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We went up to intercept a mixed raid of bombers and fighters," said Beurling. "We got over them, went through the fighters to get at the bombers. Then the bombers turned and beat it for Sicily. So we were left with just the fighters."
"Where was this, George?" asked Beurling's father. "Right over Malta?"
"No, just off the island. The odds were about eight to one against us."
"Eight to one!" I exclaimed.
"Oh, that's not uncommon," said young George Beurling, D.S.O., D.F.C., D.F.M. and Bar, Canadian ace of the R.A.F., lifting his lanky six-foot-one up in his Montreal hospital bed and shoving back his mop of yellow hair, "I've been up when the odds were twenty to one. But in this case it was only eight to one."
"Briefly, what happened?" I asked.
"I went after a group of four - two Jerries and two Eyties. I hit one - blew pieces off him. He made a couple of spins, went down, and crashed just off shore. Then I attacked another and blew him up. Then two Messerschmitt 109's passed under me, but I half rolled onto them and went under them and gave one a burst in his belly. Just as he went down, another 109 attacked me and I damaged him, but didn't bring him down. That was three, and one damaged. I came down to refuel. Then another raid came over, and I went up and we attacked six 109's. A couple of our fellows got hit and had to bail out, but I sailed in and destroyed another Jerry - he fell into the sea. That made four. Then I attacked another and he streamed black smoke, but I didn't see him hit the deck. Well, that made four in the bag that morning -and one probable. So, said Beurling, with a grin, "they thought I ought to take the afternoon off. They thought I looked kind of tired."
"Were you7"
"No, not much."
Beurling's father looked across at me, his blue eyes sparkling with satisfaction.
One, two, three, four enemy planes brought down in a forenoon - many a fighter would consider that a good bag for a season - and Beurling ticked them off as casually as if they had been four partridges.

Creature of the Air
This lad George Beurling, now only twenty-one years old, is a phenomenon worth study. Not alone because his story is thrilling (and it's plenty thrilling), not alone because his total bag up to date of twenty-nine enemy planes brought down, plus three probables and nine damaged, is very close to the top R.A.F. record and the best by far any Canadian or American can show in this war, but chiefly for two other reasons.
One: he is man-in-the-air incarnate, completely a creature of the air, more completely than I dreamed any human being could be. Since he was six, this lad has been fascinated by the air, scheming every hour of every day how to get into the air and stay there, up in the air constantly since he was fifteen, a pilot at seventeen, and now at twenty-one a master of the air, unhappy on the ground, happy in the air, thinking of his life and his future only in terms of the air. Thus Beurling is a sharp clear-cut symbol of the future.
Two: he is the war killer incarnate - hard, cold, ruthless when engaged in air fighting. Beurling will tell you that his superb record is partly due to luck, but actually it is due to the fact that he has studied his job of killing the enemy, and keeps constantly studying it, and pursues the job with relentless precision. He is, in fact, what every man of the armed forces of the United Nations must be if we are to win this war.
Beurling puts it this way: "There is no room for stupid softheartedness in this war. The enemy is trying to get you; it is up to you to get him first - hard and plenty."
George Beurling has been putting this conviction into practice with calculated scientific skill.
When he says, "I blew him up," "I gave him a burst," it doesn't mean he simply cut loose at an enemy plane, hoping to bring it down. It means that - whenever possible - he has fired at the enemy plane from a certain intended distance, at an intended moment and an intended angle, and often at an intended spot in the enemy plane.
His first bag is an example. It was in April, 1942. For months, at training camps in England, he had been itching to get into action, and then suddenly his squadron was assigned as part of a daylight sweep of Spitfires into France escorting bombers in a raid on Lille. Beurling asked to be put last in the squadron - the most dangerous spot. "There wasn't much action over France at that time," he said, "and I thought if I was last man I might see some fun."
A squadron leader doesn't like to ask a man to take last position, Beurling explained. If the man happens to get knocked off, then the leader will feel responsible. But if a man volunteers, it's fine. No one's to blame but himself. The trip to the objective was comparatively uneventful, but on the way back to England, a swarm of Focke-Wulf 190's attacked the sweep. Five of them attacked Beurling.
"One after another tried to get on my tail," said Beurling, "and I kept whipping around to get them off." Then by a trick of his own, Beurling almost stopped his plane in midair. The Focke-Wulf, which was behind him at that moment, shot past and crossed in front of him. "By the speed he passed me, I judged he was going at 450 miles an hour," said Beurling. "So at about 300 yards I allowed him four and a half rings and gave him a two and a half second burst."
The six guns of the Spitfire - two 20 millimeter cannon and four .303 machine guns - are arranged so that their fire converges at about 300 yards. That is the ideal distance. If a plane is traveling 100 miles an hour across your sights, you aim the diameter of your ring-sight ahead of it. This Focke Wulf was going 450 miles an hour across Beurling's sights, so he aimed a distance of four and a half rings ahead. In other words, he fired so that the enemy plane and his bullets and shells met in the air at the same spot and the same moment. It all happened in seconds, but it was done with expert precision. "The Jerry exploded," said Beurling, "and went down in a trail of black smoke."

