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

The term ‘right stuff’ has now entered the realms of cliché, but was applicable. In the case of the First World War, the pilots were regarded as ‘intrepid aviators’, who required great courage and fortitude to leave the safety of the ground in their potentially dangerous machines. This meant that many of the first men to enter into air combat were of a notably strong character, which in some cases manifested itself in eccentricity. Perhaps the most notable example here was the inimitable Louis Strange, who as well as being probably the first British pilot to conduct a ground-attack mission, survived falling out of his aircraft and hanging inverted on to the ammunition drum of his Lewis gun before managing to swing himself back into the cockpit. Strange ended the First World War commanding 80 Wing, RAF, flying Sopwith Camels, and then distinguished himself in the Second World War.

He managed to persuade the authorities that he was still capable of flying, and in June 1940 he found himself at Merville airfield commanding the efforts to transport men and equipment away from the advancing Germans. A number of serviceable Hawker Hurricanes were on the airfield, and Strange decided to fly one back to England. Although he had never flown a Hurricane before, he successfully took off, only to be ‘bounced’ by a flight of Me109s. Although the Hurricane was not carrying any ammunition, Strange simply outmanoeuvred the enemy fighters, including some hair-raising low-level flying. He returned safely to Britain, and was awarded a bar to the Distinguished Flying Cross, 20 years after he had first won that award.

The RFC produced a number of pilots whose behaviour was extremely unusual during the Great War, but this was more by virtue of circumstances at the commencement of the conflict than by design. As the war went on, it was neither possible nor desirable to track down men who were noticeably unusual in their general behaviour in order to train them for air fighting. Instead, pilots were asked if they had experience of riding horses, or motor vehicles. The employment of the former question by recruiting officers has been ridiculed, but made perfect sense.

A man who could control a horse probably had the necessary reflexes and dexterity to control an aircraft. An interest in motor vehicles (which, by virtue of being considered more plebeian, does not receive the same level of amusement) was of use, and remained so. Robert Stanford Tuck, upon applying to join the RAF in 1935, was asked of his knowledge of ‘ICE’. Tuck had no idea what his inquisitor was talking about, but managed to bluff an answer in general terms. Upon leaving the interview, he suddenly realised that ‘ICE’ stood for ‘Internal Combustion Engines’.

Technical aptitude was important, but was not the only factor. Even if fighter pilots did not need to be brilliantly adept at flying, they needed to be competent. The demands of air combat placed heavy psychological and physiological demands upon pilots. Not only did pilots have to cope with the violence, speed and ferocity of air fighting, they had to sustain heavy g-loadings, cold, and changes in air pressure, all of which had a cumulatively fatiguing effect. In the First World War pilots rarely had the benefits of oxygen supply, and the majority flew for their entire careers without it. At heights above 10,000 feet, the thinner air combined with the cold to make air fighting a difficult task. The effort required to change the ammunition drum on a machine-gun was substantial, as the thinner air made exertion more taxing. The lack of oxygen also had the effect of dulling mental agility, crucial to air fighting, which demanded swiftness of thought. The Second World War at least saw the use of oxygen, but sub-zero temperatures remained a challenge, even with the provision of heating systems in the enclosed cockpits. The physical stresses of flying in both wars meant that pilots became fatigued. This, coupled with psychological fatigue, created dangerous and often fatal circumstances.

The fighter pilot was invariably on his own in combat.

This required a certain type of person. Research conducted after the Second World War suggests that a combination of physical and psychological factors were important in selection of pilots. Good pilots were not anxious types and had good psychomotor adaptation and co-ordination. In addition, they tended towards introversion, but – crucially – had the ability to get on well with others when they wished.

The top-scoring ‘ace’ Erich Hartmann noted this, and contended, with the benefit of empirical observation rather than science, that fighter pilots tended towards individualism. This is supported by the historical examples of Billy Bishop, Georges Guynemer and Albert Ball from the First World War, and George ‘Screwball’ Beurling from the Second, all of whom preferred to operate alone.

This did not mean that they were anti-social on the ground, although Ball was famed for his solitary lifestyle, which included wandering outside his self-built cabin playing the violin.

In contrast to Ball and others, ‘Mick’ Mannock believed in teamwork, often ‘setting up’ kills for new pilots to give them confidence. Boelcke and Immelmann formulated their tactics together, and experience in the Second World War demonstrated the importance of fighting as a pair. The trust between pilots was important, since it was comforting to know that there was someone watching out for attack by the enemy. The nature of air combat demanded qualities that were apart from those required in other forms of fighting. Hugh Dundas noted this after his first combat in 1940:

‘From the leading Messerschmitt came thin trails of grey smoke as the pilot fired his guns. The group faded into specks which, in an instant, disappeared beneath the thick black smoke cloud rising from Dunkirk…

Perhaps this little cameo lasted before my eyes for about five seconds; it was a lightning personal introduction to the use of guns in earnest and to the terrifying quality of air fighting. But I did not at that time have so much as one second to reflect upon it, for I was suddenly aware that the formation in which I was flying… was breaking up in violent manoeuvre.’

