Ewart Garland was still in training, when Portal joined No 60 Sqn in May 1916. Born in Canada of an Irish father and English mother, he went with them to Melbourne, Australia, where his father became chairman and managing director of the Dunlop Rubber Co. Ltd. The family, which comprised three other boys and a girl, owned a large ‘Victorian Colonial Style’ house with living-in servants. Garland’s father had ‘two or three motor cars’, each of his boys rode motorbikes ‘and a horse or two’.
Garland’s elder brother fought at Mons in 1914 about which he wrote ‘vividly and poignantly’. Charles described how ‘lighthearted young boys thirsting for heroic adventure and comprehending only victory were the next morning shocked, tired, desperate and frightened old men – that is those who miraculously survived.’ It was scarcely a ringing call to battle, and Ewart did not immediately respond.
After leaving school, he went to a sheep station as ‘general dogsbody’ for a year. There he ‘got bitten with the wish to fly aeroplanes’, thanks to a school friend who had joined a flying school at Melbourne. Visiting him, Garland found ‘one solitary machine, a sort of box kite with an engine’. Soon his friend had left for England to join the RFC, and in September 1915 Garland followed him, encouraged by his father, who paid for his passage and gave him twenty gold sovereigns as a nest egg.
Staying with relatives of family friends in London, Garland joined the Inns of Court Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) and applied for a commission in the RFC. He duly reported to Christ Church College, Oxford, on 16 April 1916 for a three-week introductory course. Shortly afterwards, he informed his parents that he was ‘intensely happy’ and enclosed the Inns of Court badge ‘as a remnant of the six weeks I spent in it’.
On 3 May, Garland went for flying training to Shoreham, where he appears to have had an energetic instructor. On 18 May, after performing aerobatics over Brighton, they landed on the beach and had tea at the Metropole hotel only to notice that the tide had turned. They just got back to the machine before it was swamped and took off. Two days later, Garland completed his first solo flight after another seaside excursion. The instructor had gone up with him ‘and did a few “stunts” over Worthing … and landed on wet sand. We stayed there 20mins while he talked to his girl’, as the crowd gazed on the three of them and the machine ‘with awe’. Minus the girl, officer and pupil returned to Shoreham and landed. The instructor ‘got out and after a few advices [sic], I started alone’.
As in other letters, Garland described his flight and added asides about danger and crashes presumably not thinking about the effect on his anxious parents thousands of miles away.
I wasn’t even thrilled or excited or anything. You open the engine out until she is doing about 50mph over the ground and then lift her slightly and she soars up about 80–100ft. Then you have to stop climbing so quick and take her gradually up to 500 or 1000. The engine of course makes a deafening row but is very comforting because you are dependent on it. After circling round a few times I got in direction to land and when about 1/2ml from aerodrome cut off engine to make her glide down. This is rather dangerous but is of course the only way to land. Then when a few feet off the ground you feather her a bit until she touches. It sounds easy but, by Jove, it’s not too easy.
Coming to earth at 50–55mph, he wrote, ‘it is very, very easy to land too heavily and smash up. I only hope I’ll have good luck all through.’
Garland explained that before going solo, he had three hours ‘actual instruction’ in the air and about an hour and a quarter ‘purely as a passenger’. Because the weather had been fine, all of this had been completed in seventeen days; during a spell of poor weather it could take up to six months. He must now fly another six hours solo before more advanced training. Garland wished his parents could be there to see him fly, and also that he had ‘a girl hereabouts’, though ‘decent [sic] girls are hard to find’.
On 22 June, Garland wrote from Dover about an ‘interesting’ flight. He had often wondered what it would be like to enter cloud. ‘Now I know’, he observed. ‘As you climb up you find yourself in a very slight fleeting mist. Then all of a sudden you see a white wall and the next moment you are enveloped in what you might compare to a thick mist in which you can see nothing but the machine. No ground, no sky. Nothing!’ Then he was through the cloud ‘with a rush of cold’. The sun was shining and ‘below it looks like billowing snow. You want to get out and play on it.’ Garland wished he could paint the scene. Suddenly, through ‘a rift’ in the cloud, he saw ‘the beautiful green and white coast of Dover 2–3,000ft below’. After a ‘two days’ graduation examination at Reading, on 6 July Garland gained his wings, which allowed him to dispense with the unwieldy German-like helmet forced on trainees. He could now don ‘a simple close-fitting helmet’.
