Hornet’s Sting is fiction based on fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which. My account of the war as it was fought on the Western Front in 1917 is fact, whereas most of the characters are invented (“Boom” Trenchard is an exception). I have tried to relate the facts of what happened in 1917 to the day-to-day life of a (mythical) squadron of the Royal Flying Corps.
Thus the descriptions of aircraft – especially the Sopwith Pup, the Nieuport Scout and the Bristol Fighter – are as accurate as I could make them. So is my reference to pilots’ skills, or lack of them. Flying training was still a pretty hit-or-miss affair in the First World War. Twice as many pilots were killed in training as died on active service. How to get out of a spin was widely regarded as a mystery. For example: two of the R.F.C.’s most successful pilots were James McCudden and Mick Mannock. When Mannock first arrived in France, in 1917, he asked: “What do I do if I go into a spin?” McCudden said, “Put all controls central and pray like hell.” That was the general state of knowledge, and I applied it to Hornet Squadron.
“Boom” Trenchard commanded the R.F.C., and he preached the gospel of the offensive spirit at all times. His policy pervades Hornet’s Sting. There is evidence that German morale suffered from the presence of British machines, constantly patrolling behind enemy Lines. Equally there is evidence that morale in British squadrons suffered because deep patrols were always carried out at a serious disadvantage. Lieutenant A. S. G. Lee flew Pups with 46 Squadron in France for most of 1917. (He reached the rank of air vice-marshal in the Second World War.) Although he supported Trenchard’s offensive spirit, he attacked the way it was applied. Trenchard’s offensive strategy, Lee said, was “in effect, a territorial offensive”, in which Trenchard believed that “for a British aeroplane to be one mile across the trenches was offensive: for it to be ten miles over was more offensive”. Lee argued that this was nonsense. Treating the air like the land – as something to be captured – was a fundamental mistake, and Trenchard’s crews paid for it.
Deep patrols were handicapped by the prevailing westerly wind. If a pilot was wounded, an engine failed, or a gun jammed, the crew was probably lost. Without parachutes (which were never issued to the R.F.C.) the likelihood was that the machine would be destroyed and the crew killed. There were times in 1917 when, according to Lee, British air losses were almost four times as great as German – and this when the R.F.C. was far below strength in men and machines. In his book No Parachute (Jarrolds, 1968), Lee described the R.F.C.’s distant offensive strategy as one of “sending obsolescent machines deep into German-held territory” and said it was “incomprehensible even at the time”. In any war, soldiers (and airmen) gain experience by fighting, but Trenchard’s stubborn insistence on Deep Offensive Patrols was so costly that the question must be asked: what profit is experience to the dead?
The Western Front was a cosmopolitan place. I have tried to reflect this, and not only in the make-up of the squadron. Chinese labour squads worked behind the Lines; there was a Portuguese division in the trenches, as well as a Russian regiment. Russian officers occasionally visited the R.F.C. There is no evidence that they served with a squadron. The Bolshevik assassins are my invention.
The introduction of Bristol Fighters was as disastrous as I describe. In April 1917, on their first patrol, the tactics of close formation flying protected by intensive crossfire proved to be a complete failure. Five Albatros D-IIIs led by Richthofen shot down four out of six Bristol Fighters and badly damaged a fifth. Tactics were quickly changed; thereafter the Biff was flown aggressively, as a fighter, and it proved to be a great success.
Captain Albert Ball’s astonishing career is accurately summarised in the story. One of Ball’s many skills was his ability to penetrate an enemy formation and fly his Nieuport so close to his target that other enemy machines were afraid to fire at him. After that, the problem was how to escape. This kind of air fighting called for enormous courage, but courage was not enough – as Ball and Mackenzie discovered. They also needed luck.
