Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  *

  If today it seems that, overall and for much of the war, the principal combatants’ air forces appeared to do surprisingly little to protect their own aircrew, it must have been partly because as the war progressed aircraft were recognised as a new weapon rather than as a mere vehicle for observers. The priority of weapons in a war is that they be deployed to inflict maximum discomfiture on the enemy, while the safety and well-being of those sent to deploy them are very much secondary considerations. As we have seen, even aircrew themselves were often reluctant to adopt protective measures.

  Aircraft designers, too, could seem comfortably distanced from the consequences of their designs. To take an example at random: the radiator of the German Albatros D.III, the bane of the RFC in early 1917, was initially placed over the centre section immediately above the pilot’s cockpit. If it was holed in flight the pilot could be suddenly drenched in boiling water. One would have thought this foreseeable, and in time the radiator was indeed moved off to starboard along the top wing. But then, it wasn’t designers who flew combat missions. On the other hand military doctors undoubtedly became much more experienced at treating the conditions and injuries associated with flying, especially crash injuries. Even by early 1916 the British Medical Journal could draw up a short list of some of the commoner problems medics might need to deal with:

  1. Head and neck injuries in crashes caused by violent deceleration when the pilot is strapped in.

  2. Eye injuries from loose nuts or bolts blown back from the engine.

  3. Frost-bite of the face at high altitudes.

  4. Partial anaesthesia by petrol vapour.

  5. Exhaust gases causing headache and drowsiness.

  6. ‘Aeresthenia’: the suggested name for the inability of flying students to achieve hand-eye co-ordination.172

  To these might have been added the permanently stiff and sore neck (to become known in the Second World War as ‘weaver’s neck’) caused by constantly looking all around the sky for enemy aircraft. It was the chafing, rather than a wish to cut a sartorial dash, that led so many fighter pilots to wear silk scarves. Still, amid the urgent pressures of war stiff necks, frost-bite and the rest were thought of more as occupational hazards than as matters requiring remedy.

  Added to which, certain types of injury recurred with certain designs of aircraft. A good deal depended on whether the crashing aircraft was of the ‘tractor’ type (with the engine in front) or the ‘pusher’ type with the engine behind and the aircrew in the boat-like nacelle that formed the aircraft’s nose. Obviously this form offered the least protection. It was common for the occupants to survive the impact but immediately to be crushed by the hot engine tearing loose from its bearers behind them.

  Fractures of the upper or lower jaw and nose were very frequent in crashes when the pilot’s face hit the cockpit edge or the instrument board or – as so often – the butt-ends of the machine guns that protruded into the cockpit. Many of these injuries could have been avoided with a safety belt and shoulder harness combined, but as will be seen in the next chapter this would probably have been thought namby-pamby as well as carrying risks of its own. Following crash-landings, fractures of the talus (the ankle bone), very seldom seen in civilian life, became common enough in the air war to be thought of as aviators’ fractures. Such injuries led to all sorts of new orthopaedic procedures at which the surgeons at Mount Vernon became increasingly skilled.

  Terrible injuries could also be caused on the ground by men carelessly walking into turning propellers. Decapitation was not uncommon. Even swing-starting aero engines was hazardous, especially in the case of a backfire. Anybody brought up in the era when most motor mowers came with a starting handle and all cars still had one for emergency use was taught never to grip the handle with the thumb wrapped around it, but always with the thumb on top because otherwise a backfire could dislocate it. Similarly, the technique of how not to swing an aircraft propeller had to be learned, otherwise broken limbs or worse might easily follow.

  The whole mysterious business of why so little was done to protect valuable aircrew better – and why it was the men themselves who so often resisted it – is the subject of the following chapter.

  9

  Parachutes and Fatalism

  Thursday, January 3rd [1918]

  I’m terribly depressed this evening. Ferrie has been killed. He led his patrol out this afternoon, had a scrap, came back leading the others, then as they were flying along quite normally in formation, his right wing suddenly folded back, then the other, and the wreck plunged vertically down. A bullet must have gone through a main spar during the fight.

