Marked for Death (31 page)

going to full afterburner and rolling the aircraft into a 60° nose-down descent through thick cloud… with the navigator calmly counting down the altitude from 17,000 ft. It was not until the cockpit low altitude voice warner could be heard saying ‘Pull up! Pull up!’ that the crew grasped the immediacy of the danger they were in and managed to recover the aircraft only 350 ft above the sea by pulling a 7G manoeuvre. The video was sent around all squadrons to show the danger of spatial disorientation (SD) and how it can occur even during routine missions.

Bluntly put, a highly trained combat pilot and his navigator had come within an ace of flying their £9.4 million aircraft straight into the sea at supersonic speed, instruments or no instruments. In fact, spatial disorientation has recently been blamed for 20 per cent of all fatal mishaps in military aviation and has been named as a factor in many high-profile civil accidents.
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In the First World War most army doctors would probably have understood little enough about the sense of balance and
how the vestibular system works. However, it was clear that many trainees as well as experienced pilots were being killed by losing all sense of their aircraft’s attitude. Nor was this just a matter of flying into the ground. In many aircraft, including the Sopwith Pup, it was easy to stall or spin simply by not flying straight and level at the right airspeed, and neither slip-bubble nor compass was reliable enough to ensure safety in all circumstances. Once again Arthur Gould Lee describes it well:

Ordinarily you keep on an even keel, both fore-and-aft and laterally, by reference to the horizon, to which you continuously and unconsciously adjust the controls. In a cloud there is no horizon, and you use the air speed indicator for fore-and-aft checks – increased speed means you’re going down, and vice versa – and the bubble, like a carpenter’s level, a joke as an instrument, for lateral angles. Wind on the side of the face means you’re side-slipping. You keep straight by holding to the bearing on your compass, but this is another joke, for the slightest jerk of the rudder sends it spinning, and it needs a longish spell of smooth, straight flying to settle down again – and this you can’t do in a cloud.
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Compasses were notoriously easy to ‘topple’ by even quite mild aerobatics, and after a dogfight surviving pilots often found themselves completely lost, especially if there was a wind and they had drifted during the battle. On a grey day without sun and with a uselessly whirling compass, a pilot might find himself heading further into enemy territory instead of homeward.

It was at Tramecourt that I was sent my first NCO pilot, who I am sorry to say did not last very long, for apparently he got lost in the air and was last seen flying east into enemy country. We never heard of him again. No doubt this sounds incredible to the uninitiated, but it was astounding the number of new pilots who were lost in this way.
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This was presumably where certain Australians and Canadians had an advantage by allegedly being better able to ‘read’ directions from such things as rivers and by having a more developed memory for terrain than many of their British comrades.

From December 1917, under the aegis of the Special Medical Air Boards, cadets applying for commissions went for medical examination at the newly established RFC Central Hospital at Mount Vernon in Northwood, Middlesex, and standards became more demanding. Many of the tests were based on those already used by the French Air Force, such as d’Arsonval’s chronometer for measuring reaction times. There were tests for heart and eyesight and co-ordination, as well as for balance and disorientation. Among the test equipment favoured by French aviation doctors was the Bárány chair. This was a device designed by the Hungarian physiologist Robert Bárány as part of his work on the balance mechanisms of the inner ear that had earned him a Nobel Prize in 1914. The blindfolded subject sat in the chair which was then spun. When it stopped the blindfold was removed and the subject asked to point at something in the room. Measurement could then be made of how wide of the mark his aim was.

