Grounded In Reality: The mythic World War I ace was just a flight of fancy Aviators have always been heroic figures in times of war. As many nations prepare to mark the outbreak of the Great War one hundred years ago and with many senior officers in the RAF and USAAF during World War II shrouded in its past, the most romantic figure of all to emerge from aerial combat myth and legend still is the World War I flying ace. Glorified by government propaganda desperate for heroes during the actual fighting, and worshipped in books and films for decades after the war ended in 1918, these pioneer flying warriors came to be viewed as 20th century incarnations of the noble knights of King Arthurs Round Table: gallant young champions in helmets, goggles, leather jackets, riding boots and white silk scarves who flung their doughty biplanes into the sky to engage the foe in gentlemanly if deadly tournament combat, returning every night to toast their fallen comrades with champagne and kiss the hands of blushing mademoiselles and frauleins. My God, its murder! It just wasnt so. The World War I aviators biggest foe was not the Hun in the sun or his Allied counterpart, but the dangers presented by the primitive aircraft of the era and his own incompetence. In Britain, more than half of all those who volunteered as pilots - 8,000 out of 14,000 - died in training accidents before they had even reached their squadrons in France. Fully 60 percent of the flying casualties came from training accidents. As was noted by actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who starred in the first Dawn Patrol movie, When those primitive planes with their rudimentary wings lost power, they dropped like bricks. Young men were sent into action after only a few hours of instruction and practice in these crates. The air war was such a meat grinder that the need for replacement pilots was constant and desperate. Fourteen hours!, British author and pilot Cecil Lewis wrote of the training period in 1916. Its absolutely disgraceful to send pilots ... with so little flying. My God, its murder! Once over the Western Front, of course, their chances of an early and terrible death increased dramatically. For all the apparent chivalry of combat in the clouds - and they did adhere to a gentlemanly code of honour - the knights of the air ran appalling risks. Pilots could hope only for a quick death. There was no romance about it. The best way to kill someone is the bullet to the back of the head before they even knew you were coming. All dreaded burning alive as their blazing planes spun towards the earth. On 21 July 1917, Captain Edward C. Mick Mannock of No. 74 Squadron RFC watched in horror as well-liked squadron member 2nd Lieutenant F.W. Rook plummeted to earth in flames after being attacked by Oberleutnant Adolf Ritter von Tutschek of Jasta 12. The event had a profound effect on the 30-year-old ace pilot who had amassed 51 air victories by 17 June 1918 and was known for the ruthless hatred of his German adversaries, delighting in burning them to death. His squadron friend Lieutenant William McScotch Maclanachan remembered that Mannock later came into his hut, speaking about what was to become an obsession with him. Thats the way theyre going to get me in the end - flames and finish, Mannock said with tears in his eyes. Then, he explained why he had started to carry his service revolver with him on flights, to finish myself as soon as I see the first sign of flames. Our unknown air heroes But the British public who hailed these pilots as heroes, would probably never have known about their brave deeds had it not been for a vigorous campaign by The Daily Mail. Prior to the campaign, British aces were kept anonymous by the War Department and referred to only by monikers such as Captain X and Lieutenant Y. Such secrecy had been decreed by Whitehall desk warriors reluctant to fete them as true British heroes. From the outbreak of the conflict in 1914, the War Department took the view that singling out high-scoring aces would be bad for morale. Bad for the pilots themselves, who might get big-headed and careless, and bad for their less high-scoring comrades who had become envious of the aces. Whitehall took the view that any enemy aircraft downed by the RFC were the result of a team effort, and that no individual should be singled out for special praise. The Germans, however, had no such inhibitions about glorifying their heroes. The exploits of their aces - men such as The Red Baron, Werner Voss and Max Immelmann - were trumpeted far and wide by official propaganda. They were worshipped like film stars by women and adoring schoolchildren. And they were positively encouraged to compete with each other to achieve as many victories as possible. Things began to change in Britain, however, when proprietor of The Daily Mail Lord Northcliffe was placed in charge of propaganda by Britains wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Northcliffe saw Britain was missing a trick by not praising its air aces and launched a campaign insisting they should be placed in the limelight. Under the headline Our Unknown Air Heroes, The Daily Mail asked on 3 January 1918: Why an Englishman whose hobby is bringing down Huns in braces and trios between luncheon and tea ... should have to wait and be killed before a grateful nation waiting to acclaim him could even learn his name? The campaign soon bore fruit. The War Department had second thoughts within days of the articles publication, executed a smart U-turn, and reversed its earlier hush-hush policy. On 7 January 1918, The Daily Mail splashed a story hailing a certain Captain McCudden and printed a picture of the handsome young aviator for the public to admire. But McCudden was a reluctant celebrity. He wrote to his sister asking whether she had read all the bosh in the paper and worried that the publicity would make him unpopular with his RFC comrades. Early military engines lead to brandy and silk scarves for pilots There was nothing at all gallant or romantic about chronic diarrhoea, a pernicious malady that afflicted virtually all Great War aviators because they flew enveloped in the fumes of the principal engine lubricant of the time: castor oil. To dull its effect, they drank copious amounts of brandy and whiskey, often mixed with milk, which also helped them withstand the intense cold aloft and their own constant and palpable fear. The imperfect combustion of any engine is not equalled by that