The training of British military airmen in the First World War followed a patchy trajectory: at first indifferent, then often sinking to appalling before improving somewhat in the last eighteen months of the war to finish better. How well a country trains its aircrew is a good measure of how seriously it values its air force; in the emergency of wartime it also inevitably reflects the pressure to match demand with supply. Britain began the war with a chronic lack of flying instructors and training airfields, and although numbers of both increased considerably, overall quality usually lagged far behind. This was revealed in the RFC’s accident rate. It is estimated that 60 per cent of all British aircraft accidents during the war occurred during training.67 According to the RFC’s own estimate made in the spring of 1917, out of 6,000 pilots then in training 1,200 (a fifth) would be killed in accidents before they could qualify.68 These are shocking figures, although it must always be borne in mind that in those days flying was a recent phenomenon and both airframes and engines were very much less reliable than they would become even twenty years later. No matter how good an instructor and his pupil, neither was proof against an engine failure immediately after take-off or of a wing collapsing in mid-air.
As we have seen, at the war’s outbreak Britain was caught unprepared. Although a Central Flying School had been established at the same time as the RFC in April 1912, the impression remains that it was all done less from a conviction of aviation’s vital military importance than because the War Secretary, J. E. B. Seely, had perhaps read in The Times one morning over breakfast that the French Army already had some 200 aircraft in service and the Germans even more. In Britain, by contrast, the chairman of the Defence Subcommittee on Aviation could observe: ‘At the present time we have, as far as I know, of actual flying men in the Army about eleven, and of actual flying men in the Navy about eight, and France has about two hundred and sixty-three; so we are what you might call behind.’69 ‘As far as I know…’ Any Briton of a certain age will recognise the dry, ironic tone of the officer class whose real concerns are elsewhere – probably at Ascot or in White’s. There was also perhaps the languid implication that what those foreigner Johnnies got up to was scarcely a matter for Britons to worry about unduly.
That was in 1912, and although the number of pilots and observers the RFC went on to train in the next two years increased, the pace still reflected a less than panicked ambition to catch up with the Continent. By the outbreak of war the RFC and RNAS combined could field 197 officers, many of whom were observers or non-flying. With assorted personnel plus all available aircraft and spares they between them constituted precisely four squadrons. (Five years later in April 1919 the RAF would have 27,906 officers and over a quarter of a million other ranks.) In 1913, though, the British Army could no doubt console itself by thinking that when push came to shove it always had a pool of civilian pilots to call on: young men who had earned their certificates in flying clubs and schools like Claude Grahame-White’s.
Grahame-White had learned to fly at Blériot’s flying school in France, in 1910 becoming the sixth holder of a Royal Aero Club pilot’s licence. At that time flying clubs were springing up everywhere in Europe, most of which offered flying lessons. With the energy and enthusiasm of the true convert, Grahame-White decided on a site at Hendon as suitable for London’s Aerodrome – possibly the first-ever use of that word – and bought the land and set it up. (It is now the site of the RAF Museum.) His club and flying school were typical of many others started at much the same time, whether run by keen individuals or by recently founded aircraft companies such as Bristol, which opened two schools in 1910 – one on Salisbury Plain and the other at Brooklands. Eager young men scrimped and saved to enroll at flying schools at home and abroad. The future commander of the RFC in France, Hugh Trenchard, learned to fly at Thomas Sopwith’s school at Brooklands. He was nearly forty years old. Within ten days he went solo, his two and a half weeks’ tuition having cost him £75 (the equivalent of over £5,000 today). All in all he had spent just sixty-four minutes in the air. Over in France Louis Blériot already had several flying schools while in Germany by 1911 there were fourteen where students could qualify for their Deutsche Luftfahrer Verband (DLV) private pilot’s licence, as well as two aircraft factories (Albatros and Aviatik) producing training machines at a rate that by the war’s start had supplied some 300. Private aircraft manufacturers like DFW (Deutsche Flugzeug-Werke) with its associated flying school went on being contracted throughout the war by the military to supply trained pilots, especially when – as in 1916 – the urgent need for them outstripped the Army’s ability to keep up with demand.
In 1914 such enterprising young Britons as already had a private pilot’s licence were exactly the volunteers the RFC badly needed to supplement those officers it had already trained at its Central Flying School in Upavon. Anyone who had had the private means or gumption to get himself into the air was plainly officer material. However, the world of pre-war flying had acquired a very definite ethos of its own, and by no means every qualified pilot was suited to military discipline. Aviation everywhere had started as a private venture and was at heart an entirely civilian enterprise. Anthony Fokker vividly remembered how, as an earnest country boy from Holland, he had moved his fledgling business to Berlin in 1911 and was amazed by the international coterie that aviation had enticed there:
Johannisthal was a thriving little cosmopolis. Aviation was a sport which had attracted daring spirits, ne’er-do-wells, and adventurers from all over the world. There were sober, industrious pilots and designers present, too, but they were in the minority. Many of the amateur pilots were rich men’s sons who found this spot a fertile ground for the sowing of wild oats. Dazzled by the dare-devilry of these men, beautiful women from the theatre and night clubs hung around the flying field, more than a little complaisant, alluring – unstinting of favours to their current heroes.70
This was the same crowd that aviation was attracting everywhere. Fokker’s description of it as a ‘sport’ was apt. By no means every pilot was either very experienced or skilled, and many were easily tempted into showing off to girlfriends and admirers, performing ever more hair-raising stunts in aircraft that had a habit of coming apart in the air. The turnover of what today would be known as ‘silly young buggers’ was brisk. Once Adolphe Pégoud, a Blériot company test pilot and instructor, had followed the Russian Pyotr Nesterov’s example a few days earlier in September 1913 and made his name by looping a Type XI monoplane, ‘looping the loop’ became a huge novelty crowd-pleaser and for a year or so acquired a death-defying mystique all its own. Pégoud went on to become an early ace until shot down in 1915 by one of his own German ex-students, who reportedly wept when he learned what he had done. Meanwhile, over in America a brilliant barnstorming pilot named Lincoln J. Beachey made his own short-lived name and fortune by performing multiple loops, the final one of which killed him when his aircraft broke up over San Francisco Bay and he drowned. Such ‘stunting’ manoeuvres were soon to become a necessary part of aerial combat, but by then aircraft were better designed for such harsh treatment. In the pre-war years it was widely recognised that a solid proportion of airshow spectators came in the expectation of thrills, death and disaster, just as they went to motor races, and they seldom left disappointed.
