The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

, others were simply appalling disasters. In 1943 the Liverpool shipping daily published the first of these two reports from Port of Spain, Trinidad. The second was a survivor’s report from the master of the tanker, British Resource:

‘A delirious merchant seaman, who landed here two days ago, his life practically “baked out of him” after 76 days drifting in an open lifeboat… was identified as William Colburn, aged 32, of Liverpool. Colburn, who survived 20 of his companions, could not give details of his ordeal, as he is still unable to talk… As days and weeks and finally months slipped by, the sun and lack of food and water took their toll, and one by one the other seamen died. Colburn did not have the strength left to throw the last five overboard, and when his tossing lifeboat was found he was huddled in the bottom surrounded by the bodies of his dead shipmates.’

‘After ordering the chief officer away in a boat with 30 men the vessel was torpedoed again… throwing a high column of blazing benzine high into the air, setting the ship on fire from the foremast, right aft. The water on both sides was immediately covered with burning benzine. In spite of the port boat being 250 feet away from the ship it was filled with burning benzine and being a metal boat it soon melted. The occupants must have perished immediately… During three hours in the water before finding a raft I bumped into several of my men. I turned two of them over but they were beyond recognition, the flames had done their work only too well.’

Both wars generated, among some of the more excitable jingoistic commentators, stories of brutal German warship crews. There were inevitably people who behaved cruelly, but the war at sea provided far more opportunities for acts of generosity and common humanity than were available to armies. When in the First World War the cruiser Dresden encountered the sailing ship Penrhyn Castle, the German captain allowed the ship to set a course for home unmolested on discovering that the sailing ship’s captain had his wife and child aboard.

There were also numerous examples of submarine crews towing lifeboats to safety, providing first aid to wounded crew members, giving navigational advice, sending radio messages to neutral ships, supplying food, water and tobacco. In both wars some of these stories got into the press. The Daily Mirror, for example, reported in 1940 that an Italian submarine, after sinking the British Fame, towed the survivors in their boats to St Michaels in the Azores

. In 1941 an 18-year-old survivor recounted how, after survivors had got into rafts and a lifeboat, the submarine rose to the surface and the U-boat commander handed over a couple of bottles of rum and some tins of bully beef. He said goodbye and submerged.

During the years of each conflict the war at sea killed thousands of seafarers. War is about damaging others defined as enemies, and this is well understood by the participants. But this engagement does not preclude the possibility of expressions of common humanity, whether it were between the formal enemies or among those on the ‘same side’, but commonly at odds with each other. Wars invariably demonstrate the absurdity of the condition itself. They also, and even more absurdly, offer some of the participants the opportunity of rediscovering the essential condition of life itself, that without solidarity there can be no life. Many survivors went to the edge and experienced that elementary lesson of interdependence – then forgot it again afterwards. It was bizarre and often remarked upon that survivors were quickly sorted out into officers and ratings. This was naturally regarded as essential because officers needed to be lodged in hotels of a certain class, and ratings in hotels of another class. Once back aboard ship – and it was the same in both World Wars – the rituals of encounters between persons of different classes carried on as usual.

In conclusion

The view of war as an imposition from a world of affairs that was ‘nothing to do with us’ was not unique to merchant seafarers, and was probably universal. In his novel August, 1914, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes what he plainly takes to be the common response to the onset of war: ‘People in the village did not discuss the war or even think about it as an event over which anyone had any control or which ought or ought not to be allowed to happen. They accepted the war… as the will of God, something like a blizzard or a dust-storm…’

Pre-revolution rural Russia, at least in terms of outlook on the world and thinking about the possibilities of human control over events, was perhaps not so far distant from Britain, which was in 1914 probably the most industrialised nation on the planet. Very little of the apparatus of the modern democratic state then existed in the UK. Property and residential requirements left roughly half the adult male population without the right to vote, and of course virtually all women were unenfranchised. A sequence of electoral reforms ensured that by 1939 almost all of the adult population had the vote, but the knowledge and experience of the democratic process beyond electoral politics was inevitably rudimentary. A young infantry lieutenant, Neil McCallum, noted in his diary during the Second World War that he found it ironic that if he and his comrades were fighting for democracy, why was it so ‘hard to find an infantryman who could define democracy?’

