Robert Burns Ridley

Robert Burns Ridley was born in Toronto on November 19, 1922, to Arthur and Florence Ridley, who were both Canadian-born Brits. Robert was the third and final child of this middle-class household. Arthur worked in finance, meaning that he was educated and valued such for his sons. The Ridleys were active members of the local United Church.

The family moved to Port Credit within the first six years of Robert’s life, where he attended Forest Avenue Public School for his primary schooling. An active boy, he was a member of the Trail Rangers and played many sports, including tennis, rugby, and basketball. Robert’s academic achievements and his family’s socioeconomic status meant that secondary school was on his horizon.

Robert proceeded to Port Credit High School in September 1935. In addition to sports, he learned to play the clarinet and spent one year in his local cadet corps. He was a well-rounded student who was deemed “exceptional” by his principal. He graduated in June 1940, having achieved his Senior Matriculation with “excellent standing”. But despite Canada’s war effort ramping up and his upcoming eighteenth birthday, Robert’s schooling days were not yet over.

Robert spent the summer of 1940 working as a tire builder in Port Credit. He then spent one year at the University of Toronto, majoring in math and physics. This was a rather upper-middle-class trajectory, as the majority of young people were not able to continue their education to that length. His family lived in one of Canada’s biggest metropolis and was clearly well-off, but it was still considered important for Robert to gain some of his own work experience.

During the summer of 1941, Robert worked as a clerk in the Production Office of Small Arms Limited in Port Credit. He was living at home with his parents and was single at the time. The reason for this is unknown, but after three months Robert decided to leave the war-driven workforce and enlist with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).

The RCAF was quite selective in the trainees they accepted. They preferred healthy young men with upper-middle-class backgrounds and post-secondary education. The air force was perceived as a heroic and chivalrous service, a class above the army and navy in the public eye. Attracted by this image, young men of Robert’s background signed up in significant numbers.

Robert enlisted at the RCAF Recruiting Centre in Toronto on November 6, 1941, just weeks before his nineteenth birthday. To complete his enlistment paperwork and tests, he was taken on strength by the No.1 Manning Depot RCAF Toronto. The records show that he was a robust and healthy young man, at almost six feet tall and 184 pounds. His sporting and educational background significantly helped his case in RCAF selection, as he had no real prior military service to his name.

Robert’s community was very proud of him for being accepted into the RCAF, which spoke to the idealization of the Air Force in public perception. In December 1941, while visiting his parents for the weekend, Robert was presented with a token of good luck from his former employer, Small Arms Limited. It was a signet ring with the RCAF badge and a sterling silver identification bracelet. The excitement of being accepted into the RACF seemed to overshadow the likely danger of the service.

It took five months for Robert finally make it into the official RCAF training program, demonstrating that building Canada’s military was a lengthy process. During these five months at the RCAF depot in Toronto, Robert would have gone through the advanced medical assignments needed for the Air Force and learned about general military life. It took practice to make your bed just right or to salute correctly. He was starting as a fresh recruit, making these basic skills all the more important to master before further training commenced. Toronto’s close proximity to Port Credit meant that it was easy to visit his parents on a weekend off, with The Port Credit Weekly sometimes reporting the visits of a hometown hero.

Finally, Robert was sent to #1 Initial Training School (ITS) in Eglinton, just east of Toronto, in March 1942. The two-month ITS program was classroom-based, with a focus on subjects such as math, law and discipline, navigation, and signals. There were also physical and anti-gas drills to be done. Robert’s classmates could have been from many different countries, as RCAF training was within the wider British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). He excelled in this course, receiving a grade of 93% and ranking second out of the sixty-nine pupils in his class. The instructor remarked that Robert was “an alert, cool, dependable airman with above-average intelligence. Neat and tidy in habit and cheerful in manner…”

With his initial classroom training complete, Robert progressed to #12 Goderich for Elementary Flying Training School (EFTS), where he would finally get into the air. From August to September 1942, Robert trained hard with his thirty-three other classmates to learn their craft. In addition to more advanced lessons in the classroom on navigation, signals, and armament, the pupils finally entered the cockpit of an airplane. Using the single-engine Tiger Moth, they were tested on their navigation, landing, night flying, aerobatics, and general knowledge in the cockpit. In order to pass they had to log twenty hours of flying time.

As the training became more advanced, trainees unfit for the air force were weeded out. Those unable to be certified as airmen could be trained as ground crew or for other non-combat roles. Fortunately, Robert was still doing quite well. He scored 88% in his classroom tests, which put him in second place. In the flying skills section, he scored 69% and secured thirteenth place. Again, the instructor had only positive things to report and deemed him a “good type for service.” Robert was well on his way to becoming a combat airman.

Only three days after the conclusion of the EFTS course, Robert began the most difficult stage of his training thus far. It was at #9 Centralia (which had recently been moved from Summerside, Prince Edward Island) that he passed the Service Flying Training School (SFTS) examinations, but it was not without some difficulty. For four and a half months Robert and his classmates were taught and tested, which aimed to do a final weeding out of any trainees unable to meet the necessary standard.

The SFTS still had a classroom component, which built upon the trainees’ previous knowledge. Many of the subjects remained the same, save for the new additions of meteorology and practical applications of signals and armaments. As already demonstrated, Robert was a strong classroom learner and achieved 81%, which put him in sixteenth place out of fifty-nine pupils.

