What Churchill Said When Canadian Aircrews Died Faster Than Any Allied Force

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[00:00:00]On the night of January 21st, 1944, a 23-year-old pilot from Malt Magny, Quebec, started the engines of a Halifax bomber at an airfield in North Yorkshire. His name was Roger Kulom, and his target was Berlin. The station was fogged in. It was almost always fogged in. The Canadian bomber bases sat in the veil of York, a low-lying corridor hemmed in by the Penines to the west and the Cleveland Hills to the east, threaded with rivers that breathed mist into the winter air. Factory smoke from Middlesborough and Darlington hung over the runways on still nights. Of all the airfields allocated to bomber command, the Canadians had been given the worst.

[00:00:40]Kulom had already been to Berlin several times. His ground crew had started calling him the Berlin kid, partly because he kept volunteering, partly because he kept coming back. Most men did not keep coming back. In the 8 weeks since Bomber Command had begun its sustained assault on the German capital, more than 400 bombers had failed to return. That was roughly 3,000 men killed, captured, or burning in the wreckage of their aircraft across northern Germany in 2 months over a single city. And tonight, the bombers were going again. Hold that image for a moment. A young Kebeekqua, 23 years old, sitting in a frozen cockpit in England, knowing the mathematics of his own survival, flying. Anyway, you will need that image later because everything in this story, the training fields, the fog, the burning aircraft, the empty chairs at breakfast leads to a single moment when the most powerful man in the British Empire stood before the world and said something about men like Kulom that would echo for 80 years. Not because of what those words contained, because of what they did not. If stories like this matter to you, a like and a subscription help this channel find the people who need to hear them. To understand how 10,000 young Canadians came to die in the night skies over Germany, more than any other Allied air contingent at a rate that still stops historians mid-sentence, you have to go back 5 years before Cologne climbed into that cockpit. You have to understand what Canada was, what it was asked to become, and who did the asking. In September of 1939, when Canada declared war on Nazi Germany, the Royal Canadian Air Force existed mostly on paper. It had 4,000 personnel. It had fewer than 30 combat capable aircraft. It possessed no bomber squadrons, no fighter wings, no operational doctrine for a European war. A handful of grass air strips were scattered across a country the size of Europe. The RCAF was, by the honest admission of its own senior officers, a peaceime organization in a wartime world. But Winston Churchill saw in Canada something no other allied nation could offer. Not soldiers. He had those, not ships. The Royal Navy was still the largest fleet on Earth. What Churchill needed was sky. Thousands of miles of flat, open, enemy-free airspace, prairies and lake country, and frozen northern plains where German fighters could not reach. where an enormous machine could train the air crew that Britain desperately needed and could not produce alone. And Churchill needed the young men to fill that machine. He needed them because he had staked Britain's survival on a single belief.

[00:03:15]In September of 1940, with the army evacuated from Dunkirk, with the continent lost, with no land force capable of striking Germany, Churchill wrote a memo to his war cabinet that would shape the next 5 years and decide the fate of a generation of Canadians who had never heard of it. The key sentence was 14 words long. The bombers alone, Church Hill wrote, provide the means of victory. Remember those 14 words. You will hear them again. Because those words are the reason Canada built 151 training schools in four years.

[00:03:48]Those words are the reason young men from wheat farms in Saskatchewan and fishing villages in Nova Scotia and suburbs of Montreal found themselves sitting in glass turrets over the Ruer Valley at 3:00 in the morning. Those words sent more Canadian airmen to their deaths than any other single sentence spoken during the Second World War. And when the last bomber landed and the last telegram was delivered and the last mother in Canada opened her door to an officer she did not want to see, those 14 words would be weighed against something else. Churchill said, "Something quieter, something worse."

[00:04:21]But in the autumn of 1939, the reckoning was still years away. The urgent question was more practical. How do you build an air force from almost nothing?

[00:04:31]Canada's answer was the most ambitious aviation training program in human history. It was called the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. And what it would do to a generation of young Canadians, the boys who walked in as volunteers and walked out as statistics, was something no one had fully imagined.