It was obvious to the British Army that while dash and pluck were as essential to its pilots as they were to its cavalrymen, they were qualities needing to be reined in and subjected to stern military discipline. Observation aircraft were to be crewed by sober men taking careful notes from the air of enemy troop movements; the Army made it quite clear it was not in the market for reckless daredevils looping the loop above the battlefield. And yet, as we can guess and as the Army was to discover, there always was something about airmen and flying that was inimical to the sort of discipline it expected. Even at the Central Flying School there was something ad hoc and unsystematic in the instructors’ methods, and before long the need to set up other training squadrons to cope with the RFC’s rapid expansion resulted in tuition that could depend entirely on the whims and prejudices of the individual instructor, not to mention the condition of the aircraft assigned.
The RFC’s standard elementary trainer was French, the Maurice Farman MF.11 ‘Shorthorn’, universally known as the ‘Rumpty’ or ‘Rumpety’, possibly because of the clattery sound its 8-cylinder inline Renault engine made until it had warmed up. It was a two-seat pusher biplane with twin curved wooden skids projecting in front of the wheels like the runners of a toboggan. (Its predecessor, nicknamed the ‘Longhorn’, had vastly bigger skids.) These ‘horns’ were intended to prevent the aircraft from tipping on its nose in a bad landing. Students (often known as ‘Huns’ because of their habit of destroying the RFC’s aircraft) who nervously confronted their first mount found
a queer sort of bus like an assemblage of birdcages. You climbed with great difficulty through a network of wires into the nacelle and sat perched up there, adorned with a crash helmet, very much exposed to the wondering gaze of men… The CO, a pompous and bossy penguin, Major Beak, maintained that Rumpties were good buses when you knew how to fly them… He was sufficiently senior to be able to avoid flying, and work off his bad temper on junior people who did fly. According to him Rumpties were fine, and it was only damned junior stupidity that jeered at them… The trainees would have to unlearn later all that they learned then, but young pilots must begin at the beginning, and the Rumpty was certainly only just beginning to be an aeroplane. Flying with their antiquated controls was a mixture of playing a harmonium, working the village pump, and sculling a boat.71
‘It was, in fact, only slightly in advance of the machine which the Wright brothers had first flown some ten or twelve years before,’ was Arthur Gould Lee’s scornful assessment of the Rumpty half a century later when describing his first flying lesson in one. Given that this took place in August 1916, it is astonishing that RFC pilots were still being trained on such a primitive aeroplane. It is similarly unbelievable that even by then the Initial Flying Training programme at Netheravon had little idea of how best to introduce apprehensive youngsters to the dangerous science of flying.
[The Major] opened up the engine, took off, climbed to 300 feet, tapped me on the shoulder again and yelled ‘Take her over!’
I was petrified. I had no idea what to do. I gazed at the control, a sort of cycle handlebar with looped ends, known as the spectacles, set on a central column. Below was a rudder bar for my feet. I timidly rested my hands on the loops and let my toes gently touch the rudder. For a minute the plane kept on a straight course then the right wing started to drop, the looped bar followed, and she began to slip sideways. I was fascinated, waiting for something to happen.
‘Straighten her up, you bloody fool!’ came a bellow in my ear. Desperately I pressed the bar down further to the right. The right wing dropped steeper, and went on dropping.
‘What the f…ing hell are you trying to do, you bleeding idiot?’ came the bellow.
In a panic, I pushed the handlebar away from me. The Rumpty dipped her nose indignantly, shuddered, banked suddenly over. Then the controls were snatched from my feeble hands and during a full, unbroken minute of bellowing in my ear I learned what a wonderful flow of expletives a Flying Corps instructor could possess. Then we turned for home and landing. I at once received a flood of vituperation such as I had never known before. I tried to explain that I’d not been given a single lesson, but he wouldn’t listen and threatened to have me sent back to my regiment. Then he stalked off.72
It was this sort of thing that set the tone in far too many RFC training squadrons. Too much depended on the character of the individual instructors and, in turn, on the station CO’s ability and willingness to ensure they were up to the job. What was lacking was not merely sympathetic tutors but a modern, standardised approach to tuition that prescribed a series of clear steps, each of which every trainee had to master before proceeding to the next. Those who had learned to fly at the Grahame-White school before the war looked back at that system with admiration. At Hendon any pupil who made a mistake in the air when up with his instructor was firmly grounded for more tuition until he thoroughly understood the theory of what he had done wrong. Only then would he be allowed back up. Meanwhile, another pupil would take his place in the air. This was salutary rather than punitive. When in the autumn of 1915 Louis Strange was posted to Gosport to take command of 23 Squadron’s training he remembered how he himself had been taught at Hendon and promptly instituted a similar regime, starting by carefully vetting his instructors. Obviously there were other similarly enlightened men at training squadrons up and down the country; but it was still largely a matter of luck whether a pupil was taught in a way that significantly increased his chances of survival in everyday flying, let alone in combat. The RFC was still seriously inconsistent in the way it taught men to fly.
