Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop
until eventually our persistence was rewarded by an invitation to look into the cockpit. There within easy reach was the “joystick”…the very sound of the word conjuring up dreams of looping and rolling in the blue heavens.’ As he studied the instruments ‘there gradually grew within me a resolve that one day I would fly a machine like this and perhaps land on this very beach to the envy and delight of my boyhood friends.’7
Almost all of these recorded episodes feel like encounters with fate. Brian Kingcome was making his languid progress through another term at yet another boarding school when, one sunny afternoon, ‘there came the drone of an aero-engine overhead – not a common sound in the mid 1930s – and a small aircraft circled the school a couple of times at roof-top height. The whole school rushed out to watch spellbound as the tiny machine throttled back and, in that lovely, burbling, swooshing silence that follows the throttling back of an old fashioned aero-engine, glided in to land in the park in front of the house.’ The pilot who emerged, nonchalant and romantic in flying helmet and silk scarf, was a young man, four years Kingcome’s senior, whom he had known at one of the several previous schools his mother’s whims had directed him to.
‘Is there a Brian Kingcome here?’ he asked. ‘Have I come to the right place?’
He had, and there was. My stock soared…Basking in the gaze of many envious eyes, I climbed aboard and a moment later found myself for the first time in a world I had never dreamed could exist – a world free from the drag of earth’s umbilical cord, free to climb, swoop and dive, free of boundaries, free of gravity, free of ties, free to do anything except stand still.8
Whatever their differences of background, all these boys were children of their time. Their enthusiasms were stoked by what they read in the illustrated papers, aimed at the youth market, that sold in millions. These, just as others would do a generation later, leant heavily on the preceding war for their material, and particularly on the doings of the heroes who had emerged from the RFC. The anonymous editors of the comics of the era, with their almost infallible comprehension of the young male psyche, recognized at once the charge that old-fashioned swashbuckling married to modern technology would carry. The example of the first fighter aces fixed itself in the imaginations of a generation being born just as they had met their deaths. Even at nineteen the thoughts of Geoffrey Page as he left his public school to go up to study engineering at London University ‘were boyishly clear and simple. All I wanted was to be a fighter pilot like my hero, Captain Albert Ball. I knew practically all there was to know about Albert Ball; how he flew, how he fought, how he won his Victoria Cross, how he died. I also thought I knew about war in the air. I imagined it to be Arthurian – about chivalry…death and injury had no part in it.’9
Yet the most popular chronicles of the air war were remarkably frank about what was entailed. The deterrent effect appears to have been minimal. Perhaps Fighter Command’s single most effective recruiting sergeant was Captain James Bigglesworth, created by W. E. Johns, who had flown with the RFC in the First World War and whose stories began to appear in Popular Flying magazine in 1932. The first novel, The Camels Are Coming, was published the same year. Biggles seems unattractive now; cold, driven by suppressed anger, a spoilsport and a bit of a bully. He was a devastatingly romantic figure to the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who went on to emulate him a few years later. Johns introduced them to a
slight fair-haired, good-looking lad still in his teens but [already] an acting flight commander…his deep-set eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines…He had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? – he had forgotten. Time had become curiously telescoped lately. What did it matter, anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it.
Many of the stories were based on real events, some relating to Mannock, who appears disguised as ‘Mahoney’. Johns made no attempt to hide the grisliness of the business, emphasizing the man-to-man nature of primitive air fighting. In one story he repeats with approval von Richthofen’s maxim that ‘when attacking two-seaters, kill the gunner first’, and goes on to describe his hero doing just that. ‘Pieces flew off the green fuselage, and as he twisted upwards into a half roll Biggles noticed that the enemy gunner was no longer standing up. “That’s one of them!” he thought coolly. “I’ve given them a bit out of their own copy-book.”’10 In another, Biggles notes an ‘Albatros, wrapped in a sheet of flame…the doomed pilot leaping into space even as he passed’.11
It is not only Germans who die. Getting killed is presented as almost inevitable. An important and enduring message, one the young readers took to heart, was that there was no point dwelling on it. ‘One of the most characteristic features of the Great War,’ Johns wrote in the Foreword to Biggles in France, ‘was the manner in which humour and tragedy so often went hand in hand. At noon a practical joke might set the officers’ mess rocking with mirth. By sunset, or perhaps within the hour, the perpetrator of it would be gone for ever, fallen to an unmarked grave in the shellholes of No Mans Land.’12
The Biggles stories are practically documentary in their starkness, as good a guide to the air war over the trenches as the non-fictional memoirs. Their audiences were absorbed and inspired by them. They changed lives. Reading them reinforced Pete Brothers’s decision to seek a short-service commission in the RAF. He found them ‘beautiful stories that enthralled me and excited me and made me want to emulate them’. At the Lancashire Aeroclub before taking up a short-service commission in January 1936, he had been pleased to find his instructor had been a Sopwith Camel pilot in the war.13
Cinematic portrayals of the air were equally frank. The most successful was Dawn Patrol, starring Errol Flynn, David Niven and Basil Rathbone, which came out in 1938. The 59th Squadron is based on a sticky sector of the Western Front. Sixteen men have gone in a fortnight. Replacements arrive, fresh from a few weeks at flying school. Orders to send them up against hardened Germans come by telephone from senior officers, comfortably quartered miles behind the lines. New names are chalked up on the duty blackboard to be wiped off within an hour. Kit-bags are returned home without ever being unpacked. The Daily Express praised the film’s ‘lack of false sentiment or mock heroics’ and called it ‘one of the best and bitterest melodramas about men and planes’. It was a box-office hit and was seen, often several times, by hundreds of the pilots who fought in 1940. No one was put off. It was the glamour, camaraderie and romance of flying that pulled them back to the local fleapits, not the message of waste and futility. By this time every young man in Britain was facing a prospect of early extinction. Dying in the air might be awful, but it was better than dying on the ground.
With the expansion programme, thousands of young men were now being given a choice in how they would fight the next war. Before it began, the RAF recruited annually about 300 pilots and 1,600 airmen. Between 1935 and 1938 the average RAF intake was 4,500 and 40,000 airmen and apprentices. Air Ministry officials appealed directly to schools for recruits and advertised in the flying magazines and popular newspapers the young men they were looking for might be expected to read. One that appeared on the front page of the Daily Express, adorned by a drawing of three Hurricanes, promised ‘the life is one that will appeal to all men who wish to adopt an interesting and progressive career…leave is on a generous scale…applicants must be physically fit and single but no previous flying experience is necessary’. Pay, in cash and kind, was set at between £340 and £520 a year. A £300 gratuity was payable after four years’ service, or £500 after six years. Age limits were set between seventeen and a half and twenty-eight. The educational qualification was school certificate standards, although ‘an actual certificate is not necessary’.
Pat Hancock, a mechanically minded eighteen-year-old from Croydon, was at Wimbledon Technical College