This marked the start of Dundas’s first ‘dog-fight’. He found it a terrifying and confusing affair:

‘…when, at last, I felt it safe to straighten out, I was amazed to find that the sky which only moments before had been full of whirling, firing fighters was now empty. It was my first experience of this curious phenomenon, which continually amazed all fighter pilots. At one moment it was all you could do to avoid collision… the next moment you were on your own.’

The rapid nature of air combat – which could be made all the more sudden by a surprise attack from the enemy – was not the only confusing matter for pilots. In both World Wars, the fighter pilot could return from a particularly arduous mission feeling lucky to have survived, then find himself going out for a pleasant evening’s relaxation before having to face the prospect of being heavily engaged the following morning. This imposed great levels of stress upon pilots, particularly for the Germans with their policy of not rotating men to training units. Unlike many other combatants, fighter pilots faced dramatic contrasts in their living conditions day after day. Coupled with the physical stresses of air fighting, this meant that even the most experienced pilots became heavily fatigued. Hugh Dundas, after scoring his first victory, noted a worrying ‘inner voice’ that urged him not to take risks. Although he heard this voice regularly, he was able to ignore it–to the extent of becoming a willing wingman to the aggressive Douglas Bader – until he approached the end of his tour. By mid-1941, he was in need of a rest, but:

‘It did not occur to me to ask for a rest. Bader’s influence had taught me that this was not an acceptable course. Indeed, I felt more strongly than ever that I must stick with the Squadron, continuing to fight… and helping to pass on to the new pilots the experience and knowledge I had gained…

At the same time, I subconsciously shrank from battle. The instinct for survival, the inner urge to rest on my laurels, was very strong. I know there were a couple of occasions when I shirked from the clash of combat at the critical moment. Looking back on it later, I recognised that this was a time of extreme danger for me and also to some extent for the men I was leading. It was the stage of fatigue when many experienced fighter pilots have fallen as a result of misjudgement or a momentary holding back from combat.’

Fatigue and misjudgement applied to all fighter pilots, and could not be avoided by the end of a tour of operations. For the Luftwaffe this meant either death or wounds that prevented flying, which was hardly the best fashion in which to husband experience. By the time of their deaths in action, both Albert Ball and Georges Guynemer were displaying signs of fatigue that may have contributed to their loss. Fatigue could affect pilots in other ways too – Philip Fullard fought with considerable aggression until November 1917, when he was injured in a football match at his aerodrome. Fullard informed Peter Liddle that he did not suffer from stress or nerves, but after his enforced removal from the front, his efforts to repress this caught up with him, and his nerves gave way, preventing him from returning to light duties until September 1918.

It is clear that the personal qualities of fighter pilots were important. Although recruiting officers could never be sure, they attempted – usually successfully – to find men who could ignore or suppress their anxieties for considerable periods. The ability to be both introverted and personable suggests that perhaps the pilots were able to compartmentalise aspects of their lives, ensuring that they could cope with the stresses imposed upon them. Although individualism was important, it is worth noting that most memoirs by fighter pilots stress the importance to them of at least one other colleague, often their wingman. This was rarely so great as to cause breakdowns if that close friend was lost, and again suggests an ability to maintain professional detachment to a greater degree than others. This mix of individualism and teamwork was vitally important, along with the third major quality of aggression. In 1917, Trenchard noted:

‘The battle in the air can only be won by taking the offensive and persevering in it… victory over [enemy] low-flying aircraft [will come] through offensive superiority [emphasis in original]… The aeroplane is a weapon that has no exact counterpart… but the principles which guide it in warfare, in order for it to be successful, are those which guide all other arms in all other elements of warfare, and the most important of these is the will and power to attack the enemy, to force him to fight, and to defeat him.’

To do this an air force required pilots who were prepared to take risks and to operate in an offensive manner. The canard ‘the best form of defence is attack’ was expected to be an unconscious part of a fighter pilot’s character. This applied across national boundaries in both World Wars; fighter pilots were required to be aggressive to be successful – and that success might be measured on occasion by whether they lived or died. Aggression could, and did, bring casualties when applied recklessly. Pilots also needed to judge when to be aggressive and when not to be. There was little room for men who were unable to think quickly and press home the advantage when they had it. This did not preclude some degree of fellow-feeling for enemy pilots. Most preferred it when the pilot of an aircraft they destroyed escaped alive. Arthur Rhys-Davids, the conqueror of Werner Voss, was heard to express his dismay that he was unable to have brought him down alive. Mannock, on the other hand, was a notable exception to the vague bonds of comradeship that fighter pilots had towards one another, and was not the only one. Pilots with these sentiments tended to be exceptions: even though the Vietnam war ‘ace’ Randall Cunningham argued that it was better to go into battle with some ‘hate in your heart’, this did not extend in either war to attacking a defeated opponent on the ground or in a parachute. Although this did happen, pilots from both sides on the Western front (in both wars) generally regarded such actions as unacceptable.

