Pilot of Fortune - Ted Beaudoin

Civilian and pioneer aircrew don’t get much of a look in here in the corridors of ABR. Well, the groaning trestle table that serves as a desk, anyway. When they do, it’s usually a former military pilot managing to gain flying work in a world swamped by eminently qualified candidates, some of whom, admittedly, never wanted, or had the chance, to fly again. An aircrew book generally only includes this period of a life in great detail if the author, having completed the most exciting part of the story, sticks with it and doesn’t condense the post-war period into a chapter or two.

Pre-war civilian flyers feature even less here. Some airlines - like Pan Am, Qantas and BOAC - kept flying in support of the war effort so those men not called up kept circulating. Like the legendary P.G. Taylor, many were brought in to the Ferry Command fold. They are more than welcome here.

That is how Pilot of Fortune came to be added to the review pile. Its author is an authority on the civilians of Ferry Command and originally wrote this biography, about the great Canadian aviator Sheldon Luck, in the early eighties when it was released as Walking on Air.

Luck was born in Ontario in 1911. His father was a reverend with a dim view of aviation. This did not deter his son who, like many boys at the time, became enamoured by these new flying machines. His education prevented a military flying career so by sheer hard graft, during a time when jobs were thin on the ground, young Sheldon earned the money that would allow him to fly. By doing any job he was offered he managed to pay for his tuition, his solo (at eighteen years old) and then subsequent commercial training.

Married by the time he was twenty, and a father shortly after, Sheldon’s first work as a commercial pilot was for a client who was prospecting for fish in the myriad lakes of the north. With a recalcitrant aircraft, an American Eagle (one of many classics to feature throughout the book), this was not a successful venture, but it led to the first of the many survival stories perhaps all of the pioneer bush pilots experienced more than once.

Looking for work from the various mining outfits in the north usually led to the same result – someone had beaten him to it. This flying entrepreneur was a man who would help shape Sheldon’s career for the best part of a decade. He was Grant McConachie, one of Canada’s airline pioneers. A man of vision, and no slouch in the cockpit himself, McConachie, as time wore on, was deskbound more and more as he kept his company running. His promises of greater pay and better aircraft in the future, if Sheldon could just hold on, were far from hollow, but they did tend to take longer than first expected. Sheldon loved the flying, he loved the people he met and carried, he loved the wild north and the respect he had for his boss was reciprocated in spades. He also liked to keep a low profile and get on with the job. It was not a volatile relationship, and Sheldon’s career benefitted from McConachie’s input more than once, but there was only so much a bush pilot could take once the success he had helped achieve made United Air Transport/Yukon Southern one of the operations that would be merged to make Canadian Pacific Air Lines.

Sheldon’s life of flying the entire UAT/YSAT fleet on wheels, floats or skis, and landing on everything from frozen rivers to sandbars, surviving terrible weather and the occasional failing aircraft, gave way to ‘polished’ airline flying. The politics were too much, however, and, with a war on, the improved conditions of Ferry Command beckoned. With his experience and survival skills, Sheldon was ideal for the role. Towards the end of the war, he was flying Consolidated Coronado flying boats with 231 Squadron. Once again, there was no shortage of adventures and misadventures.

Post-war he spent a frustrating time with CPAL and then a pioneering, but equally frustrating period with the Argentinian national airline. He then became a corporate pilot flying a Lockheed Lodestar. The 1950s is where he truly became a pilot of fortune, flying for money wherever he could find it. Supplying the DEW Line (radar stations strung across the north) construction project proved lucrative while his time farming did not. Building time in Cansos and Catalinas helped him become one of the original Flying Firefighters and you can imagine what that entailed. After close to fifty years as a commercial pilot, he let his licence lapse and, as all good legends do, lived a quiet and unassuming retirement.

This is a book full to the brim with tales of remarkable flying, the sort of tales that leave the reader buzzing. What stands out is that Luck, while living up to his surname, is completely at home in the air and a man with a lot of common sense and good judgment. The author also gives McConachie enough space to be a well understood part of Sheldon’s life. Early on, the measure of the man is laid bare when, in response to Sheldon’s second crash, he puts together a recovery program that sees our hero back in the air as soon as possible. While bearing the weight of successively burdensome corporate positions, McConachie is clearly shown to be the progressive, intelligent and insightful aviation professional that he was.

