The origins of the cancellation of Canada's Avro CF-105 arrow fighter program: A failure of strategy

Abstract

The story of the demise of Canada's remarkable CF-105 Arrow jet-fighter interceptor has been told and retold by numerous Canadian writers. As told by most, it is a tragic tale. Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, in an act as unforgivable as it was incomprehensible, not only destroyed a highly promising all-Canadian state-of-the-art aircraft but ruined all hopes of Canada ever being an important player in the North American defense industry. This article offers a contrasting interpretation — locating the problems leading to the aircraft's cancellation further back in history, and in particular in serious and determinative failures in strategic thinking and analysis by senior Canadian military officials at the time of the Arrow program's birth in 1953.

Kke words:

• Canada
• Canadian
• Avro Arrow
• CF-105
• weapons system
• defense and security strategy
• air power

Notes

¹The unending series of books on the subject include: Palmiro Campagna, Storms of Controversy: the Secret Avro Arrow Files Revealed, 3rd ed. (Toronto, ON: Stoddart 2000) and Requiem For a Giant: A.V. Roe Canada and the Avro Arrow (Toronto, ON: Dundurn 2003); James Dow, The Arrow, 2nd ed. (Toronto, ON: James Lorimer 1997); Murray Peden, Fall of an Arrow (Toronto, ON: Stoddart 1987); E.K. Shaw, There Never Was an Arrow, 2nd ed. (Ottawa, ON: Steel Rail Educational Publishing 1981); Greig Stewart, Shutting Down the National Dream: A.V. Roe and the Tragedy of the Avro Arrow, 2nd ed. (Toronto, ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1997); Randall Whitcomb, Avro Aircraft and Cold War Aviation (St. Catherines, ON: Vanwell Publishing 2002); Les Wilkinson, Don Watson, Ron Page and Richard Organ, The Story of the Avro Arrow from its Evolution to its Extinction (Erin: Boston Mills Press 1980); Peter Zuuring, The Arrow Scrapbook (Dalkeith: Arrow Alliance Press 1999) and Arrow Countdown. Rebuilding a Dream and a Nation (Kingston, ON: Arrow Alliance Press 2002).

²J.J. Brown, Ideas in Exile: A History of Canadian Invention (Toronto, ON: McClelland and Stewart 1967), 311.

³Melvin Conant, The Long Polar Watch: Canada and the Defense of North America (New York: Harper Brothers 1962), 154.

⁴See Russell Isinger and Donald C. Story, ‘The Plane Truth: the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow Program’, in Donald C. Story and R. Bruce Shepard (eds.), The Diefenbaker Legacy: Canadian Politics, Law and Society Since 1957 (Regina, SK: Canadian Plains Research 1998), 43–55. The thesis is advanced more fully in Isinger, ‘The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow Programme: Decisions and Determinants’, Unpublished MA Thesis (Univ. of Saskatchewan 1987).

⁵For an excellent treatment of Canadian military strategy during the 1950s see Andrew Richter, Avoiding Armageddon: Canadian Military Strategy and Nuclear Weapons 1950–63 (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press 2002).

⁶James Hornick, ‘Predict Avro to Build Delta Fighter for RCAF; U.K. Wing Expert Here’, Globe and Mail, 3 Jan. 1952. For a good collection of newspaper clippings on the CF-105 program see National Archives of Canada (hereafter cited as NAC), John D. Harbron Papers, MG31, D 224, Vol.8, File 16.

⁷Dow, The Arrow, 84. The CF-100 was Canada's first jet fighter, an outstanding subsonic, two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather aircraft, developed and produced by A.V. Roe for the RCAF in the early 1950s. A useful brief account of the CF-100 program is found in Randall Wakelam, ‘Flights of Fancy: RCAF Fighter Procurement 1945–1954’, Unpublished MA Thesis (Kingston, ON: Royal Military College 1997), 90–201.

⁸Adey is quoted in Stewart, Shutting Down the National Dream, 180. For a biography of Crawford Gordon see Greig Stewart, Arrow Through the Heart: The Life and Times of Crawford Gordon and the Avro Arrow (Toronto, ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1998).

⁹It is considered that the RCAF's ‘golden age’ began in 1951; see Brereton Greenhous and Hugh A. Halliday, Canada's Air Forces 1914–1999 (Montreal, QC: Art Global 1999), 133; see also Jeff Rankin-Lowe, ‘Royal Canadian Air Force 1950–1959’, Wings of Fame: The Journal of Classic Combat Aircraft, Pts. 1 and 2, Vols. 2 and 3, 142–57.