*
France, by contrast, had instituted a rigorous and uniform regime of tuition through which all its pilots went. At least, they did so after a confused start in 1914 that was almost as hesitant as that of the British, and for some of the same reasons. Their Army high command believed that for economic as well as strategic motives the war could not possibly last more than a few months – certainly not much beyond Christmas. Consequently General Bernard, Directeur de l’Aéronautique Militaire, announced there was little point in going on churning out aircraft and pilots at the current rate. He closed down most of the flying schools and sent trained mechanics off into the infantry. It was not long before the gravity of this misjudgement was apparent and the position hastily reversed.
One big difference between the Aéronautique Militaire and the RFC was the French insistence that their prospective pilots should arrive already knowing – or at least willing to learn – about engines. The British had a variety of opinionated but vague ideas about what sort of man ‘the pilot type’ was, and left it at that. Provided an airman acquired some sort of competence in the air, that was enough. Anything that went on under the cowling of his engine could be considered a mechanic’s job. Of course there were exceptions to this among pilots, like Louis Strange who was quite happy to spend a day taking out all his engine’s inlet and exhaust valves, cleaning them and grinding them in again. The Canadian ace Billy Bishop was similarly able to work on his engine when forced down within 150 yards of the German lines, and obviously there were many others whose peacetime hobby had been cars and motor racing who were willing to get their hands oily and knew what they were doing. But for the first two or three years of the war British pilots were taught next to nothing about the engines on which their lives depended and they had to get by on what they chose to pick up from colleagues and the squadron ack-emmas. To the British Army, officers and gentlemen were not grease monkeys.
The French Army’s flying tuition was considerably based on the course that Blériot had developed for his school at Buc, near Versailles. Blériot had taken one of his own monoplanes and clipped its wings so it was unable to take off. This rouleur was familiarly known as le Pingouin: a flightless bird used for the first lessons in which students learned how to taxi at increasing speeds. The Penguin was by no means easy to hold straight, and only when pupils could do unswerving runs along the ground at full speed with the tail up were they allowed to proceed to the next class: that of décoller. In this they learned to ‘unstick’ a full-winged aircraft, rise a few feet into the air while holding it straight, and then come back down. These flights were gradually lengthened until the pupil was ready for his tour de piste, his first solo that entailed flying around the airfield at about 600 feet. The noteworthy thing about the French system of training was that, unlike the British, instructors did not initially fly with their pupils. The first time a pupil took to the air he was on his own. If he survived that he went on to make cross-country flights and practise basic manoeuvres like flying spirals. But well before then the student would have been thoroughly instructed on the ground. He learned how aircraft were built; how they could be rigged so as to fly with a different attitude by altering the tension of their various wires; about rotary engines and the problems of torque; about dealing with wind and weather; about basic navigation and many other things. Finally there came a high-altitude flight and a cross-country test, at the end of which the successful pilot was awarded his brevet and could put up his wings on the uniform of his particular army regiment, which he continued to wear. After that he usually went off to an operational training squadron where he would be given advanced instruction in flying a particular type such as a bomber or a fighter.
In the last two years of the war promising pilots, after graduating from one of the major French Army flying schools like that at Avord, near Bourges, might be sent down south to Pau on the edge of the Pyrenees to the School of Aerobatics and Combat. There they would find up-to-date Nieuport fighters, all maintained in peak condition, in which they were encouraged to spend as much time in the air as possible. Once their skills and flying hours had reached a satisfactory point they graduated to the final stage: the aerobatics course – the Haute École du Ciel.
The German system was like the British only in that instructors flew with their pupils from the first. Otherwise it was much more punctilious about avoiding training accidents: the Germans had a much smaller reserve of potential pilots to draw on than did all the Entente forces combined. For much of the war the British system led to new pilots being sent over to France and often straight into combat, a situation that many squadron COs themselves described as ‘murder’. In 1916 the Germans considered their student pilots needed at least six months’ instruction before being sent to an active squadron, although by 1918 under the pressure of demand this period had been reduced to three months. What was more, unlike Allied practice, the newly qualified German pilot was not immediately awarded his ‘wings’ but had to carry out several missions (usually with an experienced observer) before getting his Flugzeugführer Abzeichen. From the spring of 1917 pilots whose record in an ordinary squadron merited selection for any of the crack new fighter squadrons (Jagdstaffeln) were sent to one of the new single-seat fighter schools (Kampfeinsitzerschulen) in Paderborn and Grossenhain, after which they went for advanced training at Jagdstaffelschule 1 in Valenciennes.