In France during Spring 1916, at Douai Max Immelmann’s unit continued to support the German Sixth Army. Aviation Section 62 completed its first year of service on 5 May, having accounted for twenty-five hostile machines for the loss of just two of its own. But Immelmann complained of a current absence of activity in his area. Although suffering from sunburn, he informed his mother that he was in good health and thanked her profusely for ‘the Easter eggs, chocolate hares and gingerbreads’. He deplored ‘imbecile’ members of the Reichstag for considering peace moves at a time ‘when we must put all our strength into the war’. Despite his complaints about lack of action, in a letter of 18 May Immelmann could describe his fifteenth victory against a Bristol fighter whose pilot was so intent on shooting down a German biplane that he forgot to keep an eye on his tail. This success brought a card with the simple message, ‘God be with you’, from the Duchess of Saxony. Nine days later, thanking his mother for her amusing letter, he assured her that he always carried her lucky clover leaf with him.
Poor weather restricted flying at the beginning of June, and Immelmann spent much of the time discussing tactics and future plans with Maj Stempel, staff officer with the Sixth Army. Stempel later wrote that summaries of Immelmann’s practical experience accompanied by illustrative diagrams were circulated among the Army’s pilots. Partly as a result of their discussions, it was decided to create squadrons of single-seat fighters responsible to Sixth Army headquarters. Immelmann was selected to form the first of these and after Aviation Section 62 left for the Eastern Front on 13 June, busied himself with its creation. He was aware that the new British fighters could out climb the Fokker and was therefore putting his faith in the forthcoming Halberstadt and Albatros biplanes.
F/Sgt James McCudden would soon be joining this contest. After five months training, on 5 July 1916 he reached the Pilots’ Pool at St Omer. His Royal Aero Club ‘aviator’s certificate’, issued on 16 April for ‘having fulfilled the conditions stipulated by the FAI [Fédération Aéronautique Internationale]’, had a quaint pre-war air. It began: ‘We the undersigned recognised by the FAI as the sporting authority of the British Empire certify that Three days after arriving at St Omer, McCudden moved to No 20 Sqn at nearby Clairmarais, where he found the FE2d pusher armed with a forward-firing machine-gun for the pilot and two machine-guns for the observer. He stayed under a month at Clairmarais before transferring to the Ypres sector where No 29 Sqn re-equipped with the single-seat ‘spinning incinerator’ DH2 pusher, which could reach 10,000ft in thirty minutes and maintain 80mph at that altitude. On 6 September, McCudden’s first combat victory was confirmed by Anzac troops, who reported his opponent’s crash. A perfectionist, McCudden constantly analysed his own performance, on 21 October deploring his failure to shoot down a Rumpler biplane. ‘Had I sighted in front of him instead of at him, I think I should have got him. Experience teaches’, he wrote. After another inconclusive clash, he blamed his own ‘too hasty’ aim.
Having at last completed his prolonged training and reached the Front, Douglas Joy wrote enthusiastically to his mother on 25 March 1916 about ‘more gadgets on my machine, camera mounting and lighting for night flying’. His squadron was billeted in a ch
ateau with sheets on the bed and ‘real American bathrooms’. The aeroplanes, which No 27 Sqn had, were ‘very much faster than any other machine I have yet met in the air’. They were also more sturdy. One pilot flew ‘slap bang’ into a 15,000 volt high-tension wire with ¼in cable and then ‘through a telegraph line with forty wires’. His machine was ‘absolutely wrecked’, but the pilot had only ‘a few scratches and a bad shaking up’.
To his brother Ernst (Ernie) he wrote that ‘for the moment it does not seem at all like war here’. The ‘very modern chateau [was] beautifully furnished, electric lights, decent American bathrooms: in fact more luxurious than we have at home’. A nine-hole golf course was in the grounds, a tennis court on the lawn and in one of the aerodrome hangars, a racquets court. Joy vastly preferred this location to Dover, where ‘our grub was rotten, the place was swamped in mist, and we had far more work of a most disagreeable and tedious kind to do.’
