Marked for Death (18 page)

It was obvious to the British Army that while dash and pluck were as essential to its pilots as they were to its cavalrymen, they were qualities needing to be reined in and subjected to stern military discipline. Observation aircraft were to be crewed by sober men taking careful notes from the air of enemy troop movements; the Army made it quite clear it was not in the market for reckless daredevils looping the loop above the battlefield. And yet, as we can guess and as the Army was to discover, there always was something about airmen and flying that was inimical to the sort of discipline it expected. Even at the Central Flying School there was something ad hoc and unsystematic in the instructors’ methods, and before long the need to set up other training squadrons to cope with the RFC’s rapid expansion resulted in tuition that could depend entirely on the whims and prejudices of the individual instructor, not to mention the condition of the aircraft assigned.

The RFC’s standard elementary trainer was French, the Maurice Farman MF.11 ‘Shorthorn’, universally known as the ‘Rumpty’ or ‘Rumpety’, possibly because of the clattery sound its 8-cylinder inline Renault engine made until it had warmed up. It was a two-seat pusher biplane with twin curved wooden skids projecting in front of the wheels like the runners of a toboggan. (Its predecessor, nicknamed the ‘Longhorn’, had vastly bigger skids.) These ‘horns’ were intended to prevent the aircraft from tipping on its nose in a bad landing. Students (often known as ‘Huns’ because of their habit of destroying the RFC’s aircraft) who nervously confronted their first mount found

a queer sort of bus like an assemblage of birdcages. You climbed with great difficulty through a network of wires into
the nacelle and sat perched up there, adorned with a crash helmet, very much exposed to the wondering gaze of men… The CO, a pompous and bossy penguin, Major Beak, maintained that Rumpties were good buses when you knew how to fly them… He was sufficiently senior to be able to avoid flying, and work off his bad temper on junior people who did fly. According to him Rumpties were fine, and it was only damned junior stupidity that jeered at them… The trainees would have to unlearn later all that they learned then, but young pilots must begin at the beginning, and the Rumpty was certainly only just beginning to be an aeroplane. Flying with their antiquated controls was a mixture of playing a harmonium, working the village pump, and sculling a boat.
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‘It was, in fact, only slightly in advance of the machine which the Wright brothers had first flown some ten or twelve years before,’ was Arthur Gould Lee’s scornful assessment of the Rumpty half a century later when describing his first flying lesson in one. Given that this took place in August 1916, it is astonishing that RFC pilots were still being trained on such a primitive aeroplane. It is similarly unbelievable that even by then the Initial Flying Training programme at Netheravon had little idea of how best to introduce apprehensive youngsters to the dangerous science of flying.

[The Major] opened up the engine, took off, climbed to 300 feet, tapped me on the shoulder again and yelled ‘Take her over!’

I was petrified. I had no idea what to do. I gazed at the control, a sort of cycle handlebar with looped ends, known as the spectacles, set on a central column. Below was a rudder bar for my feet. I timidly rested my hands on the loops and let my toes gently touch the rudder. For a minute the plane kept on a straight course then the right wing started to drop, the looped bar followed, and she began to slip sideways. I was fascinated, waiting for something to happen.

‘Straighten her up, you bloody fool!’ came a bellow in my ear. Desperately I pressed the bar down further to the right. The right wing dropped steeper, and went on dropping.

‘What the f…ing hell are you trying to do, you bleeding idiot?’ came the bellow.

