“A Canadian citizen and a British subject “ -- it’s a strange-sounding phrase to today’s ears. But several generations ago, it was heard almost everywhere in this country and underlined the special relationship that Canada and “the mother country” had at that time.
And that is why Britain, when it began expanding its armed services in the late 1930s, thought it natural to send recruiters to its senior dominion across the North Atlantic. One recruit was a young Canadian named Lloyd Hall, who told his amazing wartime story to the Feb. 12 meeting of the Roland Groome chapter of the Canadian Aviation Historical Society.
Lloyd has been told he was one of about 1,000 young Canadians who, just before the Second World War, joined Britain’s armed services, which were expanding and recruiting much more aggressively than Canada’s own services. Thus it came to pass that this 21-year-old (who had lived in Winnipeg and in Vancouver, where he had worked on the then-new Lions Gate Bridge) found his way to Britain. Like so many young man of his era, he wanted to be a pilot, but was told that, at the age of 21, he was “a little too old” for this! Instead, he was posted to the Air Armament School at RAF Manby, Lincolnshire, for its long, detailed armourer’s prewar course. A syllabus recalled by Lloyd include lessons on stripping and assembling Browning, Vickers and Lewis machine guns, ammunition, the “pistols” (detonators) that set off 250-, 500- and 1,000-lb. bombs, plus bombsights, machine gun synchronization gear and even the demolition of old explosives and structures.
He was posted initially to No. 29 Squadron (at RAF Debden), which was equipped with a mix of Blenheim and Hurricane aircraft and doing developmental work for the new science of “night fighting”. In fact, he and other armourers were told “to keep away from all this equipment... we weren’t even to touch it.”
It was while he was with this unit after the outbreak of the war that he heard the RAF was forming a squadron that would be primarily crewed by Canadians. He applied for a posting to this unit, No. 242 squadron, and received it in the early spring of 1940. (One of his buddies on the unit, at least for a while, was a fellow Canadian armourer named Frank Oliver Speed, who managed to get into trouble by innocently giving his names as “F.O. Speed”. Well, F/O” was also the RAF abbreviation for the rank of “flying officer”, so the luckless Canadian was put on report for trying to impersonate an officer! In any event, Speed’s time on the squadron would not be long: he was posted back to Canada for training as a navigator.
The first commanding officer of No. 242 squadron (which initially was stationed at RAF Church Fenton) was a Canadian in the RAF named Squadron Leader Fowler Gobeil; Lloyd remembers him as “a little bit of an eager beaver”. In any event, the squadron was deployed to France during the hard fighting in May 1940. (The inevitable Saskatchewan angle: An article in the October 1996 issue of Air Force, the magazine of the Air Force Association of Canada, noted that this period of fighting saw a number of casualties, including the death in action of P/O Andy Madore of Saskatoon, while F/L Joe Smiley of Wolseley, Saskatchewan, was shot down, captured and went on to dig tunnels at Stalag Luft III. Also downed and captured was Art Deacon of Invermay, Saskatchewan.)
Because the British and French front lines were collapsing in the face of the German onslaught in May, 1940, the surviving squadron aircraft and pilots were sent back to Britain and the squadron’s ground echelon was evacuated through the French port of Boulogne to RAF Biggin Hill in Britain in May. Strangely, the squadron returned very briefly to France in June 1940, operating with No. 17 Squadron from the Le Mans area. But after the French government surrendered, even more confusion reigned; it fell to a Warrant Officer West to use his initiative to get the groundcrew to the port of St. Nazaire, where he hustled the man onto a small freighter instead of the much larger liner Lancastria, which soon was sunk by German aircraft; the loss of life was horrifying and has been put at between 3,000 and 5,000 – by far, the worst maritime disaster in British history.
