Illuminating Lives
Page 9
Pat Pattle (left) with a fellow airman in the last days of their war in the Mediterranean, 1940
As a lawyer who was instinctively comfortable in khaki, Pattle’s father returned to military service at the outbreak of the First World War. When it ended, Jack Pattle enlisted in the South African Police in the ex-German South West Africa, and the family moved to rural and semi-arid Keetmanshoop. After a brief spell of dusty duty, he left the police to resume legal practice. But his attempt to establish himself as an attorney in the newly annexed colonial territory ended in a financial shambles, and he was obliged to look for other employment, securing a post as an assistant town clerk. Edith landed a job as matron of the tiny local hospital.
That helped Jack to recover from the misery of his money matters, and he was later able to purchase a small riverbank farm in the vicinity. Life on a farm had its inevitable outdoor attractions for Marmaduke and his younger brother, Cecil. There was the adventure of camping in rough bush surroundings. There was even splashing in the Auob River when it actually had some water. There were shotguns with which to learn to shoot. There was small game for target practice. And there were other imaginative influences to captivate the mind of a ten-year-old boy. One was loitering around the railway line between Keetmanshoop and Lüderitz to stare at locomotives. Another was the very occasional spotting of an aeroplane flying over Keetmanshoop to deliver mail to Windhoek. The De Havilland Gypsy Moth biplane left a lingering echo, stimulating the young Pattle to use his most prized toy, a Meccano metal construction kit, to make models of a variety of aircraft. Although never scaling more than the height of one of the farm’s Makalani palm trees, he was a boyhood flyer.
Meanwhile, there was the requirement of continuing desk duty. The Pattle boys attended Keetmanshoop Secondary School before experiencing the break and separation of being sent off to complete their schooling towards the end of the 1920s at Victoria Boys’ High School in Grahamstown, which Marmaduke finished in 1931. A stocky schoolboy, he was academically proficient, making up in intelligence and aptitude what he lacked in industriousness. Combining above-average intelligence with muscular athleticism – at school, he was a competitive long-distance swimmer and eager boxer – he was already showing the development of a precociously rounded style.
Simultaneously, time back at home provided him with the means to feed his growing fixation with mechanical matters. By the age of around fifteen, he had progressed beyond the building of Meccano models into a keen amateur mechanic, tinkering with tractor and motorcar engines and learning to drive. Drawn to fixing things by a natural brain for mechanics and an ability to deal easily with the practical demands of life, Pattle was rarely short of opportunities to put his artisan instincts to use. Never in trouble and rarely awkward, he was given his head to occupy himself sensibly.
His parents appear not to have been particularly ambitious for their self-motivated and self-reliant son – he had no need to be pushed. When Pattle left school, he had his eye set upon training as a mining engineer. But the end of 1931 was a lean time for getting started professionally on the mines. By then, the country’s gold-mining industry was already ageing and contracting, with the reserves of many older Witwatersrand mines having become depleted. So, despite the fact that production was soaring at the end of the 1920s, the steady closure of operations meant that the prosperity of the industry ‘was coming to rest on fewer and fewer mines’.4 With those came fewer and fewer skilled work opportunities.
Prospects were cut further by the continuing impact of the global Great Depression, which had been triggered by the Wall Street stock market crash of October 1929. With profits under pressure in the early 1930s, the Chamber of Mines pressed the industry to slash expenditure on administration and wages. There was no door open to Pat Pattle. After kicking his heels for a short while, he turned – unsurprisingly – to the Union Defence Force to try to secure employment. In 1932, he applied to join the South African Air Force (SAAF) as a pilot. There, those dreams stirred by the cloudless skies above Keetmanshoop would perhaps find a solid form.
However, also burdened by a Depression-era budget squeeze, the air force was in no immediate hurry to recruit another prospective pilot officer. Pattle was left to wait for several months, during which he found fluctuating employment doing menial jobs, including working as an attendant at a petrol station owned by a family member in Komga, north of East London. Later, he found a job in King William’s Town at a refrigeration firm. It was, altogether, an unsettled and uncertain time for Pattle, who was reliant on makeshift jobs to support himself while longing for a positive response from the air force selection board in Pretoria.
