Marked for Death (2 page)

a slight, fair-haired, good-looking lad still in his teens but an acting flight commander. His deep-set hazel eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines. His hands, small and delicate as a girl’s, fidgeted continually with the tunic fastening at his throat. He had killed a man not six hours before. He had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? – he had forgotten. Time had become curiously telescoped lately. What did it matter, anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it. His careless attitude suggested complete indifference, but the irritating little falsetto laugh which continually punctuated his tale betrayed the frayed condition of his nerves.
4

Johns’s realistic flying sequences – especially those of combat – were left as they were and remained the stories’ centerpiece. To judge from other ex-pilots’ accounts and reminiscences, they were entirely accurate. Years later, several pilots who flew in the Second World War wrote gratefully to him claiming they were still alive because they had read his stories and had survived by using some of the tricks of air combat their author had himself learned the hard way and had passed on to Biggles.
5
Even so,
Johns must inevitably stand accused of having played his part in romanticising the first war in the air: Biggles and his pals did manage to down an awful lot of Huns with remarkably little damage to themselves. Such are the conventions of juvenile fiction. But there is a difference between romanticising and blithe falsification, of which Johns was never guilty, except perhaps in harmlessly affecting for himself as an author the army rank of captain, whereas at the war’s end he had actually left the RAF as Pilot Officer Johns (the rank given those who had been 2nd lieutenants in the RFC). Otherwise, in matters that were all-important to him such as war and flying, Johns was firmly on the side of truth.

At the polar opposite, it is difficult to imagine a less accurate rendering of the First World War generally than that portrayed in
Blackadder Goes Forth
(1989), the final six episodes of the BBC’s hugely popular TV comedy series. In particular, the fourth episode with Rik Mayall as Lord Flashheart and Adrian Edmondson as Baron von Richthoven [
sic
] is grotesque in its caricature of the airmen of the RFC and the Luftstreitkräfte. Apart from the fatuous antics of all concerned, Captain Blackadder is seen already sporting his RFC ‘wings’ on his uniform even before his first day of training; and immediately afterwards he is shown impossibly piloting his ‘observer’, Private Baldrick, in a single-seat S.E.5a fighter. Maybe this pantomime version of war would scarcely matter were it not now apparently taken as having some historical accuracy by those paid to know better. In October 2013 the BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman told the Cheltenham Literary Festival that some schoolteachers were showing their pupils episodes of
Blackadder Goes Forth
as an aid to teaching the First World War. If true, it does explain how some young Britons are encouraged to fall giggling ever further down the international rankings of the uneducated.

Maybe where flying is concerned the more recent Second World War, with its own heavily mythologised aerial warfare (the Battle of Britain, the ‘Dam Busters’, the Blitz, Pearl Harbor and
the Allies’ saturation bombing campaign in Germany) has supplanted the previous war by retaining a degree of seriousness. Certainly at the level of popular culture Biggles and his comrades have long since acquired a faintly risible aura, a shorthand for outdated public school chaps indulging in derring-do in antiquated biplanes. If the aircraft themselves earn indulgent smiles it is perhaps because people conflate them to some extent with their earlier counterparts in the 1965 film
Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines
. Although this internationally popular British comedy was supposedly set in 1910 and concerned a wholly fictitious air race from London to Paris to prove Britain was ‘number one in the air’ (very far from the truth, as we shall see), it probably did much to embed an association in the popular imagination between early aviation and comedy. To that extent it was the airborne counterpart to the 1953 film
Genevieve
, an equally farcical story about the London to Brighton veteran car run. To audiences in the new supersonic Jet Age, machines from the dawn of the internal combustion era were deemed funny in themselves. Those spruce, wire and fabric flying contraptions were ‘wonderful’ but a joke, too, as they puttered about the sky; and so by extension were ‘the intrepid bird-men’ who flew them. The film’s jaunty Ron Goodwin title song and Ronald Searle posters merely set the seal on this image. There is even a brief cross-reference in the script of the
Blackadder
episode to the 1965 film’s song. For ever after, this merry fantasy has somehow preserved itself untouched by the grim daily realities of early and wartime flying: of men falling to their deaths through a mile of air because their aircraft had without warning shed a wing at 5,000 feet, or of a pilot blinded by the entrails of his front seat observer who’d been cut in half by shrapnel.

*

The first use of aircraft in war arguably represented the steepest learning curve of any innovation in the history of warfare because it was constantly accelerated by technological advances.
In 1914 little of aerodynamics was well understood. Engines were generally so weak and weight so crucial that a pilot could reduce his chances of getting off the ground in time to clear the trees at the edge of the field simply by donning a heavy sheepskin flying coat. Maximum speeds of fifty or sixty miles an hour were the norm, and in a strong enough headwind it was quite common for an aircraft to fly
backwards
relative to the ground. A mere four years later many fighters could reach more than 200 mph in a dive and altitudes of well over 20,000 feet. They could also be thrown about the sky with g-forces that would have reduced earlier models to instant matchwood. Indeed, the chief strain was increasingly on the humans who flew them, and medical understanding lagged behind the technology, particularly where the effects of altitude, disorientation and g-forces were concerned.