No Time For Fear
When George was a kid of six, in Verdun, a Montreal suburb, he came home on the run one day sobbing: "They're chasing me!" His father said: "George, I'm going to teach you how to defend yourself." He took the boy downtown and finally found a pair of little boxing gloves that fitted him. "I used to get down on the floor and teach him how to box," said his father. "Soon he was good enough to give me a good fight. I said, "George, I don't want you to look for a fight, but I don't want you to run away.'"
Since then George has never run away. He has let the other fellow do the running. When I asked him whether he was ever afraid, as for instance when once he was alone over Malta against twenty enemy planes, he said, wrinkling his brow: "Why, mister, in a fight I don't have time to be afraid."
Incidentally, George doesn't smoke or drink. His family brought him up that way and he thinks abstinence is a good thing for his air fighting.
At the same age of six his father made him a model airplane and from that moment George began to watch the skies and dream of flying. When he was eleven he began to hang around the nearest airdrome, the Curtiss-Reid Flying School at Cartierville. He said to his father: "How can I get over that fence?" "Well," his father said, "get one leg over, and when they get used to seeing one leg over, get the other leg over, and then jump down inside." So George did, and presently he was a pet of the pilots and mechanics. They let him hang around and ask questions because they saw he was no idler but really interested and intelligent. Pilots took him up on flights. His passion for planes and flying go him the nickname "Buzz", which has always stuck to him. By the time he was fourteen, he was taking flying lessons. He paid for them by selling newspapers and doing odd jobs around the airdrome, washing off planes, helping roll them in and out of the hangar, running errands for pilots. His greatest pal and mentor, a bush pilot named Ted Hogan, used to take George along on trips into the bush country north of Montreal, delivering freight and passengers to mining camps, and on these trips George often handled the stick.

George Beurling and Ted Hogan, the man who, for George, started it all

"When George was fourteen or fifteen," said his father, "I remember when we'd be walking along the street he would suddenly burst out, 'Pop, do you know what Rickenbacker did when he had four Jerries on his tail?' Or, 'Remember Richthofen, that big German ace? Do you know what he did when he was outnumbered three to one—?' George studied the air battles in the other war and he could describe and argue about the tactics of all the leading fliers. He ate, drank and slept airplanes and especially air fighting." To test George, his father tried to interest him in his own profession, that of a commercial artist, but George couldn't see it. The air for him. An uncle, a doctor, offered to put George through medical school. His parents favored that; his mother, especially, thought George had the makings of a surgeon. But George couldn't see it. The air, the sky and its freedom, for him. In 1939, when he was seventeen, just about the time he got a flying permit, he lit off for Vancouver, riding the rods, and tried to enlist in the Chinese Air Force. "I thought I'd see some good fighting out there," he said with a grin. Balked in his attempt at Vancouver, he tried to get to San Francisco, planning to hop a ship to China. "I knew if I got out to China, I could get into the Air Force," he said. But U.S. officials stopped him at the border - he had no papers and no money - and sent him home. He tried to enlist with the Finland Air Force. His dad, who is of Scandinavian ancestry, blocked that. He tried to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. They advised him to go back to finish high school - he had another year. "So," he said, "I thought I'd try the R.A.F." A friend told him there was a munitions ship down at the docks needing deckhands. He rushed down, signed on and sailed. This was the summer of '40. It was an exciting trip. The convoy was attacked several times. George's ship narrowly missed being torpedoed.

