Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  It was a repeat of the RFC’s proposal for a get-together in Macedonia, the sort of gesture soldiers tend to make only when they suspect they have the upper hand. Thereafter the decline in conditions for their German opponents in Iraq accelerated. The Staffel’s few remaining aircraft managed to photograph evidence that the British Army was preparing for an attack on Baghdad in the shape of new encampments beside the Tigris and increased steamer traffic on the river. Unfortunately, the heat tended to melt the chemicals on the photographic plates, which were anyway in short supply, and the results of these flights were not always commensurate with the risks. Captain Schüz’s retrospective narrative began to show signs of sheer frustration:

  One request for more aeroplanes and the necessaries of war followed on another; but it was a long way to Constantinople. In vain did the handful of Germans endeavour to accelerate the arrival of supplies. All such demands were rendered nugatory by that peculiarity of the Turkish temperament about which we have already complained. If it should be Allah’s will that we should be victorious, then victory shall be ours, even without new aeroplanes; but if Allah hath ordained otherwise, then nothing can help us. Kismet! All is fate!211

  By the time the British finally attacked towards Baghdad in December 1916 the remaining German aircraft were barely airworthy. Their wings were warped, instruments were missing from the cockpits and the wheels no longer had tyres, the rubber having perished. The aircraft had to take off and land on wheels whose rims were bound with wired-on rags. (It would not be long before rubber was in such short supply back home in Germany that training aircraft were shod with wooden wheels.) Baghdad at last fell to the British and after a hectic retreat the Turkish army reassembled in Mosul only sixty or seventy miles from the Turkish border. Captain Schüz went back to Germany to demand fresh supplies in person and returned in April 1917 with nine new scouts:

  In order to confound the English by the unexpected appearance of a new type, I covered the 300-odd miles from the railhead of the Baghdad line to the front in one day. But even this rapidity was of no use. On the same day an English machine appeared at a great height and dropped a tin of cigarettes with the following message: ‘The British airmen send their compliments to Captain S. and are pleased to welcome him back to Mesopotamia. We shall be happy to offer him a warm reception in the air. We enclose a tin of English cigarettes and will send him a Baghdad melon when they are in season. Au revoir. Our compliments to the other German airmen. The Royal Flying Corps.’ The English secret service had again done a brilliant piece of work.212

  For the next sixteen months the Germans and the Turks were steadily pushed back as British and Indian troops moved northwards, having already taken Gaza and Beersheba on the way to Jerusalem. They were supported by RFC squadrons under their GOC Palestine, General Sefton Brancker, the man who in 1914 had flown a B.E.2c hands-off from Farnborough to Netheravon. (Brancker was to survive the war only to die in the crash of the R.101 airship in 1930. He was last heard from via a spirit medium in a séance, describing himself as ‘rather busy’.)

  In December 1917 General Allenby secured Jerusalem after several battles. The following September he finally defeated the Ottoman army at the Battle of Megiddo and was free to march into Damascus. After making heroic efforts in the air, the remaining German Staffeln retreated to Aleppo and thence flew northwards in stages across Turkey to Samsun on the Black Sea. By then they knew the war was lost and their efforts in the blazing sands of the Middle East had been in vain. News was coming in from Germany of increasing unrest and mutiny there as, inspired by the Russian Revolution and utter disenchantment with the men who had led the country to ruin and defeat, Communists and anarchists fomented social unrest. It must have been a bitter moment for the airmen on the shores of the Black Sea, looking back on the hundreds of hours they had spent in the air, wobbling in the thermals above the endless camel-coloured landscapes of rock and sand and dried-up wadis beneath which they had left so many of their former comrades. Retrospectively, the desert must have seemed to them as Mount Everest does today: a locus of pointless travail. At the same time they were no doubt looking forward with a mixture of relief and apprehension to being back in a changed Germany they might scarcely even recognise as their homeland.