[00:04:48]The agreement was signed on December 17th, 1939 in Ottawa, barely 10 weeks after Canada entered the war. The four signitories were Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The document was dense with logistics, numbers of schools, types of aircraft, costs per trainee, schedules of graduation. But underneath the bureaucratic language, lay something extraordinary. Canada, a country of 11 million people with almost no military aviation infrastructure, had just agreed to build the largest air crew training operation in the history of flight. The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, the BCAATP, would eventually span 151 schools across every province in the country. It would use 3,500 aircraft. It would employ 33,000 military personnel and 6,000 civilians. The Canadian government would pour $1.6 billion into it, nearly 3/4 of the total cost. Enough concrete was laid for its runways to build a highway from Ottawa to Vancouver. But here's the number that matters most. By the time the last class graduated in 1945, the BCATP had produced 131,553 pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, wireless operators, air gunners, and flight engineers. Nearly 73,000 of them were Canadian. The rest came from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and a dozen occupied countries whose men had nowhere else to learn to fly. President Roosevelt watching from Washington called Canada the aerodrome of democracy. That phrase sounds grand. It was meant to. What it actually meant was this. A 19-year-old farm boy from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, who had never been inside an airplane, would walk into a recruiting office in the autumn of 1940, pass a medical and begin a journey that would take him through initial training in Toronto, elementary flying at a prairie airirstrip, service flying at a school in Alberta or Manitoba, then across the Atlantic to an operational training unit in England, and then into a bomber over Germany. The entire process from recruiting office to first combat mission could take as little as 18 months. Some of these men had never left their home province before they enlisted. Within a year and a half, they would be flying at 20,000 ft over the rurer valley in the middle of the night with German fighters hunting them and anti-aircraft shells bursting around them and a statistical likelihood of survival that no recruiting poster had mentioned. They were almost all of them volunteers. Canada did not conscript men for overseas air service. Every pilot, every navigator, every rear gunner who climbed into a bomber did so because he had raised his hand. Most were between 18 and 24. A majority had not yet turned 20 when they received their wings. They chose the air force over the army and the navy for reasons that seem almost innocent now. The glamour of flight, the blue uniform, the stories about aces from the last war. They pictured themselves in spitfires. Almost none of them pictured what was actually waiting.

[00:07:57]A seat in a heavy bomber flying blind through cloud and flack 7 hours over enemy territory in the dark. And here is a detail that matters more than it seems. Prime Minister McKenzie King had agreed to the BCATP partly because he believed it would keep Canadians at home. Training air crew in Canada was an enormous contribution to the war, and it did not require raising a large army or triggering the politically explosive question of overseas conscription. Air training was supposed to be Canada's war, safe, essential, visible, a contribution that did not fill cemeteries. That calculation was not wrong. It was incomplete. Because the BCATP did not just train air crew. It produced them in such numbers that by 1943, one out of every three men flying with Bomber Command was Canadian. Not flying with the RCAF, flying with all of Bomber Command, including dozens of RAF squadrons. Canadians were everywhere in British crews, in Australian squadrons, scattered across every bomber group in England. By 1944, the RCAF had grown from 4,000 personnel to 215,000, the fourth largest allied air force in the world. A country that had started the war with no bombers, now had more trained air crew than it could put into its own aircraft. The machine had worked. The question nobody in Ottawa was asking, the question that should have kept Mackenzie King awake at night, was what that machine was feeding its graduates into. Because by the time the first Canadian bomber squadrons began forming in England, bomber command had already become the most dangerous assignment in any Allied military service. The casualty rate was not a number that appeared in newspapers. It was not a number that recruiting officers shared, but the men who flew knew it, and the men who commanded them knew it. What those men did not know, what no one in the RCAF chain of command had been told, was that when Canada finally got its own bomber group, it would be handed the worst equipment, the worst airfields, and the worst odds of any group in the entire command. And the reason why had nothing to do with the enemy. At 1 minute past midnight on January 1st, 1943, the most powerful Canadian strike force ever assembled came into existence. Number six group, Royal Canadian Air Force, was now operational within RAF Bomber Command.