That came eventually in the early months of 1933, when he was invited to Pretoria for an interview for a commission. There were only three places, and he faced stiff competition from thirty other applicants. They included individuals who already had flying experience, with some already having flown solo. A few applicants from Johannesburg families with deep pockets had been given a leg-up with flying-club memberships and flying lessons. Inevitably, Pattle came up short and was rejected for his lack of what counted most: previous flying experience. It was a blow.
But it did not leave him floored. Resuming stopgap jobs, he made enough to enable him to attend a commercial college to pick up accounting and other clerical skills. Thereafter, towards the end of 1933, he landed a post in the assay office of Sheba Gold Mine in Barberton in the Transvaal. There, he knuckled down to precision, testing and stamping the quality of bullion. Being left to his own technical competency suited him – he appears to have enjoyed the nature of white-collar mine work so much that he even contemplated studying for a qualification at the School of Mines and Technology in Johannesburg. For a time, his hankering after a life in aviation cooled.
Yet the many clues in Pattle’s earlier life suggested that it was an interest – indeed, a passion – destined to be rekindled. And the seed that had been sown was watered by trips to the Barberton aerodrome into which De Havilland transport aircraft would sometimes fly with light supplies for the Sheba mine. Pattle was able to get exhilaratingly close to a parked plane. Still, he lacked the obsessive fixation of some other aircraft enthusiasts, such as two female Johannesburg schoolteachers who, at around this time, ‘applied to camp at Baragwanath Aerodrome’.5
During the later interwar period, flying in South Africa was cultivating a sense of ostentatiousness, or of showing off to attract publicity. Pattle was not the only one on whom it was rubbing off. A growth of flying clubs and a spread of air shows, air circuses, air pageants, joyriding and high jinks, and military flight displays produced a surge in public ‘airmindedness’, which was peaking in the 1930s. The rising popularity of aviation was aided by the SAAF, which staged mass flight displays at agricultural shows in Pretoria and Bloemfontein and in many small country towns, and by the fuss made over the visiting presence of the RAF, which was in the Union regularly from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s during its Cairo-to-Cape long-distance flight-training exercises.
As one leading historian has observed, ‘a taste of aviational culture in rural districts unaccustomed to aircraft proved to be a winning recipe’.6 That culture was sustained by national and local press advertising, reports and editorials, with newspapers like the Pretoria News and the Johannesburg Star acclaiming flight as a ‘tonic’ or an ‘intoxication’. Perhaps most breathless was the offer of a ten-minute flight in 1933 through which you would ‘taste immortality … escape your earthly destiny of a dull existence’.7 In that same year, through persistent wheedling, Pat Pattle managed to obtain a flip on a Barberton supply aircraft.
Two years later, he quit the Sheba mine to become a cadet in the ‘Bob a Day Battalion’. This was the Special Service Battalion (SSB), a recently formed military unit based at Roberts Heights in Pretoria, which paid its recruits one shilling a day. The object of the SSB was to turn young white men into exemplary employees by inculcating the habit of discipline through military training,
instilling physical fitness, and imparting various trade skills recommended by the Department of Labour and Welfare. Not exactly intended for the likes of Pat Pattle, the Battalion was a form of volunteer national service that sought to mop up poorer white youths – a uniformed social ‘upliftment’ offer to rescue them from the unemployment and gloom of the Depression. It was as if its discipline and training would somehow serve as a magical moral medicine for jobless and idle youth, rescuing them from the physical deterioration, moral degeneration and delinquency that is attributable to economic depression.
What Pattle had in mind for the end of his annual SSB service was not to be shunted off to the railways, nor to be employed on public works or in a government-controlled industry or some private business. Nor was it joining the permanent ranks of the army. With the SAAF expanding in response to the deepening crisis of the later 1930s, from 1936 onwards the Battalion was also supplying small batches of cadets for advanced training as air apprentices. This kept Pattle in the orbit of the air force, on which he continued to pin his hopes of a flying career.