The variety of interesting characters inhabiting the wilds add wonderful colour to a life of considerable adventure, as do the many aviators. All are suitably researched and portrayed, with handy references when they return after a long absence. This commitment to detail, coupled with observation and measured assumption, reveals the veteran journalist in the author. As one of considerable merit and experience, he has a particular style and unique take on things that is at first, admittedly, a little off-putting. It is far from a bad thing, but be prepared for a quirky way with words. It works, though, as the author really knows how to spin a yarn, and makes for a rollicking good read.

Even the layout of the book, with regular headings throughout each chapter, hints at a strong newspaper background, but these often serve as signposts to the next adventure. There are, however, in this edition at least, a few sentences that seem out of place and the inclusion of weird extra words at times. Whether these are the product of the revised and expanded edition is not clear, but, if they are carried over from Walking on Air, they should not have survived the most recent round of proofreading.

A book of this nature, with its fascinating people, far flung destinations and wonderful variety of classic aircraft, would benefit greatly from a fine selection of photographs. Not counting several images of Sheldon’s logbook, which are actually quite hard to read as they are printed on the same paper stock as the text, there would not be more than fifteen photographs in the entire book. While photos specific to Sheldon and his career are probably thin on the ground - you’re not going to take a photo of a Fokker on skis when your fingers are freezing – there must surely be images representative of the conditions he flew in, the towns he visited, the people he met and so on. While a lovely glossy photo section would increase the cost of the book, at least then the images would match the vibrancy of the writing. The cover, too, might be better served with an image of a Barkley-Grow, or something of that ilk, rather than a seemingly generic DC-3/C-47 photo (it’s actually an apparently irrelevant Russian Li-2!).

The vibrancy is a little lacking right at the start as the first chapter lays out the history of UAT. If the reader is not familiar enough with the history of Canadian aviation, and, to be fair, who outside of Canada would be, it’s a bit of a slog up front. It does, however, add needed context. The same can be said for when Sheldon joins Ferry Command and when CPAL came into being. Again, it is valuable context, but at that stage of the book, the reader is deeply invested in Luck’s story and wanting to read of his next adventure.

At a little over 300 pages, Pilot of Fortune is a paperback that, for the most part, is hard to put down. Canadian bush pilots are the stuff of legend, and the aircraft they flew aren’t far behind, yet very few have ever been written about in such detail and with such candour. There is little doubt Sheldon Luck deserved such treatment, but perhaps his name just popped up at the right time. Either way, his life was one worth sharing and it is pleasing to see it done so well.

ISBN 978-1-943492-19-0

Night Duel Over Germany - Peter Jacobs

Two full months (and then some) have passed since I last published a review and, for that, I apologise. The latest issue of Flightpath is largely responsible, but home life has been rather hectic as well. You do not want to know how little reading I've done in the past month! Anyway, as always when I am neglectful of ABR, one of my cadre of very clever guest reviewers is happy to step up to easily fill the void. In this case, it's Adam Purcell, a fine young Bomber Command historian here in Australia. Adam, as I have mentioned before in the introduction to his review of Norman Franks' Veteran Lancs, runs a blog called Something Very Big. It is an account of his research into a relative's bomber crew and also anything and everything to do with Bomber Command that he encounters in his travels. I always find it insightful and informative and I trust you will too. The same applies to this review. Andy Wright.

Royal Air Force Bomber Command flew its first operation of the Second World War within hours of Sir Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany. Its final trip was completed in the last week of the war in Europe. For more than five and a half years, Bomber Command waged an almost nightly war on the enemy. It is therefore an almost unfathomably complex and wide-ranging story, one that is very difficult for a single person to fully understand, let alone condense enough to fit into one book.

Not that this has stopped people trying, of course. The gold standard remains Max Hastings’ magisterial Bomber Command, first published way back in 1979. The Bombing War by Richard Overy (2013) is a close second, but also looks further afield at bombing in the Pacific and other theatres. These are substantial volumes: my 1982 copy of Bomber Command runs to 490 pages in very small type, including notes, and The Bombing War to 852. It’s simply very hard to comprehensively tell the story in less space.

But what if you don’t want or need to read that much detail? What if there was a more accessible, but still comprehensive book about Bomber Command that also looks at both sides of the war and tells a range of stories from the commanders right down to the aircrew? This is more or less what Peter Jacobs has attempted with Pen & Sword’s new title, the 208-page Night Duel over Germany: Bomber Command’s Battle over the Reich during WWII.

