Military and Oral History Conference:
Between Memory and History
“God’s Gift to the Empire”: Canadian Veterans and the Memory of the British Commonwealth Air Training Program
Rosburg, Tyson, University of Victoria
For most people the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) is something understood solely through reading history books. However, the BCATP is largely forgotten in traditional historiography. Instead of discussing the vital importance of how the program provided the desperately needed pilots needed to win the war against Hitler’s Germany, most of these books describe the BCATP as a mere stepping stone to greater things, placing a greater emphasis on the glorious achievements of pilots overseas. However, to the brave men who were pilots, instructors, or auxiliary personnel in the Second World War it was much more—it was their life, now part of their memory, and history owes them far more than a few abstract and misrepresented sentences. A new image of the BCATP is necessary, but this raises the question of how we can best illustrate the experience of the BCATP when traditional history has largely forgotten it? The answer: oral history. My paper recreates the training experience of airmen in the BCATP, and is constructed through oral interviews with three airmen who went on to become pilots and instructors. History has especially forgotten the instructors of the BCATP, but it should not be this way. The brave pilots of the Second World War whom traditional history glorifies owe much to their instructors and, more importantly, to the British Commonwealth Air Training Program as a whole, which was largely responsible for preparing them for overseas combat. The British Commonwealth Air Training Program and the men and women behind it are the true heroes of the air war against Nazi Germany.