Wings Read online

  The RFC was tolerant of unconventionality, but Ball still struck his fellow airmen as odd. At his first base at Savy Aubigny, north-west of Arras, he didn’t like the look of the billet allotted to him in the village and instead had a bell tent erected at the edge of the airfield, which as well as suiting him better also meant that ‘if ever a Hun comes I shall always be on the good work at once’. Later the tent was replaced by a hut. Ball had the ground next to it dug up and turned into a kitchen garden and asked his family to send seeds for marrows, lettuce, carrots, mustard cress and cucumber, as well as some flowers. It was an inconvenient two miles from the mess, but that did not bother Ball.4

  He preferred to spend his evenings with his violin, which he sometimes played after dinner, walking round and round a flaming red magnesium flare. A fellow pilot, Roderic Hill, described Ball sitting brooding outside his hut, listening to his gramophone. ‘He had but one idea: that was to kill as many Huns as possible, and he gave effect to it with a swiftness and certainty that seemed to most of us uncanny. He nearly always went out alone, in fact he would not let anyone else fly with him and was intolerant of proffered assistance.’5

  For all his oddness Ball was respected. A young pilot from New Zealand, Keith Caldwell, saw him as ‘a hero . . . and he looked the part, too: young, alert, ruddy complexion, dark hair and eyes. He was supposed to be a “loner”, but we found him friendly . . . we felt that it could only be a matter of time before he “bought it”, as he was shot about so often.’6

  In his first eleven weeks in France Ball flew at least forty-three operational sorties and witnessed daily the deaths of friends and enemies. It is hardly surprising that the adolescent optimism soon fades from his correspondence and darkness creeps in. Only nine days after describing his test flight he admitted in a letter to his sister Lois and brother Cyril that his mind was ‘full of poo-poo thoughts. I have just lost such a dear old pal, Captain Lucas. He was brought down by a Fokker last night about 5 p.m.’7 By the middle of July, after a frantic few days of combats, Ball could take no more: ‘The day before yesterday we had a big day,’ he wrote to his father. ‘At night I was feeling very rotten, and my nerves were poo-poo. Naturally I cannot keep on for ever, so at night I went to see the CO and asked him if I could have a short rest.’ The request was granted, but after a short respite Ball was back again and by the end of August he was yearning for home. ‘I do so want to leave all this beastly killing for a time,’ he sighed in a letter.

  In October he was sent back to England to rest before moving on to a new post as an instructor. He was already a public name, with thirty-one victories to his name, the MC, DSO and bar. In the search for positive propaganda about the war, the ban on promoting aces was abandoned and Prime Minister Lloyd George invited Ball to breakfast. However, the peace Ball had yearned for in France soon bored him. He agitated to go back and in February 1917 he was posted to 56 Squadron, which was being formed as an elite unit equipped with the new Hispano-Suiza-powered SE5 fighters which could fly at 130 mph and climb to 10,000 feet in ten minutes. During the wait Ball got engaged to an eighteen-year-old florist called Flora Young, who he met when a friend brought her to the aerodrome. Ball had suggested a flip in his plane and she gamely agreed.

  In April 1917 the squadron went to France. It numbered eighteen aircraft, arranged in three flights, and Ball was given command of one of them. This new responsibility meant that his lone-wolf tactics would be restricted. They were arriving at a time when the RFC was in trouble. It was ‘Bloody April’. The German Albatroses had gained a deadly advantage and Manfred von Richtofen lorded it over the skies. He had already achieved a dark celebrity – as the Red Baron to the British, Le Diable Rouge to the French and Der Rote Kampfflieger (The Red War Flier) to his applauding countrymen, who read his own accounts of his exploits in a vainglorious but remarkably revealing autobiography.

  Fundamental changes were in progress on the Western Front. Faced with the stalemate on the ground, the Germans had switched strategy. They were now putting their faith in starving the Allies into submission by using unrestricted submarine warfare – declared as policy in 1 February 1917 – to cut the enemy’s Atlantic trade routes. The land forces, meanwhile, fell back to a line of formidable natural and man-made defences, between Arras and the Aisne, onto which they hoped to draw the British and French armies and bleed them white.

