Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  If it was odd that no air force did much to deal with this phenomenon until quite late in the war, stranger still was the resistance by many pilots themselves to the very idea of carrying oxygen. In fact, some British squadrons luckier than Arthur Gould Lee’s were being supplied – albeit patchily – with oxygen equipment at the exact moment he was describing. The chronicles of W. E. Johns’s own squadron, No. 55, mention it in July 1917 (exactly a year before Johns was posted to France), but the tone of the entry makes it clear that the crews were initially sceptical of its value. ‘[T]hough opinions differed at the time as to the real usefulness of this additional “gadget”, it proved that ultimately the pilot and observer who dispensed with it felt the effects of altitude flying very much more than they who had consistently used it, and also that the former were liable to a sudden breakdown, possibly in the air.’144 In a leading medical journal nine months later in 1918 an exasperated M.O. noted a continued resistance to oxygen: ‘Unfortunately, some pilots have an unreasonable prejudice against the use of oxygen, possibly bred of some irresponsible scoffer, and medical officers should therefore patiently explain in the mess or in individual talks the value of oxygen at high altitudes in preventing drowsiness and loss of rapid judgement…’145 The obvious assumption has to be that of sheer ignorance: many British aircrew must have understood so little of basic science and human physiology that they didn’t realise oxygen’s importance. This seems all the more extraordinary given that nearly every pilot who had flown high for any length of time had personal experience of the deadly effects of hypoxia and dreaded being caught by an enemy aircraft when his reactions were slow and his energy depleted, like this German:

  Many a poor fellow who had carried out a long and successful flight far behind the enemy’s lines lost his strength before his sortie was over. Weakened and unable to concentrate, he would fall easy prey to some enemy fighter on his return flight. Others could not use their machine guns on account of frostbite. Defenceless, they succumbed to the enemy’s relentless attacks.146

  What was more, pilots dreaded being injured at altitude because they knew that with increased heart rate and low barometric pressure bleeding was often severe despite the cold. This syndrome had been known about since at least 1812 when the French solo balloonist Sophie Blanchard suffered a severe and unstaunchable nosebleed at 22,800 feet. The pilot of one German two-seater, seeing his wounded observer was losing blood at a great rate, broke off a fight at altitude and dived as steeply as he dared to land beside a hospital.147 In a British squadron, leaving a combat because your observer was wounded could have looked suspiciously like ‘blue funk’ or a lack of ‘fighting spirit’. But since in a German two-seater the observer was usually also the officer in command, it may be that this particular pilot was simply obeying orders bellowed imperiously from the back seat.

  *

  Even without the problem of oxygen deficiency, the sheer cold in an open cockpit with nothing but a minuscule windshield for protection from the slipstream’s freezing gale was an agony in itself. No-one was impervious to it, not even fit young men with excellent circulation. Despite leather garments with layers of clothing underneath, their legs enclosed in thigh-length sheepskin ‘fug boots’, exposed areas of the face smeared with foul-smelling whale oil and with a sinister-looking dogskin mask and goggles, the cold always got through. An inventive Australian pilot with the RNAS, Sidney Cotton, designed a one-piece suit he proudly named the ‘Sidcot’. It became officially adopted by the RFC at the end of 1917 and went on being used by the RAF until well after the Second World War.148 But good though it was, the Sidcot could do little to warm the extremities. Being roused by a batman at 4 a.m. on a dark and frosty winter morning in France to fly a dawn patrol clad in stiff and freezing leather in an open-cockpit aircraft – and usually on nothing more than a cup of tea and a slice of toast – must have demanded quite exceptional fortitude. Life in the trenches in winter with snow on the ground was no picnic; but the appalling cold at 15,000 feet or higher was another matter – further exacerbated as it was by the wind-chill of the slipstream, especially for the observer who had to stand up to man his gun. Even in summer, temperatures of minus 40°C were not unknown at altitude. Even the alcohol in the aircraft’s compass could freeze. Supposedly cold-resistant gun oil thickened to the point where weapons jammed and became unusable. Aircrew sometimes arrived back on the ground unable to climb out of their machines and in no fit state to fly again that day or even for weeks. ‘My face feels like one big bruise after the cold yesterday,’ admitted Lieutenant-Colonel H. Wyllie to his diary. ‘Mowatt rather badly frost bitten.’149

  CASE 2 – Flight Sub-Lieut. M., aet 27. Returned from bombing raid of about two and a half hours’ duration. Face very swollen though not particularly painful. Next day the face was enormously swollen, the cheeks being almost in line with the tips of the shoulders, and in addition there was much redness and some vesication of the skin below the right angle of the mouth. This latter developed into a fairly superficial necrotic patch about the size of a crown piece.