Whether an ‘ace’ or simply a regular squadron flyer, the fighter pilot has always been slightly apart from other warriors. Aggression, teamwork, popular recognition and adulation combined with danger, fear and the random nature of simple fate to make the fighter pilot’s task demanding and different. Whether German, American or British, whether fighting in the First or Second World War, or whether flying a Fokker Triplane or Supermarine Spitfire, the fighter pilot’s experience was remarkably similar. The nature of their task made it so.

Notes on contributors

Dr David Jordan, Joint Services Command and Staff College, Bracknell, UK

Dr Jordan is a Lecturer at King’s College London, based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College. He was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and the University of Birmingham, where he took his doctorate. He specialises in air power and international relations and is currently writing a book on the development of tactical air power in the First World War.

Recommended reading

Gould Lee, Arthur, No Parachute: A Fighter Pilot in World War I (London: Jarrolds, 1969)

Lewis, Cecil, Sagittarius Rising (London: Greenhill Books, 1993 (1936))

Liddle, Peter H., The Airman’s War 1914–1918 (Poole: Blandford, 1987)

Richey, Paul, Fighter Pilot: A personal record of the campaign in France, 1939–1940 (London: Leo Cooper, 1990)

Shaw, Robert L., Fighter Combat: Tactics and Manoeuvring (Annapolis: Naval Institute 1985, and Wellingborough: Patrick Stephens Limited, 1986)

Sims, Edward H., Fighter Tactics and Strategy, 1914–1970 (London: Cassell, 1972)

Spick, Mike, The Ace Factor: Air Combat and the Role of Situational Awareness (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1988)

Chapter 6 (#ulink_b269a563-21d8-5b95-b754-6722b4e0e8dc)

War in the air: the bomber crew (#ulink_b269a563-21d8-5b95-b754-6722b4e0e8dc)

Christina Goulter

‘The principal operational elements in the strategic air offensive are: first, the calibre of the crews, which is a question of selection, training, experience, leadership and fighting spirit; secondly, the performance of the aircraft and of the equipment and bases upon which they depend; thirdly, the weather; fourthly, the tactical methods and, fifthly, the nature of the enemy opposition.’

The authors of the British official history, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, which remains the best single work on the subject, acknowledged the importance of the human element in this campaign. This acknowledgement was overdue. The decades following the Second World War were dominated by interest in the technological and scientific contributions to Allied victory, and the development of nuclear weapons merely reinforced the idea that science had done away with the need for the clash of massed armies. The idea that all operational problems could be subjected to and solved by scientific principles and the application of technology was a particularly strong thread in US military thinking after 1945, and this has persisted, in spite of the Vietnam experience, which demonstrated that the hi-tech nation does not always win. In Britain such ideas were less strong, for reasons of economy and the fact that the nation was engaged in more counter-insurgency and brush-fire wars, but in both countries there was a tendency to de-emphasise the contribution of the individual and to emphasise the big picture, in which nuclear strategy in a bi-polar world was the prime concern.

Although Vietnam was not Britain’s war, it had a profound effect on the way most of the world has thought about war, especially its human face. So, the ground was fertile for the proliferation of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical accounts of individual war experience, especially from the pens of the Second World War’s aviators. What has been lacking, however, is the type of study that examines aircrew experience in the round: what motivated men, in general, to volunteer for aircrew service; whether their training equipped them adequately for the job they had to do; the contrast between expectation and combat reality; combat stress; and, finally, the re-adjustment to civilian life.

These are universal questions, which are valid for any combat flying under consideration, and, because we are dealing with the human element, there are striking similarities between apparently very different wars. Thus we are able to observe many parallels between the aircrew experiences of the First and Second World Wars, even though, some would say, the technological advances during the intervening time meant that the nature of the war differed substantially between the two conflicts.

Whether we are talking about historical examples or today, a prime motivation for joining the air force has undoubtedly been the glamour associated with aviation. This was certainly true of the First and Second World Wars, when aviation was a new and exciting science, and interest in the ‘third dimension’ pervaded society at large. For those who were coming from Allied countries, there was the added excitement of an overseas deployment. A New Zealand pilot reflected that he and his friends joining the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1939 were ‘moved more by the spirit of adventure’ and a need to validate their manhood ‘than by the burnings of patriotism’, although, invariably, this developed and ‘loyalty shone bright’.