There is evidence that the British never took such things quite as earnestly as did other nations even though the Bárány chair tests showed that Dr McWalter had been fumblingly along the right lines when he looked for a ‘sense of projection’ in prospective fliers. Still, such tests were being used by RFC doctors at least by the autumn of 1916, if in a somewhat perfunctory manner. When Billy Bishop, the future Canadian air ace who had hitherto been flying as an observer, applied to re-train as a pilot in September that year he recalled his physical examination as having been less than rigorous:

After the doctor had listened to your heart and banged your lungs and persuaded you to say ‘aah’ and ‘ninety-nine’, you were put into a swivel chair, spun around, and suddenly
invited to spring to attention. If you did not fall flat on your face it was presumed that you were a healthy individual and fit to fly. You also did things like walking a chalk line with your eyes shut. That was about all there was to it.
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By contrast an article in
The
Lancet
of 8th September 1917 makes it clear the American Army took such tests as the Bárány chair very seriously indeed, and that the standards of the medical examination undergone by prospective aviators in the United States were high, much more so than those of the equivalent British examination. (The Bárány chair is still used in research departments worldwide today.)

British would-be aviators were also quizzed about their personal habits, especially drinking and smoking, as well as their family histories. So also was any airman admitted to Mount Vernon as an in-patient. When in 1918 the establishment became the RAF Central Hospital, Dr H. Graeme Anderson noted that a patient ‘was asked to give as complete account as he is able of his family: their ages, nationalities (particularly as to any Celtic or Hebrew blood), and habits…’
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W.B. Yeats’s Irish airman foreseeing his own death probably did well not to wind up in Mount Vernon. Yet despite the great step forward that the Central Hospital’s more thorough testing represented, the official attitude towards its true value – as
The
Lancet
ruefully admitted in September 1917 – was still the familiar one of ‘We must wait and see. We don’t yet have enough data.’ It was an attitude that had served (and still serves) Britain long and well in its instinctive refusal to commit itself to anything much other than cautious fence-sitting, especially if it might cost money. Certainly in aviation medicine in the last two years of the First World War the British did sometimes give the impression they believed they were a race apart physiologically; that ‘Continental’ medical ideas were all very well for Continentals (not to mention Celts and Hebrews), but such things needed to be taken with a pinch of salt when testing British subjects.

*

Powered flight had revealed yet another phenomenon for which evolution had not equipped humans but which, as aircraft improved, pilots suddenly had to deal with. This was g-forces. What is believed to be the first recorded case of someone losing consciousness because of ‘g’ occurred in 1903 when the American-British inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim, was testing his ‘Captive Flying Machine’. He had designed this as a ride for an amusement park in London’s Earl’s Court. It consisted of a central revolving pole with metal arms attached at right angles from which hung individual seats. As it sped up the seats were flung outwards under centrifugal force. Maxim himself dismissed it as nothing more than a ‘glorified merry-go-round’, but its derivatives survive to this day in amusement parks the world over. While trying out the Captive Flying Machine Dr A. P. Thurston blacked out under 6.87 g, which surely testified to the machine’s sturdy construction as well as to Dr Thurston’s. The Medical Research Council’s 1920 report ‘The Medical Problems of Flying’ cited a test pilot in a Sopwith Triplane who, ‘flying a 4.5 g banked turn, experienced “characteristic darkening of the sky which was preliminary to fainting”’.
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The truth was that this sort of thing had long been familiar to combat pilots everywhere. ‘I zoom up violently, pressure pushes me into my seat, my sight goes for a second…’
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It was practically an everyday event in single-seat fighters.

Since the phenomenon was transient (even if it could momentarily incapacitate a pilot at a crucial juncture), no test had yet been devised that would reveal the exact moment of positive g at which a pilot’s vision blacked out as the blood drained from his brain, or of negative g at which he ‘redded’ out. In Britain, Dr (then Colonel) Martin Flack already had his subjects blow up a column of mercury as a test of their heart and lungs’ ability to deal with the lack of oxygen at high altitudes. Evidently he also saw this as a reliable indicator of the subject’s susceptibility to g.
‘It has been estimated that the centrifugal force of a vertical turn may amount to as much as four times that of gravity,’ he observed, concluding that if the heart wasn’t strong enough it could lead to ‘anaemia of the brain and insensibility’. He noted that ‘turning chairs’ (i.e. Bárány chairs) were used in the USA to test every prospective pilot but that in Britain this had not been thought necessary because ‘a heart that can support the height tests is found able to meet the demands of centrifugal force’.
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This is odd because it suggests Dr Flack had completely mistaken the purpose of Bárány chairs. They were designed to test disorientation and vestibular illusion, not the ‘g’ effects of centrifugal force. To do that, the chairs would have had to tilt at the end of the arms of a centrifuge.