of a rotary. The castor oil, being the only oil of the time that was no soluble in petroleum fuel, was spewed out into the atmosphere. As with most developments in the early stages this actually moved the problem to another location, the pilot. It would be but a short time before the whole of the slipstream area of the aircraft would be well coated with castor oil. The pilot would be soaking up oil at a fairly rapid rate as well. There are many stories about the laxative property and its effect on the pilots behind an engine that just kept on spewing out castor oil (burnt and unburnt). The first line of defence was a silk scarf to wipe it from their faces and goggles - a far cry from the dashing attire of the men in their flying machines that were hardly worn for style. However for the medicinal effects of castor oil the pilots would carry flask of Blackberry Brandy to stop things from loosening up to much. Although it is debatable if the cowling over the engine was put there for aerodynamics or to divert oil away from the pilot and under the aircraft. No parachutes If pilots did manage to keep their aircraft aloft long enough to get hit by the enemy, and the engine caught fire, they had no choice but to wave goodbye and die by burning or leaping to their death. The US Senate, in tandem with other Allied governmental bodies, banned the use of parachutes for fear that cowardly pilots might too quickly abandon valuable aircraft, yet America ended the war with a surplus of thousands of aircraft that had never even been shipped overseas. The Germans, who recognised that the value lay in experienced pilots, not their planes, were the only power to widely employ parachutes and then only toward the end of the war. The question of supplying pilots of the RFC with parachutes was raised several times at staff level from 1915 to 1917, but the general view remained that possession of a parachute might impair a pilots nerve when in difficulties so that he would make improper use of his parachute. When asked if he wished the experiments with dummy ballast on parachutes to continue, General Officer Commanding the RFC General Sir David Henderson scrawled on the memo No, certainly not! General R. M. Groves held the view that smashed aircraft generally fall with such velocity that there would hardly the time to think about the parachute. One of the notable exceptions was General C. A. H. Longcroft, commander of the 3rd Brigade RFC in France. A pilot himself, he wrote, I and my pilots keenly desire parachutes and recommend the Calthrop method of fitting the pack to the top of the fuselage. All was to no avail, however, the official reply being, This will impose a dangerous strain on the pilot. One might ask - more dangerous than being killed? The reluctance of Allied commanders to encourage the intensive development and universal use of such life-saving equipment provides a very serious indictment indeed. Until 1917, the only parachutes regularly issued in the aerial services were those issued to the balloon observers and some bomber crews. As one commentator wrote, In those days there were no closed cockpits in aircraft, no heating, no parachutes and no self-sealing fuel tanks. Senior officers who believed themselves to be experts despite having no flying experience whatsoever judged that the large size of the parachute and its weight, about 15 kg, prohibited a pilot from clearing the aircraft with its naked wires and struts sufficiently to avoid the parachute fouling up. This is supported by a clip from the video Fighter Aces, where a photographer filmed a pilot falling from his plane trailing a large, only partially opened, parachute. However, a month or two of research would undoubtedly have resulted in a compact seat pack like the one that was developed in Germany some time in 1916 and perfected by the United States in late 1918. In 1915, however, the lack of the lifesaving canopy of silk caused the deaths of hundreds of airmen. Ace of Aces One of the least known Canadian air aces of World War I is Major Raymond Collishaw, who enlisted in the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), qualifying as a pilot in January 1916. After eight months flying naval patrols along the English Channel, he was sent to France for combat duty over Western Front trenches. He quickly scored air victories at No. 3. and No. 10 Naval Squadrons. His aggressive, risk-taking flying often resulted in damage to his own aircraft and a number of crashes. He was, however, rarely injured. Although British commanders discouraged pilots from painting aircraft, Collishaw and his fellow pilots at the latter squadron painted their five Sopwith Triplanes midnight black and called themselves the All-Black Flight, a name later simplified to the Black Flight. Each plane was given a name: Black Maria, Black Roger, Black Death, Black Sheep, and Black Prince. Collishaw finished the Great War at age 25 with an official record of 60 aerial victories - the highest scoring RNAS ace, the sixth best record in the world, the highest scoring ace to fly the Sopwith Triplane and the first pilot to claim six victories in one day. Among Canadian aces, Collishaw was ranked second to Canadian fellow pilot Major William Avery Bishop, the Empires highest scoring ace. However, there has been a continuing debate over whether Collishaws victories had been understated, due to the RNAS receiving less credit than the armys Royal Flying Corps and an inter-service rivalry that existed at senior level between the RNAS and the armys Royal Flying Corps until their amalgamation in April 1918 into the Royal Air Force. In 1989, British researcher Timothy Graves concluded there is evidence to suggest that Collishaw took down up to 81 enemy aircraft, much higher than his official victory score. Graves attributes some of the difference to the rivalry between the two air services of the Royal Flying Corps and the RNAS. Graves found that of Bishops 72 victories, only 13 were witnessed by other pilots; on the other hand, 60 of Collishaws wartime aerial kills were witnessed. Graves also observed that if both Bishop and Collishaw were credited with all the victories they claimed, the final score would be 81.5 for Collishaw and 74.5 for Bishop, which would place Collishaw at the top of World War I flying aces, ahead of the Red Baron, Freiherr Manfred von Richthoven.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 09:33:46 +0000
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