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Memoirs: One - The Flying Game

by Harry Furniss

202 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #00-0178; ISBN 1-55212-513-0; US$19.50, C$22.99, EUR16.00, £11.50

The author's experiences in the air and those of his friends for over 60 years.

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book Memoirs One - The Flying Game is an inspirational and educational look at the flying career of World War II veteran Harry Furniss. As Furniss takes the reader on his journey, he introduces the reader to a colourful cast of characters and places as he re-lives the dangerous and exciting days of World War II.

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About the Author Harry Furniss started writing these memoirs about flying in the late 1980s to help Nanaimo, B.C. veterans in their publicity campaign to re-name Cassidy Airport in honour of a most distinguished native son, Air Vice-Marshal Raymond Collishaw. Ray was the second-highest scoring Allied fighter pilot in World War One, right behind Billy Bishop VC, who Furniss also knew, so he wrote about him too. And then he wrote about himself, for Furniss was a pilot with the RCAF in World War Two. Following a lapse of over 40 years, Furniss took up flying again and was able to contrast the old and the new of this most exciting profession in The Flying Game, the first of several volumes of memoirs to be published through Trafford. Furniss, now in his 80s, lives on Vancouver Island. Visit Harry Furniss' other Trafford titles, Memoirs: Two -- Sea Fever and Family & Friends

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Excerpts

Flying they say, is like riding a bicycle. Once you've got the hang of it you never forget, although 40 years of neglect can sure make you rusty!

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The Spitfire was the supreme fighter aircraft of World War Two. It has been lovingly and acccurately described as erotically responsive and tender to fly, deadly in combat, the most beautiful airplane ever built.

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The fantastic sensation of safety and command when flying high-performance fighters like the Spitfire resulted in some unusual incidents. One friend of mine left 16 inches of his port wingtip hanging on a telegraph pole during the fighting around Dieppe in 1942. Another clipped a foot off each wingtip as he rocketed under a highway bridge in an otherwise superb demonstration of derring-do. This hero landed, because of his shortened wing span, at 160 mph and large dollops of medicinal brandy were necessary to reactivate his vocal chords.

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It was sheer joy flying those open-cockpit planes ... the pungent smell of hot oil, the heat from the exhaust, the cooling rush of air around the tiny windscreen onto your goggles and across your cheeks, the wonderment of sharing the open sky with the clouds and the birds, the exhilirating freedom from gravity-bound mankind ... as long as that tired old engine kept going!

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For all these reasons I found it not at all strange that two such different lifestyles - the stiff protocal of our daily duties and mess dinners, and the carefree abandon of a Grade A Pissup - could exist side by side. Since the earliest days of aerial warfare the utter ruthlessness so necessary for survival has been turned by the strange alchemy of war into a state of intense camaraderie around the campfire.

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Fear, they say, is the fighting man's psychological enemy and ferocious partying has proven to be the surest way to cleanse the system. So have a heart for the strung-out pilots who poured beer into the piano between each round of bawdy songs (Air Vice Marshal Ray Collishaw's favorite stunt) or fired Very pistol flares around to see how quickly the fire brigade could respond (Air Vice Marshal Billy Bishop's favorite stunt). The old creed - Fly together, Party together, Fight together, Grieve together - helped many a pilot survive two frightful world wars.

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This scared the hell out of me - I didn't at all fancy ferreting around in foreign lands stealing things, getting tortured, sticking knives into people, or hightailing it for the border under a hail of gunfire. Maybe that's not exactly how spies operate, but my imagination made it all just too bloody dangerous to contemplate.

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A tinge of autumn coloured the placid English countryside the day I joined my first WW2 operational squadron at Red Hill, south of London.

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Now one thing you must realize about soldiering aroad is that while there are cooks enough to spoil any broth, there is seldom a man who knows what he's up to. In the old days the handiest private was detailed to put aside his musket and light a fire under some stray cow or sheep which had become conveniently impaled on a spit. In more modern times a poisonous menu of tinned rations passed through field kitchens with very little value added.

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During the last winter of WW2, a freak snowstorm isolated the secluded ski-resort village of Mégève, high in the French Alps near Switzerland, for almost 10 days and unexpectedly provided a handful of us Canadian fighter pilots with a memorable wartime holiday.

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"Won't be long now," shouted a voice from the heated cab up front. "That barrier over there is the Swiss border. Anyone want to make a run for freedom?"

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I landed with a hell of a jolt in a lumpy cabbage patch and gave my ankle a bad wrench as I roped in the billowing parachute. My own fault, really, for wearing a dressy pair of soft sheepskin flying boots that I had bought from an Australian pilot instead of my sturdy RCAF escape issue.

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"Queer allies. Say, Martin, did you hear that nasty story about the Russians deliberately trying to prolong the war?"

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In his more reflective moments (read tranquilized by large whiskeys) Ray was a well of information and mature opinion on life in the services and flying in particular.

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I spent a number of unforgettable evenings with the legendary Billy Bishop in the RCAF officers mess at Rockcliffe when I was there in 1940. You can imagine that not many eager young pilots (we were training there to go overseas with No. 112 City of Winnipeg suadron) would pass up the opportunity to shoot the breeze about first-hand flying and fighting with Canada's greatest ace.

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It's almost unbelievable how quickly aircraft design and development progressed in those early years.

1903 - Wilbur Wright flies 120 feet at Kitty Hawk...first flight ever
1908 - Canadians fly 3,000 feet a Baddock, Nova Scotia
1912 - Royal Navy flies airplanes off battleships, day and night
1914 - More than 5,000 airplanes of all nations fly on operations in Germany, Belgium, France, England, Austria, Italy, the Balkans and Russia before the war ended in 1918

Imagine - all this in the space of only 15 years since the first successful powered flight ever!

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In France, in both WW1 and WW2, the stress-relieving drink of choice was champagne although stalwarts like Bishop (and me) often punctuated draughts of the golden bubbly with shooters of Calvados, a fiery apple brandy made in Normandy. It has long been known that an evening of enthusiastic drinking can provide a fighting man with that most priceless gift - a few hours of deep, dreamless sleep. The final toast, an ancient one, says it all:

Here's toast to the dead already,
And hurrah for the next man who dies!

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An example of the way this common background can unite complete strangers occurred recently when I met a most-properly reserved Justice of the Supreme Court, the sort of person one would not normally approach at a private party and spin jokes. But as soon as Peter Corey revealed that he had flown bombers with the RCAF during WW2 the door was open to friendly joshing.

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Catalogue Information

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