- 2 days ago
Five Canadian pilots found the one weakness of the German Me 262 and turned an “untouchable” jet into a burning wreck over a Dutch village. Over the Waal River near Nijmegen, Spitfires of 401 Squadron RCAF chased a jet that had outrun every Allied fighter they had ever tried to catch, then changed the fight by refusing to chase it in a straight line.
This military history story follows John MacKay, Rod Smith, Hedley Everard, Robert Davenport, and Lloyd Sinclair as they work together against the first operational jet fighter in history. The fight over Overasselt becomes a lesson in air combat, speed, geometry, and patience, while also showing why the Luftwaffe later changed its rules and told pilots never to turn with a piston-engine fighter.
The episode also explains the wider jet war over Holland, the first Canadian and American encounters with the Me 262, and why the Allies learned to hunt jets where they had to slow down: on approach, over airfields, and in the moments when speed no longer protected them. It is a WWII air combat story, Canadian war story, and narrated military history feature built for listeners who enjoy Second World War documentaries, fighter pilot stories, and battlefield analysis.
Search terms: WW2 history, Canadian war stories, RCAF Spitfire, Me 262, German jet fighter, military aviation history, air combat documentary, WWII fighter pilot story, narrated history, and World War 2 battles.
This military history story follows John MacKay, Rod Smith, Hedley Everard, Robert Davenport, and Lloyd Sinclair as they work together against the first operational jet fighter in history. The fight over Overasselt becomes a lesson in air combat, speed, geometry, and patience, while also showing why the Luftwaffe later changed its rules and told pilots never to turn with a piston-engine fighter.
The episode also explains the wider jet war over Holland, the first Canadian and American encounters with the Me 262, and why the Allies learned to hunt jets where they had to slow down: on approach, over airfields, and in the moments when speed no longer protected them. It is a WWII air combat story, Canadian war story, and narrated military history feature built for listeners who enjoy Second World War documentaries, fighter pilot stories, and battlefield analysis.
Search terms: WW2 history, Canadian war stories, RCAF Spitfire, Me 262, German jet fighter, military aviation history, air combat documentary, WWII fighter pilot story, narrated history, and World War 2 battles.
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LearningTranscript
00:00October 5th, 1944.
00:03Early afternoon.
00:05High over the Voll River at Nijmegen and Flying Officer John McKay of Winnipeg was watching
00:12something move across the ground below him that had no business moving that fast.
00:18It was under the Spitfires, running for the bridge.
00:21No propellers, two long pods slung beneath the wings, and behind it, in the cold air,
00:30two thin gray lines of smoke that stayed in the sky like chalk marks.
00:36McKay had seen the shape before, in intelligence photographs.
00:40Every fighter pilot in 2nd Tactical Air Force had.
00:44What none of them had ever managed to do was catch one.
00:48Four days earlier, over this same city, pilots of this same wing had watched three of these
00:56things come down out of the sun onto Nijmegen, drop their bombs, and go home.
01:02The Canadians chased them.
01:04They firewalled everything the Merlins had, and pushed until the airframes shook, and the
01:10report that came back afterwards was one line long.
01:14It was impossible to close the range.
01:17Hold on to that sentence.
01:19It is the whole problem in six words, and everything in this story happens because five Canadians
01:26found a way around it on a Thursday afternoon over a Dutch river.
01:31McKay's squadron leader called the dive.
01:34Twelve Spitfires rolled over and went down after the jet.
01:38And McKay went with them, throttle wide open, nose steep.
01:43And the gap opened anyway.
01:46That is the part that is hard to convey now, when we are all used to the idea of jets.
01:52He was diving at full power on a target below him, and the target was getting smaller.
01:58The German had bombs hung on his aircraft and was still walking away from a Spitfire in
02:05a dive.
02:05And then the jet's nose came around.
02:08It came back.
02:10Whatever the man in that cockpit had been told about his aeroplane and what made it safe,
02:16he turned into twelve Canadian fighters, and he opened fire.
02:20And the thing that could outrun everything the Allies owned was suddenly coming the other
02:26way with four 30mm cannon in its nose.
02:29If what the Canadians did here matters to you, a subscribe helps these stories reach more
02:35people.
02:36The five men who mattered in the next several minutes knew each other well.
02:42Squadron leader Rod Smith was leading.
02:45Twenty-two, from Regina, a veteran of the siege of Malta, where his older brother Jerry had
02:52gone into the sea and never come back.
02:56Flight Lieutenant Headley Everard, whom everybody called Snooks, from Timmins, Ontario, who had
03:02fought over Burma and Tunisia before he ever saw Holland.
03:08Flight Lieutenant Robert Davenport, known in the squadron as Tex.
03:13Flying Officer Lloyd Sinclair, from Paris, Ontario.
03:18And McKay, the Winnipeg man, who had been turned down when he first tried to enlist and kept
03:24coming back until they took him.
03:26Five Canadians, one German, and an aircraft that, on paper, none of them could beat.
03:35Here is the arithmetic they lived with.
03:37The Spitfire Mark IX was one of the great fighters of the war, and flat out it would
03:44give a man something near 400 miles an hour.
03:47The machine below them would do better than 500.
03:51McKay had just felt what that meant in his own hands.
03:55Full power, best angle, and the enemy shrinking in his windscreen.
04:00That kind of margin does not make a fight harder.
04:04It hands the German every decision there is.
04:07When the fight starts, where, how long it lasts, and whether it happens at all.
04:14And the Luftwaffe had been proving it over this exact piece of ground for a month.
04:19The first time Canadians ever laid eyes on one was the 9th of September, when pilots of
04:25411 Squadron watched a jet go past and could do nothing but write it down.
04:32On the 28th, Flight Lieutenant John McCall of 416 Squadron got close enough to put rounds
04:40into one, and watched it leave.
04:42On the 30th, Flight Lieutenant Ronald Lake of 441 did the same.