¹⁰Stewart, Shutting Down the National Dream, 62.

¹¹The wording of the design studies is cited in Dow, The Arrow, 84–5.

¹²J.W. Pickersgill, My Years with Louis St. Laurent: A Political Memoir (Toronto, ON: Univ. of Toronto Press 1975), 191.

¹³By contrast, in 1950–51 Canadian defense expenditures had been $781.9 million; see Hon. Brooke Claxton, Canada's Defense Programme 1953–54 (Ottawa, ON: Queen's Printer 1953), 54.

¹⁶Cited in Wakelam, ‘Flights of Fancy’, 209.

¹⁴James Eayrs, In Defense of Canada; Growing Up Allied (Toronto, ON: Univ. of Toronto Press 1980), 208–9.

¹⁵David Jay Bercuson, True Patriot: The Life of Brooke Claxton, 1898–1960 (Toronto, ON: Univ. of Toronto Press 1993), 215.

¹⁷Claxton, Canada's Defense Programme 1953–54, 34.

¹⁸The Canada–US Military Study Group, recently struck to examine North American defense issues, had already proposed that an early warning line be built in southern Canada across the 55th Parallel, at an estimated capital cost of $80 million. Creating as much anxiety was the recommendation by an ad hoc group of US and Canadian scientists working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory during the summer of 1952 that the existing radar lines in the US and Canada be augmented by a distant early-warning radar network, stretching from Alaska across the Canadian Arctic to Greenland; the estimated installation cost in this case was $370 million and the annual operating cost $106 million; see Kenneth Schaffel, The Emerging Shield: The Air Force and the Evolution of Continental Air Defense 1945–1960 (Washington DC: Office of Air Force History, US Air Force 1991), 176.

¹⁹Lawrence Aronsen, ‘“A Leading Arsenal of Democracy”: American Rearmament and the Continental Integration of the Canadian Aircraft Industry, 1948–1953’, The International History Review 13/3 (Aug. 1991), 481–501, and Dan Middlemiss, ‘The Road from Hyde Park: Canada-U.S. Defense Economic Cooperation’, in Joel J. Sokolsky and Joseph T. Jockel (eds.), Fifty Years of Canada-United States Defence Cooperation (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen 1992), 178–84.

²⁰Wakelam, ‘Flights of Fancy’, 201.

²¹See Marjorie Earl, ‘How Roy Dobson Pushed Us into the Jet Age’, Maclean's, 20 July 1953, 13.

²²See Dow, The Arrow, 87.

²³Wakelam, ‘Flights of Fancy’, 169–70.

²⁴NAC, Brooke Claxton Papers, MG32 B 5, Vol.253, 982–3, Claxton Memoirs. One year earlier Claxton had questioned Howe's suggestion that A.V. Roe stop development work on the CF-100 program; he reminded Howe that aircraft development and production could not be entirely separated and that it was important for Canada to stay up to date on the latest technology in the field; see Dow, The Arrow, 71–2. Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn maintain that Claxton ‘placed a higher … value on Canadian technology than did Howe’; see Robert Bothwell and William Kilbourn, C. D. Howe: A Biography (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart 1979), 267.

²⁵Dow, The Arrow, 86.

²⁶Canada, House of Commons, Debates 1952–53, 2 (16 Feb. 1953), 1954.

²⁷Canada, Directorate of History and Heritage (hereafter DHH), Dept. of National Defence (hereafter DND), The Raymont Collection, Records of the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee (hereafter COSC Papers), Series 3, Minutes of the 178th Meeting of Air Members, 7 July 1953.

²⁸DHH, COSC Papers, Appendix ‘A’ to 182nd Meeting of Air Members, letter from O.M. Solandt to Mr. R.M. Brophy, Deputy Minister, Dept. of Defence Production, 27 July 1953. The designation CF-105 appears to have been given to the aircraft sometime in the early spring of 1953. Referred to during the early design stages as the C-100-S, C-100-D, C-104 and CF-104, the aircraft appears to have been called the CF-105 for the first time at a series of meetings at A.V. Roe in April 1953 between A.V. Roe, RCAF and DRB officials; see NAC, Records of the Dept. of Defence Production (hereafter DDP) RG 24 acc. 1983-84/167, Vol. 6426, File 1038CN-180 pt. 1 CF105 Aircraft Generally, Minutes of a Meeting to Discuss the CF105 Supersonic Fighter at A.V. Roe, 27–30 April 1953. Financial Post columnist Michael Barkway was referring to the aircraft as the CF-104 as late as 21 Feb. 21, 1953; see Michael Barkway, ‘Air Industry Wins Fight in Defense Reshuffle’Financial Post, 21 Feb. 1953.

