One legacy from the war years still troubled him, totally unconnected with his physical condition. He and Croye Pithey, his pilot, had made a pact that, if one were not to survive, the other would make contact with his parents. Pithey had quickly recovered from his wound, remained in the peacetime RAF but been lost in a flying accident in the Irish Sea. Busy making a living, Rhodes had not fulfilled his promise. However, in December 1936, he at last felt able to do so.
He made his way to Capetown in the liner, Stirling Castle, and up country by train to Pithey’s home. A tall man stood on the station platform. Alighting, Rhodes approached him: ‘Are you Mr Pithey?’ ‘You must be that so-and-so Rhodes’, came the unpromising reply. Outside was a large motor car and two hours later, with Rhodes on board, it drove through the gates of an impressive colonial-style mansion. Dinner was a tense affair, after which Pithey’s 87-year-old father retired and his daughter apologised for his taciturn behaviour; he had not mentioned her brother since his death. Next morning the atmosphere thawed, and Rhodes offered to tell Mr Pithey about Croye’s wartime exploits. There was no need, the old man said. He could recite the contents of every one of his son’s letters. It was a moving demonstration of both the anxiety and the grief of a parent separated from his offspring, whose hopes for his safety in a far-off land had been cruelly dashed.
Back in England, Rhodes’ manufacturing enterprise flourished before he entered Parliament, became a government minister, life peer and Knight of the Garter. During the Second World War, he commanded the 36th West Riding Home Guard. Rhodes would always be grateful to the RFC, though, for giving him the confidence to compete in a harsh commercial and political environment, pointing to the pivotal realisation during his training course at Cambridge that he could match others better educated and more experienced than himself. In a sense, his RE8 crew epitomised the ability of the flying service to bring out the best in men of different social upbringing: the pilot from a vast mansion in South Africa, the observer from a small terraced house in Yorkshire.
Ranald Reid also remained in the RAF after the war. Among his subsequent appointments were commands in Egypt, Sudan, Aden and as air attaché to Washington, 1933–5. During the Second World War, he held senior administrative posts before retiring in 1946 as an air vicemarshal and KCB. Harold Wyllie, who had skilfully sketched enemy positions and aeroplanes at the front, would become a distinguished painter living in Portsmouth. The eldest son of the celebrated marine artist W.L. Wyllie, who lost two of his five boys in the war, Harold left the RAF in 1919 to which he had been seconded with an OBE and the following year the Army. Five years later, he joined the RAF Reserve of Officers, qualified as a pilot and secured a commission in the RAF Volunteer Reserve in 1939. While serving at sea as a liaison officer, he transferred to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve being demobilised as a lieutenant commander at the end of the Second World War. He had thus been commissioned in all three Services. Louis Strange, the pilot involved in early aerial gunnery in France and reputedly Christmas Day festivies over Lille airfield in 1914, also served in the RAF during the Second World War and survived to fly a jet fighter afterwards.
In the post-war Service, Maj J.C. ‘Paddy Jo’ Quinnell spent time in Iraq, was SASO to the Advanced Striking Force in France 1939–40, and commanded an RAF group and a bomber base during the Second World War. He retired as Air Cdre in 1945 to become a prize-winning yachtsman. Toby Watkins remained in the RAF after the first conflict as well and left the Service as a wing commander.
Lt Arthur Kilburn’s post-war service was less prolonged. On 6 May 1919, he was one of two pilots and four crew members of an HP v 1500 four-engine bomber, who left RAF Manston in Kent for Madrid. Over France, the machine ran into severe hail and rainstorms, which damaged one engine. Flying south of Tours, the pilots strove to climb above the clouds, failed and dived through them in an attempt to identify a landmark. The bomber now found itself in a valley surrounded by mountains, none of which, in Kilburn’s words, ‘by a miracle’ it struck. Round and round the HP v 1500 went, as its crew anxiously sought a way out of their predicament. Suddenly, ‘the clouds parted for a moment or two … [and] through a small valley’, the sea appeared. With extreme relief, the crew guided their machine through the gap to land on the beach at Biarritz.
