Many high-ranking officers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War began their careers with the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in the First World War. One was the young officer who was to become Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir John Slessor. Most well known as a successful commander-in-chief of Coastal Command in 1943, and as the man responsible for demobilising the air force at the end of the Second World War, he became chief of the air staff at the beginning of the Cold War and V-bomber era. Between the wars he was a leading air-power strategist and had a narrow escape in the Quetta earthquake of 1936. Yet it nearly was not so. Born in India in 1897, the son of an officer in the Sherwood Foresters, Slessor suffered from polio as a child and was rejected by the RFC in 1914 as ‘totally unfit for any form of military service’.1 However, he was commissioned into the RFC on his eighteenth birthday, thanks to family connections.
There are four main sources of information about Slessor’s First World War service. The first is a substantial memoir, written in December 1918, about his time in Darfur in the Sudan and on the western front as a flight commander with 5 Squadron. This memoir demonstrates Slessor’s desire to record his experiences:
It is impossible under the present conditions to write any correct account of one’s period of service overseas. Short and somewhat infrequent spasms of leave are the only occasions when one can spare the time to write up a diary. The war is over now, of course, and it seems to emphasise rather the importance of putting some of one’s experiences and impressions on paper before lapse of time and the varied experiences of a crowded life make one forget. So all one can hope to do is to describe various disconnected experiences, in which the first person is bound to figure largely.2
The second source is a diary covering his first two and a half months with 5 Squadron, from 1 May to 16 July 1917. Although a relatively short period, with entries becoming progressively briefer, the diary is a valuable and immediate record of the RFC gradually recovering after ‘Bloody April’. Both of these sources are held at the RAF Museum, Hendon. The third source is Slessor’s 1969 memoir These Remain. This is an informal autobiography written a decade before his death in 1979, aged 82. The book was intended to provide ‘some passing interest and perhaps amusement to our grandsons and their generation’.3 The first few chapters see Slessor reflect on his time in the RFC and also remember comrades who did not survive. Finally, there is Slessor’s official autobiography, The Central Blue, published in 1956. This weighty tome only has one chapter and an appendix about the First World War. In the chapter he states: ‘I am not going to bore my readers with a detailed account of the very ordinary and, to others, uninteresting adventures of an undistinguished young officer.’4
As we have seen, there is a certain self-deprecating note when Slessor discusses his writings, but he writes all the same. Perhaps his experiences in the Second World War and as chief of the air staff overshadowed his memories of the First World War. Nonetheless, these four sources create a compelling picture of one young airman’s war, and this chapter will demonstrate that his formative experiences are not boring, not always ordinary, not uninteresting and not undistinguished.
Slessor’s first operational sortie came on 13 October 1915, while serving with 23 (Home Defence) Squadron. His engagement with Zeppelin L15 ended in failure and dense Thames fog. This operation is one of the few First World War stories included in The Central Blue, but appears for a very particular reason:
My first operational sortie came to an ignominious but painless end in the turnips by the edge of the stubble, at the cost of a wing tip, an aileron and one vee of the undercarriage … I suppose I can claim the distinction of being the first pilot ever to have intercepted an enemy aircraft over Great Britain. But I doubt whether an action has ever been fought by such inexperienced, if enthusiastic, amateurs in the air and behind the guns and lights, as on that night … That experiment was, however, the humble beginning of what was to grow into the great defensive organisation destined, 25 years later, to break the heart of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. As such, the story may have been worth the telling.5
Slessor then found himself posted to Egypt, guarding the Suez Canal with 17 Squadron. In the middle of April 1916, C Flight of 17 Squadron was sent, as part of the Western Frontier Force, to the border of Darfur province, to help quell a rebellion. This was a campaign of the type that the British Army had been fighting throughout the empire for many years, made more interesting because it happened during the First World War and because it brought aeroplanes into the colonial equation for the first time. Slessor’s memoir of his time in Darfur is extremely valuable, as it must be the longest and most detailed personal account we have of this obscure campaign.
