Aces, Warriors, and Wingmen: Firsthand Accounts of Canada's Fighter Pilots in the Second World War

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

Wayne Ralph, a pilot in the Canadian Armed Forces from 1965 until 1973,
has written a book that World War II buffs and families of RCAF veterans
will appreciate. Most of it appears in Ralph’s own words, but there
are frequent insertions by the veterans themselves, including the poem
cited by President Reagan when the Challenger exploded killing all on
board—“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” by John
Gillespie Magee Jr., an RCAF fighter pilot when he wrote it on September
3, 1941. There are pictures of many of the veterans, both when they were
in uniform and when Ralph interviewed them in the 21st century.

After a few words of introduction to the campaign at hand, Ralph
provides biographical sketches of the Canadians who served during World
War II in the RAF and the RCAF, as well as of some Americans who joined
the RCAF when the United States remained officially neutral. There are
chapters on the siege of Malta, the North African and Italian campaigns,
bombing raids from Britain against Germany, even actions in India,
Burma, and the Pacific. One chapter deals with re-entry into civilian
life at war’s end, when members of the RCAF returned to Canada as
individuals, not units, without ceremony.

The biographies provide insights into the stress and challenges of
risking one’s life for a necessary cause, with grief over the deaths
of comrades and hatred for the German enemy. Nobody who bombed civilian
targets appears to have had pangs of conscience, but in 1990, Spitfire
pilot Rod Smith received an invitation to visit a German whose bomber he
had downed. Herbert Roy Burden, who had personally witnessed the
Bergen-Belsen death camp, felt total disgust that anyone would deny the
Holocaust and that journalists would find space for Holocaust deniers.
He was appalled that even after VE Day, Canadian troops in the
Netherlands permitted German officers life-and-death control over their
subordinates. With assistance from the Seaforth Highlanders, a German
general named Blaskowitz arranged the execution of two of his men on May
13, 1945.