*
A final word should perhaps go to the indestructible Louis Strange, who in May 1918 was a lieutenant-colonel commanding the 23rd Training Wing of what was now the RAF, stationed at South Carlton, near Lincoln. In that month
the 23rd Wing did 4600 hours’ flying, which was 2000 more than any previous month. The number and standard of service pilots we turned out were greatly increased, while crashes were reduced from one to every thirty hours’ flying to one in sixty hours, and write-offs of machines fell from one in eighty to one in 145 hours’ flying.… No particular credit was due to any one individual for this improvement. We were only putting into practice a lesson that some of us had learned at Gosport and the CFS…
But others will bear me out that the work in a training Wing in those days was no joke. The write-off of one machine for every 140 hours’ flying meant the loss of something between thirty and forty machines a month, in addition to some seventy or eighty minor crashes. In the May of 1918, for instance, we had sixteen fatal accidents… higher than usual owing to a collision between two machines, the wreckage of which fell by ill luck upon another on the ground, so that the personnel of three machines were involved in the one crash. But the work had to go on at a still more feverish pace in order to cope with the overseas requirements, for at that time the monthly output of pilots from the Home Establishment was well in the neighbourhood of 400.90
These improved standards still represented an average daily toll of four crashes of various kinds, with a death every other day. Yet spread out over a wing it was an impressive advance and a tribute to the courage of a one-time ‘awful little boy’ in speaking out to his seniors.
Even so, for much of the war the slipshod and unsystematic manner in which Britain trained its aircrew was patently a false economy, given the expense and shortage of pilots and aircraft. Although the chaotic urgencies of wartime explain much, it is sometimes hard not to invoke that always-questionable category of national character. The over-valuation of the amateurish, the perennial excuse of the country having been ‘caught on the hop’, the lack of proper planning from the first, the improvising, cutting corners and doing everything on a shoestring all seem grimly familiar to this author. So, too, does the ability to turn ‘muddling through’ into an indomitable British virtue, even when muddling through in training led to the reckless squandering of so many young lives.
Another aspect of the same cavalier attitude will become evident in a later chapter where it needs to be explained why it took well over two years of German air raids on London before the authorities were at last moved by public rioting and political uproar to institute a properly co-ordinated system of home defence.
1* There is a discrepancy here. No. 2113 is listed as a B.E.2c
6
How They Lived
Enough has been said in previous chapters to suggest that from its inception the RFC was never going to be like any other corps in the British Army. The experience of flying, like the physical skill itself, was too different from anything else. Once in the air, a man metaphorically left the Army and reverted to being a lone individual largely free to go where he wanted and act on his own initiative. True, on a particular mission he might be ordered to fly in formation, but even so he was a free agent within the constraints of rapidly changing circumstances such as weather, engine failure or enemy attack.
Yet there was another important way in which the airman differed from the infantryman. In all but the most granitically unimaginative, a pilot’s aerial viewpoint could at unexpected moments become almost philosophically detached, even lordly. Contemporary letters, diaries and memoirs are full of passages like this:
I explore the vast emptiness in which I am a proud but insignificant speck, look up into the violet of the furthest heavens, into the infinite zenith, and blink at the glaring sun, then gaze around me to the faraway horizons, apparently on my level. There comes an awesome feeling of loneliness. I and my companions are utterly remote from our mundane existence on the earth which we cannot even see. The three of us are as one, seemingly stationary, with no sensation of speed, just placed here for always in the void. Everything is still. The engine is soundless. The leader’s fluttering pennants are petrified movement. Even time is at a standstill. There is nothing between us and eternity, in space, in time.
