Marked for Death (17 page)

Only politicians saw the romance in it then, with their beautiful speeches about ‘our boys’ – ‘to be an immortal, undying symbol – a wonderful spirit of self-sacrifice – the unquenchable fire which must bring us glorious victory’ – and so on – you know the stuff. Glorious victory, my hat. With most of us the war was a personal matter. Another fellow shot at you and you shot back; you shot at another fellow and he shot back; and it jolly well served you right. That’s all there was to it.
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It might be hard to believe that two-seat bombers could be any sort of match for flying circuses (although the Red Baron himself was no longer there as inspiration, having been killed in April 1918). Yet the D.H.4 that Johns’s squadron flew was a highly capable aircraft. With its 300 h.p. Rolls-Royce V-12 engine, the Eagle VIII, this two-seater could reach a ceiling of 23,500 feet and a top speed at low altitude of 143 mph (compared with the average Camel’s 115 mph, for instance; while Fokker’s much-feared D.VII fighter could just manage 117 mph). A bomber’s vulnerability at the time was that it had to ‘lay its eggs’ at quite low altitude to stand much chance of hitting a specific target,
and this obviously gave a diving fighter an excellent opportunity. Quite apart from the weight of the bombs it carried, the D.H.4 could not manoeuvre with the agility of a Fokker Triplane even though it could out-run or out-climb it with ease. From these facts some gruelling air battles developed:

Bell took a formation of six machines over and came back alone after fighting twenty-seven EA [enemy aircraft] for the best part of an hour. Dowswell brought his bus back over the lines but force-landed at Pont St. Vincent. Gompertz was his gunner. He got two EA, but what a mess he was in when the tender brought him home! This was due to the fact that Dowswell had an aileron shot off and could only fly dead straight. Gompertz’s Sidcot (a one-piece flying suit) [see p.212] hung on him in ribbons; it had been literally shot off his back; and those who read this who saw him will confirm that this is no exaggeration. Only one bullet hit him – in the shoulder. He didn’t seem in the least upset. He just sat in the door of his hut with the rags still hanging on him, and laughed.
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It was small wonder that aircrew became semi-mad with exhaustion. Looking back over his notes and log books, Arthur Gould Lee found that the thirteen men in his squadron had between them flown eighty-seven hours in one day (the best part of seven hours each), that he himself had flown nearly forty combat hours in one week and one of his colleagues notched up
fifty
.
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Ultimately, of course, what the survivors carried away from all this was a burden of death, often in the form of vignettes not necessarily drawn directly from combat in which they took part. Random scenes became engraved on the mind, such as an airfield where one machine had just landed with long strips of shot-up fabric flapping from its wings even as another was being prepared for starting. In the background was the familiar litany exchanged between pilot and mechanic: ‘Switch off’, ‘Switch off’. ‘Suck in’, ‘Suck in’. ‘Contact!’ and the roar of the engine
and a thick cloud of castor oil smoke drifting back over the returned machine from whose rear cockpit men were now gently lifting the observer, leaving his intestines behind as they did. But it was the injured man who kept weakly repeating ‘Sorry… sorry…’ until within seconds he died. As his pilot climbed shakily down to the ground and vomited an air mechanic assigned to that aircraft was crying, softly punching the fuselage in impotence as he wept.

Or else men would be standing in silence on the tarmac at dusk waiting for a flight’s return. A blackbird would be perversely singing its evening song from a tree behind the hangars, almost loud enough to mask the dull thudding of the guns in the distance. The men would react to every distant hum or speck in the darkening sky until it was clear that by now all the aircraft would be out of fuel. There was always the hope that the phone might ring in the CO’s office saying that one or other had force-landed somewhere, and maybe news would come in a week’s time that someone was injured and a prisoner in Germany. Otherwise the whole lot had gone west and there was nothing to be done about it but to send urgently for a batch of fresh-faced replacements from home. And all the while the blackbird sang.

We were duly joined by this young, golden-haired blue-eyed child who looked about 16. I never met anyone so keen and literally bubbling over with enthusiasm. His letters home to relatives and friends, which at times it was my duty to censor, were a fine example of British spirit. I remember one particular letter just after he got back from a scrap with bullet holes in the petrol tank, and his machine generally shot about. It was a letter to a school friend and he said: ‘I’ve just landed back with holes in my petrol tank, but you simply don’t know or feel the danger, it’s just one big thrill, hurry up and come out, it’s just wonderful.’ He only lasted a couple of months, poor boy, and was shot down in flames on our side
of the line. In my letter home to his people I particularly avoided any reference to the way he met his death, so it was more than distressing for them when some tactless infantry officer who reached the wreckage first took his cigarette case and pocket book, which were of course badly charred, and sent them direct to his father.
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1*
i.e. the engine designed by the Royal Aircraft Factory, Farnborough.

2*
Colney Hatch mental hospital at Friern Barnet, universally known as the ‘loony bin’.

3*
Today, DOPs would be CAPs, as the RAF calls combat air patrols.

The training of British military airmen in the First World War followed a patchy trajectory: at first indifferent, then often sinking to appalling before improving somewhat in the last eighteen months of the war to finish better. How well a country trains its aircrew is a good measure of how seriously it values its air force; in the emergency of wartime it also inevitably reflects the pressure to match demand with supply. Britain began the war with a chronic lack of flying instructors and training airfields, and although numbers of both increased considerably, overall quality usually lagged far behind. This was revealed in the RFC’s accident rate. It is estimated that 60 per cent of all British aircraft accidents during the war occurred during training.
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According to the RFC’s own estimate made in the spring of 1917, out of 6,000 pilots then in training 1,200 (a fifth) would be killed in accidents before they could qualify.
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These are shocking figures, although it must always be borne in mind that in those days flying was a recent phenomenon and both airframes and engines were very much less reliable than they would become even twenty years later. No matter how good an instructor and his pupil, neither was proof against an engine failure immediately after take-off or of a wing collapsing in mid-air.

