Marked for Death (23 page)

When they have finished flying for the day their favourite amusements are theatres, music (chiefly ragtime), cards and dancing, and it appears necessary for the well-being of the average pilot that he should indulge in a really riotous evening at least once or twice a month.
102

By late June that year the indestructible Louis Strange had once again been posted back to France, this time to command the 80th Wing. In the immediate aftermath of the German Spring
Offensive he often found morale sagging. It seemed to the men that at this rate the war might drag on until at least 1920 (for which the Entente’s high commands were indeed making contingency plans). Strange quickly realised that a mess full of silently brooding men in armchairs listlessly reading three-week old copies of British newspapers was to be avoided at all costs. ‘We could not afford to have any squadron’s mess developing the atmosphere of, let us say, the Athenaeum Club,’ he wrote. He took his cue from Lieutenant-Colonel Birley. ‘Every pilot and observer was a patient and an object of interest in Birley’s eyes. “When they are not working in earnest, keep them playing the fool,” he told me. “Keep their tails up on the ground and they’ll look after themselves in the air” was his very wise maxim.’
103

By this time the RFC had become the RAF; but well before then the difference between the air services and the regular Army had become irrevocably marked. So long as a man’s performance in the air was good a surprising degree of eccentricity could be tolerated on the ground. The young British ace Albert Ball was famously a loner who preferred to fly sorties on his own. He was allowed to live in a hut by himself where he planted a garden and played the violin in a brooding, Holmesian manner. Others acquired pets from neighbouring French farms. The Canadian ace Billy Bishop led many a local foraging raid and on one occasion he and his comrades returned with three ducks on whose wings they painted British-style red, white and blue roundels as though they were aircraft. They acquired more birds for their next experiment, which was to discover the effect of alcohol on the creatures. Bishop and his pals found that ‘although they did not like the first drop of it, when they had been forced to swallow that they eagerly cried for more. Their return home was a ludicrous sight, sitting down on the ground every minute or two, and always walking in a “beaucoup” zig-zag course, as the French would say.’
104
They later captured a small pig and gave it the same treatment, Bishop for a while leading the animal everywhere on a rope as though it were a dog on a leash. Later, a large
sow was named Baron von Richthofen, painted with German aircraft markings and a leader’s streamer attached to her tail. Such adopted squadron mascots steadily came and went.

These men also played for hours with the farmer’s baby rabbits but it was dogs that the airmen laid hold of with the greatest enthusiasm, picking up every stray they could find until the tally of animals made 60 Squadron something of a menagerie. Bishop’s favourite was a black animal with Airedale in its ancestry that he adopted and called Nigger. Several other Niggers came and went on the station since this was the usual name for almost any dog that was black (and would most famously be that of Guy Gibson’s own beloved Labrador when he was training at Scampton for the great Dams Raid in 1943). Fooling around with animals helped keep Bishop and his comrades sane in 1917, allowing them to show these stray victims of war a tenderness they dared not lavish on themselves and each other. There were enjoyable ratting parties with the dogs but the pursuit that gained the most official encouragement was shooting pigeons on the wing with a .22 rifle. This was, of course, extraordinarily difficult, which was perhaps as well since the farmer demanded compensation for each of his birds killed. One afternoon Bishop fired off 500 rounds and hit only a single pigeon, and that one a fluke. But as he said, ‘It was the very best practice in the world for the eye of a man whose business it is to fight mechanical birds in the air.’ On the occasional day off the airmen would spend it ‘either sleeping all day or roaming about the orchard in silk pyjamas, or else one would go and visit friends who possibly were stationed near. It was a great thing, as it always left us keen for work the next day.’
105

