All aspects of aircrew training had vastly improved in the past three years and, although there were still outstanding pilots on both sides who preferred to go hunting alone whenever they could, McCudden among them, air fighting was now done mostly by small fighter formations of five or six. Line astern, line abreast, echelon, arrowhead were all favoured, depending on the purpose. Arrowhead, known as Vic (the signalling term for V), with two machines on each side of the leader, and a diamond of four with a weaver astern to give warning of an attack from that direction, were the most used.
On 18 August McCudden shot down an Albatros, another the next day, two on the 21st and a Halberstadt DFW two-seater bomber on the 22nd. In the evenings, at about 7 p.m. there would be eight British fighter formations aloft, among various other types. The Germans usually sent up about the same number of fighters. According to him, ‘The evenings were wonderful, as the fighting was very fierce and well contested.’
McCudden ended 1917 with a fine metaphorical firework display. On 23 December he shot four down. On the 28th three fast LVG two-seater, two-gun bombers in twenty minutes. He surprised the first LVG by a stern attack, about which he confessed some shame. ‘I hate to shoot a Hun down without his seeing me, for although this is in accordance with my doctrine, it is against what little sporting instincts I have left’. He sent the next one down from a distance of 400 yards. He knew his estimation of the range would be disputed, but was adamant that his judgment was accurate.
As a former mechanic, he was observant of the varying performance by aircraft of the same type. He was irritated when a Rumpler C IV, which had a 260 hp Mercedes engine, out-climbed him when he was at between 15,000 and 16,000 ft. The SE5a with a 200 hp Wolseley engine came into service shortly after and he had his fitted with high compression pistons. ‘I was very keen to see the Rumpler pilots’ hair stand on end as I climbed past them like a helicopter’. It is interesting that although no helicopters had yet been built, he knew of them: perhaps from reading about Leonardo da Vinci’s design.
His life as a regular in the ranks had taught him intolerance of any form of slackness. On 24 January 1918 he shot down a DFW that was artillery spotting at 12,000 ft. ‘This crew deserved to die, because they had no notion whatever of how to defend themselves, which showed that during their training they had been slack and lazy. They probably liked going to Berlin too often instead of sticking to their training and learning as much as they could. I had no sympathy for those fellows.’
He could be admiring too. One day, leading a patrol, he saw a DFW at 4,000 ft, below the clouds. He signalled to the other four in his formation to stay above cloud in case the DFW escaped him, while he went down to attack it. He found that his Vickers had jammed, so had to rely on his Lewis. Losing height during the five-minute fight, he broke off at 500 ft. ‘The Hun was too good for me and had shot me about a lot. Had I persisted he certainly would have got me, for there was not a trick he didn’t know, and so I gave that liver-coloured DFW best.’
Well known was an Albatros with a green tail that he had often seen in action, its pilot showing consummate skill at shooting down British aeroplanes, including some from 56 Squadron. One day he and his flight met a flight led by Green-tail, at whom they shot and set his aircraft alight. The German pilot fell, or jumped, out. ‘He was hurtling to destruction faster than his machine. I now flew on to the next Albatros and shot him down at once. I must say the pilot of the green-tailed Albatros must have been a very fine fellow. I had many times admired his fighting qualities. I only hope it was my first bullet that killed him.’
On 16 February he increased his score by four. A fortnight later he was posted home, promoted to major, and in April was awarded the Victoria Cross. His death came in the last way that anyone would have expected. On 8 July he was given command of 60 Squadron. He had barely become airborne on his way to his new station, when his engine cut. Like an unwise novice he did the strictly prohibited thing: turned back to try to land on the airfield. Predictably, the aeroplane stalled into the ground and he was killed. His victories totalled 57.