Britain had nothing like these specialised fighter schools. But it should be emphasised that, regardless of how much better organised and uniform the French and German systems of training were, standards inevitably varied during the war, partly according to the quality of available instructors but also because of battlefield campaigns that made sudden and urgent demands for fresh supplies of pilots in the minimum time. Also, accident rates were high everywhere if only because it was not yet fifteen years since man’s first-ever powered flight. No amount of pilot training could reliably be proof against every eventuality in the air. It was small wonder that somebody’s brainwave to correct a particular machine’s tendency to stall might appear to work very well until it was discovered too late that it could now easily tip the aircraft into a fatal spin. ‘It spun into the carpet with all the ferocity the type could display when it was out of humour,’ as W. E. Johns would remark laconically when he himself was in training, as though of a horse that had shied unexpectedly. ‘It took the mechanics most of the day to dig Tony out, so I heard.’73
*
Although a big generalisation, it is probably justifiable to say that until at least the autumn of 1917 the majority of the RFC’s pilots were nothing like as well trained as were their French and German counterparts. The reason was no secret, still less a mystery, particularly after the losses of ‘Bloody April’ that year. ‘Boom’ Trenchard’s strategy of using air power aggressively inevitably resulted in a high rate of casualties who had to be replaced as quickly as possible. The figures are revealing: by the end of the war the Entente had lost 2.2 aircraft for every one lost by the Central Powers.74 The corollary to this was a faster turnover of aircrew with the increased need to rush men through basic training to fulfil Trenchard’s other policy of ‘no empty chairs’ in an active squadron. This kept the messes full ‘even though it meant offering up the inexperienced and the partly trained as human sacrifices,’ as one author commented later.75 It is conceivable that Trenchard was using his own experience of going solo with only sixty-four minutes’ airtime back in 1912 as a yardstick for how long it ought to take to train new pilots. Bad as even the Germans’ casualties were in training as well as in combat, their attrition rate was still significantly lower than that of the British. Quite simply, they took more time and care in teaching a pilot how an aircraft flew and how he might best fly one. This revealed a distinct difference of aviation cultures, in that a strand of thinking in ‘official’ British circles held it was probably better for an airman not to understand how his aircraft worked. The rationale for this bizarre viewpoint was summed up in late 1918 by an RAMC captain attached to the RAF writing for the august medical magazine The Lancet. He admitted to a
definite conviction that the less the fighting scout pilot knows about his machine from a mechanical point of view the better. From the very nature of his work he must be prepared to throw the machine about, and at times subject it to such strains that did he realise how near he was to the breaking-point, his nerve would go very quickly.76
In other words ignorance was bliss. It was better for a pilot to risk losing both his life and his aircraft through bad flying than it was for him to risk losing his nerve.
With official opinions as perverse as this circulating it is hardly a surprise to find that even as late as the last days of December 1917 Stuart Wortley’s fictitious letter-writer (based later on his own wartime correspondence and diaries) was exasperated both by a lack of training and an absence of keenness in the new pilots he was sent. ‘I regret to say that many of the new recruits not only don’t know how to fly or how to manipulate a machine gun but they fail to display any eagerness to learn. My wretched flight commanders have had to give up most of their spare time trying to train them, and even then some of them have to be sent back home for further instruction.’77
As the war went on the RFC’s more outspoken commanding officers of active squadrons in France often agonised at being ordered to send men up who had no right to be in the air at all, still less in combat. It seemed a needless slaughter of the innocents and added to the steadily growing pressure for Britain’s air wing to break with the Army and rid itself of the constant need to do the military’s bidding at whatever cost. In the view of many RFC officers neither the infantry nor its commanders understood how best to use air power although they broadly supported Trenchard’s approach, possibly because as a pilot he, too, was one of them.
Apart from that, there were the children who slipped through the Army’s lax net. In late 1915 Cecil Lewis, who had falsified his age and enrolled in the RFC at seventeen (the minimum was eighteen), was sent up by his instructor on his first solo after a mere ninety minutes’ dual flying. Young as he was, he was still not as juvenile as the RNAS pilot whom W. E. Johns met in Landshut POW camp after he was shot down in September 1918. This boy had also been shot down and was celebrating his seventeenth birthday as a prisoner. He had run away from school to join up, and many years later Johns might well have used him as the model for the main character in his novel The Rescue Flight.
Soloing after only one and a half hours’ dual experience in the air was not uncommon in the RFC. Lewis’s first solo was successful, Johns’s rather less so since he stalled on take-off and crashed. The terse entry in Johns’s log book reads:
Time: 8.30 a.m.
Pilot: Self
Type and number of machine: MFSH [Maurice Farman Shorthorn] 21131*
Passenger: None
Time in air: Five seconds
Height: 30 feet78
He was lucky to survive. His instructor, a Captain Ashton, was one of those who subscribed to the commonly held view that pilots, like riders after a nasty fall, should get straight back into the saddle in order not to ‘lose confidence’. He sent Johns up again the next day for a ten-minute flight ‘at the most’. In the event it lasted ninety minutes on account of Johns getting completely lost and only finding the airfield again at dusk when he was down to his last thimbleful of petrol.
In May 1917 Arthur Gould Lee, another fledgling pilot who had just arrived in France, could note: ‘Most pilots average 15–20 hours’ flying when they arrive here, with maybe 10–12 solo and five on the type they’re expecting to fight on. With that amount of piloting they can’t even fly, let alone fight.’79 He himself found he had done more flying than any of the others with whom he was posted: 85 hours all told with 72½ solo, including 18 hours on Sopwith Pups – the aircraft he subsequently flew in France. He had trained with Bristol at Filton but had been injured in a flying accident ‘due to incompetent instruction’. This turned out to be a heavily disguised blessing since, as he admitted, recuperation had allowed him to stay in England long enough to learn to fly properly. Cecil Lewis, on the other hand, had flown just thirteen hours’ solo when he was posted to his squadron in France, ‘hopelessly inequipped and inexperienced’. It was only very much later in the war that – in theory, at least – no RFC pilot was supposed to cross the lines until he had done sixty hours’ flying.
