It was this sort of thing that set the tone in far too many RFC training squadrons. Too much depended on the character of the individual instructors and, in turn, on the station CO’s ability and willingness to ensure they were up to the job. What was lacking was not merely sympathetic tutors but a modern, standardised approach to tuition that prescribed a series of clear steps, each of which every trainee had to master before proceeding to the next. Those who had learned to fly at the Grahame-White school before the war looked back at that system with admiration. At Hendon any pupil who made a mistake in the air when up with his instructor was firmly grounded for more tuition until he thoroughly understood the theory of what he had done wrong. Only then would he be allowed back up. Meanwhile, another pupil would take his place in the air. This was salutary rather than punitive. When in the autumn of 1915 Louis Strange was posted to Gosport to take command of 23 Squadron’s training he remembered how he himself had been taught at Hendon and promptly instituted a similar regime, starting by carefully vetting his instructors. Obviously there were other similarly enlightened men at training squadrons up and down the country; but it was still largely a matter of luck whether a pupil was taught in a way that significantly increased his chances of survival in everyday flying, let alone in combat. The RFC was still seriously inconsistent in the way it taught men to fly.
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France, by contrast, had instituted a rigorous and uniform regime of tuition through which all its pilots went. At least, they did so after a confused start in 1914 that was almost as hesitant as that of the British, and for some of the same reasons. Their Army high command believed that for economic as well as strategic motives the war could not possibly last more than a few months – certainly not much beyond Christmas. Consequently General Bernard, Directeur de l’Aéronautique Militaire, announced there was little point in going on churning out aircraft and pilots at the current rate. He closed down most of the flying schools and sent trained mechanics off into the infantry. It was not long before the gravity of this misjudgement was apparent and the position hastily reversed.
One big difference between the Aéronautique Militaire and the RFC was the French insistence that their prospective pilots should arrive already knowing – or at least willing to learn – about engines. The British had a variety of opinionated but vague ideas about what sort of man ‘the pilot type’ was, and left it at that. Provided an airman acquired some sort of competence in the air, that was enough. Anything that went on under the cowling of his engine could be considered a mechanic’s job. Of course there were exceptions to this among pilots, like Louis Strange who was quite happy to spend a day taking out all his engine’s inlet and exhaust valves, cleaning them and grinding them in again. The Canadian ace Billy Bishop was similarly able to work on his engine when forced down within 150 yards of the German lines, and obviously there were many others whose peacetime hobby had been cars and motor racing who were willing to get their hands oily and knew what they were doing. But for the first two or three years of the war British pilots were taught next to nothing about the engines on which their lives depended and they had to get by on what they chose to pick up from colleagues and the squadron ack-emmas. To the British Army, officers and gentlemen were not grease monkeys.
The French Army’s flying tuition was considerably based on the course that Blériot had developed for his school at Buc, near Versailles. Blériot had taken one of his own monoplanes and clipped its wings so it was unable to take off. This rouleur was familiarly known as le Pingouin: a flightless bird used for the first lessons in which students learned how to taxi at increasing speeds. The Penguin was by no means easy to hold straight, and only when pupils could do unswerving runs along the ground at full speed with the tail up were they allowed to proceed to the next class: that of décoller. In this they learned to ‘unstick’ a full-winged aircraft, rise a few feet into the air while holding it straight, and then come back down. These flights were gradually lengthened until the pupil was ready for his tour de piste, his first solo that entailed flying around the airfield at about 600 feet. The noteworthy thing about the French system of training was that, unlike the British, instructors did not initially fly with their pupils. The first time a pupil took to the air he was on his own. If he survived that he went on to make cross-country flights and practise basic manoeuvres like flying spirals. But well before then the student would have been thoroughly instructed on the ground. He learned how aircraft were built; how they could be rigged so as to fly with a different attitude by altering the tension of their various wires; about rotary engines and the problems of torque; about dealing with wind and weather; about basic navigation and many other things. Finally there came a high-altitude flight and a cross-country test, at the end of which the successful pilot was awarded his brevet and could put up his wings on the uniform of his particular army regiment, which he continued to wear. After that he usually went off to an operational training squadron where he would be given advanced instruction in flying a particular type such as a bomber or a fighter.
