Richey, Paul, Fighter Pilot: A personal record of the campaign in France, 1939–1940 (London: Leo Cooper, 1990)
Shaw, Robert L., Fighter Combat: Tactics and Manoeuvring (Annapolis: Naval Institute 1985, and Wellingborough: Patrick Stephens Limited, 1986)
Sims, Edward H., Fighter Tactics and Strategy, 1914–1970 (London: Cassell, 1972)
Spick, Mike, The Ace Factor: Air Combat and the Role of Situational Awareness (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1988)
War in the air: the bomber crew
Christina Goulter
‘The principal operational elements in the strategic air offensive are: first, the calibre of the crews, which is a question of selection, training, experience, leadership and fighting spirit; secondly, the performance of the aircraft and of the equipment and bases upon which they depend; thirdly, the weather; fourthly, the tactical methods and, fifthly, the nature of the enemy opposition.’1
The authors of the British official history, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, which remains the best single work on the subject, acknowledged the importance of the human element in this campaign. This acknowledgement was overdue. The decades following the Second World War were dominated by interest in the technological and scientific contributions to Allied victory, and the development of nuclear weapons merely reinforced the idea that science had done away with the need for the clash of massed armies. The idea that all operational problems could be subjected to and solved by scientific principles and the application of technology was a particularly strong thread in US military thinking after 1945, and this has persisted, in spite of the Vietnam experience, which demonstrated that the hi-tech nation does not always win. In Britain such ideas were less strong, for reasons of economy and the fact that the nation was engaged in more counter-insurgency and brush-fire wars, but in both countries there was a tendency to de-emphasise the contribution of the individual and to emphasise the big picture, in which nuclear strategy in a bi-polar world was the prime concern.
Although Vietnam was not Britain’s war, it had a profound effect on the way most of the world has thought about war, especially its human face. So, the ground was fertile for the proliferation of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical accounts of individual war experience, especially from the pens of the Second World War’s aviators. What has been lacking, however, is the type of study that examines aircrew experience in the round: what motivated men, in general, to volunteer for aircrew service; whether their training equipped them adequately for the job they had to do; the contrast between expectation and combat reality; combat stress; and, finally, the re-adjustment to civilian life.
These are universal questions, which are valid for any combat flying under consideration, and, because we are dealing with the human element, there are striking similarities between apparently very different wars. Thus we are able to observe many parallels between the aircrew experiences of the First and Second World Wars, even though, some would say, the technological advances during the intervening time meant that the nature of the war differed substantially between the two conflicts.
Whether we are talking about historical examples or today, a prime motivation for joining the air force has undoubtedly been the glamour associated with aviation. This was certainly true of the First and Second World Wars, when aviation was a new and exciting science, and interest in the ‘third dimension’ pervaded society at large. For those who were coming from Allied countries, there was the added excitement of an overseas deployment. A New Zealand pilot reflected that he and his friends joining the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1939 were ‘moved more by the spirit of adventure’ and a need to validate their manhood ‘than by the burnings of patriotism’, although, invariably, this developed and ‘loyalty shone bright’.2
What is also almost universally true is that men volunteered for flying duties because they had their sights on becoming pilots, rather than other aircrew trades. To be a pilot was glamorous; to be an observer, navigator, wireless operator or gunner was not. So, almost without exception, those who joined to fly joined to be pilots, and, within the pilot hierarchy, to be a fighter pilot always held the greatest cachet. However, there were no guarantees in either the First or Second World War that those wishing to be pilots would necessarily end up as pilots. Depending on the aircrew selection process, or simple supply and demand, a pilot candidate could find himself channelled into other aircrew trades.
Those who volunteered to fly in one of the air services in the First World War had witnessed aviation’s extraordinarily rapid development, from the Wright Brothers’ 1903 flight of a few hundred yards to bombing aircraft capable of round journeys of hundreds of miles by the middle of the war. In Britain, Blériot’s flight across the Channel in the summer of 1909 captivated the nation, and it was from this point, rather than later in the 1920s, that Britain became ‘air minded’.3 Few seemed to doubt that those nations possessing air power would fail to use it in the next war, and now that Britain was apparently within easy reach of potential aggressors, steps were taken by the Committee of Imperial Defence to establish a British air service. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed in April 1912 (originally with two branches, naval and military), there was no shortage of recruits.4 Many would go on to fill senior positions in the RAF, most prominent among whom were Hugh Trenchard, Arthur Longmore, Sholto Douglas, and John Slessor. What these men, and other more junior flying personnel, had in common when they joined up was a driving ambition to fly. Their recollections record their fascination and wonderment as they commenced their initial training.5
Later generations have been drawn to aviation for the same reasons, but recruits of the late 1930s and early years of the Second World War also had a desire to avoid the horrors of trench warfare, which had consumed their fathers’ generation. Although war experience after 1939 quickly demonstrated that service in the Air Force was not necessarily a safer option than service with the Army or the Navy, the perception during the 1930s was that one’s chances of surviving a war were far greater in the air, and that the quality of life, in the meantime, would be superior. A former Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps expressed it in this way:
‘When we were flying at about 17,000 feet, it gave you a wonderful feeling of exhilaration. You were sort of, “I’m the King of the Castle”. You were up there and you were right out of the war. I’d been in the infantry and we were always lousy, filthy dirty and often hungry, whereas in the Flying Corps it was a gentleman’s life. You slept in a bed, put on pyjamas every night. You had a decent mess to come back to… So, altogether, it was much more pleasant.’6
Some aircrew candidates also believed that air power offered a more humane way to wage war, and this view was particularly prevalent among Americans in the 1930s. Not only did many Americans within the US Army Air Corps (and, later, the US Army Air Forces) genuinely believe that the US possessed the technological means to perform precision bombing, and would, therefore, be able to realise Billy Mitchell’s vision of attacks on key nodes within an enemy industrial infrastructure, but there was also the view that precision instruments offered the means to avoid civilian casualties. According to one author, this satisfied the ‘deep-seated American need for the moral high ground in war, while satisfying an American hunger for technological achievement’.7
Regardless of nationality, many aircrew candidates also seem to have believed that the air service offered the greatest possibility of a quick, decisive victory. Prior to the First World War, there were those who looked at the potential of aircraft in the military sphere and felt that aircraft represented a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), even if it was not expressed in this way. One such was a Major Herbert Musgrave, who transferred from the Royal Engineers to the Royal Flying Corps. He was closely involved with aeronautical research, and his work on wireless telegraphy and bomb aiming, in particular, laid the foundation for the long-range operations undertaken during the war. Musgrave felt that