Marked for Death (19 page)

definite conviction that the less the fighting scout pilot knows about his machine from a mechanical point of view the better. From the very nature of his work he must be prepared to throw the machine about, and at times subject it to such strains that did he realise how near he was to the breaking-point, his nerve would go very quickly.
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In other words ignorance was bliss. It was better for a pilot to risk losing both his life and his aircraft through bad flying than it was for him to risk losing his nerve.

With official opinions as perverse as this circulating it is hardly a surprise to find that even as late as the last days of December 1917 Stuart Wortley’s fictitious letter-writer (based later on his own wartime correspondence and diaries) was exasperated both by a lack of training and an absence of keenness in the new pilots he was sent. ‘I regret to say that many of the new recruits not only don’t know how to fly or how to manipulate a machine gun but they fail to display any eagerness to learn. My wretched flight commanders have had to give up most of their spare time trying to train them, and even then some of them have to be sent back home for further instruction.’
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As the war went on the RFC’s more outspoken commanding officers of active squadrons in France often agonised at being ordered to send men up who had no right to be in the air at all, still less in combat. It seemed a needless slaughter of the innocents and added to the steadily growing pressure for Britain’s air wing to break with the Army and rid itself of the constant need to do the military’s bidding at whatever cost. In the view of many RFC officers neither the infantry nor its commanders understood how best to use air power although they broadly supported Trenchard’s approach, possibly because as a pilot he, too, was one of them.

Apart from that, there were the children who slipped through the Army’s lax net. In late 1915 Cecil Lewis, who had falsified his age and enrolled in the RFC at seventeen (the minimum was eighteen), was sent up by his instructor on his first solo after a mere ninety minutes’ dual flying. Young as he was, he was still not as juvenile as the RNAS pilot whom W. E. Johns met in Landshut POW camp after he was shot down in September 1918. This boy had also been shot down and was celebrating his seventeenth birthday as a prisoner. He had run away from school to join up, and many years later Johns might well have used him as the model for the main character in his novel
The Rescue Flight
.

Soloing after only one and a half hours’ dual experience in the air was not uncommon in the RFC. Lewis’s first solo was successful, Johns’s rather less so since he stalled on take-off and crashed. The terse entry in Johns’s log book reads:

Time: 8.30 a.m.

Pilot: Self

Type and number of machine: MFSH [Maurice Farman Shorthorn] 2113
1*

Passenger: None

Time in air: Five seconds

Height: 30 feet
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He was lucky to survive. His instructor, a Captain Ashton, was one of those who subscribed to the commonly held view that pilots, like riders after a nasty fall, should get straight back into the saddle in order not to ‘lose confidence’. He sent Johns up again the next day for a ten-minute flight ‘at the most’. In the event it lasted ninety minutes on account of Johns getting completely lost and only finding the airfield again at dusk when he was down to his last thimbleful of petrol.

In May 1917 Arthur Gould Lee, another fledgling pilot who had just arrived in France, could note: ‘Most pilots average 15–20 hours’ flying when they arrive here, with maybe 10–12 solo and five on the type they’re expecting to fight on. With that amount of piloting they can’t even fly, let alone fight.’
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He himself found he had done more flying than any of the others with whom he was posted: 85 hours all told with 72½ solo, including 18 hours on Sopwith Pups – the aircraft he subsequently flew in France. He had trained with Bristol at Filton but had been injured in a flying accident ‘due to incompetent instruction’. This turned out to be a heavily disguised blessing since, as he admitted, recuperation had allowed him to stay in England long enough to learn to fly properly. Cecil Lewis, on the other hand, had flown just thirteen hours’ solo when he was posted to his squadron in France, ‘hopelessly inequipped and inexperienced’. It was only very much later in the war that – in theory, at least – no RFC pilot was supposed to cross the lines until he had done sixty hours’ flying.