In the last two years of the war promising pilots, after graduating from one of the major French Army flying schools like that at Avord, near Bourges, might be sent down south to Pau on the edge of the Pyrenees to the School of Aerobatics and Combat. There they would find up-to-date Nieuport fighters, all maintained in peak condition, in which they were encouraged to spend as much time in the air as possible. Once their skills and flying hours had reached a satisfactory point they graduated to the final stage: the aerobatics course – the Haute École du Ciel.
The German system was like the British only in that instructors flew with their pupils from the first. Otherwise it was much more punctilious about avoiding training accidents: the Germans had a much smaller reserve of potential pilots to draw on than did all the Entente forces combined. For much of the war the British system led to new pilots being sent over to France and often straight into combat, a situation that many squadron COs themselves described as ‘murder’. In 1916 the Germans considered their student pilots needed at least six months’ instruction before being sent to an active squadron, although by 1918 under the pressure of demand this period had been reduced to three months. What was more, unlike Allied practice, the newly qualified German pilot was not immediately awarded his ‘wings’ but had to carry out several missions (usually with an experienced observer) before getting his Flugzeugführer Abzeichen. From the spring of 1917 pilots whose record in an ordinary squadron merited selection for any of the crack new fighter squadrons (Jagdstaffeln) were sent to one of the new single-seat fighter schools (Kampfeinsitzerschulen) in Paderborn and Grossenhain, after which they went for advanced training at Jagdstaffelschule 1 in Valenciennes.
Britain had nothing like these specialised fighter schools. But it should be emphasised that, regardless of how much better organised and uniform the French and German systems of training were, standards inevitably varied during the war, partly according to the quality of available instructors but also because of battlefield campaigns that made sudden and urgent demands for fresh supplies of pilots in the minimum time. Also, accident rates were high everywhere if only because it was not yet fifteen years since man’s first-ever powered flight. No amount of pilot training could reliably be proof against every eventuality in the air. It was small wonder that somebody’s brainwave to correct a particular machine’s tendency to stall might appear to work very well until it was discovered too late that it could now easily tip the aircraft into a fatal spin. ‘It spun into the carpet with all the ferocity the type could display when it was out of humour,’ as W. E. Johns would remark laconically when he himself was in training, as though of a horse that had shied unexpectedly. ‘It took the mechanics most of the day to dig Tony out, so I heard.’73
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Although a big generalisation, it is probably justifiable to say that until at least the autumn of 1917 the majority of the RFC’s pilots were nothing like as well trained as were their French and German
counterparts. The reason was no secret, still less a mystery, particularly after the losses of ‘Bloody April’ that year. ‘Boom’ Trenchard’s strategy of using air power aggressively inevitably resulted in a high rate of casualties who had to be replaced as quickly as possible. The figures are revealing: by the end of the war the Entente had lost 2.2 aircraft for every one lost by the Central Powers.74 The corollary to this was a faster turnover of aircrew with the increased need to rush men through basic training to fulfil Trenchard’s other policy of ‘no empty chairs’ in an active squadron. This kept the messes full ‘even though it meant offering up the inexperienced and the partly trained as human sacrifices,’ as one author commented later.75 It is conceivable that Trenchard was using his own experience of going solo with only sixty-four minutes’ airtime back in 1912 as a yardstick for how long it ought to take to train new pilots. Bad as even the Germans’ casualties were in training as well as in combat, their attrition rate was still significantly lower than that of the British. Quite simply, they took more time and care in teaching a pilot how an aircraft flew and how he might best fly one. This revealed a distinct difference of aviation cultures, in that a strand of thinking in ‘official’ British circles held it was probably better for an airman not to understand how his aircraft worked. The rationale for this bizarre viewpoint was summed up in late 1918 by an RAMC captain attached to the RAF writing for the august medical magazine The Lancet. He admitted to a
definite conviction that the less the fighting scout pilot knows about his machine from a mechanical point of view the better. From the very nature of his work he must be prepared to throw the machine about, and at times subject it to such strains that did he realise how near he was to the breaking-point, his nerve would go very quickly.76
In other words ignorance was bliss. It was better for a pilot to risk losing both his life and his aircraft through bad flying than it was for him to risk losing his nerve.
