Military and Oral History Conference:
Between Memory and History
The BCATP Revisited: The Wartime Evolution of Flight Training in Canada.
Matthew Chapman, University of Victoria
Famously heralded by Franklin D. Roosevelt as the "Aerodrome of Democracy," Canada provided the training grounds for more than 130,000 Commonwealth airmen during the Second World War. More than just the physical location, Canada provided thousands of flight instructors to teach an entire generation of aviators to fly. Yet until only shortly before the Second World War, the Royal Canadian Air Force was a mere skeleton organization of fewer than 250 "bush pilots in uniform," flying a handful of antiquated aircraft. The seemingly herculean accomplishments of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) have long been mythologized in the nation's collective memory as a triumph of national determination. What is largely absent in the relatively few historical assessments of the BCATP is any critical analysis of how it was possible that a nation with so few military aviation resources at the outset of the war, and with a civil aviation industry focused on a very different type of flying than that most BCATP graduates faced overseas, could so rapidly develop an aviation training scheme which, in scope, was the most ambitious in human history. Through an analysis of oral history interviews and a wide range of primary and secondary sources, this paper attempts to shed light on the steep and deadly learning curve that was only partially overcome by BCATP instructors and administrators by war's end.