Yet perhaps the most scandalous practice surrounding the RFC’s training methods was the way in which the instructors were chosen. Again, Johns’s experience is illustrative. After his harrowing experiences in Gallipoli, Salonika and Egypt – not to mention a severe bout of malaria – he began learning to fly shortly after arriving at No. 1 School of Aeronautics, Reading, on 26th October 1917. Once he had earned his ‘wings’ his very first posting was on 20th January 1918 as an instructor with No. 25 Flying Training School, Thetford. Thus a man with fewer than three months’ flying experience from scratch had himself
become a tutor. True, this was a sign of the RFC’s desperation at a time when almost anyone with a rough idea of what an aircraft’s controls did was press-ganged into flying combat missions in France, with a consequent dearth of experienced pilots to teach new volunteers and conscripts. At this point the life expectancy of new pilots was three weeks. A good many were dead within three days. Seasoned airmen with real experience who had survived a few months’ active service were of inestimable value to any squadron. They were far too valuable to be wasted back in Blighty teaching Huns to fly Rumpties. They were either inveigled into doing another tour or, as was common after perhaps four months, they were too shattered for further combat and became as much a menace to themselves as to any German opponent. They were often reluctantly posted back home as instructors to a flying training school like Johns’s. With their half-crazed fatalism, thousand-yard stares and often bitter rage at being banned from returning to the action in France they, too, were usually not best suited to training beginners.

*

One of the most revealing accounts of what it was like learning to fly in the RFC only a year before the Armistice comes from an American, John MacGavock Grider, who was sent with his comrades to the UK in late 1917 to be trained as a pilot for service with the RFC until such time as the United States could organise squadrons of its own. Grider’s first memory of the journey out was of being satirically regaled in Halifax harbour by a boatload of New Zealanders who paddled around their troopship singing: ‘Onward, conscript soldiers, marching as to war,/You would not be conscripts, had you gone before.’ After arriving in Britain Grider was first billeted in Oxford before being posted to the machine-gun school at Grantham.

November 18th
: There were a lot of young English kids that had been there for some time swinging the lead. [The new
CO] sent for them all and lined them up. He told them there was a war on and that pilots were needed badly at the front and they were all going solo that afternoon. They nearly fainted. Some of them had had less than two hours of air work and none of them had had more than five.

We all went out to the airdrome to see the fun. I guess there were about thirty of them in all. The squadron was equipped with D.H.6s which are something like our Curtiss planes [the JN-4 ‘Jenny’ trainer] except they are slower and won’t spin no matter what you do to them. The first one to take off was a bit uneasy and an instructor had to taxi out for him. He ran all the way across the field, and it was a big one, then pulled the stick right back into his stomach. The Six went straight up nose first and stalled. Then it did a tail slide right back into the ground.

Another one got off fairly well and came around for his landing. He leveled off and made a beautiful landing – a hundred feet above the ground. He pancaked beautifully and shoved his wheels up through the lower wings. But the plane had a four-bladed prop on it and it broke off even all around. So the pupil was able to taxi on into the hangar as both wheels had come up the same distance. He was very much pleased with himself and cut off the engine and took off his goggles and stood up and started to jump down to the ground which he thought was about five feet below him. Then he looked down and saw the ground right under his seat. He certainly was shocked…
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The afternoon progressed in similar fashion with smashed undercarriages and aircraft turning turtle. ‘They finally all got off, and not a one of them got killed,’ Grider commented. ‘I don’t see why not, tho’. Only one of them got hurt and that was when one landed on top of the other. The one in the bottom plane got a broken arm.’ The tally in written-off and broken aircraft was considerable. The cost of a D.H.6 trainer at the time
was £1,363 (without instruments),
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or roughly £65,000 at today’s prices. Needless to say, not a single one of the pilots that day ought to have been allowed up without an instructor.

November 20th
: These old short-horn Farmans are awful-looking buses. I am surprised they fly at all. We have the same sort of wild kids here for instructors that we had at Oxford, only more so, – wilder and younger. I was told that they kill off more instructors in the RFC than pupils, and from what I’ve seen I can well believe it. I have a Captain Harrison for an instructor. He seems to be a mere kid. He’s about nineteen and is trying hard to grow a mustache. Classes are a joke.

December 6th
: I have been flying for three days and Capt. Harrison says I can go solo to-morrow if it’s calm.… I have put in two hours and twenty minutes in the air and I would have soloed this evening if it had been calm enough.

