Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  As regards Lee’s assertion that he was unable to find any War Office document confirming the allegation that parachutes were to be officially discouraged, it is true that no such policy statement has yet come to light and quite possibly does not exist, if it ever did. What is usually quoted today is a sentence from a report that reads: ‘It is the opinion of the [Air] Board that the presence of such an apparatus might impair the fighting spirit of pilots and cause them to abandon machines which might otherwise be capable of returning to base for repair.’179

  This may well have represented the semi-official view and seems to have been endorsed in other air forces, notably by the French and the Americans. In the French Army in the early part of the war, when the old generals were still thinking snobbishly in terms of gentlemen cavalry, it is alleged they believed ‘pilots of [common] origin would be tempted to abandon their aeroplane too easily if they could do so by parachute’.180 (Ah, those craven lower orders!) And the commander of the American 1st Pursuit Group, Harold Hartney, claimed later that the subject of parachutes had several times been brought up and certain very senior officers had said that ‘pilots could quite possibly lose their nerve in a hot fight and might perhaps jump prematurely, and there was to be no more discussion of the matter’.181 It is hard to know whether these opinions were reached independently or were simply reflections of attitudes commonly held among the top brass of all sides. At any rate the French-American Raoul Lufbery died when he jumped out of his blazing machine at 2,500 feet and a parachute might well have saved this celebrated ace.

  Hartney was a Canadian by birth who initially fought for the RFC in France before being sent back to Toronto in late 1917, promoted to major and given command of the (US) 27th Aero Squadron. He later became a US citizen. In his book he makes another claim that is even more revealing: that some pilots thought the idea of parachutes ‘sissy’. Arthur Gould Lee does not mention this in his letters, simply leaving the clear impression that pilots were unanimous in wanting parachutes. It may be significant that apart from his quite extraordinary luck in surviving months of combat with scarcely even modest injury, Lee was unusual in that for most of the time he was the only married pilot in 46 Squadron, which he admits made him feel older (at twenty-two!) and more ‘responsible’ somehow, even if he knew he wasn’t. As already noted he habitually wrote home to his wife each day, often more than once, so he must have been keenly aware of having another life and affections elsewhere, just as Billy Bishop was.

  Yet this was by no means true for every airman. In books and memoirs of the period (many of them posthumous) there are frequent references to battle-weary young men who had given up all hope of surviving the war. As comparative veterans in their squadron they had seen too many others take off on a sortie and fail to return; had watched too many former friends fall across the sky trailing flame; had had too many undeserved escapes of their own to assign either sense or importance to their continued survival. There were many such airmen in all the combatant air forces, not least those Britons who had lived through the RFC’s darkest days in spring 1917. Such combat veterans tended to be leached-out men with nervous tics, strange habits, fearful nightmares often audible even from the sheds, superstitions and lucky mascots without which they refused point-blank to leave the ground even under threat of court-martial. They had become a race apart, and knew it. They were often morose monomaniacs, thinking of little else but the air war. Fatalists, they were obsessed with identifying and further developing that elusive edge they apparently possessed that had enabled them to survive when so many others had not. They would go on until their luck ran out or a ‘Blighty’ wound cursed them with forcible repatriation. In the worst case their six-month tour would be ended by rotation to ‘H.E.’ or Home Establishment, a posting many of them dreaded as a kind of official emasculation. These were men who might take a revolver up with them, not so much for self-defence if they were forced down over enemy lines but to shoot themselves if faced by that bleak choice of jumping out of their blazing aircraft or staying in it to be roasted alive before being smashed to pulp.

  Even if such macho and despairing types were in a minority in any squadron their outlook was contagious in that their ethos, together with the CO’s bullishness about the squadron’s reputation, would set the general tone. Everyone joined in with the nihilistic mess songs, just as everyone recognised that the squadron’s honour was sacred. It now becomes a little easier to see why aircrew might have agreed that parachutes were ‘sissy’. (Who dreads to the dust returning? Who shrinks from the sable shore?)