[00:10:22]Its headquarters was Allerton Park, a gloomy 75 room stone manor in the Yorkshire countryside, the ancestral home of Lord Mobre. Eight bomber squadrons scattered across airfields in the north of England were now formally under Canadian command. It should have been a moment of pride. Canada had fought for this. McKenzie King's government had insisted over sustained British resistance that Canadian airmen serve in identifiable Canadian units under Canadian officers with the RCAF shoulder flash visible. The British had wanted to absorb Canadian graduates into the RAF the way they had in the last war as individual replacements, nameless and nationless. King refused. If Canadian boys were going to die, they would die under a Canadian flag. He got his wish.

[00:11:10]What he did not get was a fair hand.

[00:11:13]Start with the airfields. Number six group inherited stations that number four group RAF had been happy to give up. They sat in the veil of York, a low valley between two ranges of hills threaded with rivers blanketed by fog for much of the English winter. The river ooze and the river swale pumped moisture into air that was already thick with industrial smoke drifting south from Middlesborough and Darlington. On bad nights, and bad nights were frequent, visibility dropped to nearly nothing. Bombers returning from 7-hour missions over Germany, low on fuel, some of them damaged, had to find their way down through cloud and fog into a valley boxed in by high ground on both sides.

[00:11:53]For a young pilot trained on the open prairies of Alberta, where the horizon stretched flat in every direction, this was something close to a death trap.

[00:12:01]Now, the aircraft. When Number Six Group stood up in January 1943, its squadrons were flying Vicer's Wellingtons, twin engine medium bombers designed in the 1930s. The Wellington was not a bad aircraft. It had served well earlier in the war, but by 1943, it was obsolete.

[00:12:19]It carried a smaller bomb load, flew lower, flew slower, and was more vulnerable to fighters and flack than the four engine heavies that now made up the backbone of Bomber Command. The Canadian crews knew this. They could see the Lancasters on the neighboring RAF stations. They were not flying Lancasters. Some squadrons were re-equipped with Hanley Page Halifaxes, a 4engine bomber, but not the aircraft Canadian crews wanted. Early marks of the Halifax were heavier, slower, and harder to maneuver than the Lancaster.

[00:12:49]They could not climb as high, which meant they flew closer to the flack.

[00:12:53]They could not carry as much, which meant each sorty delivered less destruction for the same risk. The Lancaster was the aircraft that every crew and bomber command wanted. The Canadians were the last to receive it.

[00:13:04]And then there was the problem that no amount of better equipment could fix.

[00:13:08]Number six group expanded too fast. In the autumn of 1942, four new squadrons were stood up in a single month. The 427th, 428th, 429th, and 431st, all equipped with Wellingtons, all staffed with crews fresh from training. To give these new squadrons any operational experience at all, seasoned men were pulled from the original units and distributed across the new ones. The result was exactly what you would expect. The original squadrons lost their most experienced crews. The new squadrons each got a handful of veterans diluted among dozens of men who had never seen a search light or heard flack burst against a fuselage. Within weeks, number six group had acquired a reputation. It was not the reputation Canada had wanted. The group had the highest loss rate in bomber command. It had the highest rate of aborted missions. Aircraft that turned back before reaching the target, often because of mechanical failure, often because of inexperience, sometimes because a 20-year-old pilot flying through his first barrage of anti-aircraft fire made the only decision his body would let him make. To the other groups in bomber command, the Canadians were the weak link. This was not a judgment on Canadian courage. It was a judgment on what happens when you send men into the deadliest theater of the air war with the wrong aircraft, the wrong airfields, and not enough time to learn from the men who had survived. And survival in bomber command was not a metaphor. It was arithmetic. A tour of duty was 30 operations. The average loss rate for a single operation in 1943 was between 4 and 5%. Run those numbers across 30 missions, and the mathematics are simple and brutal. Fewer than one in four crews could expect to finish a tour alive. For the Canadians flying Halifaxes in early 1943, the numbers were worse. Their loss rate over certain months exceeded 6% per operation. At that rate, the chance of surviving 30 trips dropped below 1 in6. 1 in six. And these were volunteers, every one of them. What happened next? What bomber command asked of these men during the winter of 1943 would make even those odds look generous. On the evening of November 18th, 1943, Air Chief Marshall Arthur Harris stood before a wall map at Bomber Command headquarters in High Wickham, Bucking Hampshire, and drew his finger across Germany to the eastern edge of the country, Berlin. He had tried before, scattered raids, probing attacks. Now he intended to flatten it.