*

As the war went on and the toll of brothers and cousins and comrades grew, so undoubtedly did a general resentment of the enemy, compounded as always by the effects of constant patriotic exhortation, propaganda and the bitterness of men aware
of missing out on the normality of a home life and career. The casual brutality of it all, of lives arbitrarily cut short or ruined, turned many men into unashamed killers, there being nothing like war for stripping things back to basics. There were indeed airmen like Richthofen who claimed to take deep satisfaction, even pleasure, in sending an enemy down in flames. Yet it is not always easy to tell how much of this was simply down to relief at being victorious in a fight that might so easily have gone the other way. Combat was a highly skilled sport, and to emerge from it as the winner would always be satisfying at a quite simple level. In most cases this would take precedence over worrying about the other man as a human being. That would come later – or not at all, depending on the person. The British ace James McCudden maintained a calm detachment most of the time, but occasionally this faltered:

At 11,000 feet he engaged an Albatros and sent a burst into it. A small trickle of flame appeared, and the aeroplane began to go down. McCudden followed it. The flames enveloped the whole fuselage and tail assembly, and suddenly McCudden saw the doomed pilot writhing in agony as the fire reached him. He didn’t sleep much that night, but the next morning he recovered his composure and confided to Rhys-Davids that a man had to ignore such incidents if he was ‘to do his work properly.’ ‘Until yesterday I never looked upon a German plane as anything but a machine to be destroyed,’ he said. ‘But when I saw the flames touch that German pilot I felt sick for a minute and actually said to myself in horror: “There’s a man in that plane.” Now I realize we can’t be squeamish about killing. After all, we’re nothing but hired assassins.’
106

Even so, he can’t have been an over-imaginative man, given that his many previous victims had hardly been tin ducks in a funfair shooting gallery.

What is worth noting is how much fellow-feeling and even decency managed to survive between the airmen on both sides. Even to an ace like Billy Bishop, intent on racking up his score each time he went aloft, there were limits to what was considered fair game. In one sector of the front in 1917 a familiar sight was a large white German machine doing artillery spotting. It was very old, had a very bad pilot and a very poor observer to protect him, and was known as ‘the flying pig’.

It was a point of honour in the squadron that the decrepit old ‘pig’ should not actually be shot down. It was considered fair sport, however, to frighten it. Whenever our machines approached, the ‘pig’ would begin a series of clumsy turns and ludicrous manoeuvres and would open a frightened fire from ridiculously long ranges. The observer was a very bad shot and never succeeded in hitting any of our machines, so attacking this particular German was always regarded more as a joke than a serious part of warfare.
107

In its way the ‘flying pig’ had become one with the barnyard animals the pilots petted or made a mock of but never deliberately harmed.

Enemy airmen who were downed were often treated to a mess lunch or dinner by the squadron to which they had fallen victim in a spirit of cameraderie that owed a great deal to the commonality of flying men everywhere. Their lives and skills were identical; only the uniforms differed. Just as the German pilot who shot down W. E. Johns and killed his observer intervened on the ground to prevent a crowd from lynching Johns, so Cecil Lewis and his comrades were called out one night when he was temporarily stationed at Rochford in Essex as part of Home Defence, to take charge of the German crew of a Gotha bomber. This big machine had developed engine trouble and its pilot crash-landed at Rochford airfield under the misapprehension that he was already back in German-occupied Belgium.

Next morning we went in to look at our prisoners. They were very quiet and rather sorry for themselves. I believe they feared victimization: raiders were not popular with the general public. However, whatever the public thought, we knew they were brave men and had a fellow-feeling for them. So we gave them a good breakfast and took them round the sheds. Then they were ordered an escort to take them to town. I accompanied them.

We had a reserved first-class compartment, locked, with the blinds down. But somehow the news had got about, and at every station there was an angry crowd. The officer in charge had to keep them off at the point of a revolver, otherwise we should all have been lynched. The Germans were anxious. We endeavoured to reassure them. One cut off the flying badges on his tunic and gave them to me. I suppose he thought they made him a little too conspicuous. At Liverpool Street there was a heavy armed escort, and the wretched men were marched away through a hostile mob to the safety of an internment camp.
108

Rudolf Stark noted an exactly equivalent episode when he shot down a British machine in 1918, slightly wounding the pilot but leaving the observer unscathed.