Jacobs (a former RAF F-4 and Tornado navigator and the author of several books for Pen & Sword) follows the conduct and background of Bomber Command’s war in a chronological fashion. He includes what was happening at the same time on the Luftwaffe side too. It’s not a bad effort. Some sections are done particularly well, such as the chapter covering the first 1000-bomber raids in 1942, and the section about Hamburg in 1943. The book clearly sets out the distinct phases of the bomber war, taking the reader through the early years, the developing see-saw of the electronic battle, and the campaigns against the Ruhr and Berlin, before turning to the end game and the inevitable section about Dresden. The book is not written in the most terribly sophisticated fashion and Jacobs’ prose could best be described as ‘workmanlike,’ but, apart from a few sentences which I thought were grammatically rather tortured, it is mostly written quite clearly. There’s also a good selection of mostly-new (to this reviewer) photographs and diagrams on glossy paper in the middle of the book that illustrate facets and personalities from both the British and German sides of the conflict.

Unfortunately, though, there are several features which take the shine off the overall effect. Jacobs is perhaps guilty of over-using certain pet words and phrases: ‘coveted’ is one, applied throughout when describing awards like the higher levels of the Knight’s Cross, and the slightly awkward phrase ‘discussions, arguments even’ crops up more often than I’d like. He has, it would appear, been let down by some rather sloppy editing: at one point ‘of’ is used in place of ‘or’.

Editing is sometimes not something that authors will have total control over, however, so these errors and annoyances perhaps reflect more on the publishers than on Jacobs himself. Having said that, I have my doubts about how Night Duel Over Germany was researched, and that is something that the author does control. There is a reasonably extensive bibliography, but what jumped out immediately at me is that it contains only secondary sources. This means that Jacobs is a little too reliant on quotes from books by other authors instead of going to the original source. About the only primary source that Jacobs appears to have consulted is the German Wehrmachtbericht, which he regularly cites throughout the text, but it is not recorded in the bibliography so it’s unclear where he got it from. It’s somewhat indicative of a lack of rigour that is perhaps what led to a few incorrect facts slipping into the final product. Things like claiming that Pathfinder leader Don Bennett was from New Zealand, as happens on page 72, are near inexcusable (he is later correctly identified as an Australian in the caption for a photograph – in the author’s defence, the inconsistency alone should have been picked up in editing). Jacobs has also confused the terminology surrounding the different Pathfinder roles of Supporters and Backers-Up.

These quibbles aside, however, Night Duel Over Germany does pull together enough detail and some gripping stories from both sides of the battle to be, overall, a useful and accessible introduction to Bomber Command’s war.

ISBN 978-1-78346-337-4

Shot Down - Steve Snyder

When the fates of the ten men shot down in an Eighth Air Force Flying Fortress range from killed in action, capture, imprisonment or evasion, to fighting with the Resistance, there’s a lot of ground to cover and the challenge is to keep a tight rein. Throwing in a myriad of brave French and Belgian civilians, and families back home, only serves to make that task more difficult. Steve Snyder provides an incredible amount of detail without getting bogged down and is guided through his father’s war by a treasure trove of material left behind by his parents. Shot Down is a fine example of an immediate relative taking the time to understand and explain the greater conflict while placing the reader alongside the main protaganists as they experienced their greatest adventures.

Howard Snyder’s crew named the bomber they flew to the U.K. after their skipper’s first daughter. As expected, although not by them, they never flew the aircraft again once it was delivered to the air depot in England in mid-October 1943 during the build-up of aircraft and crews following the Schweinfurt raids that almost spelled the end of the USAAF’s European campaign. Each man was destined to fly a number of missions each, but rarely with all of the men he had completed training with. Due to illness and an injury, Snyder had flown three missions by the time his co-pilot had flown seven. Towards the end of their time on operations, however, the crew came together and flew a series of raids before they were shot down on 8 February 1944.

Some were captured, but several evaded to varying levels of success. This is where the book is at its strongest. By the halfway mark, having experienced the breathless account of the bomber’s last moments in the first chapter (setting the hook), the narrative emerges from the rabbit hole that is USAAF equipment, tactics and opponents. It is quite well done, weaving the Snyder crew’s experiences in and around the bigger picture of American strategic bombing operations in Europe. At times, though, the crew gets a bit lost and there is a need to remind oneself who is who (there is a useful crew list on page 47). When they are shot down, it comes at the end of a series of missions where they finally appear to be hitting their straps, getting into gear to push their tour along.