Yet perhaps the most scandalous practice surrounding the RFC’s training methods was the way in which the instructors were chosen. Again, Johns’s experience is illustrative. After his harrowing experiences in Gallipoli, Salonika and Egypt – not to mention a severe bout of malaria – he began learning to fly shortly after arriving at No. 1 School of Aeronautics, Reading, on 26th October 1917. Once he had earned his ‘wings’ his very first posting was on 20th January 1918 as an instructor with No. 25 Flying Training School, Thetford. Thus a man with fewer than three months’ flying experience from scratch had himself become a tutor. True, this was a sign of the RFC’s desperation at a time when almost anyone with a rough idea of what an aircraft’s controls did was press-ganged into flying combat missions in France, with a consequent dearth of experienced pilots to teach new volunteers and conscripts. At this point the life expectancy of new pilots was three weeks. A good many were dead within three days. Seasoned airmen with real experience who had survived a few months’ active service were of inestimable value to any squadron. They were far too valuable to be wasted back in Blighty teaching Huns to fly Rumpties. They were either inveigled into doing another tour or, as was common after perhaps four months, they were too shattered for further combat and became as much a menace to themselves as to any German opponent. They were often reluctantly posted back home as instructors to a flying training school like Johns’s. With their half-crazed fatalism, thousand-yard stares and often bitter rage at being banned from returning to the action in France they, too, were usually not best suited to training beginners.
*
One of the most revealing accounts of what it was like learning to fly in the RFC only a year before the Armistice comes from an American, John MacGavock Grider, who was sent with his comrades to the UK in late 1917 to be trained as a pilot for service with the RFC until such time as the United States could organise squadrons of its own. Grider’s first memory of the journey out was of being satirically regaled in Halifax harbour by a boatload of New Zealanders who paddled around their troopship singing: ‘Onward, conscript soldiers, marching as to war,/You would not be conscripts, had you gone before.’ After arriving in Britain Grider was first billeted in Oxford before being posted to the machine-gun school at Grantham.
November 18th: There were a lot of young English kids that had been there for some time swinging the lead. [The new CO] sent for them all and lined them up. He told them there was a war on and that pilots were needed badly at the front and they were all going solo that afternoon. They nearly fainted. Some of them had had less than two hours of air work and none of them had had more than five.
We all went out to the airdrome to see the fun. I guess there were about thirty of them in all. The squadron was equipped with D.H.6s which are something like our Curtiss planes [the JN-4 ‘Jenny’ trainer] except they are slower and won’t spin no matter what you do to them. The first one to take off was a bit uneasy and an instructor had to taxi out for him. He ran all the way across the field, and it was a big one, then pulled the stick right back into his stomach. The Six went straight up nose first and stalled. Then it did a tail slide right back into the ground.
Another one got off fairly well and came around for his landing. He leveled off and made a beautiful landing – a hundred feet above the ground. He pancaked beautifully and shoved his wheels up through the lower wings. But the plane had a four-bladed prop on it and it broke off even all around. So the pupil was able to taxi on into the hangar as both wheels had come up the same distance. He was very much pleased with himself and cut off the engine and took off his goggles and stood up and started to jump down to the ground which he thought was about five feet below him. Then he looked down and saw the ground right under his seat. He certainly was shocked…80
The afternoon progressed in similar fashion with smashed undercarriages and aircraft turning turtle. ‘They finally all got off, and not a one of them got killed,’ Grider commented. ‘I don’t see why not, tho’. Only one of them got hurt and that was when one landed on top of the other. The one in the bottom plane got a broken arm.’ The tally in written-off and broken aircraft was considerable. The cost of a D.H.6 trainer at the time was £1,363 (without instruments),81 or roughly £65,000 at today’s prices. Needless to say, not a single one of the pilots that day ought to have been allowed up without an instructor.
November 20th: These old short-horn Farmans are awful-looking buses. I am surprised they fly at all. We have the same sort of wild kids here for instructors that we had at Oxford, only more so, – wilder and younger. I was told that they kill off more instructors in the RFC than pupils, and from what I’ve seen I can well believe it. I have a Captain Harrison for an instructor. He seems to be a mere kid. He’s about nineteen and is trying hard to grow a mustache. Classes are a joke.
December 6th: I have been flying for three days and Capt. Harrison says I can go solo to-morrow if it’s calm.… I have put in two hours and twenty minutes in the air and I would have soloed this evening if it had been calm enough.
January 1st, 1918: I have done my four hours’ solo on Rumpties and am done with them forever, thank God. I have done two hours on Avros [i.e. the Avro 504J]. They are entirely different and I have to learn to fly all over again.
Grider’s months in England are a litany of drunken parties, girls pursued (‘horizontal refreshment’), aircraft flown and crashes witnessed. He noted ‘wholesale funerals’ and that one of his fellow-Americans had already been to twelve in five months.
