Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  November 20th: These old short-horn Farmans are awful-looking buses. I am surprised they fly at all. We have the same sort of wild kids here for instructors that we had at Oxford, only more so, – wilder and younger. I was told that they kill off more instructors in the RFC than pupils, and from what I’ve seen I can well believe it. I have a Captain Harrison for an instructor. He seems to be a mere kid. He’s about nineteen and is trying hard to grow a mustache. Classes are a joke.

  December 6th: I have been flying for three days and Capt. Harrison says I can go solo to-morrow if it’s calm.… I have put in two hours and twenty minutes in the air and I would have soloed this evening if it had been calm enough.

  January 1st, 1918: I have done my four hours’ solo on Rumpties and am done with them forever, thank God. I have done two hours on Avros [i.e. the Avro 504J]. They are entirely different and I have to learn to fly all over again.

  Grider’s months in England are a litany of drunken parties, girls pursued (‘horizontal refreshment’), aircraft flown and crashes witnessed. He noted ‘wholesale funerals’ and that one of his fellow-Americans had already been to twelve in five months.

  February 9th: A horrible thing happened today. We were all out on the tarmac having our pictures taken for posterity when somebody yelled and pointed up. Two Avros collided right over the airdrome at about three thousand feet. God, it was a horrible sight. We didn’t know who was in either one of them. I was glad I was sitting next to Cal. They came down in a slow spin with their wings locked together and both of them in flames. Fred Stillman was in one machine and got out alive but badly burned and Doug Ellis was in the other one and was burned to a cinder. As I sat there watching I kept trying to imagine what those poor devils were thinking about as they went spinning down into hell. It made me right sick at my stomach to watch. We all went up later and felt better after a little flying. We went into town for a party with Capt. Horn…

  Later, Grider would say that most pilots were killed by structural defects or by having the aircraft catch fire in the air. This was probably true, and there is hardly a diary or journal from airmen at the time that doesn’t record several cases of wings either coming off entirely in the air or just folding up like tired sunshades. Grider himself had only four more months to live. He was shot down on 18th June 1918 some twenty miles behind the German lines, leaving an ex-wife and two young sons back in the United States.

  Certain other accidents were less accidental than self-willed. Any airfield could witness examples of the plain old showing off that was a hallmark of a certain kind of aviator then as now. In its way this, too, was a sign of poorly learned basic lessons. W. E. Johns described sitting smoking a cigarette outside the hangars at Thetford one day when a machine that was strange to him landed and taxied up. The pilot climbed out, leaving the engine ticking over, and greeted him.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Johns, nodding towards the strange machine.

  ‘An S.E.5,’ the pilot replied scornfully.

  ‘Pretty useful?’ asked Johns.

  ‘Useful?’ replied the pilot. ‘Useful! I should say she is. She’ll loop off the ground.’

  Johns’s expression must have betrayed his incredulity, for the pilot muttered, ‘Watch me!’ and climbed back into his machine. The S.E.5 took off and soared in a circle, swinging over the top and coming down. It hit the ground at well over 100 mph. Johns did not move. He could not. When the ambulance took away the pilot’s remains and the air mechanics started to pick up the pieces, Johns noticed he was still smoking the same cigarette as when the S.E.5 had first landed.82

  No matter how commonplace flying was to become over the next decades it lost little of its original glamour, and the fatal urge to shine as a demonstrator of a new type of aircraft or simply as a skilled daredevil was to persist. In 1931 Douglas Bader was famously to lose both his lower legs in a crash while attempting to slow-roll a Bristol Bulldog too close to the ground. It was pure showing off and he was lucky to get away with his life. Hundreds of other pilots down to the present day have killed themselves as well as spectators in similarly misjudged crowd-pleasing aerobatics at airshows. No matter how much safer modern aircraft are, Newtonian gravity and the laws of aerodynamics remain inflexibly unchanged.

  For whatever reasons, the casualty rate at RFC training stations in Britain was often worse even than on active squadrons in France. Johns later wrote in his magazine Popular Flying that in early 1918 when he was stationed in Norfolk no fewer than thirteen pilots and observers were burnt to death in crashes in as many days and the local village blacksmith, who had been a juryman at all the inquests, committed suicide, overcome by the horror of it all. Structural failure may have accounted for some of the carnage (in this case deliberate sabotage was suspected), but poor training was most likely to have been at the bottom of the rest. Yet by the time Johns first arrived at the School of Aeronautics in Reading, RFC training was in a transitional stage, having at last embraced a new system, and the course on which he embarked required him to study a good few subjects on the ground besides the hours of actual instruction in the air. He learned such things as how aircraft were rigged and how their instruments worked. He learned about engines, navigation, observation, signalling, aerial gunnery and much else besides. It was a revolution in the way the RFC trained its pilots – belated, undoubtedly, but a revolution nonetheless. And it was almost entirely down to one man, Major Robert Smith-Barry.