With official opinions as perverse as this circulating it is hardly a surprise to find that even as late as the last days of December 1917 Stuart Wortley’s fictitious letter-writer (based later on his own wartime correspondence and diaries) was exasperated both by a lack of training and an absence of keenness in the new pilots he was sent. ‘I regret to say that many of the new recruits not only don’t know how to fly or how to manipulate a machine gun but they fail to display any eagerness to learn. My wretched flight commanders have had to give up most of their spare time trying to train them, and even then some of them have to be sent back home for further instruction.’77
As the war went on the RFC’s more outspoken commanding officers of active squadrons in France often agonised at being ordered to send men up who had no right to be in the air at all, still less in combat. It seemed a needless slaughter of the innocents and added to the steadily growing pressure for Britain’s air wing to break with the Army and rid itself of the constant need to do the military’s bidding at whatever cost. In the view of many RFC officers neither the infantry nor its commanders understood how best to use air power although they broadly supported Trenchard’s approach, possibly because as a pilot he, too, was one of them.
Apart from that, there were the children who slipped through the Army’s lax net. In late 1915 Cecil Lewis, who had falsified his age and enrolled in the RFC at seventeen (the minimum was eighteen), was sent up by his instructor on his first solo after a mere ninety minutes’ dual flying. Young as he was, he was still not as juvenile as the RNAS pilot whom W. E. Johns met in Landshut POW camp after he was shot down in September 1918. This boy had also been shot down and was celebrating his seventeenth birthday as a prisoner. He had run away from school to join up, and many years later Johns might well have used him as the model for the main character in his novel The Rescue Flight.
Soloing after only one and a half hours’ dual experience in the air was not uncommon in the RFC. Lewis’s first solo was successful, Johns’s rather less so since he stalled on take-off and crashed. The terse entry in Johns’s log book reads:
Time: 8.30 a.m.
Pilot: Self
Type and number of machine: MFSH [Maurice Farman Shorthorn] 21131*
Passenger: None
Time in air: Five seconds
Height: 30 feet78
He was lucky to survive. His instructor, a Captain Ashton, was one of those who subscribed to the commonly held view that pilots, like riders after a nasty fall, should get straight back into the saddle in order not to ‘lose confidence’. He sent Johns up again the next day for a ten-minute flight ‘at the most’. In the event it lasted ninety minutes on account of Johns getting completely lost and only finding the airfield again at dusk when he was down to his last thimbleful of petrol.
In May 1917 Arthur Gould Lee, another fledgling pilot who had just arrived in France, could note: ‘Most pilots average 15–20 hours’ flying when they arrive here, with maybe 10–12 solo and five on the type they’re expecting to fight on. With that amount of piloting they can’t even fly, let alone fight.’79 He himself found he had done more flying than any of the others with whom he was posted: 85 hours all told with 72½ solo, including 18 hours on Sopwith Pups – the aircraft he subsequently flew in France. He had trained with Bristol at Filton but had been injured in a flying accident ‘due to incompetent instruction’. This turned out to be a heavily disguised blessing since, as he admitted, recuperation had allowed him to stay in England long enough to learn to fly properly. Cecil Lewis, on the other hand, had flown just thirteen hours’ solo when he was posted to his squadron in France, ‘hopelessly inequipped and inexperienced’. It was only very much later in the war that – in theory, at least – no RFC pilot was supposed to cross the lines until he had done sixty hours’ flying.
