Wings (13 page)

When he returned to his quarters that night he found the splendid boots awaiting him and two bottles of Bols liqueur in his overcoat pockets, gifts from his batman, who had scavenged them from
the wreck. The boots carried ‘an odour of smoked bacon’ and he shoved them quickly outside. The Bols he drank. Its presence in the aircraft gives us an idea of how airmen dealt with the
constant, hovering attendance of death.
⁸

It was a fate like this that haunted all pilots and none more so than Mick Mannock. Mannock had been inspired to transfer from the Royal Engineers to the RFC after hearing and reading of the
exploits of Albert Ball. Both men shared the same dedication and ruthlessness, both enjoyed playing the violin. Otherwise their characters and backgrounds were strongly contrasted. Mannock was
already twenty-seven by the time he arrived at the main RFC depot in St Omer. He had a rough upbringing. His father was a violent, hard-drinking
NCO in the Inniskilling
Dragoons, who abandoned his family when Mick was twelve, leaving his wife Julie to bring up two sons and two daughters in poverty in Canterbury.

Mannock left school at fourteen to become a clerk in the local office of the National Telephone Company, but soon graduated to a technical job checking the lines. His experiences made him a
socialist and an admirer of Keir Hardie, and Mannock would later enjoy alarming his middle-class brother officers with his views on class and privilege. When the war came he was working as a
foreman for a cable-laying company in Turkey and had to be freed from internment by the Red Cross before he could join up.

Mannock arrived on 40 Squadron in the late spring of 1917 at the height of the Albatros ascendancy. He survived the first, desperately dangerous weeks, learning his craft quickly and on 7 June,
while flying as an escort on a bombing mission to Lille, he shot down his first aeroplane.

‘My man gave me an easy mark,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I was only ten yards away from him – on top, so I couldn’t miss! A beautifully coloured insect he was –
red, green, blue and yellow. I let him have sixty rounds . . . there wasn’t much left of him. I saw him go spinning and slipping down from fourteen thousand. Rough luck, but it’s war,
and they’re Huns.’
⁹
It was the start of a sequence that would end with an astounding seventy-three victories.

If Ball was a lone wolf, Mannock was a pack leader. As a flight commander with 74 Squadron and as CO of 84 Squadron, he instilled in his men the need for teamwork and training as well
as constant caution and vigilance. ‘Always above, seldom on the same level and never underneath’ was his motto.

But he was also almost manically determined, persisting with his attacks until he was certain his man had gone down. When it came to a kill, Mannock suffered the same emotional confusion that
Hawker had experienced. After downing an Albatros whose pilot put up a good fight, he wrote in his diary that he was ‘very pleased that I did not kill him’. On 5 September 1917 he
attacked a DFW biplane over Avion, which ‘went down in flames, pieces of wing and tail, etc., dropping away from the wreck. It was a horrible sight and made me feel sick.’
¹⁰
On another occasion, after destroying four enemy aircraft in the space of twenty-four hours, he ‘bounced into the mess shouting: “All tickets
please! Please pass right down the car. Flamerinoes – four! Sizzle-sizzle wonk!”’

It seemed to be a case of making light of what he most feared, and he carried a pistol with which to shoot himself if he ever became a ‘flamerino’. On leave in London in June 1918
Mannock went down with influenza and spent several days in bed at the RFC club, unable to sleep because of the nightmares of burning aircraft that filled his head when he closed his eyes. He
visited friends in Northamptonshire, who were shocked by his appearance and manner. When he talked about his experiences he subsided into tears and said he wanted to die.

Mannock went back to France as commander of 85 Squadron. On 25 July he spent much of the day with his friend Ira Jones, who wrote in his diary: ‘Had lunch, tea and dinner
with Mick. I can’t make out whether he has got nerves or not. One minute he’s full out. The next, he gives the impression of being morbid and keeps bringing up his pet
subject of being shot down in flames. I told him I had got a two-seater in flames on patrol this morning before breakfast. “Could you hear the sod scream?” he asked with a sour smile.
“One day they’ll get you like that, my lad. You are getting careless. Don’t forget to blow your brains out.” Everyone roared with laughter.’
¹¹

The following day he took off at dawn with a greenhorn pilot, Lieutenant Donald Inglis, who had yet to shoot anything down, to show him how it was done. They ran into a two-seater over the
German lines. Mannock began shooting, apparently killing the observer, and left the
coup de grâce
to his pupil, who set the aeroplane on fire. Instead of following his own rules,
which advised climbing away immediately after a kill, Mannock then swooped to examine their victim.

Inglis followed his leader as he ‘made a couple of circles around the burning wreckage and then made for home. I saw Mick start to kick his rudder, then I saw a flame come out of his
machine; it got bigger and bigger. Mick was no longer kicking his rudder. His nose dropped slightly and he went into a slow right-hand turn and he hit the ground in a burst of flame. I circled at
about twenty feet, but could not see him and as things were getting hot made for home . . . Poor Mick . . . the bloody bastards had shot my Major down in flames.’
¹²
Once again the exact cause of an ace’s death was a mystery. It is not known where the shots that downed him came from and his body was never recovered.

So even great skill was no protection from the attentions of the Grim Reaper. It was no wonder that the fliers believed so much in the power of luck. Superstition was rife
and rational men followed obsessive lucky routines and reverenced lucky charms. Authority recognized their importance and made generous accommodations. Hubert Griffith, a twenty-year-old aspiring
writer who joined 15 Squadron from his yeomanry regiment, told a story of how ‘one evening, in some mess skirmish or other, I had broken a ring that I used to wear. It was a Russian-silver
peasant ring of no negotiable value whatsoever; but I had had it throughout the war, it had seen me through a winter in the trenches, I had flown with it and had survived a disastrous flying crash
and other eventualities and I had come, rightly or wrongly, to regard it as an omen of good luck. I had gone straight to the Squadron Commander and had said that I didn’t want to be on the
flying programme next day till after the ring had been mended by the squadron workshops. He had agreed in full seriousness to this grotesque proposition.’