The Darfur campaign had its origins in the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-Sudanese wars, and was exacerbated by the Ottoman Turks and the Senussi sect encouraging Ali Dinar, the ruler of Darfur, to rebel against the British. With customary detail, Slessor explains why the conflict broke out:
In September 1898, when the combined British and Egyptian Armies were almost within sight of the houses of Khartoum, and the Dervishes under the Khalifa Abdullahi were flocking out of Omdurman to give battle on the plains of Kerreri, one Ali Dinar, heir to the Kingdom of Darfur, who had for some time been with the Khalifa, foreseeing the probable end of the campaign, fled with a few followers through Kordofan into Darfur, where he re-established himself at El Fasher. When the Battle of Omdurman was over, and Abdullahi was fleeing for his life into Kordofan, Ali Dinar sent envoys to the Sirdar offering to govern Darfur for the Egyptian government and pay tribute of £500. His offer was accepted. For some considerable time before the outbreak of the European war, the Sultan Ali Dinar had been a source of anxiety to the authorities in Khartoum, and in 1914, influenced probably by the Senussi, a very powerful Mohammedan sect throughout Egypt and the Sahara, he openly announced his independence in sundry insolent letters to the Sirdar, and refused to pay his tribute. For 18 months he remained in passive antagonism, and the Egyptian government were too much occupied with the seriousness of the situation in Egypt to be able to afford either the money or the troops to reduce him. But he was becoming a very dangerous firebrand among the other chiefs in the Sudan, and finally at the repeated instigation of the Senussi he made preparations for actions against the loyal tribesmen, and announced his intention of invading Sudan territory and forming a general movement against the Sudan government. He publicly declared a jihad, and occupied the small town of Jebel el Hilla close to the Kordofan frontier, thus seeking to break down British rule in the Sudan while the grand Senussi was keeping us busy in the North, on the western frontiers of Egypt.6
C Flight consisted of four BE2 aircraft plus technical crew. They were there to support the rest of the Western Frontier Force, which included units from the Sudanese Camel Corps and infantry and the Egyptian infantry, by carrying out reconnaissance, dropping proclamations and bombing. Conditions in the desert were tough, particularly for such delicate aircraft. The distances covered in just getting across Sudan to the Darfur border were huge, and water sources few and far between. The Leyland lorries transporting part of the flight ‘were repeatedly sinking in over the axles and having to be dug out, the water in the radiators always boiling, and the heat of the sun so intense that it cracked … all the triplex glass windscreens of the Crossleys’.7 The rest of the transport was done by camel, which was generally much more reliable, although carrying the uprights of a Royal Aircraft Factory tent proved challenging: ‘We solved this particular difficulty by placing two camels, one in front of the other, and lashing the long iron poles one on each side of them.’8
Once settled near the border of Kordofan province and Darfur, the flight got into a routine of flying out to reconnoitre the surrounding area, learning to deal with the violent bumps caused by air pressure. Captain Edgar Bannatyne, who obviously impressed Slessor, commanded the flight: ‘I don’t think I ever met a man like Bannatyne, who is so frightfully keen and energetic, that no amount of flying in the worst bumps seems to tire him.’9 Slessor describes a fairly typical reconnaissance flight that took place on 19 May:
Bellamy was to have gone out, but he was sick all night, probably owing to the quantities of sand he had swallowed in the haboob [a violent and oppressive summer wind] the night before, so it fell to my lot to go out again. The objective was again Meleit where we were to land and get instructions. Bannatyne and I both went all the way, and found Hamer frantically clearing an aerodrome … with fire and with a company of Camel Corps who were hacking away the mimosa bushes with their gigantic knives. We landed there, with one tyre flat as usual. (One has to get accustomed to landing on one wheel, it is hopeless to try and protect the wheels, though we did try with Willesden canvas, but the thorns go smack through anything.) Colonel Kelly and Little were there, and Hamer with a beard looking a monstrous scoundrel. I left Bannatyne on the ground, talking things over with Kelly and went off down the Fasher road, but the country was absolutely destitute of any human being with the exception of the occasional goatherd, and we flew back to Hilla, arriving back at about 6000 feet and mightily impressing the [locals] thereby.10
Monday 22 May saw the beginning of the decisive actions that put down the rebellion and finally returned Darfur to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Outside the village of Beringia, the Darfur forces attacked the Western Frontier Force, who were arranged in an old-fashioned defensive square formation, in a very one-sided engagement. Slessor notes that ‘in spite of the withering fire from the machine guns, some of them succeeded in getting within 10 yards of the square’.11
The next day Slessor was involved in the taking of El Fasher, the capital of Darfur. He dropped the bomb that killed Ali Dinar’s camel from under him, and was himself wounded in the thigh. For this action he was awarded the Military Cross (MC). The Western Frontier Force only had one field hospital and very little anaesthetic. To remove the bullet, the senior officers decided to get him drunk on champagne and brandy. Years later he noted that he could trace his ‘lack of enthusiasm for champagne from that occasion’.12 He was then invalided home: ‘A little over five weeks later I was landed at Southampton as a cot-case in the hospital ship Delta, just in time to hear of the great British offensive on the Somme which had opened that morning — 1 July 1916. The news made my little adventures in Sinai and the Sudan seem pretty small potatoes.’13
After a period of convalescence and some time as an instructor, Slessor joined 5 Squadron as a flight commander at Savy on the western front at the start of May 1917; this was during the Battle of Arras and in the aftermath of what has become known as ‘Bloody April’, when the German Air Service took back the initiative with superior aircraft. By May, the RFC was beginning to introduce better machines, such as the RE8, SE.5a and Sopwith Camel, and 5 Squadron were in the process of transferring from BE2s to specialist reconnaissance and spotting RE8s. They were a corps squadron, which means they were attached to a particular army corps and engaged in keeping its infantry and artillery units informed of the enemy’s movements, supplied with photographs, and, in the case of the artillery, directing and observing their fire. They were not meant to fight, but often had to defend themselves.