After the engine had been repaired and more petrol ‘scrounged’, the HP v 1500 eventually reached Madrid on 12 May. There it took up Spanish passengers for ‘joy flips’, before leaving for Barcelona with press representatives on board. Once more, several ‘joy flips’ were carried out before a four-and-a-half hour return flight to Madrid, with the additional press passengers still on board and only ten minutes petrol to spare on landing.
Following an eventful flag-waving exercise, the RAF machine took off on 30 May 1919 for a non-stop flight back to England. Not long after leaving Madrid, while over mountains part of an engine exhaust came apart ‘and hung on by a wire, causing considerable agitation owing to the awful country we were going over’. To Kilburn’s immense relief, the crew managed to negotiate the Pyrenees and were ‘all set for home’. Then the rear starboard propeller sheered off ‘jarring the whole machine terribly and taking two of the engine struts with it also making great gashes in the wings’. Kilburn admitted that the aeroplane was ‘more or less out of control’. The two pilots decided to get down on ‘some piece of the shore’, but were unable to keep the machine straight and finished in the sea. The crew members were rescued by a rowing boat, though Kilburn lost his camera, his photos of the trip and a great deal of personal kit. Shortly after reaching England once more, Kilburn was demobilised. In his journal, with evident warmth he wrote: ‘No more flying for this Child!’
Following the Armistice, John Jeyes remained at Worthy Down, from which he had set out on his excursion to Micheldever earlier in the year, testing and ferrying aeroplanes, until demobilisation in 1919. He returned to the family firm, P. Jeyes & Co of Northampton, before qualifying as a pharmacist and in the 1920s, becoming prominent in gliding competitions. Hugh Chance joined his family’s glass firm, Chance Bros. The former Rolls-Royce fitter Edwin Bousher, whose operational career had begun and ended during the Battle of Passchendaele, was discharged from the RAF on 19 May 1918 and shortly afterwards joined the Department of Aircraft Production as a technical examiner.
Roy Brown, credited with shooting down Richthofen, returned to Canada post-war and became a successful businessman. Wilfred May, the Red Baron’s intended eighty-first victim, won a DFC before pursuing a career in civil aviation. Stuart Keep, when a test pilot with the Westland Aircraft Company at Yeovil, Somerset, lost both legs below the knee in 1924 after crashing the cantilever monoplane Dreadnought in taking off for its initial flight. Fitted with two artificial legs and aided by sticks, he recovered to act progressively as factory superintendent, business manager and general manager before retiring in 1935.
Sgt Harold Taylor, who had been shot down and wounded in 1917, had his damaged leg amputated in 1960. By then, he had discovered that his machine was the twenty-eighth victim of Lt Kurt Wolff of Jasta 11. In his 70th year, musing on ‘all the horrors of war’ he wrote: ‘I do know that when men are faced with death they can establish a comradeship which is never present in civil life in peacetime.’
Men like Rhodes, Reid, Quinnell, Keep and Taylor did not have their wartime exploits publicised. But a cult of personality contributed to a misleading presentation of aerial warfare during the inter-war years. The term ‘ace’ was a press invention, the first on the Allied side after achieving five ‘kills’ being the Frenchman Adolphe Pégoud in 1915. The Germans, while not officially using the word, initially awarded the Pour le Mérite (Blue Max) after eight successes, then later, after sixteen. The British authorities did not formally acknowledge aces either, though allegedly a DFC was sometimes awarded after eight victories. If the French criterion of five ‘kills’ had been followed, over 500 RFC and RAF airmen would have qualified. By definition, aces were likely to be fighter pilots
, and this focus on one aspect of aerial operations detracted from roles like reconnaissance, close support for troops, co-operation with artillery and tanks, tactical and strategic bombing. Fighters evidently dominated the skies; a fiction perpetuated by illustrated volumes like W.E. Johns’ Fighter Planes and Aces.
Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, at one stage James McCudden’s pilot during the war and who, as Air Chief Marshal, would be Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Bomber Command at the outbreak of the Second World War, had reservations about undue accent on the exploits of VCs for psychological reasons. Publication of their feats prompted civilian and Service exhilaration, but news of their deaths triggered corresponding depression. Maurice Baring admitted to being acutely downcast on learning of Albert Ball’s loss, and Johns confessed that McCudden’s death could not have shocked him more than revelation that the Kaiser was in Paris.
Johns also wrote somewhat disparagingly, ‘so hero-worshipping youth turns his eyes upwards and visualises himself in the cockpit of the fighting plane that wings its way across the sky’. Yet, whether intentional or not, like other contemporary writers William Earl Johns helped to foster an unrealistic, romanticised impression of fighting in the air. Writing to an old school friend, the author Henry Williamson, Victor Yeates complained: ‘I read an awful book the other day called The Camels Are Coming [by Johns]: it was about Camels in the War and it was super-bunk’. Ludlow-Hewitt deplored the way his former observer James McCudden was portrayed in volumes about wartime figures. Stating that McCudden was ‘a quiet, unassuming, essentially modest person … far from the glamorous, fire-eating hero of fiction’.
Apart from fears, like incineration in the air or in accidents on the ground, airmen writing memoirs and personal journals showed intense preoccupation with being trapped in a doomed machine, as parachutes were provided for balloons, but not aeroplanes. The container fixed to the side of the balloon basket had the parachute inside, which was pulled clear as the balloonist jumped and opened by the air current caused by his fall.
A belief has arisen that parachutes were forbidden in British aeroplanes in case they undermined ‘the spirit of aggression’; airmen being likely to bale out prematurely. However, there were practical problems about using a static system in aeroplanes, such as operating at heights higher than those attained by balloons or need to avoid a mass of wires, struts and whirling propellers. One further consideration involved weight; the available parachute equipment being 40lbs. Indirectly, German aviators proved the validity of some negative points, when using static parachutes from aeroplanes in the closing months of the war. Several men were lost, when the apparatus became entangled in the structure or machinery of their aeroplane. Experiments involving a parachute, with the airman pulling a rip-cord to open it, had been carried out in 1912, but not for another ten years would the Irvin free-fall parachute be developed. It was rumoured that Edward Mannock, the VC lost in July 1918, carried a revolver for personal use should he be involved in an inescapable fire.
Flying in the First World War reinforced the need for teamwork. Shortly before his death, James McCudden reflected: ‘I often look back and think what a splendid squadron No 3 was. We had a magnificent set of officers, and the NCOs and men were as one family.’ Another aviator, Hubert Griffith, pondering his wartime experiences focused more closely on the crew of two-seaters. ‘Within the squadron’, he wrote, ‘the pilot-and-observer relationship was more binding than that of a marriage … It was, I suppose, the most personal relationship that ever existed.’ An exaggeration, perhaps, but the example of Freddie West and Alec Haslam supports the general thesis. Both were born in 1896 and lived to the age of 92. Throughout their long lives, different careers and interests – West addicted to horse racing, Haslam in middle age an Anglican priest – they remained in close touch. Both retained an enduring respect for one another and until West died, they spoke on the phone on the anniversary of the action on 10 August 1918 when West won the VC and Haslam the DFC.
The grief of Amelie McCudden represented the lingering effect of the air war on many families, which like hers showed a closeness and affection for one another in their correspondence. Having lost three sons as pilots, on Armistice Day 1921 Mrs McCudden was chosen to represent British mothers and lay a wreath at the burial of the American Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery, Washington DC. In July 1920, she had suffered more personal tragedy when returning to their Kingston home from his job in the Air Ministry in London, her husband had been killed in a railway accident at Clapham Junction. Her youngest son Maurice survived the war, but failed to become a pilot, and four months before his father’s death had been discharged from the RAF. He subsequently qualified for a civil flying licence and tested new aircraft at Farnborough, dying from bowel inflammation in 1934. The squadron with which his brothers William and James went to war, No 3, supplied the funeral party.
