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On a Wing and a Prayer: The Untold Story of the Pioneering Aviation Heroes of WWI, in Their Own Word
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rachelmanija Feb. 8th, 2023 11:11 am)
rachelmanija Feb. 8th, 2023 11:11 am)An absolutely superb history of aviation in WWI, in the words of the people who lived it. (Mostly British, with some exceptions.) I love first-person accounts, and this one is exceptionally good: vivid, startling, detailed, exciting, enlightening, often surprisingly funny, and as often unsurprisingly heartbreaking. You don't have to be interested in the subject matter for this to be well worth reading - I'd recommend it to anyone who likes history at all, ever.
It's full of useful details if you write in this period. It confirms that RFC/RAF pilots did get treated at Craiglockhart, along with a lot of other harrowing accounts of PTSD. It's got lots about daily life, like that pilots got pretty good food, put on plays which sometimes involved cross-dressing, and in one case wrote to their parents to ask for fast-growing seeds so they could grow a garden - fast-growing because many of them only survived for a few weeks. It has tons of details about how to fly a Sopwith Camel and other planes of the period, and informs us that the official plural of the German fighter plane, the Albatros, is Albatri.
Levine mostly keeps in the background, though he occasionally indulges in a bit of dubious speculation. For instance, he mentions that W. E. Johns was treated for STDs during his service and dubiously speculates that that was the REAL reason why Biggles stayed single.
I listened to this in audio first, then bought the book in hard copy. The audio version is excellent and includes some music of the period, which was great, but if you want to use it for reference you'll need the physical book.
I was hoping the book would have cites for every source, but unfortunately Levine got the majority of his material from museum and library archives and the originals aren't otherwise available. He only cites six published books in his bibliography, though he definitely uses material from more than that - for instance, he doesn't include Manfred von Richthofen's autobiography in the bibliography, though it's quoted and attributed in the book itself. But he does include the names of everyone he quotes (or says they're anonymous) so it's possible to start from there.
Here's some excerpts, which will give a sense of what the whole book is like. (You all benefit from me FINALLY getting Dragon Dictate to work again on my phone).
These are all accounts by different people. All are British unless marked otherwise.
[By a pilot who started out as an infantryman]
I knew what war was like. I had seen death – too much of it. When I left the trenches, my brother officers said, "Good Heavens, haven't you seen enough planes come down in flames?" I said, "Yes, but haven't you seen enough death in trenches?"
With flying, it would soon be over if you'd come to the end of your life. You didn't have to sleep in mud, night after night, day after day, in mud and water.
***
I have often been asked what one the sensations were in aerial combat. The answer is that it was so exciting that really one's only emotion was excitement.
***
The excitement of the dogfight was very considerable. The odds were that you would be killed, or you would kill the other chap, and those are pretty big odds to play with, but as a rule, the Germans would try to disappear. Coming down again after a dog fight, after that type of excitement, I would find that I was kind of exhausted. I would frequently get onto my bed and fall fast asleep for a couple of hours.
***
The Sopwith Triplane was at once my favorite aeroplane. She was an absolute beauty. She was really a glider with an engine, and she had no bad manners. Of course you realized you mustn't play any tricks with her because there was only one set of flying wires, and I noticed that when I was diving very hard I could see the strain on the center section; there would almost be a curve on it.
But she was so delightful that I remember one shocking occasion, when it was very hot and I was coming home from a very high patrol, and believe it or not I went to sleep. Only momentarily. Really the culprit was her manners. She was so beautiful.
***
Camels were wonderful flyers when you got used to them, which took about three months of hard flying. At the end of that time you were either dead, a nervous wreck, or a hell of a pilot and a terror to Huns.
***
[By a pilot, recounting what is IMO the single most jaw-dropping story in the entire book, involving a Sopwith Camel.]
As I was approaching the airfield at 6000 feet, I decided to try a new maneuver which might prove useful in combat. It was to be a half loop and then I would roll at the top and fly off in the opposite direction.