*

If today it seems that, overall and for much of the war, the principal combatants’ air forces appeared to do surprisingly little to protect their own aircrew, it must have been partly because as the war progressed aircraft were recognised as a new weapon rather than as a mere vehicle for observers. The priority of weapons in a war is that they be deployed to inflict maximum discomfiture on the enemy, while the safety and well-being of those sent to deploy them are very much secondary considerations. As we have seen, even aircrew themselves were often reluctant to adopt protective measures.

Aircraft designers, too, could seem comfortably distanced from the consequences of their designs. To take an example at random: the radiator of the German Albatros D.III, the bane of the RFC in early 1917, was initially placed over the centre section immediately above the pilot’s cockpit. If it was holed in flight the pilot could be suddenly drenched in boiling water. One would have thought this foreseeable, and in time the radiator was indeed moved off to starboard along the top wing. But then, it wasn’t designers who flew combat missions. On the other hand military doctors undoubtedly became much more experienced
at treating the conditions and injuries associated with flying, especially crash injuries. Even by early 1916 the
British Medical Journal
could draw up a short list of some of the commoner problems medics might need to deal with:

1.  Head and neck injuries in crashes caused by violent deceleration when the pilot is strapped in.

2.  Eye injuries from loose nuts or bolts blown back from the engine.

3.  Frost-bite of the face at high altitudes.

4.  Partial anaesthesia by petrol vapour.

5.  Exhaust gases causing headache and drowsiness.

6.  ‘Aeresthenia’: the suggested name for the inability of flying students to achieve hand-eye co-ordination.
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To these might have been added the permanently stiff and sore neck (to become known in the Second World War as ‘weaver’s neck’) caused by constantly looking all around the sky for enemy aircraft. It was the chafing, rather than a wish to cut a sartorial dash, that led so many fighter pilots to wear silk scarves. Still, amid the urgent pressures of war stiff necks, frost-bite and the rest were thought of more as occupational hazards than as matters requiring remedy.

Added to which, certain types of injury recurred with certain designs of aircraft. A good deal depended on whether the crashing aircraft was of the ‘tractor’ type (with the engine in front) or the ‘pusher’ type with the engine behind and the aircrew in the boat-like nacelle that formed the aircraft’s nose. Obviously this form offered the least protection. It was common for the occupants to survive the impact but immediately to be crushed by the hot engine tearing loose from its bearers behind them.

Fractures of the upper or lower jaw and nose were very frequent in crashes when the pilot’s face hit the cockpit edge or the instrument board or – as so often – the butt-ends of the machine guns that protruded into the cockpit. Many of these injuries
could have been avoided with a safety belt and shoulder harness combined, but as will be seen in the next chapter this would probably have been thought namby-pamby as well as carrying risks of its own. Following crash-landings, fractures of the talus (the ankle bone), very seldom seen in civilian life, became common enough in the air war to be thought of as aviators’ fractures. Such injuries led to all sorts of new orthopaedic procedures at which the surgeons at Mount Vernon became increasingly skilled.

Terrible injuries could also be caused on the ground by men carelessly walking into turning propellers. Decapitation was not uncommon. Even swing-starting aero engines was hazardous, especially in the case of a backfire. Anybody brought up in the era when most motor mowers came with a starting handle and all cars still had one for emergency use was taught never to grip the handle with the thumb wrapped around it, but always with the thumb on top because otherwise a backfire could dislocate it. Similarly, the technique of how not to swing an aircraft propeller had to be learned, otherwise broken limbs or worse might easily follow.

The whole mysterious business of why so little was done to protect valuable aircrew better – and why it was the men themselves who so often resisted it – is the subject of the following chapter.