Almost in wonder, I realize that I am one of the few thousand human beings in the history of mankind who have been chosen to experience this celestial vision. Compared with ordinary earthbound mortals I am an Olympian god, enthroned high in the heavens, free, serene, uninvolved. Compared with the wretched millions locked in earthly combat, I and my companions are a winged aristocracy among warriors, looking down on the invisible trenches below in pity and amazement.91
‘Winged aristocracy’ says it all. This is hardly the ideal soldier as promulgated in the various handbooks and manuals of the British, German or French armies, where unquestioning obedience rather than aloof detachment was constantly stressed. The whole idea of being ‘in the ranks’ was that you were not isolated – least of all in the British ranks of the Pals’ Brigades where your morale was boosted by being with men from your own town or even street. By contrast, as Leutnant Rudolf Stark observed in June 1918 when he was leading a German fighter squadron, Jagdstaffel 35,
We fliers live in fearful and splendid isolation. We cannot do without this isolation and have no desire to. Isolation changes a man’s nature, and so many other things have changed for us, too: battle, life and death. Nations wage war on one another and down on the ground beneath us men tear each other to pieces. We play a part in this war, and yet it seems that everything that happens below is alien to us. We hover between heaven and earth. We have not attained heaven, and yet we no longer belong to the earth. We are alone.92
It is easy to see how this concept of the alienated loner could later lead to its being over-romanticised for ideological reasons. The groundwork for this had already been well laid by poets like Gabriele d’Annunzio and F. T. Marinetti in their pre-war celebration of Futurism and the idea of young warriors cleansed by the new violence conferred on them by machines. The writings of the French airman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were later to tend in much the same direction. Mussolini himself proved susceptible to the twin spells of d’Annunzio and aircraft and in 1920 he took flying lessons near Milan under the instruction of Cesare Redaelli. In 1935 Guido Mattioli drew an explicit parallel between aviation and Fascism in an admiring book about the Italian dictator, who by then had his pilot’s brevetto. In the book’s jacket design the initial ‘M’ of Mussolini takes wing and is graphically transformed into a scarlet bird of prey. ‘No machine requires so much human concentration of soul and willpower as an aircraft does to make it fly well. A pilot truly understands the meaning of the word “control”. There therefore seems to be an intimate spiritual link between Fascism and flying. Every airman is a born Fascist.’93
This, however, was not yet the meaning any airman in the First World War would have attached to finding himself serenely remote at 15,000 feet above a world that was ‘one map of wastening war unrolled’.94 It was still too early in the history of aviation for the experience to have jelled into anything like an ideology, still less a political agenda. On the other hand it was quite distinctive enough to give airmen a profound sense of their collective identity, one that was clearly separated from that of the terrestrial army – the ‘poor bloody infantry’ or PBI. This was true even for men who had transferred from the trenches in order to fly. Only after the severe British troop losses of late autumn 1914 was there any attempted movement in the other direction, when some airmen applied to leave the RFC and return to their battalions because so many officers had been killed. Permission was refused because they were too valuable where they were. That was a time – not to be repeated until the Germans’ Kaiserschlacht, the great Spring Offensive in 1918 – when the front was moving so fast it was possible to take off on a sortie and return after a couple of hours only to
find your home airfield now in enemy hands.
Stuart Wortley became profoundly aware of the difference between the lives of airmen and those of the infantry when his CO gave him a rest from flying during the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. He had recently flown so many shows he was dog-tired. Curious to see how the other half lived and died he arranged to visit the trenches he had so often flown over and was given a guided tour by a battalion transport officer. One of the things about life in the British trenches that many visitors commented on was what sometimes looked like the troops’ heroic light-heartedness in the face of unremitting death, rats, boredom, privation and danger. This was normally glossed over as evidence of the British Tommy’s true fighting spirit and indomitable morale. It may well have been; but there was an additional possibility that visitors of the officer class preferred not to consider. This was that conditions in the trenches were often little worse – and in some respects actually better – than they were in an industrial slum back home. Plenty of Tommies had grown up with rats and privation; they were equally used to boredom with the possibility of maiming and even death while working in factories. Now, out of the blue had come the prospect of escape from slums, poverty and drudgery by means of foreign travel (however restricted) at government expense, plus regular free meals and medical treatment. This, together with excitement and youth’s conviction of its own immortality, could for a while have made the experience something of a lark and explain the puzzling high spirits that visitors found so touching.
Stuart Wortley was alternately shocked, humbled and simply baffled by what he saw and heard on his own tour of the trenches, as also by his escort’s casual acceptance of things.
Suddenly I felt we two were poles apart. We were both fighting the same enemy – he on the ground and I a few hundred feet above his head. But those few hundred feet constituted an abyss almost unbridgeable. We had not the remotest notion of each other’s feelings. I wish it could be arranged that infantry officers should be attached to RFC units and vice versa…95
German pilots were naturally no different, and expressions of a complicated mixture of guilt, pity and wistfulness were common among those who had left the infantry to become airmen.
Many a man in the course of his duty up in the sky thought with shame of his own warm quarters as he watched those thin lines beneath him where our troops, beset by cold and rain, faced attack by forces ten times as strong, and longed to be with his old friends once more and join in their struggle.96
A recurring motif in airmen’s memoirs is their consciousness of how infinitely more comfortable their lives were than those of the infantry in the trenches. Much of the time they were decently billeted on an airfield with proper sleeping accommodation and a mess with reasonable eating and drinking. Except when actually flying there was time off from the war each day – even for several days if dud weather kept the aircraft grounded. Depending on how near the airfield was to a village or town, and the opportunity to scrounge a lift, there were possibilities for visiting bars and restaurants and chatting up the owners’ daughters. There are numerous descriptions of airmen in France spending languorous summer days swimming in a nearby river, writing letters or just horsing around, almost the only reminder of the war being the irritable dialogue of the big guns just over the horizon maintaining a rumble that could even be felt through the earth if one lay with one ear pressed to the ground.