Lloyd George’s flowing rhetoric ‘cavalry of the clouds’ could perhaps be justified by referring to fighters as light cavalry skirmishers and bombers as heavy cavalry shock troops. But it is the concept of a ‘knighthood’ in the sky, with its overtones of chivalry, which has had the greater impact. In his poem, ‘The Pioneer’, Neil East captured this mood with an image of ‘new knight-errants’ riding on ‘broad-winged shining cars’; a concept roundly condemned by Victor Yeates. Similarly, Franz Immelmann referred to ‘honourable knightly combats’, and the text chosen by the pastor at Oswald Boelcke’s funeral service ran, ‘so let us die in knightly fashion for the sake of our brethren’. To some extent British actions, like burying Richthofen with full military honours and dropping of a wreath, ‘to the memory of Captain Boelcke, our brave and chivalrous opponent’, reinforced the myth.
In 1933 Harold Balfour, decorated wartime pilot and future government minister, firmly dismissed this seductive fantasy: ‘Of the chivalry of the air, which is so fatuously and ignorantly written about, neither side could afford to indulge in.’ Conscious of the number of British airmen he had killed or maimed, Edward Mannock once reputedly declined to raise a glass to Richthofen with the words: ‘I won’t drink a toast to that bastard.’
There were examples of pilots waving at one another, when they ran out of ammunition or guns jammed during combat. In his early days as an observer, Harold Taylor recorded that the crews of British and German machines patrolling their own side of the line did sometimes salute one another without opening fire. But he soon came to realise that ‘this was total war’ in which he had ‘to kill or be killed’. In the words of Manfred von Richthofen: ‘[War] is not as the people at home imagine it, with a hurrah and a roar; it is very serious, very grim.’ As Freddie West VC MC put it: ‘You survive, I survived, by being the first to shoot.’
Appendix A
Significant Dates
1900
2 July
German rigid airship Luftschiff Zeppelin (LZ.1) flies
1903
17 December
Orville Wright’s initial flight
1908
16 October
S.F. Cody makes first recognised aeroplane flight in Britain
1909
28 January
Report of Esher sub-committee of the CID on ‘aerial navigation’
25 April
Formation of unofficial Parliamentary Aerial Defence Committee
25 July
Blériot’s cross-Channel flight
1910
8 March
First Aviation certificate awarded by Royal Aero Club
1911
1 April
Air Battalion of Royal Engineers formed
25 April
Balloon Factory, Farnborough, renamed Army Aircraft Factory (later Royal Aircraft Factory)
November
Italian airmen bomb rebels in Tripoli
1912
28 February
Report of Haldane’s sub-committee of the CID on ‘aerial navigation’
11 April
Seely sub-committee recomme
nds establishing RFC
13 April
Royal Warrant creates RFC with Naval and Military wings
19 June
Central Flying School opens at Upavon
1 September
Brig Gen David Henderson appointed Director-General of Military Aeronautics
1914
28 June
Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo
1 July
Naval Wing of RFC renamed RNAS
27 July
RNAS on war footing
3 August
Germany invades Luxembourg and Belgium, RFC mobilised
4 August
United Kingdom at War
7 August
Lt Col H.M. Trenchard takes command of RFC (Military Wing) and depot at Farnborough
9 August
BEF crosses Channel prior to deployment in north-eastern France
13 August
Commanded by Brig Gen Sir David Henderson, RFC squadrons begin to cross Channel
16 August
Four RFC squadrons operational close to BEF
Cavalry of the Clouds Page 30