²⁹A 22 Dec. 1953 memorandum, approved by Canada's Chiefs of Staff Committee in Jan. 1954, observed: ‘At the very least, a general war during 1954 must appear to [the Soviet Union] such an uncertain gamble (with such a risk that their own country would suffer crippling damage) that it seems unlikely that they would deliberately initiate one’. See NAC, Records of the Dept. of External Affairs (hereafter DEA) RG 25, Vol. 4581, File 50045 F-40 Part 2, Memo for the Chiefs of Staff Committee, ‘The Current Risks of General War’, 22 Dec. 1953.

³⁰Quoted in Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford: OUP 1998), 183.

³¹Donald Barry (ed.), Documents on Canadian External Relations 1953, Vol. 19 (Ottawa, ON: Canada Communication Gp 1991), 1095.

³²Aronsen, ‘A Leading Arsenal of Democracy’, 497.

³³Richard M. Leighton, History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: Strategy, Money and the New Look 1953–1956, Vol. III (Washington DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense 2001), 128.

³⁴Slemon assumed the position of Chief of the Air Staff on 31 Jan. 1953.

³⁵Air Marshal Wilf Curtis had told Air Council as early as Sept. 1951 that, because of Russian advances in long-range jet bombers, the RCAF should switch to supersonic fighter aircraft as soon as possible; see DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 135th Meeting of the Air Members, 19 Sept. 1951.

³⁶DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 178th Meeting of Air Members, 7 July 1953.

³⁷For a brief description of the role and operation of the COSC, see Douglas L. Bland, The Administration of Defense Policy in Canada 1947 to 1985 (Kingston, ON: Ronald P. Frye 1987), pp.151–52.

³⁸Both Simonds and his successor, Lt.-Gen. Howard Graham as Chief of the General Staff, were very critical of Foulkes for his unwillingness to stand his ground on military principle against the Defence Minister. According to Simonds' biographer, Simonds assailed Foulkes for not objectively presenting the military case and instead ‘helping Claxton towards his political goals’; see Dominick Graham, The Price of Command: A Biography of General Guy Simonds (Toronto, ON: Stoddart 1992), 250. Howard Graham would similarly later accuse Foulkes of allowing his plans to be ‘too much watered down and diluted to retain what was undoubtedly a cordial relationship with the government’; see Howard Graham, Citizen and Soldier: The Memoirs of Lieutenant-General Howard Graham (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart 1987), 215.

³⁹Mainguy laid out this proposal at COSC meetings on 20 and 25 Nov. 1953. The program called for the production of Vancouver-class frigates, Grumman S2F anti-submarine aircraft, coastal minesweepers, seaward defense patrol craft, and propulsion units. See DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 550th and 551st meetings of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, 20 and 25 Nov. 1953. The record of the 25 Nov. 1953 meeting suggests that Mainguy had a bigger issue with the RCAF, which was asking whether the Navy's requirement for the S2F anti-submarine aircraft represented a duplication between services.

⁴⁰DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 545th Meeting of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, 6 Oct. 1953.

⁴¹Graham, Simonds, 245.

⁴²DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 551st Meeting of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, 25 Nov. 1953.

⁴³DHH, COSC Papers, General Charles A. Foulkes Papers, File 14-2 Arrow, ‘The Story of the CF-105 Avro ‘Arrow’, 1952–1962’, 4.

⁴⁴A record of the discussions of these meetings is found in Barry (note 30), p.1093–96, 1099.

⁴⁵The apparent treatment of the costs of the aircraft's engine and electronics as relatively minor reflected either an inattentiveness to, or an ignoring of, the experience of US aircraft development experts that an aircraft's components were as important as the quality of the airframe: the ‘weapons systems’ approach embraced in the US assumed that the airframe should be planned and designed around the aircraft's weapons systems; see Schaffel, Emerging Shield, 164.