04:48On the 1st of October, jets came over the airfield at Grave and scattered canister bombs across
04:54it.
04:54And the adjutant of 125 wing was killed on his own ground by an aircraft nobody could reach.
05:02On the 2nd, Flying Officer Forest Young of 442 damaged another.
05:08It left two.
05:10Four Canadians in three weeks got their sights onto the future of aviation, squeezed, saw
05:16strikes, and then watched it accelerate out of their lives.
05:19That is what untouchable actually means.
05:23Not that you cannot hit it, that you cannot hold it.
05:27The Germans knew exactly what they had.
05:30The bridge at Nijmegen was the reason the whole salient existed.
05:34The crossing the Allies had paid for in September, and could not afford to lose.
05:39And the Luftwaffe had begun sending its new jets to break it.
05:43Not in formations, in ones and twos.
05:47One aircraft, high and fast, in and out.
05:51And the enormous Allied fighter umbrella over Holland could do nothing but watch it work.
05:56Now look at it from the other cockpit, because this matters later.
06:00That morning, somewhere east of the Rhine, a man had climbed into a Messerschmitt 262 with
06:06bombs slung under it and taken off to hit that bridge.
06:09His name was Hans Christoph Buttmann, a captain, 24 years old, born in February of 1920, and
06:17he did not belong to a fighter unit at all.
06:20He was a bomber pilot from a bomber outfit, flying one of the fastest aircraft on earth as
06:25a delivery van.
06:26He had every advantage a pilot has ever had, speed no Allied fighter could match.
06:32His bombs already gone, his own airfield behind him, and nothing but empty sky in between.
06:38He had one move, the only move that had worked, every single time, for every jet pilot on that
06:44front for a month.
06:46Put the nose down, open the taps, go home.
06:50Instead, he turned.
06:52Why he turned is the question this whole story hangs on, and the answer is not the one most
06:57people assume.
06:58But before we get there, you need to see what five Canadians did with the gift they had just
07:03been handed.
07:03Because for the next several minutes over a Dutch village called Over Asselt, they took
07:08turns shooting pieces off the first jet fighter in history, and it shot back the entire way.
07:13Nobody in 401 Squadron had ever been attacked by a jet before, so nobody had a drill for it.
07:20What McKay had in his windscreen was a grey shape swelling much too fast, with a light winking
07:27in the nose.
07:28And then it was gone.
07:30Through the Canadian formation, out the far side, a mile away and still accelerating before
07:37the Spitfires had finished the turn they had only just begun.
07:42Understand what that does to a fighter pilot's hands.
07:46Everything he knows is calibrated to closing speeds he has flown a hundred times.
07:52A Fockel-Wulf coming at you head-on gives you a second and a half to shoot.
07:57This gave them less than one.
08:00And then it was behind them, and their guns were pointing at empty sky.
08:04Here is where the afternoon could have ended exactly like every other encounter of the
08:10previous month.
08:11Rod Smith had twelve fighters strung out above a Dutch river and one target.
08:17And the instinct of every fighter pilot alive was to point the nose at it and firewall the
08:23throttle.
08:23That instinct had been tried over this city four days earlier.
08:28It had failed.
08:29It had failed on the 28th of September, and on the 30th, and on the 2nd of October.
08:36Chasing a jet is the one thing that never works.
08:39So the Canadians did not chase it.
08:42They kept their height, and they kept their spread.
08:45And they let the German come back to them.
08:47A squadron of Spitfires stacked in layers over a few square miles of sky is not a single weapon.
08:54It is twelve separate weapons pointing at twelve different pieces of air, and a fast airplane
09:00crossing that space is going to pass close to one of them, not the same one twice.
09:06Whoever was nearest took a shot, and the rest stayed where they were and waited their turn.
09:11And Butman kept coming back.
09:14Watch what that cost him, because it is the mechanical heart of this story.
09:19Every time he turned hard, he shed speed.
09:22A big airframe, two engines hung out on the wings, wide radius, energy bleeding away in
09:29the turn.
09:29And here is the part almost nobody knows about those early jets, and it matters more than
09:34the speed everybody quotes.
09:37He could not simply ask for it back.
09:39The engines on his aircraft had to be handled like something asleep that you did not want
09:43to wake.
09:44Shove the throttles forward the way a Spitfire pilot shoved his, and a Jumo would flame out,
09:49or surge, or catch fire outright.
09:52German pilots were taught to move those levers slowly, deliberately, counting in their heads,
09:57while the world outside went on happening at the speed the world happens in a fight.
10:01So picture Butman in that cockpit, turning, watching Spitfires slide across his canopy, with
10:07his left hand doing the one thing a fighter pilot must never do in combat, being careful.
10:1320 seconds to rebuild what one hard turn had cost him.
10:16In 20 seconds McKay's Merlin would give him everything it had the instant his hand moved.
10:21That is the whole of it, and I want you to hold it, because in three months' time this
10:25exact arithmetic becomes a standing order in the Luftwaffe.
10:29A 262 is untouchable in a straight line, and ordinary in a turn.
10:34The Germans had not written that down yet.
10:36They were about to learn it from five Canadians over a village in Gelderland.
10:41What followed was not a pass, it was a fight, and it went on for minutes.
10:46An extraordinarily long time in the air, long enough for a man on the ground to watch it
10:50from start to finish.
10:52Smith, Everard, Davenport, McKay.
10:55They took it in turns.
10:57One Spitfire would get an angle, close, fire a short burst, and break away as the jet accelerated
11:03out from under him.
11:04Then the next man had his moment.
11:06Then the next.
11:07Pieces began coming off it.
11:09Bits of grey airframe going back through the slipstream, and the aircraft still flying,
11:14still turning, still fighting.
11:16Because he was fighting.
11:17This was not a man running the gauntlet.
11:20Buttman shot back at the Canadians throughout.
11:22Cannon fire coming out of that nose at spitfires that kept arriving from angles he could not
11:28cover.