Spots 'Em First
During his R.A.F. training in England, George paid especial attention to two things. He trained his eyesight. "I would pick out a hill in the distance," he said, "then a tree on that hill, then a branch of that tree, and bring my eyes to focus on it and try to make out the details as quickly as possible. By doing that again and again, I found I could spot aircraft in the sky and distinguish what they were quicker than other fellows could."
At Malta, it was said that he could always spot a squadron of approaching enemy planes before anybody else. Also he constantly trained his eyes to take in the whole heavens in one searching and regularly repeated glance "You've got to do that constantly when there may be enemy planes about," he said. "Especially you've got to watch the sky above you - that's the dangerous place - and when you look, make sure there's nothing there, or if there is, what it is."
He paid special attention to shooting. In Canada, knowing he was going to be an air fighter, he and a friend had practiced with an old Vickers machine gun. Especially he studied "deflection shooting," believing from his study of air combats that it was a vital factor - possibly the most vital - in success in the air. Deflection shooting means shooting which takes into account the angle of your plane to the enemy plane, their respective speeds and the distance they are from each other. If you were always dead on the tail of the other fellow and always got him dead in the bull's eye when you fired, you wouldn't need to know anything about deflection shooting. "But," asks George Beurling, "how often does that happen? Most times you are coming at him on an angle and he has one speed, and you another, so there are several factors to take into account. Without knowing deflection shooting, I'd have a bag of five or six today instead of twenty-nine."
Beurling has become such a master of deflection shooting that the British Air Ministry now has a book he has written on the subject, for the use of R.A.F. pilots.
In getting his second bag, Beurling had a narrow squeak. Determination, quick wit and skill brought him out of it. His squadron was on a fighter sweep over the French coast near Calais. Attacked by a swarm of FW-190's, they were outnumbered five or six to one. Beurling, again in the rear by his own request, got all the fun he wanted. "I got it from both sides," he said, "cannon shells and machine-gun bullets. The plane bucked and shuddered with the impact. I thought it was going out of control. Shrapnel pierced the cockpit and got me in the ribs. My port cannon and machine guns were knocked out of action, my starboard cannon was knocked loose so it was pointing down and flapping in the breeze, my only effective guns were my two starboard machine guns. A shell burst inside one wing, blowing it up to three times its size, so the whole lift of the wing was thrown off - the wing was actually wobbling. And I was out over the middle of the Channel. I thought for a minute I'd have to bail out. Then the Jerries came at me again - six of them. I pulled my plane around and flew right into the sun. The Jerries who were on my tail turned and flew after me, but the sun must have blinded them as I thought it would. They flew right on over me without seeing me. I gave the middle one a burst with my two machine guns. He was only fifty yards ahead of me. I couldn't hear the guns, as only two were firing, and thought I'd run out of ammunition, but he blew up, and the other Jerries beat it for France."
And George staggered home toward England....his plane riddled, the engine shot through and through and leaking, one wing almost falling off...but he got home.
A month or so later, he went to Malta. A fellow he knew had been detailed there, but didn't want to go because he had a wife in England, so Beurling volunteered in his place. "I understood Malta was a hot spot, so I thought I might get some good fighting."