It would never have happened in the army. As Griffith pointed out, ‘if an infantry subaltern had gone to his Colonel and said, “Colonel, Colonel, I don’t want to go up the line
today because one of the eyes of my teddy bear mascot has fallen out,” he would not necessarily have been charged with cowardice, but would merely have been certified as a
lunatic.’
¹³

The RFC’s accommodating attitude reflected the fact that flying was new and different. The old rules and attitudes did not always fit the new circumstances and realities. It was also,
perhaps, a recognition of the fact that the men now fighting the air war were not as conformist – or naturally obedient – as their terrestrial counterparts. By the
time Griffith arrived on his squadron the social composition of the RFC had changed. At the start it had been composed of adventurous young soldiers drawn from the usual social strata that supplied
the ranks of the officer class. When Griffith joined 15 Squadron on attachment in 1917 he was struck by the ‘infinite individuality and variety, the cosmopolitanism of the Flying
Corps’. He found that the ‘average types of young English public-school boy . . . were on the whole in the minority’. The rich social mixture included ‘types who had been
promoted from the ranks . . . Canadians, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, and pilots and observers from every other part of the Empire’. Among them were ‘a man who had been
a cow-puncher in the Argentine, and a Maltese-born pilot, a cross-country jockey who was later to win the Grand National,
³
a man who had had half an ear
shot off in some American brawl and a little New Zealand observer who used to read Homer in the original Greek.’
¹⁴

The RFC in general radiated an air of raffishness, which pervades the pages of
Sagittarius Rising
(1936), the classic memoir of Cecil Lewis, who, while more representative of the run of
RFC officers than Ball or Mannock, was very far from being a stock product of his class. Lewis describes one evening in the mess when the CO of A Flight returned from
Amiens
with a case of whisky, a case of champagne, and a large bath sponge, and announced his intention to ‘throw a drunk’ for the other two flights. After dinner a tin basin was placed on the
mess table and filled with whisky and champagne. The Major then dunked the sponge in the mixture and squeezed it over the heads of his pilots. The evening ended in a drunken melee as the flights
pitched into each other, squirting soda siphons.
¹⁵

Other evenings involved a trip to the local town in search of women, despite the high risk of a dose of clap. A 1915 drinking song describes the finale to a particularly trying day:

The raffishness and insouciance were part of the RFC’s rapidly forming identity. When Lewis joined in 1915 it was only three years old, but it was already brimming with confidence.
‘The RFC attracted the adventurous spirits,’ he wrote. ‘The devil-may-care young bloods of England, the fast-livers, the furious drivers – men who were not happy unless they
were taking risks. This invested the Corps with a certain style (not
always admirable). We had the sense of being the last word in warfare, the advance guard of wars to come
and felt, I suppose, that we could afford to be a little extravagant.’
¹⁶

The swagger was largely justified. But beneath the dash, the lines of an efficient organization were forming and for every brilliant maverick like Ball and Mannock there were many more who
combined courage with high intelligence and vision, and many of those who survived would form a cadre that would come to the fore of the air force in the 1930s and lead it through the war years.
Names that will crop up in the pages to come, such as Charles Portal, Arthur Harris, John Slessor and Arthur Tedder, were all RFC pilots.

By the time the final year of the First World War began, air power had penetrated the lives of everyone involved in the conflict – soldiers, seamen and civilians. On the
Western Front the RFC had become an extra limb for the army, and one on which it leaned heavily. Airmen and aircraft played an essential part in almost all operations. Unlike their comrades on the
ground, they had established a clear ascendancy over the enemy. Huge numbers of aircraft were pouring out of the factories. In 1917 there were 14,832 deliveries to the Front. The following year
that number more than doubled. The RFC and the French air force ruled the skies and the arrival of the Americans in the early summer sealed Allied air superiority. Flying was still a bloody
business. The outnumbered Luftstreitkräfte shifted Jastas up and down the line to try and win some temporary and limited dominance, and the Germans were able to inflict considerable damage.
More than a third of the total aggregate of casualties suffered by
the air force occurred in the last seven and a half months of the war.

Many were sustained in the spring of 1918, when the Germans launched their last great effort. After the October Revolution of 1917, the Russians were out of the war and Germany could switch its
resources to a single front. This respite was the signal for the 1918 Spring Offensive, a huge outpouring of desperate energy that took the Allies by surprise, pushing them back – forty miles
on some sectors of the Front. The air forces were thrown in to try and stem the flood. The squadrons found themselves caught up in massed, swirling air battles as spotters called down fire on the
advancing formations – protected by fighters who buzzed above them, trying to keep the Germans at bay – while underneath, at dangerously low altitudes, others swooped on and raked the
enemy on the roads, lanes and rail tracks. The effect they had could be devastating, as nineteen-year-old Ewan Stock of 54 Squadron observed when out on a strafing mission in his Sopwith Camel on
the afternoon of 22 March. ‘I saw what seemed to be a long wall of sandbags,’ he wrote. ‘I could not understand why I had not seen it before, until diving at the enemy behind it,
I noticed that it was a wall of dead bodies heaped one upon the other. The enemy were on the east side of it, so I was able to sweep this wall with machine-gun fire until there must have been a
hundred or so German soldiers to add to this human wall.’
¹
On 12 April the air force carried out more operations than on any other day of the
war. It was the crescendo of the German effort. Exhaustion set in and the offensive faltered.