Gradually, almost out of nowhere, a tradition assembled itself and grew. Because of the plurality of the men’s origins it couldn’t celebrate a particular county like an infantry regiment. Instead it emphasised the uniqueness of each squadron, together with its crest and motto. Since in the first two years of the war so many RFC officers were ex-public school men, much of the shape that squadron life and attitudes took was unconsciously modelled on the peculiar philistine ethos of Britain’s fee-paying private schools. A school’s honour morphed easily into the squadron’s honour, the largely good-natured rivalries with neighbouring squadrons often being competitively based on sports fixtures as well as on combat successes, especially if they were flying the same type of aircraft. Squadrons in a particular sector might compete to see which would be the one to destroy an observation balloon that had recently appeared behind the enemy lines. It was a mission everybody knew was quite likely to be fatal but the challenge was, well, sporting. Cecil Lewis, who with a friend had defected from Oundle School in 1915 at the age of sixteen in order to join the RFC, wrote in 1936:
The RFC attracted the adventurous spirits, the devil-may-care young bloods of England, the fast livers, the furious drivers – men who were not happy unless they were taking risks. This invested the Corps with a certain style (not always admirable): we had the sense of being the last word in warfare, the advance guard of wars to come, and felt, I suppose, that we could afford to be a little extravagant.97
If there is a suggestion here of arrogance it was surely not misplaced. ‘Flying was still something of a miracle. We who practiced it were thought very brave, very daring, very gallant: we belonged to a world apart,’ Lewis added. Identical sentiments were expressed in the RNAS and, come to that, in all the other combatants’ air forces.
The RFC quickly acquired its own language that even trainee pilots soon picked up. A conversation between two such students was recorded by a Daily Mail correspondent identified as ‘W.A.B’, writing on 19th July 1917:
First ‘Hun’: Did you see old Cole’s zoom on a Quirk this morning?
Second ‘Hun’: No, what happened?
First ‘Hun’: Oh, nothing to write home about… Stalled his bus and pancaked thirty feet… crashed completely… put a vertical gust up me... just as I was starting my solo flip in a Rumpty.
A ‘Quirk’ was standard slang for the despised B.E.2c. As always, the point of such jargon was to emphasise the exclusiveness of their world, while the nonchalance was a useful way of dealing with its mortal threat. It was all very much in the public school spirit. To describe oneself as having got the wind up was unthinkable; but to have a vertical gust up was permissible because ostensibly comic.
For young men from a world that was apart even back in Britain, having to sleep in a hut with four or six others on a damp airfield in France was nothing new after ten years of freezing school dormitories, and mostly no great hardship. By the time airmen from the Dominions arrived in numbers a regime of squadron life had been established with a unique flavour of its own, one that in many respects ran counter to many of the regular Army’s most sacred tenets. Typical of this were matters of discipline and dress, for everyday life on an active squadron was often conducted in comparatively informal terms, depending on how much of a stickler the CO was for the proper military formalities. Visiting brass were often surprised and occasionally scandalised that RFC airmen might not only dispense with saluting but came and went on the airfield in a motley assortment of clothes. This commonly ranged from flying jackets black with the oil that rotary engines threw back to uniform trousers worn with tennis shoes. A visiting major from a cavalry regiment was reported to have almost fainted on discovering one of a squadron’s pilots wearing pyjama bottoms beneath his flying suit, though exactly how he made this discovery is unfortunately not recorded.
*
The main locus of squadron life was undoubtedly the officers’ mess, and getting it suitably furnished and civilised was something of a priority whenever the unit moved and was billeted somewhere new. Unlike in films, where squadrons seem always to wind up living in a château with a seductive young comtesse in the offing, most inherited a group of ramshackle farm huts and outhouses that the men made habitable in an amazingly short time, mainly by begging, borrowing or stealing some basic furnishings. Once the rats had been banished, the worst of the draughts plugged, the roof made rain-proof and the stove installed, things began to look more civilised. With chairs and tables and the odd flea-market picture bought in the local town, an unpromising barn became the squadron’s mess, its walls hung with the fami
liar trophies brought from their previous station: shattered propellers and painted insignia on canvas cut from downed enemy machines.
Part of the filmic mythology surrounding the RFC involves riotous extroversion as though the mess was in a state of nightly mayhem. This was simply not so. In surviving memoirs there are plenty of vignettes of sudden flarings of temper over someone’s unconsciously whistling the same tune over and over again in one corner of a brooding room. Many aircrew were far too exhausted or tense after the day’s operations to stomach revelry. They would either go to bed, write a letter, or try to unwind in the armourer’s hut by carrying out some useful but monotonous task like loading gun belts with their preferred mix of ammunition for a dreaded balloon-strafing sortie the next day. One tracer, five ball, one Buckingham; one tracer, five ball, one Buckingham; one tracer…
In its normal state the mess was a scene of endless card games such as poker, slippery Sam and Australian banker. Someone might have crafted a shove ha’penny board and had his mechanic grind down one face of the coins with valve seating paste until they had a mirror finish and ‘floated’ silkily on the chalk-dusted board. A scene, in fact, much like a junior common room at university, except for a certain dark undercurrent and the wind-up gramophone from whose ornate but battered horn music hall numbers would blare tinnily. It was an unwritten law that men returning from home leave should bring with them new records of songs from the latest London shows. As V. M. Yeates observed, the function of this constant background noise was to block ‘the icy stare of eternity through chinks of silence’. Even so, the sound of aero engines being tested by mechanics in the sheds or someone taking off for gunnery practice or a patrol would regularly break in.
Marked for Death Page 16