11:29And here is a detail that tells you what kind of shooting it was, from both sides.
11:35In several minutes of combat, with a German firing at close range and Canadians crossing
11:41in front of him, he did not hit anybody.
11:44Not one of the five came home with a hole in him.
11:49Now sit with the thing that should be bothering you.
11:53At any second in those minutes, any second at all, that man could have leveled his wings,
12:00eased his throttles forward, and left.
12:03The door was never shut.
12:05The Canadians could not have followed him, and he knew it better than they did.
12:11Thirty miles of sky, and he is on his own runway, with a story to tell his squadron.
12:17And there is no first jet victory in history.
12:21And there is no video about it eighty years later.
12:24He didn't take the door.
12:26He turned back into them again.
12:29I said at the start that the answer to that is not the one most people assume.
12:34And it isn't.
12:35The easy explanation is arrogance.
12:38The German with the wonder weapon, too proud to run from propeller aeroplanes.
12:43It reads well.
12:45It's also almost certainly wrong.
12:47And the proof is sitting in his service record.
12:50The man in that cockpit was not a fighter pilot, and never had been.
12:55He belonged to a bomber unit.
12:58Someone had put him in the fastest aircraft on earth, and given him a job that had nothing
13:04to do with dog fighting.
13:06And the reason that happened is one of the strangest decisions of the war.
13:11And it was not made by anyone in the Luftwaffe.
13:15Below them, the ground was full of witnesses.
13:18Owe Asselt is farmland south of the river.
13:22And in October of 1944, it sat inside the corridor the Allies had fought all autumn to hold.
13:29Dutch farmers, signalers, gunners, men on their backs in slit trenches, looked up at a sky that
13:37had been humiliating them for weeks, and saw the jet, the untouchable one, turning and turning
13:45inside a ring of Spitfires with its skin coming off.
13:49One of those Spitfire pilots, Lloyd Sinclair of Paris, Ontario, was going to be awarded a
13:56share in what happened next without firing a single round.
14:01Not one.
14:02And when you understand why he still deserved it, you will understand exactly how the Canadians
14:09did this.
14:10Follow one man for a moment.
14:12Flying officer Lloyd Sinclair, from Paris, Ontario, 25 years old, who had already done a tour on
14:20Malta before he ever flew over Holland, was sitting in a Spitfire somewhere on the outside
14:27of that circling fight with his gun sight on and his thumb near the button.
14:32And he was not shooting.
14:35Not because he couldn't see the target.
14:37He could see it perfectly.
14:39The jet was turning inside a loose Canadian wheel.
14:42And Sinclair was on the far side of that wheel, holding a piece of sky between the German
14:49and the east.
14:50Between the German and home.
14:53Every second he stayed there was a second the jet could not use the one maneuver that
14:59would have saved it.
15:01Because straightening out on that heading meant flying through a Spitfire that was already
15:06pointed at him.
15:07His award citation, written up months later, says he shared in the destruction of the
15:12the first enemy jet-propelled aircraft ever shot down by the Royal Canadian Air Force
15:17and that it came after a long and bitter struggle.
15:20It also, quietly, records that the jet hit the ground without Lloyd Sinclair having fired
15:26a shot.
15:27Remember that.
15:28A man who never pulled the trigger got a share of the first jet in history.
15:32And the people who handed out awards in 1944, who were not generous men, looked at what he
15:38had done and agreed.
15:39Now the other cockpit, because you cannot understand this fight without understanding why that particular
15:45German was in that particular place.
15:48Hans Christoph Buttmann was a captain, 24 years old, and he belonged to Kampfgeschwader 51,
15:54a bomber wing, not a fighter wing.
15:57A man from that world learns a completely different trade, navigation, formation, bomb release, holding
16:04a straight line while other people shoot at you.
16:06He had been at war for years.
16:08He had almost certainly never been trained to fight another aeroplane in his life.
16:15And yet, he was flying the fastest combat aircraft on the planet.
16:21Here is why, and it is one of the strangest decisions of the entire war.
16:28The Messerschmitt 262 was designed as a fighter.
16:33When Hitler was shown it in 1944, he did not want a fighter.
16:38He wanted a bomber.
16:40An aircraft so fast it could hit the invasion beaches and come home untouched.
16:46And he insisted, personally and furiously, that his new jet be built and used that way.
16:55So the first operational jets on the Western Front went not to the fighter force, but to
17:01a bomber outfit.
17:02And the men who flew them were bomber pilots.
17:06And the aircraft themselves were modified for the job.
17:10Bombs slung underneath, and two of the four cannon in the nose taken out to make room for
17:17the equipment.
17:18Think about what that means.
17:21The most advanced fighter aircraft in the world was handed to men trained not to dogfight,
17:27with half its guns removed, and sent out to drop a pair of bombs.
17:33Bootman's job on the 5th of October was the bridge at Nijmegen.
17:38Not the whole bridge.
17:40Nobody expected a single aircraft with two bombs to drop a span into the Val.
17:46The Luftwaffe was sending jets over that crossing in ones and twos, day after day, to keep the
17:53pressure on the one artery holding the Allied corridor together.
17:58High, fast, a shallow dive, release, and gone before anybody could react.
18:06It was infuriating.
18:08It was also, and the German records are honest about this, achieving almost nothing.
18:15Pinpricks, one or two aircraft at a time, and the bridge stayed open.
18:20And here is the detail that puts the whole jet campaign over Nijmegen into perspective,
18:27because it is not the one you would expect.
18:30The Germans did get at that bridge.
18:33Not with jets.
18:34A week before Bootman flew his last sortie, German combat swimmers came down the river in
18:41the dark with explosive charges, put them against the piers, and damaged the crossing badly enough
18:48to close it for days.
18:50Men in the water, with their hands, did what the wonder weapon could not do from the air.