  In the spring of 1917 the Allies moved into the ceded ground and prepared for what they hoped was a final breakthrough. The Spring Offensive bore the name of the man who planned it, the French general Robert Nivelle, and the RFC was expected to support it to the utmost. It would be a costly undertaking, as everyone from Trenchard downwards knew. They had aircraft in quantity – more than the German squadrons could muster – but this advantage was more than cancelled out by their poor overall quality. The Germans had a new improved Albatros – the D.III. They were also better organized. In October 1916 their air force was given institutional coherence with the foundation of the Deutschen Luftstreitkräfte (‘German Air Force’), with its own commander and staff. At a tactical level, fighter units were now formed into Jagdstaffeln or ‘Jastas’, fourteen aircraft units which operated with devastating efficiency. The most feared was Jasta 11, commanded by Richtofen.

  As preparations for the latest big push warmed up, Trenchard’s policy of aggression no matter what the odds ensured that the RFC was flung forcefully into battle. He accepted that losses would be high, and so it turned out. Ten squadrons, with 365 aircraft, took part in the Battle of Arras, which began on 9 April 1917. By the end, 245 aeroplanes had been destroyed, 211 aircrew were dead or missing, and another 108 were prisoners of war. This massacre went down in history as ‘Bloody April’. The Germans had suffered too, with 119 machines shot down. But even when set against the routine carnage of the conflict, these losses seemed unacceptable. The war in the air appeared to be matching the attritional slog on the ground and many wondered whether the sacrifices were worth it.

  It was in this period that the RFC came closest to defeat on the Western Front. It was saved by another shift in technological advantage. In the following months Bristol Fighters and Sopwith Camels – difficult to handle but superbly manoeuvrable – began to arrive on the squadrons. Here at last were aeroplanes that could outfly and outshoot the Albatroses. The crisis of April passed and the tide turned towards increasing Allied dominance of the air.

  The bigger picture was of little concern to Ball. In his letters to Flora he revealed that he had set himself a target: he wanted to pass the record set by Boelcke, who had knocked down forty planes by the time he died. Ball did indeed beat that tally, but he never made it back to his fiancée. At 5.30 p.m. on Monday, 7 May 1917 he set off with ten other SE5s from 56 Squadron, heading for the skies over Arras in an effort to tempt Richtofen and his men into action. Cecil Lewis, who was with him, described the chocolate-coloured fighters flying into ‘threatening masses of cumulus cloud, majestic skyscapes, solid-looking as snow mountains, fraught with caves and valleys, rifts and ravines’.

  Then the Germans they were looking for appeared, led not by the Red Baron but by his brother Lothar von Richtofen. A swirling dogfight developed. Lewis saw Ball disappear into a cloud. A little later German officers on the ground saw Ball’s aeroplane emerge from the cloud, upside down, trailing black smoke. It smashed into a low sloping field. When the officers reached the wreckage a young woman from the village had already pulled Ball clear. There were no marks on his fresh features, but he was dead. Lothar seized the credit for downing him, but the claim was never accepted. Like many aces of this and the following war, the precise details of how Ball met his end have never been conclusively established.

  After the carnage of Bloody April, Ball’s death further depressed morale. ‘The mess was very quiet that night,’ wrote Cecil Lewis. They held a sing-song in a barn to try and cheer themselves up. A band played the hits of the time – ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’, ‘Way Down Upon the Swanee River’,
‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Then Lewis performed Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’, which ends: ‘Glad did I live and gladly die, / and I laid me down with a will.’

  Ball’s brief existence had been strange and disconnected, warped by an appalling routine of daily risk and death, reaching his end before he had time to form mature feelings and thoughts. At least it was clean. Despite the chivalric pretentions, death in the air was no less gruesome than the ends met by the ground troops whom the airmen pitied. Oswald Boelcke accepted that his life would terminate violently and he only wondered whether it would be ‘feucht oder getrocknet’: ‘wet or dry’. Wet meant a crash. Dry meant being consumed by flames.

  The appalling reality was spelled out by a German airman, Hans Schroder, describing an incident that took place in July 1917. As a counter to the notion that air fighting was somehow less gruesome than the terrestrial struggle it is worth recounting in full. Schroder was driving past the wreck of a British aeroplane that had just been shot down when ‘it exploded in front of my window and burst into flames. The burning petrol greedily consumed the unlucky pilot, whose face was charred; his breeches were burnt away at the thighs, and the roasting flesh sizzled in the heat. From all sides came men with buckets intending to throw water on the blaze.’