Back in Britain, the squadron also got a new commanding officer, Squadron Leader Douglas Bader, who today is known worldwide, but in 1940 was known only as a prewar RAF fighter pilot who had lost both of his legs in a flying accident in the 1930s and returned to active duty only after a long fight. Lloyd said squadron folklore held that Bader arrived at 242 Squadron’s dispersal, found some officers playing cards and asked who was in charge. Stan Turner, a Canadian who later went on to much prominence as a fighter pilot, roused himself, looked around and finally allowed that he was. Bader was shocked by the squadron’s casual attitude, so he went to a Hurricane and put on such a daring display of aerobatics that (in Lloyd’s words) “by the time he finished they respected him and he soon had that squadron in shape”.
(In fairness to members of the squadron, we note what the air force veterans’ association magazine said in an article on the squadron in October 1996: “Stan Turner is said to have put Douglas Bader straight when the latter complained about dress in the mess as he took over the squadron. The Canadians felt forsaken by an RAF in turmoil in the field. They left France with what they had on their backs and now some twit was making noises about dress in the mess! Bader was man enough to pull back, then led a united 242 squadron.”
During the Battle of Britain, the illustrious squadron claimed as destroyed no fewer than 105 enemy aircraft. As Lloyd put it, “I think most of us realized we were fighting for our very existence.”
Bader left No. 242 squadron in March 1941 to take over the Tangmere Wing, but by that time Lloyd (who had married a Scottish lass) was long gone, having been sent by ship to the Middle East in January 1941. (As for No. 242 Squadron itself, its Canadian members gradually left the squadron, which later in 1941 was sent to the Dutch East Indies, where it was overrun by the Japanese after the outbreak of war and all of its personnel either killed or imprisoned by the Japanese. It was re-established in April 1942 in Britain, then disbanded 30 months later and now exists as an Air Training Corps squadron -- similar to a Canadian air cadet unit. As far as Lloyd can determine, the only remaining veterans of No. 242 squadron’s Canadian era are himself and Vancouver’s Larry Tavener.)
Lloyd and a number of other armourers were taken by troopship to the Suez Canal zone and somehow ended up at RAF Kabrit. For some reason, perhaps a surplus of airmen, he found himself sent to a commando-style course that included unarmed combat and grueling physical training. (“Strange part of it was that I never met another man who took this course,” Lloyd wrote in a mini-memoir in his scrapbook. “Maybe the Army did, but no one else had even heard of it.”)
He later serviced bombers at a repair depot, was promoted to corporal and was sent to Heliopolis, the main British air base and overhaul depot in the vicinity of Cairo. There certainly were worse postings: Lloyd was able to see the pyramids and the Holy Land, right down to The Wailing Wall.
Kabrit and Heliopolis also figure in history of a notable unit in the British Army: the Special Air Service (SAS). It was formed in the summer of 1941 at Kabrit in order to give the British Army in the Middle East a parachute capability with which to carry out sabotage and reconnaissance operations deep behind enemy lines, such attacks then being the “flavor of the day” in military circles. One of the SAS’s founders, Captain David Stirling, wagered with an RAF officer that SAS members could successfully infiltrate the base at Heliopolis. This they did, traveling 80 miles on foot over four nights from Kabrit, dodging sentries and then attaching between 40 and 50 paper labels to aircraft indicating they had been “bombed”.
After this happened, “the guard at night was made bigger and more patrols were added. All in all, I think the easy days here were over for the senior staff as they realized the war could come to them,” Lloyd wrote in his scrapbook. One day, some of his fellow armourers, “joined a desert convoy, which is a bunch of trucks equipped for a journey into the desert. Whether we should have all been on this convoy, or someone saw the chance of getting rid of us, I don’t know, but about three weeks later we were told we should have gone with them and work up for an instant posting, which meant we had a day to get all our documents signed and packed up, ready to move. So the next day, we were loaded onto a Bombay transport plane and flew out of Heliopolis for the last time and landed out of the blue somewhere at 601 Squadron.
“I don’t remember a thing about serving on 601 except that it was the County of London Squadron. They didn’t need us ... it seems to me that we were there only for a few days because we were soon on our way by truck and dropped off at a big fort ‘out in the blue’ somewhere that turned out to be another manning pool -- this time a PTC, which stood for personnel something or other. And lo and behold, there were others from our group... here, there were hundreds and hundreds of all services and trades and all we did was attend parades twice a day to see if we were posted anywhere. If not, we spent the rest of the day looking at the sand again....