  It is certainly not hard to imagine their reaction had a member of their squadron actually ordered his Guardian Angel from a London shop. It would have been quite impossible to live down, and he could never have worn it even had it been allowed. Who would have wanted to become the mocked outsider, the only person to do a show wearing a parachute? Had he any idea what other squadrons would say? ‘Windy’ would be the least hurtful nickname he could hope to acquire. He would be finished in that squadron, and his reputation would precede him wherever he went. For in the background would always be the obscure and unvoiced thought: if your parachute did actually save you it would somehow imply that your life was of more value than those others it might also have saved, thereby constituting a betrayal of the dead. (Hurrah for the next man that dies!)

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  Such are some of the difficulties with Lee’s simplistic polarity: on the one hand airmen wanting parachutes and on the other the seemingly callous intransigence of the top brass. This is more or less how the argument has been positioned ever since. Yet the truth was certainly more complicated and shadowy than that, as can be seen from reactions to several other safety measures for airmen that were gradually introduced. A British doctor specialising in air accidents wrote in 1918: ‘There is a natural disposition on the part of most pilots to feel they want to be free and unimpeded whilst flying. In the old days many used to scoff at goggles, safety helmets or belts; but at present most aviators realise the value of these things…’182 This makes it clear that even by the end of the war not every pilot was wearing goggles, a helmet or even a belt. In fact there was considerable resistance to all three, just as there was to carrying oxygen. The young RFC ace Albert Ball VC reportedly never wore goggles or helmet. He used to claim that ‘he liked to feel the wind in his hair.’183

  One objection to goggles was that sometimes a speck of oil on a lens could be mistaken for an enemy aircraft, and many pilots flying rotary-engined machines refused to wear them because they so easily fogged up with the oil fumes being blown back. But in any case there was an instinctive conviction, at a time when visual acuity was vital, that eyesight was at its best when not mediated by glass. And this when it could be daily shown that goggles fitted with ‘Triplex’ shatterproof lenses were saving many an airman’s eyesight. They were protection not only against fragments of shrapnel from ‘archie’, something blown back from the engine or a sudden gush of alcohol or mercury from an instrument hit by a bullet, but against the endemic conjunctivitis caused by staring into the slipstream.

  As for safety helmets, they were principally worn by trainees. Once he had his ‘wings’ no airman worth his salt wanted to wear an absurd padded hat and go on looking like a ‘Hun’ at flying school. Aircrew preferred the normal leather flying helmet with ear flaps. Never mind that it offered no real protection other than to stop the ears freezing: it had mysteriously become traditional (and was to last essentially unchanged, but for the addition of space for earphones, right through the Second World War). The matter of safety belts, on the other hand, was hotly debated, and with rather better reasons. They were clearly vital in violent dogfight manoeuvres when an aircraft might spend time upside down. But they were were no less desirable for flying in ordinary bad weather, as the German Oberleutnant Haupt-Heydemarck discovered when flying in the Balkans in 1917:

  I was supposed to be testing a two-seater which had had a new engine installed, so I took the mechani
c up with me. The machine ran into a downward gust and pitched violently nose-down. I just managed to get her under control again but I’d had enough and landed as quickly as I could. While I was taxying I called out to the chap behind me: ‘Man alive, we were damn lucky!’ But as I got no answer I looked round and to my astonishment the observer’s seat was empty. The poor fellow had been thrown out from about a thousand metres up!184

  At other times seatbelts could be a liability. Landing accidents in biplanes on rough or improvised airfields were common. No single-engined aircraft of the day had brakes, and in a short field the only way of stopping quickly was to do a ‘three-pointer’. This was hard to get right in a crosswind, especially if the aircraft was damaged, and virtually every pilot had at one time or another ended up with the machine pitched up on its nose or even upside down, leaving him dazed and hanging by the seatbelt. Since turning turtle often sent petrol cascading over the hot engine and a single spark from a dying magneto could set the whole thing ablaze, some pilots preferred to take their chances by not wearing a belt or by opening it before impact and hoping to be thrown clear. Many a mess echoed to impassioned arguments about the pros and cons of seatbelts, with both sides ready and able to cherry-pick cases to prove their point.