18:57So you have a captain from a bomber wing, in a fighter with half its teeth, doing a job
19:02that was not working, over the single patch of sky in northwest Europe most reliably full
19:09of allied fighters.
19:11Every advantage he had was in the machine.
19:15Every disadvantage was in the situation somebody else had put him in.
19:20And now the machine's advantage was gone, because he had thrown it away in the first turn.
19:28Back in the wheel over overassault, the Canadians kept working.
19:32McKay came round again, closed, fired, broke off as the jet gathered itself and pulled away.
19:41And by the time he was clear, somebody else was already firing.
19:45Smith.
19:47Davenport.
19:48Everard.
19:50Nobody held the target for long.
19:52Nobody needed to.
19:53Each burst was two seconds of strikes, and the aircraft that was absorbing them had been
19:59designed for speed, not for punishment.
20:03Light structure, thin skin, two engines that had already given their pilot every reason to
20:09treat them gently.
20:11Bits of it were in the air now.
20:13That is what several minutes of this does.
20:16Not one dramatic burst and an explosion.
20:20A long accumulation.
20:22Five men taking their turns, and an aeroplane slowly coming apart in front of a farming village
20:28while its pilot kept turning back into the only thing that could kill him.
20:34He was, at this point, low.
20:37He had traded away altitude along with his speed, because that is what turning fights
20:42do.
20:43And every foot he lost made the next escape more expensive.
20:48The ring around him was tightening in a way no German pilot had yet had to think about,
20:53because no German jet pilot had ever been in this situation and lived to describe it.
21:00The end of it came fast, and it came with a piece of drama that two of these Canadians
21:04would still be arguing about half a century later.
21:07Rod Smith spent much of his post-war life on this, writing, correcting, going back to the
21:13records.
21:13Because one of the men in that sky put a version of the last 30 seconds into a published memoir,
21:19and Smith said flatly that it did not happen that way.
21:22So, before we get to what the wreckage proved, you are going to see both versions.
21:27The end came the way these things actually end, not with one perfect shot, but with an
21:33aeroplane that had been taking hits for minutes, finally deciding it had taken enough.
21:39By then, the jet was low over the field south of the river, still turning, still trying, and
21:46the Canadians were coming at it in a rhythm that had become almost mechanical.
21:50Close.
21:51Burst.
21:52Break.
21:53Close.
21:54Burst.
21:55Break.
21:56Strikes flickering along the fuselage and the engine pods.
22:00And then fire.
22:02Burst.
22:02It came out of the aircraft and streamed back along it, and the Messerschmitt went down over
22:09the farmland near the village of Overasselt and hit the ground.
22:12And Hauptmann Hans Christoph Butmann, 24 years old, born in February of 1920, was killed in
22:21it.
22:21The first jet fighter in history to be shot down in air combat had just been shot down
22:27by five men from Canada, and it had taken them several minutes of hard work in front
22:32of an audience of Dutch farmers and Allied soldiers who had spent the previous month being
22:37bombed by aircraft they could not touch.
22:40Back at the landing ground, the intelligence officer sat the pilots down and did what intelligence
22:45officers do, took it one gun camera and one man at a time.
22:49Smith fired and saw strikes.
22:52Everard fired and saw strikes.
22:56Davenport fired and saw strikes.
22:58McKay fired and saw strikes.
23:02Sinclair held the door shut and never squeezed the trigger at all.
23:07Five Canadians, one dead German, one aircraft the Allied air forces had been chasing since
23:12September, and a problem.
23:15Who gets it?
23:16They split it, one-fifth each.
23:20That is not a bureaucratic detail, and I want you to see what it did to these men's records.
23:25Rod Smith finished the war with thirteen enemy aircraft destroyed and one-fifth of another.
23:31Thirteen and one-fifth.
23:32For the rest of his life, the odd fraction at the end of his score was this, a Thursday
23:38afternoon over a Dutch village, and a share in something no pilot in any Allied air force
23:43had ever managed before.
23:46Now here is where it gets human, and a little sad.
23:50Forty-four years later, one of the five published a memoir.
23:54Hedley Everard, Snooks, the Timmins man who had flown in Burma and North Africa and Italy before Holland, put his
24:01war between covers in 1988, and his telling of those minutes
24:05over over assault did not match the paperwork.
24:09Rod Smith said so, publicly and repeatedly.
24:12He went back to the contemporary reports, his own, and those of the men who had flown on
24:17his wing that day, and he laid them against the book, and he said the book was wrong.
24:22You have to know something about Smith to understand why he would spend years of an otherwise comfortable
24:28life in Vancouver arguing about thirty seconds in 1944.
24:34He was twenty-two in that cockpit, and he had already buried a war.
24:40On Malta, in 1942, he and his older brother Jerry flew as a pair, in the same squadron, in
24:48the same sky, and Jerry went into the Mediterranean and was never found.
24:54Smith came home, became a lawyer, spent his professional life on evidence, and he treated his own war the
25:02same way.
25:04What was in the report was what happened.
25:07What a man remembered forty years later, however sincerely, was not evidence.
25:13I am not going to adjudicate it for you, and neither did the Air Force.
25:19Here is what nobody disputes, then or since, from any source on either side.
25:25There were five Canadians in that fight.
25:28It lasted minutes, not seconds.
25:31They took turns.
25:33Every one of them who fired hit the aircraft.
25:37The German fought back the whole way and did not touch a single one of them.
25:42And the credit went to all five equally, because no honest reconstruction of those minutes could
25:48say that any one man had done it.
25:50Hold that thought, because it is the beginning of the real answer to the question this story
25:56is asking.
25:58Not how one Canadian outshot a jet.
26:01Five men did something together that no individual pilot in this war had been able to do alone.
26:07And the Air Force's own paperwork admitted it by refusing to name a winner.
26:13There was one more consequence that afternoon, and it was the one the intelligence people cared
26:18about most.
26:18The wreck was on the Allied side of the line.
26:22It had come down inside the corridor.
