Ah, Canada. Our diagnosably chill neighbor to the north is indeed a study in extremes. Of late, our Canadian friends have suffered from a protracted spate of liberal governance. As near as I can tell, that seems to have lowered serum testosterone levels among Canadian males across the board.
Their Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, looks like a movie star. I’ll give him that. However, he and his family tried to pass themselves off as Indian during an official junket to the sub-continent. Nobody bought it. He also once corrected a woman at a meet and greet with, “We like to say ‘peoplekind,’ not necessarily ‘mankind,’ because it’s more inclusive.” Wow. To paraphrase Star Wars, the wokeness is strong in his family….
A list of famous Canadian media personalities includes Jim Carrey, Seth Rogen, Ryan Gosling, Michael Cera, Ryan Reynolds, and Mike Myers. Funny? Absolutely, but not exactly paragons of manliness. Keanu Reeves is a gleaming exception, but he was actually born in Beirut.
That was not always the case. Back during World War 2, Canada produced some of the manliest men on the planet. Among them was a curiously awesome insecure extrovert named George Beurling. His buddies called him, among other things, “Screwball.”
The George Beurling Origin Story
Some people are born with a proclivity for music, dance, or oratory. George Beurling was a natural-born pilot. The 3rd of five children born in 1921 to a religiously conservative family in Verdun, Quebec, Canada, George’s father was a commercial artist. His parents wanted the kid to go into art or medicine. Fate had other plans.
At age six, George and his father made a model airplane. He took his first flight in a real plane at age 9. From that point forward, he began skipping school to spend time with the mechanics and pilots at the local aerodrome. He built and sold model airplanes to make money for flying lessons. The boy studied WW1 air combat tactics and, thanks to his fundamentalist upbringing, assiduously avoided tobacco, alcohol, or the company of questionable women. He first took the controls of an airplane at age 12 and soloed in 1938 at age 17.
George was so consumed with airplanes that his grades cratered. He dropped out of school in the Ninth Grade wanting more stick time. He eventually found a job as a copilot for a company that hauled air freight. It was tedious work that consisted predominantly of navigating, but it built up his flight time in an era when there weren’t a whole lot of experienced pilots in circulation. With war clouds brewing, he tried to stow away on a tramp steamer headed for China, intending to fly as a mercenary with the Chinese Nationalist Air Force. However, he was apprehended while passing through America and served two months in jail.
Enlisted
With WW2 now on full boil, Beurling presented himself to his nearest Royal Canadian Air Force recruiting station ready to fight the Jerries. However, the recruiters refused his application, disparaging his school performance and honestly denting his pride in the process. By now both angry and frustrated, he signed on as a crewmember of the munitions ship Valparaiso and struck out across the Atlantic at the height of the U-boat war.
Once in Glasgow, he sought out a recruiting office only to be told he could not enlist without a birth certificate, which he had forgotten to retrieve before his departure. He signed on yet again on a ship returning to Canada that was actually torpedoed en route. Once finally safely back on Canadian soil, he went straight home, fetched the piece of paper, and crewed yet another merchant vessel back past the wolf packs. Kind of makes you appreciate the miracle of FedEx, doesn’t it?
Straight To Training
Now finally wearing an RAF uniform, Beurling bypassed basic flying school and went straight to OTS or the Operational Training School. It was here that he learned the rudiments of the Supermarine Spitfire.
I have had the privilege of flying a vintage Spitfire, and it is indeed an incredible machine. For George Beurling, the Spitfire cockpit became home. He had finally found his calling.
Like most young soldiers, Beurling had a stylized image of what war was really like. He imagined chivalrous engagements between gentlemen that were decided based upon relative skill and quickness on the trigger. However, during a brief period of leave in London, he came across a little girl with her arm blown off in a bombing raid, whom he got to safety. Later that same day he encountered another girl whose leg was trapped in her basement as it was rapidly filling up with water from a broken water main. He helped support the young woman while a local surgeon amputated her limb on the spot and saved her life. These experiences sparked a white hot hatred of the Nazis in George Beurling.
“Superhuman” Beurling
While Beurling was indeed an exceptional natural pilot, he also had uncanny eyesight and a near-supernatural gift for aerial gunnery. Flying Mk V Spitfires equipped with nothing more than a simple ring and post gunsight, Beurling consistently pulled off the most extraordinary deflection shots on fast-moving targets.