“I have no idea how long we were at this place as time just lost its meaning. Nothing but these parades and, “number one accounted for, sir! Number two, number three, number four, sir!” Which is how the British do it....
“There wasn’t many air force men here, so we got to chum up with a lot of army blokes, who used to kid us about having sheets on a our beds and ‘joining the man’s army’ and using Brylcreem, but it was all in fun and we got to point out that we were ‘old sweats’ when it came to desert service...”
After being in this centre for “how long I don’t know”, Lloyd and a buddy boldly marched into the adjutant’s office (“without even knocking, as I remember”) and begged to be posted somewhere, anywhere. “He made some remark about the way we had marched in -- like a couple of real soldiers -- and maybe he had just the right thing for us ... something voluntary that was called ‘night lights’ and he had no idea what it was all about. It sounded kind of nice, but I guess anything would have sounded better than staying there.”
That’s how he came to be attached, as an RAF member, to the very early Special Air Service.
Odd things now began to happen. The airmen who had been posted to the unit were told to put their personal possessions into a ground sheet for storage. Their air force clothing went into storage and army uniforms were issued, although “later on, everyone dressed how he pleased and some of us managed to liberate some of our stuff from stores.”
The “A” in “SAS” stood for “air”, of course, although after one disastrous airborne operation it more usually traveled in the trucks of the British Army’s Long-Range-Desert Group. (The founder of the LRDG was a British Army Signal Corps officer named Major Ralph Bagnold, who had a deep interest in traveling through trackless desert and even made design improvements to the existing sand compass that were sophisticated enough to earn him a patent! More practically, this innovation allowed him and his personnel to navigate with amazing precision in the desert, said Lloyd, who noted that the German and Italian armies in the western desert lacked the same cadre of eccentric British officers in love with the desert -- and therefore stayed within about 50 miles of the Mediterranean Sea while British patrols ranged deep into the desert and around the southern flank of the axis armies.
“There were lectures about the job and training plus practical lessons in the loading of trucks, sleeping and ground to stay comfortable and dry, how to hide a move silently, which we had taken anyhow, but lots of other stuff to keep us alive when out in the desert,” Lloyd wrote in his scrapbook. “As we were all experienced armourers, there was no worry about us when it came to handling explosives or the various weapons and the training came easy to us. When the Browning (machine) gun came along, we were in our element as we knew more than some of the instructors. (Well, we thought so!). And the thing was that it all seemed so easy to us people...”
“There was always something going on there, with trucks coming and going, some would unload and some would load. We helped out where we were wanted when there wasn’t training going on ... Not every one knew we were air force as we all wore the same uniform in the Middle East except for the shoulder patch. But then, everyone seemed to wear what they wanted anyhow...”
“We got to know (SAS founder David) Stirling and (his deputy, Major Paddy) Mayne by sight... I remember Randolph Churchill was there, but I do remember that he was untrained and didn’t go out into the blue for some time.”
“The trucks we used were called ‘30-hundredweight’ by the British. I guess they were a half-ton or thereabouts ... the windshields were removed, I think, so there would be no reflections from the moon, and a stand was installed in the back to mount a machine gun ... each truck had a gun for defensive measures, just in case. And when the trucks stopped, usually a man stayed with a gun always. Usually one of us, of course.”
“Loading was mostly water and gasoline (‘petrol’ to the British) -- necessary, of course, for survival when in the desert. The food was compo rations, which were really something. There was dinner for so many men in a box, then breakfast and another, so it was easy to figure out how many boxes to load. And it was great when we went out, even rice pudding for dessert and cigarettes came evenly, so there would not be one left over to fight over...”
