Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

There were periods when squadron life became suspended: days of wash-out when bad weather made any flying out of the question. The men played desultory games in the mess or dutifully wrote home, their combat-tautened nerves unable to deal with enforced inertia. Now and then they itchily went outside to stand gazing upward in the chill gloom, cold mouths mumbling fog. Sounds of metal would come from the sheds as though through wool. The blood sang in their ears. Even the distant guns were silent, blinded as they were, their blank muzzles beaded with dew. It was as though all Europe held its breath, waiting for the cheerful sun to break through and announce that normal killing could resume.

  Sometimes the squadron became subdued by loss, but more often tragedy was the signal for perverse celebration. Two American pilots who flew with French escadrilles described a mess dinner following the particularly grievous loss of a comrade:

  Dinner that evening was a very noisy one. Everyone talked at once; Golasse cracked his funniest jokes and the squadron phonograph was never allowed to stop for a moment. I have never seen a more gallant or a less successful attempt to drown the eloquence of one empty chair.98

  However, when the squadron had reason to celebrate a particular victory, somebody’s medal or simply a guest night, the celebratory ‘binge’ would usually be preceded by cocktails made by mixing together in a tureen as many of the local French drinks as possible, typically involving cognac, vermouth, cider, champagne, pastis and absinthe. Great quantities of wine would accompany the meal, after which there might be drunken speeches and a sing-song.

  If there was a mess piano that had survived previous moves and dinners, and provided there was anyone left to play it, it might make a more or less harmonious contribution to the old favourites. These were often well-known tunes reset to cheerfully obscene or topical words. ‘We are Fred Karno’s army’ was one, set to the hymn tune of ‘The Church’s one foundation’. (Fred Karno was the stage name of an immensely popular music hall comedian of the day.)

  We are Fred Karno’s army,

  We are the RFC.

  We cannot fight, we cannot shoot,

  What blinking use are we?

  But when we get to Berlin,

  The Kaiser he will say:

  Hoch! Hoch! Mein Gott!

  What a jolly fine lot

  Are the boys of the RFC!

  Or it might be a ditty of many verses sung to the tune of ‘D’ye ken John Peel’ and full of the pessimism that cheers:

  When you soar into the air in a Sopwith scout

  And you’re scrapping with a Hun and your gun cuts out,

  Well you stuff down your nose till your plugs fall out,

  ’Cos you haven’t got a hope in the morning.

  Chorus –

  For the batman woke me from my bed,

  I’d had a thick night and a very sore head,

  And I said to myself, to myself I said:

  ‘Oh, we haven’t got a hope in the morning!’

  Perhaps the most famous home-grown song was the ‘The Young Aviator’. This existed in many variants, much as rugger and drinking songs do. It emerged from RFC messes during the First World War in the way that folk songs start, almost by a process of osmosis when the pressure of sentiment filters through a semi-permeable membrane of alcohol. It varied from squadron to squadron and was still being sung in one form or another by a fresh generation of airmen in the Second World War. The first verse and the chorus were usually much the same:

  The young aviator lay dying,

  And as in the wreckage he lay,

  To his comrades all gathered around him

  These last parting words he did say:

  Chorus –

  Take the pistons out of my kidneys,

  The gudgeon pins out of my brain, my brain,

  From the small of my back take the crankshaft,

  And assemble the engine again.

  Many lugubrious verses followed. But by far the bleakest song the airmen roared was one to words written by the nineteenth-century Irish-born poet Bartholomew Dowling, who reportedly had in mind some Indian Army officers who had been victims of a tropical plague. It coincided perfectly with the nihilistic feelings of many airmen in the later years of the war. Half the faces in the mess might be new each time it was sung, and the ghosts of those no longer there clustered ever more thickly around the squadron’s trophies. Two verses are enough to give the flavour:

  We meet ’neath the sounding rafter,

  And the walls around are bare:

  As they shout back our peals of laughter,

  It seems as the dead were there.

  Then stand to your glasses steady!

  We drink ’fore our comrades’ eyes,

  One cup to the dead already:

  Hurrah for the next man that dies!