  Once again, it was not a simple open and shut matter. Indeed, precisely the same arguments could be heard in any British pub in the 1970s about the impending seatbelt legislation for car drivers and front passengers. They could be heard in 1983 when the law was finally passed and still can be from those constitutionally opposed to it. As for crash helmets, ever since the neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns had operated on T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) after Lawrence came off his Brough Superior motorcycle at speed in 1935, sustaining a fatal head injury, Cairns campaigned for all dispatch riders to wear crash helmets. This measure saved countless lives during the Second World War and afterwards. Yet when wearing a crash helmet finally became compulsory for all UK civilian motorcyclists in 1973 there was no lack of bikers protesting that it was sissy to wear them. What was worse, they claimed, crash helmets removed much of the open-air pleasure of riding a motorbike and, like seatbelts, could even cause death in certain circumstances.

  So maybe there was nothing very strange about combat-toughened young airmen during the First World War preferring to rely on their own skill and luck rather than on protective devices that might have hampered them. Above all, there was always that vital component to take into account: a pure revelling in unimpeded flying. This was the sheer exhilaration of youths who had so recently been liberated by aircraft not only from life in the trenches but from a world that was everywhere still largely horse-drawn and pedestrian. Lee himself became lyrical about ‘contour-chasing’ in his Sopwith Pup in a moment of boyish exuberance when issues of safety were cast to the wind:

  I went down to the area towards Bailleul where it’s pretty level and raced across the countryside ten feet up, lifting over trees and cottages and camps, then surging on at full throttle. Because I’d set out only to do a test I wasn’t wearing my helmet or goggles nor, of course, flying gear, and it was fine to feel the rush of air past my temples and my hair waving madly in the slipstream swirling around the tiny windscreen. And, of course, without my helmet the noise of the engine was terrific. This is the most marvellous thrill you can get out of flying, scudding along close to the ground, the feeling of speed, and especially in so smooth and docile a machine as a Pup. Everything is spinning by at ninety miles an hour. The plane’s shadow skims across the fields just below. You come to a road without trees or telegraph poles and you go down until your wheels almost touch. This flying at two feet is really intoxicating, seeing people dive for the ditch, troops scattering, lorries lurching across the road like drunks. Turning west towards Hazebrouck I dived on a couple of staff cars and one of them, an open tourer with red-tabbed officers, nearly went up a tree and finished in the ditch. I certainly put the gust up that lot. All good, clean fun, and it makes these staff wallahs realise there are dangers even in their kind of war.185

  Such intense youthful pleasures aside, serious aviators had tended from the first to be on the conservative side. The dangers of war only intensified this, pardonably leading them to mistrust innovation and change or any deviation from the tried and familiar. This point was well made by Biggles himself in full mess-bore mode – or rather, by W. E. Johns writing from his own memory of 55 Squadron attitudes some fourteen years earlier:

  ‘That’s the trouble with this damn war; people are never satisfied. Let us stick to Camels and S.E.s and the Boche can have their D.VIIs – damn all this chopping and changing about. I’ve heard a rumour about a new kite called a Salamander that carries a sheet of armour plate.1* Why? I’ll tell you. Some brass-hat’s got hit in the pants and that’s the result. What with sheet iron, oxygen to blow your guts out and electrically heated clothing to set fire to your kidneys, this war is going to bits.’186

  And yet by August 1918 all German pilots had access not only to parachutes and oxygen equipment but to electrically heated flying suits as well (not to mention the armoured Junkers J.I), and German aviators can’t have been utterly different from their British counterparts. However, they were the beneficiaries of an air force high command with much smaller manpower reserves to draw on and anxious to conserve its greatest asset: its aircrew. Such pragmatism presumably outweighed diehard British conservatism and the prodigality of being able to rely on a vast Empire to supply unlimited numbers of airmen. At any rate it must surely have been someone like Biggles in the Air Ministry in 1947 who decided that Britain’s proposed new jet V-bombers should be designed with ejector seats for the two pilots but none for the three-man crew in the compartment behind, who would merely have parachutes. And in due course, very much in the spirit of 1917, there was no lack of crewmembers to be heard saying that they never missed having bang seats; that on the contrary, they were so engrossed in their various electronic tasks the possibility of an emergency never crossed their minds and anyway they were happy to settle for parachutes.