The merchant seafarer – or at least the ratings – came from the same stratum as McCallum’s infantrymen and were no less hard-pressed to explain what the war was about.

Fifty years afterwards and thinking about how he and his shipmates had thought about the Second World War, Alan Peter, who had been a bosun, was surely right in his characterisation of attitudes:

‘We had no control over the politics of war, had we? In the fo’c’sles of all the ships that I can remember or amongst the crew when we’d sit out on the poop at night chewing the fat just before the sun went down, there’d be fooling about among the younger ones wrestling or sparring up to each other, doing their hobbies or playing the mouth organ. That was the usual thing and occurred no less than in peacetime. There was no great discussion about the pros and cons of war.’

It is impossible to escape the conclusion that most merchant seamen, despite feeling the full brunt of war, especially in the Second World War, felt that it had little to do with them. They kept it out of their lives even though it pervaded them.

Notes on contributors

Professor Tony Lane, Cardiff University, UK

Tony Lane is Director of the Seafarers International Research Centre at Cardiff University. He has written extensively on merchant seafarers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including The Merchant Seaman’s War (1990).

Recommended reading

Beckman, Morris, Atlantic Roulette (Brighton: Tom Donovan Publishing, 1996). Easily the best everyday account of a wartime voyage. Excellent.

Bennett, G. H. and R., Survivors (London: Hambledon Press, 1999). A very full account of Second World War merchant seafarer survivors.

Lane, Tony, The Merchant Seaman’s War (Manchester: University Press, 1990, and Liverpool: The Bluecoat Press, 1993)

‘The people’s war at sea: work-discipline and merchant seamen, 1939–1945’ in Scottish Journal of Labour History, 1995, pp61–86. Provides the only case study refutation of the ‘people’s war thesis’.

Thomas, R. Gabe, Milag: Merchant Navy Prisoners of War (Porthcawl: Milag Prisoner of War Association, 1995). A very detailed ‘warts and all’ account of the merchant seafarers POW camp, Milag Nord, in North Germany.

Woodman, Richard, Arctic Convoys 1941–1945 (London: John Murray, 1994)

There have been no thorough studies of merchant seafarers in the First World War. Books published during the war or soon thereafter are neither in print nor readily available.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_8a3173eb-d559-5fc9-87bc-00b210f389a7)

War in the air: the fighter pilot (#ulink_8a3173eb-d559-5fc9-87bc-00b210f389a7)

David Jordan

The first flight of an aircraft in 1903 created a new arena for warfare. In simple terms, the aircraft was another piece of machinery produced by advancing technology. Although from the perspective of the 21st century it is difficult to perceive the Wright Flyer or Blériot’s monoplane as articles of cutting-edge technology, at the time of their construction they represented the height of innovation. They were also dangerous. Their newness made them unreliable, and herein lay the difficulties. If a piece of new technology failed to function on the ground, it did not usually lead to death or injury. The person operating the machine would simply note that it was not functioning and attempt to make it work. If he failed, he would send for technical assistance, either from the machine’s inventor or the manufacturer. For a pilot this was not an option. If a piece of equipment failed, the aviator had no time for the luxury of sending out for help. Technological failure meant a rapid return to earth, with all the attendant risks. Although the knowledge existed to get a man into the air, the development of the parachute to get him down again was running some way behind. As a result, the public came to adore the ‘magnificent men in their flying machines’, ranking them as a special breed.