In a panic, I pushed the handlebar away from me. The Rumpty dipped her nose indignantly, shuddered, banked suddenly over. Then the controls were snatched from my feeble hands and during a full, unbroken minute of bellowing in my ear I learned what a wonderful flow of expletives a Flying Corps instructor could possess. Then we turned for home and landing. I at once received a flood of vituperation such as I had never known before. I tried to explain that I’d not been given a single lesson, but he wouldn’t listen and threatened to have me sent back to my regiment. Then he stalked off.
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It was this sort of thing that set the tone in far too many RFC training squadrons. Too much depended on the character of the individual instructors and, in turn, on the station CO’s ability and willingness to ensure they were up to the job. What was lacking was not merely sympathetic tutors but a modern, standardised approach to tuition that prescribed a series of clear steps, each of which every trainee had to master before proceeding to the next. Those who had learned to fly at the Grahame-White school before the war looked back at that system with admiration. At Hendon any pupil who made a mistake in the air when up with his instructor was firmly grounded for more tuition until he thoroughly understood the theory of what he had done wrong. Only then would he be allowed back up. Meanwhile, another pupil would take his place in the air. This was salutary rather than punitive. When in the autumn of 1915 Louis Strange was posted to Gosport to take command of 23 Squadron’s training he remembered how he himself had been taught at Hendon and promptly instituted a
similar regime, starting by carefully vetting his instructors. Obviously there were other similarly enlightened men at training squadrons up and down the country; but it was still largely a matter of luck whether a pupil was taught in a way that significantly increased his chances of survival in everyday flying, let alone in combat. The RFC was still seriously inconsistent in the way it taught men to fly.

*

France, by contrast, had instituted a rigorous and uniform regime of tuition through which all its pilots went. At least, they did so after a confused start in 1914 that was almost as hesitant as that of the British, and for some of the same reasons. Their Army high command believed that for economic as well as strategic motives the war could not possibly last more than a few months – certainly not much beyond Christmas. Consequently General Bernard, Directeur de l’Aéronautique Militaire, announced there was little point in going on churning out aircraft and pilots at the current rate. He closed down most of the flying schools and sent trained mechanics off into the infantry. It was not long before the gravity of this misjudgement was apparent and the position hastily reversed.

One big difference between the Aéronautique Militaire and the RFC was the French insistence that their prospective pilots should arrive already knowing – or at least willing to learn – about engines. The British had a variety of opinionated but vague ideas about what sort of man ‘the pilot type’ was, and left it at that. Provided an airman acquired some sort of competence in the air, that was enough. Anything that went on under the cowling of his engine could be considered a mechanic’s job. Of course there were exceptions to this among pilots, like Louis Strange who was quite happy to spend a day taking out all his engine’s inlet and exhaust valves, cleaning them and grinding them in again. The Canadian ace Billy Bishop was similarly able to work on his engine when forced down within 150 yards of the
German lines, and obviously there were many others whose peacetime hobby had been cars and motor racing who were willing to get their hands oily and knew what they were doing. But for the first two or three years of the war British pilots were taught next to nothing about the engines on which their lives depended and they had to get by on what they chose to pick up from colleagues and the squadron ack-emmas. To the British Army, officers and gentlemen were not grease monkeys.

The French Army’s flying tuition was considerably based on the course that Blériot had developed for his school at Buc, near Versailles. Blériot had taken one of his own monoplanes and clipped its wings so it was unable to take off. This
rouleur
was familiarly known as
le Pingouin
: a flightless bird used for the first lessons in which students learned how to taxi at increasing speeds. The Penguin was by no means easy to hold straight, and only when pupils could do unswerving runs along the ground at full speed with the tail up were they allowed to proceed to the next class: that of
décoller
. In this they learned to ‘unstick’ a full-winged aircraft, rise a few feet into the air while holding it straight, and then come back down. These flights were gradually lengthened until the pupil was ready for his
tour de piste
, his first solo that entailed flying around the airfield at about 600 feet. The noteworthy thing about the French system of training was that, unlike the British, instructors did not initially fly with their pupils. The first time a pupil took to the air he was on his own. If he survived that he went on to make cross-country flights and practise basic manoeuvres like flying spirals. But well before then the student would have been thoroughly instructed on the ground. He learned how aircraft were built; how they could be rigged so as to fly with a different attitude by altering the tension of their various wires; about rotary engines and the problems of torque; about dealing with wind and weather; about basic navigation and many other things. Finally there came a high-altitude flight and a cross-country test, at the end of which the successful pilot was awarded his brevet and could put up his wings on the
uniform of his particular army regiment, which he continued to wear. After that he usually went off to an operational training squadron where he would be given advanced instruction in flying a particular type such as a bomber or a fighter.