  Even so, none of this is to deny Arthur Gould Lee’s implied point that the powers-that-be could have issued parachutes to RFC aircrew well over a year earlier had they really wanted to. It is here that we come up against that imponderable mixture of official indifference and bureaucratic languor, leaving us unable to decide where the ultimate responsibility lies. It is a perennial question. In the Second World War the eminent British-born Princeton mathematician Freeman Dyson was assigned to the RAF’s Operational Research Section where he made a disturbing discovery. About half the crews of American bombers shot down in daylight raids were escaping from their aircraft to become PoWs. From the older British night bombers, the Halifax and the Stirling, about 25 per cent escaped. From the RAF’s newest bomber, the Lancaster, a mere 15 per cent of the crews survived. Dyson established that this was because its escape hatch was not only badly sited but too small for men wearing parachutes to squeeze through easily. An informant on a bomber squadron told him that the true fraction of survivors among shot-down crews was kept secret from the airmen even more strictly than were the true odds against their completing an operational tour. ‘If the boys had found out how small was the fraction who succeeded in baling out after being hit, some of them might have been tempted to jump too soon.’187 This was an exact reprise of the WWI ‘official’ argument against parachutes.

  There ensued a two-year attempt to get Bomber Command first to acknowledge the problem and then to notify Avro to modify the Lancaster’s escape hatch. Avro took months simply to design a larger hatch and build a prototype, and the war ended before it could be installed. It had clearly never been considered a priority. The ‘entrenched inertia of the military establishment’ had been matched by that of the aircraft’s manufacturers. Dyson hazards that the inadequacy of the Lancaster’s hatch ‘probably cost the lives of several thousand boys’. The military’s instinct, then as earlier, was that the priority in war is killing the enemy and not saving the liv
es of one’s own combatants.

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  In finally addressing the question of why no parachutes were issued to British aircrew in the first air war, perhaps the most important thing of all is to remember that it is simply no longer possible to understand exactly how people thought a century ago. On 11th November 1914, towards the end of the First Battle of Ypres, the Prussian Guard launched a concerted attack on the British 1st Guards Brigade. In the ensuing Battle of Nonnebosschen the Germans were defeated, but at terrible cost to both sides. Out of eighty British officers and 4,500 men who went into battle, five officers and 478 other ranks were left standing at the end. Afterwards, when the C-in-C asked a surviving brigadier how his men had done, he reportedly replied: ‘We had an uncommonly good shoot,’188 as though he had spent a pleasant day on a grouse moor.

  This is not a code we can hope to crack merely by invoking stiff upper lips or British understatement. We are as much at a loss to grasp it fully as the brigadier would have been to understand our present conventions of health and safety, let alone modern free-for-all sexual mores. As the opening of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between has it: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ This crux has to be appreciated when trying to make any sense of the First World War and is too often left out of the equation. Apparent inconsistencies of attitude about such things as parachutes and seatbelts now seem baffling, contradictory or simply downright perverse but were obviously quite differently weighted at the time. Indeed, no sooner had an agreement been signed in 1919 for the first commercial flights to start between London and Paris than Frederick Handley Page ‘civilianised’ one of his big O/400 bombers as a passenger aircraft by turning it into a simulacrum of a suburban parlour. There were curtains for the windows, flowers in vases on the window sills and a drawing-room clock up on a bracket near the ceiling. For the fourteen passengers there were two rows of cane chairs with floral cushions, but not a seatbelt anywhere. Presumably to be hurled about the cabin in an ‘air pocket’ was all part of the thrill of flying, and if anyone were hurt it wouldn’t occur to them to sue.