The plane facts of war
HISTORY is full of people who wished they had kept their mouths shut. Marshal Ferdinand Jean-Marie Foch, French General and Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces at the end of the First World War, took a dim view of aeroplanes.
In 1911 he described them as ‘interesting toys, of no military value”. Nine years later, aeroplanes had proved as useful in ending the war as Marshal Foch himself.
RAF AT 100 WITH EWAN AND COLIN MCGREGOR (Sunday, BBC1) charted the journey of Britain’s military flyers and their flying machines, from the first kites to the multi-million pound Mach 2 killing machines of the modern era.
The first members of the RAF’s predecessor, the Royal Flying Corps, were recruited from the cavalry – it being presumed biplanes might be a bit like horses.
In truth, they were a bit like the toys Marshal Foch spoke of – wood sewn together with canvas and string. Armed with cameras, the first military biplanes soon proved their worth as reconnaissance machines but while taking pictures of enemy positions, the pilots sometimes froze to death in their open cockpits. This was a slightly better end than going down in flames – which also happened. Flyers carried revolvers, mainly so they could blow their brains out before the fire consumed them.
The upper-crust, cavalry-officer image of the RAF stayed in place for many decades but as last night’s programme showed, it was not the whole picture. One of the earliest First World War fighter aces was Mick Mannock, a working class Irish Catholic with Republican sympathies. After the war, RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire became a training facility for ground crew, opening the elite service to men of all backgrounds and shaking up the class structure of the country.
In the Second World War, alongside the derring-do of Battle of Britain pilots, the story of the Air Transport Auxiliary was often overlooked. Ewan and his former fighter pilot brother Colin paid a just tribute last night, meeting Mary Ellis and Joy Lofthouse – two surviving ATA flyers with a combined age of 194 and a number of flying missions 10 times that, although Joy sadly died last year.
Their task was to fly the planes from factories and workshops to the front-line airfields, often without instruction or navigation equipment. They must have been terrified and judging by the look on Ewan’s face when strapped into the cockpit of a Typhoon jet, things have not changed.
Appropriately enough, at THE GOOD KARMA HOSPITAL (ITV) past deeds were rebounding on the staff and patients. Wandering through the Indian town, Doctor Lydia Fonseca (Amanda Redman) was infuriated to see long queues outside the ‘surgery’ of traditional herbalist Anila (Shabana Azmi).
Where were the X-ray machines, the scanners, the test tubes, Doctor F demanded to know? How could Anila make proper diagnoses? It became a battle of science versus tradition, waged over the head of poorly bus driver and single mum Reya Kohli (Shavani Cameron).
Anila’s herbs were not doing any good – and why would they with a serious heart condition? Then again, Dr Fonseca’s hospital had forgotten to follow up on Reya’s test results. The final outcome was far from happy and a reminder that despite the sunshine and beach shots, this is far from being an escapist drama. More like Casualty with monsoons.