Marked for Death (30 page)

Here, a public school housemaster disguised in RAMC khaki has plainly had the last word. Clean-limbed, clear-eyed and sporty ’varsity boys versus weedy working-class townees? No competition. And after all, he was probably right. The one thing that upset this easy preference was the influx of pilots from the Dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – because they were more unreadable in class terms. They tended overwhelmingly to be country boys, and mostly far tougher and fitter even than Oxbridge men who rowed. Better still, thanks to lives lived in the great open spaces, they often had terrain-reading skills that seemed positively uncanny to their British instructors and proved less likely than their British counterparts to get lost in the air.

The belated introduction of the Special Medical Air Boards ensured that the RFC’s doctors began to catch up with the more scientific approach of their Continental counterparts. However, anyone looking through bibliographies of the medical problems that early flying threw up will be struck by how few of the contemporary books are in English. Whether addressing aviation accidents, ear-nose-and-throat conditions, altitude sickness or the psychology of fliers, the majority of the texts are in French, German and Italian with only the occasional British or American book. It was not that Britain lacked scientists of J. S. Haldane’s calibre – or even first-rate doctors, come to that. As we know, the German and French army high commands were at first equally sceptical about an air war. But their scientists were clearly ahead of the game, the Germans being particularly advanced in aviation medicine thanks to their supremacy in airship technology (while nevertheless allowing at least some of their Zeppelin crews to fly without oxygen).

At any rate the RFC did eventually adopt physiological and even rudimentary psychological tests for airmen. These included measurement of reaction times (using French-designed apparatus), visual acuity tests and sometimes pressure chamber tests to weed out those abnormally susceptible to altitude. Yet even here a doctor writing in a British journal after the war could say: ‘On the Continent observations have been made upon the circulatory system in the air at different heights. I had hoped to carry out a series of similar observations myself as it does not follow that one would obtain the same results with British pilots.’
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Evidently he felt Britons were physiologically different from Continentals.

Some aviation doctors formed their own rule-of-thumb notions of how to spot a potential aviator that may well have had a modicum of validity:

I have noticed that if a man had a good ‘sense of projection’ he made a good aeronautist… This test seems to me to be almost decisive of a man’s fitness for flying. By ‘sense of projection’ I mean that a man having looked at a small object [at arm’s length] will afterwards be able quickly and accurately to touch it with the eyes closed.
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The real problem, of course, was that while it was theoretically possible by now to subject men to all sorts of physical tests to see if they were suitable for flying training, it was far more difficult to evaluate a man’s psychology or character in a way that would yield reproducible scientific data. Thus in the latter half of 1918 an American doctor could write:

While at a medical conference at the central recruiting office in England for [RAF] aviators, at which there was an exhaustive discussion of physical tests, I was surprised to note how little stress was laid on the psychological element. It was admitted that even the most experienced examiner could
not predict how a flier would behave in action, or whether he would cease to be useful after he had met with an accident, or had had a narrow escape from death.
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This was hardly surprising, given that nearly a century later such things are still to some extent unpredictable, despite batteries of psychological tests and widely-held beliefs that the mechanics of the mind are today far better understood. At the time, RFC and RAF doctors had to rely on first impressions of each candidate as a suitable ‘character’. Their recorded assessments could then be matched up with those of the men’s first instructors – although in many cases it is hard to see how the wretched candidate was ever allowed to climb into an aircraft in the first place, even if he had been to the right sort of school:

‘Windy’ in this context meant timid and fearful, with unmistakable overtones of cowardice: the polar opposite of ‘guts’. Number 40 was probably not an ornament to the unlucky squadron (presumably bombers) to which he was posted.

It can be seen that predicting the sort of man who would make a good aviator in the RFC or RAF was, until late in the war, considerably a matter of personal prejudice on the part of the examiner, whether he was a doctor or a flying instructor. In the absence of more sophisticated medical tests this was not unreasonable, given that he would have formed his opinions by means of experience (in an instructor’s case experience that had probably come very close to killing him on several occasions). By September 1918 it seemed that something of a consensus had been reached in RAF medical circles about the qualities that made a good combat pilot:

The fighting scout is usually the enthusiastic youngster, keen on flying, full of what one might call ‘the joy of life’, possessing an average intelligence but knowing little or nothing of the details of his machine or engine; he has little or no imagination, no sense of responsibility, keen sense of humour, able to think and act quickly, and endowed to a high degree with the aforementioned quality, ‘hands’ [i.e. lightness of touch on the controls]. He very seldom takes his work seriously, but looks upon ‘Hun-strafing’ as a great game.
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A very British prescription, this, of the ‘playing fields of Eton’ variety. Apparently the requirement was for young men who were not very bright, pig-ignorant about the technicalities of their aircraft, and with a feckless enough sense of humour to view killing and being killed as just a game. Certainly this profile was very much at variance with the far better informed, professional and seriously accomplished airmen Robert Smith-Barry’s Gosport system was even then trying to train.