  The others went after him and steered close to him in vertical dives. They could see him struggling to get clear of his harness, then half standing up. They said it was horrible to watch him trying to decide whether to jump. He didn’t, and the machine and he were smashed to nothingness.

  I can’t believe it. Little Ferrie, with his cheerful grin, one of the finest chaps in the squadron. God, imagine his last moments, seeing the ground rushing up at him, knowing he was a dead man, unable to move, unable to do anything but wait for it. A parachute could have saved him, there’s no doubt about that. What the hell is wrong with those callous dolts at home that they won’t give them to us?173

  This, the penultimate of Lieutenant Arthur Gould Lee’s daily letters home to his wife before he was posted back to England, manages to encapsulate three of the air war’s defining parameters: the utter randomness of violent death, the apparent refusal of the authorities to save lives where they could, and ordinary human grief. Capt. R. L. M. Ferrie was a Canadian pilot who had been posted to 46 Squadron the previous June and had already survived seven months’ combat flying. By the standards of the RFC’s attrition rate he was a veteran. As a knowledgeable old hand he would be extremely valuable to any squadron, with its rapid turnover of inexperienced young pilots. It was men like Lee and Ferrie who provided enough continuity to keep morale up. A death as seemingly arbitrary and pointless as Ferrie’s only further took the heart out of men already sick of the war.

  So why were British aircrew not issued with parachutes until the closing weeks of the war, and then only for use with specific aircraft types that in the event were never used before the Armistice was declared? This is a question that has puzzled historians ever since. Perhaps the locus classicus of the debate is to be found in Appendix C of Lee’s own book under the rhetorical title ‘Why no parachutes?’ This appendix was presumably written considerably later than the letters because his book was not published until 1968, by which time he had long retired from the RAF as an air vice-marshal and was well placed to forage through such archives as remained. He summarised the ‘official’ answers as follows: 1) the War Office of the day seemed to believe that if a pilot carried a parachute he might be tempted to use it too soon and abandon a valuable aircraft that he could otherwise have nursed home; and 2) it was maintained that no parachute reliable enough existed at the time.

  Lee quickly disposes of both these supposed rationales. In the first instance he says his thorough searches through War Office files have failed to turn up any official document confirming the allegation; and in the second he points out that parachutes had long been in use for jumps from balloons, a common enough spectacle at pre-war fairs and air shows and generally accident-free. This was certainly true. A daring American named A. Leo Stevens had successfully jumped from a Curtiss aircraft as early as 1908 and another American had also jumped from an aircraft in 1912. Captain Edward Maitland had done the same in 1913 from 2,000 feet above a large crowd at a Hendon display. Also in 1913 a Breton named Jean Bourhis made several successful jumps from a Deperdussin monoplane piloted by a certain Lemoine, so there was no lack of precedent. Bourhis was using a parachute designed by Frédéric Bonnet that functioned well until he and Lemoine came to grief the following year when the opening parachute fouled the aircraft’s rudder, tearing it off and ripping the chute. Bourhis fell
and the aircraft crashed, but by a miracle both men lived. In any case, even a parachute that was less than a hundred per cent reliable still offered pilots a sporting chance of survival. Lee then goes on to recount the constant rebuffs officialdom had given a retired British engineer named Everard Calthrop who in 1913 had invented a parachute that was an improvement over the Spencer model that would be issued to observers in balloons at the beginning of the war. It should be pointed out that none of these parachutes so far mentioned was of the ‘free fall’ type. All required a static line that was fixed to the balloon basket or to the aircraft and pulled the canopy out of its pack as the jumper fell.

