Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  But there is another aspect. Unlike Richthofen, Bishop was one of the aces who acted as ‘lone wolves’. Such men of exalted reputation were often pretty much free to come and go as they chose, preferring to hunt alone, and this inevitably made corroborating their victories more difficult even at the time. The implication that anyone whose score is doubtful was probably a liar is an easy cynicism. Bishop and others like him typically flew far more sorties in a given period than the average airman – often twice as many - and there is every reason to suppose that this level of obsessive searching for quarry would have paid off in higher scores. At the very least the sheer courage in spending twice as much time in the air, thereby doubling the chances of disaster, is undeniable.

  However, the lingering doubt about Bishop’s award of the VC for his 2nd June sortie remains awkward, and even Kilduff skirts the issue. The awarding of the most prestigious British medal in these anomalous circumstances must naturally prompt the question of whether there might not have been political motives at work here. First it must be said that the awarding of any medal has a political component since the recommendation has to be passed from the unit commander up through the chain of higher command until it is officially ratified, rejected or modified. Some sort of attempt at even-handedness has always to be made: it would be injudicious to allow one particular service, regiment or squadron to receive far more awards than any other. It was yet another of the drawbacks of the ‘ace’ system that once its laurelled heroes had entered a kind of national pantheon, they themselves acquired political significance willy-nilly. It so happens that in Canada by April 1917 popular backing for the war was evaporating. In that month the Canadian House of Commons passed a conscription act that was bitterly divisive. For one thing French Canadians in Québec were stolidly opposed to being forced to fight in yet another European war. Canada had already sacrificed large numbers of its bravest young men on a muddy altar thousands of miles away with no sign of an end in sight. And while British Canada continued to support the Canadian Corps, which had racked up brilliant victories as well as catastrophic casualties, many Canadians were privately opposed to conscription – above all farmers who stood to lose their young farm hands. Thus it is not at all beyond conjecture that a decision was taken at the most senior British level, and almost certainly with the agreement of the King himself, that the Empire’s highest award for bravery would be a very timely morale booster for Canada and make it that much more difficult for the Dominion to slacken its efforts.

  The fact is that by 1917 (and regardless of disdainful leading articles in Flying about foreign practices) no military was above using its heroes to its own internal advantage, especially when it came to the various services competing to prise more money out of dwindling national treasuries. This writer has no desire to enter the lists in disputes about any of the aces’ scores. Even if it turned out that none had ever made more than thirty kills they would still be revealed as men of quite outstanding valour and skill, and Billy Bishop is no exception to this. It would just have been far better for his posthumous reputation had he been awarded the medal for cumulative bravery, like Albert Ball. God knows he’d earned it. It was a shame they chose that particular morning’s unwitnessed action for the citation. In any case the VC Bishop was awarded in 1917 turned him overnight into a national hero, to be fêted and celebrated for the rest of his life. Perhaps the most famous Canadian of his generation, he went on to become Air Marshal of the RCAF on the outbreak of the Second World War and died in 1956 at the age of sixty-two, a national hero to the last. Nevertheless, the scholarly wrangles continue to this day over the deeds of his younger self in the skies above France almost a hundred years ago, as they do over those of his peers on both sides.

  There are 188 known First World War flying aces listed with twenty and more kills, which of course excludes virtually all the earliest aces like Pégoud with five and over, as well as one of the two greatest pioneers of aerial combat, Max Immelmann, with his fifteen victories – a good example of the inherent bias of a system that only counts gun-notches. Justice has since been done to Oswald Boelcke, who at the time of his death was credited with nineteen victories but has now been granted forty, scholarship having posthumously overcome his modesty. Even among the highest-scoring men some names are more familiar than others, perhaps a reflection of the attention paid to them by the newspapers of the day according to the relative attractiveness of their personalities. Thus the second-ranking ace of the war, René Fonck with seventy-five victories, is arguably less well known outside France than his more sympathetic compatriot Georges Guynemer with fifty-three. Similarly, while many Britons have heard of the RFC’s second, third and fifth highest scorers – respectively Mick Mannock, James McCudden and Albert Ball – fewer are familiar with George McElroy, in the UK’s fourth position with forty-seven victories. But why? Was it because he was Irish-born?

  At all events the relative absurdity of the ace system rests in its never making quite clear what was being rewarded other than notches. True, there was always going to be an unusually high standard of airmanship, marksmanship and courage. But as any pilot of the day would have attested, an awful lot depended on sheer luck: on being in the right place at the right time, on a gun not jamming or an engine conking out, on the wind suddenly dropping or a chance hazard like a bird-strike on an opponent’s aircraft at a critical juncture. In addition, as Trenchard rightly thought, the ‘sports’ nature of competitive scoring heavily discounted the astounding daily bravery of men in two-seaters who had to loiter in the sky for hours on end as targets while observing for artillery or taking photographs of enemy positions; of those who ventured far over the lines to the limit of their fuel to drop a few small bombs on a factory or railway junction; or of those sent to fly low-level ‘trench-strafing’ missions in unarmoured machines of wood and canvas with every man on the ground focussing a withering barrage of lead and steel at them from close range. And not only this, but these men did it over and over again, day after day after day until their luck or nerve ran out. The more one reads the histories and accounts and memoirs, the more one realises that, admirable though the aces were, they were emphatically not the only flying heroes. What is more, in terms of the war’s outcome they were a complete irrelevance.

  1* see Glossary on p.321 for an explanation of these terms.

  2* ‘Between March and May 1,270 RFC aeroplanes were destroyed or failed to return; and during one five-day period in April 75 were shot down, of whose 105 occupants 86 were killed or missing’ (Arthur Gould Lee, No Parachute, p.21).

  8

  Airmen and Medics

  In the earliest days of flight there was little reason to think that the new science might also require new medical expertise. However, as soon as aircraft performance improved an entirely novel range of aviators’ symptoms presented that needed to be addressed. Among them were the effects of altitude, disorientation, vertigo, air-sickness and even g-forces. Furthermore, once war had broken out and the various armies needed to recruit aircrew by the hundred, the question of how best to select suitable trainees became urgent. Should they be different from ordinary soldiers? What qualities – both physical and mental – made a good airman? Having a private income and being able to drive a motor car might not, after all, be enough. Being fit and healthy was surely a good start, but even the fittest human body had its limitations when faced with conditions for which no terrestrial creature had evolved. Of these, the ill-effects of altitude had at least been long recognised.

  The early balloonists had been much admired and even lionised for their daring, and few did more to earn their accolades than Victorian scientists like James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell. On 5th September 1862 these two gentlemen, clad in ordinary street clothes with tweed jackets, ascended in their basket without oxygen to some 32,000 feet or six miles (nearly 10,000 metres). This was as high as today’s transatlantic jetliners grazing the stratosphere and leaving their white contrails. At 29,000 feet the temperature
had sunk below minus 21°C. Quite apart from the cold, both men had for some time been suffering the increasing effects of hypoxia. Their hands had turned black and now their vision was too blurred to take further readings from the barometer that was effectively their altimeter. Both men were losing control of their limbs and drifting in and out of consciousness, and the balloon was still rising. One of the pigeons they had brought with them was already dead. They would undoubtedly have died as well had not Coxwell somehow willed himself to climb up, seize the rope attached to the gas-release valve in his teeth and pull it open before slumping down beside his insensible companion. Once the balloon had descended and the temperature risen the men, like their remaining pigeons, recovered quickly. This was just as well because on finally landing they had to tramp several miles to the nearest house. It was not for nothing that such pioneers inevitably became known as ‘balloonatics’.

  Elsewhere in Europe, and particularly in France, scientific studies were being carried out to discover the precise effects of high altitude on the body. Increased heart rate and respiration, headaches, blurred vision, intense weakness and finally unconsciousness: were these caused by the low pressure or lack of oxygen or by something else as well, such as changed blood chemistry? And were such symptoms made worse by subzero temperatures? A tough breed of scientists began setting up some very stark laboratory huts at remote sites on Europe’s highest mountains. Not only must they have been competent mountaineers but unafraid of sheer physical hardship as well. The French climber and natural scientist Joseph Vallot was the first, constructing his hut 14,320 feet up Mont Blanc in 1890. Three years later the Italian neurophysiologist Angelo Mosso built a similar hut 650 feet higher on Monte Rosa. In 1910 the German physiologist Nathan Zunz led an expedition to Tenerife, setting up his laboratory at 10,695 feet in the Rifugio Altavista del Tiede the Scottish astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth had first built there in 1856.

  It was not until 1911 that there was a fully scientific anglophone high altitude research trip. This was the celebrated Pike’s Peak expedition to the mountain in Colorado where there was already a comfortable hotel at 14,100 feet and, better still, a rack and pinion railway to reach it. Two leading British physiologists, J. S. Haldane and C. G. Douglas, together with two equally distinguished American colleagues, Yandell Henderson and E. C. Schneider, spent five productive weeks at the hotel. With classical thoroughness they had earlier taken their bodily measurements at sea level. They then did the same at altitude for over a month plus a final set of data back at sea level. Their findings were of unprecedented accuracy.

  Even so, the French scientist Paul Bert had long been granted the honorary title of ‘the father of high-altitude physiology’ since the publication of his great treatise La Pression Barométrique in 1878. He had used animals in low-pressure chambers at his laboratory in the Sorbonne and established once and for all that the ill-effects of high altitude were caused by low concentrations of oxygen in the atmosphere. Given this finding, which was fully corroborated by all subsequent research, it is surely very odd that forty years later pilots flying above 12,000 feet or so did not automatically carry an oxygen supply once aircraft were powerful enough to manage the extra weight of the cylinder. RFC pilots flying Sopwith Pups in 1917, for example, quite frequently went to 20,000 feet for lengthy patrols. The main reason for flying so high was that by then the Pup was obsolescent and the only way it could defend itself against the German Albatros D.III was by its sole advantage of superior manoeuvrability at extreme height. But the effects of flying at that altitude for extended periods without oxygen were very severe, especially if the least effort was required. Arthur Gould Lee left a vivid description of having to answer a call of nature in his Pup at 20,000 feet:

  I give my reluctant attention to a difficult expedient, with the hope that no Hun will come along at an inconvenient moment. My hands are completely numb, but I pull off my right gauntlet and fumble interminably at opening buttons, which takes quite a time because my fingers have no sense of touch. Then comes the task of finding the way through a barrier of obstinate underclothes. This achieved, there is the problem of where? The refined procedure is to have a funnel with a rubber tube running to a container on the floor of the cockpit, but most of us just aim at the joystick and hope for the best, the hope being strongest over Hun territory. Then comes the job of getting things back as they were. When it is all over and the gauntlet is replaced, the effort has exhausted me and I flop back in my seat panting for several minutes.138

  It might have been even worse. Diarrhoea was a well-known affliction of those who flew aircraft – like the Pup – with a rotary engine that spewed out quantities of castor oil whose laxative mist airmen constantly inhaled. Supposed remedies included blackberry juice and brandy, flasks of which pilots sometimes carried. After a while many men acquired an immunity to castor oil and quite probably to brandy as well.

  Almost as bad were the agonising pins and needles in the hands and feet when descending quickly to lower altitude, not to mention the splitting headache that would sometimes linger for days. The Germans, too, had long experience of these symptoms in their airships, and during the war Zeppelin bomber crews were often badly affected. The hours of slow flight by night to the English coast against the prevailing wind, temperatures of forty degrees of frost and a lack of oxygen rendered many men useless. They were obliged to give up flying altogether and return to the trenches. A German officer later recorded the example of one such Zeppelin, the L.44, making a raid on Harwich in May 1917. The crew were so incapacitated by hypoxia that ‘the ship drifted over the town completely out of control, and without a single engine running. It was not until they were well out in the middle of the North Sea that two of the engines were restarted, and the ship was able to return to its base.’139

  What is strange about these examples is that despite all that had long been known to science about oxygen deficiency impairing performance, the various militaries were so slow to do something to alleviate it even though their airmen were being incapacitated as fighting men. Certainly the slight extra weight of oxygen cylinders would have been insignificant in an airship. Nor was it for lack of suitable equipment. Back in October 1904 Scientific American had carried an article on ‘The Guglielminetti–Draeger Respiratory Apparatus’ and it was clear that some medics with an interest in aviation were aware of this piece of equipment because in 1914 the British surgeon J. Elrick Alder wrote about its advantages. Among these was the pilot’s ability to control the flow of oxygen according to need. He simply wore ‘a mask communicating by a pipe with the vessel. This caused the aeronaut to avoid all effort in carrying to his mouth the vivifying gas.’140 Mr Alder knew all about the effects of altitude and had observed ‘cyanosis of the extremities: the fingers become purple. Wynmalem [the Dutch flyer and altitude record holder, Wyn Malem] who reached a height of 8,340 feet felt the blood pour from his nails into his fur gloves, and red pearls were on his lips.’ (This last phrase is pure Oscar Wilde.)

  The particular example he quotes picked up yet another important characteristic of altitude sickness that any mountaineer recognised: that different people reacted very differently to it, and it was not just a matter of fitness. There seemed no way of knowing in advance who would be better able to resist hypoxia without subjecting each man to tests in a barometric chamber. A British aviation doctor who had studied under Haldane, Captain Martin Flack, recorded a series of thirty-five pilots he had examined while consultant to the Air Board in 1917. He listed them (together with the number of flying hours in their log books) to show the variation in their reactions to altitude:

  No. 1 (28 hrs): Giddy above 4,000 feet.

  No. 2 (10½ hrs): Giddiness and blurring of vision when flying at 6,000 feet.

  No. 3 (140 hrs): Fainted twice in air above 8,000 feet.

  No. 11 (300 hrs): Since crash, fainted twice in air at 8,000 feet and 10,000 feet.

  No. 31 (400 hrs): At first all right, then on 3 occasions faint at 7,000
feet.141

  Quite often pilots seemed to have no idea that they were affected by altitude. This is a familiar syndrome, which explains the later testing of military aircrew in decompression chambers to teach them how to spot the symptoms of hypoxia. Despite their own blue fingertips subjects may gradually lose consciousness without the least awareness of its happening. In the first air war men carrying out high observation recces over 15,000 feet would often return to earth quite unable to remember what they had seen, their reports sketchy or useless. Many had failed to take notes at the time because, either through hypoxia or cold, they couldn’t hold a pencil. Once back on the ground the effects of amnesia became obvious. The military doctor Lieutenant-Colonel J. L. Birley RAMC recorded how ‘One observer returned from a high photographic reconnaissance well pleased with his effort until it was discovered that he had taken 18 photographs on the same plate…’142 After the war Birley, who had co-authored reports for the new Air Ministry, confided to The Lancet: ‘It has always been my opinion that the paralyzing and insidious effects of oxygen-want had a far greater influence in determining the course of aerial operations than has yet been realized.’143