Dee” Brasseur were the first three female RCAF pilots. — Joel Ralph
April 1943, he completed his air bombers course at No. 9 Air Observer School in Quebec before proceeding overseas.
In England, aircrew continued their training and gained additional experience, often learning first-hand from the small number of experienced pilots, navigators, flight engineers, bomb aimers, wireless operators, and machine gunners who had completed a thirty-mission tour of duty. Perhaps the most important part of the training was forming a new bomber crew, a process that was far more informal than one might imagine for a military operation. Howard Hewer, a Canadian wireless operator, recounted that all the newly qualified crew were hurried into a large mess hall and left to their own devices to build out a bomber crew. “We’ve found that it’s best for you to sort yourselves out, and pick whom you wish to finish the course with,” Hewer recalled his squadron leader explaining. “I’ll leave you to it then. Good luck.”
Hewer focused on finding a good pilot, which seemed to him the surest way to survive the war. Joe Halloran teamed up with Jack Lunn, a pilot who grew up watching planes fly over his family farm near Gainsborough, England. They completed their training together before joining 622 Squadron based at RAF Mildenhall in late 1943. A week after their first mission to Magdeburg in January 1944, they would be called upon to attack Berlin.
Roger Coulombe, a pilot from Montmagny, Quebec, knew all too well the challenges that Berlin presented to the attackers. Coulombe, a pilot with RCAF 426 “Thunderbird” Squadron, had already participated in nine raids on the German capital and would complete twelve by the end of March, earning him the nickname “the Berlin Kid.” “Most of our raids on Berlin were done during the fall and winter when the period of darkness was the longest,” explained Coulombe. The eight-hour flight from England to Berlin through the long winter night was a perilous journey for bomber crews. Each member had to contribute to a successful mission, constantly scanning the night sky for enemy aircraft, taking careful navigational readings, sending and receiving wireless messages, and guiding the aircraft to the target. Crews were only illuminated by the enemy searchlights, the fires below, or, on particularly bad nights, the light of the moon. They often flew in –40°C temperatures, stocked with just the right amount of fuel to get to the target and home.
In addition, the city of Berlin was heavily guarded by extensive fortifications. “The Big City,” recalled Coulombe in a letter to historian David Bashow, “was protected by a tremendous quantity of anti-aircraft guns … [and] there was a terrific quantity of searchlights trying to cone and isolate a bomber if the sky was not completely overcast. This combination of searchlights and always intense flak was terrifying enough.” In addition to the ground defences, German night fighters prowled in and around the bomber stream at nearly every stage of the flight. “They attacked from the rear and from below, where they could not be seen in pitch darkness, while they could easily see us silhouetted against the lighter sky.”
Despite the dangers that were present on all bomber raids, Coulombe felt a raid on Berlin put the most strain on aircrews. “Going against Berlin, you felt overwhelmed by the immensity of the defended area. You had the feeling of the impossibility of getting through the collective opposition of so many defenses.”
The second mission for Halloran was more harrowing than the first. On the way to Berlin his aircraft was attacked by a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 night fighter. The bomber’s rear gunner signalled to the pilot to corkscrew to port, and, as the aircraft dived away, the rear gunner fired off a two-second burst from his machine guns. Bombers were notoriously outgunned by night fighters, but on this occasion it was enough to stave off the attacker. Halloran’s crew was able to carry on, and they completed their bombing run against Berlin.
In February, the Allies launched a series of bombing raids against the airfields and aircraft production facilities in and around the city of Leipzig, Germany. Halloran’s crew was caught by an attacking Messerschmitt Me 210 night fighter, and they once again took evasive action. This time the rear gunner’s fire was more accurate: He claimed the night fighter as destroyed, but not before it had hit the aircraft with several high-calibre twenty-millimetre cannon shells. The pilot, Jack Lunn, recalled the event nearly fifty-five years later in a letter about his war experiences: “We had a few combats, the one on Leipzig put a cannon shell into the port inner engine without warning, the ground crew kept it as a souvenir. I lost 7000 ft [2,130 metres] in diving and found that I had to pull out by being as strong as an elephant. I took it steady in case anything broke.”
Cloud cover sheltered Leipzig from serious damage that
night, but it failed to hide the bomber stream from the German night fighters. The loss rate of 9.5 per cent of attacking aircraft, seventy-eight in total, marked one of the worst nights of the war for Bomber Command. At least 546 crewmen did not return: They were either killed or taken prisoner, many of them wounded. Other aircraft almost certainly returned home carrying wounded or dead airmen. On average, only around twenty-five per cent of Halifax bomber crews and fifteen per cent of Lancaster crews whose aircraft were shot down managed to bail out. For the RAF and RCAF, it was a brutal result that could not be sustained, and the attack marked the beginning of the end of the period known as the Battle of Berlin. Pressure was mounting on Harris to focus bombing attacks on reducing the enemy air force and clearing the way for the invasion of Normandy — codenamed Operation Overlord — which was now less than four months away.