[00:15:38]Harris sent a message to Churchill that week. The language was blunt. He told the prime minister that if bomber command could wreck Berlin from end to end, it would cost Germany the war. He estimated it would cost 400 to 500 aircraft. He considered this a price worth paying. Churchill did not object.

[00:15:56]What followed was the most sustained and lethal air campaign of the war. From November 1943 to the end of March 1944, 4 and a half months, Bomber Command launched 16 major raids on Berlin alone and dozens more on other German cities.

[00:16:12]On a given night, 700 or 800 heavy bombers would lift off from airfields across England, form a stream 60 m long, cross the North Sea, penetrate German airspace, and fly deep into the most heavily defended city on Earth. The round trip was 7 to 8 hours. Much of it was flown in darkness in winter at altitudes where the outside temperature dropped to 40 below. For the Canadian crews of number six group, every Berlin raid began the same way. A briefing in a Nissen hut. The station commander pulling back a curtain to reveal the red thread stretching from Yorkshire to the center of Germany. The collective groan when the thread ended at Berlin because everyone in the room knew what Berlin meant. Then the walk to the aircraft.

[00:16:56]Then the takeoff into fog. Then the long climb over the North Sea, watching for the condensation trails that appeared behind each engine at altitude. Trails that glowed in the moonlight and turned every bomber into a target. The German night fighters found the bomber stream early. They had learned to track it using airborne radar and ground controllers who plotted the course in real time. A twin engine measures or junkers would slide underneath a bomber unseen and fire upward into the belly of the aircraft using a weapon the Germans called shrega music. Jazz music, a pair of cannons mounted at an angle behind the cockpit. The bomber crew often never saw the fighter at all. The first sign was a line of cannon shells ripping through the floor, through the fuel tanks, through the bodies of men sitting above them. An aircraft loaded with three tons of bombs and 1,500 gallons of aviation fuel did not burn slowly. It exploded or it broke apart or it fell in a long spiral while the crew tried to reach their parachutes in the dark in a fuselage that was already on fire. On the night of December 2nd, 1943, bomber command sent 458 aircraft to Berlin. 40 did not return. Two nights later, another raid. Another 28 lost. On December 23rd, Christmas week, 379 bombers went out. 28 more were gone by morning. In a single month, bomber command lost more than 150 aircraft over Berlin. That was more than a thousand men. Number six group was in every raid.

[00:18:31]The Canadian squadrons at Leming, Middleton, St. George, Linton on Thorp, East Moore. They flew the same routes, carried the same bomb loads, and entered the same defended airspace as every other group, but they were still flying early mark Halifaxes on many of these missions. Aircraft that could not climb above the worst of the flack, aircraft that were slower and easier to catch.

[00:18:55]And when a Halifax was hit, the survival rate for its crew was lower than for a Lancaster crew. Roughly one in four managed to bail out compared to one in six or seven from a Halifax. The numbers were known. They were discussed in whispers, never in briefings. Canadian pilot Murray Pedin, who flew through this period, wrote after the war that the odds were rarely understood outside Bomber Command itself. At times during the winter offensives, he recalled, "The short-term statistics showed that fewer than 25 out of every 100 crews would survive their first tour of 30 operations. Fewer than 25. Three out of four would be dead, captured, or missing before they finished." Roger Cologne, the Berlin kid, flew through all of it.

[00:19:39]Nine raids on Berlin by January, 10 by February, 12 by the end of March. Each time he came back, the faces at the breakfast table had changed. Each time he walked to his aircraft, he passed ground crews painting over the identification letters of bombers that no longer existed, preparing the same aircraft for a crew that no longer needed it. And here is what the crews did not know. While they were dying over Berlin at a rate that should have stopped any rational commander, the man who had called their sacrifice the means of victory was beginning to have second thoughts, not about the strategy, about something else entirely. Church Hill was beginning to wonder about what the bombs were doing when they landed. What he said when he found out would mark the beginning of a betrayal that took 2 years to complete. In June of 1943, Winston Churchill sat in a screening room and watched film footage of what British bombs had done to German cities.