*
The highest-scoring pilot in the British and Commonwealth air forces was Major Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock VC, DSO, MC, who shot down 73 enemy aircraft. He was highly eccentric, neurotic and extreme in his views, political, social and of the enemy. His career in the RFC is all the more extraordinary because he joined it so late in the war. In origin as well as by nature he differed greatly from the well-born Hawker and the lower-middle-class McCudden. The latter, who had joined as a regular and served for nearly four years in the ranks, during which he had exerted the authority of a senior NCO and flown with many commissioned pilots, had no prejudice against officers. In those class-conscious days he had experienced the formalities of the sergeants’ and warrant officers’ mess. He also had ample time to observe the way in which commissioned officers behaved and the shibboleths of social convention to which they were brought up. When he was commissioned he felt immediately at home in the officers’ mess. In Mannock, detestation of class distinction and privilege was as relentless as his hatred for Germans. His position of top-scorer gives him the undeniable right to be ranked, with Hawker and Ball, among Britain and the Commonwealth’s five greatest, whatever personal qualities he lacked in comparison with them.
Born on 24 May 1887, he was the son of a hard-drinking Irish corporal in the Royal Scots Greys and later 5th Dragoon Guards. That the senior Mannock enlisted as a regular, evidently owing to a poor education, is surprising — his father had been editor of a Fleet Street newspaper. Even more surprising is that Mick passed the RFC air crew medical, let alone that he was so brilliant with a machine-gun: in India, when aged ten, he was blinded for two weeks by a dust-borne amoebic infection that left him with corneal damage to his left eye, which permanently impaired his vision. His father taunted him about his poor sight and told him he would ‘never be a real man’, by which he meant a soldier. Mick had also contracted malaria. He showed his courage at a very early age: whenever his brutal, drunken father threatened to thrash him and approached with raised fist, he did not retreat but confronted him and the bully always desisted. He used to say this taught him that even a false show of fearlessness would discourage an attacker.
After the Boer War, Corporal Mannock had served his time and became unemployed. When he had squandered the small sum that he and his wife had managed to save, he deserted her and their three children. Mick got a job with a greengrocer at two shillings and sixpence (12½p) a week and next with a barber at twice the wage. In 1903 he joined the National Telephone Company as a clerk. In 1906 he transferred to the Engineering Department as a labourer, which entailed climbing telegraph poles to do repairs in all weathers. To fill his spare time profitably by earning a few shillings for attending parades, he joined a Territorial unit of the Royal Army Medical Corps, in which he rose to sergeant. Although, as a result of his abominable childhood and penurious young manhood he had become a ranting, proselytising socialist, he was a great patriot who would verbally challenge anyone who denigrated Britain or its monarchy.
In February 1914 he went to Turkey, hoping to find work on a project there for building telephone exchanges and laying cables; which he did, as a supervisor. When war was declared in August, Germany began negotiating an alliance with the Turks but the work continued. In November the British Ambassador was recalled and all British residents were made prisoners of war. The Turks intended to repatriate them but the Germans objected. Mannock and others tried unsuccessfully to escape and eventually a Turk who used to work for him and was visiting him in the concentration camp, agreed to cut the wire so that he could break out every night to buy food for himself and his fellow prisoners; until he was caught and put in solitary confinement. Through American intervention, the British were sent home in January 1915, Mannock ill with a bout of malaria.
The hatred he already had for Germans was exacerbated when he heard about their use of gas and other — some apocryphal —atrocitie
s. According to his best friend, ‘His blood ran hot. Even his waxy complexion could not conceal it. His face reddened and I saw his knuckles growing white as he clenched and unclenched his fists in a growing fury.’
In July 1915 he rejoined the RAMC and was soon made a sergeant again. Hoping to arouse an aggressive spirit in his comrades — surely inappropriate in medical orderlies — he used to harangue them with tales about Turkish and German cruelty. Demonstrating how to treat wounded, his accompanying imaginative descriptions of front line dressing stations were lurid with gruesome detail about mud, filth, mangled limbs and enemy shelling. The thought of perhaps having to attend to enemy wounded was so repellent that he asked for a transfer to the Royal Engineers.
