Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

MEMORIES OF COMMANDO...
photograph and held it for a moment. Then she asked,
“Was your father in the British army”
“No, he is an American, a civilian.”
She studied the photograph—a portrait of a rather
portly man in a three-piece suit with an inscription that
read: “To Captain Vanderkloot with fond memories of
Commando. —Winston S. Churchill.”*
Riveting the class’s attention, our teacher began to
describe the man in the photograph. He was one of the
great leaders of the war, she said—one of the towering
figures of the 20th century. At that moment I knew I
needed to learn more about how my father and this great
man had come together.
The Transatlantic Ferry
It’s essential first to know the story of a secret band of
aviators called the Royal Air Force Ferry Command: pilots
with the critical and dangerous task to bring planes, and
later passengers, across the North Atlantic: an ocean so cold
that survival in the water is measured in minutes. Even
ships with experienced crews have a treacherous time in
winter. A crossing by air, at the time of World War II, was
deemed almost impossible.
The first successful aerial crossing of the North
Atlantic was made in 1919 by a pair of Englishmen, John
Alcock and Arthur Brown. In response to a prize offered by
the Daily Mail, they took off from Newfoundland, and
twenty-three hours later crash-landed in a peat bog in
Ireland. At a ceremony in London, Alcock and Brown were
awarded their prize cheque by a sometime pilot, Secretary of
State for War and Air Winston S. Churchill.
Over the next twenty years under 100 attempts were
made to fly the North Atlantic, fewer than half of which
were successful. The needs of war created an aviation revolution,
and by 1945 transatlantic flights were commonplace,
but the transformation wasn’t easily achieved.
The tenth of May 1940, when Winston Churchill
became Prime Minister, was one of the worst days of the
Second World War. The Germans, supreme in Poland,
Norway and Denmark, had now invaded Holland, Belgium
and Luxemburg, and were making for France. The
Luftwaffe was in daily action and the RAF was desperately
short of aircraft. Britain needed planes, especially bombers,
a major source of which was the USA.
But America was neutral. U.S. neutrality laws forbade
military aircraft from flying to Canada, which like Britain
was a belligerent. So some U.S. planes were flown to an airfield
in North Dakota and pulled by horses legally across
______________________________________________
* My father used the Americanized spelling of the name in
one word. Alas, the photograph disappeared in a burglary;
autograph dealers should be on the lookout for it.
the border. They were then flown to Canadian ports, disassembled
and placed on ships bound for Britain. If the
convoys made it, they were reassembled and delivered to the
RAF. The process took months, and many planes were lost
to the attacks of German U-boats.
Churchill’s appointee Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of
Aircraft Production, was told to get needed aircraft by any
means necessary. A Canadian press baron disdainful of
bureaucracy, Beaverbrook was determined to succeed on his
own terms, famously remarking: “They’re planes, aren’t
they Let’s just fly them over!” But RAF commanders told
him that flying the dangerous Atlantic was foolhardy, and
refused to offer pilots, even for a test mission.
Beaverbrook needed a miracle, and he found it in a
gallant Australian, Donald C.T. Bennett, a man born for
this dangerous adventure. A record-setting transatlantic flier
and expert navigator, Bennett convened a group of
American aviation experts and Canadian business leaders to
form a secret operation that became Ferry Command.
In November 1940, the group flew seven Lockheed
Hudsons to Gander, Newfoundland, their departure point
for flying the Atlantic. They arrived in the middle of a
snowstorm, and crews had to camp in converted rail cars,
the only structures available, to wait out the weather. On
the afternoon of November 10th the weather broke. After
chipping ice off their planes by hand, the crews prepared for
departure. A small military band showed up. As the engines
started, they played, “There’ll Always Be an England.”
Some observers may have thought it a funeral dirge.
Flying the Atlantic in winter was so dangerous, RAF
commanders said, they would consider the operation a
success if only half the planes made it. To the pleasant surprise
of everyone, they all survived. Bennett and his team
FINEST HOUR 148 / 20