I pulled her up into a neat half loop but I was going rather slowly and I was hanging upside down in the air. With an efficient safety belt that would have been no trouble at all – but our standard belts were 100% unsafe. Mine stretched a little and suddenly I dived clean through it and fell out of the cockpit. There was nothing between me and the ground. The first 2000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably firma.
As I fell I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her. I was able to grip onto her top plane and that saved me from slithering straight through the propeller which was glistening beautifully in the evening sunshine. She was now diving noisily at about 140 mph. I was hanging onto her with my left hand and with one foot hooked into the cockpit, I managed to reach down with my other hand and I pulled the control stick backwards to pull her gently out of her dive. That was a mistake – she immediately went into the most appalling inverted spin. Even with two hands on the top plane, I was slipping. I had about 2500 feet left.
Remembering that everything was inverted, I managed to put my right foot on the control stick and I pushed it forwards. The Camel stopped spinning in half a turn and went into a smooth glide but upside down. It was now easy to reach my hands down (or up) and pull her gently down and round into a normal glide. I grabbed the seat cushion which was obstructing the cockpit, chucked it over the side and sat back down. I was now at about 800 feet but in spite of the extraordinary battering she had received, my little Camel was flying perfectly. One or two of the wings were a bit loose but nothing was broken.
I turned the engine off in case of strains so my approach was made in silence. I made an unusually good landing but there was no one there to applaud – every man-jack of the squadron had mysteriously disappeared. After a minute or so, heads began to appear all over the place – popping up like bunny rabbits from every hole. Apparently, when I had pressed my foot on the control stick, I'd also pressed both triggers and the entire airfield have been sprinkled with bullets. Very wisely, the ground crew dived as one man for the nearest ditch.
***
One night I was lying in bed and I thought, "I'll do something nobody else has ever done – tomorrow morning I will loop off the ground!"
My Bristol Bullet had a maximum speed of about 70 mph but I thought that if I held it down just over the top of the grass until I was going flat out, then I could go up in a very big loop and when I got to the top I could pull the joystick into my tummy, with the tail over, and gravity plus the engine would pull me around.
So next morning I went off and tried it. I pulled up in the loop, flipped it – and realized I hadn't enough room.
I have a feeling that my life was saved by some sheep grazing at the far end of the airfield. They all started to run out star fashion away from me and I was so interested in watching them that I didn't stiffen myself up. I went straight into the ground at about 150 mph. I shot through the front of the aircraft, my belt broke, I hit my head on the instrument board and was knocked out. My legs shot through the rotary engine. Another quarter of a turn and I would've lost both my legs. As it was, I finished with the engine in my crotch. The ground was hard and nothing had sunk more than a few inches into the earth. Everything was flattened like a pancake.
My CO stopped everyone from running out because he thought I was going to be a nasty mess. So he strolled slowly across to the crash. When he got there, he found me singing. I was quite out of it but I was singing the latest song:
"Sprinkle me with kisses,
A lot of lovely kisses,
If you want my love to grow."
***
It took a lot of hard thinking to get myself into a condition of stability to keep myself flying. Every time I thought of it all, I couldn't hold a knife and fork when I was having a meal. They would fall out of my hands. But I did manage to overcome it and I kept on flying.
***
I didn't like the Germans as a whole, but I had respect for certain of them. The great commander Boelke I respected him tremendously. He was a splendid chap, and in an enemy sense, he was a gentleman.
***
[From Manfred von Richthofen's memoir, after Boelcke's death colliding with a German plane flown by his friend Böhme]:
It is a strange thing that everybody who met Boelcke imagined that he alone was his true friend. I have made the acquaintance of about 40 men, each of whom imagined that he alone was both his intimate. Each imagined that he had the monopoly of Boelcke's affections. Men whose names were unknown to Boelcke believed that he was particularly fond of them. This is a curious phenomenon that I have never noticed in anyone else.
***
Levine: On hearing of Boelcke's death, British squadrons dropped wreaths over the German lines to be placed on his grave.