He informed his brother that he had flown ‘a long way’ behind enemy lines taking photographs. ‘“Archie” is too damn good these days’, he added. ‘He makes a rotten noise, smells rotten and makes a rotten lump and flash in the air’. So far he had been lucky, ‘although several times he has made me chase my own tail to make him puzzled’. Joy explained that his biplane was a fast single-seat scout with a powerful water-cooled engine. He usually flew on half throttle, which allowed him ‘to make rings round any other type of machine I have yet met in the air’. It could climb quickly, and Joy had often been up to 3 miles (almost 16,000ft) ‘where your heart begins to pump’. However, the Martinsyde Scout was ‘very hard to land’, normally requiring three to four attempts. Joy admitted to his brother that he had ‘crashed several undercarriages’. But, he concluded, ‘aviation is most fascinating and I could go on writing about it all night’.
While Joy achieved his ambition to fly operationally, Stuart Keep’s persistence at length brought him success. When ‘the country was flooded with recruitment posters’ in 1914, he had wanted to join the RFC. Like other aspiring pilots, however, he discovered the need for a Royal Aero Club Certificate, the cost of which had risen to £100. This sum would be refunded when he qualified, but ‘in those days it was a big IF’. He ‘reluctantly came down to earth’ and in May 1915 was commissioned into The Royal Warwickshire Regiment. After ‘mud wallowing’ in France, he was sent home with blood poisoning in May 1916. In hospital, a fellow patient gave him ‘several tips’ on how to get into the RFC; so he decided to try again.
Joy ‘hobbled up’ to the War Office to be severely ticked off for not having gone through the usual channels but did secure an interview with a staff officer. ‘I proceeded to put my case before him in as rosy a light as possible to show him that I was the one man the RFC had been waiting for.’ However, nothing positive could be done until Keep regained full mobility. At a rehabilitation centre, he persuaded the medical officer to pass him fit and Keep put together ‘a fine imposing package’, which this time he did forward through official channels: ‘I already had visions of soaring into the clouds.’ To his dismay, he learnt that instead he was to be posted to the infantry depot at Rouen. Forsaking fourteen days’ embarkation leave, Keep badgered the local military authorities and the RFC at Adastral House in London. At length, the infantry posting was cancelled and in August Keep went to No 24 Reserve Sqn at Netheravon for practical and theoretical instruction. Unlike the Insall brothers, he found Netheravon ‘fascinating, right out in the country surrounded by undulating downs covered with short, green turf, the living quarters built in red and white, and beyond the long line of hangars and behind them the workshops’.
Stuart Keep explained that ‘the pupils donned great leather helmets rather like pudding basins with heavy padding round the edge as crashes were frequent and the helmets helped to save cracked skulls.’ This was the headgear so disliked by Ewart Garland. Keep’s first flight involved a wide circuit of the aerodrome with an instructor: ‘Altogether it had only lasted about five minutes, but it was the most wonderful five minutes that I’ve ever spent in my life.’ In due course, he went solo and moved on to a more advanced training centre at Rendcomb, Gloucestershire, ‘By this time I was beginning to consider myself quite an aviator but my pride was soon to receive a fall.’
During the evening of 12 September, although it was ‘a bit windy’ he took up ‘an old BE8A affectionately known as the “bloater” from its fishy appearance’. The rotary engine had a habit of ‘liberally’ spraying the pilot with castor oil, but, more worryingly, the machine had ‘a strong inclination’ to turn to the left. ‘This was popularly supposed to be due to the fact that the old thing was used to doing left-hand circuits round and round the aerodrome like the donkeys on the sea shore and resented any attempt to make it leave its usual course.’
Keep took off without difficulty, but at 200ft ‘the engine went on strike’. The next he knew was that
… we were rapidly making for earth sideways. Then there was a horrid bump and a sound of much splintering of wood and a cloud of dust and I was crawling out from the shattered remains of the poor old bloater. Except for a few grazes on my hand, I was unhurt but the bloater’s days were done – probably owing to my treatment as I had no experience of rotary engines.
