Posted 12-1-2006 at 02:19 AM

A great article from some magazine. I just had to cut it out and share it with you all.

When Prime Minister Mackenzie King hosted Buzz Beurling on Parliament Hill in 1942, Canadians were introduced to a homegrown fighter ace-and to the power of the photo op.
By Wayne Ralph

THE LOOK ON PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING'S face on November 9, 1942, might be adoration. As he gazed up at Pilot Officer George (Buzz) Beurling, perhaps King was recalling Charles Lindbergh, who'd flown into Ottawa 15 years earlier in his famous Spirit of St. Louis for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Like the famous American aviator, whom King compared to "a young god who had appeared from the skies," Beurling had intense Scandinavian blue eyes. Everyone commented on them, some seeing the naive gaze of a child, others the look of a stone-cold killer.

King's adoration was mixed with relief. The war news from overseas had been unremittingly grim, and the political implications for King's Liberals were ominous. The Canadian Army's recent battle at Dieppe had resulted in the greatest Canadian losses in a single day for the entire war. An amphibious force of 4,960 suffered some 900 fatalities, and more than 1,900 were taken prisoner. If this was the cost of war, how could King avoid imposing national selective service, the conscription of all able-bodied men?

But just five days before this photograph was taken, the British army had its first victory. Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army had defeated Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps at E1Alamein, Egypt. What helped stop Rommel was Malta, the small Mediterranean island that served as an airfield from which Britain could attack ships carrying fuel and ammunition to the Afrika Korps. If Malta had collapsed, Rommel, his supply lines intact, could have taken Cairo and the Suez Canal. Middle East oil would have fallen under German control.

Beurling's anxious family is with him on Parliament Hill. Weak, malnourished and hobbled by gunshot wounds not yet healed, the 20-year-old fighter ace from Verdun, Quebec, had lost 50 pounds in five months' service in Malta. He had been one of about 100 Canadian pilots who had defended the island, and after 1942 he was the most famous. He had shot down more than two dozen enemy aircraft, had been shot down twice himself and was decorated four times by the Royal Air Force.

Not the Royal Canadian Air Force. A high school dropout, Beurling had been rejected in 1939 by the RCAE Like hundreds of Canadian teenagers, he then made his way to Britain. Though just one of the many RAF fighter aces in Malta, back in Canada he became this war's Billy Bishop. Less than four weeks after bailing out of his Spitfire into the Mediterranean, he'd been brought home for the government's third Victory Loan fundraising campaign.

King was asking Canadians for three-quarters of a billion dollars and hoped this dean-cut homegrown superhero would motivate citizens to give generously. In his Montreal radio speech to launch the campaign--"Nothing matters now but victory"-- King had told Canadians for the first time of Germany's concentration camps: "Where the master race fears the greater fertility of other races, wholesale extermination by starvation, disease, and even by mass murder, has been in evidence."

Following this photo op, anxious calls went out from King's office to the RCAF, where Beurling was now on temporary duty while in Canada: "How is he recovering?" By February 1943 he was well enough to travel, and in four weeks covered some 10,000 kilometres stumping for the Liberals. Though he felt greatly taken advantage of, the young fighter pilot -- a member of the Plymouth Brethren church who carried a small Bible in aerial combat--was flattered by the attention, especially from young women.

Meanwhile, King was facing some of the toughest days of his leadership. After touring the battlefields in 1944, his defence minister, J. Layton Ralston, argued that conscription was morally and militarily essential to relieve the exhausted troops overseas. Francophones strongly opposed a draft that compelled troops to ship out; anglophones generally supported it. King feared the issue could bring down his government. In 1942, Ralston had tendered his written resignation over the issue, which King had declined. At the height of the crisis, in November 1944, King retrieved Ralston's old letter and used it to force him out. King eventually did agree to send conscripts overseas but did not reinstate his former minister of defence.

Soon after the war, King, like Winston Churchill, came to be viewed as yesterday's leader. For Beurling, things were no happier. Following one last round of combat for the RAF, Beurling requested-- and was granted- a transfer to the RCAE Deemed too difficult to manage because of his reluctance to play by RCAF rules, he was forced into retirement the following year. His marriage to Diana Whittall, a Vancouver debutante he'd met on the Victory Loan tour, lasted only four months. He drifted until 1948, when he was recruited by the RCAF's most decorated Jewish pilot, Sydney Shulemson, to fly for the newly

formed Israeli air force. Many Canadian pilots quietly agreed to do the same thing, but Beurling could not keep his involvement in the new nation a secret, blabbing to iournalists in Toronto and New York. At an airport near Rome, his aircraft was apparently sabotaged (likely by a British Secret Service agent) and caught fire at the end of a routine test flight. He and fellow Canadian Malta veteran Leonard Cohen burned to death at about 11:30 A.M. on Thursday, May 20, 1948.

War heroes were no longer in vogue, war bond tours no longer necessary. Beurling's death made the front pages, but the prime minister did not mention it in his diary. More shocking to King was that the day following Beurling's death his former defence minister died. Ralston's wife despised King, and she would not see him after the funeral; King believed that she blamed him for her husband's death.

The day Beurling died, King instructed Lester Pearson, then minister of external affairs, to have Canada's United Nations representative support Britain's pro-Arab motion but abstain from the United States motion condemning Egypt's aggression against Israel. King wrote in his diary: "I have little confidence in the judgment of Americans in regard to matters in the Middle East. Equally I feel that the British have the best of reasons..."

Pearson sent a condolence telegram to the Beurling family, adding that External Affairs unfortunately was unable to pay for the repatriation of their son's remains. Beurling's American girl friend, Vivian Stokes (the Countess Crespi), paid for his burial in Rome, not far from the graves of the poets lohn Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In luly 1950, less than two years out of office, misunderstood and little mourned, Mackenzie King died. A few months later, Sydney Shulemson, at the request of Beurling's mother, bad Beurling exhumed and transported by destroyer to Israel. There he received a hero's funeral, attended, at Israel's invitation, by his family. The greatest Canadian fighter pilot of the Second World War today lies in an Israeli military cemetery in Haifa.