Eventually, he managed to be accepted by the RFC for pilot training and on 7 April 1917 arrived at the Western Front as a member of 40 Squadron, which flew the Nieuport 17. When the Commanding Officer, Major Tilney, described by another member of the squadron as ‘a rather florid-faced youth’, took him to the officers’ mess to introduce him, the impression he made was obnoxious. Shyness and social clumsiness coupled with an eagerness to learn in detail about his new environment precipitated him into insensitive and seemingly impertinent questioning. Most of the pilots had just returned from a patrol on which the most popular member of the mess, Lieutenant Pell, had been killed, Mannock’s bumptiousness in asking each of them how many ‘Huns’ he had ‘fanned down’, which was very bad form, guaranteed his instant unpopularity. Worse was to come. His new colleagues had begun their flying careers on pusher types. When training, he had acquired more hours on tractors than any of them yet had. Bolstered by this, he now launched into a dissertation on air fighting and, in general, expressed views on the war that they felt he was not qualified to. When they sat down to lunch, he took the chair that Pell had usually occupied; this, he did not know, but it unfairly added to the offence he had given.
A pilot who recalled Mannock’s bombastic, conceited-seeming behaviour, said, ‘Apart from that he was different. He seemed too cocky for his experience, which was nil. New men usually took their time and listened to the more experienced hands. He was the complete opposite and offered ideas about everything; even the role of scout pilots and what was wrong with aeroplanes. He seemed a boorish know-all.’
Until he was sent on his first operational sortie, Mannock practised firing at a ground target from different angles and at various speeds. For this, he was ridiculed behind his back, but perhaps many of those who made fun of it would have lived longer if, as Ball and McCudden did, they also had striven to perfect their gunnery in this way. Obtusely, he bragged about his accuracy and announced that if he closed to within twenty yards of an enemy machine he would bring it down. When he made his first combat flight he was so tense with nerves that he kept losing formation, a mishandling of throttle and controls that persisted. Because of his slow reactions he was the last to enter a fight and began to be suspected of cowardice. Ignored or treated contemptuously, he tried to make himself accepted by cutting into conversations. His worst breach of mess etiquette was an insistent introduction of politics as a topic so that he could press his left-wing views.
On 1 May his flight escorted four Sopwith 1½-strutters on a bombing raid against the Douai aerodrome, Jasta 11’s base. When he tried to fire a short testing burst — ‘clearing’ the gun — it jammed. Thinking that if he turned back he would be accused of cowardice, he flew on. Hearing machine-gunfire behind, he turned about and saw a yellow and green Albatros diving at him. In retrospect he said that he heard a strange noise and realised that he was screaming with anger, which helped his nerves. Altogether, his conduct on the ground and in the air would seem to have made him a more suitable candidate for psychiatric treatment than for the distinction of becoming the RFC’s top ace.
On 7 May, the day of Ball’s death, he was on a balloon-busting operation for the first time. Major Tilney had perfected a new method of attacking observation balloons and Mannock was one of the five pilots whom his flight commander, Captain Nixon, led across the enemy lines to put it into execution. Hitherto, when the enemy saw a raid on balloons approaching at high altitude, there was often time to winch the balloons down. Tilney’s innovation was an approach hugging the ground at fifteen feet, although this meant passing through successive belts of ground fire. This time, five Albatroses with Lothar von Richthofen in the lead were waiting for the Nieuports. Nixon indicated a target for each of his pilots. Mannock’s was at one end of the line of widely-spaced balloons. He destroyed it with one long burst. Nixon had seen the Albatros and peeled off to try to protect his comrades. This drew the enemy’s attention and while four Albatroses distracted his, Lothar shot him down.
On 9 May Mannock was No. 2 in a pair behind the enemy lines at 16,000 ft when his leader turned back with engine trouble. Mannock saw three Albatroses and turned to take them on. His gun jammed, so he spun out but they followed him down. He kept coming out of his spin to fly towards the British lines until, when he was safely behind them at 6,000 ft, the enemy retired. He freed the jam and returned to enemy territory, but found no trade. He was detailed to patrol again in the afternoon, but Tilney saw how tired and dejected he was so sent him as passenger in a 16 Squadron RE8 to fetch a new Nieuport from St Omer. On the way, Mannock experienced a change of attitude. Brooding on the fear he felt when in enemy air space or in a fight, he realised that he must overcome it and apply himself entirely to learning his trade. Thenceforward he was relaxed and more cheerful and the other pilots began to show friendliness.