***
[By a German pilot in von Richthofen's squadron]
When I came for the first time to the wing formation of Baron von Richthofen, he invited me to lunch and he was very friendly and a very agreeable officer. Of course it was a great honor to be in the troop of Richthofen. And it was very interesting to see how Baron von Richthofen made an air fight. He was a very good shooter and he saw all. That was his success.
He had a very good influence on us, and in the day we had much practice in shooting, and otherwise we played together hockey, billiards, table tennis, and in the evening we play poker and we loved him very very much.
***
[by an English chaplain]
Young Swann was shot down in No Man's Land and killed. It has knocked us all very badly: he was a perfectly sweet and adorable little boy, and extraordinarily loved by his whole squadron. His major and I went up to the line to see about bringing the body back and we buried him near his squadron.
I can hardly read the service for the first time since being out here. His flight Sgt. said to me on Sunday evening, "His death has almost broken my heart," and it's just the same with all the men in his flight. He was a dear boy and looked about 15 years old. He was a brilliant pilot and put up an awfully good show before he was killed. One of the men in his the squadron said to me, "You felt like kissing him rather than shaking hands with him." It's a contrary world.
***
After a pilot or an observer had been there for a day or two he was sent down to the photographic office. He went inside and the photographers took a silhouette of his head and they cut it out in black paper, and it went on to a white frieze in the mess. When you looked up at the frieze, some fellows were still with the squadron, some had gone home for rest, and some had gone for an eternal rest.
And the thing that struck me is very strange – they refer to fellows whose silhouette was on the wall, refer to him by name, and tell you all his faults, all his goodness, and exactly what sort of pilot he was, as though he still lived. They tell you all about the fellow, in a very friendly way, and in a way that they missed him intensely.
Silhouettes of pilots and observers, dead and alive.
It's full of useful details if you write in this period. It confirms that RFC/RAF pilots did get treated at Craiglockhart, along with a lot of other harrowing accounts of PTSD. It's got lots about daily life, like that pilots got pretty good food, put on plays which sometimes involved cross-dressing, and in one case wrote to their parents to ask for fast-growing seeds so they could grow a garden - fast-growing because many of them only survived for a few weeks. It has tons of details about how to fly a Sopwith Camel and other planes of the period, and informs us that the official plural of the German fighter plane, the Albatros, is Albatri.
Levine mostly keeps in the background, though he occasionally indulges in a bit of dubious speculation. For instance, he mentions that W. E. Johns was treated for STDs during his service and dubiously speculates that that was the REAL reason why Biggles stayed single.
I listened to this in audio first, then bought the book in hard copy. The audio version is excellent and includes some music of the period, which was great, but if you want to use it for reference you'll need the physical book.
I was hoping the book would have cites for every source, but unfortunately Levine got the majority of his material from museum and library archives and the originals aren't otherwise available. He only cites six published books in his bibliography, though he definitely uses material from more than that - for instance, he doesn't include Manfred von Richthofen's autobiography in the bibliography, though it's quoted and attributed in the book itself. But he does include the names of everyone he quotes (or says they're anonymous) so it's possible to start from there.
Here's some excerpts, which will give a sense of what the whole book is like. (You all benefit from me FINALLY getting Dragon Dictate to work again on my phone).
These are all accounts by different people. All are British unless marked otherwise.
[By a pilot who started out as an infantryman]
I knew what war was like. I had seen death – too much of it. When I left the trenches, my brother officers said, "Good Heavens, haven't you seen enough planes come down in flames?" I said, "Yes, but haven't you seen enough death in trenches?"
With flying, it would soon be over if you'd come to the end of your life. You didn't have to sleep in mud, night after night, day after day, in mud and water.
***
I have often been asked what one the sensations were in aerial combat. The answer is that it was so exciting that really one's only emotion was excitement.
***
The excitement of the dogfight was very considerable. The odds were that you would be killed, or you would kill the other chap, and those are pretty big odds to play with, but as a rule, the Germans would try to disappear. Coming down again after a dog fight, after that type of excitement, I would find that I was kind of exhausted. I would frequently get onto my bed and fall fast asleep for a couple of hours.
