(See Cover) At an airport near London one day last week a wiry little man clambered out of an R.A.F. transport plane and bustled up to the city. In the next days bigwigs in paneled Whitehall offices and hard-working operations officers in the low buildings of coastal airdromes spent time looking into a pair of piercing, watery blue eyes peering out from under uptwirled Mephisto eyebrows. Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill, one of the hottest top-ranking officers that the R.A.F. has produced in World War II, was back from Canada.
Four months ago Sir Frederick left Britain and a berth as head of the vital R.A.F. Coastal Command on two days' notice. Twelve hours later, having flown the Atlantic, he went to work in Montreal. Less spectacular than the Coastal Command, his new job was now more vital to Britain's defense. He took over for the R.A.F. the critical task of seeing that U.S. bombers got to Britain, quickly and safely.
Sir Frederick's job as chief of the Atlantic Ferry Command has been "purely administrative." What Britons and Canadians wanted to know last week was why he had left his desk at Montreal's new Dorval Airport. They wondered whether the 61-year-old Marshal was slated to get a still more important command, even though Lady Bowhill, who works in the command's code room, this week had taken a new apartment in Montreal.
Purely administrative though it may be, Sir Frederick's ferry performance could well tilt the balance between defeat and victory for Britain. To start an offensive in World War II, let alone to win the war, the first thing is to deliver the planes, the next to use them. U.S. factories supply the planes—currently some 38 a day, but between Canada, where U.S. Army ferry pilots turn the ships over to the R.A.F., and Britain lie 2,000 miles of fog-strewn North Atlantic. The job of the Ferry Command is to fly to Britain the bombers that can make the long hop.
The A.F.C. is virtually a huge one-way airline. Eastward to Britain each month fly fleets of sleek Lockheed Hudsons, big Boeing Flying Fortresses, plus some Consolidated Liberators (6-24) and a few Catalinas (PB-Y). They fly without the amenities of commercial airlines, part of the way without radio beams, with minimum equipment. The planes are built, not for transatlantic cruising, but for bombing flights.
In spite of this, the A.F.C. has hung up a proud record of deliveries. It has delivered many hundreds of bombers (the exact number is a tightly held secret) to Britain, has lost about a half-dozen ships on ocean flights. Of these only three were bombers in delivery. The others were shuttle planes, used to carry pilots and crews back to Newfoundland.
For this record neither Sir Frederick nor the R.A.F. takes full credit. The ferry route was pioneered last year by the civilian Atlantic Ferry Organization ("Atfero" for short) headed by a Montreal banker, Morris W. Wilson. Atfero hired the pilots, planned the routes, selected the airports. set up weather and radiocommunication stations. Sir Frederick's job was to smooth out rough spots until flying the Atlantic became a matter of routine.