January 1st, 1918
: I have done my four hours’ solo on Rumpties and am done with them forever, thank God. I have done two hours on Avros [i.e. the Avro 504J]. They are entirely different and I have to learn to fly all over again.

Grider’s months in England are a litany of drunken parties, girls pursued (‘horizontal refreshment’), aircraft flown and crashes witnessed. He noted ‘wholesale funerals’ and that one of his fellow-Americans had already been to twelve in five months.

February 9th
: A horrible thing happened today. We were all out on the tarmac having our pictures taken for posterity when somebody yelled and pointed up. Two Avros collided right over the airdrome at about three thousand feet. God, it was a horrible sight. We didn’t know who was in either one of them. I was glad I was sitting next to Cal. They came down in a slow spin with their wings locked together and both of them
in flames. Fred Stillman was in one machine and got out alive but badly burned and Doug Ellis was in the other one and was burned to a cinder. As I sat there watching I kept trying to imagine what those poor devils were thinking about as they went spinning down into hell. It made me right sick at my stomach to watch. We all went up later and felt better after a little flying. We went into town for a party with Capt. Horn…

Later, Grider would say that most pilots were killed by structural defects or by having the aircraft catch fire in the air. This was probably true, and there is hardly a diary or journal from airmen at the time that doesn’t record several cases of wings either coming off entirely in the air or just folding up like tired sunshades. Grider himself had only four more months to live. He was shot down on 18th June 1918 some twenty miles behind the German lines, leaving an ex-wife and two young sons back in the United States.

Certain other accidents were less accidental than self-willed. Any airfield could witness examples of the plain old showing off that was a hallmark of a certain kind of aviator then as now. In its way this, too, was a sign of poorly learned basic lessons. W. E. Johns described sitting smoking a cigarette outside the hangars at Thetford one day when a machine that was strange to him landed and taxied up. The pilot climbed out, leaving the engine ticking over, and greeted him.

‘What’s that?’ asked Johns, nodding towards the strange machine.

‘An S.E.5,’ the pilot replied scornfully.

‘Pretty useful?’ asked Johns.

‘Useful?’ replied the pilot. ‘Useful! I should say she is. She’ll loop off the ground.’

Johns’s expression must have betrayed his incredulity, for the pilot muttered, ‘Watch me!’ and climbed back into his
machine. The S.E.5 took off and soared in a circle, swinging over the top and coming down. It hit the ground at well over 100 mph. Johns did not move. He could not. When the ambulance took away the pilot’s remains and the air mechanics started to pick up the pieces, Johns noticed he was still smoking the same cigarette as when the S.E.5 had first landed.
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No matter how commonplace flying was to become over the next decades it lost little of its original glamour, and the fatal urge to shine as a demonstrator of a new type of aircraft or simply as a skilled daredevil was to persist. In 1931 Douglas Bader was famously to lose both his lower legs in a crash while attempting to slow-roll a Bristol Bulldog too close to the ground. It was pure showing off and he was lucky to get away with his life. Hundreds of other pilots down to the present day have killed themselves as well as spectators in similarly misjudged crowd-pleasing aerobatics at airshows. No matter how much safer modern aircraft are, Newtonian gravity and the laws of aerodynamics remain inflexibly unchanged.

For whatever reasons, the casualty rate at RFC training stations in Britain was often worse even than on active squadrons in France. Johns later wrote in his magazine
Popular Flying
that in early 1918 when he was stationed in Norfolk no fewer than thirteen pilots and observers were burnt to death in crashes in as many days and the local village blacksmith, who had been a juryman at all the inquests, committed suicide, overcome by the horror of it all. Structural failure may have accounted for some of the carnage (in this case deliberate sabotage was suspected), but poor training was most likely to have been at the bottom of the rest. Yet by the time Johns first arrived at the School of Aeronautics in Reading, RFC training was in a transitional stage, having at last embraced a new system, and the course on which he embarked required him to study a good few subjects on the ground besides the hours of actual instruction in the air. He
learned such things as how aircraft were rigged and how their instruments worked. He learned about engines, navigation, observation, signalling, aerial gunnery and much else besides. It was a revolution in the way the RFC trained its pilots – belated, undoubtedly, but a revolution nonetheless. And it was almost entirely down to one man, Major Robert Smith-Barry.