  Who dreads to the dust returning?

  Who shrinks from the sable shore

  Where the high and haughty yearning

  Of the soul can sting no more?

  No! Stand to your glasses steady!

  This world is a world of lies,

  One cup to the dead already:

  Hurrah for the next man that dies!

  ‘This world is a world of lies’ accorded perfectly with the conviction held by many airmen of all sides by 1918 that most of what they were told by officialdom was ‘hot air’, and almost everything said by politicians in Westminster, the Palais Bourbon or the Wilhelmstrasse was brazenly self-serving. It was in the spirit of such cynicism that the RFC’s official communiqués were known throughout the force as ‘Comic Cuts’, after the popular cartoon weekly. By this stage in the evening no-one would know or care if the tears in many eyes were the overflow of drink or token of something deeper. The singing was often followed by horseplay that involved the smashing of furniture and general scrimmaging. Some semblance of order might be temporarily restored with a parody of army discipline in the form of a subaltern’s court martial. In this, an unlucky victim was charged under Section 40 of the Army Act with ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline’.

  The judgment of the Court was a foregone conclusion and the prisoner was condemned to be publicly de-bagged, and to be branded with the Censor’s stamp upon either side of his posterior. His advocate, who was adjudged by the Tribunal to have given voice to subversive doctrines, was awarded the same penalty. The execution of the sentence was carried out after a terrific struggle…

  Anything involving de-bagging was, of course, a throwback to public schooldays in its purest form. The amazing thing is that, drunk as these airmen were by the time they staggered or were carried to their beds, they would be up again next morning after ‘a thick night’ and with ‘a very sore head’ to climb once more into their machines and face the prospect of a hideous death even before breakfast.

  The question of drinking and flying evidently touched a raw nerve at the time since it was often vehemently denied that any airman would ever touch a drop. However, V. M. Yeates’s character Tom Cundall takes it as axiomatic that ‘no flying man could live in France and remain sober’, and gives a description of going on morning patrol with his comrades after an entire night’s carousing:

  Climbed in all right, anyway. Felt better in cockpit. Comfortable. Couldn’t fall out. It’d be damn funny doing a blotto patrol. Wouldn’t be any Huns about so soon after rain. Contact. Giving her revs all right on the ground. Could see the rev-counter. Not so blotto. They were all pretty tight except Cross. Let’s go. Could he taxi? Yes, easy. Open fine adjustment. Throttle. Off we go. Hold her nose down then zoom. Up, up. Pulling nicely. Roll. Left stick and rudder. Throttle back. Here’s the horizon coming straight. Stick and rudder central. Throttle open. God, trees. Just over. Near thing. What the hell, rolling at that height in formation. Bombs on too. Christ, he’d forgotten. No wonder he’d lost height. Tom, you’re blotto. Sit tight, you loon. You know you’re blotto, so don’t play the fool.99

  Others stoutly maintained, most implausibly, that they had never known any
man fly under the influence, that airmen were far too responsible and had too great a respect for the effects of alcohol on airmanship. That is as may be; but a case study by Dr Graeme Anderson somewhat belies this since it describes

  an accomplished aviator who after a few drinks at a friendly aerodrome did a series of stunts and then made off home, a distance of thirty miles. He felt content but sleepy, made up his mind to do no more stunts in the air, and remembered coming down to land at his own aerodrome. Later he woke up in the sick bay with a doctor stitching a scalp wound. Although he had made up his mind to do no more stunts, onlookers saw him loop and roll the machine a number of times when coming down to land. There seems little doubt that the action of alcohol is accentuated in the air…100

  There are simply too many descriptions of pilots hitting the bottle, like those W. E. Johns gave, for there to be any doubt that it was a recognised problem. As Biggles’s chum Mahoney told the station CO, Major Mullen:

  Biggles is finished unless he takes a rest. He’s drinking whisky for his breakfast and you know what that means – he’s going fast. He drank half a bottle of whisky yesterday morning before daylight, and he walked up to the sheds as sober as I was. A fellow doesn’t get drunk when he’s in the state Biggles is in.… It’s a pity, but most of us go that way at the end I suppose.101

  Plenty of pilots reached a stage of extreme stress when they could no longer fly sober. Like thousands of car drivers since, they were probably convinced they flew better that way and that their reactions were unimpaired. One or two of them may even have been right, but many more must have died without ever knowing how wrong they were.