  Just then a car drew up full of airmen, including Schroder’s friend Klein, who had scored the victory. He was exultant. In the fight that had just finished he had bested his opponent, who had signalled that he was going to land, then at the last moment had ‘pulled his nose up and put at least twenty bullets into my machine’. Klein hardened his heart. After that ‘there was no mercy for him. We buzzed round and round . . . at a height of fifty metres, like two dogs chasing one another. He had no notion where he was, but he pulled his machine up, and I zoomed after him.’ After putting a burst into him, Klein watched his opponent ‘go down by one wing and crash by Wevelghem’. There were no regrets. Klein judged him ‘a bad lot. That sort spoils the chivalry one expects in flying. He deserved his fate.’

  And what a fate it was. Schroder watched in horrified fascination as the blaze died down gradually. There was ‘a hiss from the burnt thighs when the spectators emptied their buckets of water on the body. There was a ghastly smell of grilled ham, but the legs below the knees were hardly touched by the fire. The fine new laced boots reaching almost to the knees proclaimed that this was the body of a human being who only a little while ago had been full of the warm life that pulsated in all our bodies.’

  When he returned to his quarters that night he found the splendid boots awaiting him and two bottles of Bols liqueur in his overcoat pockets, gifts from his batman, who had scavenged them from the wreck. The boots carried ‘an odour of smoked bacon’ and he shoved them quickly outside. The Bols he drank. Its presence in the aircraft gives us an idea of how airmen dealt with the constant, hovering attendance of death.8

  It was a fate like this that haunted all pilots and none more so than Mick Mannock. Mannock had been inspired to transfer from the Royal Engineers to the RFC after hearing and reading of the exploits of Albert Ball. Both men shared the same dedication and ruthlessness, both enjoyed playing the violin. Otherwise their characters and backgrounds were strongly contrasted. Mannock was already twenty-seven by the time he arrived at the main RFC depot in St Omer. He had a rough upbringing. His father was a violent, hard-drinking NCO in the Inniskilling Dragoons, who abandoned his family when Mick was twelve, leaving his wife Julie to bring up two sons and two daughters in poverty in Canterbury.

  Mannock left school at fourteen to become a clerk in the local office of the National Telephone Company, but soon graduated to a technical job checking the lines. His experiences made him a socialist and an admirer of Keir Hardie, and Mannock would later enjoy alarming his middle-class brother officers with his views on class and privilege. When the war came he was working as a foreman for a cable-laying company in Turkey and had to be freed from internment by the Red Cross before he could join up.

  Mannock arrived on 40 Squadron in the late spring of 1917 at the height of the Albatros ascendancy. He survived the first, desperately dangerous weeks, learning his craft quickly and on 7 June, while flying as an escort on a bombing mission to Lille, he shot down his first aeroplane.

  ‘My man gave me an easy mark,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I was only ten yards away from him – on top, so I couldn’t miss! A beautifully coloured insect he was – red, green, blue and yellow. I let him have sixty rounds . . . there wasn’t much left of him. I saw him go spinning and slipping down from fourteen thousand. Rough luck, but it’s war, and they’re Huns.’9 It was the start of a sequence that would end with an astounding seventy-three victories.

  If Ball was a lone wolf, Mannock was a pack leader. As a flight commander with 74 Squadron and as CO of 84 Squadron, he instilled in his men the need for teamwork and training as well as constant caution and vigilance. ‘Always above, seldom on the same level and never underneath’ was his motto.

  But he was also almost manically determined, persisting with his attacks until he was certain his man had gone down. When it came to a kill, Mannock suffered the same emotional confusion that Hawker had experienced. After downing an Albatros whose pilot put up a good fight, he wrote in his diary that he was ‘very pleased that I did not kill him’. On 5 September 1917 he attacked a DFW biplane over Avion, which ‘went down in flames, pieces of wing and tail, etc., dropping away from the wreck. It was a horrible sight and made me feel sick.’10 On another occasion, after destroying four enemy aircraft in the space of twenty-four hours, he ‘bounced into the mess shouting: “All tickets please! Please pass right down the car. Flamerinoes – four! Sizzle-sizzle wonk!”’