[00:20:30]The footage showed streets that no longer existed. Buildings opened up like broken teeth. Block after block of rubble where neighborhoods had been. And in the margins of the frame, although the camera did not dwell on them, the outlines of human cost. Churchill turned to the men beside him and asked a question. Are we beasts? He said, "Are we taking this too far?" Pay attention to that question. It tells you something critical about the man who asked it.

[00:20:56]Churchill was not naive. He had ordered the bombing. He had championed it, defended it, built his entire war strategy around it. He had told his war cabinet that bombers were the only path to victory. He had pushed Arthur Harris to escalate, to attack harder, to send more aircraft deeper into Germany. And now, watching the results on a screen in the safety of England, he flinched, but he did not stop. That is the detail that changes the meaning of everything else.

[00:21:23]Churchill asked, "Are we beasts?" and then approved the next round of raids.

[00:21:28]He expressed moral doubt and then demanded the Battle of Berlin. He questioned whether the bombing was going too far and then let Harris send 700 aircraft a night into the most heavily defended airspace in Europe night after night for four straight months with loss rates that no other military operation in the war could match. The question was real. The doubt was real. But the bombers kept flying and the Canadians kept dying. And the man who had asked the question never gave the order that would have been the only honest answer to it. By late March of 1944, the price was beyond anything Harris had predicted. Bomber command had lost more than a thousand aircraft over Berlin and other German cities since November.

[00:22:10]Replacements were arriving, but the men inside them were younger, less trained, less experienced than the crews they replaced. The BCATP machine in Canada was producing bodies, but experience cannot be manufactured. It can only be earned. And in Bomber Command, the cost of earning it was measured in funerals.

[00:22:29]Then came the night that broke the arithmetic. March 30th, 1944.

[00:22:34]The target was Nuremberg. 795 bombers were dispatched. 572 Lancasters, 214 Halifaxes, nine mosquitoes. The weather forecast promised high cloud on the outbound route that would shield the bomber stream from fighters. The forecast was wrong. The sky was crystal clear. A bright moon hung over the continent and the exhaust from hundreds of engines condensed into white trails that stretched across the darkness like arrows pointing at every aircraft in the stream. The German night fighters found them early. They were in the stream before the bombers crossed Belgium. What followed was not a battle. It was a corridor of killing that stretched 400 miles from the Belgian border to Nuremberg and back. Pathfinder navigator Doc Watson, riding in a Lancaster above the main force, watched from his cockpit and made a tick mark in his log book every time he saw a bomber go down. By the time they reached the target, he had made 57 marks. Each mark was a 4ine aircraft. Each aircraft carried seven men. Number six group had sent 118 crews that night. The 419th Moose Squadron alone lost 13 aircraft, the worst single mission loss in the squadron's history.

[00:23:46]91 men from one Canadian squadron gone between midnight and dawn. Across all of bomber command, the night cost 94 bombers shot down. Another 12 crashed on return. 545 men killed, 159 taken prisoner. More airmen died over Nuremberg in a single night than in the entire Battle of Britain. After Nuremberg, the strategic bombing of German cities paused. Harris was ordered to redirect his force toward targets in France, railway junctions, airfields, coastal defenses in preparation for the invasion of Normandy. The missions were shorter. The flack was lighter. The fighters were fewer. For the Canadian crews who had survived the winter, the shift felt like a reprieve. Loss rates dropped. Men who had stopped counting their missions started counting again.