February 9th: A horrible thing happened today. We were all out on the tarmac having our pictures taken for posterity when somebody yelled and pointed up. Two Avros collided right over the airdrome at about three thousand feet. God, it was a horrible sight. We didn’t know who was in either one of them. I was glad I was sitting next to Cal. They came down in a slow spin with their wings locked together and both of them in flames. Fred Stillman was in one machine and got out alive but badly burned and Doug Ellis was in the other one and was burned to a cinder. As I sat there watching I kept trying to imagine what those poor devils were thinking about as they went spinning down into hell. It made me right sick at my stomach to watch. We all went up later and felt better after a little flying. We went into town for a party with Capt. Horn…
Later, Grider would say that most pilots were killed by structural defects or by having the aircraft catch fire in the air. This was probably true, and there is hardly a diary or journal from airmen at the time that doesn’t record several cases of wings either coming off entirely in the air or just folding up like tired sunshades. Grider himself had only four more months to live. He was shot down on 18th June 1918 some twenty miles behind the German lines, leaving an ex-wife and two young sons back in the United States.
Certain other accidents were less accidental than self-willed. Any airfield could witness examples of the plain old showing off that was a hallmark of a certain kind of aviator then as now. In its way this, too, was a sign of poorly learned basic lessons. W. E. Johns described sitting smoking a cigarette outside the hangars at Thetford one day when a machine that was strange to him landed and taxied up. The pilot climbed out, leaving the engine ticking over, and greeted him.
‘What’s that?’ asked Johns, nodding towards the strange machine.
‘An S.E.5,’ the pilot replied scornfully.
‘Pretty useful?’ asked Johns.
‘Useful?’ replied the pilot. ‘Useful! I should say she is. She’ll loop off the ground.’
Johns’s expression must have betrayed his incredulity, for the pilot muttered, ‘Watch me!’ and climbed back into his machine. The S.E.5 took off and soared in a circle, swinging over the top and coming down. It hit the ground at well over 100 mph. Johns did not move. He could not. When the ambulance took away the pilot’s remains and the air mechanics started to pick up the pieces, Johns noticed he was still smoking the same cigarette as when the S.E.5 had first landed.82
No matter how commonplace flying was to become over the next decades it lost little of its original glamour, and the fatal urge to shine as a demonstrator of a new type of aircraft or simply as a skilled daredevil was to persist. In 1931 Douglas Bader was famously to lose both his lower legs in a crash while attempting to slow-roll a Bristol Bulldog too close to the ground. It was pure showing off and he was lucky to get away with his life. Hundreds of other pilots down to the present day have killed themselves as well as spectators in similarly misjudged crowd-pleasing aerobatics at airshows. No matter how much safer modern aircraft are, Newtonian gravity and the laws of aerodynamics remain inflexibly unchanged.
For whatever reasons, the casualty rate at RFC training stations in Britain was often worse even than on active squadrons in France. Johns later wrote in his magazine Popular Flying that in early 1918 when he was stationed in Norfolk no fewer than thirteen pilots and observers were burnt to death in crashes in as many days and the local village blacksmith, who had been a juryman at all the inquests, committed suicide, overcome by the horror of it all. Structural failure may have accounted for some of the carnage (in this case deliberate sabotage was suspected), but poor training was most likely to have been at the bottom of the rest. Yet by the time Johns first arrived at the School of Aeronautics in Reading, RFC training was in a transitional stage, having at last embraced a new system, and the course on which he embarked required him to study a good few subjects on the ground besides the hours of actual instruction in the air. He learned such things as how aircraft were rigged and how their instruments worked. He learned about engines, navigation, observation, signalling, aerial gunnery and much else besides. It was a revolution in the way the RFC trained its pilots – belated, undoubtedly, but a revolution nonetheless. And it was almost entirely down to one man, Major Robert Smith-Barry.
Smith-Barry had a reputation as a considerable eccentric as well as an experienced airman. One of his early school reports at Eton described him as ‘an awful little boy. He has no aptitude whatever,’83 although he must at least have had a talent for music since he spent two years practising the piano for eight hours a day with a view to a career as a concert pianist. However, he was bitten by the aviation bug and learned to fly in 1911. Three years later he was in the first batch of pilots sent to France with 5 Squadron in August 1914. He was severely injured in a crash following engine failure in his B.E.8, badly breaking both his legs, and after several operations was left with a life-long limp. While recovering in England he flew in anti-Zeppelin night patrols and acted as an instructor. He returned to active duty in France in May 1916 as a major in command of 60 Squadron. There he became steadily more obsessed and upset by the feeble flying abilities of the young pilots he was being sent and began bombarding Trenchard’s RFC headquarters with letters. These were not shy of using emotive phrases like ‘Fokker fodder’ to emphasise how appallingly vulnerable these airmen were, but they were also full of practical recommendations about what should be done to improve things. A letter he wrote on 10th December 1916 is worth quoting in full since it was probably the first time that an officer of his experience and seniority had summarised the deficiencies of the RFC’s training and brought them to the attention of the high command. His frankness must have struck his superiors quite forcibly.
Up until the end of last May when the writer left England no attention whatever was paid to the fundamental importance of instruction in the mere manual part of flying. This was left to those who were resting, those who were preparing to go overseas, and those who had shown themselves useless for anything else. The first two classes had other interests paramount; the third had no interests at all. The present-day pupil is being taught to fly by people who are altogether without enthusiasm and whose indifference is, as always, contagious.