  They certainly had no monopoly of bitterness. Prince Feisal, Lawrence and his victorious Sherifian forces were in Damascus when Allenby arrived and had already announced a provisional Arab government. Lawrence had to translate for the Prince as Allenby informed him that this might not be recognised. Seventeen months later, shortly after he had proclaimed the independent Kingdom of Syria, Feisal was abruptly told that this was null and void and Damascus was to be handed over to the French. Sykes–Picot had triumphed. By then Lawrence was back in Britain on leave, sick with forebodings of the betrayal he knew was in store for his Arab comrades.

  *

  That story had a curious sequel. In 1920, and with some difficulty after the wholesale demobilisations that followed the war, W. E. Johns had managed to get himself reinstated on the RAF’s active list. With the recently established rank of Flying Officer he was posted to the deskbound job of an Inspector of Recruiting in London. The new downsizing RAF was keen to reinvent itself with fresh volunteers, and F/O Johns was under strict instructions not to enlist former officers of the RFC, RNAS or RAF. He was based in offices in Covent Garden and was deeply affected by the pathetic sight of jobless ex-servicemen living rough in the city. One day a former pilot from 110 Squadron, who had been in Landshut POW camp in Germany with him, walked into the office, having survived a week of sleeping in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields with a single penny bun to eat each day. Forbidden to wangle him a job, Johns could only give the man some of his own cash and send him away. The anger and disgust he felt at the way neglect was being lavished on these men who had risked their lives for their country came out in a story he later wrote about an ex-RFC pilot who decided to live a postwar life of crime in order to give the proceeds to needy ex-servicemen. So much for Lloyd George’s ringing promise of ‘a land fit for heroes to live in’. Johns’s mistrust and contempt for politicians became yet more deeply ingrained.

  One day in August 1922 a potential recruit walked in to whom Johns took an instant dislike. He was thin, pale-faced and somehow arrogant. He gave his name as Ross but failed to provide a birth certificate so Johns sent him away to get the necessary documents and meanwhile contacted Somerset House. This check confirmed that the man’s identity was false, so when Ross returned Johns quite rightly rejected him. He came back within an hour in the company of a messenger from the Air Ministry bearing an order for Ross’s enlistment. Reluctantly, Johns sent him upstairs for the obligatory medical inspection, but one look at the scars on Ross’s back was enough for the doctor to turn the man down on medical grounds. He was all too plainly not of the calibre needed for the rejuvenated RAF, since apart from anything else he was already thirty-four. This time the Air Ministry sent its own doctor to the Covent Garden depot to sign Ross’s medical form. Furious at this high-handed treatment, Johns complained to his own CO who simply told him that he had just rejected Lawrence of Arabia, so he might as well shut up if he wished to keep his job. There was nothing anybody could do. The Chief of Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard himself, had facilitated the whole process of smuggling Lawrence into the RAF disguised as Aircraftsman Ross, and that was that.213

  Johns never forgot this lesson in military realpolitik. Together with his wartime experiences it no doubt accounted for the deep scepticism of his later editorials in Popular Flying and elsewhere when commenting on official pronouncements by service chiefs and politicians. In some ways his belligerent advocacy for a properly prepared British air response to Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s had something in common with Noel Pemberton Billings’s denunciations and warnings in the House of Commons during the First World War. Though vastly different in character, both ex-pilots were unafraid of men in gold braid and had admirably clear vision and opinions
when it came to understanding air power and its consequences.

  12

  Postscript

  At the end of a book about the beginnings of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force a century ago it is impossible to prevent a valedictory note from sidling in. After 1918 a little over two decades of comparative decline would pass before the hastily expanded RAF reached its illustrious peak during the Second World War. There followed a further thirty-odd years when it remained the most charismatic of the nation’s three services in terms of public awareness and fascination. It was also at its military zenith in size, importance and the power it could wield – not to mention its annual budget. Its heyday arguably ran from the Battle of Britain in 1940 to the moment in 1969 when Royal Navy submarines took over the duty of delivering the UK’s nuclear deterrent in the Cold War, thereby rendering Britain’s remaining V-bomber force of Vulcans and Victors redundant as vehicles for Britain’s nuclear retaliation. Between those years the RAF achieved its pinnacle in terms of global reach, with squadrons stationed somewhere on every continent and Transport Command flights in the air twenty-four hours a day ferrying supplies and personnel to and from Britain’s military outposts all over the world.