Then it gets really complicated. Each of the eight survivors is followed from the time of their bail out to the eventual culmination of their journeys. For those that were hidden by the local community, the constant fear of discovery or betrayal, or both, is palpable. Many French and Belgian civilians are involved and, again, it becomes quite difficult to keep a handle on the various players. Several contextual paragraphs or chapters, where the author lifts his gaze to explain what is happening at that stage of the war, don’t make this any easier. Footnotes would have worked perfectly here as I was itching to know what Snyder, for example, was going through and not what General Patton’s nickname or mantra was. Snyder had by far the most interesting story of survival (the majority have relatively short tales one way or the other), but he seems to get a bit lost here and there among these well-researched passages and even among the accounts of the fates of the other airmen.

Exceptionally illustrated, complete with images of the buildings in which the men hid or were hidden, the proportion of two-page spreads without at least one photograph included is quite low. This is no small feat for a main body of text that fills 340 pages and is, in turn, supported by twenty pages of bibliography and a very good index. The technical detail is very readable and mostly on point especially where entire books have been written on several of the areas covered. There are several photos, however, that either need to be swapped out with something else or have their captions re-written entirely. 

I did read this with a lot of interruptions due to pressing deadlines so keeping track of the crew, and the brave French and Belgians, would obviously be easier if the reader were to tackle this book in long sittings. It is certainly not one that lends itself to dipping in and out of, but it was never intended to be. There are some wonderful gems of information to be found, not least being the left waist gunner, Joseph Musial, having flown 72 missions in the Pacific prior to this tour! He is certainly someone deserving further research. The excerpts from Snyder’s letters, too, provide a window into his life in England as well as the relationship with his wife. The descriptions of English civilian life, partly based on Snyder’s writings, are fairly standard from ‘an American in England’ (and a married father at that!), where everything is interesting and different, and worn down by four years of war, but not a patch on back home. Snyder, however, proves an astute observer (unlike Ernest C. Ford who commented that all Australian women had wooden teeth!) with an empathy indicative of his age and fatherhood.

A beautifully put-together book, complete with a semi-gloss finish to the boards which accentuates the gold lettering and does not soak up greasy fingerprints (you take the dustcover off to read, don’t you?!), Shot Down is at the top end of self-published works. The author, as tireless as he was to bring together the stories of what must be easily more than fifty people, has gone above and beyond to spread the word about the book and, therefore, raise awareness of the Snyder crew and the many thousands like them. It is an effort that matches the epic sweep of this book and long may it continue. This is one of those books that has reached, and educated, thousands. What they take away from it is entirely up to them, but, at the very least, there are ten young men who will live on in the hearts and minds of some who had no previous connection to them. Education and remembrance, it’s all an aircrew book can hope to be, and Shot Down is an admirable example.

ISBN 978-0-9860760-0-8

The Mallon Crew - Vic Jay

Bomber Command seems to be everywhere at the moment. While I don’t exactly pepper ABR with reviews these days (I do try!), I still have to be careful not to feature Bomber Command book after Bomber Command book because, in reality, I could and that’s not really fair on the other areas of the air war and, of course, the men who served in them. Publishers, while relishing the popularity of the subject, can afford to be picky to some extent so, coupled with a healthy self-publishing industry, there is an impressive number of ‘solo’ aircrew books being released. Some are the result of years, decades even, of research while others are very obviously put together quite quickly with little time taken, or effort made, to understand the subject beyond the main protagonist. At a little over 200 pages and loaded with detail, The Mallon Crew easily falls in the former category.

The author’s father was a flight engineer with No. 75 Squadron (NZ) and part of the crew led by Kiwi Bill Mallon. Jay Senior was one of three RAFVR members on the crew with the other four being New Zealanders. They joined the squadron in early 1945 and flew their first op on 8 March. It was a short war for the Mallon crew, with less than ten ops completed (plus Manna drops), but don’t let the brevity of their operational service fool you. It was still very much a dangerous job and, with daylights regularly flown, the crews could clearly see the fate of those bombers shot down around them. At least the darkness of night ops hid some of the horror.