  Naturally, boisterous and boozy squadron guest nights were not peculiar to the RFC. It was the same in German Staffeln and French escadrilles, and to judge from letters and diaries left by American trainee pilots like John Grider and Elliott Springs who went on to fly in France, heavy drinking was practically a rite of passage. It is true that most of them were at that blessed age when bounce-back from a night’s carousing is remarkably fast, but not all of them were and some of the older men probably needed to be cautious. Yet squadron revels were by no means confined to boozing, and there were often quite elaborate satirical pantomimes and fancy dress parties with the sort of cross-dressing many would have remembered from school plays. These home-grown entertainments, as well as the rough-housing, were encouraged by perceptive officers like the neurologist James Birley, who in 1918 was a lieutenant-colonel in the RFC and had marked views on the importance of keeping airmen’s spirits up when on the ground. By that time he was not alone in this and other doctors had come to similar conclusions about the boys they were tending:

  When they have finished flying for the day their favourite amusements are theatres, music (chiefly ragtime), cards and dancing, and it appears necessary for the well-being of the average pilot that he should indulge in a really riotous evening at least once or twice a month.102

  By late June that year the indestructible Louis Strange had once again been posted back to France, this time to command the 80th Wing. In the immediate aftermath of the German Spring Offensive he often found morale sagging. It seemed to the men that at this rate the war might drag on until at least 1920 (for which the Entente’s high commands were indeed making contingency plans). Strange quickly realised that a mess full of silently brooding men in armchairs listlessly reading three-week old copies of British newspapers was to be avoided at all costs. ‘We could not afford to have any squadron’s mess developing the atmosphere of, let us say, the Athenaeum Club,’ he wrote. He took his cue from Lieutenant-Colonel Birley. ‘Every pilot and observer was a patient and an object of interest in Birley’s eyes. “When they are not working in earnest, keep them playing the fool,” he told me. “Keep their tails up on the ground and they’ll look after themselves in the air” was his very wise maxim.’103

  By this time the RFC had become the RAF; but well before then the difference between the air services and the regular Army had become irrevocably marked. So long as a man’s performance in the air was good a surprising degree of eccentricity could be tolerated on the ground. The young British ace Albert Ball was famously a loner who preferred to fly sorties on his own. He was allowed to live in a hut by himself where he planted a garden and played the violin in a brooding, Holmesian manner. Others acquired pets from neighbouring French farms. The Canadian ace Billy Bishop led many a local foraging raid and on one occasion he and his comrades returned with three ducks on whose wings they painted British-style red, white and blue roundels as though they were aircraft. They acquired more birds for their next experiment, which was to discover the effect of alcohol on the creatures. Bishop and his pals found that ‘although they did not like the first drop of it, when they had been forced to swallow that they eagerly cried for more. Their return home was a ludicrous sight, sitting down on the ground every minute or two, and always walking in a “beaucoup” zig-zag course, as the French would say.’104 They later captured a small pig and gave it the same treatment, Bishop for a while leading the animal everywhere on a rope as though it were a dog on a leash. Later, a large sow was named Baron von Richthofen, painted with German aircraft markings and a leader’s streamer attached to her tail. Such adopted squadron mascots steadily came and went.