Then, chance intervened. Following the launch in 1934 of the RAF Expansion Plan to increase aircrew training in response to dramatic shows of strength by Germany’s Luftwaffe, Britain’s air force extended its recruitment throughout the Empire. Fishing in the Union, its newspaper advertisements offered five-year short-service ‘airmen under training’ commissions for Empire cadets under the age of twenty-five. Acceptance for RAF pilot training would be based on age, educational level, intelligence, fitness and aptitude. Subsequent service commissions would be granted on merit. For Pat Pattle, who was confident in his capabilities, the RAF looked a far better prospect than the SAAF. But he was still stuck in the SSB and would have to buy a discharge. And if invited as an applicant to undergo a selection-board interview and medical check, he would have to make his way to London. Early in 1936, the invitation he craved arrived.
When it came to savings, he wasn’t exactly flush. Although he managed to buy himself out of his Battalion service, Pattle had to lean on his family for the rest. Determined to get himself to London, he wrote to his mother, Edith, that he was going to try to persuade her brother in East London to use his Union-Castle Steamship Company connection to help out:
Mom, Darling – I simply must go over. I am writing to Uncle Sam to see whether he can manage to fix me up with a job on a boat. If I could get a boat I reckon about 30 Pounds ought to be plenty to see me through, and anything I have over I could return. Mom, couldn’t you possibly manage it? I know how hard pressed we all are, and realise if it can’t be managed I’ll give up the idea. But it wouldn’t take me long to get on my feet there and I could return it all … I’m going to the Royal Air Force even if I haven’t got a penny in my pocket.
Besides personal fervour and a driving determination, there was no trace here, or elsewhere, of Empire loyalism or of ‘Mother Country’ idealism, and none of ideology or politics in the motivations of this eager twenty-one-year-old trainee. What it came down to was that Pattle wanted British flying training to become a pilot, but not necessarily as preparation to fight in a war, for all that such an outcome seemed to be an increasing possibility. Edith Pattle’s support of her son – more open-handed than that of her less demonstrative and more detached husband – saw him through. In April 1936, he sailed to Britain on a Union-Castle mail ship.
After a nod from the Air Ministry selection board, Pattle was posted to the civil Central Flying School in Prestwick, near Glasgow in Scotland. His fellow pupil pilots, in an intake of about thirty, were all English, several of them Oxford undergraduates who regarded him as a colonial upstart. They were soon put in their place, however, when this quietly competent South African came out top in their class examinations. Described by his instructors as the best of his group in airmanship, gunnery and bombing, Pat Pattle was passed with distinction in 1937 as ‘a fine aerobatist with a highly cultivated air sense who should make an outstanding service pilot’.8 He had now become a pilot officer.
He was posted to an RAF fighter formation called 80 Squadron, which had recently been re-equipped and reformed. Operating under the motto ‘Strike True’, the squadron was equipped with the last of the RAF’s front-line biplane fighters, the Gloster Gladiator, a nimble and responsive machine that has been described as ‘a delight to fly’ and a ‘piece of cake’ to handle.9 In 1938, Pattle’s unit was shipped to Egypt to provide air defence for the Suez Canal. But first there was other Middle Eastern business to attend to along the way: the 1936–1939 nationalist Arab revolt against the British Mandate administration of Palestine, in demand of Arab independence and the termination of unrestricted Jewish immigration and acquisition of land. It was the most serious challenge to British colonial rule since the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence.