  It seemed to be a case of making light of what he most feared, and he carried a pistol with which to shoot himself if he ever became a ‘flamerino’. On leave in London in June 1918 Mannock went down with influenza and spent several days in bed at the RFC club, unable to sleep because of the nightmares of burning aircraft that filled his head when he closed his eyes. He visited friends in Northamptonshire, who were shocked by his appearance and manner. When he talked about his experiences he subsided into tears and said he wanted to die.

  Mannock went back to France as commander of 85 Squadron. On 25 July he spent much of the day with his friend Ira Jones, who wrote in his diary: ‘Had lunch, tea and dinner with Mick. I can’t make out whether he has got nerves or not. One minute he’s full out. The next, he gives the impression of being morbid and keeps bringing up his pet subject of being shot down in flames. I told him I had got a two-seater in flames on patrol this morning before breakfast. “Could you hear the sod scream?” he asked with a sour smile. “One day they’ll get you like that, my lad. You are getting careless. Don’t forget to blow your brains out.” Everyone roared with laughter.’11

  The following day he took off at dawn with a greenhorn pilot, Lieutenant Donald Inglis, who had yet to shoot anything down, to show him how it was done. They ran into a two-seater over the German lines. Mannock began shooting, apparently killing the observer, and left the coup de grâce to his pupil, who set the aeroplane on fire. Instead of following his own rules, which advised climbing away immediately after a kill, Mannock then swooped to examine their victim.

  Inglis followed his leader as he ‘made a couple of circles around the burning wreckage and then made for home. I saw Mick start to kick his rudder, then I saw a flame come out of his machine; it got bigger and bigger. Mick was no longer kicking his rudder. His nose dropped slightly and he went into a slow right-hand turn and he hit the ground in a burst of flame. I circled at about twenty feet, but could not see him and as things were getting hot made for home . . . Poor Mick . . . the bloody bastards had shot my Major down in flames.’12 Once again the exact cause of an ace’s death was a mystery. It is not known where the shots that downed him came from and his body was never recovered.

  So even great skill was no protection from the attentions of the Grim Reaper. It was no wonde
r that the fliers believed so much in the power of luck. Superstition was rife and rational men followed obsessive lucky routines and reverenced lucky charms. Authority recognized their importance and made generous accommodations. Hubert Griffith, a twenty-year-old aspiring writer who joined 15 Squadron from his yeomanry regiment, told a story of how ‘one evening, in some mess skirmish or other, I had broken a ring that I used to wear. It was a Russian-silver peasant ring of no negotiable value whatsoever; but I had had it throughout the war, it had seen me through a winter in the trenches, I had flown with it and had survived a disastrous flying crash and other eventualities and I had come, rightly or wrongly, to regard it as an omen of good luck. I had gone straight to the Squadron Commander and had said that I didn’t want to be on the flying programme next day till after the ring had been mended by the squadron workshops. He had agreed in full seriousness to this grotesque proposition.’

  It would never have happened in the army. As Griffith pointed out, ‘if an infantry subaltern had gone to his Colonel and said, “Colonel, Colonel, I don’t want to go up the line today because one of the eyes of my teddy bear mascot has fallen out,” he would not necessarily have been charged with cowardice, but would merely have been certified as a lunatic.’13

  The RFC’s accommodating attitude reflected the fact that flying was new and different. The old rules and attitudes did not always fit the new circumstances and realities. It was also, perhaps, a recognition of the fact that the men now fighting the air war were not as conformist – or naturally obedient – as their terrestrial counterparts. By the time Griffith arrived on his squadron the social composition of the RFC had changed. At the start it had been composed of adventurous young soldiers drawn from the usual social strata that supplied the ranks of the officer class. When Griffith joined 15 Squadron on attachment in 1917 he was struck by the ‘infinite individuality and variety, the cosmopolitanism of the Flying Corps’. He found that the ‘average types of young English public-school boy . . . were on the whole in the minority’. The rich social mixture included ‘types who had been promoted from the ranks . . . Canadians, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, and pilots and observers from every other part of the Empire’. Among them were ‘a man who had been a cow-puncher in the Argentine, and a Maltese-born pilot, a cross-country jockey who was later to win the Grand National,3 a man who had had half an ear shot off in some American brawl and a little New Zealand observer who used to read Homer in the original Greek.’14