⁴⁶Several authors have noted that by early 1954 St. Laurent's deteriorating physical and mental health had become noticeable, and was affecting his leadership in Cabinet and in Parliament. Described alternately as depression, anxiety and exhaustion, his mental difficulties were manifest in a loss of interest in the issues of the day and finally a loss of command of the government. On St. Laurent's declining health, see Bruce Hutchison, Mr. Prime Minister 1867–1964 (Toronto, ON: Longmans Canada 1964), 305; Bothwell and Kilbourn, C. D. Howe, 292; Donald Fleming, So Very Near: The Political Memoirs of the Honorable Donald M. Fleming Vol. I, The Rising Years (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart 1985), 253; Paul Hellyer, Damn the Torpedoes: My Fight to Unify Canada's Armed Forces (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart 1990), 12; and Michael Bliss, Right Honorable Men: The Descent of Canadian Politics from Macdonald to Mulroney (Toronto, ON: HarperCollins 1994), 182.

⁴⁷Much has been written about the orderly approach taken by St. Laurent to Cabinet business; see Dale Thomson, Louis St. Laurent: Canadian (Toronto, ON: Macmillan 1967), 262–3; Pickersgill, My Years with Louis St. Laurent, 174–5; Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond and John English, Canada Since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (Toronto, ON: Univ. of Toronto Press 1981), 132; Bothwell and Kilbourn, C. D. Howe, 225–6; and Paul Martin, A Very Public Life: So Many Worlds, Vol. II (Toronto, ON: Deneau 1985), 16–17.

⁴⁸Quoted in James Eayrs, In Defence of Canada: Peacemaking and Deterrence (Toronto, ON: Univ. of Toronto Press 1972), 15. Dan Middlemiss and Joel Sokolsky have observed that Canadian Prime Ministers typically exercise a ‘passive oversight role’ with respect to defense policy, leaving these matters to the Defense Minister; see Dan Middlemiss and Joel J. Sokolsky, Canadian Defence Policy: Decisions and Determinants (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1989), 75.

⁴⁹Howe is quoted in Stewart, Shutting Down the National Dream, 181.

⁵⁰ The Globe and Mail's James Hornick duly reported on 4 Jan. 1954 that the Cabinet had approved an exciting new supersonic fighter for Canada as part of a new ‘billion-dollar’ military aircraft replacement program, designed to stabilize employment in the defense industry while keeping plants in a state of war readiness; see James Hornick, ‘Plan to Keep Plants Busy until 1960’, Globe and Mail, 4 Jan. 1954. Hornick explained that contracts would be issued to the four leading Canadian aircraft manufacturing firms, De Havilland Aircraft, Canadair Ltd., Canadian Car and Foundry and Avro Canada Ltd. to build several different military aircraft for Canada; the potentially biggest and most complex project was the CF-105. A similar report was made by the Financial Post's Michael Barkway, who described the CF-105 fighter program as the ‘biggest decision approved by the Government in a recent long-range survey of future equipment for the RCAF’; see Michael Barkway, ‘Avro Will Build New Jet Fighter’, Financial Post, 2 Jan. 1954).

⁵¹Analyzing Canada–US defense economic cooperation decades later, Dan Middlemiss would indeed characterize the CF-105 development program as the ‘centrepiece’ of an expansive plan by C.D. Howe's Dept. of Defence Production to develop a core industrial base in Canada capable of producing specialized and highly sophisticated products in the aircraft, electronics and shipbuilding sectors mainly for the domestic market; see Middlemiss, ‘The Road from Hyde Park’, 184. Still, R.B. Byers has argued convincingly that Canadian defense procurement has never been grounded in a coherent national industrial strategy; see Byers, ‘Canadian Defence Procurement: Implications for Economic Policy’ in Denis Stairs and Gilbert R. Winham (eds.), Selected Problems in Formulating Foreign Economic Policy, Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, Vol. 30 (Toronto, ON: Univ. of Toronto Press 1985), 158.

⁵²See Claxton, Canada's Defence Programme 1953–54, 5.

⁵³ Debates, 1953–54, 1 (26 Nov. 1953), 362–5.

⁵⁴Dan Middlemiss and Joel J. Sokolsky have observed that typically Ministers, ‘burdened with the pressing issues of their own particular Departments, rarely have the time to involve themselves in defense policy … Indeed cabinet members have often displayed little inclination to become involved in defense policy, partly because the issues frequently revolved around arcane matters of strategic doctrine and sophisticated technology or which the average cabinet minister may understand very little. Ministers may also feel at a disadvantage compared to the defense minister, who can draw freely on the expertise of his staff and bureaucratic advisers'; see Middlemiss and Sokolsky, In Defence of Canada, 68.

⁵⁵These were the words that would later be used by USAF Chief of Staff Thomas White to describe what was needed in a North American defense system; White is quoted in Schaffel, Emerging Shield, 232. NSC 159/4, signed by Eisenhower in Sept. 1953, called for a ‘reasonably effective defense system’; see Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 183.

