First World War airmen from New Brunswick were pioneers of air warfare
Global News
Airmen from New Brunswick were pioneers of air warfare during the First World War. During that time, aircrafts were in the development stage.
When pilots took to the air for combat during the First World War, it had been less than 15 years since the Wright brothers’ famous first flight in 1903. Aircraft were in the development stage, made of canvas over a wood frame and held together by something similar to piano wire.
“They were underpowered. They were quite flimsy, and if you happened to land heavily, sometimes they would be damaged,” said J. Brent Wilson, a historian who has just published “War Among the Clouds: New Brunswick Airmen in the Great War.”
Even training could be deadly for the pioneering pilots, he noted.
About 22,000 Canadians served in the British air services during the First World War, mostly from well-educated families in Ontario and Western Canada, Wilson said in a recent interview. But at least 252 were from New Brunswick, many from small farming communities.
They flew not just on the Western Front in France and Belgium, which was the main theatre of operations, but also around the Mediterranean and in Italy, Russia, Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, Wilson said.
Wilson’s book draws on accounts of their service contained in letters home and in other records. He said he wanted to document the lives of airmen who came from rural New Brunswick. “I think it’s important that we remember that they made an important contribution to the wider war effort in defending the country,” Wilson said.
Tim Cook, chief historian at the Canadian War Museum, said that while flight was relatively new and initially exciting, it evolved during the war to include large-scale dogfights involving dozens of airmen who battled for control of the air.
While the “knights of the skies,” as the glamorous pilots were sometimes called, captured the attention of the public, he said, of greater importance to the armies on the ground, mired in the mud, were slower-moving observation aircraft. They photographed the front, providing crucial intelligence to commanders, gunners and infantry.
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