They were an extraordinarily varied bunch. Most were British. There was a sprinkling from the diaspora of the defeated nations, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, French and Belgians, wanting their revenge on Germany. They were outnumbered by large numbers of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, the ‘colonials’ as they were mockingly but affectionately called, whose lands were not directly threatened by Nazism but who, driven by a sense of adventure or fellow-feeling for their British cousins, nonetheless offered themselves for what it was soon understood were among the most dangerous jobs in warfare.
For imaginative boys growing up in the 1930s, the prospect of going to war in an aeroplane carried an appeal that the older services could never match. Aviation was only a generation old and flying glowed with glamour and modernity. In the years before the war Peter Johnson, languishing in a hated job as a breakfast-cereal salesman, looked at this world and longed to join it. ‘I read aviation magazines,’ he wrote, ‘watched the activities at an RAF aerodrome from behind a hedge and even once penetrated into a flying club on the pretext of finding out the cost of learning to fly. That, needless to say, was well out of my income bracket but the contact with the world of flight, the romantic instructors in their ex-RFC leather coats, the hard, pretty girls with their long cigarette holders, the rich young men boasting about their adventures, fitted perfectly with my picture of a dream world to which, if I joined the Air Force, I could find a key.’1
By the time the great wartime expansion began, the RAF’s aura of chic had faded. There was little that was dashing about Bomber Command. The new aircraft were big, blunt and utilitarian and the men who flew in them were unmistakably sons of the modern age.
The pre-war professionals were, on the whole, skilled and conscientious fliers, but they masked their seriousness behind a show of pseudo-aristocratic insouciance. The new boys were much less sophisticated. They came from all backgrounds and classes, and the prevailing ethos was democratic and popular. In their writings, in their work and play, they seem sterner, more earnest and more grown-up. The white flying-suited paladins of the RAF of the 1920s and early 1930s had joined to fly rather than to fight. The newcomers had signed up to do both.
On the outbreak of war, young men flocked to join the air force. In the initial rush, the recruiting staff were sometimes overwhelmed. Edward Johnson, who went on to fly as a bomb-aimer on the Dams Raid, was working for J. Lyons, the bakers, in Leeds when war broke out. ‘I tried very hard to join up but in the initial stages they kept sending me back because they had nowhere to send people that were volunteering … it was a case of calling regularly to see if they’d made up their minds they were going to let us join.’2
As an eighteen-year old trainee surveyor, Arthur Taylor joined the Territorial Army before the war and was called up on the day war was declared. Within a few months he was bored and responded eagerly to an official circular announcing the RAF was looking for volunteers. So too did many of his companions. ‘About twenty-two applied immediately,’ he wrote. ‘Understandably our colonel took a poor view of this and pointed out that few of us were bright enough to be accepted. The number of applications then dropped dramatically to fifteen.’3
In the month of September 1939, the Aviation Candidates Board at Cardington near Bedford interviewed 671 young men. The recruiting officers were delighted at the quality of the applicants. The board could afford to be choosy. Of the 671 who presented themselves, 102, or 15.2 per cent, were rejected.
The surplus of suitable manpower persisted throughout the war. In the first quarter of 1944, when Bomber Command was suffering terrible losses during the Battle of Berlin, the board still felt able to turn away 22.5 per cent of the volunteers who applied. The great majority of applicants had not waited for an official summons before stepping forward. A much smaller proportion had chosen the RAF after being called up. There were also a number seeking a transfer from the army. The general standard of education of the army candidates tended to be lower than that of the pure volunteers, the board’s head, Group Captain Vere Bettington, observed, and a higher percentage of rejections was to be expected. RAF personnel working on the ground also responded well to appeals to ‘get operational’.
At first, candidates were required to hold the School Certificate, the multi-subject examination taken by sixteen-year-olds before going on to higher education, but by August 1940 this proviso had been dropped. Nor was leaving school before the age of sixteen considered a bar. The initial test included intelligence, mathematics and general knowledge papers. But Bettington never rejected an applicant on educational grounds alone. ‘A candidate’s desire to fly and fight,’ he declared, is ‘of primary importance.’4
The old RAF’s sensitivity about its arriviste origins had given it a tendency to snobbery. This was dissolved in the flood of men from modest and poor homes taking up the flying duties that had formerly been the preserve of the sons of the military, clerical, medical and colonial middle classes. Harry Yates, who left school at fourteen and worked as a junior clerk in the offices of a printing company in the south Midlands, wondered as he waited for a reply from the RAF whether his lack of education would disqualify him. ‘Could it be,’ he wrote, ‘that, in reality, becoming one of these pilot types required a university education or even an old school tie? Was it the preserve of the sons of the well-to-do? But this, as I was to discover, was far from true. Terrible thing though it was, the war brought opportunity. The great British class system counted for surprisingly little. I saw nothing of it in all my RAF days.’5
The impulse to fly had been stimulated in many applicants by an early encounter with aeroplanes. Brian Frow went to the 1932 Hendon Air Show with a friend from his south-London prep school. ‘I was spellbound,’ he remembered. ‘A hostile fort was bombed with live missiles; balloons forming life-sized animals were chased by big game hunters in fighter aircraft and eventually shot down.’ In the school holidays he cycled to Croydon aerodrome with an aircraft recognition book in his satchel, identifying and recording everything that flew. The fact that his eldest brother, Herbert, had been killed in action flying in the First World War did not dent his enthusiasm. Herbert’s loss was commemorated by a shrine in the family home made out of the wooden propeller of his doomed aircraft.6
Ken Newman, another south-London boy, also made regular pilgrimages to Croydon, which was only a mile or so from his home. ‘As a boy, and like so many others of my generation, I had been fascinated by aeroplanes,’ he recalled. ‘They were seldom seen in the sky and caused open-mouthed surprise when they were … I used to go and watch, from the roof of the airport hotel next to the terminal and flight control building.’ Sometimes an hour or more would pass between the arrivals of the Imperial Airways and KLM airliners ‘but every take-off and landing was exciting, particularly when the aeroplanes came close to the hotel building.’7
In opting for the RAF, volunteers were exercising a choice, and choices were rare in wartime. By doing so, they avoided being drafted into a less congenial branch of the services, and in 1939, there was no more unattractive option than the army.
The young men arriving at the recruiting centres had been born during, or just after, the end of the First World War. They had heard tales of the Western Front from their fathers and male relations. Dennis Field, the Coventry boy who had witnessed the Blitz from his back-garden shelter, had an uncle who had been in the trenches. ‘His pugnacity and bitterness were apparent even to a youngster,’ he wrote. ‘My friend’s father was a signaller in France and only reluctantly talked of the moonscape devastation, or mud, barbed wire, shell holes, bodies and rats and lice and drownings in mud and filth. My youthful picture was overwhelmingly one of revulsion.’8
In the streets, the sight of men who had lost limbs, the wheezing and hacking of gas-damaged lungs, told young men what they could expect. Aeroplanes were intrinsically dangerous, everyone knew that. But they were also exciting. And death in an aeroplane seemed quicker