⁵⁶Liberal Party leader, Lester Pearson would later recount that the US aircraft industry had made it known that it was ‘not going to allow any interference with its own right to produce its own aircraft for its own government’. See Jon B. McLin, Canada's Changing Defence Policy, 1957–1963: The Problems of a Middle Power in Alliance (Toronto, ON: Copp Clark Publishing Co. 1967), 71.

⁵⁷Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 231.

⁵⁸The fighter that the USAF would eventually select as its long-range interceptor was North American's F-108 Rapier, whose specifications would be considerably beyond the CF-105's. According to Bill Gunston, the F-108 was to be of a state-of-the-art, stainless steel, two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather fighter, having a speed in excess of Mach 3, a service ceiling of 80,000 feet and a combat range of 1,150 miles; see Bill Gunston, Fighters of the Fifties (Cambridge, UK: Patrick Stephens 1981), 178–9; for a brief history of the F-108 program see Dennis R. Jenkins and Tony Landis, North American XB-70A Valkyrie, Warbird Tech Series, Vol. 34 (North Branch, MN: Specialty Press 2002), 12–20.

⁵⁹DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 194^th Meeting of Air Members, 7 April 1954.

⁶⁰NAC, DND Records RG 24 acc. 1983-84/167, Vol. 6426, File 1038CN-180 pt. 1 CF105 Aircraft Generally, Minutes of the Meeting to Discuss Air Specification Being Prepared for the Prototype CF105 Aircraft, 12 Nov. 1953.

⁶¹Quoted in Dow, The Arrow, 95.

⁶²DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 189th Meeting of Air Members, 18 Nov. 1953. As early as April 1953 the Air Council was discussing the possibility of reorganizing RCAF auxiliary squadrons into composite squadrons with an increased number of regular pilots to ‘ensure a greater return from the expensive and complicated equipment involved’. See DHH, COSC Papers, Minutes of the 172nd Meeting of Air Members, 22 April 1953.

⁶³ Debates 1955, Vol. 6 (13 July 1955), 6088.

⁶⁴Dow, The Arrow, 95.

⁶⁵For an excellent discussion of the USAF's response to the attempts by the US Army and US Navy to contest the predominance of manned bombers in US strategic doctrine by shifting the focus to ballistic missile technology, see Michael R. Terry, ‘Formulation of Aerospace Doctrine from 1955 to 1959’, Air Power History (Spring 1991), 47–54.

⁶⁶The USAF had originally selected the F-102 for its 1954 Interceptor Program but teething troubles with the project, together with new advances in electronics, missiles and engine technology, resulted in the development of an advanced version of the aircraft, designated the F-106A, with twice the power and speed, a wider radius of action and higher altitude, and superior missile capability. The F-106A was delivered to the USAF starting in Oct. 1959. The F-101B Voodoo was an adaptation of the F-101A bomber escort aircraft designed by McDonnell Aircraft during the Korean War. In June 1954 the USAF, worried about delays in the development of the F-102, awarded a contract to McDonnell to adapt the F-101A Voodoo as an all-weather-interceptor. The F-101B Voodoo entered service in the USAF in early 1958 (and, after the cancellation of the Arrow, RCAF service in 1961). For a concise account of the development of the F-101, F-102 and F-108 aircraft, see Schaffel, The Emerging Shield, 224–34.

⁶⁷Bowie and Immerman, Waging Peace, 189.

⁶⁸Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1959), 267.

⁶⁹Fred Schindeler has noted that during the St. Laurent years senior civil servants in the Canadian bureaucracy exercised unbridled power, forwarding recommendations to the Cabinet that ministers, given little or no prior opportunity to assess, found themselves approving without much discussion; see Fred Schindeler, ‘The Prime Minister and the Cabinet: History and Development’, in Thomas A. Hockin (ed.), Apex of Power: The Prime Minister and Political Leadership in Canada 2nd ed. (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall 1977), 27.

⁷⁰Adrian Preston has argued that, unlike their counterparts in the US and Britain at this time, Canadian military leaders had, by virtue of their expertise, knowledge and access to intelligence, enormous influence in the formulation of Canadian foreign and defense policy; see Preston, ‘The Profession of Arms in Postwar Canada, 1945–1970: Political Authority as a Military Problem’, World Politics: A Quarterly Journal of International Relations 23/2 (Jan. 1971), 200.