The Valour and the Horror

The Royal Canadian Air Force sent 48 squadrons and 94,000 officers and men overseas. Tens of thousands served in RAF squadrons, most quite happily, but it took enormous pressure on London from the air minister, C. G. Power, to get substantial Canadian formations created. Power's policy of Canadianization succeeded none the less, and there were soon RCAF fighter wings and a bomber group. Fighter pilots fought in the battle of Britain, in Malta, in the Western Desert campaigns, and in north&endash;west Europe; two transport squadrons flew out of Burma; and a Catalina squadron served notably on Ceylon. The RCAF also had responsibility for home defence, notably on the east and west coasts. It also provided fighter squadrons in support of US forces in Alaska.

But it was in the bomber war that Canada made its greatest operational contribution. The RCAF formed its first bomber squadron in June 1941, entirely from Canadians serving with the RAF. The next year, seven more squadrons took to the air, and on 1 January 1943, No. 6 Group of eight squadrons came into being. Based in Yorkshire, a long distance from their targets, the RCAF Group suffered serious teething problems. It flew older Wellington bombers; it had bad luck, and it lost more than a hundred aircraft and crews between March and June 1943; it suffered in consequence from morale problems. Not until the disciplinarian Air Vice&endash;Marshal 'Black Mike' McEwen took over command in January 1944, and not until Lancasters and Halifaxes had replaced the Group's Wellingtons, did matters improve. Thereafter the Canadians played their part well. In all, the group's aircraft flew 41,000 operations and dropped 126,000 tons of bombs, one-eighth of Bomber Command's total. The cost was 3,500 dead; another 4,700 RCAF officers and men died in other Bomber Command squadrons. In all, 17,101 members of the RCAF were killed during the war, a number almost exactly equal to the army's combat losses in the European theatre.

The Oxford Companion to World War II