***
The Sopwith Triplane was at once my favorite aeroplane. She was an absolute beauty. She was really a glider with an engine, and she had no bad manners. Of course you realized you mustn't play any tricks with her because there was only one set of flying wires, and I noticed that when I was diving very hard I could see the strain on the center section; there would almost be a curve on it.
But she was so delightful that I remember one shocking occasion, when it was very hot and I was coming home from a very high patrol, and believe it or not I went to sleep. Only momentarily. Really the culprit was her manners. She was so beautiful.
***
Camels were wonderful flyers when you got used to them, which took about three months of hard flying. At the end of that time you were either dead, a nervous wreck, or a hell of a pilot and a terror to Huns.
***
[By a pilot, recounting what is IMO the single most jaw-dropping story in the entire book, involving a Sopwith Camel.]
As I was approaching the airfield at 6000 feet, I decided to try a new maneuver which might prove useful in combat. It was to be a half loop and then I would roll at the top and fly off in the opposite direction.
I pulled her up into a neat half loop but I was going rather slowly and I was hanging upside down in the air. With an efficient safety belt that would have been no trouble at all – but our standard belts were 100% unsafe. Mine stretched a little and suddenly I dived clean through it and fell out of the cockpit. There was nothing between me and the ground. The first 2000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably firma.
As I fell I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her. I was able to grip onto her top plane and that saved me from slithering straight through the propeller which was glistening beautifully in the evening sunshine. She was now diving noisily at about 140 mph. I was hanging onto her with my left hand and with one foot hooked into the cockpit, I managed to reach down with my other hand and I pulled the control stick backwards to pull her gently out of her dive. That was a mistake – she immediately went into the most appalling inverted spin. Even with two hands on the top plane, I was slipping. I had about 2500 feet left.
Remembering that everything was inverted, I managed to put my right foot on the control stick and I pushed it forwards. The Camel stopped spinning in half a turn and went into a smooth glide but upside down. It was now easy to reach my hands down (or up) and pull her gently down and round into a normal glide. I grabbed the seat cushion which was obstructing the cockpit, chucked it over the side and sat back down. I was now at about 800 feet but in spite of the extraordinary battering she had received, my little Camel was flying perfectly. One or two of the wings were a bit loose but nothing was broken.
I turned the engine off in case of strains so my approach was made in silence. I made an unusually good landing but there was no one there to applaud – every man-jack of the squadron had mysteriously disappeared. After a minute or so, heads began to appear all over the place – popping up like bunny rabbits from every hole. Apparently, when I had pressed my foot on the control stick, I'd also pressed both triggers and the entire airfield have been sprinkled with bullets. Very wisely, the ground crew dived as one man for the nearest ditch.
***
One night I was lying in bed and I thought, "I'll do something nobody else has ever done – tomorrow morning I will loop off the ground!"
My Bristol Bullet had a maximum speed of about 70 mph but I thought that if I held it down just over the top of the grass until I was going flat out, then I could go up in a very big loop and when I got to the top I could pull the joystick into my tummy, with the tail over, and gravity plus the engine would pull me around.
So next morning I went off and tried it. I pulled up in the loop, flipped it – and realized I hadn't enough room.
I have a feeling that my life was saved by some sheep grazing at the far end of the airfield. They all started to run out star fashion away from me and I was so interested in watching them that I didn't stiffen myself up. I went straight into the ground at about 150 mph. I shot through the front of the aircraft, my belt broke, I hit my head on the instrument board and was knocked out. My legs shot through the rotary engine. Another quarter of a turn and I would've lost both my legs. As it was, I finished with the engine in my crotch. The ground was hard and nothing had sunk more than a few inches into the earth. Everything was flattened like a pancake.
My CO stopped everyone from running out because he thought I was going to be a nasty mess. So he strolled slowly across to the crash. When he got there, he found me singing. I was quite out of it but I was singing the latest song:
"Sprinkle me with kisses,
A lot of lovely kisses,
If you want my love to grow."