As we have seen, at the war’s outbreak Britain was caught unprepared. Although a Central Flying School had been established at
the same time as the RFC in April 1912, the impression remains that it was all done less from a conviction of aviation’s vital military importance than because the War Secretary, J. E. B. Seely, had perhaps read in
The Times
one morning over breakfast that the French Army already had some 200 aircraft in service and the Germans even more. In Britain, by contrast, the chairman of the Defence Subcommittee on Aviation could observe: ‘At the present time we have, as far as I know, of actual flying men in the Army about eleven, and of actual flying men in the Navy about eight, and France has about two hundred and sixty-three; so we are what you might call behind.’
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‘
As far as I know…
’ Any Briton of a certain age will recognise the dry, ironic tone of the officer class whose real concerns are elsewhere – probably at Ascot or in White’s. There was also perhaps the languid implication that what those foreigner Johnnies got up to was scarcely a matter for Britons to worry about unduly.

That was in 1912, and although the number of pilots and observers the RFC went on to train in the next two years increased, the pace still reflected a less than panicked ambition to catch up with the Continent. By the outbreak of war the RFC and RNAS combined could field 197 officers, many of whom were observers or non-flying. With assorted personnel plus all available aircraft and spares they between them constituted precisely four squadrons. (Five years later in April 1919 the RAF would have 27,906 officers and over a quarter of a million other ranks.) In 1913, though, the British Army could no doubt console itself by thinking that when push came to shove it always had a pool of civilian pilots to call on: young men who had earned their certificates in flying clubs and schools like Claude Grahame-White’s.

Grahame-White had learned to fly at Blériot’s flying school in France, in 1910 becoming the sixth holder of a Royal Aero Club pilot’s licence. At that time flying clubs were springing up everywhere in Europe, most of which offered flying lessons. With the energy and enthusiasm of the true convert, Grahame-White
decided on a site at Hendon as suitable for London’s Aerodrome – possibly the first-ever use of that word – and bought the land and set it up. (It is now the site of the RAF Museum.) His club and flying school were typical of many others started at much the same time, whether run by keen individuals or by recently founded aircraft companies such as Bristol, which opened two schools in 1910 – one on Salisbury Plain and the other at Brooklands. Eager young men scrimped and saved to enroll at flying schools at home and abroad. The future commander of the RFC in France, Hugh Trenchard, learned to fly at Thomas Sopwith’s school at Brooklands. He was nearly forty years old. Within ten days he went solo, his two and a half weeks’ tuition having cost him £75 (the equivalent of over £5,000 today). All in all he had spent just sixty-four minutes in the air. Over in France Louis Blériot already had several flying schools while in Germany by 1911 there were fourteen where students could qualify for their Deutsche Luftfahrer Verband (DLV) private pilot’s licence, as well as two aircraft factories (Albatros and Aviatik) producing training machines at a rate that by the war’s start had supplied some 300. Private aircraft manufacturers like DFW (Deutsche Flugzeug-Werke) with its associated flying school went on being contracted throughout the war by the military to supply trained pilots, especially when – as in 1916 – the urgent need for them outstripped the Army’s ability to keep up with demand.

In 1914 such enterprising young Britons as already had a private pilot’s licence were exactly the volunteers the RFC badly needed to supplement those officers it had already trained at its Central Flying School in Upavon. Anyone who had had the private means or gumption to get himself into the air was plainly officer material. However, the world of pre-war flying had acquired a very definite ethos of its own, and by no means every qualified pilot was suited to military discipline. Aviation everywhere had started as a private venture and was at heart an entirely civilian enterprise. Anthony Fokker vividly remembered
how, as an earnest country boy from Holland, he had moved his fledgling business to Berlin in 1911 and was amazed by the international coterie that aviation had enticed there:

Johannisthal was a thriving little cosmopolis. Aviation was a sport which had attracted daring spirits, ne’er-do-wells, and adventurers from all over the world. There were sober, industrious pilots and designers present, too, but they were in the minority. Many of the amateur pilots were rich men’s sons who found this spot a fertile ground for the sowing of wild oats. Dazzled by the dare-devilry of these men, beautiful women from the theatre and night clubs hung around the flying field, more than a little complaisant, alluring – unstinting of favours to their current heroes.
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This was the same crowd that aviation was attracting everywhere. Fokker’s description of it as a ‘sport’ was apt. By no means every pilot was either very experienced or skilled, and many were easily tempted into showing off to girlfriends and admirers, performing ever more hair-raising stunts in aircraft that had a habit of coming apart in the air. The turnover of what today would be known as ‘silly young buggers’ was brisk. Once Adolphe Pégoud, a Blériot company test pilot and instructor, had followed the Russian Pyotr Nesterov’s example a few days earlier in September 1913 and made his name by looping a Type XI monoplane, ‘looping the loop’ became a huge novelty crowd-pleaser and for a year or so acquired a death-defying mystique all its own. Pégoud went on to become an early ace until shot down in 1915 by one of his own German ex-students, who reportedly wept when he learned what he had done. Meanwhile, over in America a brilliant barnstorming pilot named Lincoln J. Beachey made his own short-lived name and fortune by performing multiple loops, the final one of which killed him when his aircraft broke up over San Francisco Bay and he drowned. Such ‘stunting’ manoeuvres were soon to become a necessary part of aerial
combat, but by then aircraft were better designed for such harsh treatment. In the pre-war years it was widely recognised that a solid proportion of airshow spectators came in the expectation of thrills, death and disaster, just as they went to motor races, and they seldom left disappointed.