Share this story For forty-five years, the only legal way to fly into West Berlin was down one of three lanes twenty miles wide, drawn across hostile territory by a committee in 1945. Stay inside them and you were untouchable. Drift out and you could be shot down, and...
Share this story There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder. The Navy did not ask for one and the Air Force did not want one. It exists because a physicist at a desert laboratory in California decided the official requirements were wrong, worked on it out of the...
Share this story In 1952 a group of scientists at MIT was asked a straightforward question: how vulnerable are the United States and Canada to aerial bombing? Their answer was that a line of search radars should be built across the Arctic, as rapidly as possible. Two...
Share this story The story of Arnhem is usually told from the ground: the bridge, the perimeter, the nine days, the evacuation across the Rhine on the night of 25 September. There is another version of it that happens at 900 feet, in unarmed transport aircraft, flown...
Share this story The line abreast loop is not a difficult manoeuvre for four good pilots. You climb several thousand feet side by side, pull over the top in a slow inside loop, and come down the back of it at over four hundred miles an hour. Then you level off at...
Share this story Spangdahlem sits on a hilltop in the Eifel, thirty kilometres north of Trier, in country that is green and quiet and mostly sheep. It exists because in 1951 somebody drew a line at the Rhine and decided that American fighters needed to be west of it....
Share this story There is a moment on the approach to Narsarsuaq where the decision stops being yours. You have turned into the fjord. The water is below, the rock is on both sides, and the channel is too narrow and the walls too high to turn around in. The only way...
Share this story The Directorate of History and Heritage keeps Canada’s official squadron lineages, and its entry for 664 Squadron opens with five words that contain an entire institutional quarrel: “This Canadian Army squadron was authorized”. 664...
Share this story On 1 February 1968 the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force stopped existing. Not reorganised, not renamed — abolished, as legal entities, and replaced by a single service called the Canadian Armed Forces....
Share this story The Royal Canadian Navy bought the Grumman Tracker for one reason above all others: it was short enough to fit on HMCS Bonaventure. Then de Havilland Canada built ninety-nine of them at Downsview, the only Canadian-built aircraft the RCN ever ordered....
Share this story HMS Nabob was a Royal Navy escort carrier with a Royal Canadian Navy crew, and on 22 August 1944 a German torpedo opened her starboard side below the waterline, dropped her stern fifteen feet, killed twenty-one of her men and left her dead in the...
Share this story The McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee was the only jet fighter the Royal Canadian Navy ever flew from a carrier deck, and Canada very nearly did not get it. The navy asked for sixty new aircraft. It received thirty-nine used ones, handed down from the United...
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