26:25In among the troops, it had been sent to bomb.
26:27Which meant that for the first time, a Messerschmitt 262 lost in combat lay in pieces where men with
26:35notebooks and tape measures could walk up to it.
26:37Everything the Allies had about this aircraft until that day had been photographs, radar plots,
26:44and frightened estimates of its speed.
26:47Now there was metal.
26:49And the news went up the chain fast, because of what it proved.
26:54Not that the jet was weak, it wasn't.
26:57That it could be beaten in the air, with the aircraft the Allies already had, by pilots flying
27:05an ordinary patrol.
27:07But there was an argument waiting at the other end of that signal.
27:11And it came from the Americans.
27:13Because the United States Army Air Forces had been at this longer, over Germany, with more aircraft, and they had
27:22already put two of these jets into the ground, one of them a full five weeks before Nijmegen.
27:29So why is this Canadian fight the one the record books mark as the first?
27:35The difference is one word, and it is not a word anybody in 401 Squadron chose.
27:42Five weeks before Nijmegen, on the 28th of August, an American major named Joseph Myers was leading
27:49a flight of Thunderbolts at 11,000 feet near Termonde in Belgium, when he looked down and
27:54saw what he took for a marauder in a tearing hurry.
27:57It was going too fast to be a marauder, Myers rolled into a 45 degree dive with his wingman,
28:032nd Lieutenant Manfred Croy, and went after it.
28:06The aircraft was a Messerschmitt 262, and the man flying it was a German sergeant pilot,
28:12Hieronymus Lauer, who everybody called, Ronnie.
28:15What happened next is the reason this story has an argument in it.
28:19With Thunderbolts coming down on him, Lauer went for the deck, ran out of options at very
28:24low level, and put the jet into a belly landing in a field.
28:28He climbed out.
28:29He walked away from it.
28:31The Americans then came round and shot the abandoned aircraft to pieces on the ground,
28:36and Myers and Croy were credited between them with the destruction of the first German jet.
28:41So which one was first?
28:43Both, depending on a single word.
28:48And it is a word neither side chose for propaganda reasons.
28:52It is simply what the paperwork says.
28:56The Americans destroyed the first jet.
28:59The Canadians shot down the first jet.
29:04Lauer's aeroplane was wrecked on the ground after its pilot had left it under his own power.
29:10Bootmann's aeroplane was set on fire in the air by gunfire, in a fight it could not get
29:17out of, and its pilot died in it.
29:20I am telling you both versions because this audience has no patience for a channel that
29:25hides the inconvenient half.
29:27The Americans were there five weeks earlier, and they earned what they got.
29:34But if the question is the one in the title, could this thing be caught and killed in a
29:39fight, by fighters, in the air?
29:42Then the answer to that question is Canadian, and it is dated the 5th of October, 1944.
29:49And that answer went up the chain in a hurry, because everybody above squadron level had been
29:56quietly dreading these aircraft for months.
29:59What over assault proved was not that the 262 was overrated.
30:04It proved that a jet could be brought to a fight and held there, and that a squadron of
30:10ordinary Spitfires, flown properly, could finish it.
30:14Now, while five Canadians were writing up their reports at a muddy landing ground in Holland,
30:20something was happening 150 miles east that would make the whole thing much harder.
30:26Two days before Bootman died, a new German unit had gone operational at two airfields near
30:33Osnabrück.
30:34Its commander was Major Walter Novotny, a name every Allied intelligence officer knew, a man
30:42one with an enormous score from the Russian front, and his command existed for one purpose,
30:49to work out how the jet should actually be flown in combat, and to write the manual.
30:55Which is another way of saying this, Bootman was not the problem.
31:01Bootman was a bomber pilot from a bomber wing, handed a fighter with half its guns removed,
31:06and sent alone over the most heavily patrolled sky in Europe.
31:11The Canadians had caught the version of this aircraft that was easiest to catch, and the
31:16version that was hard was standing on a runway at Ackmer, being flown by professional fighter
31:22pilots who were paid to think about exactly the problem the Canadians had just handed them.
31:29Here is what those men found out, and it is the most surprising set of numbers in this
31:34story.
31:35Novotny's unit claimed 19 Allied aircraft.
31:39Against that, it lost 6 jets in combat, and another 16 destroyed or damaged in accidents
31:47and engine failures.
31:49Read that again.
31:50The aircraft was killing its own pilots faster than the enemy was.
31:56Novotny himself was told, in the end, to stay on the ground.
31:59On the 8th of November, he went up anyway, into American fighters, and he did not come back.
32:07But before he died, his unit had answered the question the Canadians had raised.
32:11And the answer was written as an instruction.
32:14And the instruction was brutally simple.
32:18Never turn.
32:19Do not circle.
32:21Do not maneuver with a piston-engined fighter.
32:23Ever.
32:24Never.
32:24For any reason.
32:26Come in fast and high.
32:28Take one pass.
32:29And keep going.
32:29And if somebody gets behind you, do not fight him.
32:33Simply leave.
32:34Everything Butemann had done over over assault was now, formally, forbidden.
32:39Think about what that means for the five men in this story.
32:43Their victory was real.
32:44Their method worked.
32:46And within weeks, the enemy had made that method obsolete by ordering their pilots never
32:51to give a Canadian the chance again.
32:53And you can watch it happen in the record.
32:56Canadian pilots kept meeting jets through the autumn and into the winter, over Holland and
33:01over the Rhine.
33:01They kept reporting them.
33:04They kept, now and then, getting a burst in.
33:07By the end of the war, the Royal Canadian Air Force had damaged at least 19 German jets,
33:12and shot down 11.
33:15That ratio is the whole story of the jet war in two numbers.
33:20And behind it are a lot of young men who got their sights onto something for half a second
33:25and then watched it go away.
33:27The over assault method had one requirement, and the Germans had just removed it.
33:34It needed a jet pilot willing to turn.
