Ups & Downs
Hopes were in the wind that last week's Ottawa Air Training Conference of 14 United Nations* might coordinate future air power and keep its nose on the horizon of world control. For a time the conference ship appeared poised for a spectacular takeoff. But at week's end it was still on the ground.
Earth bound. What kept the conference grounded was the ponderous problem of who was going to pay for what and who was going to run the controls. As to that. Canada, the U.S. and Britain had different ideas.
> Canada's problem was to get maximum use of her $1,000,000,000, 103-field air-training plant, which Franklin Roosevelt called the "airdrome of democracy." The R.C.A.F. had dug thousands deep into Canada's manpower reservoir, was reaching the point where the annual crop of air-crew prospects might soon fall below training facilities. R.C.A.F. recruits from the U.S., now being repatriated, had represented from 10% to 20% of R.C.A.F. trainees.
> Britain's problem was to clear her airfields for operational duties (bombing raids on the Continent) by moving British air-crew trainees to the U.S. or Canada. Britain wanted to run the schools and have the U.S. pay for them. At the same time Britain wants to maintain seniority control of greatly expanding European air operations.
> The U.S. was in the difficult position of trying to cooperate with all United Nations while at the same time building the U.S. air-training program into the biggest the world has ever known.
Failure of the conference to announce any integrated scheme for North American air training meant that the present program of each nation controlling its own trainees--while leaving closer liaison work to respective high commands--would continue.
Airbound. Concrete results of the conference were the exchange of information on air-training problems, the setting up of a Combined Committee on Air Training in North America (in Washington), and a start on standardization of training methods. According to this nice theory, in the future a Chinese navigator might take over in a U.S. plane piloted by a Canadian with a Belgian gunner and a Greek bombardier.
Approval of this procedure came from such airmen as China's dapper Major General Shen Teh-hsieh, commander of Chinese "Thunderbirds" now training in Arizona. He also reported that, in order to bomb Japan and nearby shipping lanes, China now had the airfields, ground crews and pilots, needed only planes.
Apologizing for his English, Poland's Group Captain Stefan Sznuk explained: "Only in one instance does a Polish airman speak this language distinctly and with the proper accent--it is when he speaks to the enemy using the eloquent language of the twelve English-made machine guns of his fighter plane."
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