The last major raid by Bomber Command against Berlin occurred on the night of March 24–25, 1944. Eight hundred and eleven aircraft were sent to attack the city, but most were blown off course by severe winds. The city’s defences claimed seventy-two of the heavy bombers along with their aircrew, more than five hundred men. The 622 Squadron report indicates that Halloran’s Lancaster returned to base after the “operation was abandoned as aircraft couldn’t climb.” Crews turned back on raids for a variety of issues, often mechanical or weather-related, but no matter what the reason they would always be suspected of a lack of will to see the mission through.
The stress level for aircrew was significant, and the loss of any member of the aircrew, whether from enemy fire or from strain, could prove deadly on a mission. On one occasion Halloran’s navigator had a nervous crisis while in the air, leaving his crew blind. Halloran’s daughter, Patsy Rohoman, recalled her mother telling her, “the pilot called my dad and asked him to come up and calm him [the navigator] down, talk to him, and help him navigate.”
The final mission of the Battle of Berlin was against the city of Nuremberg, Germany, on the night of March 30–31, 1944. The bombers were caught in bright moonlight and tracked by enemy night fighters the entire way towards the target. Across the night sky, bombers were exploding left and right. Halloran’s aircraft was hit by an incendiary bomb, dropped from above, that crashed through the port wing. A total of ninety-six bombers were shot down, a loss rate of 11.8 per cent — the worst of any single bombing mission during the war. Countless more aircraft came back heavily damaged or crashed upon their return. Halloran’s aircraft somehow came through, but his squadron lost two bombers on the raid, and the squadron report grimly noted that the “broadcast winds hindered navigation and enemy fighters aided by the moon created havoc on the bomber stream.” Over the city of Nuremberg, airmen were haunted by the sight of bombers exploding all around them, illuminating the night sky, while they waited for an almost-certain attack on their own aircraft.
After more than twenty thousand bomber missions over Germany (counting each sortie by each plane as a single mission) the Battle of Berlin ended in defeat for the Allies in March 1944. While extensive damage was done to Berlin and to important industries, the Nazi war machine fought on. Thousands of Berliners were killed, while hundreds of thousands lost their homes. In the air, nearly 500 bombers were shot down, and more than 3,500 aircrew were killed or captured raiding the capital city, while another 550 bombers were shot down on other missions during this period.
“The Berlin raids were arguably the most arduous and taxing period in the operational histories of Bomber Command and 6 Group,” wrote Bashow in his book No Prouder Place: Canadians and the Bomber Command Experience, 1939–1945. The brutal battle of attrition also had a significant impact on the effectiveness of the German Luftwaffe, but those effects would not be seen for months. Surviving a tour of duty during this period was a perilous task. Lunn, Halloran’s pilot, recalled, “only four crews out of nineteen finished the tour with me.”
Fortunately for RCAF crews, the focus of their attacks shifted to targets in France and western Germany in preparation for D-Day. These targets included German aircraft manufacturing plants, airfields, transportation networks, and coastal defences, which, while still heavily defended, were closer to England and
therefore involved significantly shorter operations with less flying time over enemy territory.
Joe Halloran was one of the lucky ones. He completed his tour of duty, which included a bombing mission over Ouistreham, France, on D-Day. He met his sweetheart, Patricia Reynolds, who was serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, at a dance in Cambridge, England. They married on July 15, 1944, about ten days after his last mission. His flying logbook includes an extra entry stating that his duty of the day was bridegroom and that the one-hour mission finished with “good results.” The couple eventually settled in Toronto, where they always kept a box of Oh Henry! or Eat-More candy bars on top of the fridge — like the ones Halloran had eaten before every mission, lest they go to waste.
Like most veterans, Halloran never spoke much about the war to his children. Staring out the nose of a Lancaster, down six thousand metres to the destruction below, no doubt took its toll. His daughter recalled: “My mom told me that every once in a while my dad would get the shakes, for no reason, just shake really bad. And she used to go over and give him a hug, and she hugged him so hard that he told her he couldn’t breathe.”
Halloran, Philp, and Coulombe are just a few of the thousands of Canadian aircrew who served during the war. Together they faced a terrifying experience that is retold today at the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, Alberta, and at more than two dozen other aviation museums across the country. The museum exhibits often connect Bomber Command to the history of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. In Nanton, the names of the 10,637 Canadians and citizens of other Allied nations killed while serving in the RCAF during the Second World War are etched on the Bomber Command memorial. While No. 6 RCAF Group was disbanded on September 1, 1945, following the defeat of Japan, the RCAF lives on, celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary this year.
Patsy Rohoman explained that her parents relied on each other and on their shared understanding of the war to get through the postwar period. “They had the best time at the worst time because they were at war, getting bombed all the time, and they never knew if they were going to be alive the next day,” she said. “It just puts a different perspective on your outlook. My dad especially was very appreciative of every day that he had.”