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He broke into a peal of nerve-jarring laughter which ended in something like a sob. "Get me a drink somebody, please," he pleaded. "Lord! I am tired."
This is the very first Biggles book, a collection of the first Biggles short stories, set in WWI and including his first appearance in "The White Fokker." He's introduced as a teenage pilot barely holding himself together, and the whole collection is understatedly harrowing. It's also full of exciting aerial warfare, fascinating period details, and cool concepts, plus an introduction by Johns in which he describes some of the experiences that inspired the book and says that most of the stories in it are more-or-less true.
These planes, or "machines" as they're often called, were made of canvas and wood, and were flown without parachutes or radio. (Pilots used hand signals (!) or plane movements to communicate.) If you were shot down, you generally died. But if you crash-landed, you could often literally get up and walk away. At one point someone gets a ride hanging on to a wing!
Dogfighting pilots were so close at times that they could see each other's faces and even expressions, and the aces on both sides knew each other's names and some personal details. It was a weirdly intimate kind of warfare.
The stories were published individually, but they connect to form a loose narrative. The flying sequences and the general sense that death is hanging over them all and can come at any moment when they're in the air gives the book incredible tension. In "The Packet," he's the third pilot to be sent on the same mission within a matter of hours, after the first two were killed trying. He has to pick up a packet of papers that are only twenty miles away; he'll be either back or dead within the hour.
Major Raymond appears in "The Balloonatics," in which he eggs on Biggles to risk his life for six bottles of whiskey! (To be fair, there was a mission of tactical significance involved, and Biggles would have been happy to do it without the prize.) I would bet money that this more-or-less really happened. That story would have fit right in as a M*A*S*H episode.
Algy Lacey is introduced in "The Boob" and plays a major role in "The Battle of Flowers," both of which also have a M*A*S*H-like feel. He's Biggles' cousin whom his aunt arranged to send to his squadron. Biggles has less-than-fond memories of him from childhood: "His Christian names are Algernon Montgomery, and that's just what he looked like--a slice of warmed-up death wrapped in velvet and ribbons."
Algy arrives with ten hours of flying Camels under his belt, and Biggles warns him that the average lifespan of a new pilot is 24 hours, but if he survives the first week he should be all right. He's serious, too. Of course, he shows his stuff in a pleasingly unexpected manner, and turns out to be even more of a courageous lunatic than young Biggles.
Marie Janis appears in "Affaire de Couer," which establishes that Biggles' type is "honorable and attractive German spy, any gender fine."
"The Last Show" sees Biggles so far gone that he's about to be sent home before he gets himself killed, but he has one last mission he's determined to fly...
Reading this without context, it's an excellent set of atmospheric, exciting war stories with interesting hooks. Read with the context of a bunch of other Biggles books, I kept thinking, "This poor kid!" He is SEVENTEEN.
I'd already read Biggles Learns to Fly, which has a similar tone, but this one is especially good to keep in mind as his and Algy's backstory when reading other books.
I ended up reading this off the Internet Archive link because the versions I could find online were so poorly formatted. I will eventually get a hard copy (It's on my wish list and my birthday is coming up JUST SAYING) but I wanted to read it sooner. Hopefully this is not the infamous bowdlerized edition where the pilots are risking their lives to win six bottles of lemonade (originally whiskey.) I wonder if the other pilots in that edition worry about Biggles because he's gotten so depressed and burned out that he's drinking half a bottle of lemonade before breakfast!
This is the very first Biggles book, a collection of the first Biggles short stories, set in WWI and including his first appearance in "The White Fokker." He's introduced as a teenage pilot barely holding himself together, and the whole collection is understatedly harrowing. It's also full of exciting aerial warfare, fascinating period details, and cool concepts, plus an introduction by Johns in which he describes some of the experiences that inspired the book and says that most of the stories in it are more-or-less true.