[00:24:34]Roger Koulom, the Berlin kid, finished his tour. 12 trips to Berlin, and he was still breathing. He met a woman. He kept flying. He was one of the statistics that the recruiting officers could point to. Proof that survival was possible, even if the numbers said otherwise. But the reprieve did not last. After D-Day, after the breakout from Normandy, after the Allied armies pushed into France and Belgium, Harris got what he had been waiting for, permission to resume the strategic bombing of Germany. The bombers went back. The Canadian squadrons went with them. And in the winter of 1945, Bomber Command would carry out raids that made everything before them look restrained. One of those raids would force Churchill to put his doubts in writing. And what he wrote in a classified memo that his own bomber crews were never meant to see would be the first step toward the silence that erased them. In the autumn of 1944, the bombers went back to Germany. The targets were familiar. the RER, Hamburg, Cologne, Essen, the industrial cities that Harris had been burning since 1942.

[00:25:38]But the scale had changed. Bomber command was now stronger than it had ever been. More aircraft, better navigation, improved marking techniques, and number six group had finally received what its crews had been waiting for. 11 of its squadrons were now flying Lancasters, including Canadianbuilt Mark 10s that had been fed across the Atlantic. The days of the obsolete Wellington and the sluggish Halifax were largely over. The Canadians were flying the best bomber in the world. The irony was savage. By the time the equipment matched the mission, the mission itself was becoming harder to justify. Allied armies were on the Rine. The Luftwaffa was a broken force. German industry was producing at a fraction of its capacity.

[00:26:21]The strategic argument for area bombing that it was the only way to hit Germany had evaporated. There were other ways.

[00:26:27]Now, the armies were doing it on the ground, but the bombing continued, and in the final 5 months of the war, bomber command dropped more tonnage than in any previous period. March of 1945 alone saw the heaviest single month of bombing in the entire conflict. Canadian crews were in the air almost every night, hitting rail yards, oil refineries, naval bases, and cities. They were still dying, not at the catastrophic rates of the Battle of Berlin, but dying. A crew lost here.

[00:26:57]Two crews lost there. A Halifax from 431 Squadron that did not return from Dortmund. A Lancaster from 419 that went down over Hanover. Quiet, steady, mechanical loss. The kind that no longer made headlines because the war was almost won. Then came Dresden. On the night of February 13th, 1945, bomber command sent nearly 800 aircraft to attack the city of Dresdon in Eastern Germany. The city was swollen with refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army.

[00:27:27]It had not been heavily bombed before.

[00:27:29]The attack created a firestorm that consumed the city center and killed approximately 25,000 people, most of them civilians. Canadian crews from number six group were in the bomber stream that night. They dropped their loads on markers laid by the Pathfinders, turned for home, and landed in Yorkshire before dawn. Most of them did not know what they had done. The scale of the destruction at Dresden only became clear in the days that followed as reports filtered back through neutral channels and the story reached the press. Churchill knew and this time he did not simply ask whether they were beasts. He put it in writing. On March 28th, 1945, Churchill sent a memo to his chiefs of staff. The language was careful, as Churchill's language always was when he was covering a retreat. It seems to me, he wrote, that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. He called the destruction of Dresden a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. Read those words again, simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts.

[00:28:38]Churchill was not questioning the strategy he had ordered. He was rewriting history while it was still happening. He was placing the moral weight of area bombing on the shoulders of the men who had carried it out, on Harris, on bomber command, on the crews, while lifting it from his own. Harris was incandescent. He had been ordered to bomb German cities. He had been told repeatedly by Churchill himself that the bombers were the means of victory. He had sent his men, tens of thousands of them, including 10,000 Canadians who would never come home, into the most dangerous assignment of the war because the prime minister had demanded it. And now the prime minister was writing memos that read like the opening argument of a prosecution. The memo was classified. No bomber crew ever read it. No Canadian airman shivering in a Nissen hut in Yorkshire knew that the man who had sent him to war was already drafting the language of disownment. But the signal was clear to those inside the corridors of Whiteall. Bomber command was becoming a liability. The thing that had been indispensable was becoming embarrassing, and the man who had built his strategy around it was looking for a way out. 6 weeks later, the war in Europe ended. On the 8th of May 1945, crowds filled the streets of London. Churchill appeared on the balcony of the Ministry of Health overlooking Whiteall and spoke to the nation. 3 days after that, on May 13th, he gave a longer broadcast, a formal accounting of the war, a survey of the 5 years since he had taken power. He named the army. He named the navy. He named fighter command and the men who had won the Battle of Britain. He named the merchant marine and the civil defense and the factories and the farms. What he did not name is what every surviving bomber crewman heard loudest. On the afternoon of May 13th, 1945, Air Chief Marshall Arthur Harris sat in his office at Bomber Command headquarters in High Wickham. Beside him was Lieutenant General Ira Eker, commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, and a man who had led American bomber crews over Germany. The two men had fought the air war together. They had sent their crews into the same defended skies, attended the same briefings, read the same loss reports. Now the war was over and Churchill was about to summarize it for the nation. The broadcast was long.