Both look very unhappy, but their faces brighten up when they catch sight of me. It is rather an unpleasant business to fall into the hands of the troops. They are not very kindly disposed to enemy airmen, especially if they have just had a few bombs dropped on their huts. We greet one another almost like old acquaintances. We bear no malice. We fight each other, but both parties have a chance to win or lose. In a kind of way we are one big family, even if we scrap with one another and kill each other. We meet at the front, we get to know the respective badges of Staffel and squadron and are pleased to meet these old acquaintances in the flesh…
109

There were even moments of pure farce, such as when a Sopwith Triplane from 8 Squadron RNAS and a Nieuport scout from 40 Squadron tackled a two-seater Aviatik in April 1917 and had a twenty-minute scrap at 12,000 feet that ended with the German machine’s petrol tank being holed, forcing it to land in a field without further damage. The Triplane followed it down but made a bad landing on the rough field and turned ‘ack tock’ (absolutely turtle) at the end of its run. The pilot scrambled out unhurt in time to see the Nieuport pilot land and do precisely the same thing. Somewhat blushingly, the two Britons approached the Aviatik to take the German prisoner whereupon he saluted smartly and said sardonically in English: ‘It looks more as if
I
have brought
you
down and not vice versa, doesn’t it?’
110

Once the war was over, Louis Strange went to Germany and got to know several of his old opponents well, including ‘Leuzer’ (Loerzer) mentioned earlier in the Weapons chapter, p.75. ‘I have been lucky enough to meet quite a number of old German war pilots,’ he was to write. ‘They are the best of good fellows and marvellous hosts.’
111

*

All this notwithstanding, it was hardly surprising that beneath the camaraderie of the squadron mess, conversations often held a savage undertow. A familiar topic concerned life when the war was over – on the off-chance that anyone present would still be alive. There was glum recognition that even if they did survive they would have lost their place on society’s ladder; that in their absence others who had evaded being drafted or had managed to wangle a cushy job back home would have had first pick of the jobs going, the women, the housing, everything. It was a feeling almost of betrayal. They who were away bleeding and dying for their country would find themselves thereafter for ever pushed aside, having missed the bus at a crucial juncture. It was a widespread feeling and by no means confined to airmen. It found its way into popular adventure stories by authors like Percy F. Westerman (who
was billed on a flyleaf in 1919 as ‘Lieut. RAF’, a non-existent rank). One of his characters mentions a bemedalled sergeant in France with a brother back in England, ‘a hefty lout’ who had managed to get exemption from military service by being an engineer – a reserved occupation.

‘Lord! After the war, won’t there be a gulf between men and slackers?’

‘One will feel sorry for the slackers. They won’t be able to hold their heads up,’ remarked Derek.

‘Not they,’ corrected Kaye, giving his bootlace a vicious tug. ‘They’ll have whole skins and fat purses. The blighters who’ve done all the work and gone through all the danger will be back numbers when the war’s over – if it’s ever going to be over.’
112

This was typical mess talk, even if the vocabulary of ‘shirkers’ and ‘slackers’ reeked of
Tom Brown’s School Days
. It was yet another example of the chasm that marked off servicemen from civilians. Their day-to-day experiences had little or no counterpart back home, and they remained convinced that few civilians had any idea of what was really going on and who – if anyone – was taking responsibility for it. Worse still, aggrieved notions were frequently voiced of being actively betrayed back in Britain. ‘We probably hate strikers at home, stabbing us in the back, far more than we hate the Huns we have to fight, who are risking their skins for their country just as we are – only they happen to have been born in Germany,’
113
as Arthur Gould Lee put it. In a squadron mess it was not unusual to hear politicians described as prolonging the war, whether by blundering ineptitude or from career motives of their own. Either way, they obviously preferred not to face up to the consequences of their actions. Such a cynical attitude could only be strengthened when an airman in France went to visit an injured comrade in hospital. Just such a visit was made by an American pilot who was flying with the
heroic volunteers who formed the Lafayette Squadron in the days before US conscripts could join the RFC. He never forgot the experience: