Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson
Tags: #History, #Military, #World War I, #Aviation, #Non-Fiction
Marked for Death (42 page)
Plus ça change
, and all that; but
one definite advantage of today’s unmanned drones and vastly expensive modern technology is that at least there can never again be the wholesale wastage of aircrew in both training and battle that in the first air war seemed to be accepted without question by the military hierarchy. It shocks and baffles us still, viewing that crackling bonfire of young men a hundred years ago. Had their lives really no value? The answer in the actuarial sense is no, they hadn’t. No parent or wife was ever going to sue the government for negligence, stupidity or other culpability. It was wartime: the state could expend lives with impunity. No-one would ever be held personally responsible, still less in a legal or financial sense. If a teenager was sent into combat in an aircraft he was quite unqualified to fly and failed to return, his empty chair in the mess that night would by official decree be filled with his equally unqualified successor. If a drunken, burnt-out instructor crashed and killed his eighteen-year-old student it was either God’s will, the luck of the draw or hard cheese: you took your pick. The era of citizens’ rights still lay far in the future.
Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the hundred-year gulf between that first air war and today’s Britain than this change in attitude. Wars are no longer popular. Prime ministers who nowadays blithely commit their armed forces to military adventurings abroad more from an abject desire to appease an ally than out of a primary duty to defend the realm risk paying for it at the ballot box. It is difficult enough even to write about war for readers who have no military experience and have known only a peace that has so far stretched uneasily for seventy years. It is
still harder to do so at a time when (if the
Daily Mail
is to be believed) prevailing social attitudes can be so anti-military that sometimes servicemen and -women hardly dare wear their uniforms in public for fear of abuse and even violence. It is a contrast so immense with the Britain this writer grew up in, where an RAF uniform was a good deal more revered than an archbishop’s mitre, that it transcends any private emotional response and simply becomes a historical phenomenon.
Nor is there an easy way of speaking about the gallantry and suffering that took place on such an epic scale a century ago. As always, the currently alive are fully taken up with their own mortal problems. In addition there is the dead weight to overcome of war’s misrepresentation by newspapers, film and TV companies that are inevitably driven more by the quest for sales and ratings than for factual accuracy. Once war has been turned into entertainment, once nursery toys are sent into imaginary combat and PC game warriors take on the Red Baron from their armchairs, the men who actually did the fighting must die afresh. Those who were converted in an instant to rags of flesh and char on and above the fields of France and Flanders vanish behind the ritual humbug of ‘The Glorious Dead’ every bit as comprehensively as the men slain at Waterloo, who were piled into barges and brought home to be dug into the fields of Lincolnshire as fertiliser. No cenotaphs for
them
. Only those who have actually fought fully understand the nature of this deal; the rest of us can have no idea. Like everybody else, the war dead live on as individuals only to those who knew them personally. And when these, too, are gone they die the second death of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The To-Be-Forgotten’ and vanish into blank oblivion, as shall we all. In his 1936 memoir
Sagittarius Rising
the RFC pilot Cecil Lewis made a point of remembering his dead comrades. Of the friend who was blown to pieces in the air that day by a British artillery shell he wrote: ‘Pip is dead, twenty years dead, and I can still hear the lark over the guns, the flop and shuffle of our rubber-soled flying-boots on the dusty road; I can
remember, set it down, that here on this page it may remain a moment longer than his brief mortality. For what? To make an epitaph, a little literary tombstone, for a young forgotten man.’
214
When that was written Pip was not forgotten; he became so at the moment Lewis himself died in 1997.
Little the airmen of the first air war achieved seems reflected in any discernible political reality today, except perhaps for their having established aviation as a vital dimension of modern warfare. Yet their more benign legacy survives indelibly in the aircraft we fly about the world in and whose safety we take for granted. In effect they were all unwitting test pilots, which is why so many were marked for death as they climbed up among the wires and spars into their tiny bare cockpits and called to the mechanic to swing the propeller.
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We hope you enjoyed this book.
For more information, click one of the links below:
Chronology of the First Air War
Note on the Classification of Aircraft Types
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Also by James Hamilton-Paterson
An invitation from the publisher
1. An early B.E.2c. A remarkably stable British machine designed in 1912 expressly for reconnaissance and photography, it later acquired unfair notoriety by being pressed into combat situations such as artillery spotting in which it was virtually defenceless.
2. A photo by Stephen Slater of Matthew Boddington flying their replica B.E.2c. Unlike the earliest versions of the type this has staggered wings and ailerons instead of using wing-warping. The skid undercarriage was authentic until spring 1915.
3. A ‘Rumpity’ or Maurice Farman MF.11 ‘Shorthorn’. The flares throw into relief the birdcage construction that so baffled trainee RFC pilots like W.E. Johns when first they tried to climb into the exposed nacelle of this prewar ‘pusher’ design.
4. The Fokker E.III, the world’s first warplane with a synchronised machine gun. It was primarily responsible for the ‘Fokker scourge’ of winter 1915
–16 and was much feared despite its poor handling due to using wing-warping rather than ailerons. It also had a tendency to shed its wings in a dive.
5. Anton ‘Anthony’ Fokker (1890
–1939) the Dutch pioneer aviator and designer. He went to work in Berlin before the war and produced several of Germany’s best fighter aircraft. The unarmed prototype M.18 seen here never became one of them. He is also credited with designing the first reliable synchronisation gear in 1915.
6. A pre-war flight instructor and test pilot for Louis Blériot, Adolphe Pégoud was the second man ever to loop the loop and the first pilot to parachute from his aircraft. In 1915 he became the world’s first air ace and was known in France as le roi du ciel.
