Tracking Radar's Untold Story
By Kelly Patrick
"Here’s $100. Buy what you need for a year. Because where you’re going, there isn’t going to be a thing."
Those were the orders radar technician Bill McLachlan received before shipping out on a Second World War mission so secret even he didn’t know the destination.
It turned out to be a remote outcropping on Newfoundland’s northernmost tip. McLachlan, then a fresh-faced 19-year-old, was bobbing in a wooden boat on the frigid north Atlantic when he first glimpsed it.
"It was absolutely barren. There wasn’t even a tree, just rocks," he says.
For 10 months, beginning in September 1942, McLachlan had almost no contact with the outside world while he and 40 others constructed then manned a radar station at Cape Bauld, one of 41 clandestine posts monitoring Canada’s seas and skies from 1942 to 1945.
Today, those stations and their stories are nearly as little-known as they were during the war. Official histories of the Second World War ignore the 3,000 Royal Canadian Air Force members who served on Canadian radar stations, says McLachlan, so he decided to capture their stories himself.
In January, the 80-year-old Cartier Street resident published RCAF Radar: 1941-1945, a book he says is the first to reveal the closely-guarded story of Canadian radar.
"It was so secret there was nothing written in Canada, and overseas they didn’t particularly care about Canada," says McLachlan. "But it’s part of Canada’s history. Millions were spent on building the stations, millions were spent training and almost nothing was written until my book."
It took McLachlan three years to compile and write his detailed volume, filled with photos, detachment newsletters and first-person tales from former Canadian radar technicians and operators. Their stories are fascinating, but readers will be most surprised, McLachlan says, to discover how much enemy action radar stations captured along Canada’s coast.
They didn’t want to know there were ships sunk right outside Quebec – it was hush-hush," he says during an animated three-hour interview.
With his full head of grey hair, neatly trimmed moustache and clear eyes, McLachlan, a spry octogenarian, could pass for 60. His retirement schedule is as full as any working mom’s; 19 years after leaving his post teaching electronics at Philemon Wright High School in Gatineau, he visits sick veterans in the hospital, presides over their funerals, and helps run the Montgomery Legion on Kent Street in Ottawa. He became a neophyte author in his eighth decade.
"He’s very motivated," says Phyllis, his wife of 48 years and mother of his two grown daughters. "(The book) was very busy for him. He worked at it non-stop. I was almost glad when he finished."
At the two-hour mark in his tale, McLachlan wets his palette with a Molson Export, then shows off a birthday gift from his daughter – a T-shirt that declares McLachlan only gets better with age. "It ain’t bragging. It’s telling it like it is," the shirt reads.
McLachlan tells his life story with a similar forthrightness.
The fourth of five children raised by a single mother in depression-era Ottawa (a brain tumour felled his father when McLachlan was a boy), McLachlan banished poverty’s miseries with crystal sets, battery-operated two-tube radios and boy scout meetings at the Knox Presbyterian Church at Elgin and Lisgar streets.
After high school, he harnessed his electronics hobby and the Morse code he’d picked up in scouts to earn a spot in a radio course taught by the Royal Canadian Air Force at the Ottawa Technical High School on Albert Street. "It covered all the techniques involved in radio, all the math equations, general electronics, maintenance," he explains.
The six-month, 1,500-hour course wrapped up just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in December 1941. With the British suffering heavy losses on the continent and the curtain rising on the Pacific theatre, McLachlan swept through basic training then joined a top-secret British Royal Air Force radar training school in Clinton, Ontario.
A crew of guards and a six-foot fence topped with barbed wire protected the secrets McLachlan and 25 classmates learned at the school.
"You couldn’t even take notes out. You had to memorize it," McLachlan says. "We never told anybody anything. Even when we came home on leave, I never told the chap who helped me get into radio school."
The school’s mission remained under the tightest of wraps because radar technology was in its infancy when the Second World War exploded in Europe. Radar’s British inventor, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, had only figured out how to record the radio pulses reflected by an airplane’s metal parts in 1935.
By the time Hitler’s armies marched into Poland, 20 primitive stations stretched like vertebrae along Britain’s coast, forming the backbone of the country’s radar defenses. Each station could detect enemy planes from as far away as 160 km and spot submarines. The Axis and Allied powers raced to improve and apply the new technology. Radar outposts sprouted across the globe; Canada fortified its defenses with 30 of its own on the East Coast and 11 on the West. Radar technicians and operators couldn’t be trained fast enough.
"The radar crew was a fairly highly skilled crew," McLachlan explains. "Most were university graduates in electrical engineering, but they were so desperate for radar crew they started recruiting high school kids."
The British trained 5,000 Canadians at the Clinton school – one third of the radar technicians and operators that filled the Royal Air Force’s radar ranks from Britain to Burma.
McLachlan was working on one of the new eastern stations when he received the cryptic orders dispatching him to Cape Bauld. When McLachlan’s company landed on its stony coast, Cape Bauld was deserted save for a lone off-limits lighthouse. The men erected a neat row of Nissen huts – round shelters that look a bit like tin tents – for protection against the bitter winds, and spent four months assembling radar equipment and erecting a kitchen and recreation hall.
"But at this place there was no entertainment. They sent about four baseballs and a dozen bats – that lasted about three hours before we lost (the balls). They sent about 20 books and we read them over and over again until we got down to the Bible and a dictionary," says McLachlan. Chess games lasted a week. Every two months, an oversized garbage pail filled with boiled ice chunks became the base bathtub.
McLachlan’s isolation was total. He filed his radar reports in Morse code to St. John’s. At Christmas, a plane brought mail, but the pilot dropped the bundle from the sky without a parachute, smashing gift bottles of whiskey on the rock bed below.
In 1987, McLachlan and Phyllis – who he married while he was on leave in 1945 – returned to Cape Bauld. "Only the lighthouse was left," says Phyllis. "You could see a few cement piers, but the lighthouse keeper had no idea the station had ever been there."
Like the remnants of the Cape Bauld station, little evidence remains of Canada’s Second World War radar stations and their dying keepers.
McLachlan’s friend Robert Linden, an ex-radar tech himself, recognized that when he read the Royal Canadian Air Force’s official history of the Second World War and found no mention of radar technicians or operators. "I started digging and found out there were 5,000 radar men no one knows of," Linden says.
To remedy that, he formed the Canadian Radar History Project in 1993 and traveled the country searching for surviving Second World War radar men like McLachlan.
When Linden began assembling his own book on Second World War radar across the globe, he knew McLachlan had the energy and enthusiasm to write a chapter on Canada. "He’s a very generous person in giving of himself. He spends more time with disabled veterans, he attends their funerals . . . in fact, we kid him, we say, ‘Bill, you should have been a minister for God’s sakes.’"
Compiling the material for that chapter inspired McLachlan’s book. Since publishing it in January, he’s sold about 200 copies to radar enthusiasts from Nova Scotia to Florida who contacted him directly to order the book.
"I didn’t want to see all those pictures and (that) information buried with me."
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Updated: April 16, 2004