Joey Jacobson's War Read online

  Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Usher, Peter J., 1941–, author

  Joey Jacobson’s war : a Jewish Canadian airman in the Second World War / Peter J. Usher.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77112-342-6 (pbk.). – ISBN 978-1-77112-344-0 (epub). –ISBN 978-1-77112-343-3 (pdf)

  1. Jacobson, Joey. 2. Flight navigators – Canada – Biography. 3. Airmen – Canada – Biography. 4. Great Britain. Royal Air Force. Squadron, 106. 5. World War, 1939–1945 – Aerial operations, British. I. Title.

  D786.U84 2018 940.54’4941092 C2017-904632-2

  C2017-904633-0

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  Cover design by Blakeley Words + Pictures. Front cover: top – Joe, Regina, 1940 (courtesy Janet Jacobson Kwass); bottom – A Handley-Page Hampden Mk. I of No. 455 Squadron RAAF, based at Leuchars in Scotland, May 1942. © Imperial War Museums (COL 182). Back cover: Air observer pupils and Anson trainer, No. 3 Air Observer School, Regina, 1940. Joe Jacobson is second from left (Canadian Jewish Archives).

  Text design by Mike Bechthold.

  © 2018 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

  Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

  www.wlupress.wlu.ca

  This book is printed on FSC® certified recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.

  Printed in Canada

  Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Father and Son

  One

  September 1939

  Two

  Preston

  Three

  Enlistment

  Four

  Toronto

  Five

  Regina

  Six

  Mossbank

  Seven

  Rivers

  Eight

  Montreal

  Nine

  Debert

  Part Two

  Discoveries

  Ten

  The North Atlantic

  Eleven

  The Blitz

  Twelve

  England

  Thirteen

  Operational Training

  Fourteen

  A Canadian’s Estimate of England

  Fifteen

  A Home Away from Home

  Sixteen

  Preparing for Battle

  Part Three

  Night Bombing

  Seventeen

  Bomber Command

  Eighteen

  Initiation

  Nineteen

  Confidence Affirmed

  Twenty

  The Four Horsemen

  Twenty-One

  Confidence Tested

  Twenty-Two

  A Brotherhood Lost

  Twenty-Three

  Action and Inaction

  Twenty-Four

  Questions and Doubts

  Twenty-Five

  Winding Down

  Part Four

  Holding the Line

  Twenty-Six

  New Ideas

  Twenty-Seven

  December Doldrums

  Twenty-Eight

  New Directions

  Twenty-Nine

  28 January 1942

  Part Five

  Failed to Return

  Thirty

  Requiem

  Thirty-One

  Holland

  Thirty-Two

  Epilogue

  Notes on Sources

  Notes

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Joey with sister Edith and brother Peter, ca. 1922

  Percy with Peter and Joey, ca. 1929

  Joey at Twin Lakes summer camp, Vermont, 1933

  Joey and May, Twin Lakes summer camp, ca. 1935

  Joey at 635 Grosvenor Avenue, Westmount, ca. 1938

  Joey in McGill Redmen practice jersey, ca. 1938

  Cecily Samuel, graduation photograph, University of Toronto, 1942

  Joe, Regina, 1940

  Joe in flying gear, with Anson trainer, Regina, 1940

  Air observer pupils, No. 3 Air Observer School, Regina, 1940

  Air observer pupils and Anson trainer, No. 3 Air Observer School, Regina, 1940

  Joe in flying gear, No. 2 Bombing and Gunnery School, Mossbank, Saskatchewan, 1940

  Joe in service uniform, with Fairey Battle trainer, Mossbank, Saskatchewan

  Joe on eastbound train, 19 February 1941

  106 Sqn. Hampden at RAF Finningley, April 1940

  Crew exiting a Hampden bomber (83 Sqn., October 1940)

  Hampden bombers in flight over the patchwork quilt of the English landscape

  The Hell Hooters, July 1941

  After a swim, July 1941

  Joe with Janine Freedman and Henriette Kostoris

  Tennis with Dan Kostoris, July 1941

  Joe at Midfield, July 1941

  Roger Rousseau and Joe, July 1941

  Target for Tonight recruiting poster

  Joe with Roger Rousseau in front of Mrs. Lettice’s house, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, late 1941

  Internal view, air observer’s cockpit, looking forward

  External view of the air observer’s cockpit

  Map – Joe’s objectives, showing distance from RAF Coningsby, and the Kammhuber Line

