Whisky, Gin, and Champagne

Pilot Officer Ralph Roberts nursed his crippled Spitfire, K9964 (SH-W) towards the French coast. The 20-year-old was on temporary secondment to 64 Squadron RAF. He had arrived at Kenley on 10 August 1940, damaged a Dornier Do 17 on Adlertag, and now, in ‘broad daylight’ on 15 August, put down neatly on what was III./JG27’S airfield. ‘He had got lost over Normandy and had run out of fuel’, Erbo told his parents. Erbo and his friends treated Roberts as their guest, sensing no irony that their battle rationale was to kill RAF airmen. ‘We had a great time! We cheered him up tremendously with large measures of whisky, gin, and champagne.’

During the Great War, a romanticised imagining of duels between knights of the air was embraced regardless of national allegiance. When Oswald Boelcke crashed to his death in October 1916, Royal Flying Corps pilots made up wreaths ‘to our brave and chivalrous foe’ and dropped them over a German airfield. Manfred von Richthofen erected a gravestone to commemorate the victims of his first credited victory, ‘his honourably fallen enemies’. Chivalry informed interwar accounts of Great War battles. Hermann Göring particularly embraced the noble concept and, in 1936, commended Leslie Sutherland, former member of the Australian Flying Corp’s 1 Squadron, for his ‘descriptions of German chivalry’ in Aces and Kings, his account of the AFC. For the time it took to swallow the whisky, gin, and champagne, Roberts and his captors were equal: enmity was suspended, and the war forgotten. It was ‘most pleasant’, Erbo enthused. Bottles emptied, Roberts was packed off to Germany as a prisoner of war.

■ Above right: Spitfire K9964 (SH-W), crash-landed in France by Pilot Officer Ralph Roberts on 15 August 1940, photographed with another Luftwaffe fighter pilot, Oberleutnant Müller-duhe of JG26. Roberts was royally entertained by Luftwaffe fighter pilots when captured. (AS)

■ Above and below: After Pilot Officer Ralph Roberts RAF was entertained by Erbo and his comrades, he was incarcerated in a number of German POW camps including Oflag XXI-B, Schubin. Roberts is front row, right. (Courtesy of Edward Mcmanus via Dudley Craig)

■ Both the RAF and the Luftwaffe embraced a degree of chivalry in the early stages of the war. Göring was particularly enthusiastic about romanticised aerial encounters as this letter to Australian author, Leslie Sutherland reveals. (Author’s collection)