‘A man who isn’t frightened lacks imagination’: The life of Canada’s greatest bomber pilot

Johnny Fauquier, the most decorated Canadian airman of the Second World War, was born into spectacular wealth in Rockcliffe.

The son of a railway builder, Fauquier grew up in a mansion named “Ardvar” — it now serves as the residence of Sweden’s ambassador to Canada — with a commanding view of the Ottawa River. He attended Ashbury College, captained the cricket team, and later launched a career as a stockbroker in Montreal.

Fauquier married Dorothea Coulson, an heiress whose family owned the Alexandra Hotel in Ottawa, and appeared ready to settle into a life of money and privilege.

But he was restless. Fauquier took up racing cars and motorcycles, then joined the Montreal Light Aeroplane Club, where he learned to fly a two-seat biplane.

“Johnny’s life was changed,” biographer Dave Birrell wrote in his book, ‘Johnny: Canada’s Greatest Bomber Pilot.’ “He felt that was born to fly.”

That conviction would lead Fauquier to turn his back on the easy life. He would change careers, work as a bush pilot, then enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force at the age of 30.

During the Second World War, Fauquier would fly three tours of duty — at least 93 combat missions — and survive encounters with flak, night fighters and an empty gas tank.

His daring and determination earned him unprecedented promotion within British-dominated Bomber Command. Fauquier became the first RCAF officer to command a bomber squadron and the only Canadian to command the RAF’s 617 Squadron, an elite group of precision bombers known as “The Dambusters.”

Fauquier took part in some of the most storied raids of the war and developed a reputation for both fearlessness and accuracy.

As a leader, he could be brusque, impatient, demanding and profane. Some said he was heartless about casualties. One airman threatened to kill him.

A fellow pilot, decorated RCAF Capt. Reg Lane, said Fauquier had “ice in his veins.” “He was as hard as nails and it didn’t make any difference whether he was thinking of the enemy or getting into a fight in a pub in London,” Lane said. “He just had no fear.”

But Fauquier insisted fear was a necessary element of his success.

“A man who isn’t frightened lacks imagination,” he told one interviewer, “and without imagination he can’t be a first-class warrior.”

***

Johnny Fauquier imagined a different life for himself in the early 1930s. The stock market had crashed in 1929, and he longed for something more than the desultory trading of stocks and bonds.

With his father’s financial backing, Fauquier abandoned the trading desk and in 1933 launched a business offering bush pilot services to mining exploration companies in northern Quebec. Fauquier was both chief pilot and CEO.

Bush pilots played a key role in opening Canada’s North to exploration and development, but in the early days of aviation they flew without radios or navigational aids. Fauquier remembered putting a writing pad on his knee and hand-drawing a map as he crossed over lakes and rivers while flying with a colleague to the far reaches of Hudson’s Bay.

“Otherwise, we would never have been able to return,” he told an interviewer. “I shudder to think of the chances we took.”

Fauquier flew under all conditions for the next six years, logging as many as 300,000 air miles. It meant he was one of Canada’s more experienced pilots when the Second World War began in September 1939.

Fauquier enlisted in the RCAF one week after Canada joined the war. He was commissioned as a pilot officer and assigned to the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP) as a flight instructor. The plan made Canada the international centre for Allied pilot training.

For the next 14 months, Fauquier helped young men learn to fly as the program turned out 3,000 pilots a month.

He requested a combat assignment, and, after a stint at RCAF headquarters in Ottawa, he got his wish: Fauquier sailed for England in June 1941. He was 32.

Fauquier trained as a bomber pilot and was assigned to 405 Squadron, a recently formed RCAF squadron based at RAF Pocklington in Yorkshire. His first operation, behind the controls of a Wellington bomber, was a raid on the German city of Emden in October.

Bomber Command was then the principal instrument for carrying the war to Germany, which dominated Europe. Flight crews were pushed to their limit. On Nov. 7, Fauquier joined a large raid on Berlin that had been ordered into the sky despite terrible weather: hail, sleet and high winds.

Fauquier’s plane was coned by a searchlight near the target, exposing him to heavy flak, but he turned and dove out of the light. After dropping his bombs, Fauquier crawled home in his damaged plane, flying into a stiff headwind, which ate through his fuel. He told his crew to prepare to ditch in the churning English Channel.

