Wings (12 page)

‘The war below us was a spectacle,’ wrote Cecil Lewis. ‘We aided and abetted it, admiring the tenacity of men who fought in verminous filth to take the next trench thirty yards
away. But such objectives could not thrill us, who, raising our eyes, could see objective after objective receding, fifty, sixty, seventy miles beyond.’
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This perspective encouraged feelings of detachment. Many airmen on both sides clung to the idea that what they were engaged in was somehow ‘clean’ in comparison to the vileness of
trench warfare. British pilots used public-school lingo to describe what they were doing. ‘Have just been up to test my new machine [one of the newly arrived Nieuports],’ Albert Ball
wrote to his parents in May 1916. ‘Well, I have never had so much sport. I fooled about and banked it, having such a topping test ride.’ He finished: ‘Huns, look out!’

The exuberance in Ball’s early letters home is the last sparkle of schoolboy innocence. He was nineteen years old when he arrived in France in February 1916, but in photographs his taut,
uncreased skin makes him look even younger.
He stares straight at the camera, giving nothing away. The letters, however, reveal his inner confusion as the values of the playing
field jostle uncomfortably with the neurosis of the battlefield.

Ball was the first British pilot to become famous. He was brought up in a middle-class home in Nottingham, where his father had become Lord Mayor after starting his working life as a plumber. He
went to a local public school organized along Christian lines with plenty of cold baths and exercise. When the war broke out he hurried to join up and was posted to the infantry. Bored with waiting
to be sent to France he took flying lessons with a view to joining the RFC. He fell instantly in love with flying, despite the dangers. ‘It is rotten to see the smashes,’ he wrote in a
letter. ‘Yesterday a ripping boy had a smash and when we got up to him he was nearly dead. He had a two-inch piece of wood right through his head and died this morning.’ He informed his
parents – without apparent irony – that he ‘would be pleased to take you up any time you wish’.

Ball reached France in time for the big Somme offensive of the summer of 1916 and soon made his mark by his extraordinarily aggressive approach. By now airmen were developing new tactics. The
more skilful pilots disliked the close escort duties that Trenchard had demanded, which restricted their tactical options and made life more dangerous both for the aircraft they were supposed to be
protecting and themselves. They preferred to operate solo, going off on hunting missions to seek out the enemy before they arrived over no-man’s-land. It was a singularly British approach and
RFC fliers spent more
time to the east of the front lines than the Germans did over British territory.

Ball was the embodiment of this approach. He would set off alone, having first tuned his aeroplane to his liking. Odds meant nothing to him and he would fly straight into swarms of opponents,
closing to almost point-blank range and opening up with his Lewis gun. If he failed to down his victim with the first drum of ammunition he would break off, change the magazine and try again.
Frequently, on his return from combats, his machine was found to be riddled with bullet holes.

The RFC was tolerant of unconventionality, but Ball still struck his fellow airmen as odd. At his first base at Savy Aubigny, north-west of Arras, he didn’t like the look of the billet
allotted to him in the village and instead had a bell tent erected at the edge of the airfield, which as well as suiting him better also meant that ‘if ever a Hun comes I shall always be on
the good work at once’. Later the tent was replaced by a hut. Ball had the ground next to it dug up and turned into a kitchen garden and asked his family to send seeds for marrows, lettuce,
carrots, mustard cress and cucumber, as well as some flowers. It was an inconvenient two miles from the mess, but that did not bother Ball.
⁴

He preferred to spend his evenings with his violin, which he sometimes played after dinner, walking round and round a flaming red magnesium flare. A fellow pilot, Roderic Hill, described Ball
sitting brooding outside his hut, listening to his gramophone. ‘He had but one idea: that was to kill as many Huns as possible, and he gave effect to it with a swiftness and
certainty that seemed to most of us uncanny. He nearly always went out alone, in fact he would not let anyone else fly with him and was intolerant of proffered
assistance.’
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For all his oddness Ball was respected. A young pilot from New Zealand, Keith Caldwell, saw him as ‘a hero . . . and he looked the part, too: young, alert, ruddy complexion, dark hair and
eyes. He was supposed to be a “loner”, but we found him friendly . . . we felt that it could only be a matter of time before he “bought it”, as he was shot about so
often.’
⁶