33:37So what do you do when the enemy has an aircraft you cannot catch in a straight line, and orders
33:44forbidding him to fly anything but straight lines?
33:47You find the place where he has no choice.
33:50There is exactly one, and it took the allies until the winter to work it out.
33:56And when they did, the Canadians went at it with a ferocity that is genuinely startling,
34:01and lost some of their best people doing it.
34:05But before we go there, I owe you the real answer to the question this whole story has
34:10been asking.
34:11Because I have shown you what happened over over assault, and I have not yet told you
34:16what those five Canadians actually did.
34:20Not the shooting.
34:22The thing underneath it.
34:24The thing the Germans read in their own casualty report and turned into a standing order.
34:32It comes down to something McKay did without being told, and to a man who never fired his
34:39guns.
34:39Go back to that Thursday for a moment, because now you can see what was really happening.
34:45John McKay comes in on the jet, gets his two seconds, sees strikes flash along the fuselage,
34:53and then he does the hardest thing a fighter pilot ever does.
34:58He lets go.
34:59He does not follow.
35:02He breaks away while the German is still in front of him, and climbs back up to where he
35:07started.
35:08And he waits.
35:11That is the answer.
35:12That is the whole thing.
35:15Every Canadian who had failed against a jet in the previous month had failed doing the
35:20same thing.
35:22Pointing the nose at it and chasing.
35:24It is the natural act.
35:26It is what every instinct in a fighter pilot's body demands.
35:30And against a 262 it is not merely useless, it is actively fatal to your own chances.
35:37Because a stern chase is a contest of speed.
35:42And speed was the one contest the German won every single time.
35:48Four Canadians in three weeks had proved it.
35:51One line in a wing report had summed it up.
35:54Impossible to close the range.
35:57So the five men over Overosold ran a different problem.
36:00They stopped treating the jet as a target to be pursued and started treating it as an object
36:05moving through a volume of sky they already occupied.
36:0812 Spitfires spread out and stacked in layers are not 12 pursuers.
36:14They are 12 pieces of sky that are lethal to fly through.
36:18The German could out-accelerate any one of them.
36:21He could out-accelerate all of them.
36:23But he could not be in a place where none of them was.
36:25And crucially, none of these Canadians tried to own the kill.
36:29Each man fired when the geometry gave him a shot and then removed himself.
36:34Which meant the jet never got the one thing it needed, which was a single opponent to pull
36:39away from.
36:40Sit with what that costs a young man in a cockpit.
36:43You have the most famous aircraft in the world in your sights, burning, with a war's
36:48worth of glory hanging off it.
36:50And you break off and hand it to the next fellow.
36:53Four of them did that, over and over, for minutes.
36:57And then there is Lloyd Sinclair, sitting out on the eastern side of the wheel with his
37:02guns cold.
37:04Sinclair is the piece most people miss, and he is the reason the Air Force could not name
37:10a winner.
37:11The jet did not die of gunfire.
37:14It died of geometry.
37:17Every turn Bootman made cost him speed he could only rebuild slowly.
37:21With a throttle hand he had to keep gentle.
37:25He could have stopped paying that price at any moment.
37:28One straight line east and the Canadians were finished.
37:32What stood on that line was a spitfire from Paris, Ontario that never fired a round.
37:38The door was shut and it stayed shut, and the man in the jet kept turning back into the
37:44only thing that could kill him, because the alternative was flying into somebody's guns
37:49at close range.
37:51So here is the real answer to the question in the title, and it is not the one a Hollywood
37:57version would give you.
37:58Canadian pilots did not outfly a jet.
38:02They did not outshoot it.
38:05They took away the thing that made it untouchable, its speed.
38:10And then, by the way they flew as a squadron, they never let it be given back.
38:16Not one of them could have done it.
38:18Five of them could.
38:20And this is worth pausing on, because it is the part of the Canadian war that never sounds
38:25impressive in a headline.
38:27These men were not flying a superior aircraft.
38:31The Spitfire Mark 9 was a middle age design by October of 1944, provided by the British,
38:38flown by an air force belonging to a country of 11 million people that had begun the war
38:44with almost no fighter force at all.
38:47They beat the most advanced aircraft on earth with position, patience, and the willingness
38:52to let somebody else have the shot.
38:55And when it was done, they split the victory five ways, rather than pretend one of them
39:00had won it.
39:01The Germans read the same lesson in their own casualty report, and turned it into that one
39:06word order, never turn.
39:10Which is the highest compliment the Luftwaffe ever paid to 401 squadron, an instruction to
39:16their own pilots to never again do the thing that let Canadians kill one.
39:21And when German pilots obeyed that order, this method stopped working.
39:26Completely.
39:28Here is what a 262 looks like when it is flown the way Novotny's people said it should be
39:33flown, and I am not going to soften it, because Canadians were on the receiving end.
39:38The 31st of March, 1945.
39:42Number 6 group, the Canadian Bomber Group, is over Hamburg in daylight.
39:47Out of the east come jets of the German fighter wing that had finally got the aircraft it should
39:53always have had, and they are carrying something new under the wings.
39:57Small rockets, fired in a salvo, designed to be launched from outside the range of a bomber's
40:04guns, and to tear a four engine aircraft apart.
40:07There is no turning fight.
40:09There is nothing for a gunner to hold in his sights for more than a moment.
40:13They come through the stream at a closing speed nothing in the formation can answer.
40:18And in a few minutes, five Lancasters and three Halifaxes are gone.
40:22Thirty-three Canadian airmen were killed that day, and twenty-three came down into captivity.
40:28One cruise experience tells you what those minutes were.
40:31Flying officer Stanley Avis, 429 Squadron, was attacked four separate times by jets and
40:37his gunners, Flight Sergeant Ross and Flight Sergeant Whitehead, called the corkscrew every
40:42time.
