Olympians: Against all odds
New book celebrates the Air Force Flyers and Canadian hockey at the 1948 Winter Games
One of my Christmas gifts this year was a hockey book that I hadn’t heard of called Against All Odds. Its subtitle is The Untold Story of Canada’s Unlikely Hockey Heroes. P.J. Naworynski tells the story of the 1948 Canadian Olympic hockey team, drawn mostly from retired or still active Air Force personnel and put together in just a few months to represent Canada in the Winter Games in San Moritz, Switzerland. For the record, that was 70 years ago and I was five years old.
While I was growing up in Toronto’s west end I was imaginatively fixated on the six-team NHL – well, truth be told, I adored the Toronto Maple Leafs. They were known to me mostly by means of radio, newspaper sports and parental chatter. However, I do recall being fascinated by the teams chosen by Canada to represent the country at the Olympic Games and the World Ice Hockey Championships during the late 1940s and 1950s. That period of my life is now a bit of a blur to me, though a number of those early teams are vivid in my memory. They included the Penticton Vee’s, the Trail Smoke Eaters, the Whitby Dunlops and the Belleville Mcfarlands. All four of these teams went to Europe as Allan Cup winners (that is, at the Senior A level), having thus earned the right to represent Canada in the World Championships. These teams were romantic names to me; in fact, they were made up of skilled hockey players, many of whom were of professional caliber; for various reasons, however, they were unable to make it in the NHL.
Most of these teams won in grueling open-ice, European competitions. I remember listening to some of their games on the radio and soaking myself in the drama of Canada’s amateur teams competing against world-class opposition on outdoor rinks. The enemies of course were the Czechs, the Russians and the Swiss and the Swedes, but it was clear to me by the mid to late 1950s that it was the Russians and the Czechs who were then our most formidable international opponents.
But 1948 was earlier still and it was a ticklish situation for Canada. I was too young at the time to have any idea of what was going on. Our international hockey body was in a flap about the International Ice Hockey Federation’s new rules designed to insure that the Olympic Games be played only by amateurs. Disturbed by aspects of the new rule, Canadian officials chose to pull out our team. About that time, an Air Force Doctor in Ottawa named Sandy Watson floated the notion that, with a lot of effort and a little luck, he could try to put together a ‘Canadian’ Air Force team at the eleventh hour.
Undaunted by myriad challenges, Watson hastened to gain governing approval, find a capable coach in Frank Boucher, and recruit as many solid amateur players from the ranks of retired and active Air Force personnel as he could manage. Putting a competitive team together in three months was a formidable task! At the same time he had to make all the arrangements for the trip. Plans had to include a series of exhibition games at home and a set of games both before and after the Olympic Games in Switzerland. There were also the ocean trips to and from Europe. He called his team the Canadian Air Force Flyers. Once they were in San Moritz they found themselves fascinated by Barbara Ann Scott and her successful bid to win a gold medal in figure skating for Canada.
Naworynski decided to write this book after having directed a documentary film about the Air Force hockey team’s unlikely victory
in Switzerland. The filming and research left him aware of the team’s many individual stories of heroism in the war; these needed to be told in fuller detail.
Overall, Against All Odds is a wonderful, feel-good story (victory was ever thus!) and one that makes an important contribution to the fast-growing library of hockey books being published yearly in Canada. On the one hand it was a ‘ragtag ’ collection of players from across the country and on the other a collection of Air Force ‘brothers,’ many of whom had done extraordinary things in the recently-ended war. As Naworynski recalls, “I had no idea that Canada’s 1948 Olympic hockey team was made up of men who had jumped from burning bombers over the skies of Germany during World War II, or who had lived off the land as escaped prisoners of war, hiding in the hills of the Carpathian Mountains. Nor had I known that a member of that crew had joined forces with the Polish resistance and liquidated Gestapo agents. [As well] I was amazed to learn that many of the men had grown up playing shinny using frozen balls of horse manure for pucks on windblown, frozen ponds.”
Two other heroes must be emphasized. Dr. Sandy Watson was the chief medical officer of the RCAF while Frank Boucher, who was from a famous hockey family, was an RCAF sergeant. It was Watson who, upon hearing the news in September 1947 that Canada would not be sending a team, “decided to take it upon himself to strike up the charge and find a team for the nation.” Watson asked his close friend Boucher to be the coach. Happily, the Air Force infrastructure provided accommodation in Ottawa for the training camp and for flying in players from air bases across the country for the hasty tryouts.
The book covers the tryout period, the ocean trip (in steerage) when the boys found themselves mocked by the American team that was travelling in first class, and the games in Europe. The press in Canada were highly skeptical about their chances. However, with some judicious additions to the roster and fine coaching by Boucher they prevailed in the tournament by tying the favored Czech team 0-0 and then beating the Swedes 3-0 in the final game. Playing outdoors, they had to endure poor ice conditions and snowfalls. On occasion they were pelted with snowballs. Naworynski recreates the on-ice drama and the off-ice dynamics vividly and concisely, though he is prone to sporting clichés in the process.
But the book also tells the personal war stories of the management team and the individual players. Naworynski presents those experiences with a kind of breathless excitement. Most of the boys had come from modest Canadian roots and several had endured dangerous escapes after plane crashes in Europe during the war. Yet hockey was their shared interest before and after the war, and the opportunity to play in the Olympics trumped any post-war obstacles facing them. Naworynski’s only caveat was that, by the time he began to work on his film about the team, only a few of the players were still alive. Nevertheless, with the help of some excellent researchers he brings the wartime experiences of exemplary chaps like Hubert Brooks, Frank Dunster and Roy Forbes to life.
It was overall the gold medal was an amazing Canadian achievement. To win what were dubbed as the “Games of Renewal” on short notice and with amateur skill and exuberance was a rare feat. As Peter Mansbridge notes in his recommendation, “It’s a great story and it’s OURS!”