  106 Sqn. flying crew, September 1941

  A detail showing Gerry Roberts’ crew

  Joe and Monty Berger, England, late 1941

  Robin Selfe, 1941

  The cable that every family dreaded

  Joe’s headstone

  A Leo Passhuis photo of AT122 on the morning of 29 January 1942

  A second Leo Passhuis photo of AT122 on the morning of 29 January 1942

  Belgian labourers dismantling the wreck of AT122 shortly after the crash

  The horse-drawn hearses of the crew of AT122

  The townspeople of Lichtenvoorde in the funeral procession

  The funeral service for the crew of AT122

  Hendrik Leemreize with May and Percy Jacobson at Joe’s grave

  The graves of the crew of AT122

  Preface

  Four black horse-drawn carriages led the funeral cortège to the cemetery under leaden skies and light snow. Each bore the coffin of an unidentified flyer recovered from the wreckage of a Royal Air Force bomber. Several hundred Dutch townspeople and a platoon of German soldiers followed. The pastor who conducted the funeral service at Lichtenvoorde General Cemetery declared that the four unknown men had fallen for a cause they knew was just. His eulogy would soon be rewarded with a term in concentration camp. A few men surreptitiously recorded these events
on film, at risk of their own arrest. In this second winter of the occupation, the airplane that had dropped from the sky was a harbinger of help from afar. The funeral, which the townspeople had insisted on organizing, was their first act of collective defiance. Active resistance, notably by assisting downed Allied airmen to evade capture, would follow.

  One of those coffins contained the body of Flight-Sgt. Joseph Alfred Jacobson of Westmount, Quebec. He was the sole Canadian of the bomber crew that had crashed short of its target at Münster on 28 January 1942. He had had no doubts about the justice of the cause for which he fought. He had taken his copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man on his fatal flight.

  Joey, as his family and friends called him, was a privileged and ambitious son, a university graduate, and an accomplished athlete. He was the only Jew on McGill University’s 1938 league championship football team. In June 1940, he left behind a bright and secure future to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). Like many new recruits, he wanted to become a pilot, but he was selected for air observer training – navigating a bomber aircraft to the target and bombing it. That seemed like office work compared to flying the aircraft, but it was office work of the most dangerous kind.

  Even before he left Canada, Joey was convinced that he would be engaging in a mortal struggle for civilization: a total war in which there could be no partial or limited victory. When he arrived in England in May 1941, the British Empire stood alone against Germany, the depth of American commitment was as yet unclear, and the Soviet Union watched from the sidelines. The precariousness of the situation served only to fire his appetite for the struggle.

  Like so many young Canadians who volunteered for air force duty as spring turned to summer in 1940, Joey Jacobson did not survive. Unlike most of them, he recorded what he saw and did, who he met, what was happening around him, and how he interpreted and judged events as they unfolded, in over two hundred letters to family and friends and in several personal diaries and notebooks that did survive. His father Percy, a Montreal businessman, author, and playwright, also kept a diary throughout the war. Separated by four hundred miles after Joey left home in September 1939 for a factory job in Ontario, father and son began a weekly correspondence that would continue until that January night in 1942 when Joe failed to return. Over that time, their relationship changed from that of a youth still in passage to adulthood and needing fatherly guidance, to one of grown men confiding in each other their hopes and fears in uncertain times. Joey, the boy from Montreal, became Joe, the man in combat over Europe.

  The letters exchanged between a young man, who would be buried in Europe before his twenty-fourth birthday, and his family and friends in Montreal, testify to the struggle of war as experienced on the front line and in Canada. They reveal the state of mind that fuelled Joe’s convictions, and how those convictions inspired his actions. His letters home while training in Canada and England were full of amazement and discovery. Even during his most intense months of combat, Joe continued to write long letters home and keep detailed diaries that conveyed the immediacy of his experience. Joe lived his life with an intensity that burns through his letters. Percy was lit by that intensity for the time that Joe wrote home, and he was crushed by its absence. For Joe, his father’s counsel and understanding was his anchor in rough waters. Reading Joe’s diaries, discovered after his death, left Percy humbled by his son’s life and courage.

  It is those letters and diaries that lay claim on our attention today. None of their authors was of independent or enduring fame. Virtually all of those who knew and loved and mourned them are now dead. Hardly anyone now remembers the sound of their voices and their laughter, their mannerisms and expressions, their jokes, pranks, or preoccupations. It is through their letters and diaries that they wrote themselves into enduring visibility, and enabled us to put human faces and personalities on names carved in stone long ago.

  Letters are rarely bulletins from the deepest reaches of the writer’s soul, nor can they reveal more than a fragment of the writer’s thoughts and actions. Yet what is truly exceptional about Joe’s record is how much it does reveal. We know how he experienced and understood the execution of the war in the air, how he responded to the inevitable battle stress, and how he became both an idealist and a deadly serious warrior, because he told us.