The squadron came into its own under Major Eric Tyson, who joined just after Slessor. After Tyson’s death in March 1918, Slessor paid this touching tribute:
Tyson was an ideal squadron commander. He pulled the squadron up before he had been with it a week. He got in touch with the corps and established a firm liaison with the HA and counter battery office. He was a mine of energy and absolutely fearless himself and he got an absolute maximum of work out of the squadron with an absolute minimum of what is best described as hot air. It should be sufficient to say that by the end of the first month he was with us, no. 5 Squadron was recognised as the best squadron in the wing, and continued to turn out better results, particularly in the photography line, than one would have never believed possible when one considers the state it was in at the beginning of May.14
This quote sums up Slessor in many ways — knowledgeable and accurate in his work, he was also generous about those he worked with.
One of the closest relationships within an RFC squadron was between a pilot and his observer. They needed to work as a team — one flying the aeroplane, and the other keeping his eyes peeled for anything interesting — in order to carry out their missions as safely and effectively as possible. Slessor appears to have had an excellent relationship with his observer, Frederick Tymms: ‘I flew up the line with Tymms, late of the South Lancs, who was destined to become my observer for 5 months, and who was the finest observer and one of the stoutest fellows I have ever known.’15
Slessor’s writings provide many snapshots of their relationship, and this entry demonstrates how humour was used to deal with the constant strain of life on the western front:
I start up my engine suddenly nearly blowing out of his seat the excellent Tymms who is leaning out of his seat indulging in mild repartee with C Flight commander, who has already done his job for the day and is therefore amusing himself by ribald enquiries as to what sort of flower we like and have we any messages we would like sent to parents or loved ones. It is a form of amusement which appeals to people of small intelligence to stroll out to your machine when you are just leaving the ground on a stickyish job and murmur casually some suggestive sentence such as ‘Dear Mr … it is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you your son … etc.’16
Tymms went on to have an illustrious career in civil aviation. He was knighted in 1941 and died in 1987, aged 98.17
On 2 June, the squadron moved a few kilometres to Acq. The following day was Slessor’s twentieth birthday. Given his responsible role and experience, it is easy to forget his youth. One issue he kept noting in his diary was the inexperience of the new pilots sent to 5 Squadron:
30/5/17 Hedges destroyed another RE8 and returned to hospital. He will have to go now. Thank heaven.18
31/5/17 Russell, the new pilot instead of Hedges seems a good fellow, but I’m afraid as usual a rotten pilot. He did in his centre section today on his first effort.19
12/6/17 Our new pilot Harman seems a footling person, has only been in the army two months and lands very badly. We are trying a gadget for straightening the RE8 undercarriage, which he gave a pretty good test. The new observer, Harrison, seems a harmless youth.20
These new pilots could have a devastating impact on the more experienced men around them:
Two new pilots just rolled up. Not bad I think, but still not up to much. Splendid work, Tyson and Owen, Smart and Currie got MCs. Great binge in the mess … The new pilots are pretty bad, one got into a spin and nearly killed Stone … The other new pilot, Ashton, wrote off S683 in the morning. Stone with him again. I think his nerve has gone badly now. No wonder, he has had 5 bad crashes, all with new pilots.21
Despite continually changing personnel, one pilot stuck in Slessor’s memory for many years, even though initially he wrote quite brutally about him in his diary: ‘Pember is a rotten bad pilot, he does not seem to be able to land a machine once without breaking something. He charged the sheds this morning and twisted her round to avoid running into them, straining his cross bracing wires and undercarriage. He will have to go home if it happens again.’22 But in his 1969 memoir he devotes a whole chapter to Edward Pember, whom he calls ‘Porter’ in this account:
The first thing about Porter that struck one was his youth — he really was incredibly young. As a matter of fact I suppose he had only been born a year or so later than most of us. I was only just 20 but had an ops tour in the Middle East behind me and a little thin gold wound stripe on the sleeve of my maternity jacket, and thought myself the hell of an old soldier. And from the day Porter joined my flight, fresh from home just after the Battle of Vimy Ridge, I always felt somehow paternal about him — or perhaps it was more accurate to say I felt like a College Prefect towards a particularly defenceless and immature new boy. He was so eager and so inexperienced — so brave and so willing. Long before I felt he had had enough experience on quiet, cushy sorties to fit him for the real business, he was aching to get into battle. In appearance he was rather cherubic, with fair unruly hair, a wide smile and frank blue eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles — he was short-sighted and I can’t think how he had been passed for service as a pilot. His father was a very senior Don and he had been nicely brought up — an only child — in a quiet home in North Oxford. He was a gunner, but had quickly transferred to the RFC and this was his first experience of active service. And he was a very bad pilot. I think it was probably those eyes, but anyway he was really bad. I have often kicked myself since for not having had the moral courage to get him taken off flying. But I think it would have broken his heart. He broke several aeroplanes — it was always a rather nerve-wracking experience to watch him coming into land. I made him do a lot of practice flying without a passenger, took him up several times to show him how to land a R.E.8, and then gave him a few soft jobs with an experienced observer. There was one moment when I hardened my heart and told him that I was going to have him sent home; Porter’s jaw dropped, he stared at me in horror and his eyes actually filled with tears. Well — I mean, what could one do when that sort of thing happened? Anyway what I did was weaken and give him another chance. It might have been different in a single-seater squadron, but we had the RE8 and I should have had more consideration for the poor devils who had to go up with him.23
Somewhat inevitably, Pember met a tragic end aged 19, never able to take up the place awaiting him at Oxford University:
Later in the day 13 Squadron, on our right, rang up to say one of their chaps on patrol had seen an R.E.8 shot down in flames by a couple of Hun fighters — though they thought it was just inside the enemy line on Greenland Hill. And that evening we were told by Corps that the wreckage was in no-mans-land just south of Gavrelle, where the front line trenches were unusually far apart, and a stretcher party of the Rifle Brigade had brought in the bodies …
Next morning I set off in an old Crossley Tender, calling on the way at Corps HQ for guidance and advice to see if I could retrieve the lens [of the camera on the RE8]. I also wanted to bring back the bodies for burial at the little cemetery near the airfield.
Having lifted what was left of poor Porter and Morris reverently into the back of the tender, [I] drove sadly back home through the gathering dusk to our little airfield at Acq.24
For Slessor it appears that it was far easier to reveal his sadness at Pember’s — and others’ — plights after the war rather than during it, possibly because it was difficult to dwell on what was happening around him. In his 1969 memoir, Slessor attempted to comment impartially on these sentimental feelings about his fallen comrades, which had grown over the years: ‘I don’t know — perhaps people of my generation tend to be unduly sentimental about the friends of our distant youth, those golden young men who died in their thousands in the holocausts of 3rd Ypres and the Somme, and whose like their surviving contemporaries swear we shall never see again.’25 This memoir very much suggests that as Slessor got older his memories of the First World War were much less overshadowed by his later career.
Those who lived through both world wars had a lifetime of experiences, and the First World War certainly set the young Slessor up for a career that took in colonial policing, the Second World War and the Cold War. It is impossible to say exactly how much his service in the First World War influenced the rest of his time in the RAF, but his writings about that war provide an intimate picture of one young officer’s experiences, and a retired Marshal of the Royal Air Force’s reflections on them.
Notes
1 John Slessor, The Central Blue: Recollections and Reflections (London, Cassell, 1956), pp. 6–7.
2 Memoir: John Slessor, c1918, B373, RAF Museum, Hendon, London (hereafter RAFM).
3 John Slessor, These Remain: A Personal Anthology: Memories of Flying, Fighting and Field Sports (London, Michael Joseph, 1969), p. 165.
4 Slessor, The Central Blue, op. cit., pp. 15–16.
5 Ibid., p. 14.
6 Memoir, op. cit., pp. 1–3.
7 Ibid., p. 17.
8 Ibid., p. 21.
9 Ibid., p. 55.
10 Ibid., p. 69.
11 Ibid., p. 11.
12 Slessor, These Remain, op. cit., p. 58.
13 Ibid.
14 Memoir, op. cit.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Edward Bishop, The Daily Telegraph Book of Airmen’s Obituaries (London, Grub Street, 2003), pp. 18–20.
18 Diary: John Slessor, 30 May 1917, B374, RAFM.
19 Ibid., 31 May.
20 Ibid., 12 June.
21 Ibid., 13–15 July.
22 Ibid., 24 May.
23 Slessor, These Remain, op. cit., pp. 70–1.
24 Ibid., pp. 74–5, 77.
25 Ibid., p. 25.