[00:30:56]Churchill spoke for nearly an hour, surveying the 5 years since he had taken power. He began with the dark days of 1940, the fall of France, the evacuation from Dunkirk, the threat of invasion. He spoke of the Royal Navy and its vigil across the Atlantic. He spoke of the army and its long march from North Africa to the Rine. He named Fighter Command and the men who had won the Battle of Britain. the few," he called them again, as he had in 1940, and Air Chief Marshall Lord Dowing, whose name, Churchill said, would be forever linked with that victory. He spoke of the civil defense workers, the merchant seaman, the factory hands, the farmers. He acknowledged the Commonwealth and the alliance with America and the Soviet Union. He even mentioned the damage inflicted on Berlin, a single passing reference, stripped of any attribution.

[00:31:45]What he did not mention was Bomber Command. Not by name, not by implication, not even as an aside. The only branch of the British armed forces that had carried the war to Germany for 4 years, the force that had dropped a million tons of bombs, that had lost 8,300 aircraft, that had buried 55,000 of its men, was absent from Churchill's accounting of victory. Every other service was named, every other sacrifice acknowledged. Bomber Command, the force Churchill himself had called the means of victory, was the one thing he chose not to say. Harris listened with what witnesses later described as growing incredul. He had spent three years sending young men to their deaths on Churchill's orders. He had absorbed the criticism, the moral questioning, the whispered accusations. He had watched his crews, including 10,000 Canadians, die at rates that made infantry losses look moderate. And now the man who had ordered all of it could not bring himself to say their name out loud. 2 days later on May 15th, Churchill sent Harris a telegram. It was private, not broadcast, not published, not read to any crowd. Now that Nazi Germany is defeated, it read, "I wish to express to you on behalf of his majesty's government the deep sense of gratitude which is felt by all the nation for the glorious part which has been played by bomber command in forging the victory."

[00:33:07]The telegram continued with language that had it been spoken publicly might have meant something. The moral tests to which the crew of a bomber were subjected reached the extreme limits of human valor and sacrifice. Here chance was carried to its most extreme and violent degree above all else. They never flinched or failed. They never flinched or failed. Churchill wrote those words in a private message that the men they described would never read.

[00:33:35]The public heard silence. The crews heard silence. The families of 10,000 dead Canadians heard silence. And the telegram, the only acknowledgement Churchill ever made, was filed in an archive where it gathered dust for decades. Then came the final insult.

[00:33:51]Bomber command was denied a campaign medal. Every other major command in the British armed forces received one. The army, the navy, fighter command, coastal command. Bomber command alone was excluded. the men who had flown the most dangerous missions of the war, who had suffered a 44% fatality rate, who had volunteered for a duty that killed more of them than survived it. These men were told that their existing service ribbons were sufficient. Harris was offered a periage, the standard honor for a wartime commander-in-chief. He refused.

[00:34:24]He was the only senior British commander to do so. He refused because his men had been denied their medal and he would not accept a personal honor while his crews were treated as though their service was something to be quietly set aside. Hurt and bitter, he left England for South Africa where he managed a shipping company. He did not return for years and across the Atlantic the Canadian airmen came home. They stepped off troop ships in Halifax and Montreal, collected their discharge papers, and returned to the towns and farms and city streets they had left three or four years earlier.

[00:34:57]There were no parades for bomber command, no national ceremony, no prime minister standing at a podium to say what Churchill had refused to say. 3/4 of all RCAF deaths in the Second World War, three out of every four Canadians killed in air operations, had been in bomber command. It was by every measure Canada's single greatest sacrifice in the air war. And it was met with the same silence in Ottawa that it had received in London. The boys who came home carried that silence with them.