  After 1969 the RAF’s story, like that of its sister services (and especially the Fleet Air Arm), became one of gradual shrinkage and ‘rationalisation’. Although various fighter and other squadrons were still stationed abroad in Germany and elsewhere, and although a new generation of fast jets had vastly increased firepower up to and including the delivery of nuclear weapons, it was difficult to overlook that Britain was struggling to afford them, just as it became progressively less clear exactly why it should. Missiles had already taken the place of aircraft in any likely scenario for nuclear war; and even though the USAF’s B-52s went on raining down conventional bombs on people’s heads in Indo-China for another couple of years, to onlookers it seemed an oddly dated and crude sort of warfare and, given that war’s final outcome, ineffective. In Britain, at any rate, there was no ignoring that the twin constraints of diminishing budgets and a less obvious role for its many aircraft were foreshadowing a much reduced future for the RAF.

  This process of shrinkage accelerated after the formal death of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991 and has inexorably continued until within today’s RAF there are pessimists who unattributably (and sotto voce) foresee the effective end of the service that has done so much to shape British – and world – history over the last hundred years. They believe the RAF today is experiencing what the cavalry went through in the First World War: a sense of its own impending obsolescence, much bolstered by a widespread lack of confidence in ever again getting serious government investment and support. The traditions, the trophies, the mess songs, the memories: all are gradually fading from view as the names of those men to whom they once meant everything appear on the Obituaries page of their squadron association’s newsletter. (Hurrah for the next man that dies!) Even the jaunty slang and studied understatement have been displaced by a grim defence-industry babble riddled with acronyms and transatlantic business jargon. Of course (they concede) the RAF will survive in a nominal sense as a rump force ‘flying’ drones, together with some military transports, a handful of AEW&C (airborne early warning and control) aircraft, the odd tanker, a few squadrons of fourth- and fifth-generation fast jets plus a scattering of helicopters. But it will never go back to being what it so gloriously was for those three decades at its apogee: an international byword for flair and competence. Having once displaced horses, the pilot is now himself being elbowed out by aerial robots as his service ineluctably heads for a ‘fully pilotless offensive capability’ – a change that will be welcomed in the corridors of Whitehall with champagne and cheers because of the massive savings, especially in personnel and pensions. Ironically, it is almost exactly what a former Minister of Aviation, Duncan Sandys, envisioned in his notorious cost-cutting White Paper of 1957, except at that time it was missiles rather than drones he was hoping would make aircraft redundant.

  This depressed argument is of course hotly repudiated by many defence experts who regard both the RAF and the pilot as irreplaceable. However, it does hinge on the undeniable fact that neither Britain nor its military any longer have the international political clout they once had. Any likely future call upon Britain’s armed forces will come from the treaty obligations the UK has with NATO – itself something of a Cold War fossil – and other allies, rather than from a call to arms as a truly independent instrument of Westminster’s will. Gone for ever are the days of Britain picking its own fight and off its own bat sending the RAF to dominate the airspace above a foreign battlefield. The world is no longer like that, and Britain certainly isn’t. There remains intact the one sacred obligation that falls to any Prime Minister: that of ensuring the defence of Britain’s shores. Yet even this sacred obligation comes with built-in leeway. As Sir Humphrey Appleby acutely pointed out in Yes, Prime Minister, ‘The purpose of our defence policy is to make people believe Britain is defended.’