It is perhaps not so strange that when war broke out across Europe in the summer of 1914 none of the armies involved had given much thought to aerial combat as such, although it was widely recognised that aeroplanes had potential for observation. It was, of course, hardly news to the military anywhere that an army’s ability to ‘see over the hill’ could be decisive. In fact the history of airborne observation already stretched back well over a century. In 1794 the newly formed French Compagnie d’Aérostiers had used a balloon for observation at the Battle of Fleurus, when two officers remained aloft in their basket with a telescope for nine hours, dropping notes about the Austrian Army’s movements that greatly aided a French victory. Seventy years later balloons were similarly used in the American Civil War; and towards the end of the nineteenth century the British Army in South Africa employed them extensively during the Boer War. But it was generally agreed by the military everywhere that tethered balloons were bulky and inconvenient to deploy in a mobile campaign, dependent on large supplies of hydrogen gas as well as highly vulnerable to wind and weather.

It was therefore possible to see the far more manoeuvrable and independent aeroplane as being potentially useful for spying on enemy movements and maybe even for helping an artillery battery to get its shells on target. But despite H. G. Wells’s prophetic 1908 novel
The War in the Air
, the idea of aircraft actually fighting each other remained for a while the stuff of fiction. Most existing aircraft could scarcely lift the extra deadweight of a gun and ammunition, and still less could they safely perform much in the way of evasive manoeuvres. But it was not only their physical limitations in the air that needed to be overcome. Resistance on the ground was also considerable. In 1914 there was no independent air force anywhere. Whatever military air arm did exist was part of a country’s army or navy and very firmly under its control. Since armies everywhere tend to be conservative in outlook, high commands mostly viewed the new airborne machines with the deepest scepticism and even disgust.

In 1911
Field Marshal Sir William Nicholson, the Chief of Imperial General Staff, who had taken a few cautious steps to reorganise the British Army after the humiliations of the Boer War, delivered a withering verdict on the subject: ‘Aviation is a useless and expensive fad advocated by a few individuals whose ideas are unworthy of attention.’ That same year Sir Douglas Haig confidently asserted that ‘Flying can never be of any use to the Army.’ He may have regretted this dictum the following year when he was soundly beaten in manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain by Lieutenant-General Sir James Grierson, who had made extensive and intelligent use of reconnaissance aircraft. If so, there was little sign of repentance when Haig addressed his officers in 1914: ‘I hope none of you gentlemen is so foolish as to think that aeroplanes will be able to be usefully employed for reconnaissance purposes in the air. There is only one way for a commander to get information by reconnaissance, and that is by the use of cavalry.’
6
Four years later he was relying heavily on air support as he began the Battle of Amiens.

Similar dismissive opinions were initially also common in the French and German armies – especially among cavalry officers, an elite caste who bitterly resented the very idea that these noisy, smelly and unreliable new contraptions might usurp their beautiful horses and centuries of glorious tradition. However, as will be seen, the French had already established a clear lead in aeronautics and could field better aircraft backed up by better organisation than anybody else at the time, and there were influential factions in the French Army with an imaginative grasp of aviation’s potential in war. Although by September 1914 German aircraft outnumbered French, the German General Staff was for the moment less forward-looking. ‘Experience has shown that a real combat in the air such as journalists and romancers have described should be considered a myth. The duty of the aviator is to see, not to fight,’ as one of their reports put it.
7

*

The ensuing four years of war were to produce as profound a change in military attitudes and strategy as the aircraft themselves were to show in development. By the Armistice in November 1918 cavalry had gone the way of bowmen and it had become an article of faith that domination of the air above the battlefield was henceforth crucial to success. Only fifteen months after the war in Europe had ended Britain’s new RAF would intervene decisively in what was then British Somaliland to overthrow the rebellious Dervish leader known as the ‘Mad Mullah’. In early 1925 bombing and strafing alone enabled the RAF, without the loss of a single airman, to quell a revolt by tribesmen in Waziristan, today’s still-restive borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan. From that moment on, such policing of the British Empire using aeronautical terrorism (under the bland title of ‘air control’) was to maintain an unbroken lineage up to and beyond enforcing the ‘no-fly zones’ in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from 1991.

The extraordinary thing is the speed with which this new order came into being. A mere eleven years after a British Army general had rated aircraft as less useful than horses, the future of air power with global reach was assured and Britain had the world’s biggest air force. Exactly how war had driven technology, and then technology war, is worth examining in some detail.

The design, manufacture and supply of aircraft in Britain during the First World War were from time to time critically affected by social and industrial upheaval, as also from the first by political indecision and military rivalries. This needs explaining.

In 1960 Philip Larkin wrote ‘MCMXIV’: a poem both sentimental and disingenuous, which no doubt explains its popularity. Like a black-and-white period photograph it is full of the tokens of a supposedly immemorial time: old coinage (farthings and sovereigns), enamelled tin advertisements, dusty unmetalled roads, a pre-industrial countryside. Together with its refrain of ‘Never such innocence,/Never before or since… Never such innocence again’ it plays to a trope so popular among the English middle classes it has become an article of faith. This is that the high summer of British Imperialism (Durbars,
Pomp and Circumstance
and all) coincided with a secure world of Edwardian certainties that war was about to sweep away abruptly and for ever: the ‘watershed’ theory of social history. Countless documentary films have pandered to this version by emphasising the exceptionally beautiful summer of 1914, with plenty of grainy old black and white footage showing people swimming and boating beneath skies in which not even a metaphorical cloud was to be seen. The voice-over assures us that prosperity was on the up-and-up in Europe generally and that war was the very last thing on anybody’s mind.