The Hottest Spot On Earth
At that time, last summer, and indeed all through early fall, Malta was the hottest spot on earth. Raids of German and Italian bombers and fighters would come over from Sicily, sixty miles distant, seven or more times a day, beginning at four in the morning, day after day. Then there would be a few days' lull, and it would begin again. There would be perhaps fifteen bombers and from fifty to one hundred and fifty fighters, and against this the island's defenders often had only eight, ten or twelve planes. Once there were only four Spitfires on hand to protect the island. (Of course today Malta is better defended)
The purpose of the attacks was to destroy the airdrome and the shipping, and make Malta ineffective as a base from which air attacks could be launched in aid of the armies in Libya. But due to the brilliant defense by the R.A.F., the enemy signally failed to destroy Malta. In this defense, Buzz Beurling played a star role. He destroyed twenty-seven enemy aircraft and helped boost the total of his squadron to over three hundred planes brought down - the best record of any fighting squadron in the world.
On account of the nearness of the airdromes from which the enemy took off, the advance warning was very short. Even if the R.A.F. felt sure a raid would be coming at a certain hour, they couldn't send fighters up ahead of time to meet it, because of the shortage of petrol. The Spitfires had to remain on the ground till the raid was actually reported. Then they took off.
"It would take us about ten minutes to get up to twenty thousand feet, maybe fifteen to get to thirty thousand," said Beurling. "After we got in the air, the airdrome would let us know what was coming. It might radio, 'Boys, there's some Jerries coming.' and in that case we would look alive, but they might say, 'Boys, there's some Ice-cream Merchants coming over, take it easy.' Then we could relax. The Eyties are comparatively easy to shoot down. Oh, they're brave enough. In fact, I think they have more courage than the Germans, but their tactics aren't so good. They are very good fliers, but they try to do clever acrobatics and looping. But the Eyties will stick it even if things are going against them, whereas the Jerries will run."
Beurling would watch the flying of an enemy squadron and pick out the really good ones and go for them. "After a pilot has made one or two turns you can tell if he is really good and worthy of a fight," said Beurling. The really good ones, he explained, are the boys to get rid of first, because they will wait outside and at the right moment come in, whish, and knock you out.
On one occasion he engaged a number of enemy fighters that were escorting Junkers 88 bombers and shot down two. In the evening of the same day he went up to help repel another raid and shot down another fighter at 800 yards. "I elevated my guns to get him at that range. I wasn't sure I had him at first but he was seen to fly ten miles out to sea and explode."
"I had a wonderful ground crew," he went on. "They deserved as much credit as I did. They always kept my plane in perfect shape. Sometimes when I came down riddled full of holes, they spent half the night patching up my ship so I could go up again in the morning."
Of course it is more valuable to bring down a bomber than a fighter, Beurling said, but a fighter is more fun, because it can give you a better scrap. He learned just where to hit a bomber to knock it out.
"Suppose you hit one in the bomb rack?" I said.
Beurling's face lighted up. "Then it's really good, the whole thing goes up with a bang!" As Beurling developed his tactics and his system of deflection shooting, he began to knock them off with a sureness and regularity that astonished and delighted his pals. It was said at Malta that if there was anything in the sky when Beurling went up, he would get it. He studied air firing so carefully that he rarely fired except from the exact range from which his guns were harmonized for maximum concentration. If he fired from a shorter distance, thus encountering the possibility that the fire from his two wing-cannons might pass to either side of the target, he made allowances and aimed so that one of his cannons would be certain of striking home.
Once last August he was up with another fighter and the other man's engine developed trouble and he had to go down, leaving Beurling alone facing twenty enemy fighters. They poured a hail of bullets into him. One got under him and put a cannon shot in the belly of his ship, wounding Beurling with shrapnel in the heel. The tail of his plane was riddled; the top of his cockpit shot away, but his guns kept firing. "I got one of them" he said, "then the others kind of faded away. I think they were running out of gas."
Not long after that, he and another pilot were mixed up with fifteen. Beurling shot down one Messerschmitt, then all the rest of the enemy came for him, riddling him with bullets. Suddenly his engine conked out. He would have bailed out, but he found that he had picked up somebody else's parachute - the harness was very loose and Beurling was afraid that if he jumped, he would be brought up with such a jolt that he might rupture himself. So he put his ship's nose down and glided precipitously to the island, a twenty-five thousand foot drop. Malta is a very difficult place on which to make a crash landing, for the island is all divided up into small fields separated by high stone walls. To hit one of those walls would be fatal. Beurling picked out the biggest field he could see, one that looked little bigger than a big backyard, and dove for that.
"I had seen a couple of crash landings in the movies here in Canada, and I noticed that they always took the force of the crash on one wing. So I stuck one wing down and when we hit, I hardly felt the shock," he said. "My plane was smashed, but all the damage I got was my arm ripped open and a few scratches."
He caught a truck ride back to the airdrome, had his arm sewed up, and in half an hour he was up again in the thick of another raid. "We were short of pilots that day," he said.

