away, Squadron Leader Jacques A. Chevrier ordered Mont Joli’s technicians to ready Squadron 130’s Curtis Kittyhawks for flight. An hour later, led by Sub-Lieutenant Chevrier, four single-seat fighter planes, each carrying 227 kilograms of bombs and armed with six 12.77-mm machine guns, the bullets of which could rip through a conning tower, were flying over the St. Lawrence at almost 250 miles an hour. Thirty minutes later, through the dim early morning light, Chevrier’s squadron spotted an oil slick.
Chevrier ordered his squadron back to Mont Joli. He himself never made it. While flying over the river near Cap-Chat, his plane burst into flames. Witnesses reported seeing a long smoke trail before the plane, travelling at high speed, hit the water. One of the few French Canadian pilots in the RCAF, Chevrier was the first Canadian serviceman to die in the Battle of the St. Lawrence. The sorrow over his death at Mont Joli turned to bitterness two weeks later when, in a debate in the House, Charles G. Power, minister responsible for the RCAF, rose to squelch the rumour that the reason it took an hour for Mont Joli to get its planes in the air was that the pilots “were all drunk and out with women at the time of the sinkings.”
Other flights launched from Sydney and Mont Joli over the next few days would be no more successful. Two would bomb what their aircrews thought were submarines.
In 1975, then air marshal C. R. Dunlap and Murray Lister, the air vice-marshal, recalled in a letter to historian W. A. B. Douglas the second of these flights, which took place on July 8, 1942:
Neither Wing Commander Lister nor Dunlap was stationed at Mont Joli. They were there because two days earlier Dunlap had ferried a Nomad bomber to the Bombing School at Mont Joli, and Lister had volunteered “to pick him up.” Just before Dunlap and Lister were due to take off for their return to their base in Mountainview, Ontario, Mont Joli received a telephone message “that a submarine had been spotted on the surface a few miles up river from Sept Iles, and that members of the crew were seen diving and swimming underwater near the ship’s hull,” apparently investigating damage to the hull. Dunlap recalled: Naturally one’s first thought was “Let’s get something into the air and carry out an attack.” … After all Sept Iles was only 135 miles away on the other side [the north shore] of the St. Lawrence. The first act was to relay the information to Eastern Air Command … but alas their nearest base was so far removed from Sept Isles that it would take hours for one of their aircraft to arrive.
Dunlap and Lister convinced George Godson, one of the base’s armaments officers, and Flight Lieutenant Taché to install several 250-lb. bombs and a bombsight; this last was abandoned because it would have taken several hours to install. After gathering maps and weather information, Dunlap and Lister plotted their course in the Operations section, and then boarded their Bolingbroke for an unauthorized mission. “We made no move to communicate with our Headquarters in Toronto, i.e., No. 1 Training Command [or Air Services in Ottawa], for there seemed no point in doing so,” recalled Dunlap.
With Lister at the controls, the Bolingbroke took off at around 1 p.m.; they were over the search area about a half hour later.
Squinched in the bomber’s “glass house” in the nose of the aircraft, Dunlap felt “somewhat naked”; there had been no time to install the machine guns that he would have used to defend the plane as it approached the U-boat.
Tension built as they neared Sept-Îles. Neither man had ever seen combat. Training with live ammunition? Yes. But in training, the man with the gun isn’t trying to hit you. Flight training with windsocks and tracers? Yes. But not German-engineered bullets fired by marksmen who know it’s either you or them.
Dunlap recalled the “thrilling prospect of perhaps being able to do something
Chevrier ordered his squadron back to Mont Joli. He himself never made it. While flying over the river near Cap-Chat, his plane burst into flames. Witnesses reported seeing a long smoke trail before the plane, travelling at high speed, hit the water. One of the few French Canadian pilots in the RCAF, Chevrier was the first Canadian serviceman to die in the Battle of the St. Lawrence. The sorrow over his death at Mont Joli turned to bitterness two weeks later when, in a debate in the House, Charles G. Power, minister responsible for the RCAF, rose to squelch the rumour that the reason it took an hour for Mont Joli to get its planes in the air was that the pilots “were all drunk and out with women at the time of the sinkings.”
Other flights launched from Sydney and Mont Joli over the next few days would be no more successful. Two would bomb what their aircrews thought were submarines.
In 1975, then air marshal C. R. Dunlap and Murray Lister, the air vice-marshal, recalled in a letter to historian W. A. B. Douglas the second of these flights, which took place on July 8, 1942:
Neither Wing Commander Lister nor Dunlap was stationed at Mont Joli. They were there because two days earlier Dunlap had ferried a Nomad bomber to the Bombing School at Mont Joli, and Lister had volunteered “to pick him up.” Just before Dunlap and Lister were due to take off for their return to their base in Mountainview, Ontario, Mont Joli received a telephone message “that a submarine had been spotted on the surface a few miles up river from Sept Iles, and that members of the crew were seen diving and swimming underwater near the ship’s hull,” apparently investigating damage to the hull. Dunlap recalled: Naturally one’s first thought was “Let’s get something into the air and carry out an attack.” … After all Sept Iles was only 135 miles away on the other side [the north shore] of the St. Lawrence. The first act was to relay the information to Eastern Air Command … but alas their nearest base was so far removed from Sept Isles that it would take hours for one of their aircraft to arrive.
Dunlap and Lister convinced George Godson, one of the base’s armaments officers, and Flight Lieutenant Taché to install several 250-lb. bombs and a bombsight; this last was abandoned because it would have taken several hours to install. After gathering maps and weather information, Dunlap and Lister plotted their course in the Operations section, and then boarded their Bolingbroke for an unauthorized mission. “We made no move to communicate with our Headquarters in Toronto, i.e., No. 1 Training Command [or Air Services in Ottawa], for there seemed no point in doing so,” recalled Dunlap.
With Lister at the controls, the Bolingbroke took off at around 1 p.m.; they were over the search area about a half hour later.
Squinched in the bomber’s “glass house” in the nose of the aircraft, Dunlap felt “somewhat naked”; there had been no time to install the machine guns that he would have used to defend the plane as it approached the U-boat.
Tension built as they neared Sept-Îles. Neither man had ever seen combat. Training with live ammunition? Yes. But in training, the man with the gun isn’t trying to hit you. Flight training with windsocks and tracers? Yes. But not German-engineered bullets fired by marksmen who know it’s either you or them.
Dunlap recalled the “thrilling prospect of perhaps being able to do something
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