  Calthrop was not a man who gave up easily. Born in 1857, he had a long and distinguished career as a railway designer and engineer. One of nature’s inventors, he was a close friend of the Hon. Charles Rolls and was deeply upset by witnessing Rolls’s death at the Bournemouth air meeting in 1910 referred to in Chapter 2, p.45. This led him to turn his inventive energies towards parachutes. He designed his first in 1913 and by 1915 had improved it and patented it as the ‘Guardian Angel’. Like the Spencer type this was also issued to balloon observers, slung in bulky containers outside their wicker baskets. Though men were naturally reluctant to jump at all, the Guardian Angel undoubtedly saved very many of them, in some cases more than once. However, its use in aircraft was much more problematic, chiefly owing to considerations of weight. In October 1915 Mervyn O’Gorman wrote to the Director-General of Military Aeronautics suggesting that Farnborough should test the Guardian Angel.

  When O’Gorman’s minuted suggestion reached Sir David Henderson’s desk, that otherwise sympathetic aviator scrawled ‘No, certainly not!’ This official opposition evidently remained in force because in January 1917 a successful series of jumps from a B.E.2c using Calthrop’s parachute took place at Orfordness but still failed to interest the Air Board. After the carnage of Bloody April that year and the subsequent chronic shortage of aircrew it might have seemed likely that a senior enough officer would be able to induce a change of attitude. At that point Hugh Trenchard himself suggested that the Guardian Angel tests should be continued over in France, but even this was turned down. General Charles Longcroft, who despite his seniority still flew missions in France, wrote that he and his pilots ‘keenly desired’ parachutes. He, too, was ignored. On the other hand an order by Trenchard for twenty black Calthrop parachutes for dropping spies over the lines by night was quickly approved and filled.

  In short, there seemed to be an unbridgeable gulf between the fighting men in France and those in Whitehall too senior to fight, although even a flying man like Robert Smith-Barry turned out to have no use for parachutes. His Gosport training schedule was designed to instill a spirit of aggressive competence rather than passive survival. Nevertheless, according to Lee the issue of parachutes would have done wonders for the morale of pilots and observers over in France, especially in Bloody April, and his fellow aviators had made it clear they wanted them. The trouble was that their views seldom got beyond squadron level, possibly because commanding officers were nervous of acquiring a reputation for weakness or for not showing enough ‘offensive spirit’ (in the current Army cant). That year Calthrop’s company began offering his parachute for sale in flying magazines. Even in 1917 it was perfectly normal for officers to buy their own supplementary kit, including pistols, from London retailers such as the Army & Navy Stores and Gamages, and it can be assumed that a good few pilots in France would have had fantasies about ordering a Guardian Angel from the stores’ catalogues even though the prevailing squadron ethos made it clear they would never be able to use one.

  Over in Germany, however, attitudes were finally shifting. On 1st April 1918 – coincidentally the very day the RFC became the RAF – a pilot from Jasta 56 hit the headlines for having parachuted safely to earth after baling out of his burning Albatros D.Va. By that summer group photographs of German pilots show many of them wearing the new Heinecke parachute harness. Then came the news that the top surviving German ace, Ernst Udet, had also saved his life by parachuting from his stricken aircraft and angry articles began appearing in the British press asking why, if the German air force were now being issued with parachutes, British pilots were not? In June 1918 the new RAF formed a Parachute Committee and as a result ordered 500 Guardian Angels from Calthrop’s firm and 500 of a neater type of parachute that the pilot could wear called the Mears, but they came too late to be useful. After the war, summing up his years of campaigning, Calthrop wearily gave what he felt was the reason for the British authorities’ foot-dragging: ‘No one in high quarters had any time to devote to investigating the merits of an appliance whose purpose was so ridiculously irrelevant to war as the saving of life in the air.’174 It was an understandably bitter diagnosis but it probably contained a degree of truth and makes a bizarre kind of sense when taken in conjunction with the ready fulfilment of Trenchard’s order for the black parachutes. Dropping spies was a properly warlike activity; preventing deaths was not.