With his gauges “knocking on zero,” Fauquier later reported, he saw a homing light and flew straight at it. He found an abandoned airfield and came in to land, only to discover the runway was blocked with iron pylons to prevent its use by enemy planes. Fauquier swerved and put his plane down on a nearby field, crashing to a stop eight hours fifty-six minutes after leaving RAF Pocklington.

Out of 169 bombers that night, only 73 reached their target, and 21 never returned home.

During the war, Allied aircrew were committed to a tour of duty made up of 30 operational flights. Only about half of them would survive.

When his squadron leader was killed in late November 1941, Fauquier was named his replacement; months later, he was given command of 405 Squadron.

Fauquier led his squadron on the first of the “thousand bomber raids” on May 31, 1942, when 1,103 bombers pounded the German city of Cologne in the largest attack of its kind to that point in the war. During another of the mass raids, on Bremen, Germany, Fauquier’s plane was again coned by searchlights and peppered with flak. This time he dove 12,000 feet so that his rear and mid-turrets could fire on the German positions. It was an audacious act for a bomber pilot.

By August 1942, Fauquier had completed 35 combat missions, and he was reassigned to RCAF overseas headquarters.

Less than a year later, he was back in combat operations as commanding officer of 405 Pathfinder Squadron, the RCAF’s contribution to an elite corps of bombers that would lead all raids and light the target for the more inexperienced crews that followed. The initiative was aimed at improving the accuracy of bomb drops.

On Aug. 17, Fauquier was among the 596 bomber pilots who lifted off from England for a critical attack on a Nazi rocket research and testing centre at Peenemunde on Germany’s Baltic coast. The raid damaged the facility and delayed production of the V-2 rocket that would later terrify London.

Fauquier led many of the squadron’s raids as master bomber, a role that required him to light the target with incendiary devices and direct bomber traffic while circling the area.

He could be a hard taskmaster. One aircrew, on probation with his squadron, returned early from an operation with engine trouble. Fauquier would not give them permission to land. He told them to return to their original squadron since they were unsuited for the Pathfinders.

In his book, Above and Beyond, author Spencer Dunmore wrote that Fauquier drove his crews hard and was impatient with those who did not have the stomach to deliver bombs to well-defended targets.

Dunmore quoted a witness who said she saw one drunken officer pull a service revolver and threaten to shoot Fauquier, who was unmoved by the incident.

“He saw his job as getting every available aircraft on the target on every night of operations,” Dunmore wrote.

In January 1943, having completed another 38 combat missions, Fauquier was relieved of his command, promoted to Air Commodore and sent back to RCAF headquarters. But he tired of the desk job, and, when the opportunity arose, he asked to take command of the RAF’s high-profile 617 Squadron, the Dambusters, who earned their nickname with a successful raid against dams in Germany’s industrialized Ruhr Valley.

Fauquier took a demotion to Group Captain in order to command 617 Squadron since more senior officers were not allowed to fly in combat.

He became the first Canadian to command an RAF squadron and flew another 20 sorties with the Dambusters. He led precision raids against key bridges, viaducts and U-boat pens as Allied forces moved across Europe and into Germany.

His accolades — they included a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Distinguished Service Order with two bars — made him the most decorated Canadian airman of the Second World War.

At the end of the fighting, he vowed never again to touch the controls of an airplane. He felt he had exhausted all of his luck.

***

Air Commodore Fauquier returned to Canada a celebrity. Newspapers reported on his local appearances and speeches.

In an address to the Empire Club of Canada in November 1945, he praised Bomber Command and said its relentless air campaign against Germany had hastened that country’s defeat.

“By its achievements, it undoubtedly saved countless thousands of casualties for our army, and shortened the war by many months, in fact, years,” he told the audience.

France awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Palm and made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He was inducted into Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame, and the Royal Canadian Mint produced a $20 sterling silver coin with his image in gold above a Lancaster bomber.

Fauquier went into the mining business, where he made and lost a fortune. He later settled in Toronto with his second wife, Mary, opened a concrete business and then moved into real estate.

He died in April 1981 at the age of 72 from a heart attack and was buried at Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery.

In an interview, Debby Johns, Fauquier’s daughter-in-law, said he rarely spoke about his wartime heroics.

“He was very straightforward, called a spade a spade, but never really talked about the war,” she said. “He was personable. You felt comfortable around him. But he didn’t waste words.”

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