These planes, or "machines" as they're often called, were made of canvas and wood, and were flown without parachutes or radio. (Pilots used hand signals (!) or plane movements to communicate.) If you were shot down, you generally died. But if you crash-landed, you could often literally get up and walk away. At one point someone gets a ride hanging on to a wing!
Dogfighting pilots were so close at times that they could see each other's faces and even expressions, and the aces on both sides knew each other's names and some personal details. It was a weirdly intimate kind of warfare.
The stories were published individually, but they connect to form a loose narrative. The flying sequences and the general sense that death is hanging over them all and can come at any moment when they're in the air gives the book incredible tension. In "The Packet," he's the third pilot to be sent on the same mission within a matter of hours, after the first two were killed trying. He has to pick up a packet of papers that are only twenty miles away; he'll be either back or dead within the hour.
Major Raymond appears in "The Balloonatics," in which he eggs on Biggles to risk his life for six bottles of whiskey! (To be fair, there was a mission of tactical significance involved, and Biggles would have been happy to do it without the prize.) I would bet money that this more-or-less really happened. That story would have fit right in as a M*A*S*H episode.
Algy Lacey is introduced in "The Boob" and plays a major role in "The Battle of Flowers," both of which also have a M*A*S*H-like feel. He's Biggles' cousin whom his aunt arranged to send to his squadron. Biggles has less-than-fond memories of him from childhood: "His Christian names are Algernon Montgomery, and that's just what he looked like--a slice of warmed-up death wrapped in velvet and ribbons."
Algy arrives with ten hours of flying Camels under his belt, and Biggles warns him that the average lifespan of a new pilot is 24 hours, but if he survives the first week he should be all right. He's serious, too. Of course, he shows his stuff in a pleasingly unexpected manner, and turns out to be even more of a courageous lunatic than young Biggles.
Marie Janis appears in "Affaire de Couer," which establishes that Biggles' type is "honorable and attractive German spy, any gender fine."
"The Last Show" sees Biggles so far gone that he's about to be sent home before he gets himself killed, but he has one last mission he's determined to fly...
Reading this without context, it's an excellent set of atmospheric, exciting war stories with interesting hooks. Read with the context of a bunch of other Biggles books, I kept thinking, "This poor kid!" He is SEVENTEEN.
I'd already read Biggles Learns to Fly, which has a similar tone, but this one is especially good to keep in mind as his and Algy's backstory when reading other books.
I ended up reading this off the Internet Archive link because the versions I could find online were so poorly formatted. I will eventually get a hard copy (It's on my wish list and my birthday is coming up JUST SAYING) but I wanted to read it sooner. Hopefully this is not the infamous bowdlerized edition where the pilots are risking their lives to win six bottles of lemonade (originally whiskey.) I wonder if the other pilots in that edition worry about Biggles because he's gotten so depressed and burned out that he's drinking half a bottle of lemonade before breakfast!
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(a) The entire collection sounds unqualifiedly great. I am fascinated by the sort of pip-pip-cheerio pop-cultural revision that seems to have taken place since.
(b) That is a fantastic title.
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I read a history book last year about WW1 aces, and every page there was something mentioned, and it was exactly as it’s described in this and the other WW1 books. I remember a story in there about a guy who went on patrol in his pyjamas under his flying suit, got shot down and spent three days wandering around no man’s land in his pjs before he managed to get back to his squadron - you could easily picture Biggles doing that!
And Algy’s introduction is fantastic - the bit where Mahoney advises Biggles to get the letter to Algy’s mother written in advance...! And everything about the flowers. The way it ricochets between horrifying death and teenage pranks is like nothing else.
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It really gives a lot of insight into later Biggles - his particular combination of emotional calm combined with absolutely batshit problem solving - that this was what was going on in his life from about age 17-19.
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Have you seen Only Angels Have Wings (1939)? It is one of my favorite movies which I continue to feel absolutely inadequate to describe, but it's not only in clear descent from WWI aviation traditions, at least one character in the cast canonically learned to fly in the war (and you can see it).