He remembers his first reconnaissance patrol. “It was sure an education on living in the desert, as we had actually no idea of what it was like. Travel all day -- for days. Sometimes crawling along as the sand was soft and we would get stuck – the sand there would be just like it was hard to believe. The trucks traveled in sort of echelon, so you wouldn’t be traveling in the dust of another truck. But sometimes, it was impossible and we would have to wear those awful plastic glasses that cut into your cheek and were very uncomfortable, but necessary just the same.
“Some days, we stopped for lunch, sometimes not, and we munched on hardtack. But always a good meal when we stopped for the night. The LRDG (Long-Range Desert Group) drivers always knew where they were and usually picked a nice spot. But sometimes, out in the open, we had to pull out the scrim nets to try and hide the trucks.... we learned how to hide in plain sight if caught out in the open if a plane was near. Hunker down, hug your knees and don’t move because it is movement that can be seen. And don’t look up, of course, because rocks don’t have faces.”
When Lloyd and the other RAF personnel who’d been attached to the SAS were finally returned to the air force from the army, he took great pride in receiving the thanks of Paddy Mayne.
From his time in the desert, Lloyd vividly remembers a few impressions, like the relentless column of ants that was about 10 feet wide “and stretched as far as we could see in both directions and went on for four days” and the speed with which night fell in a region so close to the equator (in stark contrast to the long, casual, twilight on the Canadian prairies). “Everybody should take a trip to the desert. The stars are fascinating; there are millions and millions of them.”
So back to an RAF manning pool went Lloyd and his buddies. His scrapbook is a wee bit unclear as to which squadrons he served with as the Allies advanced westward across North Africa, then to Sicily and up the Italian peninsula -- except that they included two South African Air Force squadrons (Nos. 12 and 24) and to Royal Australian Air Force (Nos. 450 and 451). On one South African squadron, the armament officer’s sole qualifications seemed to include having sold shotguns and rifles in a department store before the war; he also had an abusive nature and a drinking habit. Lloyd and other armourers once had to disobey this officer’s frantic orders to disarm some bombs. From the nature of the fuses or pistols, Lloyd knew the bombs were booby-trapped to go off; at one point he and the other armourers walked away from the ordnance, hoping the temperamental South African would not risk a court-martial for murder by shooting them in their backs! But when the squadron’s commanding officer heard their side of the case and investigated, he said he regretted he could not give them a medal – but compensated by giving them with a posting away from the squadron.
Lloyd said he much preferred working with Australians. “The British didn’t get on with them because they treated them (the Australians) like they were just a bunch of criminals,” he said.
It was in this capacity that he went through the Battle of El Alamein in late 1942. “It’s almost forgotten now, but it was a turning point,” he said. “Before El Alamein, we hadn’t won a battle; after El Alamein, we didn’t lose a battle.”
From his perspective, the Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943 initially met with very little opposition from the half-hearted Italian army, but there were many organizational problems like faulty maps and the incongruous mixing of RAF trucks with army assault forces. Lloyd remembered how the rear gate of such a truck accidentally came open on a Sicilian dock, spilling a number of bombs onto the ground -- to the horror of all those watching it. “Of course, they were all perfectly safe, but nobody knew that!” he chuckled.
Lloyd served with the Australians in the Bari and Foggia areas, again working as an armourer until an Australian officer took pity on him and sent him back to Britain, where he arrived around D-Day. He was posted to RAF Grangemouth in Scotland, near the home of his wife -- and was “living the life of Riley” until he some how ran a foul of an officer and was in danger of being posted back to -- would you believe? -- Egypt !
At this point, he was able to transfer to the RCAF, which, when the war finally ended, assessed his long service overseas and sent him back on one of the first available boats, which happened to be the mighty Queen Mary.
As a postscript, Lloyd worked postwar in Winnipeg and then in Toronto and was associated in the engineering work on machine guns and cannon for the CF-100 and the CF-105 Arrow.
(This article was prepared from Lloyd Hall’s February 12 talk to our chapter, supplemented by his scrapbook of clippings and take notes plus the Wikipedia entries on the Special Air Service and Long-range-Desert Group and the book Squadron Histories RFC, RNAS & RAF 1912 -- 1959 by Peter Lewis.
- by Will Chabun