The new challenge was upgrading to a twin-engine plane. Robert tackled this using a twin-engine Avro Anson, which was of British design and popular for BCATP training. He was tested on the same skills as in a Tiger Moth at EFTS, but now had the challenge of a more powerful airplane under his control. It is clear that most trainees found this upgrade to be somewhat of a challenge, as Robert placed last in the top third of his class with only 71%. By February 1943 he had done a total of 194 recorded flying hours.

While one SFTS instructor had positive comments, the other thought Robert demonstrated nothing more than average skill and recommended that he was not commissioned as a pilot. Fortunately, Robert had enough positive reports on his record to drown out the one negative. He was commissioned with his pilot’s flying badge on February 9, 1943, fifteen months after his initial enlistment.

With the completion of SFTS, it was time for Robert to head overseas. However, he was first entitled to two weeks of embarkation leave, which allowed him to spend time in Port Credit and see his family and friends. Because all of his training had been completed in Ontario, Robert had never been far from home and did not have to waste leave travelling across the country. This was not the case for many soldiers, as they were scattered across the country in the intricate web of camps that made up the Canadian military machine.

Robert left Port Credit for No.1 “Y” Depot in Halifax in late February, which, sadly, was the last time he saw his family. Along with thousands of other troops, he departed from Halifax in a large convoy headed for the United Kingdom (UK). Early 1943 was a dangerous time to cross the Atlantic as German U-boats successfully sank thousands of Allied ships in the Battle of the Atlantic. Fortunately, Robert made it safely to the UK, arriving on March 17, 1943.

Robert’s training in Canada had built his foundational knowledge as a pilot, but it was his eight months of further training in the UK that prepared him for combat. The first few months focused on Beam Approach Training, on which Robert scored 67%. During this time he learned the intricacies of “beam” based navigation, which employed radio waves to guide pilots in stormy weather or the dark.

Next came two months of Advanced Flying Training, which was done in a twin-engine Airspeed Oxford. Robert struggled with this phase, scoring 60% in the flying tests and only 55% in the character and leadership assessment. His examiner remarked that Robert should not be considered for the role of a flight instructor, calling him “lazy and forgetful” and “careless in appearance.” These were rather significant changes from Robert’s previous assessments. While the degree of difficulty in training was certainly increasing, perhaps he was also struggling to adjust to life overseas.

The last component of Robert’s pilot training was in an Operational Training Unit, which took place in the final four months of 1943. The focus of this training was a culmination of everything he had learned thus far, with the addition of dropping bombs. From a Vickers Wellington, which was a twin-engine, long-range medium bomber, Robert dropped 51 day bombs and 54 night bombs. As usual, his best score came in the classroom component (81%), while he struggled with the flying tests (56%). But his commanding officers were confident in his skills and needed the extra trained men. Thus, after scoring 65% in the character and leadership assessment, Robert was recommended for active service.

Twenty-eight months after Robert had enlisted with the RCAF, he was finally combat-ready. In February 1944 he was taken on strength by a British unit – No.166 Squadron, Royal Air Force (RAF) based at RAF Kirmington. It was because of the BCATP that a high degree of interoperability was possible with airmen from around the Commonwealth.

He joined in on the RAF’s intense bombing campaign of Germany, attempting to destroy German infrastructure and weaken civilian morale. His life now consisted of long hours of waiting and sleeping during the day, followed by stressful nighttime bombing raids. This unique mixture of safety and extreme danger wore on airmen’s nerves as they hoped to complete their thirty successful missions, which would then earn them a six-month break from active combat.

Operational flying was dangerous and half of all Allied aircrew were killed in action, which was a faster rate than they could be replaced. Over 17,000 Canadian airmen died during the Second World War, and Robert became one of them on April 28, 1944. He was twenty-one years old and three months into his first tour of duty.

Robert’s Lancaster MK 1 was reported missing after bombing operations over Friedrichshafen, Germany, on the night of April 27. His had been one of 322 bombers assigned to the mission. Two of his crew had been able to parachute to safety over neutral Switzerland and eventually escaped back to England. But, according to eyewitness accounts, Robert piloted his burning aircraft away from the Swiss village of Hamikon in order to avoid harming the civilian population. That decision meant that he was too low to successfully bail out. Robert and four of his crew perished in the crash. They had completed sixty-seven flight hours together and even survived the deadly Nuremburg raid of March 30/31, 1944, which ninety-five bombers did not.

Robert and his crew were buried with full military honours by Swiss and British authorities in Vevey, Switzerland, alongside other Allied aircrew and First World War dead. Thus, he was able to be reclassified as “killed in action”. His mother had received the last letter her son wrote – while in London on leave on April 21 – only an hour before receiving the official notice that Robert’s plane was missing.

Robert’s story is not particularly unique in the case of Canadian airmen of the Second World War, however, it does well to humanize the BCATP. Robert’s educational achievements, middle-class upbringing, and athleticism made him an ideal candidate for the RCAF. He progressed steadily through the various levels of training in both Canada and the UK, which took a total of twenty-eight months. Unfortunately, his story ended with a deadly crash in Switzerland after only three months of operational combat.

This story map was made by the Project '44 team. Project '44 is a free online web map that maps out the North West Europe campaign from DDay on the 6th of June 1944 to Victory in Europe Day on the 8th of May 1945. You can visit our web map at map.project44.ca