The Impact of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan on Western Canada: Some Saskatchewan Case Studies

The Impact ofthe British Commonwealth Air Training Plan on Western Canada: Some Saskatchewan Case Studies BRERETON GREENHOUS and NORMAN HILLMER The British Canadian Air Training Plan was an impressive national achievement. Canada became one of the great air training centres of the Second World War, contributing more than 130,000 trained aircrew to the Allied cause. The federal government paid three quarters of the total bill, an amount in excess of two and a quarter billion dollars. With expenditure and achievement came immense (if difficult to measure precisely) economic benefit and social impact . From British Columbia to Nova Scotia, communities freshly liberated from the Depression saw the construction of important training facilities and the influx of men, money and markets. The natural advantages of weather and terrain made the prairies attractive for air training. Saskatchewan attracted our attention because we felt that it might be particularly sensitive to the effects of the Plan. Here some fifty schools, bases and related training centres were concentrated . Here one fifth of the BCATP pilots and as much as thirty per cent of some categories of aircrew were trained. Here was an economically unified, culturally conservative society devastated by the Depression, and a number of communities - ranging in size from 3,000 to 20,000 people - large enough to generate sufficient documentation and reminiscence but small enough so that impact may be thought to be substantial and discernible.• Into this relatively simple and stable environ-ment were placed a dozen different kinds of BCATP units, each standardized as much as possible in the interests of mass production. The Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 16, Nos. 3&4 (Automne-Hiver 1981 Fall-Winter) most common were the flying training schools pilot factories - since more pilots were needed than any other category of aircrew and a pilot's training took longer. After a sojourn at an Initial Training School (which did not involve any flying ), a pilot candidate went to an Elementary Flying Training School, where he spent eight weeks learning to fly a single-engined light aircraft . EFTS's varied more than any other kind of unit, partly because they came in four sizes ranging from Class A with 90 pupils to Class D with 240, and partly because they were generally run under contract by civilian flying clubs. The federal government provided the airfield and most of the equipment; the companies and flying clubs were paid a flat sum to take care of instructional services and maintenance. When he graduated from an EFTS a novice pilot went to a Service Flying Training School to refine his skills and specialize in either highperformance single-engined fighter trainers or in multi-engined machines. SFTS's were the biggest, typically running to a permanent establishment of 1100 all ranks, with four classes of sixty pilots each under training at any one time. Each SFTS consisted of a main field and two satellite fields, nearly all the staff and services being based on the former, which was usually situated three to four miles away from the town - an easy bus ride but a fair walk in winter, especially for RAF men unused to the severity of the prairie climate. The course lasted twelve weeks and a new class graduated every four. It is on three of these service flying schools - two manned and operated by the Royal Air Force (Moose Jaw and Weyburn) and one by the Royal Canadian Air Force (Yorkton) - that our attention has been mainly directed. The responsibility for the initial placing and the building of aerodromes was given to the Civil Aviation Division of the federal Department of Transport, which by September 1940 had let 94 major aerodrome construction contracts, for a total of eleven and one half million dollars, and a large number of subsidiary contracts. Western contractors were given preference on the prairies, although by late summer 1940 ''it was necessary to ask Eastern contractors to invade the West as 133 firms there all had their hands full. "2 Provincial highway agencies made the bulk of the contour plans of aerodrome sites, while provincial health departments co-operated, inter alia, by providing analyses of the water supply. Potable water was not easy to find on...