  Also exceptional about Joey Jacobson’s account is the detail of his experience and the depth of his comprehension of the strategy, tactics, and effectiveness of Bomber Command’s attempt to destroy the nerve centres of Germany’s war-making capacity. In order to understand his story, therefore, I have also related in parallel the nature and progress of Bomber Command’s training and operations during that most discouraging time in 1941. Joey’s experience was shared by hundreds of Canadians who served in that early stage of the air war. His story, at least in part, is also theirs.

  Believing his views on air force operations would never pass the postal censors, Joe Jacobson recorded them in his private diaries and notebooks that were secreted home after his death. Both Joe and his father considered that their letters and diaries could serve as rough drafts of history. Letters were their forum for discussion and debate, and their means to challenge each other to live each day to the fullest in accord with their ideals. Joey expected much of his friends, and Percy expected much of him. Joe’s letters and diaries brought news of things far beyond the experience of those at home in Canada. More than a record of daily life in air force service, they addressed existential questions of purpose and perseverance in the face of danger and death. He made no attempt to conceal the risks, even as he reassured his family of the rightness of his task and his dedication to it. He had a gift for letter writing. He could tell a good story about events and exploits, and paint a deft character sketch. More than that, setting out his hopes and fears was a means for Joe to push himself to carry on night after night to face whatever fate he had volunteered to encounter and still get the most out of life. Writing was the means by which Joe sought to understand his life.

  Servicemen’s letters may be questioned as reliable indicators of attitude and emotion because they are normally written (under the watchful eye of the censor) to minimize distress and sustain morale at home. Joe Jacobson’s letters, however, made little effort to please or dissemble. Personal wartime diaries, because they are necessarily kept secret, are thought to offer better access to the actuality of experience and mood. Joe and Percy’s letters and diaries, in combination, provide exceptional insight to the state of mind of their authors. Joe’s attitudes, actions, and outlook emerge unreconstructed by subsequent reflection or events. The record is remarkably complete, and without mysterious gaps. Joe wrote letters home at least weekly, and virtually all were received and preserved. He made entries in his personal diary, kept not only as a record of events but also of self-reflection and self-improvement, every day for the last year of his life. He also kept an operational diary, and several notebooks on his views of the air war and the books he was reading.

  Yet even such a richness of sources only hints at some things and reveals nothing about others. I have speculated about some of the inevitable missing spaces, but I have avoided attributing dialogue or thoughts for which there is no evidence. When Joey was nineteen he confided to his diary that he had a strong tendency to exaggerate: “I improve upon and often distort facts. I shall try to be more precise.” Keeping this self-admitted proclivity for embellishment in mind I have sought, with the aid of both official and unofficial sources, to distinguish among what may be true, what cannot be true, and what is undoubtedly true, to the extent that those distinctions matter.

  As readers will divine, these are men’s letters. Women are spoken of, but rarely speak for themselves, mainly because so few of their letters have survived. I have omitted the mundane, along with the family news and gossip (important as that was in sustaining the connection with home and family), although those elements have grounded my description of Joey’s home life and background, espe
cially in Part One. Where dates are unrecorded in the original (or are apparently incorrectly recorded), I have tried to reconcile them with or infer them from other sources, so far as is possible. I have taken the liberty of correcting obvious typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors. These were few in the original, mostly the consequence of haste and immediacy at the time of writing. Otherwise I have not edited the authors’ particular styles of writing, which convey both their personalities and their time. To distinguish among the source materials, a three- or four-letter code precedes the date of each item: PJD for Percy Jacobson’s diaries and PJL for his letters, JJD for Joe’s diaries (except for his operational diary, which is denoted as JJOD), JJL for his letters, and JJN for his notebooks. Other writers are identified by their full name.

  The air offensive against Nazi Germany began on the first day of the war and continued until a few days before its end. Bomber Command’s objectives, capabilities, and strategies evolved rapidly during those years, as did the training and capabilities of the aircrews charged with carrying them out. Those Canadians who volunteered at the outset went into action when the bombing war brought little to cheer about. Rarely were Germany’s industries and railways brought to a standstill, despite well-publicized bombing attacks on them. When they were it was not for long. Germany’s battleships and submarines continued to prowl the seas in 1941. Unknown to those reading and listening to news bulletins at home was that on any given night, more of Bomber Command’s flyers were killed in the air than were Germans on the ground. Bomber Command’s learning curve would be steep, its losses high, and its successes few. The popular heroes of those early years were the Spitfire pilots who had turned the tide in the Battle of Britain. Bomber Command’s spectacular successes, like the dam-buster raid and the attack on the V-2 rocket facility at Peenemünde, were another two years off. Those who served in the early years of the strategic air offensive did so with no less courage and determination than the pilots of Fighter Command, but with far less tangible reward. Nor was their cup sweetened by postwar controversies about the effectiveness and morality of the bombing of Germany.