Yet perhaps the most scandalous practice surrounding the RFC’s training methods was the way in which the instructors were chosen. Again, Johns’s experience is illustrative. After his harrowing experiences in Gallipoli, Salonika and Egypt – not to mention a severe bout of malaria – he began learning to fly shortly after arriving at No. 1 School of Aeronautics, Reading, on 26th October 1917. Once he had earned his ‘wings’ his very first posting was on 20th January 1918 as an instructor with No. 25 Flying Training School, Thetford. Thus a man with fewer than three months’ flying experience from scratch had himself become a tutor. True, this was a sign of the RFC’s desperation at a time when almost anyone with a rough idea of what an aircraft’s controls did was press-ganged into flying combat missions in France, with a consequent dearth of experienced pilots to teach new volunteers and conscripts. At this point the life expectancy of new pilots was three weeks. A good many were dead within three days. Seasoned airmen with real experience who had survived a few months’ active service were of inestimable value to any squadron. They were far too valuable to be wasted back in Blighty teaching Huns to fly Rumpties. They were either inveigled into doing another tour or, as was common after perhaps four months, they were too shattered for further combat and became as much a menace to themselves as to any German opponent. They were often reluctantly posted back home as instructors to a flying training school like Johns’s. With their half-crazed fatalism, thousand-yard stares and often bitter rage at being banned from returning to the action in France they, too, were usually not best suited to training beginners.
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One of the most revealing accounts of what it was like learning to fly in the RFC only a year before the Armistice comes from an American, John MacGavock Grider, who was sent with his comrades to the UK in late 1917 to be trained as a pilot for service with the RFC until such time as the United States could organise squadrons of its own. Grider’s first memory of the journey out was of being satirically regaled in Halifax harbour by a boatload of New Zealanders who paddled around their troopship singing: ‘Onward, conscript soldiers, marching as to war,/You would not be conscripts, had you gone before.’ After arriving in Britain Grider was first billeted in Oxford before being posted to the machine-gun school at Gr
antham.
November 18th: There were a lot of young English kids that had been there for some time swinging the lead. [The new CO] sent for them all and lined them up. He told them there was a war on and that pilots were needed badly at the front and they were all going solo that afternoon. They nearly fainted. Some of them had had less than two hours of air work and none of them had had more than five.
We all went out to the airdrome to see the fun. I guess there were about thirty of them in all. The squadron was equipped with D.H.6s which are something like our Curtiss planes [the JN-4 ‘Jenny’ trainer] except they are slower and won’t spin no matter what you do to them. The first one to take off was a bit uneasy and an instructor had to taxi out for him. He ran all the way across the field, and it was a big one, then pulled the stick right back into his stomach. The Six went straight up nose first and stalled. Then it did a tail slide right back into the ground.
Another one got off fairly well and came around for his landing. He leveled off and made a beautiful landing – a hundred feet above the ground. He pancaked beautifully and shoved his wheels up through the lower wings. But the plane had a four-bladed prop on it and it broke off even all around. So the pupil was able to taxi on into the hangar as both wheels had come up the same distance. He was very much pleased with himself and cut off the engine and took off his goggles and stood up and started to jump down to the ground which he thought was about five feet below him. Then he looked down and saw the ground right under his seat. He certainly was shocked…80
The afternoon progressed in similar fashion with smashed undercarriages and aircraft turning turtle. ‘They finally all got off, and not a one of them got killed,’ Grider commented. ‘I don’t see why not, tho’. Only one of them got hurt and that was when one landed on top of the other. The one in the bottom plane got a broken arm.’ The tally in written-off and broken aircraft was considerable. The cost of a D.H.6 trainer at the time was £1,363 (without instruments),81 or roughly £65,000 at today’s prices. Needless to say, not a single one of the pilots that day ought to have been allowed up without an instructor.
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