It is submitted that a good way to remedy this would be a school of training for instructors, where they could (a) have their flying brought up to the very high standard necessary before they can teach with confidence and ease, and be combed out if they do not speedily reach this standard; and (b) be given definite lines upon which to instruct. The institution of such a school would tend to produce an esprit de corps among the instructors and could improve the atmosphere surrounding the whole business.
The writer has been surprised to notice how little interest in flying is taken by many young pilots who come out to the Front. Though very young, and quite fresh, they have to be ordered to go up from the very first; they never ask permission to go up even for a practice flight. Before the war young flyers were always begging to be allowed up. It is thought that this, though in part due to the difference between volunteers and conscripts, is largely due to the mental supineness of instructors in England.84
This letter cogently made the point that in order to improve flying standards it was necessary first to train the trainers. By implication it was a fierce criticism of the Central Flying School, which was where the RFC’s instructors were taught, and it had an immediate effect. The officer in charge of the RFC’s training, General John Salmond, had a high personal regard for Smith-Barry and promptly posted him back to England as CO of No. 1 Reserve Squadron at Gosport, giving him a free hand to institute a system of his own. It is not clear when he arrived there how much was left of the regime Louis Strange had introduced during his command a little over a year earlier. In any case it was at Gosport that Smith-Barry began the process that finally managed to institute radical change throughout the RFC by revising the entire way in which flying instructors taught and pupils learned.
As an enthusiastic and veteran combat pilot himself, Smith-Barry considered that provided a pupil was accompanied by a genuinely inspirational instructor, he ought to be encouraged in hands-on flying from the very first. The essential was to have a man in the back seat who was as calm as he was experienced, someone who didn’t curse and shout obscenities at his hapless student but was reassuring and encouraging. It may seem odd to us today that such a regime had not been made general far earlier; but it is perhaps not so surprising since in 1914 no pilot anywhere had combat experience and thereafter nearly anyone who could fly was needed for active duty rather than to instruct. In private, Smith-Barry probably acknowledged that the French and German systems had been much better planned from the beginning, if subject to the vagaries of demand, but that maybe in the final analysis they relied a little too much on the academy approach: a degree of methodical plodding at the expense of inspirational teaching.
One of Major Smith-Barry’s first moves was to order the antique Rumpties banished from all flying training schools as quickly as possible. To replace them he selected the Avro 504J as the RFC’s basic trainer, a controversial choice in some quarters that considered this excellent aircraft ‘too advanced’ for beginners, whatever that meant. It had many advantages, among them a rotary engine that enabled pupils to become used to the characteristics of the type of engine they would most likely be flying in France, as well as handling that was a good introduction to genuinely advanced machines like the Sopwith Camel and the S.E.5. The Avro must have been a good choice because it was to remain in service for many years. In all, 5,446 were built and in due course it became the aircraft in which the future King George VI learned to fly.
The reason for choosing the Avro was that Smith-Barry was no longer thinking in terms of airmen sent to France being able to fly in an ordinary way. Traditional RFC practice had been for instructors to drum into their students the situations to avoid at all costs, like getting into spins. Smith-Barry could see no point in telling future combat pilots what to avoid, given that by that stage in the war combat could involve advanced aerobatic manoeuvres they needed to master in order to be safe. To have no more than mere ‘ordinary’ flying expertise was just asking for trouble.
His new system therefore involved pupils being deliberately faced with exactly those situations their predecessors had been told at all costs to avoid: spinning, for example, which in many pilots’ minds still represented something fearsome that was easily slipped into and practically certain to end fatally, like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The job of Smith-Barry’s instructors was to take their students to the brink at a safe altitude, push them over, and show them how to stop the hypnotically approaching earth from revolving around the aircraft’s nose. To be fair to the older methods of teaching, in the days of the Rumpties anything much more athletic than gentle turns and shallow dives risked the machine breaking up. For at least the first two years of the war nobody in any air force bothered to teach combat flying as a skill in its own right, partly because it was still not really needed and partly because so few machines were safely capable of anything very dramatic in the way of agility. The spectacular aerobatic ‘dogfighting’ so beloved of film-makers in the late 1920s and 1930s (Wings, Hell’s Angels, Dawn Patrol) was almost entirely confined to the war’s last eighteen months. But by 1917 the construction of aircraft had greatly improved and the Avro 504J could safely handle enough basic aerobatic manoeuvres to make conversion to an advanced fighting machine like a Camel or an S.E.5 a logical progression instead of potentially fatal.
Thus piloting skills had to keep pace with technological development. By the end of a Gosport-style course a pilot would have unlearned any residual dread of stalls and spins and could initiate and correct them at will. What was more, the installation in the Avros of what became known as the Gosport speaking tube that connected the pilot’s and instructor’s helmets at last made it unnecessary for instructors to whack their pupils over the head and bellow in their ear above the noise of the engine.
