Ocean Bridge: The History of RAF Ferry Command

Dean F. Oliver is the assistant director of the Centre for International
and Security Studies at York University in Toronto.

“Military historians,” Carl Christie notes, “have tended to focus
on personalities, or on tactical and strategic considerations,
overlooking more mundane matters such as globe-circling logistical.”
His comment is accurate but self-contradictory: to call “mundane” an
organization that delivered nearly 11,000 military aircraft to Allied
air forces around the world at a time when transoceanic air travel was
in its infancy is more than slightly inappropriate, as Christie himself
amply demonstrates. Historians shy away from the less dramatic,
nonbattle narrative at their interpretive peril. Carl Christie’s fine
book—along with Fred Hatch’s earlier work on the British
Commonwealth Air Training Plan—is one of the few Canadian works to
study the “sinews of war.”

As the book’s title indicates, it is not, strictly speaking, a
“Canadian” monograph. Ferry Command was a British organization run
by British officials. Its effects on Canadian and Newfoundland
attitudes, industry, and topography were nonetheless dramatic. Gander
and Goose Bay, Newfoundland, and Dorval, Quebec, for example, were
transformed completely because of their strategic importance in the
ferry operation. Despite this, Ottawa’s relationship with Ferry
Command remained arm’s-length. Though the Command’s headquarters
were in Montreal and its principal air corridors crisscrossed Canadian
territory, the Canadian government played a minor role in the
organization’s evolution, preferring instead to watch developments
with “consuming interest” for their possible impact on postwar
commercial air policy.

The impact of Ferry Command on the Allied war effort, which Christie
describes (a tad too frequently, perhaps) as enormous, is the book’s
first and most important theme; its influence on postwar international
air agreements is the secondary focus. The latter subject, however, is
not explored in great depth, despite an excellent introductory section
on North Atlantic air cooperation and commercial aviation in the
interwar period. A third theme is the human dimension of
mid–20th-century long-range air travel. Christie’s examples of
individual heroism and quiet endurance place in startling perspective
the machinations of ministers, air marshals, and civil aviation
officials, few of whom, as late as 1940, believed a massive
trans-Atlantic airlift possible.

Such accounts add substantially to the book’s popular appeal, but
also to its length. Ocean Bridge is far longer than it needs to be
because of the author’s excessive reliance on block quotes and the
experiences of individual aircraft and their crews. Christie also is not
a gifted writer, but his book makes a valuable and overdue contribution
to the study of military aviation and logistics during World War II.