What is refreshing about TMC is that it doesn’t muck around with Bomber Command history, its tactics or equipment. Most of the people who would pick this book up would already be familiar with such things. As a result, there are no chapters or passages where the author is effectively preaching to the converted. There is an assumed knowledge and any clarification or explanation is kept to, at most, a short paragraph. It certainly makes for a shorter book, but it also means a more focused one. The focus, as you’d expect, is on the crew.

Admittedly, the background, training and operational experiences of the crew could be dropped into any Bomber Command scenario and fit nicely. They all follow the expected path, but there is no escaping this. You need to know the men in order to fly with them and, boy, do you know them once you finish the book. There is a strong impression that no stone was left unturned when it comes to uncovering the lives the crew led before, during and, importantly, after the war. It is less journey of discovery and more lesson in how to use modern resources to hunt, track down and learn about men who had all passed away before the author even began his research. In the case of the author’s father, 38 years passed from his death to the beginning of the work that would lead to TMC. That is not terribly unusual, but the author’s tenacity, and the coincidences that come with this sort of research, really shines through. What is especially impressive is that this extends beyond the core members of the Mallon crew. They occasionally flew with ‘spare’ or extra airmen (a mid-under gunner, for example) and these chaps are not ignored. For the author to examine and learn about their lives is to learn more about his father’s experiences. This is the clear driver behind this work.

There is a lot of Vic Jay in TMC and that’s not just because he is the author. He has been fortunate to experience being inside two separate Lancasters while they were running (one taxiing, the other flying) and both momentous occasions, particularly the taxi ride, serve as inspiration. There are not many authors of this genre who can lean back in their chair, close their eyes and transport themselves to the time they were shaken to the very core by four Merlins vibrating through the thin skin of a bomber. The descriptions of these experiences are really the only time the author allows himself to be overly sentimental and romantic, but few, if any, could avoid doing so when sitting in a living, breathing example of the aircraft that played such a big part in a relative’s life.

As with all airmen that have their lives laid bare in an aircrew book, there is a fervent wish for them to survive and go on to live a long and happy life. TMC, as a crew biography as opposed to a memoir, provides the most extensive ‘follow up’ I have encountered for some time even down to the legacy the men left because they survived. Again, it is a case of ensuring the circle is closed on each man’s life. Here, however, it must be mentioned that one member of the crew, the mid-upper gunner Don Cook, could not be traced nor was his family found (if you have any leads, the author would be most grateful). His absence from the research, not for the want of trying, is more than made up for by the author ensuring non-Mallon crew airmen mentioned in the text are also given their time in the spotlight as if to prove they are not forgotten. This analysis of the ‘supporting cast’ reveals some fascinating operational careers that would benefit from further research. That said, it can be difficult at times to keep up with who’s who, even among the Mallon crew, but there is a useful crew listing at the front of the book if a little bit of confirmation is needed.

A tidy and well-presented paperback, TMC is copiously illustrated. The photos are reproduced within the main body of text so are largely dependent on the paper stock for their quality. There is a little bit of grain in the period images because of the paper, and not just the circumstances in which they were taken, but this is kept to a minimum by keeping the sizes to respectable dimensions. To find a page spread without an illustration of some sort is a rare thing. There is no index, but this is not unexpected with a self-published book. To counter this somewhat, dates, targets and some names are printed in bold and stand out very clearly.

There is little to suggest that this book was developed from an internet blog, save the mentions of it of course, although it is clear what discoveries and developments the author was particularly fascinated by. He maintains a good balance, however, and remains mostly objective despite his closeness to the subject and the general first person narrative feel to the text. It is a very active narrative more akin to a presentation or magazine style of writing, but this is part of the adventure of it all and a legacy of the blog style of regular updates detailing the latest discoveries.

All in all, happily, this is another Bomber Command crew that has had its story told and told well. Operationally, there was not a lot to go on, but the twists and turns of each man’s life is what really makes The Mallon Crew work. Nothing is overtly dramatised, nor is it avoided for lack of existing information. It is a son’s honest and pragmatic tribute to his father and his crew that gets the point across, but largely avoids waxing lyrical about sacrifice and doomed youth. It doesn’t need to, such were the fates of some of the men featured. It had a job to do and it got it done, just like the crews of Bomber Command.

ISBN 978-1-523252-89-3