  Treatment consisted of keeping the face warm by wool and bandage, and dusting powder to the necrotic patch. Later a zinc oxide ointment dressing was applied to this latter. The swelling gradually decreased, and the slough turned black and separated, leaving a healthy base about the fifteenth day. The face was very painful for some weeks after this whenever exposed to the cold.150

  Yet just as with oxygen, there was resistance on the part of some pilots and observers to the issuing of electrically heated clothing, some versions of which were introduced in early 1918. Like the electrical supply for wireless sets, the power came from a generator attached to a strut and driven by a small propeller that turned in the slipstream. One pilot noted the case of an Australian who refused both these aids to his well-being on the grounds that the small extra weight plus wind resistance ‘added to the burden put upon the engine, and so tended to deprive him of just that last ounce of power which makes all the difference when manoeuvring against the Hun’.151

  *

  By now military doctors serving with all the combatants realised that a significant proportion of their aircraft accidents and losses was caused by the aircrews’ physical state rather than by enemy action. An example of this was recorded of a new officer who joined 20 Squadron in France in 1917:

  He was a quiet and delightful man who had just been elected to the Fellowship of his college. A week or so later, he was under arrest for cowardice. On each of three occasions when his flight had been on reconnaissance patrol, he had joined the flight above the airfield, had begun to move off with them and then broke off and returned alone. He did not know why he had done this and did not even realize that he had until after he had landed. Heald [an RAMC captain, the squadron’s Medical Officer] examined him and found a chronic suppurating otitis media [middle ear infection] and a history of his having been awarded his wings without ever exceeding 1,000 feet. As he had to rendezvous at about 2,500 feet for his sorties he had obviously become dizzy and disorientated. Heald made a full report in writing and in person to the brigadier and the court martial was cancelled. The officer returned to his regiment with his honour unsullied.152

  This reveals much about the standards of aircrews’ medical selection and training in the RFC at the time. It seems incredible now: a highly articulate young man with a chronic weeping ear infection and no experience of going above 1,000 feet who was nonetheless passed as suitable for combat flying in a war zone. Behind such cases lay an administrative absurdity: that despite all that was being recognised by aviation medics, RFC recruits were still given the standard army medical inspection designed to weed out obvious physical deficiencies such as bad eyesight or lameness, as well as infectious diseases like TB and VD. One army doctor wrote candidly of the inspection he was required to carry out as ‘a perfunctory examination calculated to exclude the one-legged, the hunch-backed, the man moribund of cardiac disease, and the blind’.153 To be fair, he was sp
eaking of coping with the great rush of volunteers in the autumn of 1914. All the same, standards of public health in Britain were often so bad that in some units upwards of 20 per cent of men were found unfit for military service.

  The 42nd Territorial Division was nearly at full establishment when it left Britain, but when it arrived in Egypt in September 1914 the GOC, Sir John Maxwell, found 100 men technically blind, 1,500 riddled with vermin, one dying of Bright’s disease and ‘hundreds so badly vaccinated they could hardly move’. One officer concluded that the division had ‘picked up any loafer or corner boy they could find to make up the numbers’.154

  For all that these men had volunteered, the result was like press-ganging all over again; and it scarcely helped that until May 1915 doctors were paid half a crown for every man they passed as fit: a system that practically guaranteed abuse. Both the French and the Germans were well aware of deficiencies in the health of their own potential recruits, but all evidence suggests that they were generally more thorough, and at an earlier date, than were the British, certainly when medically vetting their future airmen. Once he had passed the standard Army inspection a man applying for the RFC was usually deemed by implication to be fit to fly. Indeed, there were documented cases of men diagnosed as unfit for the trenches being recommended for transfer to the RFC, although it is probably safe to assume a degree of Army ill-will was operating here, and not just medical incompetence. This being noted, 1917 was also the year when the RFC formed its Special Medical Boards – much to the scepticism of the existing Army medical services. This was in direct response to casualty figures that had become quite unsustainable. In that year of Bloody April the air arm’s reinforcement demands were running at roughly 500 per cent per annum – a rate that implied a complete turnover of RFC personnel every ten weeks or so. More than half these casualties occurred in the first six weeks of training. The Special Medical Air Boards began applying much more rigorous selection standards and by autumn these were showing dividends. They halved the wastage of men and machines by weeding out early the obviously unfit, and disqualifying certain prospective flyers from even basic training. Even so, a further 10 per cent of recruits were eliminated during training as ‘unlikely to become efficient flyers’. It was yet another sign of the impending break of the Royal Flying Corps from the Army, which formally took place on 1st April the following year with the creation of the RAF. By now it had become evident that a particular sort of man was needed in the air, with quite different attributes to those of an infantryman. Inevitably, he would also be prone to a different set of ailments and injuries.

  *

  The question of the best flying temperament had long been moot. It was all very well bluff types in flying club bars booming that anyone who could drive a motor car could learn to fly; but since at least the days of Blériot and his flying schools the question of whether there was a particular ‘type’ of person who made an ideal aeronaut had been much debated. The war only made this both more urgent and more problematic because men were no longer required just to be skilled aviators. They also had to be warriors; and ‘fighting spirit’ seemed to demand yet another kind of character. The idea was common then (and persisted into the 1930s among older officers in the RAF) that a good horseman made the best aviator. Sensitive hands, a good seat and an eye for country were thought to be essential requirements. It is perhaps too easy to scoff at this today. In fact, the light biplanes of the early days of flying never responded well to heavy-handed treatment and nor, for that matter, do modern aircraft. Once stable machines like the B.E.2c had been superseded by fighting aircraft deliberately designed to fly on the very edge of stability like the Sopwith Camel, it was not hard for an unwary pilot who was a little rough on the controls to tip his machine into a spin or a stall – either of which could easily prove fatal, as training airfields witnessed almost daily throughout the war.