[00:35:25]What it cost them is a story that took decades to surface and that one young man from Hamilton, Ontario did not survive long enough to tell. Roger Kulom went home. The Berlin kid survived 12 raids on the most heavily defended city in Europe, finished his tour, and returned to Quebec. He was 24 years old.

[00:35:45]He had seen more men die than most people would meet in a lifetime. He did not talk about it much. Most of them did not talk about it much. Across Canada, the bomber crews folded their uniforms, packed their log books, and tried to find their way back to the lives they had left behind. Some returned to farms.

[00:36:03]Some went to university on veterans benefits. Some married the girls they had written to from Yorkshire. They took jobs in banks and lumber yards and insurance offices, and they carried inside them a silence that mirrored the one Churchill had given them, not because they chose not to speak, but because no one asked. One of them was a young man named Byron Rosson from Hamilton, Ontario. Before the war, Rosson had been a student at McMaster University, planning to become a lawyer.

[00:36:29]He enlisted in the RCAF at 19, earned his wings, and was posted to 429 Bison Squadron where he flew Wellingtons and Halifaxes over Germany. He survived. He was decorated. He came home in the autumn of 1945, enrolled in courses, found a room in Toronto, and by all outward appearances, began to rebuild.

[00:36:50]But his friends noticed the change. He was not sleeping. He had become, in the words of those who knew him, morose and cheerless. His roommate in Toronto recalled that Rosson had told him quietly that death in a doomed aircraft was the preferred manner to die. The young man who had flown through the worst of bomber commands war could not find his way through peace. On December 23rd, 1945, 3 months after leaving the RCAF, Byron Rosson died at his parents' home in Hamilton. He was 23 years old.

[00:37:21]His death was not counted among bomber commands casualties. Not then. It took 73 years. In 2018, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission reviewed his case and ruled that his death was attributable to his military service. 73 years to be counted among the dead he had flown beside. Rosson was not the only one. He was simply the one whose story survived long enough to be recovered. How many other young Canadians came home from the bomber war and found that the silence, the national silence, the political silence, the silence of a country that did not know what to do with the men who had burned cities was more than they could carry. That number does not exist in any archive. It was never counted because no one was counting. The recognition, when it finally came, arrived with the slowness of an apology that has been rehearsed too long. In 2012, 67 years after the war, a memorial to the men of Bomber Command was unveiled in Green Park, London. It was not funded by the British government. It was paid for by private donations by veterans and their families and people who remembered. The British government had to be shamed into allowing it. At the ceremony, a Lancaster from the Battle of Britain memorial flight opened its Bombay doors over central London and released 800,000 paper poppies, one for every bomber command casualty. Training deaths included 42 Canadian veterans, most of them in their 90s, were flown to London on an RCAF aircraft to stand before the memorial and see for the first time their service acknowledged in stone. The following year, the Canadian government issued a bomber command bar, a small clasp to be worn on the Canadian Volunteer Service Medal. It was estimated that 1500 veterans were still alive to receive it. Most were in their late 80s or 90s. They had waited nearly 7 decades for a piece of metal that said what Churchill would not. What Churchill said when Canadian air crews died faster than any Allied force was nothing. He said nothing when it mattered. He said it privately when it was too late. And then he spent the rest of his life making sure that the men who had carried out his strategy would carry its moral weight alone. 10,000 Canadians, a country of 11 million people, sent 10,000 of its sons into the night skies over Germany. And most of them did not come back. They were volunteers, everyone. They flew because Church Hill told their country that bombing was the only way. And when it was over, the man who lit the match pretended he had never held it. Thank you for staying with this story for nearly an hour. These men, the Canadian air crews of Bomber Command, are among the least remembered heroes of the Second World War. And every like, every subscription, every tap of that notification bell helps their story reach the people who should hear it. I want to know where are you watching from tonight? And if someone in your family served in the Air War, a grandfather, a great uncle, someone whose name you found on a metal or in a box in the attic, tell us about them in the comments. They deserve to be remembered by name. Thank you for being