Diverted to Palestine to provide RAF air power to assist in the suppression of the Arab Revolt, Pattle’s squadron provided precisely what the local air commander, Air Commodore Arthur Harris – a no-nonsense English-born Rhodesian – wanted: the machine-gun firepower of Gladiators. Applauding the ‘Glosters’ as ‘an outstanding success’ for their ‘wholesale killing’ of rebels, Harris gushed in his praise of Gladiator pilots for their ‘highly dangerous’ task of performing ground attacks from the air. Earning later notoriety in some quarters as ‘Bomber’ and ‘Butcher’ Harris for his indiscriminate heavy-bombing tactics in the Second World War, Pattle’s controversial Palestine superior was not one to mince his words. ‘The only thing the Arab understands,’ Harris concluded in 1938, ‘is the heavy hand and, sooner or later, it will have to be applied.’10
Pat Pattle was soon in the thick of things in Palestine, supplying air reconnaissance and providing fire support to British ground forces, which were often operating in difficult terrain. Any squeamishness he may possibly have had about excessive force would have evaporated in the last phase of the crushing of the rebellion, as 80 Squadron accompanied the bombing of settlements and joined in strafing the inhabitants of recalcitrant villages. There were no real rules, there was little danger from poorly armed peasant resisters, and the Gladiator with its twin pairs of guns was a frightening weapon. Not so much combat, it was war as work. For Pattle, who was called into the air repeatedly at short notice for aggressive low flying, Palestine became a grisly real-life realisation of the simulated air-show attacks on mock-Arab villages that the SAAF staged in order to entertain crowds at various airfields in the Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Pattle is known to have survived one particularly close shave. While accompanying a Hawker Hind light bomber, an engine malfunction brought his Gladiator down on rough ground in hostile rebel surroundings. Luckily for him, his stranded fighter was spotted from the air and a detachment of the Black Watch regiment was sent out in armoured cars to extract him. While withdrawing, they came under intermittent fire and managed to evade an ambush. Although denied a kilt by his Scottish regiment rescuers, Pattle celebrated his escape by seizing a rifle and joining a bayonet charge, yelling Zulu war cries in the fashion of white South African colonial bravado.
For all the domination from the air that Pattle had been playing his part in imposing, this was a pent-up moment of release. In truth, he was likely to have been frustrated and bored by his role in the RAF. Although Middle Eastern weather, with its cloudless skies, upper thermal winds and unrestricted ground visibility, was ideal for flying, the Palestinian territory did not bring the testing challenge of war in the air. With peasant villagers the target below, it was merely the mastery of war from the air.
On the ground, life was cramped and confining for the pilots and ground-crew of 80 Squadron during their time in the Middle East. There were no social amenities like bars and clubs, few recreational activities to partake in such as sport or hunting, and villages and towns were unsafe to visit when off-duty because of the chameleon nature of the enemy. Peaceable one week, they might have become perilous the next, suddenly ‘speaking out of turn’ because of re
bel infiltration.11 London’s Palestinian counter-insurgency was altogether an exceptionally dirty business, a harsh operation in effect ruled by martial law and marked by collective British reprisals, brutal mass killings, routine torture and other atrocities.
Pattle’s experience there left him drained and alienated, a feeling worsened by poor communication with his family and friends in South Africa, to whom he mostly remained Tom. Bottling it up, he put the memory of his short and small colonial war behind him, leaving it until April 1940 – exactly a year before his death – to confess in a letter to his beloved mother, ‘I feel I have put up another black by not telling you sooner’ that ‘I got a medal early this year’, and about what it had been like in operations in Palestine in September 1938.
Even then, what he told her was predictably optimistic, written in a breezy tone that would instil pride in a son’s brave achievement. Not only had he been awarded a medal, putting him only seven behind his father’s tally; he had even been recommended for a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC), with ‘the big bugs’ eventually deciding against giving it, as he had served only a month in Palestine, whereas the standard practice was for DFCs to be awarded ‘only to fellows who had operated for six months or over’. Nonetheless, as Edith could see, ‘it was rather an honour to be recommended for one, all the same’.12 Pride was cloaked by false modesty.
At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Pattle’s squadron had been moved on to Egypt, stationed at RAF Helwan, a major British airfield on the outskirts of Cairo. The base acquired one of the new Hawker Hurricane monoplane fighters, which were making the older and slower Gladiators obsolete, and the enthusiastic South African was invariably at the front of any queue to try it out from time to time. But his flying was mostly confined to the unit’s regular Gloster equipment. At this stage, the atmosphere of a so-called phoney war still prevailed in Egypt, and his flights were largely to keep in trim and to monitor the effectiveness of the modifications made to the Gladiators for desert conditions. Several months later, ‘still grinding’ his teeth ‘at being left out of it’ and itching to ‘plunge in like a wild beast of prey’, in the early weeks of 1940, Pattle was curiously half-resigned to a fate of uncertainty. ‘I wonder what this year has in store for us?’ he pondered in a letter home. ‘I hope, the end of the war; if not then at least an opportunity for me to do my bit.’13