What is also almost universally true is that men volunteered for flying duties because they had their sights on becoming pilots, rather than other aircrew trades. To be a pilot was glamorous; to be an observer, navigator, wireless operator or gunner was not. So, almost without exception, those who joined to fly joined to be pilots, and, within the pilot hierarchy, to be a fighter pilot always held the greatest cachet. However, there were no guarantees in either the First or Second World War that those wishing to be pilots would necessarily end up as pilots. Depending on the aircrew selection process, or simple supply and demand, a pilot candidate could find himself channelled into other aircrew trades.

Those who volunteered to fly in one of the air services in the First World War had witnessed aviation’s extraordinarily rapid development, from the Wright Brothers’ 1903 flight of a few hundred yards to bombing aircraft capable of round journeys of hundreds of miles by the middle of the war. In Britain, Blériot’s flight across the Channel in the summer of 1909 captivated the nation, and it was from this point, rather than later in the 1920s, that Britain became ‘air minded’.

Few seemed to doubt that those nations possessing air power would fail to use it in the next war, and now that Britain was apparently within easy reach of potential aggressors, steps were taken by the Committee of Imperial Defence to establish a British air service. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed in April 1912 (originally with two branches, naval and military), there was no shortage of recruits.

Many would go on to fill senior positions in the RAF, most prominent among whom were Hugh Trenchard, Arthur Longmore, Sholto Douglas, and John Slessor. What these men, and other more junior flying personnel, had in common when they joined up was a driving ambition to fly. Their recollections record their fascination and wonderment as they commenced their initial training.

Later generations have been drawn to aviation for the same reasons, but recruits of the late 1930s and early years of the Second World War also had a desire to avoid the horrors of trench warfare, which had consumed their fathers’ generation. Although war experience after 1939 quickly demonstrated that service in the Air Force was not necessarily a safer option than service with the Army or the Navy, the perception during the 1930s was that one’s chances of surviving a war were far greater in the air, and that the quality of life, in the meantime, would be superior. A former Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps expressed it in this way:

‘When we were flying at about 17,000 feet, it gave you a wonderful feeling of exhilaration. You were sort of, “I’m the King of the Castle”. You were up there and you were right out of the war. I’d been in the infantry and we were always lousy, filthy dirty and often hungry, whereas in the Flying Corps it was a gentleman’s life. You slept in a bed, put on pyjamas every night. You had a decent mess to come back to… So, altogether, it was much more pleasant.’

Some aircrew candidates also believed that air power offered a more humane way to wage war, and this view was particularly prevalent among Americans in the 1930s. Not only did many Americans within the US Army Air Corps (and, later, the US Army Air Forces) genuinely believe that the US possessed the technological means to perform precision bombing, and would, therefore, be able to realise Billy Mitchell’s vision of attacks on key nodes within an enemy industrial infrastructure, but there was also the view that precision instruments offered the means to avoid civilian casualties. According to one author, this satisfied the ‘deep-seated American need for the moral high ground in war, while satisfying an American hunger for technological achievement’.

Regardless of nationality, many aircrew candidates also seem to have believed that the air service offered the greatest possibility of a quick, decisive victory. Prior to the First World War, there were those who looked at the potential of aircraft in the military sphere and felt that aircraft represented a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), even if it was not expressed in this way. One such was a Major Herbert Musgrave, who transferred from the Royal Engineers to the Royal Flying Corps. He was closely involved with aeronautical research, and his work on wireless telegraphy and bomb aiming, in particular, laid the foundation for the long-range operations undertaken during the war. Musgrave felt that the impending war would be ‘the hardest, fiercest, and bloodiest struggle’ experienced to date, and that aviation would play a decisive role.

However, the idea that aircraft could deliver the ‘knock-out blow’ gained most currency during the inter-war period. Even though there was very little in the First World War experience to indicate that air power would be able to deliver the quick, decisive victory, strategic bombing theory dominated air power doctrine. In Britain, as a number of scholars have already demonstrated, the pressures of budgetary constraint and inter-service rivalry, which threatened the independent existence of the RAF, led to increasingly grandiose claims being made for air power. Chief of Air Staff Trenchard’s debates with the Navy were publicised in the national press, and added to the ‘air-mindedness’ of the country. Air power’s overwhelming success in Britain’s empire policing role, followed by a series of bombing assaults on populated centres overseas by other air power nations (notably Japan against Shanghai in 1932 and combined Fascist forces against Guernica in 1937), merely reinforced the public’s belief that the next war would be dominated by massed aerial attack. So, although most aircrew candidates in the late 1930s and early war years volunteered with the hope of becoming fighter pilots, it was widely accepted that the bomber would decide the outcome of the next war.