Details of the battles of Arras and Third Ypres – the bombardments, the tunnel under Arras, the swamp maps made by the Tank Corps, the casualty figures, the persistent bad weather, and so on – are all based on records of the fighting. Passchendaele was taken by Canadian troops with the help of ground-strafing by the R.F.C. The village (or rather its ruins) was about five miles from the Allied Lines at Ypres, where the battle had begun more than three months earlier. All this gain in ground, and more, was lost six months later.
I have tried not to exaggerate the appetite in R.F.C. squadrons for destructive horseplay and violent games during what the crews called “binges”. But records show that exaggeration would be difficult. Pianos really were destroyed, furniture was smashed, revolvers were fired, much alcohol got drunk, occasionally blood was shed, and sometimes farm animals were found in bedrooms. None of this is surprising. Life was short; while it lasted, it was celebrated strenuously.
Which brings me to the episode where Mackenzie and Tyndall swap cockpits while their Biff is airborne. The late Squadron Leader Wally Wallens (who won a D.F.C. in 1940 for shooting down three Me-109s in one day) told me that in 1937 he and another trainee pilot performed the cockpit-swapping trick three times in succession, always without wearing parachutes. They were flying an Audax, an open-cockpit biplane not unlike a Bristol Fighter. They landed after each swap. Their purpose was to annoy an unpopular flight sergeant whose job was to record aircraft movements. He became increasingly confused when the pilot who landed was not the pilot who had taken off.
Mackenzie himself is not a model citizen. In some respects he is similar to Cattermole, a fighter pilot in my novel Piece of Cake, about the Battle of Britain. Some retired RAF officers found Cattermole unacceptable. Others did not. Group Captain Myles Duke-Woolley, D.S.O., D.F.C., commanded a Hurricane squadron that fought in the Battle of Britain. “I go along with all your characters,” he told me; and added that when he was asked if a squadron should get rid of an especially maverick pilot, he advised them to keep him. “He was bad for discipline but good for morale,” he said. “Every squadron should have just the one.”
The presence of Dabinett and Klagsburn in France is an echo of the visit by an American film crew to the Western Front in 1917. They came to make a film that would stimulate enthusiasm in the American people for the war. What they saw in the trenches was not encouraging, so they went to Palestine, where the British Army was visibly winning a war against Turkey.
One of the most difficult things to capture in a story of this sort is the outlook of the people. We know now that the United States joined the Allies in 1917, and that the war ended in 1918. With hindsight, it’s tempting to see 1917 as a year of hanging on, of summoning up the strength for one last Big Push. But that was not how most people felt at the time. It was a very bad year, all blood and mud: colossal bombardments, huge battles, appalling losses, and virtually no change. Three years of massive effort had failed to break the deadlock on the Western Front. Most soldiers thought the war would last for years, perhaps for another decade, perhaps even for a generation. As late as September 1918, Lord Northcliffe, who owned the Daily Mail, and had led a mission to the US in 1917 and so might be expected to see the big picture, declared, “None of us will live to see the end of the war.” So when Hornet Squadron held its smoking concert in Trenchard’s presence, McWatters’ sketch about how the war had lasted in the 1920s or 1930s was not just gallows humour. Many men could see no alternative.
It is not easy to enter the mind-set of young pilots whose expectation of life was measured in weeks, perhaps only days, in a war that threatened to outlast everyone. This knowledge was yet another test to be added to the everyday strains of the Deep Offensive Patrols: fatigue, bitter cold, ceaseless searching of the sky, sudden frantic combat, the sight of a flamer, the loss of a comrade, the frequent arrivals of replacements. To fly with the R.F.C. was to fight a separate war with one’s own fears, and to stretch one’s endurance to the limit. There was no science of post-operative trauma in 1917. Shell-shock was barely acknowledged. In keeping with this, I have tried to describe the treatment of mental casualties, such as Spud Ogilvy, according to the very narrow understanding of the day. If Hornet’s Sting comes across as an account of just one damn thing after another, such is the nature of war. 1917 happened to be a worse year than most.