When the First World War broke out, their image was enhanced. The nature of warfare between 1914 and 1918 meant that the public at home could not easily find heroes from among the armies on the ground. The days of the knightly champion indulging in single combat were at an end. The great naval heroes of the 19th century were largely absent, thanks to the absence of great naval battles, leaving only the airmen. Initially, the acclaim they enjoyed related to the dangerous nature of flight rather than war, but within 12 months of the outbreak of conflict there was a new type of pilot to admire. The fighter pilot.

The need to prevent interference with operations by enemy aircraft led to the development of machines first equipped and then specifically designed for the task of fighting with other aircraft. The nature of this work provided heroes for the Home Front of every nation engaged in the conflict. Aerial combat seemed to possess the chivalry of old – man against man, machine against machine. Pilots, not just those in fighters, were eulogised as an elite band, engaged in combat that owed something to the age of chivalry. David Lloyd George informed the House of Commons:

‘The heavens are their battlefield; they are the cavalry of the clouds. High above the squalor and the mud… they fight out the eternal issues of right and wrong. Their daily, yea, their nightly struggles are like the Miltonic conflict between the winged hosts of light and darkness… They are the knighthood of this war, without fear and without reproach.’

Lloyd George was not altogether accurate. In fact, fighter pilots knew fear, and they soon discovered that chivalric acts were just as likely to get them killed as to be to their benefit. Nonetheless, the image held. This leaves historians with a problem. The popular perception of fighter pilots of both World Wars is one dominated by the ‘aces’ – those pilots with five or more victories against the enemy. This neatly overlooks the fact that approximately 40 per cent of aerial victories have been achieved by around 5 per cent of all fighter pilots.

This means that to understand the fighter pilots’ experience in two World Wars, we need to look beyond the aces; if we do not, we miss out of the equation large numbers of fighter pilots. They flew many hours on operations and scored only a few, if any, aerial victories. In fact, if the experience of fighter pilots, ace and non-ace, is considered, there is a remarkable seriality of experience. This applies to both conflicts and across national boundaries.

Although the popular perceptions of fighter pilots may be distorted, there are a number of truisms that can be drawn from the false imagery. Air combat is a difficult pursuit. Unlike other forms of warfare, it is fought in three dimensions, which adds to the challenge of being successful. The truly successful fighter pilot needs to possess great perception of what is happening around him; in the course of an air battle, this has proved to be extremely difficult. This ‘situational awareness’, or ‘SA’, is important to all fighter pilots. Those who possess the best SA have tended to be the high scorers. In the two World Wars pilots could not rely upon technology to guide weapons against enemy aircraft, and had to rely upon their shooting skills. For every crack shot, there were tens of others who were unable to bring a sufficient weight of fire to bear upon the enemy. This consideration applies across the board. It is notable that many aces have been described as only average pilots.

‘Billy’ Bishop was regarded as being a particularly ham-fisted pilot, but his shooting skills enabled him to become one of the leading aces. As will be discussed below, just how accurate was Bishop’s total of claims is now open to serious doubt; nonetheless, there is enough evidence to state that he destroyed enough aircraft to be considered an ‘ace’ (although the Royal Flying Corps and its successor the Royal Air Force have never officially used the term), and his shooting skills were undoubtedly important. In comparison, the New Zealander Keith Caldwell, who ended the First World War commanding 74 Squadron RAF, was noted for his skilful flying and abysmal shooting. Mike Spick regularly makes the point that the adage ‘good flying never killed anyone yet’ holds a great deal of truth.

Spick also makes an important contribution by noting that the idea that the top-scorers were only average pilots is inherently subjective. As most, if not all, of the highest-claiming men possessed better situational awareness, they were able to use this superior judgement to avoid placing themselves in circumstances where superlative flying skill was required to save themselves.

The debate over the importance of flying skill and shooting ability is not an easy one to resolve. The easiest way to score while avoiding trouble was to sneak up upon an opponent and press home an effective close-range attack before he knew what had occurred.