  A further reason for not scoffing at the perceived connection with riding has to do with class. In 1914 horses were ubiquitous and most well-to-do young men could ride, if only after a fashion. Such youngsters constituted the pool from which the British Army mainly drew its pilots in the early part of the war because by and large they were the middle-class men who had already learned to fly at their own expense in private aero clubs. Particularly in Britain, the type of man the military chose tended to self-select in conformity with the Army’s preconceptions. Yet the pressures of war soon obliged the RFC’s recruiting officers to look further afield. By late 1918 an RAMC doctor could report that ‘Flying is not now confined to the public school boy, the cavalry officer, or the athlete. We take many of our pilots at present from the lower middle classes and some from the artisan class.’155 Even so, at much the same time another doctor who had already spent eighteen months as the chief medical officer of various RFC and RAF training camps could write:

  [O]ne would much sooner accept a well-educated nervous type as a pilot than one whose mental training has been very limited. For the nervous, pale-faced, introspective East End clerk with little or no experience of outdoor exercise and sport, whose habit of life almost compels him to think far too much of [i.e. about] himself, one would probably advise rejection; while for the university athlete, equally nervous but trained to ignore himself and to control his feelings, trained to act and think of and for others, of good physique and broad in mental outlook, one would on the whole advise acceptance.156

  Here, a public school housemaster disguised in RAMC khaki has plainly had the last word. Clean-limbed, clear-eyed and sporty ’varsity boys versus weedy working-class townees? No competition. And after all, he was probably right. The one thing that upset this easy preference was the influx of pilots from the Dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – because they were more unreadable in class terms. They tended overwhelmingly to be country boys, and mostly far tougher and fitter even than Oxbridge men who rowed. Better still, thanks to lives lived in the great open spaces, they often had terrain-reading skills that seemed positively uncanny to their British instructors and proved less likely than their British counterparts to get lost in the air.

  The belated introduction of the Special Medical Air Boards ensured that the RFC’s doctors began to catch up with the more scientific approach of their Continental counterparts. However, anyone looking through bibliographies of the medical problems that early flying threw up will be struck by how few of the contemporary books are in English. Whether addressing aviation accidents, ear-nose-and-throat conditions, altitude sickness or the psychology of fliers, the majority of the texts are in French, German and Italian with only the occasional British or American book. It was not that Britain lacked scientists of J. S. Haldane’s calibre – or even first-rate doctors, come to that. As we know, the German and French army high commands were at first equally sceptical about an air war. But their scientists were clearly ahead of the game, the Germans being particularly advanced in aviation medicine thanks to their supremacy in airship technology (while nevertheless allowing at least some of their Zeppelin crews to fly without oxygen).

  At any rate the RFC did eventually adopt physiological and even rudimentary psychological tests for airmen. These included measurement of reaction times (using French-designed apparatus), visual acuity tests and sometimes pressure chamber tests to weed out those abnormally susceptible to altitude. Yet even here a doctor writing in a British journal after the war could say: ‘On the Continent observations have been made upon the circulatory system in the air at different heights. I had hoped to carry out a series of similar observations myself as it does not follow that one would obtain the same results with British pilots.’157 Evidently he felt Britons were physiologically different from Continentals.

  Some aviation doctors formed their own rule-of-thumb notions of how to spot a potential aviator that may well have had a modicum of validity:

  I have noticed that if a man had a good ‘sense of projection’ he made a good aeronautist… This test seems to me to be almost de
cisive of a man’s fitness for flying. By ‘sense of projection’ I mean that a man having looked at a small object [at arm’s length] will afterwards be able quickly and accurately to touch it with the eyes closed.158

  The real problem, of course, was that while it was theoretically possible by now to subject men to all sorts of physical tests to see if they were suitable for flying training, it was far more difficult to evaluate a man’s psychology or character in a way that would yield reproducible scientific data. Thus in the latter half of 1918 an American doctor could write:

  While at a medical conference at the central recruiting office in England for [RAF] aviators, at which there was an exhaustive discussion of physical tests, I was surprised to note how little stress was laid on the psychological element. It was admitted that even the most experienced examiner could not predict how a flier would behave in action, or whether he would cease to be useful after he had met with an accident, or had had a narrow escape from death.159

  This was hardly surprising, given that nearly a century later such things are still to some extent unpredictable, despite batteries of psychological tests and widely-held beliefs that the mechanics of the mind are today far better understood. At the time, RFC and RAF doctors had to rely on first impressions of each candidate as a suitable ‘character’. Their recorded assessments could then be matched up with those of the men’s first instructors – although in many cases it is hard to see how the wretched candidate was ever allowed to climb into an aircraft in the first place, even if he had been to the right sort of school:

  Remarks of M.O.

  Instructor’s Remarks

  7. All there – guts

  Good – plenty of guts