The Making of Billy Bishop

The First World War Exploits of Billy Bishop, VC

Brereton Greenhous

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781550023909
• eBook ISBN: 9781554880232
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

It's a war story that is told every time the career of Billy Bishop is discussed: On June 2, 1917, the young pilot single-handedly took out a German airfield in an early morning raid at the height of the Great War. For this, he was awarded the Victoria Cross, and a place in Canadian history.

And yet, the attack never happened.

In this explosive new biography, Brereton Greehous exposes the myth of Billy Bishop. While his bravery never comes into question (Bishop was as courageous as any of the men who risked their lives in those early warplanes) his credibility as a storyteller does. From exaggerations and half-truths to flat-out lies, stories of Bishop's legendary exploits contain as much fiction as they do fact.

Greenhous reveals many startling truths: he presents evidence that some of the medals Bishop wore late in his career were unearned, uncovers a number of examples of Bishop embellishing or inventing combat stories, and, most significantly, shows that the only account of the ace's raid on the German airfield came from Bishop himself. Even official German records of casualties fail to corroborate the Canadian's claims.

The Making of Billy Bishop is a book certain to stir up controversy. Twenty years ago, a documentary film questioning Bishop's credentials as a hero was considered so blasphemous that a senate investigation was launched in an attempt to restore the pilot's name. Now, Greenhous's research vindicates the claims of the filmmakers, and re-ignites an argument once thought settled.

CHAPTER 1

“The Greatest Game in the World”

William Avery Bishop was born, fair-haired and blue-eyed, on 9 February 1894, at Owen Sound, Ontario, the third and youngest son of Will and Margaret Bishop. Will was an undistinguished lawyer by trade, a Liberal by choice, and registrar of Grey County by vocation. His eldest son, Worth, was ten years older than Billy. A second son, Kilbourne, had been born two years after Worth, but died in 1903 at the age of seven. A sister, Louise, completed the family in 1895.

Judging from his appearance in later years, Billy must have been a handsome lad of compact, medium proportions. He spoke with a nascent lisp. Psychologically, he was something of a nonconformist by the standards of rural Ontario at the turn of the century. He was never keen on the usual team sports that engrossed most adolescent boys — baseball, lacrosse, hockey — preferring such individual diversions as swimming, riding (he had his own horse) and rough shooting. His riding and shooting skills were to serve him well in the years to come. More unusually, he was apparently the only young male in Owen Sound who obviously enjoyed attending dancing classes,¹ although there was nothing effeminate about him.

In 1910, when he was sixteen, he met a visitor from Toronto: Margaret Burden, granddaughter of the millionaire Timothy Eaton of department store fame. While Billy apparently flirted enthusiastically with any number of other girls, then and later, he took Margaret rather more seriously. Late in 1917, after winning his Victoria Cross, he would marry her. Meanwhile, it was mightily important to him that he find whatever ways he could of dazzling her and, perhaps more crucially, given the mores of the time, impressing her parents. To just what extent that impulse drove him in his wartime quest for glory we can only speculate, but it may well have been a significant element.

For the moment, it was hard to see how he could impress anyone. His lowly academic stature, due perhaps more to a lack of interest than of intellect, made university an unlikely proposition, for at that time Canada’s few universities were very much realms of academic excellence. However, the Royal Military College of Canada, at Kingston, Ontario — from which his brother Worth had graduated in 1903, tenth out of twenty-six* — had lower academic standards then than it does today. Upon graduation it offered a diploma rather than a degree and a commission in the militia. Normally, only the top two or three graduates would be offered commissions in either the British Army or Canada’s minuscule Permanent Force. RMC’s emphasis on engineering, combined with Will Bishop’s Liberal party connections, raised the possibility of Billy following Worth into the ranks of the federal Department of Public Works — not a particularly auspicious appointment, but one that would offer security and a certain minimal status in society.

Billy “crammed” for an entrance examination in which he placed forty-second out of the forty-three who passed, but his marginal entrance marks gave an accurate indication of what was to come. In a vain endeavour to scrape through his first-year examination, he was caught cheating in some unspecified manner and “rusticated,” or temporarily suspended. College regulations stipulated that:

If a Cadet affords to, or obtains from another Cadet, any assistance during an examination, or if he makes use of any improper means of obtaining information relative to an examination he will, if it be his final examination for graduation, be debarred from receiving a Diploma; if at any annual examination other than his final, or at any intermediate examination, he will be rusticated, and, in addition, lose all the marks given for that particular paper, and will not be reexamined in it.