Beurling was a great pilot, but he was a handful to lead. He was consistently assigned the tail-end Charlie spot in the RAF’s antiquated standard four-ship diamond formations. In this position, his primary job was to troll for Luftwaffe aircraft attacking from the rear while leaving the other three ships free to hunt. This didn’t suit the brash young Canadian, so he quite frequently abandoned his position to go on the offensive alone. This tendency bought him several victories but did not endear him to his squadron mates. For his sins, Beurling was posted to Malta.
Well-Positioned In The War
At this point in the war, Malta was a meat grinder. German and Italian planes pounded the small island mercilessly. The lyrically outnumbered Commonwealth defenders fought back as best they could, but they were frequently overwhelmed. However, there was killing to be done here, and George Beurling had a gift.
Originally christened “Buzz” by his RAF mates back in England, once he became operational in Malta, Beurling was known as “Screwball.” To keep his marksmanship skills sharp, Beurling began hunting the ubiquitous lizards that populated the airfield and its environs. Armed with his .38-caliber Webley pistol, Beurling would stalk the reptiles until they approximated the relative size of a German fighter at his preferred engagement range of 250 yards. He would then strive to dispatch the beasts with a single round. Along the way he made a substantial impact on both the local lizard population and Hitler’s Mediterranean aviation assets.
These were not the chivalrous aerial duels of WW1 about which Beurling had so exhaustively read in his youth. Pilots on both sides were often machine-gunned, both under a canopy and in the water after having been brought down in combat. German pilots who bailed out over the island seldom survived their initial encounters with the local population. As days became weeks, Beurling’s score steadily rose.
A Steep Descent
Beurling lost friends and took lives with wanton abandon. Eventually, all the other pilots with whom he had been close had been killed, so he took to spending his free time alone. Additionally, like most everyone at the base, Beurling was plagued with relentless dysentery. After a few short months, he had lost fully fifty pounds that he didn’t have to lose. Despite his conservative Christian upbringing, George Beurling had matured into a seasoned killer of men. He carried a Bible given him by his mother in his shirt pocket during every combat mission, but he had no compunction about slaughtering the enemy at every opportunity.
Reminiscing
Eventually the combination of refractory diarrhea and a variety of combat injuries rendered him too weak to continue fighting. He was subsequently evacuated back to Canada for a period of rest and recovery. He was later interviewed for the Brian Nolan book Hero. Here is an insight into his mindset after so many months of unfettered slaughter—
“I came right up underneath his tail.” Beurling was going faster than the other guy. “I was tending to overshoot. I weaved off to the right, and he looked out to his left. I weaved to the left and he looked out to his right. So, he still didn’t know I was there. About this time I closed up to about thirty yards, and I was on his portside coming in at about a fifteen-degree angle. Well, twenty-five to thirty yards in the air looks as if you’re right on top of him because there is no background, no perspective there and it looks pretty close. I could see all the details in his face because he turned and looked at me just as I had a bead on him.”
“One of my cannon shells caught him in the face and blew his head right off. The body slumped and the slipstream caught the neck, the stub of the neck, and the blood streamed down the side of the cockpit. It was a great sight anyway. The red blood down the white fuselage. I must say it gives you a feeling of satisfaction when you actually blow their brains out.”
Beurling – An Unbearable Companion
Beurling eventually made it back to Europe but he was still impossible to be around. Finally, toward the end of 1944, he downed a pair of German FW-190 fighters, raising his final score to 31. After having been rejected for service by the RCAF, Screwball Beurling ended up the highest-scoring Canadian fighter pilot of the war. He bested his next-closest competition by ten downed planes. However, the toxic combination of his wartime experience and his caustic personality made him intolerable.
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He returned home a hero and was married. However, his young wife left him in short order. Commercial airlines would not hire him, given his well-deserved reputation as a cowboy pilot who ignored the rules. Right after the war, he was tragically reduced to begging for food on Montreal street corners.
Beurling Wraps It Up
Sensing opportunity, Beurling signed on to smuggle warplanes into Israel in support of the nascent nation’s struggle for independence. The money was good, and he had always wanted to fly the Mustang, a type that the fledgling Israeli Air Force was known to operate. Alas, while piloting a Noruuyn Norseman cargo plane out the Urbe Airport in Rome, Beurling had an engine failure on takeoff, crashed, and died. Sabotage was suggested but never proved.
George Beurling was the classic “Break Glass in Case of War” pilot. Brash, unpleasant, and amazingly gifted, he used his near-superhuman talents to kill the enemy at every opportunity. Ultimately, he died as he lived, at age 26, at the controls of a rickety airplane. George Beurling was the archetypal war junkie.
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