In his first eleven weeks in France Ball flew at least forty-three operational sorties and witnessed daily the deaths of friends and enemies. It is hardly surprising that the adolescent optimism
soon fades from his correspondence and darkness creeps in. Only nine days after describing his test flight he admitted in a letter to his sister Lois and brother Cyril that his mind was ‘full
of poo-poo thoughts. I have just lost such a dear old pal, Captain Lucas. He was brought down by a Fokker last night about 5 p.m.’
⁷
By the
middle of July, after a frantic few days of combats, Ball could take no more: ‘The day before yesterday we had a big day,’ he wrote to his father. ‘At night I was feeling very
rotten, and my nerves were poo-poo. Naturally I cannot keep on for ever, so at night I went to see the CO and asked him if I could have a short rest.’ The request was granted, but after a
short respite Ball was back again and by the end of August he was yearning for home. ‘I do so want to leave all this beastly killing for a time,’ he sighed in a letter.

In October he was sent back to England to rest before
moving on to a new post as an instructor. He was already a public name, with thirty-one victories to his name, the MC,
DSO and bar. In the search for positive propaganda about the war, the ban on promoting aces was abandoned and Prime Minister Lloyd George invited Ball to breakfast. However, the peace Ball had
yearned for in France soon bored him. He agitated to go back and in February 1917 he was posted to 56 Squadron, which was being formed as an elite unit equipped with the new Hispano-Suiza-powered
SE5 fighters which could fly at 130 mph and climb to 10,000 feet in ten minutes. During the wait Ball got engaged to an eighteen-year-old florist called Flora Young, who he met when a friend
brought her to the aerodrome. Ball had suggested a flip in his plane and she gamely agreed.

In April 1917 the squadron went to France. It numbered eighteen aircraft, arranged in three flights, and Ball was given command of one of them. This new responsibility meant that his lone-wolf
tactics would be restricted. They were arriving at a time when the RFC was in trouble. It was ‘Bloody April’. The German Albatroses had gained a deadly advantage and Manfred von
Richtofen lorded it over the skies. He had already achieved a dark celebrity – as the Red Baron to the British, Le Diable Rouge to the French and Der Rote Kampfflieger (The Red War Flier) to
his applauding countrymen, who read his own accounts of his exploits in a vainglorious but remarkably revealing autobiography.

Fundamental changes were in progress on the Western Front. Faced with the stalemate on the ground, the Germans
had switched strategy. They were now putting their faith in
starving the Allies into submission by using unrestricted submarine warfare – declared as policy in 1 February 1917 – to cut the enemy’s Atlantic trade routes. The land forces,
meanwhile, fell back to a line of formidable natural and man-made defences, between Arras and the Aisne, onto which they hoped to draw the British and French armies and bleed them white.

In the spring of 1917 the Allies moved into the ceded ground and prepared for what they hoped was a final breakthrough. The Spring Offensive bore the name of the man who planned it, the French
general Robert Nivelle, and the RFC was expected to support it to the utmost. It would be a costly undertaking, as everyone from Trenchard downwards knew. They had aircraft in quantity – more
than the German squadrons could muster – but this advantage was more than cancelled out by their poor overall quality. The Germans had a new improved Albatros – the D.III. They were
also better organized. In October 1916 their air force was given institutional coherence with the foundation of the Deutschen Luftstreitkräfte (‘German Air Force’), with its own
commander and staff. At a tactical level, fighter units were now formed into Jagdstaffeln or ‘Jastas’, fourteen aircraft units which operated with devastating efficiency. The most
feared was Jasta 11, commanded by Richtofen.

As preparations for the latest big push warmed up, Trenchard’s policy of aggression no matter what the odds ensured that the RFC was flung forcefully into battle.
He
accepted that losses would be high, and so it turned out. Ten squadrons, with 365 aircraft, took part in the Battle of Arras, which began on 9 April 1917. By the end, 245 aeroplanes had been
destroyed, 211 aircrew were dead or missing, and another 108 were prisoners of war. This massacre went down in history as ‘Bloody April’. The Germans had suffered too, with 119 machines
shot down. But even when set against the routine carnage of the conflict, these losses seemed unacceptable. The war in the air appeared to be matching the attritional slog on the ground and many
wondered whether the sacrifices were worth it.

