The Immortal Beaver. Sean Rossiter
program. By mid-Depression, Vickers was down to four employees, but Moffett brought the company to life again in time to licence-build twenty modern all-metal Northrop Delta transports and the twenty outdated Supermarine Stranraer flying-boats that were Canada’s bicoastal aerial patrol force at the war’s outset. Moffett became Federal Aircraft’s general manager in mid-1940 to put together the Anson production consortium, but was unhappy there and resigned twice before being released to become production manager on Anson IIs at DHC that autumn.
“Suddenly,” writes Fred Hotson, who saw these changes firsthand, “DHC had a formidable factory management team—their own old-timers plus the cream of the Vickers/Fairchild experience. On his arrival at Downsview [Christmas Day, 1940] Moffett saw that the existing machine shop was completely inadequate, and he had a new one set up and furnished with the very latest equipment.”21
Hotson recalls that DHC’S two new brick buildings, “smelling of concrete and fresh paint,” were absorbed so smoothly into the expansion program of autumn 1940 that the company was soon being given such additional contracts as the conversion of another batch of seventy-five Anson is from Britain to Jacobs powerplants and the assembly of thirty-eight Fairey Battle single-engine bombers, some of which became target-towing aircraft for air training plan gunnery instruction. So far ahead of schedule was the production of Anson fuselages in 1941 that they became airborne without wings, engines or tails: the Ansons were being hung from the factory ceiling, like model airplanes, for storage.22
Two of the most outstanding Polish engineers who accompanied Jakimiuk to DHC in 1940 were the aerodynamicist W. Z. Stepniewski and Waclaw Czerwinski, a structures engineer. Aerodynamicist Dick Hiscocks would remember both as “very competent and stimulating people to be with.”23
Czerwinski, who had designed gliders in Poland, organized a DHC gliding club within the engineering department, members of which built their own glider in their spare time. He also came with plywood-forming expertise that proved invaluable when DHC became committed as a second source for the “Wooden Wonder,” the 400-mph Mosquito bomber from Hatfield that became one of the most versatile combat aircraft of the war. A group of the Polish engineers at DHC formed Canadian Wooden Aircraft to manufacture formed-plywood parts, often shaped into complex curves, that replaced parts made from strategically important metals.24 The Mosquito would eventually bomb Nazi rallies in Berlin with the aid of streamlined formed-plywood drop tanks made at first in a converted piano factory and later at a larger plant on Sorauren Avenue, both in Toronto.25
Czerwinski found himself in wide demand. He was involved with several similar projects at the National Research Council to replace metal with wood, including the Anson v, on which he worked with Hiscocks. He joined Avro Canada after the war and was part of the Arrow fighter project.
Stepniewski left DHC after the war to work for Frank Piasecki’s helicopter manufacturing company in Philadelphia and became one of the most respected vertical-flight engineers in he world. Piasecki specialized in big, powerful, twin-rotor helicopters in which the torque of one rotor was cancelled out by the other. Without the need to siphon off power to a vertical tail rotor to keep them on course, Piasecki’s machines could devote more of their available power to carrying payloads. The Piasecki organization eventually became the Boeing Airplane Company’s Vertol helicopter division.
The cooperation between DHC and the National Research Council on the Anson v project was typical of Downsview’s practical approach to research and development. Before the war they had jointly developed streamlined ski landing gear for the Rapide. The Englist company naturally had little interest in equipping its aircraft with skis, so that was the kind of project DHC interested itself in. But with the coming of war, small experimental undertakings only got in the way of the company’s mass-production goals.
The answer was to set up Central Aircraft Ltd. in London, Ontario. With the arrival of Jakimiuk and the other Polish engineers at Downsview, Francis Hyde-Beadle was freed to do the work he liked best. Phil Garratt’s executive assistant, John McDonough, a former mail and bush pilot who had tested the first Noorduyn Norseman and who was at loose ends after supervising the plant expansion at Downsview, became manager.26
It was by joining Central Aircraft in 1943 that Fred H. Buller first stepped into DHC’S orbit. Buller, who succeeded Hyde-Beadle as chief engineer of Central Aircraft on the latter’s death late that year, had a lot in common with the Englishman. Buller [was a pure designer who preferred doing original engineering and was brilliant at it.
The team that would design and manufacture the Beaver was now almost complete. First, though they had a war to win. Doing so would involve near-cataclysmic changes at DHC. There were Mosquitoes to be built—Mosquitoes to interfere with Adolf Hitler’s speeches, Mosquitoes to make Hermann Goering wish for Mosquitoes of his own.
Chapter Four One thousand mosquitoes
Facing page, top: The US government paid for Mosquito production at Downsview under for Mosquito production at Downsview under Lend-Lease, partly to have a claim on some of them as photo reconnaissance machine. They were known to the U.S. Army Air Force ax F-8s, Downsview built thirty-nine F-8s. Bottom: The first Downsview Mosquito, B. MkVII (B (or Bomber) KB300, the first of twenty-four of that model built there. It flew for the first time September 23, 1942. Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. demonstrated it in Washington and San Diego. BOTH PHOTOS: PETER M. BOWERS
The de Havilland Canada that had started the war building Tiger Moths and reassembling used and crated Avro Anson trainers was not the same company that built 1, 33 topics of the world’s first operational 400-mile-per-hour combat aircraft, the DH.98 Mosquito.1
The first DHC was a near-cottage industry that had congratulated itself on designing and fabricating streamlined landing-gear skis for the Rapide and a sliding cockpit canopy for the Tiger Moth. It was a small outfit with a managing director, Phil Garratt, who didn’t much care for titles and who knew the name of everyone else in the company.
The second DHC was a fully-integrated industrial organization, primed with government financing, embracing its own subsidiaries, subcontractors and satellite facilities, and even an elected local of the United Auto Workers. Several key engineers from Hartfield had joined the Canadian company, including the chief technical engineer since 1925, W.D. (Doug) Hunter, professionalizing DHC’s production methods. It was this second DHC that, by the end of the war, was fully capable of designing and manufacturing the line of Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) aircraft that began with the Beaver.
Yet the changes that made the company more capable came at a huge price. In wartime, human costs are secondary to the overall objective. By the time DHC had expanded five-fold and was making its contribution to Canada’s war effort, there was no Phil Garratt at Downsview. He was sent into exile by the company’s new government taskmasters. A number of other company luminaries also left.
The only quibble about Garratt’s management style from those who worked for him is that it was a thing of the past. In his eye-to-eye meetings along the production line, which he toured every day, Garratt treated everyone as an equal—at least as much of an equal as anyone facing a man of his size and bearing could feel. He cultivated the wives of his workers, since they were his allies in getting the best out his work force. Phil was a pretty good listener, and by listening carefully he enlisted everyone in the plant in his personal quest to elevate DHC’s engineering and manufacturing