This apparently required only competent flying, but demanded good planning and accurate shooting. Although this type of attack fell outside the bounds of chivalric behaviour, this consideration did not worry fighter pilots. One of the leading British pilots of the Great War, Philip Fullard, firmly believed that his high score of victories owed more to his ability as a pilot rather than to superior shooting skills. Fullard was not shy in his self-analysis, calling himself a ‘brilliant pilot’. He also remarked upon his penchant for getting so close to the enemy aircraft that he could see the bullets striking home.

Even if pilots were excellent shots, the need to get in close to the enemy was stressed time and time again. The second highest-scoring American pilot of the Second World War, Thomas B. McGuire, told new arrivals to his unit they should ‘go in close, and then when you think you’re too close, go in closer still.’

With the arrival of batteries of wing-mounted guns in Second World War fighters, it is noticeable that the British aces all harmonised their guns to a set point, so that the rounds would converge. In the Battle of Britain a number of pilots had the harmonisation set at 50 yards.

This was in contrast to the initial alignment of the guns so that a ‘shotgun pattern’ was achieved. Although this was an admirable recognition of the lack of shooting ability of the vast majority of pilots, it did nothing to compensate, reducing the concentration of weight of fire. The same difficulty affected the Luftwaffe, where it was noted that the armament of the early versions of the Messerschmitt 109 created problems for the less experienced pilots. The Me109’s armament of two rifle-calibre machine-guns over the engine and one cannon firing through the propeller hub demanded precise shooting for full effect.

The successful pilot invariably preferred to get in close. The leading ‘ace’ of the Second World War, Erich Hartmann (352 victories), remarked:

‘You can have computer sights or anything you like, but I think you have to go to the enemy on the shortest distance and knock him down from point blank range. You’ll get him from in close. At long distance it’s questionable.’

And:

‘I liked the whole of my windscreen to be full of the enemy aircraft when I fired.’

Getting in close reduced the need to possess deadly shooting skills; the major difficulty appears to have been that of judging distance. There are countless examples of pilots opening fire beyond the range of their guns, thus alerting the enemy and reducing their ammunition before closing to an effective distance. Hence, while the ability to shoot straight was important, the ability to judge range was equally imperative, especially when shooting with any degree of deflection.

Although the majority of pilots who followed the simple dictum of getting in close could score a few victories, the high-scorers were set apart by their ability to aim accurately while compensating for angles of deflection between them and their target. It will be realised that the majority of aerial combats did not involve straight and level flight. The twists and turns seen as aircraft manoeuvred for position meant that the ability to judge an aiming point became vital. It was therefore necessary for pilots to judge where their shells and the enemy aircraft would converge. This was true in both World Wars, but, coupled with the higher speeds of the Second, it made air combat a tricky business. More than anything else, this explains why shooting skills were arguably more important than flying ability.

In the First World War the French ‘ace’ René Fonck used to spend a great deal of time while on the ground practising his shooting. Although he used a shotgun or a rifle, the principles were the same. He ended the war with an official tally of 75 victories, a total that, in fact, may have been even higher. Fonck was also renowned for his ability to dispatch an enemy aircraft using remarkably few rounds of ammunition. In the Second World War the British ‘aces’ ‘Johnnie’ Johnson and Robert Stanford Tuck, both of whom went game shooting, were able to score highly (at least 38 and 29 victories respectively) as a result of their experience of judging both distance and movement so as to bring their guns to bear on a moving target. The closer the range, the less danger of miscalculation. Even with practice, be it gained from hunting birds or in the more official surroundings of a gunnery school, the shooting ability of the top-scorers relied heavily upon developed instinct. Gunther Rail, the third-highest scoring German pilot of the Second World War, with 275 victories, noted:

‘I had no system of shooting as such. It is definitely more in the feeling side of things that these skills develop. I was at the front [for] five and a half years and you just get a feeling for the right amount of lead [ie angle of deflection].’