In Billy’s case that meant being set back a year. He was re-admitted for 1912–13, but condemned to repeat his first year. The second time around, the advantages that accrued from repetition enabled him to place twenty-third out of forty-two — quite a respectable showing. In his second year, 1913–14, however, he was back at the bottom of the class: thirty-third out of thirty-four. The one cadet below him failed his year.

Having completed their third year, Billy’s original classmates graduated in the spring of 1914 and produced, at their own expense, the usual class yearbook. Despite the fact that two years had now passed since he had taken classes with them, Billy was included in it (did he pay his share, or was his inclusion entirely a tribute to his charm and popularity among his one-time peers?), and the entry devoted to him perhaps illustrates one aspect of his academic problems. Girls — and, in this case, probably not Margaret Burden!

Voice from Cadet with telescope peering out of his window: “There’s a red coat on Fort Henry hill. There’s an umbrella there, too, with a couple of people behind it. Wonder who it can be?”

Voice from next room: “Come on, Steve, Bill Bish is out, let’s swipe his tobacco.”²

Bishop returned to RMC for his graduating year on 28 August 1914, just twenty-four days after Great Britain had declared war on Germany and automatically taken her colonies, including Canada, with her. It was a popular decision among Canada’s anglophone communities, however, and young, single men with a romantic, idealized view of war stampeded to the Colours. Bishop must have been torn as to which direction to take. Although enrolled at a military institution, we have his own word for it that “I had never given much thought to being a soldier,”³ and he was certainly not the sort who would happily tolerate the kinds of physical hardship indivisible from much of early twentieth-century soldiering. He must have had some inkling of those hardships; on the other hand, he probably also recognized that joining the army would relieve him from his academic travails. For the moment, however, he did nothing.

It was customary for the senior class to supply most of the cadet appointments within the college, such cadet non-commissioned officers being selected by the commandant largely on the advice of his adjutant. Surprisingly, given his disciplinary and academic record and the qualities expected of cadet NCOs, Bishop was appointed a lance corporal and, ten days later, promoted to corporal. “Cadets so entrusted with authority should remember that upon their example and the manner in which their duties are performed, in a great measure depend the general conduct, gentleman-like, honourable and moral tone of the cadets,” intoned Standing Orders.⁴ There was little in his college record to date to suggest that he was likely to set such an example to his juniors, but it seems young Billy could charm commandants and adjutants as well as girls.

On 16 September, fifteen of Bishop’s classmates left the college, having accepted commissions in the British Army. A sixteenth soon departed in search of a Canadian Militia commission, and at the end of the month Billy, too, withdrew “at parents’ request,” the time-honoured formula for escaping without a diploma on the one hand or expulsion on the other. On a scale of Exemplary, Very Good, Good or Bad — the last one reserved for cadets who were expelled — his discharge certificate assessed his conduct as “Good.”

He was immediately commissioned in the Mississauga Horse, a well-entrenched and fashionable Toronto militia regiment, but the whimsical, egocentric ideas of Canada’s minister of militia and defence, Sam Hughes, meant that the unit would never be mobilized for active service. Instead, numbered battalions and regiments were being created out of thin air to form the Canadian Expeditionary Force, an approach which at least ensured that there would be no bitter recriminations (with inevitable political undertones, since the “militia colonels” constituted a powerful parliamentary lobby) between units selected for overseas service and those condemned to remain at home.

The First Contingent was preparing to leave for England and a Second Contingent was now forming. There was no glory to be won serving in Canada, and Billy desperately needed glory to impress the Burdens as a potential son-in-law. He transferred to one of Hughes’ creations, the 7th Canadian Mounted Rifles, which was mobilizing for active service in London, Ontario. Its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ibbotson Leonard, a thirty-three-year-old businessman, had graduated from RMC in brother Worth’s year, 1903 (now and later, Dame Fortune often smiled on Billy Bishop). Bishop, a fellow alumnus if not a fellow graduate, and a fine rider to boot, quickly established himself as one of Leonard’s favourites. The latter’s diary records how often Billy was at his home for lunch, tea or dinner, and later at his lodgings near Folkestone, England.⁵

Meanwhile, in France and Flanders, barbed wire and machine guns were already dominating the battlefield, while poison gas was beginning to play a part. There would be no significant role for cavalrymen in this war. The already-formed first two brigades of Canadian Mounted Rifles, all six regiments, were dismounted and turned into four battalions of infantry, which became the 8th Brigade of the 3rd Canadian Division. The 7th CMR, originally intended for a third mounted brigade, was broken up, one squadron (handpicked by Leonard, who, through his friendship with Sam Hughes, retained command of it while preserving his lieutenant colonel’s rank) keeping its horses and becoming the 2nd Division’s mounted reconnaissance squadron.* Bishop, appointed a troop leader, was among the five officers chosen by Leonard to stay with him, and the squadron sailed from Montreal aboard the Caledonian on 9 June 1915, arriving in England on the 22nd. He was off to war, to do his duty for King and country! Before he left, he became informally engaged to Margaret Burden. Now all he needed to do was convince her parents that he was worthy of their daughter.