"A Wonderful Show" Beurling's mother, who happened to be in the hospital room as he was telling this part of the story, looked at her son and sighed with relief. Then she said: "What about night fighting on Malta, George? Did you have much of that' Beurling rose up in bed excitedly. "It's a wonderful show! Best on earth! Lights, red, green and yellow from the shells, red strings of flame, 'onions,' they call them, like great yellow fingers - aircraft caught in the searchlights - aircraft falling in flames, flaming pieces falling off and being caught by the wind! Oh, Mom, it's really great! When they drop their incendiaries they just cover the whole island, it's like liquid hot metal, one big solid mass. You see high explosives hit the aircraft and explode in a deep red glow! And you're up there too -" Now Beurling was standing up beside his bed, his face glowing, his blue eyes shining, a tall blond Viking of the air. "- sometimes your own anti-aircraft guns pick you up and cut loose. Once I was up at night looking for Junkers bombers and I saw shells curving up and then turning and coining toward me. I thought they were firing at a Junkers, but then I realized they were firing at me! They thought I was a Jerry! I radioed down to quit it and they radioed back, 'Okay.' Oh, it's terrific, and wonderful! I wish I was back there this minute!" He sank back in bed. I could imagine Beurling's mother saying to herself, "I'm thankful he's not..."

"Aw shucks" - Beurling meets Mackenzie King, then Prime Minister of Canada. Also present is Beurling's Father (left), his two brothers (in front), his Mom (in the fur) and AVM L. S. Breadner is behind her. According to Breadner, King did everything "but crown him."

As Beurling's score rose at Malta, he got citation after citation. First, the Distinguished Flying Medal, then a bar to that medal. He was offered a commission, but for a time refused it, saying frankly that he wanted to remain a sergeant. But later he was persuaded to accept a commission as Pilot Officer, equivalent to Second Lieutenant. Then he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. "A relentless fighter whose determination has won the admiration of his colleagues," said this last citation.
Because of the strain of constant air raids day and night, other fighter pilots on Malta worked on alternate days, one day on, one day off, but "Buzz" Beurling worked straight through, "because," he says, "I loved it."
Other pilots could stand only two months or so of it at a stretch, then had to get away on leave. Beurling was there almost five months straight and probably would be there yet if he hadn't been shot down and wounded.
On a day in October, Beurling went up in a squadron of eight fighters to meet a raid of bombers and fighters.
"I spotted them coming from the east," he said, "and we climbed to get above them. My leader destroyed one fighter, No. 2 damaged another, and I half rolled onto a bomber, hit him and set him afire; his wing fell off and he spun down. But just as he fell, the gunner got a shot at me from below - wounded me in the arm and fingers. Then I saw a Messerschmitt attacking my leader. I gave him a couple of seconds' burst; he spun into the sea. Then I heard two Spitfires calling for help down below. I went down in a power dive at about 600 miles an hour, got under the whole formation of enemy planes, came up under one Jerry and blew off one of his wings. But another had followed down; I didn't think anybody could be as fast, but he was, and he gave me a burst, shot my controls away and put cannon shells into the belly of my plane. Shrapnel got me in the foot. There I was at eighteen thousand feet, my engines out of control, doing a power dive in spirals down toward the sea. My engine was on fire, flames coming over toward me. I tried to climb out of the cockpit, but the way I was spinning, centrifugal force pressed me into my seat. I fought to get out and at the last minute I did get out and jump. Another split second and it would have been too late."
The power dive had taken him from eighteen thousand feet to one thousand feet above the sea in an unimaginably brief tick of time. His parachute opened. He floated gently down into the Mediterranean. A power launch rushed out from shore and picked him up. His foot was bleeding badly; shrapnel had cut an artery. He went right to the operating room. While he lay in hospital, he was awarded the D.S.O., an honor usually reserved for senior officers.
Shortly afterward the R.C.A.F. asked that Beurling, Canada's greatest air hero of this war, be granted leave to come home. He came - narrowly missing death in a plane crash at Gibraltar which killed fifteen of his fellow passengers - and I found him chafing in a hospital bed, crazy to get back into action. When he gets on his pins, he will make a tour of Canada talking to young air recruits, telling them what air fighting is like, what to look out for in a fight, how to train for fighting. "But I want to get back to Malta," he said.
I say again, this lad Beurling is the kind of fighter all our men in the armed forces should be if we are to win this war.

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Beurling, back in Canada, sits in the cockpit of a Hurricane checking out its sights

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--- Beurling ---

--- Canadian Aces ---

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