On a cool day in November of 1950, a ship from Italy arrived in the Port of Haifa. Meeting the ship at the dock was an Israeli Military Honor Guard that carried the Israeli Flag draped coffin of George “Buzz” Beurling off the ship and slowly through the streets of Haifa. Large crowds gathered along the streets to pay homage to Canada’s greatest air ace from World War II and a member of Israel’s new Air Force. Slowly the procession approached a small Military Cemetery just south and east of Haifa at the foot of Mt. Carmel. With full military honors this son of Canada, a committed Christian teetotaler from Montreal, was laid to rest.
Beurling dreamt of flying from the time he was a young boy. He quit school early to pursue flying and took his first solo flight in 1938, when he was only 17.
When Canada entered the war in 1939, Beurling immediately tried to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force but was rejected since he did not meet their academic requirements. Not to be deterred, Beurling then tried to join the Finnish Air Force which, in the winter of 1939, was fighting the Russians in what became known as the Winter War. But Beurling’s mother refused to sign the necessary papers waiving the age requirement and again he was rejected. Still wanting to get into the war, Beurling then travelled to England where, finally, in September of 1940, he was accepted him into the RAF.
Beurling developed exceptional flying skills and became an expect marksman with the Spitfires’s 8 Browning machine guns. Flying at high speed, Beurling learned the art of the deflection shot which meant that he learned to aim his guns not directly at his target, but an imaginary point in space in front of his target where the speeding bullets would intersect with the flight path of his enemy. During training his gunnery and flying skills brought him to the attention of his superiors and he graduated flying school with top marks.
Fighting in North Africa between Rommel’s Afrika Corps and the British made the British controlled Island of Malta a key battleground in 1941 and 1942. To send supplies to the Afrika Corps, the Germans needed to send cargo vessels laden with everything from tanks to fuel from Italy to Africa. With Malta in British hands, these German convoys were under constant attack. To counter the British threat coming from Malta, Goering , head of the Luftwaffe promised Hitler that that he could bomb Malta in submission. What developed was a major air war to control the skies around Malta. And into this melee Beurling injected himself by volunteering to be assigned to the famous Squadron 249, on Malta.
Beurling arrived in Malta on June 9, 1942 and just 3 days later he began racking up air victories. By July 30, just 7 weeks later, he had already shot down 17 enemy planes, 4 on one day alone. On September 25, 1942 he had another big day with 3 more confirmed kills. By the time he was finished flying in Malta, he had shot down 27 enemy planes, by far the highest of any RAF pilot during the fighting on Malta.
At this point in his career he as sent back Canada to participate in the public effort to sell War Bonds. He was not especially happy to be out of the cockpit and and soon angered the people running the Bond Drive by talking about how much he liked killing the enemy. This soon put an end to his participation in selling Bonds and he was sent back to England to train new pilots in gunnery and flying skills.
On September 1, 1943, he transferred from the RAF to the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and returned to active flight duty. By the time the war was over, he had 31 1/2 confirmed kills. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and Distinguished Flying Medal.
Although he was most familiar with flying Spitfires, when the P-51 came into service, he tried to join a squadron of P-51’s so that he could take long flights into Germany accomanying Bombers on their deep penetrating raids into German industrialized areas. To quench his thrust for action, he even tried at one point to join the US Air Force because he thought he had a better chance of joining a P-51 squadron if he was part of the USAF. But it was not to be.
Beurling did not get his way in the air all the time. Over his career he was forced to bail out 4 times including once when he was shot down by a student pilot during his time when he was assigned to a training school. He also crashed 5 additional times either from mechanical problems or from damage to his plane inflicted by the enemy. He was wounded several times but never severely.
Beurling’s flighing skills were second to none and many of his fellow pilots adopted one of his favorite tricks to shake an enemy from his tail. Beurling perfected a manoever that put his Spitfire into a vicious and violent stall by pulling way back on the flight controls and then jamming them hard over. This flipped the plane over and made it drop like a rock. It also made it nearly impossible for the enemy pilot to continue his pursuit. Many flight instructors thought this was a crazy idea but it worked and many Spitfire pilots would adopt this trick to get away from an enemy plane.
When the war came to an end, Beurling had a lot of trouble transitioning back to civilian life. This finally led him to join the fledging Israeli Air Force where he knew he could continue to fly in combat. The Israelis were at first skeptical and could not understand why a Christian wanted so desperately to join Israel’s air force. But with the help of a few of his Jewish friends from Montreal he was finally able to convince them that he was serious. Israel was buying some surplus P-51’s and he had every intention to fly one of them. So in 1948 he joined the IAF and began ferrying aircraft from Europe to Israel. During one of these flights, Beurling’s plane crashed in Italy and he was killed. It was his 10th crash landing and his last.