40:44Not shot them down, called the break, over and over, throwing thirty tons of Lancaster onto
40:49a wing while a jet came in, and the assessment afterwards was that those two men and their
40:54turrets probably saved the entire crew.
40:57That is the limit of the over-assault answer.
40:59Against a jet flown correctly, a Canadian could do exactly one thing, survive it.
41:05So the problem came back around, harder than before.
41:08And this time, the Canadians did not solve it in the air over a river.
41:12They solved it by working out the single place on Earth where a Messerschmitt 262 has to
41:17be slow, must be slow, cannot be anything but slow, and by going there deliberately, day
41:24after day, into the worst anti-aircraft fire in Germany.
41:28The first Canadian to do it properly was a rancher's son from Lethbridge, Alberta, and
41:33he had been in combat for exactly four days.
41:36The first of January, 1945.
41:39Hiesch, in Holland, first light.
41:42And John McKay was sitting on the runway with his engine running.
41:46401 and 412 squadrons were lined up to take off, when the sky over the airfield filled
41:51with German fighters.
41:53The Luftwaffe had thrown everything it had left into one enormous dawn attack on Allied
41:58airfields, and by pure bad luck for the Germans, they arrived at Hiesch at the exact moment a
42:03wing of Canadian Spitfires was pointing down the runway with throttles in hand.
42:08McKay took off into it.
42:10What he did in the next few minutes is on his record, and it is one of the more extraordinary
42:15entries in the Canadian air war.
42:17He shot down a Messerschmitt 109.
42:20He shot down a Focke-Wulf.
42:21He shot at a second Focke-Wulf until his gun stopped, because he had run out of ammunition,
42:27and then he stayed on it.
42:28He flew it into the ground.
42:30Two of the three aircraft he destroyed that morning were forced down by a man with nothing
42:36left to shoot with, who simply refused to let them climb away.
42:41Remember the Canadian who broke off his attack over-over-osult and climbed away to wait his
42:47turn?
42:48Same pilot.
42:50Fifteen months of war between the two, and by January he had become the sort of man who
42:56herds an enemy fighter into the earth with empty guns.
42:59And later on that same first of January, McKay and Flight Sergeant Woodhill got in among a
43:07.262 and damaged it.
43:09That is the second time in three months that a jet had been in this Winnipeg man's gun sight.
43:16He was not going to be the one who killed it.
43:19But the hunt had changed, and he was already inside the new version of it.
43:25Because in December, somebody had found the place.
43:28On the third of that month, a Canadian named John Garland, flying a Tempest with an RAF
43:35squadron, was near the German airfield at Rhine when he saw a .262 coming home.
43:42Not cruising.
43:43Coming home.
43:44Descending.
43:46Lined up.
43:46Doing the one thing that aircraft was physically incapable of doing quickly.
43:52Garland closed in and killed it with a short burst.
43:56Now think back to everything we established about that engine.
43:59A jet on final approach has its gear down, flaps out, speed bled off to something a Spitfire
44:05pilot would consider leisurely, and a pilot whose left hand cannot rescue him, because
44:10slamming those throttles open produces a flame-out or a fire rather than acceleration.
44:16For roughly 90 seconds, twice a sortie, the fastest aircraft in the world is the slowest
44:22thing in the sky.
44:23It has to be.
44:25There is no other way to get it back on the ground.
44:29The Allies called what followed rat scrambles.
44:32And through January, February, and March of 1945, they ran them over the jet airfields
44:38at Rhine and Hopsten almost as a routine.
44:41Tempests down low, wading in the circuit like men standing outside a door.
44:46Spitfires of the Canadian wings stacked above them as cover.
44:49The principle was exactly the principle of over-ossel, applied to a whole airfield instead
44:55of a single fight.
44:56You cannot catch a jet, so you go and stand where the jet must come to you, slowly.
45:02Which brings us to the young man I mentioned, and to the four days.
45:07Flight Lieutenant Richard Audet, Dick to the squadron, was 22, from Lethbridge, Alberta,
45:14raised on his family's ranch in the Milk River Valley.
45:17He had joined 411 Squadron in September of 1944 and flown for three months without ever
45:24shooting anything down.
45:25Then, on the 29th of December, leading a section near Rhein, he ran into a dozen German fighters
45:32and destroyed five of them in a single engagement.
45:35Five.
45:37In his first real combat.
45:39Four weeks later, he turned that ability on the jets.
45:42On the 23rd of January, he destroyed two Messerschmitt 262s in one day.
45:48One in the air, one caught in the ground.
45:51And the following day, he damaged another.
45:54In roughly a month, Dick Audet had become the most effective jet killer the Royal Canadian
45:59Air Force produced.
46:01The Germans had one answer left, and they used it.
46:05They ringed the jet fields with anti-aircraft guns until the approach to Rhine was one of
46:10the deadliest strips of air in Europe, and they put piston-engined fighters overhead specifically
46:15to cover their jets in the circuit.
46:18The place where a 262 had to be slow became the place where an Allied pilot was most likely
46:24to die.
46:25Everybody flying those patrols understood the trade they were making.
46:29They kept going anyway, and the kills kept coming.
46:34On the 14th of February, two Canadians of 439 Squadron, Flying Officers Lyle Shaver and
46:41Hugh Fraser, each shot down a 262 near Cleve.
46:45Read that once more and let it land.
46:47They were flying typhoons, great heavy ground-attack aircraft built to carry rockets against tanks,
46:55hauled into a fight with the most advanced fighter in the world, and they each took one down.
47:00By the end of the war, the Royal Canadian Air Force had destroyed 11 German jets.
47:05Every single one of those victories traces back through the same understanding.
47:10The aircraft is untouchable only where it is allowed to be fast.
47:14And there are exactly two places where it isn't.
47:18In a turn it should never have entered, and over its own runway with the wheels down.
47:22The Canadians found both.
47:25The first one they found by accident, over a Dutch village, on the 5th of October.
47:29The second they went looking for and paid for.