It was in this period that the RFC came closest to defeat on the Western Front. It was saved by another shift in technological advantage. In the following months Bristol Fighters and Sopwith
Camels – difficult to handle but superbly manoeuvrable – began to arrive on the squadrons. Here at last were aeroplanes that could outfly and outshoot the Albatroses. The crisis of
April passed and the tide turned towards increasing Allied dominance of the air.

The bigger picture was of little concern to Ball. In his letters to Flora he revealed that he had set himself a target: he wanted to pass the record set by Boelcke, who had knocked down forty
planes by the time he died. Ball did indeed beat that tally, but he never made it back to his fiancée. At 5.30 p.m. on Monday, 7 May 1917 he set off with ten other SE5s from 56 Squadron,
heading for the skies over Arras in an effort to tempt Richtofen and his men into action. Cecil Lewis, who was with him, described the chocolate-coloured fighters flying
into
‘threatening masses of cumulus cloud, majestic skyscapes, solid-looking as snow mountains, fraught with caves and valleys, rifts and ravines’.

Then the Germans they were looking for appeared, led not by the Red Baron but by his brother Lothar von Richtofen. A swirling dogfight developed. Lewis saw Ball disappear into a cloud. A little
later German officers on the ground saw Ball’s aeroplane emerge from the cloud, upside down, trailing black smoke. It smashed into a low sloping field. When the officers reached the wreckage
a young woman from the village had already pulled Ball clear. There were no marks on his fresh features, but he was dead. Lothar seized the credit for downing him, but the claim was never accepted.
Like many aces of this and the following war, the precise details of how Ball met his end have never been conclusively established.

After the carnage of Bloody April, Ball’s death further depressed morale. ‘The mess was very quiet that night,’ wrote Cecil Lewis. They held a sing-song in a barn to try and
cheer themselves up. A band played the hits of the time – ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’, ‘Way Down Upon the Swanee River’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’.
Then Lewis performed Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’, which ends: ‘Glad did I live and gladly die, / and I laid me down with a will.’

Ball’s brief existence had been strange and disconnected, warped by an appalling routine of daily risk and death, reaching his end before he had time to form mature feelings and thoughts.
At least it was clean. Despite the chivalric pretentions, death in the air was no less gruesome than the ends
met by the ground troops whom the airmen pitied. Oswald Boelcke
accepted that his life would terminate violently and he only wondered whether it would be ‘
feucht oder getrocknet
’: ‘wet or dry’. Wet meant a crash. Dry meant being
consumed by flames.

The appalling reality was spelled out by a German airman, Hans Schroder, describing an incident that took place in July 1917. As a counter to the notion that air fighting was somehow less
gruesome than the terrestrial struggle it is worth recounting in full. Schroder was driving past the wreck of a British aeroplane that had just been shot down when ‘it exploded in front of my
window and burst into flames. The burning petrol greedily consumed the unlucky pilot, whose face was charred; his breeches were burnt away at the thighs, and the roasting flesh sizzled in the heat.
From all sides came men with buckets intending to throw water on the blaze.’

Just then a car drew up full of airmen, including Schroder’s friend Klein, who had scored the victory. He was exultant. In the fight that had just finished he had bested his opponent, who
had signalled that he was going to land, then at the last moment had ‘pulled his nose up and put at least twenty bullets into my machine’. Klein hardened his heart. After that
‘there was no mercy for him. We buzzed round and round . . . at a height of fifty metres, like two dogs chasing one another. He had no notion where he was, but he pulled his machine up, and I
zoomed after him.’ After putting a burst into him, Klein watched his opponent ‘go down by one wing and crash by Wevelghem’. There were no regrets. Klein judged him
‘a bad lot. That sort spoils the chivalry one expects in flying. He deserved his fate.’

And what a fate it was. Schroder watched in horrified fascination as the blaze died down gradually. There was ‘a hiss from the burnt thighs when the spectators emptied their buckets of
water on the body. There was a ghastly smell of grilled ham, but the legs below the knees were hardly touched by the fire. The fine new laced boots reaching almost to the knees proclaimed that this
was the body of a human being who only a little while ago had been full of the warm life that pulsated in all our bodies.’