Keep ‘retired from aviation for a few days’, then successfully took up another BE8A which restored his confidence. After passing the requisite tests, Stuart Keep gained his wings on 26 October 1916.
Like Keep, the doggedness of another soldier, John Jeyes, took him into the RFC. As a schoolboy at Oundle, Jeyes was fascinated by ‘the early vintage aircraft flown by Gustav Hamel’ and by watching aeroplanes taking part in a London–Liverpool race. ‘My schoolboy hopes were that perhaps one day I could have an opportunity to take to the skies. Flying seemed to be so elusive and almost intangible.’ After leaving Oundle, Jeyes worked in the family business, while he decided which branch of the services he would join. He preferred the RFC ‘but I was not sure that I would be able to cope with the demands and challenges involved’. On the other hand, he was not keen on the infantry: ‘I was really upset by the tales and experiences which we had heard about trench life in France.’
So, when he reported to Northampton Barracks, he intended to apply for the RFC. However, ‘somehow I was caught up with the RSM’, who enlisted him and told him he would go to Colchester the following day: ‘I went home wondering how I found myself being posted to an army unit.’ Jeyes had planned to see the recruiting officer, Maj A.E. Ray, before the RSM secured 5/- (25p) for enlisting him. Early next morning, Jeyes went to the barracks, avoided the RSM and waited half an hour to see Maj Ray. Jeyes reminded him that he had seen him on 11 May 1916, when ‘under eighteen years old’ and Ray had told him to come back in a month, Jeyes having been born on 3 June 1898.
As he was explaining the position to Ray, the RSM appeared and said that Jeyes had been attested and was due to go to Colchester. To Jeyes’ relief, Ray ‘took the law into his own hands’, secured the papers from the RSM and said that he would deal with the matter. The result was that Jeyes did not go to Essex, was given two months to confirm his choice of the RFC and the RSM failed to pocket 5/-. In August, Jeyes thus found himself at Denham Cadet Camp near Uxbridge earning 1/- (5p) a day at the beginning of his RFC career.
At the front, Harold Wyllie revealed the mounting strain of the life to which John Jeyes aspired. On 13 June, he got up at 2am for a dawn reconnaissance, but to his irritation poor weather caused its cancellation. Then he learnt that ‘I am to go over the lines with two pilots who have put in one reconnaissance and one patrol between them. No experience in formation flying or fighting. Sometimes I feel that I simply cannot carry on any more under present conditions.’
He recorded on 20 June that ‘a spy’ reported one of the Squadron’s pilots had been shot down by an Allied aeroplane. Then one of his pilots ‘completely lost his nerve and told me to-day that he could not go on flying’; so he was sent back to England. Wyllie was informed by the squa
dron commander that he had been recommended for an MC, but to his disappointment the award would not be confirmed. On 15 July, Wyllie heard that he was to go home on promotion. Two days before he had taken the opportunity to visit his brother Bill at a nearby infantry position. ‘This was the last time I saw my brother,’ who was killed shortly afterwards, and before the Armistice Harold Wyllie would lose another brother in action.
The summer of 1916 proved an active period for ground forces and the RFC, as the Germans continued to make serious inroads at Verdun. On 28 June, Sir Douglas Haig explained that the forthcoming offensive on the Somme, supported by French troops on the British right, would be conducted ‘with such vigour as will force the enemy to abandon his attacks on Verdun’.
In the run-up to this battle, the RFC had several encouraging signs; in particular, as Immelmann sensed, that the Fokker might no longer be quite so menacing. Late on the evening of 18 June, two patrolling FE2b machines of No 25 Sqn came across three of the German aeroplanes and with the advantage of height, attacked. One immediately made off, the other two flew towards Lens with the British in pursuit. As they did so one of the Fokkers suddenly climbed and shot down the leading FE2b, whereupon the second British machine opened fire. As this FE2b manoeuvred to attack, the German fell away steeply and crashed. Later 2/Lt G.R. McCubbin would discover that his observer (Cpl J.H. Waller) had accounted for Max Immelmann, who that day was flying a 100hp machine because his more powerful type was unavailable. At the time, No 25 Sqn merely noted that McCubbin had ‘fought and crashed a Fokker’.
Cavalry of the Clouds Page 12