  Overall, Lee’s argument appears unassailable. Yet there are further points to consider, the first being that the British were by no means unique in their resistance to parachutes. It was surely not accidental that the Germans did not issue them until late in the war, while neither the French and Italian air forces nor the American command did until afterwards. One underlying reason was that until at least 1916 when the design of aircraft and engines had progressed, the added weight of a parachute would have significantly affected an aircraft’s performance. While increasing fuel consumption it would also have reduced the machine’s potential ceiling and rate of climb, as well as making it that much more sluggish in combat.

  The basic struggle in aeroplane design was to secure maximum rate of climb and ceiling against the limitation of engine power, and the only solution was light wing loading. Every pound saved was vital. A parachute, with container and static line, weighed about 15% of the entire disposable load of armament, pilot, fuel and oil carried by the [Sopwith] Pup. Most pilots judged that a preferable life-saver was in expending that weight on another gun and more ammunition… for with a single gun they had only 50 seconds’ total firing before their ammunition was finished.175

  It was all very well for Lee to write in another letter, ‘Every pilot would sacrifice a little performance to have a chance of escape from break-ups and flamers,’176 but it is clear that he was not speaking for every pilot. Squadron-Commander J. R. Boothby of the RNAS wrote (in a seemingly perverse spirit of self-sacrifice), ‘We don’t want to carry additional weight merely to save our lives.’177 His was the authentic voice of a fighter pilot who knew life could depend on the tiniest margin of his aircraft’s performance.

  Apart from this there was the question of where to stow the parachute and how best to deploy it. One has only to look at a typical single-seater cockpit of the period to realise that there simply wasn’t room for anything besides the pilot: a tiny wood-and-fabric-framed compartment with a flimsy seat. Once forward-firing guns became the norm, their padded ends protruded into the cockpit over the front coaming and still further restricted available space. It is also clear from contemporary photographs that aircrew of the period were generally skinny by today’s standards. (In fact an early British book on flying had already noted the obvious: ‘To be an aviator it is best to be small, compact, and wiry…’178) Writing of one of his fellow pilots Lee observed that he was a big man ‘and has to practically use a shoehorn to work himself into the [Pup’s] narrow cockpit’. Photographs show the French ace and national hero Georges Guynemer to have been, in Keats’s phrase, ‘spectre-thin’, his putteed legs mere sticks. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether the average pilot today could fit into a Sopwith Pup or a SPAD S.VII, let alone when wearing a Sidcot suit. There was simply no extra room for a bulky parachute without altering the entire design of the cockpit.

  Nevertheless, once aero engines had become powerful enough for the small additional weight to be ignored, a static line para
chute could in theory have been fitted into or on top of the fuselage immediately behind the pilot, and in the event this was exactly what was done in 1918 with Calthrop’s Guardian Angel (for example in the S.E.5a). Such comparatively minor structural alterations were obviously possible; it just needed the will. Space for the less bulky Mears type which the pilot wore on his back was created behind the pilot in the S.E.5a and the D.H.9 by removing his backrest and installing a light bulkhead a little further back, against which he could lean with the parachute forming an uncomfortable sort of cushion. In fact, in the early months of 1918 experiments were successfully carried out in equipping the S.E.5a, the Sopwith Snipe and Dolphin, the Bristol Fighter, the D.H.4, D.H.9 and D.H.9a with Calthrop parachutes, but all – thanks to official dilatoriness – too late to save any lives. One of the problems cited by opponents of parachutes was that both the Mears and the Guardian Angel were static types, which meant they had to be attached by a lengthy webbing strap to an anchor point on the aircraft. As Bourhis and Lemoine’s experience in 1914 had shown, the opening parachute could snag on part of the aircraft as a man jumped. When jumping from a biplane with its fixed undercarriage and cat’s cradle of wires and spars while still connected to it by a strap, there was always a chance that the pilot might become entangled and unable to free himself from the falling aircraft. In due course the Bristol Fighter’s tailskid also proved notoriously capable of snagging parachutes. This was a valid point, and accidents of this sort did occur. Yet once again this objection could have been trumped by the simple fact that just because success might not be guaranteed every time it was no reason for not giving a valuable airman a fighting chance to save his life.