  There is an irony in observing how history repeats itself. Once the first air war had been won Britain complacently allowed its aviation industry to decline, believing that the ‘war to end all wars’ removed any immediate urgency for developing more advanced aircraft. In effect, the hideous sacrifice of the Great War was rendered in vain from the moment Hitler’s re-arming of Germany began to infringe the clauses of the Versailles Treaty unopposed. In 2015, with its depleted armed forces and public opposition to war, Britain is once again showing many of the same ostrich-like signs: a blind faith in international treaties as if no-one ever broke them; an entirely understandable loathing of war as if that had ever prevented one; and a near-mystical belief that if the worst ever did happen Britain would once again muddle through as on the last two occasions when the nation was bombed and threatened.

  Plus ça change, and all that; but one definite advantage of today’s unmanned drones and vastly expensive modern technology is that at least there can never again be the wholesale wastage of aircrew in both training and battle that in the first air war seemed to be accepted without question by the military hierarchy. It shocks and baffles us still, viewing that crackling bonfire of young men a hundred years ago. Had their lives really no value? The answer in the actuarial sense is no, they hadn’t. No parent or wife was ever going to sue the government for negligence, stupidity or other culpability. It was wartime: the state could expend lives with impunity. No-one would ever be held personally responsible, still less in a legal or financial sense. If a teenager was sent into combat in an aircraft he was quite unqualified to fly and failed to return, his empty chair in the mess that night would by official decree be filled with his equally unqualified successor. If a drunken, burnt-out instructor crashed and killed his eighteen-year-old student it was either God’s will, the luck of the draw or hard cheese: you took your pick. The era of citizens’ rights still lay far in the future.

  Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the hundred-year gulf between that first air war and today’s Britain than this change in attitude. Wars are no longer popular. Prime ministers who nowadays blithely commit their armed forces to military adventurings abroad more from an abject desire to appease an ally than out of a primary duty to defend the realm risk paying for it at the ballot box. It is difficult enough even to write about war for readers who have no military experience and have known only a peace that has so far stretched uneasily for seventy years. It is still harder to do so at a time when (if the Daily Mail is to be believed) prevailing social attitudes can be so anti-military that sometimes servicemen and -women hardly dare wear their uniforms in public for fear of abuse and even violence. It is a contrast so immense with the Britain this writer grew up in, where an RAF uniform was a good deal more revered than an archbishop’s mitre, that it transcends any private emotional response and simply becomes a historical phenomenon.

  Nor is there an easy way of speaking about the gallantry and suffering tha
t took place on such an epic scale a century ago. As always, the currently alive are fully taken up with their own mortal problems. In addition there is the dead weight to overcome of war’s misrepresentation by newspapers, film and TV companies that are inevitably driven more by the quest for sales and ratings than for factual accuracy. Once war has been turned into entertainment, once nursery toys are sent into imaginary combat and PC game warriors take on the Red Baron from their armchairs, the men who actually did the fighting must die afresh. Those who were converted in an instant to rags of flesh and char on and above the fields of France and Flanders vanish behind the ritual humbug of ‘The Glorious Dead’ every bit as comprehensively as the men slain at Waterloo, who were piled into barges and brought home to be dug into the fields of Lincolnshire as fertiliser. No cenotaphs for them. Only those who have actually fought fully understand the nature of this deal; the rest of us can have no idea. Like everybody else, the war dead live on as individuals only to those who knew them personally. And when these, too, are gone they die the second death of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The To-Be-Forgotten’ and vanish into blank oblivion, as shall we all. In his 1936 memoir Sagittarius Rising the RFC pilot Cecil Lewis made a point of remembering his dead comrades. Of the friend who was blown to pieces in the air that day by a British artillery shell he wrote: ‘Pip is dead, twenty years dead, and I can still hear the lark over the guns, the flop and shuffle of our rubber-soled flying-boots on the dusty road; I can remember, set it down, that here on this page it may remain a moment longer than his brief mortality. For what? To make an epitaph, a little literary tombstone, for a young forgotten man.’214 When that was written Pip was not forgotten; he became so at the moment Lewis himself died in 1997.