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I think you may like it very much!
Historical aviation was an interest of mine, off and on over the years, even before the Biggles books happened to me, which has now re-ignited in a major way.
I can probably recommend way too many aviation pictures set during WWI.
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Oh, please give me a list! :D
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Okay!
Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol (1930) may be the gold standard. I don't have a complete review of it, but I did write about the 1938 remake which I discovered first. Everything about the pre-Code original is better except perhaps for Basil Rathbone.
William Dieterle's The Last Flight (1931) is set almost entirely post-war, but I would still give it pride of place if anyone asked me to program a festival of this stuff.
Stuart Walker and Mitchell Leisen's The Eagle and the Hawk (1933) is mid-war with trauma in spades and I thought of it while reading this review of The Camels Are Coming. Fredric March is electrifyingly difficult to watch. The whump just keeps on coming.
I called Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels (1930) a hot mess and I stand by it, but the aviation sequences are so good that I recommend the film to anyone with an interest in this era of flying. The dogfights are fucking terrifying! There's a zeppelin crash! I don't care that most of the dialogue is of the species George, you can type this shit, but you sure can't say it, I still want to see it on a big screen.
RKO's The Lost Squadron (1932) is two-thirds not good, but since the third that is good is actually trying to grapple with what a bunch of flying aces do with themselves after the war and the answer is stunt flying for Hollywood, I really want to rescue those scenes into a better film. I would not by any stretch of the imagination call it essential, but it has some neat ideas.
I have never managed to see Ace of Aces (1933) even though Guy Maddin adores it. Wings (1927) is legendary and I've just never written about it. I really think of Only Angels Have Wings as being part of this cycle, even a generation on. There's also a peculiar cluster of commercial aviation films in the 1930's of which Angels was clearly a part, of which I have seen fewer than the actual war films but which seem to be tapping into some of the same tropes and questions. Further research required.
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Welcome! I hope you can find them readily.
[edit] On that note, see below.
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The quality is nothing to write home about, but some traumatized aviators fell off the back of this bus.
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Any sources for The Eagle and the Hawk?
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Since the last time I checked, yes!
[edit] Hell's Angels looks to be on YouTube, which may have to suffice in the absence of an IMAX theatre.
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Even by pre-Code standards, I did not see it coming!
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I'm realizing that I haven't seen many pre-Code movies. That was legit shocking.
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It is!
I have nothing like a systematic list of essential pre-Codes to point to (and tend to disagree with those kinds of lists when I see them myself), but I very strongly recommend the entire brief, vivid period. Its films can feel like alternate history simply by being so much closer to the world as it existed than the codified moralities of Code enforcement which followed them. Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000) and Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002) remain groundbreaking and fun, if no longer cutting-edge introductions to the era. I anti-recommend the scholarship of Thomas Doherty.
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I like LaSalle. I don't agree with his every assessment of an actor or a film, but who expects to? He's smart and nuanced about screen personae in a way that makes me wish he would just write a biography of Richard Barthelmess or Ann Harding and I believe him to be the person who validated my growing impression (now an active hobbyhorse) that while it's easy to think of the pre-Code era in terms of the sexual agency afforded its female characters, it's just as important to consider it in terms of the emotional range permitted its male characters. I would like to have inherited its continuity of culture rather than having to rediscover it as though it came from the hell of a universe next door.
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Yes, it does. I bet every single time he has a birthday he feels mildly bewildered that he's lived this long.
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I think you're right, and also, I feel like there is ABSOLUTELY a fic in that.
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Once I started reading aviation biography and autobiography, I started recognising the sources, eg a rampage that an SE5 pilot went on, lifted more or less whole and entire by Johns. Truth, as he keeps stating in his Forewards, is stranger than fiction. I forgive him for using other people's experiences because he lived through so much himself, and passed on what he'd learned so well, at a time when it was desperately needed.
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As
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Goering flew a white Fokker. Coincidence? I think not.
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