Bermuda Flying School

This operated as a staging point on scheduled trans-Atlantic flights by flying boats of Imperial Airways and Pan American.

These, along with a regular army detachment of infantry at Prospect Camp, formed the Bermuda Garrison, tasked with defending the various facilities of importance to the war effort.

Although a contingent from the BVRC, with attachments from the other units, was sent to join the Lincolnshire Regiment in England in 1940, no further drafts were allowed to be sent for fear of weakening the defences.

The school was under the command of Major Cecil Montgomery-Moore, DFC, who had served as a fighter pilot during the First World War.

With the moratorium against sending drafts overseas, this meant local soldiers came to see the BFS as the easiest way of reaching sharper ends of the war.

Although the local units were allowed to send drafts overseas in 1943, the preceding state of affairs meant that a disproportionately high number of aviators appears on the list of Bermuda's war dead (ten out of thirty-five).

This would continue to be a problem as late as 1944, when the British Army was forced to disband a division after Operation Overlord due to a shortage of manpower.

Although the school was closed, Bertram Work and Major Montgomery-Moore oversaw the conversion of its administration into a recruiting arm, the Bermuda Flying Committee, for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), sending sixty aircrew candidates to that service before the War's end.

[6] Flying instructor Captain Stafford moved to RAF Transport Command, and was later shot down, becoming a prisoner-of-war in Germany.

Evidently due to a navigational error, they found themselves over occupied France and were shot down near Landéda, Brittany, by anti-aircraft artillery and two Luftwaffe fighters.