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By the end of the war active RAF units in France at last had their own medical officers rather than just a medical orderly, most of whom would have had a working knowledge of the particular
ailments to which airmen were prone. They might not have been able to predict a newly posted man’s aptitude for war flying with any accuracy, but the attrition of Bloody April in 1917, the temporary reign of the German massed-Jasta ‘circuses’ and the ever-widening scope of air operations had made them practised judges of what today is known as Combat Stress Reaction. W. E. Johns’s first description of the fictional Biggles, quoted in the Introduction, is that of a pilot showing all the symptoms of ‘battle fatigue’ (although with artistic licence the often exuberant aerial adventures he went on to enjoy miraculously belie this). Dr Birley gives a still bleaker description of a pilot at the end of his combat usefulness:

To keep himself going he smokes to excess, or may even come to rely on alcohol. If he meets an enemy formation on patrol he either turns tail or attacks recklessly, too tired to think about manoeuvring. In the last stage the noise of engines on the aerodrome distresses him; he cannot bear to see a machine take off or land, and he even hates to hear ‘shop’ talked. Sooner or later he must give in. The career as a war pilot of an individual who reaches this extreme stage is irrevocably finished.
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The tragedy was that aircrew shortages meant such diagnoses were often ignored by station commanders desperate to keep their machines in the air. In some ways it was even worse that so many of these shattered men were sent back to Britain to act as flying instructors.

It was generally agreed that observers in two-seaters suffered more strain than pilots. Not surprisingly, any loss of confidence in his pilot’s skill greatly increased the observer’s anxiety. This could become extreme if, for instance, his usual pilot went off on leave or was injured and he was assigned a greenhorn straight out of flying school. Not only would he have no faith in the man’s flying ability until it was proved, but there was a lot to
learn by bitter experience about surviving in the air over the front, and the first few weeks were crucial. Any experienced observer would have found this learning period agonising. Furthermore, an observer had far more to do in the air than did his pilot. Not only had he to keep a constant lookout for enemy aircraft that could appear in a split second as if from nowhere, especially from the blind spot beneath the aircraft, and be prepared to use his gun at an instant’s notice; he usually had to combine this with taking photographs or making pencil notes or drawings of enemy positions and movements he could see below. He might also have to tap out wireless messages in Morse. It became recognised on all sides that observers usually broke under the strain before pilots did, and to a more serious degree.

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One of the most intractable physiological difficulties to beset aviators became apparent almost as soon as the earliest aeroplanes encountered mist or cloud. It was commonly known as ‘pilot’s vertigo’ and medically as disorientation. That word (derived from the mediaeval ‘orienting’ of churches so as to face east) normally implied losing one’s sense of direction in the usual two earthbound dimensions. It was the addition of a third dimension that led to pilot’s vertigo. After some two million years’ evolution as a bipedal animal, our genus
Homo
has acquired a pretty reliable sense of balance when dealing with abrupt changes of direction, especially at running speeds (while hunting or being hunted), even though this can easily be disturbed – as any child knows who spins around fast enough to induce giddiness. But until humans flew powered craft they did not have to deal with abrupt changes of direction in three dimensions, and at undreamt-of speeds. Suddenly, human physiology was found wanting. The appropriate circuitry had never evolved because it had never been needed.

Early aviators commonly became lost in the conventional sense of compass bearings. But for what was surely the first time in
human history they also found themselves not always knowing which way was up and which down. It is difficult to convey to someone who has never flown a light aircraft in thick cloud how astonishingly easy it is for the body’s sense of up and down to become completely fooled; and the longer this state of ‘blind’ flying lasts, the more disorientated a pilot can become. This is why a vital part of training is in instrument flying. Instruments are generally reliable; the fabled seat of one’s pants less so. Without instruments virtually nobody manages to blind-fly dead level for very long. It may sound hard to believe but there are instances on record of an aircraft emerging from a thick bank of cloud
inverted
, without the pilot having realised he has gradually turned upside down. It would be a considerable shock to burst suddenly into brilliant sunshine to find rivers and fields overhead.

One of the very first instruments in aircraft was the ‘slip bubble’. This was simply a sealed tube of liquid with either a bubble or a ball in it, much the same as a builder’s level but slightly curved. It was essentially an athwartships spirit level. If the aircraft’s wings were parallel to the horizon and its vertical axis in line with the earth’s gravity, the ball would remain in the centre. But this primitive gadget could seriously mislead a pilot flying blind in a cloud if the aircraft was in a banked turn and centrifugal force counteracted gravity. Not only could this cause the ball to remain in the centre despite the aircraft being tilted, but because the pilot felt his weight increase the turn could also give him the illusion that that he was in a climb. Seeing the slip bubble apparently registering level flight, he might be tempted to push the stick forward to descend or to pull it back hoping to fly out of the cloud. Obviously this could easily lead to disaster or at the very least to acute disorientation, as happened to Cecil Lewis one day in 1916, slowly climbing up through 2,000 feet of thick cloud and at last emerging into sunlight:

But what in heaven had happened to this cloud-bank? It wasn’t level. It was tilted as steeply as the side of a house. The machine
was all right – airspeed constant, bubble central – and yet here were the clouds defying all natural laws! I suppose it took me a second to realize that
I
was tilted, bubble or no bubble; that I had been flying for the best part of fifteen minutes at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizon –
and had never noticed it!
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It might be thought that, a century on and with all the sophisticated electronic instrumentation and gadgetry available to modern military and civil aviation, disorientation would no longer be a problem. Yet an article in the May 2013 issue of
Aerospace International
entitled ‘Battling spatial disorientation’ shows this to be wishful thinking. It begins with a description of an onboard video recording made in the cockpit of an RAF Tornado while its two-man crew practised anti-missile evasive manoeuvres high above the North Sea. They began by