The rock stars of the skies
They were splattered mid-air with the blood of the enemy – and had a life expectancy of just 3 weeks. But to an adoring public, WWI flying aces were . . .
BOOK OF THE WEEK MARKED FOR DEATH: THE FIRST WAR IN THE AIR by James Hamilton-Paterson (Head of Zeus £20)
Necessity might be the mother of invention, but war is the father. Our daily lives are full of things conceived for military use, from computers and satellite navigation systems to stainless steel and duct tape.
Aviation doesn’t quite fall into that category, since powered aircraft existed before World War i but, as the first air war in history, the conflict was directly responsible for aviation seriously taking off — in more ways than one.
Any kind of flying was madly precarious 100 years ago, let alone flying in combat. in all the various nations’ fledgling air forces, ‘only’ 50,000 or so aircrew died during World War i, a tiny fraction of the nine million lives lost in the fighting overall. Nonetheless, airmen shared with the infantry a 70 per cent chance of injury or death.
Moreover, there were all kinds of other hardships in those rickety biplanes we can hardly imagine today, not least widespread diarrhoea among pilots who flew aircraft such as the sopwith Pup, which had rotary engines spewing out castor oil. Pilots constantly inhaled the oil’s laxative mist, for which one of the remedies was brandy, though that wasn’t exactly conducive to flying safely, either.
then there was altitude sickness to contend with, the intense cold of open cockpits and agonising pins and needles brought on when descending quickly, not to mention splitting headaches that could last for days.
Yet for all that, pilots in World War i were considered ineffably glamorous creatures, and did little to dispel the image. After all, why bother pointing out that the silk scarves they routinely wore were not to cut a sartorial dash, but to stop the nasty chafing caused by all the looking around they had to do in the sky?
the glamour was intensified by the phenomenon of flying ‘aces’ who, on both sides of the conflict, were the equivalent of today’s rock stars and footballers.
the most famous of them was German. And when Manfred von richthofen — known as the red Baron for his provocatively daring habit of having his aircraft painted red — was finally shot down in April 1918 with a record 80 ‘kills’ to his name, it wasn’t just his own people who mourned.
the Australians in whose sector he was downed gave him a burial with full military honours, and units from all over the newly formed royal Air Force sent wreaths, as well as dropping messages of commiseration behind German lines.
But James hamilton-Paterson’s superb book, not only meticulously researched but also supremely readable (two virtues that do not always overlap), tells the tales of many other heroes, too.
i loved reading about Flight subLieutenant reginald Warneford who, a century ago next month, chased a Zeppelin airship over Ostend and dropped bombs on it until it blew up.
the explosion flipped his aircraft upside down and stopped the engine, but Warneford managed to land in German-occupied territory, fix a fuel leak with his cigarette holder and take off again.
there was just time for George V to give him the Victoria cross and for him to enjoy his new status as a national hero before, ten days later, he was killed when flying an American journalist over Versailles. his biplane succumbed to ‘mid-air structural failure’ — a deadly reminder that these machines were still works in progress.
All the same, progress was rapid. By the end of the war in 1918, forced ever higher by improving ground defences, aircraft could climb to well over 20,000 ft, quite unimaginable four years before, when around 3,000 ft was the norm.
technological strides had been made at breakneck pace. Literally so, for the cost was prodigious in a human as well as financial sense. regrettably, while the celebrated line about lions led by donkeys refers to the trench warfare below, it applies
to the skies, too. The author is withering in his condemnation of the British top brass who oversaw the ‘slipshod and unsystematic’ training of aircrew, leading to the ‘ squandering’ of many young lives.
SHOCkINgLy, in 1918, the life expectancy of new British pilots was just three weeks. But then it was only seven years since Field Marshal Sir William Nicholson, the Chief of Imperial general Staff, had opined that ‘aviation is a useless and expensive fad advocated by a few individuals whose ideas are unworthy of attention’. Some fad.
He should have listened to journalist Harold Wyatt, who had observed of the large crowds on the cliffs of Dover welcoming Louis Bleriot, when he made his epic flight across the Channel in 1909, that they might not have been so rapturous if they’d known they were ‘assisting at the first stage of the funeral of the sea power of England’.
yet hidebound attitudes such as Nicholson’s endured even once the war had begun. For most of its four-year duration, British capacity and capability in the air lagged well behind the French, who were at least on our side, but also that of the germans. That would all change.
Just 11 years after a British Army general had declared aircraft to be less useful than horses, Britain had the world’s biggest air force. But we spent almost all of World War I rather desperately playing catch-up.
Hamilton-Paterson unearths fascinating information on this, but the book is just as good on the nuts and bolts of flying, and what it was like to engage in a dogfight. Surprisingly, it was far more important as a pilot to be an excellent shot than brilliant at aerobatics.
That was key to the success of Richthofen, who liked to attack out of the sun and advised ‘ aim for the man and don’t miss’.
The aces agreed it was essential to get really close to the target — it wasn’t unknown for their goggles to be splattered by the blood of their opposite number.
Nothing betrayed a novice like opening fire from 300 yards. When that happened, the experienced combat pilot rejoiced, knowing he had a kill practically in the bag.