  Smith-Barry had a reputation as a considerable eccentric as well as an experienced airman. One of his early school reports at Eton described him as ‘an awful little boy. He has no aptitude whatever,’83 although he must at least have had a talent for music since he spent two years practising the piano for eight hours a day with a view to a career as a concert pianist. However, he was bitten by the aviation bug and learned to fly in 1911. Three years later he was in the first batch of pilots sent to France with 5 Squadron in August 1914. He was severely injured in a crash following engine failure in his B.E.8, badly breaking both his legs, and after several operations was left with a life-long limp. While recovering in England he flew in anti-Zeppelin night patrols and acted as an instructor. He returned to active duty in France in May 1916 as a major in command of 60 Squadron. There he became steadily more obsessed and upset by the feeble flying abilities of the young pilots he was being sent and began bombarding Trenchard’s RFC headquarters with letters. These were not shy of using emotive phrases like ‘Fokker fodder’ to emphasise how appallingly vulnerable these airmen were, but they were also full of practical recommendations about what should be done to improve things. A letter he wrote on 10th December 1916 is worth quoting in full since it was probably the first time that an officer of his experience and seniority had summarised the deficiencies of the RFC’s training and brought them to the attention of the high command. His frankness must have struck his superiors quite forcibly.

  Up until the end of last May when the writer left England no attention whatever was paid to the fundamental importance of instruction in the mere manual part of flying. This was left to those who were resting, those who were preparing to go overseas, and those who had shown themselves useless for anything else. The first two classes had other interests paramount; the third had no interests at all. The present-day pupil is being taught to fly by people who are altogether without enthusiasm and whose indifference is, as always, contagious.

  It is submitted that a good way to remedy this would be a school of training for instructors, where they could (a) have their flying brought up to the very high standard necessary before they can teach with confidence and ease, and be combed out if they do not speedily reach this standard; and (b) be given definite lines upon which to instruct. The institution of such a school would tend to produce an esprit de corps among the instructors and could improve the atmosphere surrounding the whole business.

  The writer has been surprised to notice how little interest in flying is taken by many young pilots who come out to the Front. Though ve
ry young, and quite fresh, they have to be ordered to go up from the very first; they never ask permission to go up even for a practice flight. Before the war young flyers were always begging to be allowed up. It is thought that this, though in part due to the difference between volunteers and conscripts, is largely due to the mental supineness of instructors in England.84

  This letter cogently made the point that in order to improve flying standards it was necessary first to train the trainers. By implication it was a fierce criticism of the Central Flying School, which was where the RFC’s instructors were taught, and it had an immediate effect. The officer in charge of the RFC’s training, General John Salmond, had a high personal regard for Smith-Barry and promptly posted him back to England as CO of No. 1 Reserve Squadron at Gosport, giving him a free hand to institute a system of his own. It is not clear when he arrived there how much was left of the regime Louis Strange had introduced during his command a little over a year earlier. In any case it was at Gosport that Smith-Barry began the process that finally managed to institute radical change throughout the RFC by revising the entire way in which flying instructors taught and pupils learned.

  As an enthusiastic and veteran combat pilot himself, Smith-Barry considered that provided a pupil was accompanied by a genuinely inspirational instructor, he ought to be encouraged in hands-on flying from the very first. The essential was to have a man in the back seat who was as calm as he was experienced, someone who didn’t curse and shout obscenities at his hapless student but was reassuring and encouraging. It may seem odd to us today that such a regime had not been made general far earlier; but it is perhaps not so surprising since in 1914 no pilot anywhere had combat experience and thereafter nearly anyone who could fly was needed for active duty rather than to instruct. In private, Smith-Barry probably acknowledged that the French and German systems had been much better planned from the beginning, if subject to the vagaries of demand, but that maybe in the final analysis they relied a little too much on the academy approach: a degree of methodical plodding at the expense of inspirational teaching.

  One of Major Smith-Barry’s first moves was to order the antique Rumpties banished from all flying training schools as quickly as possible. To replace them he selected the Avro 504J as the RFC’s basic trainer, a controversial choice in some quarters that considered this excellent aircraft ‘too advanced’ for beginners, whatever that meant. It had many advantages, among them a rotary engine that enabled pupils to become used to the characteristics of the type of engine they would most likely be flying in France, as well as handling that was a good introduction to genuinely advanced machines like the Sopwith Camel and the S.E.5. The Avro must have been a good choice because it was to remain in service for many years. In all, 5,446 were built and in due course it became the aircraft in which the future King George VI learned to fly.

  The reason for choosing the Avro was that Smith-Barry was no longer thinking in terms of airmen sent to France being able to fly in an ordinary way. Traditional RFC practice had been for instructors to drum into their students the situations to avoid at all costs, like getting into spins. Smith-Barry could see no point in telling future combat pilots what to avoid, given that by that stage in the war combat could involve advanced aerobatic manoeuvres they needed to master in order to be safe. To have no more than mere ‘ordinary’ flying expertise was just asking for trouble.