Within a short while Smith-Barry’s experiment was acknowledged a success and the RFC adopted his system as quickly as it could. The Army being what it was, especially in wartime, this was not as fast as he wished, as witness Stuart Wortley’s letter of December 1917, a year after Smith-Barry’s posting to Gosport, noting there was still a lack of enthusiasm in young pilots. The American John Grider’s diary entries of exactly the same date make it clear the old Rumpties were even then still in service although he did progress to Avros. Additional testimony of change can be found in the fascinating letters home written by a Canadian from Toronto, Roderick Maclennan, who began his own training as a pilot in England in July 1917. His experience reveals both the Gosport influence and the time it was taking to implement fully. His first week was spent either in a classroom or in a hangar studying rigging and engines. ‘We had four hours of practical work on [engines],’ he noted on 1st July, ‘running them and starting them by turning the propeller. This is usually done by a mechanic but an officer has to learn how it is done in case he has to make a forced landing and then has to restart his engine to get home.’85 Later that week Maclennan had to sit an exam in ‘(1) Rotary engines, (2) Stationary engines, (3) Bombs, Instruments, Photography, Wireless, etc., (4) Rigging and Theory of Flight, (5) Aerial Observation, and (6) A practical test in reading Morse on the buzzer.’ The range of the syllabus is impressive, even though it can hardly have been covered with much thoroughness in only six days. He first went up in an aircraft on 8th July and flew his first solo on the 22nd. Obviously the RFC had shifted into high gear where turning out pilots was concerned since in November that year Maclennan was able to remark: ‘There are so many pilots now that after they have done about four months in France, nearly all are returned to England as instructors…’86
He himself was not to be so lucky. He arrived in France on 28th November. On 15th December he wrote home: ‘I can hardly express what a wonderful thing flying is, and what a hold it gets on one. I am having the time of my life… Aside from flying we get lots of motoring, football and even riding. Certainly it pays to go to the war on wings.’87 Three days later he flew his first patrol over the lines. Two days before Christmas Roderick Maclennan was burned to death. He was twenty-four.
In spite of delays, the implementation of the new training regime did gradually spread and its influence take hold, with results that became visible even in the air. V. M. Yeates’s semi-fictional character Tom Cundall, newly posted to his squadron in France, watched an old hand ‘put his bus down almost in the hangar mouth with a pukka sideslip Gosport landing that reduced his forward speed to ten miles an hour, or so it looked.’88 The name of Gosport had already become shorthand for a recognisable style of competence and panache. In some respects even the French system of aerobatics taught at their Hautes Écoles du Ciel was evidently not as comprehensive or advanced as Major Smith-Barry’s. Gosport taught the side-slip as a matter of course for losing height quickly and especially to get back on the ground in a hurry. In the event of fire, for instance, pilots might side-slip to fan the flames away from the cockpit. It was a manoeuvre new and dramatic enough to take a group of French pilots by complete surprise when they first saw it practised in France. They assumed the British pilot was completely out of control until by what they took to be sheer luck he regained it at the last moment.
Not that the Gosport School (as the system became known) was for the faint-hearted. Geoffrey de Havilland remembered it in his 1979 autobiography as being run on the ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ principle. ‘After only a few hops, the pupil was taken up and treated to a rapid series of evolutions, from loops to rolls and spins. On return to earth, if the pupil staggered away groaning, he was considered unworthy of further instruction; if he was still sane and obviously in his right mind, the training programme continued.’89 This was probably a slight exaggeration and makes it sound more brutal than encouraging; but Smith-Barry was bullish, and undoubtedly some way was needed early on in the course to weed out those pupils who for physiological or other reasons would be unable to cope with the demands of combat flying. In any case the fame of his system soon spread to become a model for flying schools world-wide. Perhaps its true excellence can be judged by the fact that even the French came to adopt it.
*
A final word should perhaps go to the indestructible Louis Strange, who in May 1918 was a lieutenant-colonel commanding the 23rd Training Wing of what was now the RAF, stationed at South Carlton, near Lincoln. In that month
the 23rd Wing did 4600 hours’ flying, which was 2000 more than any previous month. The number and standard of service pilots we turned out were greatly increased, while crashes were reduced from one to every thirty hours’ flying to one in sixty hours, and write-offs of machines fell from one in eighty to one in 145 hours’ flying.… No particular credit was due to any one individual for this improvement. We were only putting into practice a lesson that some of us had learned at Gosport and the CFS…
But others will bear me out that the work in a training Wing in those days was no joke. The write-off of one machine for every 140 hours’ flying meant the loss of something between thirty and forty machines a month, in addition to some seventy or eighty minor crashes. In the May of 1918, for instance, we had sixteen fatal accidents… higher than usual owing to a collision between two machines, the wreckage of which fell by ill luck upon another on the ground, so that the personnel of three machines were involved in the one crash. But the work had to go on at a still more feverish pace in order to cope with the overseas requirements, for at that time the monthly output of pilots from the Home Establishment was well in the neighbourhood of 400.90
These improved standards still represented an average daily toll of four crashes of various kinds, with a death every other day. Yet spread out over a wing it was an impressive advance and a tribute to the courage of a one-time ‘awful little boy’ in speaking out to his seniors.
Even so, for much of the war the slipshod and unsystematic manner in which Britain trained its aircrew was patently a false economy, given the expense and shortage of pilots and aircraft. Although the chaotic urgencies of wartime explain much, it is sometimes hard not to invoke that always-questionable category of national character. The over-valuation of the amateurish, the perennial excuse of the country having been ‘caught on the hop’, the lack of proper planning from the first, the improvising, cutting corners and doing everything on a shoestring all seem grimly familiar to this author. So, too, does the ability to turn ‘muddling through’ into an indomitable British virtue, even when muddling through in training led to the reckless squandering of so many young lives.
Another aspect of the same cavalier attitude will become evident in a later chapter where it needs to be explained why it took well over two years of German air raids on London before the authorities were at last moved by public rioting and political uproar to institute a properly co-ordinated system of home defence.
1* There is a discrepancy here. No. 2113 is listed as a B.E.2c