The Immortal Beaver. Sean Rossiter
Air Force, with which he fought in the Battle of Britain. He served with three other Polish RAF squadrons, took command of 317 Squadron in 1944, and that same day was shot down for a third time and wounded by German soldiers. His second attempt to escape from his German hospital succeeded. He left the Polish Air Force in 1947 and immigrated to Canada.
By then Wsiewolod Jakimiuk, the man who developed the fighter in which Gnys scored the first Allied aerial victories of the war, was running the design department at the de Havilland Canada plant in Downsview. His introduction to Canada was indicative of the chaotic early stages of the country’s call to arms. After a hazardous journey through war-torn Europe from Poland, desperately needed by an aircraft industry not yet capable of building the kind of all-metal designs his PZL establishment had been mass-producing for eleven years, Jakimiuk found himself denied a permanent visa when he arrived in Canada.11
In war, as much as any other time, government’s left hand seldom knows what the right hand is doing. Despite one department’s agreement with the Polish government-in-exile to accept Jakimiuk and his colleagues, another department entangled the engineers over, among other matters, travel costs. These were considerable for the time, although the Poles had hardly travelled first-class.
The de Havilland Company at Hatfield, grateful for Jakimiuk’s expertise on the DH.95 airliner project, guaranteed the cost of transportation for him and an eventual total of forty Polish war guests who came to work at Downsview. The total bill, $200,000, was fully repaid by the Poles.12 Their largely unsung contributions far outweighed the costs of bringing them to Canada, and their talents took them to some of aviation’s far horizons after the war.
By the time his colleagues were establishing themselves elsewhere, Jakimiuk, who remained with DHC after the war, was laying the foundations for Canada’s greatest line of indigenous aircraft. By the end of 1946 Jakimiuk had already designed what is regarded as the first all-Canadian postwar aircraft, the DHC-I Chipmunk military trainer, and was supervising the design of the Beaver.
Many of those who were close to the Beaver’s design and development process draw a parallel with Jakimiuk’s PZLS, which did have a similar layout, if for different reasons. Likewise, the Beaver pioneered all-metal construction for bush planes.13
Moreover, “Jaki,” as he was known to his growing staff of engineers, had pulled off a personal coup for a newly arrived war refugee and expatriate Pole. With charm enough for three men, Jakimiuk had become a member of Toronto’s exclusive Granite Club, not otherwise known as a haven for refugees from overseas, soon after he arrived in Canada. Wartime de Havilland people recall Jakimiuk as “an almost opera-quality bass-baritone, [who could] sing a vast repertoire of songs from arias to folk melodies.14
Jakimiuk had the endearing quality of being able to laugh at himself, often by exaggerating his own Polish accent, which had in fact been refined under his wife’s influence into the kind of mid-Atlantic speech pattern that would have been at home on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of the time.
So the man who by the end of the war was DHC’s chief design engineer was a good fellow to have around during or after business hours. Just as he had got his professional break early in his career with the death of Zygmunt Pulawski, Jakimiuk recognized and prompted young talent.
Infected by Jakimiuk’s worldly bonhomie and that of the other Poles, Canadian-born engineers like Fred Buller would express their affection for their war guests by lapsing into cornball Polish accents at home and at work. Among the many expressions that originated with the Poles was a line Betty Buller attributes to W. Z. Stepniewski, the aerodynamicist, who, encountering some problem at the Downsview plant, exclaimed within earshot of some of the natives, “It is without any sense.” He then shrugged his shoulders and sighed “But anyhow...” and attacked the problem with renewed vigour.
There is something endearing about an aircraft manufacturer’s engineering department that, for a while at least, encountered the daily dilemmas of their work by saying out loud, in their caricatures of eastern European English, “It is without any sense,” shrugging their shoulders, adding “But anyhow...” and then going at the difficulty with redoubled effort. The Poles did that for DHC, and much, much more.
Chapter Three Downsview goes to war
Facing page: Future test pilot George Neal works on an Armstrong-Whitworth Cheetah radial engine in one of the first batch of Avro Ansons reassembled by DHC in early 1940. By 1943 Downsview would build 375 An son Ils with American Jacobs engines from scratch. VIA GEORGE NEAL
The de Havilland of Canada organization that Jakimiuk joined had been among the smallest aircraft manufacturers in Canada at the beginning of the war. During die mid-1930s, employment peaked at fifty-two people in the Downsview plant,1 many of them women who worked in the DHC fabric shop, sewing, gluing and doping linen wing and fuselage skins for the lightweight stick-and-wire biplanes that Downsview’s parent at Hatfield specialized in. Even then, de Havilland’s aircraft construction methods were falling well behind the times.
The tall, skinny, bespectacled young Dick Hiscocks’s experience working for DHC during the summer of 1937 and for the English parent company at Hatfield the following year impressed him mainly by how wilfully backward the company’s management was-especially compared with its innovative design staff. A University of Toronto student in Engineering Physics 1938. Hiscocks found himself working eighteen-hour days that first summer assembling the Globe and Mail’s “Flying Newsroom,” a twin-engine DH.89 Dragon Rapide mounted on floats.2 The Rapide pretty much summed up de Havilland’s design philosophy.
Like the entire DH Rapide small airliner series, CF-BBG was an elegant machine, with slender biplane wings, a minimum of strut-bracing and wires, and good visibility through an almost-continuous strip of windows running halfway back along the fuselage. It was typical of de Havilland products in having evolved through a progression of gradual changes, each of which slightly altered a thoroughly obsolete concept.
Fabric-covered biplanes were already things of the past. Lockheed, Boeing and finally Douglas Aircraft, with its epochal DC-3, had all been building larger, faster, all-metal airliners for years. In fact, wooden wings had been outlawed on commercial aircraft operated in the United States since 1928, when a wood-winged Fokker airliner had crashed, killing, among others, Notre Dame’s famous football and track coach, Knute Rockne.
The Dragon Rapide’s great virtue was its economy of operation. Like many of de Havilland’s small airliners, the Dragon Rapide had found markets as a short-haul commuter airliner and as an executive aircraft for private industry, and would be built in the thousands as a wartime military transport and trainer. The Globe intended to share its flying newsroom with a northern mining promoter.
Another attraction of de Havilland designs was that they could be assembled by relative novices such as Hiscocks, who found himself placed in charge of wing assembly for the Globes Rapide while still in school. The wood and metal parts were shipped from England. The woodwork involved in assembly was considered within almost any employee’s capabilities. Nor did the shipments from England include drawings, “which were considered an unnecessary distraction for any competent assembler,” Hiscocks recalls.3
His foremost qualification for supervising the Rapide’s wing assembly was that he had found a picture of the airplane in a copy of Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft.