Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  19. Uptake slow

  Good but silly

  24. Slow uptake, no sports, clerk

  Average – slow learning

  40. Dull and windy

  Poor – sent to heavier machines

  42. Mentality very poo

  Hopeless

  50. Quick but bumptious & over-confident

  Good but objectionable

  72. Little stamina, clerk

  Average

  89. Civil Service clerk

  Poor – slow

  107. No physique – windy

  Poor, windy and sick

  139. Charterhouse School, but slow, heavy

  Poor, very slow160

  ‘Windy’ in this context meant timid and fearful, with unmistakable overtones of cowardice: the polar opposite of ‘guts’. Number 40 was probably not an ornament to the unlucky squadron (presumably bombers) to which he was posted.

  It can be seen that predicting the sort of man who would make a good aviator in the RFC or RAF was, until late in the war, considerably a matter of personal prejudice on the part of the examiner, whether he was a doctor or a flying instructor. In the absence of more sophisticated medical tests this was not unreasonable, given that he would have formed his opinions by means of experience (in an instructor’s case experience that had probably come very close to killing him on several occasions). By September 1918 it seemed that something of a consensus had been reached in RAF medical circles about the qualities that made a good combat pilot:

  The fighting scout is usually the enthusiastic youngster, keen on flying, full of what one might call ‘the joy of life’, possessing an average intelligence but knowing little or nothing of the details of his machine or engine; he has little or no imagination, no sense of responsibility, keen sense of humour, able to think and act quickly, and endowed to a high degree with the aforementioned quality, ‘hands’ [i.e. lightness of touch on the controls]. He very seldom takes his work seriously, but looks upon ‘Hun-strafing’ as a great game.161

  A very British prescription, this, of the ‘playing fields of Eton’ variety. Apparently the requirement was for young men who were not very bright, pig-ignorant about the technicalities of their aircraft, and with a feckless enough sense of humour to view killing and being killed as just a game. Certainly this profile was very much at variance with the far better informed, professional and seriously accomplished airmen Robert Smith-Barry’s Gosport system was even then trying to train.

  *

  By the end of the war active RAF units in France at last had their own medical officers rather than just a medical orderly, most of whom would have had a working knowledge of the particular ailments to which airmen were prone. They might not have been able to predict a newly posted man’s aptitude for war flying with any accuracy, but the attrition of Bloody April in 1917, the temporary reign of the German massed-Jasta ‘circuses’ and the ever-widening scope of air operations had made them practised judges of what today is known as Combat Stress Reaction. W. E. Johns’s first description of the fictional Biggles, quoted in the Introduction, is that of a pilot showing all the symptoms of ‘battle fatigue’ (although with artistic licence the often exuberant aerial adventures he went on to enjoy miraculously belie this). Dr Birley gives a still bleaker description of a pilot at the end of his combat usefulness:

  To keep himself going he smokes to excess, or may even come to rely on alcohol. If he meets an enemy formation on patrol he either turns tail or attacks recklessly, too tired to think about manoeuvring. In the last stage the noise of engines on the aerodrome distresses him; he cannot bear to see a machine take off or land, and he even hates to hear ‘shop’ talked. Sooner or later he must give in. The career as a war pilot of an individual who reaches this extreme stage is irrevocably finished.162

  The tragedy was that aircrew shortages meant such diagnoses were often ignored by station commanders desperate to keep their machines in the air. In some ways it was even worse that so many of these shattered men were sent back to Britain to act as flying instructors.

  It was generally agreed that observers in two-seaters suffered more strain than pilots. Not surprisingly, any loss of confidence in his pilot’s skill greatly increased the observer’s anxiety. This could become extreme if, for instance, his usual pilot went off on leave or was injured and he was assigned a greenhorn straight out of flying school. Not only would he have no faith in the man’s flying ability until it was proved, but there was a lot to learn by bitter experience about surviving in the air over the front, and the first few weeks were crucial. Any experienced observer would have found this learning period agonising. Furthermore, an observer had far more to do in the air than did his pilot. Not only had he to keep a constant lookout for enemy aircraft that could appear in a split second as if from nowhere, especially from the blind spot beneath the aircraft, and be prepared to use his gun at an instant’s notice; he usually had to combine this with taking photographs or making pencil notes or drawings of enemy positions and movements he could see below. He might also have to tap out wireless messages in Morse. It became recognised on all sides that observers usually broke under the strain before pilots did, and to a more serious degree.

  *

  One of the most intractable physiological difficulties to beset aviators became apparent almost as soon as the earliest aeroplanes encountered mist or cloud. It was commonly known as ‘pilot’s vertigo’ and medically as disorientation. That word (derived from the mediaeval ‘orienting’ of churches so as to face east) normally implied losing one’s sense of direction in the usual two earthbound dimensions. It was the addition of a third dimension that led to pilot’s vertigo. After some two million years’ evolution as a bipedal animal, our genus Homo has acquired a pretty reliable sense of balance when dealing with abrupt changes of direction, especially at running speeds (while hunting or being hunted), even though this can easily be disturbed – as any child knows who spins around fast enough to induce giddiness. But until humans flew powered craft they did not have to deal with abrupt changes of direction in three dimensions, and at undreamt-of speeds. Suddenly, human physiology was found wanting. The appropriate circuitry had never evolved because it had never been needed.

  Early aviators commonly became lost in the conventional sense of compass bearings. But for what was surely the first time in human history they also found themselves not always knowing which way was up and which down. It is difficult to convey to someone who has never flown a light aircraft in thick cloud how astonishingly easy it is for the body’s sense of up and down to become completely fooled; and the longer this state of ‘blind’ flying lasts, the more disorientated a pilot can become. This is why a vital part of training is in instrument flying. Instruments are generally reliable; the fabled seat of one’s pants less so. Without instruments virtually nobody manages to blind-fly dead level for very long. It may sound hard to believe but there are instances on record of an aircraft emerging from a thick bank of cloud inverted, without the pilot having realised he has gradually turned upside down. It would be a considerable shock to burst suddenly into brilliant sunshine to find rivers and fields overhead.

  One of the very first instruments in aircraft was the ‘slip bubble’. This was simply a sealed tube of liquid with either a bubble or a ball in it, much the same as a builder’s level but slightly curved. It was essentially an athwartships spirit level. If the aircraft’s wings were parallel to the horizon and its vertical axis in line with the earth’s gravity, the ball would remain in the centre. But this primitive gadget could seriously mislead a pilot flying blind in a cloud if the aircraft was in a banked turn and centrifugal force counteracted gravity. Not only could this cause the ball to remain in the centre despite the aircraft being tilted, but because the pilot felt his weight increase the turn could also give him the illusion that that he was in a climb. Seeing the slip bubble apparently registering level flight, he might be tempted to push the stick forward to descend or to pull it back hoping to fly o
ut of the cloud. Obviously this could easily lead to disaster or at the very least to acute disorientation, as happened to Cecil Lewis one day in 1916, slowly climbing up through 2,000 feet of thick cloud and at last emerging into sunlight:

  But what in heaven had happened to this cloud-bank? It wasn’t level. It was tilted as steeply as the side of a house. The machine was all right – airspeed constant, bubble central – and yet here were the clouds defying all natural laws! I suppose it took me a second to realize that I was tilted, bubble or no bubble; that I had been flying for the best part of fifteen minutes at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizon – and had never noticed it! 163

  It might be thought that, a century on and with all the sophisticated electronic instrumentation and gadgetry available to modern military and civil aviation, disorientation would no longer be a problem. Yet an article in the May 2013 issue of Aerospace International entitled ‘Battling spatial disorientation’ shows this to be wishful thinking. It begins with a description of an onboard video recording made in the cockpit of an RAF Tornado while its two-man crew practised anti-missile evasive manoeuvres high above the North Sea. They began by

  going to full afterburner and rolling the aircraft into a 60° nose-down descent through thick cloud… with the navigator calmly counting down the altitude from 17,000 ft. It was not until the cockpit low altitude voice warner could be heard saying ‘Pull up! Pull up!’ that the crew grasped the immediacy of the danger they were in and managed to recover the aircraft only 350 ft above the sea by pulling a 7G manoeuvre. The video was sent around all squadrons to show the danger of spatial disorientation (SD) and how it can occur even during routine missions.

  Bluntly put, a highly trained combat pilot and his navigator had come within an ace of flying their £9.4 million aircraft straight into the sea at supersonic speed, instruments or no instruments. In fact, spatial disorientation has recently been blamed for 20 per cent of all fatal mishaps in military aviation and has been named as a factor in many high-profile civil accidents.164

  In the First World War most army doctors would probably have understood little enough about the sense of balance and how the vestibular system works. However, it was clear that many trainees as well as experienced pilots were being killed by losing all sense of their aircraft’s attitude. Nor was this just a matter of flying into the ground. In many aircraft, including the Sopwith Pup, it was easy to stall or spin simply by not flying straight and level at the right airspeed, and neither slip-bubble nor compass was reliable enough to ensure safety in all circumstances. Once again Arthur Gould Lee describes it well:

  Ordinarily you keep on an even keel, both fore-and-aft and laterally, by reference to the horizon, to which you continuously and unconsciously adjust the controls. In a cloud there is no horizon, and you use the air speed indicator for fore-and-aft checks – increased speed means you’re going down, and vice versa – and the bubble, like a carpenter’s level, a joke as an instrument, for lateral angles. Wind on the side of the face means you’re side-slipping. You keep straight by holding to the bearing on your compass, but this is another joke, for the slightest jerk of the rudder sends it spinning, and it needs a longish spell of smooth, straight flying to settle down again – and this you can’t do in a cloud.165

  Compasses were notoriously easy to ‘topple’ by even quite mild aerobatics, and after a dogfight surviving pilots often found themselves completely lost, especially if there was a wind and they had drifted during the battle. On a grey day without sun and with a uselessly whirling compass, a pilot might find himself heading further into enemy territory instead of homeward.

  It was at Tramecourt that I was sent my first NCO pilot, who I am sorry to say did not last very long, for apparently he got lost in the air and was last seen flying east into enemy country. We never heard of him again. No doubt this sounds incredible to the uninitiated, but it was astounding the number of new pilots who were lost in this way.166

  This was presumably where certain Australians and Canadians had an advantage by allegedly being better able to ‘read’ directions from such things as rivers and by having a more developed memory for terrain than many of their British comrades.

  From December 1917, under the aegis of the Special Medical Air Boards, cadets applying for commissions went for medical examination at the newly established RFC Central Hospital at Mount Vernon in Northwood, Middlesex, and standards became more demanding. Many of the tests were based on those already used by the French Air Force, such as d’Arsonval’s chronometer for measuring reaction times. There were tests for heart and eyesight and co-ordination, as well as for balance and disorientation. Among the test equipment favoured by French aviation doctors was the Bárány chair. This was a device designed by the Hungarian physiologist Robert Bárány as part of his work on the balance mechanisms of the inner ear that had earned him a Nobel Prize in 1914. The blindfolded subject sat in the chair which was then spun. When it stopped the blindfold was removed and the subject asked to point at something in the room. Measurement could then be made of how wide of the mark his aim was.

  There is evidence that the British never took such things quite as earnestly as did other nations even though the Bárány chair tests showed that Dr McWalter had been fumblingly along the right lines when he looked for a ‘sense of projection’ in prospective fliers. Still, such tests were being used by RFC doctors at least by the autumn of 1916, if in a somewhat perfunctory manner. When Billy Bishop, the future Canadian air ace who had hitherto been flying as an observer, applied to re-train as a pilot in September that year he recalled his physical examination as having been less than rigorous:

  After the doctor had listened to your heart and banged your lungs and persuaded you to say ‘aah’ and ‘ninety-nine’, you were put into a swivel chair, spun around, and suddenly invited to spring to attention. If you did not fall flat on your face it was presumed that you were a healthy individual and fit to fly. You also did things like walking a chalk line with your eyes shut. That was about all there was to it.167

  By contrast an article in The Lancet of 8th September 1917 makes it clear the American Army took such tests as the Bárány chair very seriously indeed, and that the standards of the medical examination undergone by prospective aviators in the United States were high, much more so than those of the equivalent British examination. (The Bárány chair is still used in research departments worldwide today.)

  British would-be aviators were also quizzed about their personal habits, especially drinking and smoking, as well as their family histories. So also was any airman admitted to Mount Vernon as an in-patient. When in 1918 the establishment became the RAF Central Hospital, Dr H. Graeme Anderson noted that a patient ‘was asked to give as complete account as he is able of his family: their ages, nationalities (particularly as to any Celtic or Hebrew blood), and habits…’168 W.B. Yeats’s Irish airman foreseeing his own death probably did well not to wind up in Mount Vernon. Yet despite the great step forward that the Central Hospital’s more thorough testing represented, the official attitude towards its true value – as The Lancet ruefully admitted in September 1917 – was still the familiar one of ‘We must wait and see. We don’t yet have enough data.’ It was an attitude that had served (and still serves) Britain long and well in its instinctive refusal to commit itself to anything much other than cautious fence-sitting, especially if it might cost money. Certainly in aviation medicine in the last two years of the First World War the British did sometimes give the impression they believed they were a race apart physiologically; that ‘Continental’ medical ideas were all very well for Continentals (not to mention Celts and Hebrews), but such things needed to be taken with a pinch of salt when testing British subjects.

  *

  Powered flight had revealed yet another phenomenon for which evolution had not equipped humans but which, as aircraft improved, pilots suddenly had to deal with. This was g-forces. What is believed to be the first recorded case of someone losing consciousness becau
se of ‘g’ occurred in 1903 when the American-British inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim, was testing his ‘Captive Flying Machine’. He had designed this as a ride for an amusement park in London’s Earl’s Court. It consisted of a central revolving pole with metal arms attached at right angles from which hung individual seats. As it sped up the seats were flung outwards under centrifugal force. Maxim himself dismissed it as nothing more than a ‘glorified merry-go-round’, but its derivatives survive to this day in amusement parks the world over. While trying out the Captive Flying Machine Dr A. P. Thurston blacked out under 6.87 g, which surely testified to the machine’s sturdy construction as well as to Dr Thurston’s. The Medical Research Council’s 1920 report ‘The Medical Problems of Flying’ cited a test pilot in a Sopwith Triplane who, ‘flying a 4.5 g banked turn, experienced “characteristic darkening of the sky which was preliminary to fainting”’.169 The truth was that this sort of thing had long been familiar to combat pilots everywhere. ‘I zoom up violently, pressure pushes me into my seat, my sight goes for a second…’170 It was practically an everyday event in single-seat fighters.

  Since the phenomenon was transient (even if it could momentarily incapacitate a pilot at a crucial juncture), no test had yet been devised that would reveal the exact moment of positive g at which a pilot’s vision blacked out as the blood drained from his brain, or of negative g at which he ‘redded’ out. In Britain, Dr (then Colonel) Martin Flack already had his subjects blow up a column of mercury as a test of their heart and lungs’ ability to deal with the lack of oxygen at high altitudes. Evidently he also saw this as a reliable indicator of the subject’s susceptibility to g. ‘It has been estimated that the centrifugal force of a vertical turn may amount to as much as four times that of gravity,’ he observed, concluding that if the heart wasn’t strong enough it could lead to ‘anaemia of the brain and insensibility’. He noted that ‘turning chairs’ (i.e. Bárány chairs) were used in the USA to test every prospective pilot but that in Britain this had not been thought necessary because ‘a heart that can support the height tests is found able to meet the demands of centrifugal force’.171 This is odd because it suggests Dr Flack had completely mistaken the purpose of Bárány chairs. They were designed to test disorientation and vestibular illusion, not the ‘g’ effects of centrifugal force. To do that, the chairs would have had to tilt at the end of the arms of a centrifuge.