47:33Dick Audet did not live to see the end of it.
47:36On the 3rd of March, 1945, he went after a train west of Munster, low and fast in his
47:42own Spitfire, and the return fire caught him.
47:45He was 22 years old.
47:47His body was never recovered, and his name is on the memorial at Runnymede with the rest
47:52of the airmen who have no grave.
47:54Which leaves the five men who started this.
47:56One of them was about to be shot down himself.
48:00One of them would spend the next 50 years arguing about what happened in those minutes.
48:05And one, the Winnipeg man who broke off his attack and climbed away to wait his turn, would
48:11meet a jet again, 8 years later, in a different war, on the far side of the world, in the
48:17last
48:17minute of the last day it was still possible to.
48:21Overasselt is farmland again, and has been since the spring of 1945.
48:26Flat fields, a church tower, a road running down toward the Maas.
48:31Somewhere in that ground, on a Thursday afternoon in October, the first jet fighter ever shot
48:37out of the sky in combat came down burning while five Canadians circled above it.
48:42The man in it was buried nearby, at Molenhoek.
48:47In November of 1946, they moved him, along with thousands of others, to the German cemetery
48:53at Isselstein in the south of Holland.
48:55And Hans Christoph Butmann has been there ever since.
48:58A bomber pilot who was handed the fastest aircraft in the world, and a job it could not do.
49:05Twenty-four years old, five days past the moment his own air force worked out the rule that
49:10would have saved his life.
49:12Rod Smith was posted away from 401 Squadron at the end of November, a few weeks after Overasselt.
49:19He finished the war with thirteen enemy aircraft destroyed and one-fifth of another, a distinguished
49:25flying cross and bar, and a brother still missing in the Mediterranean.
49:30He went home, took engineering at McGill and law at Osgood Hall, and practiced as a barrister
49:36in Vancouver until 1987.
49:39There is an irony in his file that he never seems to have mentioned.
49:43He finally stopped flying in the early fifties, invalided out of the auxiliary with inner ear
49:48damage caused by an accident with a jet engine.
49:51He spent his later years on the record, going back through reports, correcting accounts, writing
49:57to historians, insisting that what was written down in 1944 should outrank what anybody remembered
50:03afterwards, including himself.
50:05He also went back to Malta, to Normandy, and to Germany, where he visited the family of
50:11Heinz Heuser, a German pilot he had shot down over Malta in 1942 and afterwards befriended.
50:19Smith died in Vancouver in 2002, at 80.
50:23The memoir he was still working on was finished by others and published six years later.
50:30Snooks Everard had the shortest run of the five.
50:32He was given command of 401 Squadron in December, and on Christmas Day of 1944, he was shot down
50:39over Germany and spent the last six months of the war as a prisoner, eventually liberated
50:44by Russian troops coming the other way.
50:47He came home, flew as a test pilot for Canadair, stayed in the Air Force until 1964, and in 1988,
50:55he published the book that Rod Smith spent years disputing.
50:59He died in Victoria in 1999.
51:03I have no interest in ruling on that argument, and I would ask you not to either.
51:09Two men who flew through the same four minutes at 25 years old remembered them differently
51:14at 70.
51:15That is not dishonesty.
51:17That is what memory does.
51:21Lloyd Sinclair was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for that autumn's work, the citation
51:29recording a long and bitter struggle and the destruction of the first enemy jet ever shot
51:35down by the Royal Canadian Air Force.
51:38He did not actually receive the decoration until December of 1948, more than three years
51:44after the war ended, a small, very Canadian postscript for the man who won it by not firing
51:51his guns.
51:52Tex Davenport flew on.
51:54Dick Audet, who killed more German jets than any other Canadian, has no grave.
52:01And John McKay went home to Winnipeg and stayed in the Air Force, and eight years later found
52:07himself at Suwon in Korea, flying an American Sabre with an American wing.
52:12A Canadian on exchange, doing 70 odd hours of combat in four months in an aircraft that
52:19would have been science fiction to the man who dived on Buttman.
52:22On the 30th of June 1953, weeks before the guns stopped, McKay was leading a flight of four
52:30when he saw a lone MiG-15 sliding in behind a formation of friendly aircraft.
52:37He turned into it and shot it down.
52:39It was the last enemy jet destroyed by a Canadian pilot.
52:44The closing entry in a story that had opened over a Dutch river with five spitfires and a
52:51man who could not use his throttle.
52:54He retired in 1969, went back to school in British Columbia, took two degrees, and died
53:02in 2013.
53:04Think about the shape of that life for a moment.
53:08The same man who, as a flying officer, broke off an attack and climbed away to let someone
53:15else have the shot was there at the start of the jet age and at the end of its first
53:21war.
53:22He did not shoot down a jet in 1944.
53:26He shared a fifth of one.
53:29And that fifth is exactly the point.
53:32Because here is what Canadians did in this story, and it is not a story about better aircraft.
53:39They had no better aircraft.
53:41They flew British Spitfires that were already outdated in an air force belonging to a country
53:46of 11 million people against the most advanced machine any nation had put in the sky.
53:52They beat it the first time by doing the least glorious thing in aerial warfare, flying as
53:57a unit, letting go of the target, standing in the way, and then splitting the credit five
54:02ways because no honest man could claim it alone.
54:06And when the Germans changed the rules to make that impossible, Canadians went and waited
54:11at the end of German runways instead, and paid for it with men like Dick Audet.
54:16Untouchable is a word about a machine.
54:18It was never a word about the men who had to fly against it.
54:23Thank you for staying with this one to the end.
54:25Nearly an hour on a single afternoon over a Dutch village is a lot to ask, and I'm grateful
54:30you gave it.
54:30If you think what the Canadians did here deserves to be remembered, a like genuinely helps it
54:36reach people who would never otherwise hear about overassault.
54:39And if your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War in any
54:45service, in any uniform, I'd be honored to hear about him in the comments.
54:49We're here every week.