  These men also played for hours with the farmer’s baby rabbits but it was dogs that the airmen laid hold of with the greatest enthusiasm, picking up every stray they could find until the tally of animals made 60 Squadron something of a menagerie. Bishop’s favourite was a black animal with Airedale in its ancestry that he adopted and called Nigger. Several other Niggers came and went on the station since this was the usual name for almost any dog that was black (and would most famously be that of Guy Gibson’s own beloved Labrador when he was training at Scampton for the great Dams Raid in 1943). Fooling around with animals helped keep Bishop and his comrades sane in 1917, allowing them to show these stray victims of war a tenderness they dared not lavish on themselves and each other. There were enjoyable ratting parties with the dogs but the pursuit that gained the most official encouragement was shooting pigeons on the wing with a .22 rifle. This was, of course, extraordinarily difficult, which was perhaps as well since the farmer demanded compensation for each of his birds killed. One afternoon Bishop fired off 500 rounds and hit only a single pigeon, and that one a fluke. But as he said, ‘It was the very best practice in the world for the eye of a man whose business it is to fight mechanical birds in the air.’ On the occasional day off the airmen would spend it ‘either sleeping all day or roaming about the orchard in silk pyjamas, or else one would go and visit friends who possibly were stationed near. It was a great thing, as it always left us keen for work the next day.’105

  *

  As the war went on and the toll of brothers and cousins and comrades grew, so undoubtedly did a general resentment of the enemy, compounded as always by the effects of constant patriotic exhortation, propaganda and the bitterness of men aware of missing out on the normality of a home life and career. The casual brutality of it all, of lives arbitrarily cut short or ruined, turned many men into unashamed killers, there being nothing like war for stripping things back to basics. There were indeed airmen like Richthofen who claimed to take deep satisfaction, even pleasure, in sending an enemy down in flames. Yet it is not always easy to tell how much of this was simply down to relief at being victorious in a fight that might so easily have gone the other way. Combat was a highly skilled sport, and to emerge from it as the winner would always be satisfying at a quite simple level. In most cases this would take precedence over worrying about the other man as a human being. That would come later – or not at all, depending on the person. The British ace James McCudden maintained a calm detachment most of the time, but occasionally this faltered:

  At 11,000 feet he engaged an Albatros and sent a burst into it. A small trickle of flame appeared, and the aeroplane began to go down. McCudden followed it. The flames enveloped the whole fuselage and
tail assembly, and suddenly McCudden saw the doomed pilot writhing in agony as the fire reached him. He didn’t sleep much that night, but the next morning he recovered his composure and confided to Rhys-Davids that a man had to ignore such incidents if he was ‘to do his work properly.’ ‘Until yesterday I never looked upon a German plane as anything but a machine to be destroyed,’ he said. ‘But when I saw the flames touch that German pilot I felt sick for a minute and actually said to myself in horror: “There’s a man in that plane.” Now I realize we can’t be squeamish about killing. After all, we’re nothing but hired assassins.’106

  Even so, he can’t have been an over-imaginative man, given that his many previous victims had hardly been tin ducks in a funfair shooting gallery.

  What is worth noting is how much fellow-feeling and even decency managed to survive between the airmen on both sides. Even to an ace like Billy Bishop, intent on racking up his score each time he went aloft, there were limits to what was considered fair game. In one sector of the front in 1917 a familiar sight was a large white German machine doing artillery spotting. It was very old, had a very bad pilot and a very poor observer to protect him, and was known as ‘the flying pig’.

  It was a point of honour in the squadron that the decrepit old ‘pig’ should not actually be shot down. It was considered fair sport, however, to frighten it. Whenever our machines approached, the ‘pig’ would begin a series of clumsy turns and ludicrous manoeuvres and would open a frightened fire from ridiculously long ranges. The observer was a very bad shot and never succeeded in hitting any of our machines, so attacking this particular German was always regarded more as a joke than a serious part of warfare.107

  In its way the ‘flying pig’ had become one with the barnyard animals the pilots petted or made a mock of but never deliberately harmed.

  Enemy airmen who were downed were often treated to a mess lunch or dinner by the squadron to which they had fallen victim in a spirit of cameraderie that owed a great deal to the commonality of flying men everywhere. Their lives and skills were identical; only the uniforms differed. Just as the German pilot who shot down W. E. Johns and killed his observer intervened on the ground to prevent a crowd from lynching Johns, so Cecil Lewis and his comrades were called out one night when he was temporarily stationed at Rochford in Essex as part of Home Defence, to take charge of the German crew of a Gotha bomber. This big machine had developed engine trouble and its pilot crash-landed at Rochford airfield under the misapprehension that he was already back in German-occupied Belgium.