By early July, the squadron was under canvas at Dibgate, near Folkestone, on England’s south coast, and Bishop was complaining bitterly about the dust storms that beset the camp. “You can’t imagine what we are going through here today,” he wrote in a letter to Margaret.

A frightful sandstorm is on. It is so bad one can barely breathe, and outside cannot dare open one’s eyes. Even goggles are no protection, the fine sand gets in. Our eyes are full of blood, and the sand is so bad that some of the men’s faces are bleeding. We have had to cut out all parades, and only leave our tents to tighten up the guys and tend to the poor horses. They are suffering awfully, poor dumb things. I have just been out to see mine and they all nuzzled up to me trying their level best to talk. . . . As I write this sand floats over the paper every minute and I have to keep blowing it off.

Two days later:

Yesterday it rained all afternoon and evening and night, and we rode through it, leaving here at 2 p.m. and getting back at 1 this morning. It would have been a lovely ride if the weather had been decent, but it wasn’t half bad as it was, although we all got soaked and this morning woke up with nasty colds. It is still raining and we are, of course, still soaking wet.

When it wasn’t raining, it was blowing hard. On the 14th, “today we are faced with another sandstorm which is blowing everything to pieces,” and the next day, although the sandstorm was over:

. . . streams of thunderstorms come down on us. We are planning to march out on a bivouac this afternoon and come back tomorrow afternoon, but owing to the awful weather conditions we may not do it. I hope not, as sleeping in wet grass is no fun, but I am afraid we will go in spite of all.⁶

“Streams of thunderstorms,” indeed. Letter after letter complains about the weather, although the official history of the Canadian Expeditionary Force makes a point of noting that, unlike the previous year, “it was a dry summer, and life under canvas presented no hardship.”⁷ Not for most men, perhaps, but it did for Bishop. He was briefly in hospital when “the chill I got on our bivouac knocked me partially out of working order, and as a tent is a poor place to get over a chill they sent me here for a few days.”⁸ His medical documents called it pleurisy.⁹

There were wounded officers in the hospital, back from the newly congealed Western Front, and no doubt Bishop learned from them how much worse the best of trench life could be. Much worse than Dibgate. Wetter and colder and muddier — not to mention the rats! Returning to duty after a few days in hospital, and visiting Folkestone, he fell into conversation with an unidentified staff officer and heard about the rather easier life of an airman in France, with a jovial mess to relax in of an evening, and a comfortable bed to lie on at night. Not a bit like the trenches. Bishop did not fear danger, although he had yet to experience it in any degree: it was discomfort that repelled him, and he must have made that clear to his new acquaintance.

I got a note from an officer yesterday on the staff of the Royal Flying Corps whom I had met in Folkestone, asking me to call on him at the War Office today [6 August 1915]. I had no idea what it was about but came hot foot, as a summons to the W.O. is something to make a poor subaltern tremble. Anyway, I went to see him and he enlightened me to the following extent. There is a vacancy in the RFC for an observing officer (there are two kinds, pilots and observing officers) and he offered it to me — if I can get transferred from the Canadians. I am to call again at 12.45 tomorrow and see Lord Cecil, whoever he is, he has something to do with it, and will know more then. It is a great chance, as everybody is merely watching for such an opportunity.¹⁰

He was interviewed by Lieutenant Lord Hugh Cecil, the staff officer in charge of aircrew recruiting, whose wartime rank in the army belied his status in society. Cecil was the balding, witty, middle-aged son of former prime minister Lord Salisbury, brother of the current earl, and he promptly offered Bishop a transfer to the RFC as an observer “just as soon as I can get my application through Canadian Divisional HQ.”¹¹

Colonel Leonard was agreeable, all went well, and on 1 September 1915, Bishop joined a newly formed 21 Squadron at Nether...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “The Greatest Game in the World”
• Chapter 2: A Pilot at the Front
• Chapter 3: Tricks of the Trade
• Chapter 4: Flight of Fancy
• Chapter 5: Flying High
• Chapter 6: A Statistical Interlude
• Chapter 7: “I Have Never Been So Furious in My Life”
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Endnotes
• Index