***
It took a lot of hard thinking to get myself into a condition of stability to keep myself flying. Every time I thought of it all, I couldn't hold a knife and fork when I was having a meal. They would fall out of my hands. But I did manage to overcome it and I kept on flying.
***
I didn't like the Germans as a whole, but I had respect for certain of them. The great commander Boelke I respected him tremendously. He was a splendid chap, and in an enemy sense, he was a gentleman.
***
[From Manfred von Richthofen's memoir, after Boelcke's death colliding with a German plane flown by his friend Böhme]:
It is a strange thing that everybody who met Boelcke imagined that he alone was his true friend. I have made the acquaintance of about 40 men, each of whom imagined that he alone was both his intimate. Each imagined that he had the monopoly of Boelcke's affections. Men whose names were unknown to Boelcke believed that he was particularly fond of them. This is a curious phenomenon that I have never noticed in anyone else.
***
Levine: On hearing of Boelcke's death, British squadrons dropped wreaths over the German lines to be placed on his grave.
***
[By a German pilot in von Richthofen's squadron]
When I came for the first time to the wing formation of Baron von Richthofen, he invited me to lunch and he was very friendly and a very agreeable officer. Of course it was a great honor to be in the troop of Richthofen. And it was very interesting to see how Baron von Richthofen made an air fight. He was a very good shooter and he saw all. That was his success.
He had a very good influence on us, and in the day we had much practice in shooting, and otherwise we played together hockey, billiards, table tennis, and in the evening we play poker and we loved him very very much.
***
[by an English chaplain]
Young Swann was shot down in No Man's Land and killed. It has knocked us all very badly: he was a perfectly sweet and adorable little boy, and extraordinarily loved by his whole squadron. His major and I went up to the line to see about bringing the body back and we buried him near his squadron.
I can hardly read the service for the first time since being out here. His flight Sgt. said to me on Sunday evening, "His death has almost broken my heart," and it's just the same with all the men in his flight. He was a dear boy and looked about 15 years old. He was a brilliant pilot and put up an awfully good show before he was killed. One of the men in his the squadron said to me, "You felt like kissing him rather than shaking hands with him." It's a contrary world.
***
After a pilot or an observer had been there for a day or two he was sent down to the photographic office. He went inside and the photographers took a silhouette of his head and they cut it out in black paper, and it went on to a white frieze in the mess. When you looked up at the frieze, some fellows were still with the squadron, some had gone home for rest, and some had gone for an eternal rest.
And the thing that struck me is very strange – they refer to fellows whose silhouette was on the wall, refer to him by name, and tell you all his faults, all his goodness, and exactly what sort of pilot he was, as though he still lived. They tell you all about the fellow, in a very friendly way, and in a way that they missed him intensely.
Silhouettes of pilots and observers, dead and alive.
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The best book I’ve read on WW1 flying, with tons and tons of primary sources cited, is ‘Aces Falling’ by Peter Hart. It’s specifically about 1918 and how aviation affected the final year of the war, but it has so much excellent detail in the pilots’ own words, British and German.
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Thanks for the rec! I will definitely get that. I love "in their own words" history.
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Also, I meant to say, LOL at the STD thing. Though Johns wasn’t alone, it was such a problem that there were dedicated STD hospitals for servicemen...
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Incidentally, while I'm recommending WW1 history, I have to make a special mention of 'Wounded: A New History of the Western Front' by Emily Mayhew, which I think you would like, reviewed here: https://philomytha.dreamwidth.org/192066.html
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You should have a scene in which Biggles tells someone about falling out of his airplane and falling back into it. I think it's too unbelievable for a plot-relevant scene but would make a GREAT anecdote to make everyone around him stop and stare at him.
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https://sovay.dreamwidth.org/718634.html
https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/458014.html
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https://my.mail.ru/mail/vm_gluschenko/video/102987/102995.html
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It's so odd and so good.
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I love these quotes. The one about three months learning to fly Camels is great. And oh my GOD, the pilot falling out! The loop from the ground is sure something, too.
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I can't get over the falling out story. It's so wild!
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