The skies over Alberta were full of warplanes 70 years ago.
It was the Second World War, and scores of planes were landing and taking off every day from Blatchford Field in Edmonton as part of a secret effort to help the Allies defeat the Nazis.
St. Albert's Ted Kaftan remembers looking up as a kid near Peace River and seeing the wings of planes roaring by overhead.
"I'd see them go over there all hours of the day and night," he says, five or six at a time. Years later, he'd work on some of them as a mechanic with the Canadian air force.
This week, if he looked up at the right time, Kaftan would have seen another of those old planes winging overhead to land at Villeneuve.
Washington pilot Jeff Geer touched down in his vintage North American AT-6 Texan fighter plane at Villeneuve Airport Tuesday afternoon. The stop was part of his team's effort to recreate the route flown by pilots during the Second World War as part of the U.S.-Soviet Lend-Lease program – all 11,200 kilometres of it.
"It's a part of World War Two that's extremely important," Geer says, but that few people know.
This is the untold story of the hundreds of men and women who risked and lost their lives to get planes to the front lines, he continues.
"We don't want our youth to forget about the sacrifices our country made."
An untold story
Geer, 57, says he first stumbled across this bit of history about 10 years ago through a meeting of the Washington Pilots Association.
The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa, wiping out about half the Soviet air force in the process, he explains. The U.S. was neutral at the time, but wanted to support Allied nations in the war effort.
That led to the Lend-Lease initiative, where the U.S. made ships, tanks, planes and other war equipment and lent/leased them to nations such as Canada and the Soviet Union.
U.S. neutrality meant that they could not initially fly warplanes directly into Canada, notes Kaftan, an amateur historian. That led to the strange sight of U.S. pilots landing at the Alberta border for Canadians to drag the planes across with horses.
The U.S. needed to get planes to Russia but it was too dangerous and too time-consuming to send them by ship, says Lech Lebiedowski, curator of the Alberta Aviation Museum at Edmonton's Blatchford Field.
They eventually decided to fly the planes up through Canada to Alaska where they would hand them off to Russian pilots. About 8,000 planes were shipped this way, all of which went through Blatchford Field.
"They literally came in waves," Lebiedowski continues, with up to 800 landing per day in 1943 – a world record at the time.
Inspired by what he'd learned, Geer says he created the Bravo 369 Flight Foundation to try and recreate this flight route and bring its story to the world. Now, after five years of fundraising and one trial run, he and his team are winging it in time for the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
The plane
About 5,000 of the planes shipped to Russia were P-39 and P-63 fighter planes, reports the Bravo 369 website. Just 54 were AT-6 Texans.
Working P-39s and P-63s are extremely rare nowadays, so Geer and his team decided to go with the Texan. They've also partnered with a Russian team that's flying parallel to their route in a Douglas C-47 Skytrain transport – another plane shipped along this route. (This particular one reputedly took part in the D-Day landings at Normandy.)
The Texan was used by the air force to train pilots to fly fighter planes, Geer says. It has a top speed of 338 km/h, gets about 805 kilometres per tank, and can mount twin .30 calibre machine guns in front or in a back-seat turret and a pair of 45 kilogram bombs under the wings.
Geer says his plane was built in 1943 and restored in 2004. While it didn't fly to Russia in the war, it was used to train pilots, and was at one point owned by a Canadian.
Texans were typically painted yellow when used as trainers, Kaftan says. Student pilots would often buzz low to read the town names off grain elevators, getting grain in their engine intakes as a result.
"The farmers used to call them 'Yellow Perils' because the used to make quite a noise."
A dangerous flight
The Alaska-Siberian air route started in Great Falls and came up through Alberta via Edmonton. The U.S. leg of the trip ended in Fairbanks, Alaska, after 4,800 km. The Russians then flew the planes 6,400 km over Siberia to Krasnoyarsk.
This was an extremely dangerous route, as temperatures would often dip as low as -60 C in the unheated cockpits, reports the Bravo 369 website. Frostbitten lungs and fingers were not uncommon.
Without modern radar and GPS systems, pilots had to navigate by compass and landmarks such as the Alaska Highway, Geer says.
That made the weather a huge hazard. Pilots would often get lost in the clouds or fly off course due to storms, crashing into mountains or in remote regions where rescue was impossible.
At least 177 pilots crashed and died along this route during the Second World War, say Geer and Lebiedowski. Many of those wrecks can still be found in the Canadian wilderness today.
Geer's flight is a bit easier in that he's got a heater, radio and GPS but is pretty close to what those pilots would have endured 70 years ago. The cockpit is hot and noisy, and he has to keep a constant eye on his gauges and surroundings.
"You're pretty drained after a three-hour flight."
Geer says he keeps himself occupied by flying formation with his support plane and taking in the landscape.
"The Prairies up here are beautiful to look at."
Geer says he's had a lot of chances to talk about the plane and the flight's history since setting off from Grand Falls on Monday. He's now off to Dawson Creek en route to Nome.
He and the Russian team will make a stop in Fairbanks to hold a formal hand-off ceremony at the Lend-Lease Monument on July 26, which depicts a Russian and an American pilot standing before a bronze cast of a propeller and nose from a P-39 fighter plane.
"To be there with our Russian partners, being able to hand the flight off just like we did in World War Two, is going to be an incredible experience."
Geer will head home from Nome (he couldn't get clearance to fly to Russia), but the Russians will fly the rest of the way to Krasnoyarsk in their C-47. Geer will rejoin them this August for the MAKS air show near Moscow, where the C-47 will be donated to a museum along with a plaque commemorating this flight project.
After that, Geer says he and his team will create a documentary based on the flight to preserve this history for the future.
"It needs to be told."
Visit bravo360.net for more on the flight.