In the last two years of the war promising pilots, after graduating from one of the major French Army flying schools like that at Avord, near Bourges, might be sent down south to Pau on the edge of the Pyrenees to the School of Aerobatics and Combat. There they would find up-to-date Nieuport fighters, all maintained in peak condition, in which they were encouraged to spend as much time in the air as possible. Once their skills and flying hours had reached a satisfactory point they graduated to the final stage: the aerobatics course – the Haute École du Ciel.

The German system was like the British only in that instructors flew with their pupils from the first. Otherwise it was much more punctilious about avoiding training accidents: the Germans had a much smaller reserve of potential pilots to draw on than did all the Entente forces combined. For much of the war the British system led to new pilots being sent over to France and often straight into combat, a situation that many squadron COs themselves described as ‘murder’. In 1916 the Germans considered their student pilots needed at least six months’ instruction before being sent to an active squadron, although by 1918 under the pressure of demand this period had been reduced to three months. What was more, unlike Allied practice, the newly qualified German pilot was not immediately awarded his ‘wings’ but had to carry out several missions (usually with an experienced observer) before getting his
Flugzeugführer Abzeichen
. From the spring of 1917 pilots whose record in an ordinary squadron merited selection for any of the crack new fighter squadrons (
Jagdstaffeln
) were sent to one of the new single-seat fighter schools (
Kampfeinsitzerschulen
) in Paderborn and Grossenhain, after which they went for advanced training at
Jagdstaffelschule
1 in Valenciennes.

Britain had nothing like these specialised fighter schools. But it should be emphasised that, regardless of how much better organised and uniform the French and German systems of training were, standards inevitably varied during the war, partly according to the quality of available instructors but also because of battlefield campaigns that made sudden and urgent demands for fresh supplies of pilots in the minimum time. Also, accident rates were high everywhere if only because it was not yet fifteen years since man’s first-ever powered flight. No amount of pilot training could reliably be proof against every eventuality in the air. It was small wonder that somebody’s brainwave to correct a particular machine’s tendency to stall might appear to work very well until it was discovered too late that it could now easily tip the aircraft into a fatal spin. ‘It spun into the carpet with all the ferocity the type could display when it was out of humour,’ as W. E. Johns would remark laconically when he himself was in training, as though of a horse that had shied unexpectedly. ‘It took the mechanics most of the day to dig Tony out, so I heard.’
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Although a big generalisation, it is probably justifiable to say that until at least the autumn of 1917 the majority of the RFC’s pilots were nothing like as well trained as were their French and German counterparts. The reason was no secret, still less a mystery, particularly after the losses of ‘Bloody April’ that year. ‘Boom’ Trenchard’s strategy of using air power aggressively inevitably resulted in a high rate of casualties who had to be replaced as quickly as possible. The figures are revealing: by the end of the war the Entente had lost 2.2 aircraft for every one lost by the Central Powers.
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The corollary to this was a faster turnover of aircrew with the increased need to rush men through basic training to fulfil Trenchard’s other policy of ‘no empty chairs’ in an active squadron. This kept the messes full ‘even though it meant offering up the inexperienced and the partly trained as human sacrifices,’ as one author commented later.
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It is conceivable that
Trenchard was using his own experience of going solo with only sixty-four minutes’ airtime back in 1912 as a yardstick for how long it ought to take to train new pilots. Bad as even the Germans’ casualties were in training as well as in combat, their attrition rate was still significantly lower than that of the British. Quite simply, they took more time and care in teaching a pilot how an aircraft flew and how he might best fly one. This revealed a distinct difference of aviation cultures, in that a strand of thinking in ‘official’ British circles held it was probably better for an airman
not
to understand how his aircraft worked. The rationale for this bizarre viewpoint was summed up in late 1918 by an RAMC captain attached to the RAF writing for the august medical magazine
The Lancet
. He admitted to a