  His new system therefore involved pupils being deliberately faced with exactly those situations their predecessors had been told at all costs to avoid: spinning, for example, which in many pilots’ minds still represented something fearsome that was easily slipped into and practically certain to end fatally, like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The job of Smith-Barry’s instructors was to take their students to the brink at a safe altitude, push them over, and show them how to stop the hypnotically approaching earth from revolving around the aircraft’s nose. To be fair to the older methods of teaching, in the days of the Rumpties anything much more athletic than gentle turns and shallow dives risked the machine breaking up. For at least the first two years of the war nobody in any air force bothered to teach combat flying as a skill in its own right, partly because it was still not really needed and partly because so few machines were safely capable of anything very dramatic in the way of agility. The spectacular aerobatic ‘dogfighting’ so beloved of film-makers in the late 1920s and 1930s (Wings, Hell’s Angels, Dawn Patrol) was almost entirely confined to the war’s last eighteen months. But by 1917 the construction of aircraft had greatly improved and the Avro 504J could safely handle enough basic aerobatic manoeuvres to make conversion to an advanced fighting machine like a Camel or an S.E.5 a logical progression instead of potentially fatal.

  Thus piloting skills had to keep pace with technological development. By the end of a Gosport-style course a pilot would have unlearned any residual dread of stalls and spins and could initiate and correct them at will. What was more, the installation in the Avros of what became known as the Gosport speaking tube that connected the pilot’s and instructor’s helmets at last made it unnecessary for instructors to whack their pupils over the head and bellow in their ear above the noise of the engine.

  Within a short while Smith-Barry’s experiment was acknowledged a success and the RFC adopted his system as quickly as it could. The Army being what it was, especially in wartime, this was not as fast as he wished, as witness Stuart Wortley’s letter of December 1917, a year after Smith-Barry’s posting to Gosport, noting there was still a lack of enthusiasm in young pilots. The American John Grider’s diary entries of exactly the same date make it clear the old Rumpties were even then still in service although he did progress to Avros. Additional testimony of change can be found in the fascinating letters home written by a Canadian from Toronto, Roderick Maclennan, who began his own training as a pilot in England in July 1917. His experience reveals both the Gosport influence and the time it was taking to implement fully. His first week was spent either in a classroom or in a hangar studying rigging and engines. ‘We had four hours of practical work on [engines],’ he noted on 1st July, ‘running them and starting them by turning the propeller. This is usually done by a mechanic but an officer has to learn how it is done in case he has to make a forced landing and then has to restart his engine to get home.’85 Later that week Maclennan had to sit an exam in ‘(1) Rotary engines, (2) Stationary engines, (3) Bombs, Instruments, Photography, Wireless, etc., (4) Rigging and Theory of Flight, (5) Aerial Observation, and (6) A practical test in reading Morse on the buzzer.’ The range of the syllabus is impressive, even though it can hardly have been covered with much thoroughness in only six days. He first went up in an aircraft on 8th July and flew his first solo on the 22nd. Obviously the RFC had shifted into high gear where turning out pilots was concerned since in November that year Maclennan was able to remark: ‘There are so many pilots now that after they have done about four months in France, nearly all are returned to England as instructors…’86

  He himself was not to be so lucky. He arrived in France on 28th November. On 15th December he wrote home: ‘I can hardly express what a wonderful thing flying is, and what a hold it gets on one. I am having the time of my life… Aside from flying we get lots of motoring, football and even riding. Certainly it pays to go to the war on wings.’87 Three days later he flew his first patrol over the lines. Two days before Christmas Roderick Maclennan was burned to death. He was twenty-four.

  In spite of delays, the implementation of the new training regime did gradually spread and its influence take hold, with results that became visible even in the air. V. M. Yeates’s semi-fictional character Tom Cundall, newly posted to his squadron in France, watched an old hand ‘put his bus down almost in the hangar mouth with a pukka sideslip Gosport landing that reduced his forward speed to ten miles an hour, or so it looked.’88 The name of Gosport had already become shorthand for a recognisable style of competence and panache. In some respects even the French system of aerobatics taught at their Hau
tes Écoles du Ciel was evidently not as comprehensive or advanced as Major Smith-Barry’s. Gosport taught the side-slip as a matter of course for losing height quickly and especially to get back on the ground in a hurry. In the event of fire, for instance, pilots might side-slip to fan the flames away from the cockpit. It was a manoeuvre new and dramatic enough to take a group of French pilots by complete surprise when they first saw it practised in France. They assumed the British pilot was completely out of control until by what they took to be sheer luck he regained it at the last moment.

  Not that the Gosport School (as the system became known) was for the faint-hearted. Geoffrey de Havilland remembered it in his 1979 autobiography as being run on the ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ principle. ‘After only a few hops, the pupil was taken up and treated to a rapid series of evolutions, from loops to rolls and spins. On return to earth, if the pupil staggered away groaning, he was considered unworthy of further instruction; if he was still sane and obviously in his right mind, the training programme continued.’89 This was probably a slight exaggeration and makes it sound more brutal than encouraging; but Smith-Barry was bullish, and undoubtedly some way was needed early on in the course to weed out those pupils who for physiological or other reasons would be unable to cope with the demands of combat flying. In any case the fame of his system soon spread to become a model for flying schools world-wide. Perhaps its true excellence can be judged by the fact that even the French came to adopt it.