Still he did not score a victory. To encourage him by a show of confidence, Tilney often let him lead a patrol; which increased his self-assurance but did not improve his fortunes. On 25 May he led his flight in an attack on two artillery spotters, of which one proved too high to catch up with. He fired thirty rounds into the other one’s cockpit. It nosed down slightly but flew on. He was sure he had killed the pilot and the aeroplane was continuing its way as it had been trimmed to fly. None of his companions had seen him hit it, so he said nothing about it, for fear of disbelief.
On 7 June he shot down an Albatros, which was confirmed. Five days later he was coming in to land when he felt intense pain in his right eye. He fainted when the squadron Medical Officer attended to it. In hospital, under anaesthetic, a surgeon removed a large piece of grit and a sliver of metal. Another five days passed without scoring and he went home on fourteen days’ leave, found that his mother had become an alcoholic, and returned gladly to France.
On 12 July he brought a DFW two-seater down and, when he went to see the wreckage, was sickened by the sight of two dead men and, in the rear cockpit, a small black dog, all three badly mashed up by his gunfire. He sent down two more two-seaters next day, which ended any suspicions about his willingness to fight.
A newcomer to the squadron at about that time, Second Lieutenant McLanachan, saw him in a different light from the one in which he had been regarded when he joined No. 40. On the afternoon of his arrival, McLanachan was surprised to see a tennis court, where a game of doubles was being played, watched by officers in deck chairs. He asked where the CO was. Someone pointed him out, on the court, ‘but you’d better not disturb him until the set’s finished’. Noticing the new arrival, Tilney called, ‘You the new pilot? See you when we’ve won this set’.
When Tilney sat down to talk to McLanachan, he asked if he, straight from a training course, had ever Flown a Nieuport and was surprised when he answered ‘Yes’.
‘Here’s a fellow from No. 1 Reserve Squadron, who’s already flown a Nieuport. Let’s see what he can do,’ Tilney said.
No. 1 RS was commanded by the famous Smith Barry, who had revolutionised flying training.
McLanachan had climbed only to 1,000 ft when his engine cut. To everyone’s astonishment, he performed one of No. 1 RS’s favourite ‘stunts’, a spinning nosedive; which, everywhere but in Smith Barry’s unit, was regarded as certain death. McLanachan landed safely and waited for the
mechanics to re-start the engine. Instead, he was told that the Major wished to speak to him. When he approached, Tilney turned and walked away. Hastening after him, McLanachan began to apologise but was cut short with a dismissive gesture.
‘A tall, weather-beaten pilot was laughing’, McLanachan recalled. It was Mannock, who explained that all the onlookers thought he was going to crash and kill himself. ‘We don’t like watching fellows kill themselves, and Tilney looked away when he thought you were finished.’
McLanachan feared that he would he sent back for further training, but Mannock told him, ‘If you can handle a machine like that, we want you in this squadron.’
He was ever grateful for Mannock’s friendly and encouraging words, which showed him that Mannock ‘had a somewhat puckish sense of humour’.
A few days later, on patrol with two others, McLanachan saw a Nieuport catch fire, flown by a popular nineteen-year-old. The spectacle revolted him and the third pilot. The Germans were using incendiary bullets, which were forbidden by the Geneva Convention, except against balloons. For his next sortie, McLanachan told his mechanic to arm his gun with incendiaries, but the mechanic refused because he would also incur a court martial. McLanachan set about loading his gun himself, but Mannock talked him out of it: ‘They’ve never fired anything at me but incendiary. Could you coolly fire that muck into a fellow creature; or worse still, into his petrol tank, knowing what it must mean?’
By the end of the year Mannock was a captain commanding a flight, had shot down six hostiles and been awarded an MC and bar. He was posted to an instructing appointment in England. During the past nine months he had thought deeply about tactics and become a fine leader. He realised that air fighting had developed to a point where team work and tactical judgment were most important. Like others before him, he constantly repeated his own essential rules. Boelcke’s and Manfred von Richthofen’s were long, as, twenty-three years later, were Malan’s. Mannock’s were brief: ‘always above, seldom on the same level, never underneath’.
Von Richthofen: The Legend Evaluated Page 10