Читать книгу Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory - Patrick Bishop - Страница 22

The great lexicographer of slang Eric Partridge recorded that in 1937 soldiers and sailors began to refer to their Air Force colleagues as the ‘Glamour Boys’.1 The term was not necessarily admiring or affectionate. A little later on the RAF attracted another nickname. They were the ‘Brylcreem Boys’, a reference to their habit of slicking their hair with a best-selling pomade. The manufacturers, County Chemicals of Birmingham, were delighted with the association. In 1939, launching the ‘handy active service tube’ they chose to dress the model in Air Force forage cap and tunic and during the war a glossy-haired airman appeared regularly in their advertisements. It was only many years later that the man in the ads, one Tony Gibson, was revealed as a conscientious objector who did several stints in jail for his beliefs.2

Hair cream and the Air Force seemed to go together. The product had a practical use. Richard Passmore, a wireless operator/air gunner on Blenheims in the early part of the war, recalled how his ‘side cap hung above my ear at angle which mocked gravity and was a mute testimony to the adhesiveness of Brylcreem’.3 However, the main point of it was that it allowed you to look like an up-to-the-minute civilian male while wearing military uniform.

Like many of the trends adopted by the youth of Britain in the 1930s, the trend for sculpted men’s hairdos was imported from America via Hollywood movies. The notion of glamour was a contemporary one. If any branch of the armed services had claim to it, it was the Air Force.

The RAF’s modern image gave it a marked advantage over the other services in the competition for human resources. Expansion required men as well as machines, to fly them and to service them. In 1933 the RAF needed only one recruiting depot to fill its manpower needs, and took on less than a thousand extra men in addition to the regular Halton and Cranwell intakes. By the spring of 1938 there were eleven depots and thirty-one sub-depots which over the next eighteen months scooped up 43,795 recruits. With the introduction of conscription and the outbreak of war the numbers exploded. Between September 1939 and January 1942, 789,773 joined the ranks. By the time recruiting was halted in 1944, nearly 1.2 million men and women were wearing Air Force Blue.4

Trenchard had identified the need for manpower structures that were light and simple yet strong enough to support a rapid increase in numbers when needed. Initially, the system worked very well. In peacetime, in addition to the small core of regulars, the RAF could rely on a steady throughput of short service commission officers to supply most of its aircrew requirements. After doing their time they then passed into the Reserve of Air Force Officers (RAFO). The front-line squadrons were backed up by the amateurs of the Auxiliary Air Force and University Air Squadrons.

By early 1936, with the likelihood of war growing by the month, it was clear that these sources would soon dry up once the fighting began and a much bigger reservoir of aircrew would be needed. The experience of the last war had taught that ‘casualties in air warfare are high and the replacement of wastage is an even greater problem for a personnel than an equipment department’.5 The need to make good the ‘wastage’ – the term must have struck some as inhumane even then – prompted the creation of a pool of airmen who had received at least a basic level of flying training. They would learn theory at evening classes in city schoolrooms and practise at civilian air schools at the weekend, in readiness to fill the gaps torn in the front line when hostilities commenced.

The RAF Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) hastened the transformation of the Air Force from a tiny elite dominated by the comfortably off and privately educated into a mass organization drawn from every level of Britain’s sharply stratified society.

From the outset it was presented as a democratic endeavour. ‘The social and political setting of the time had considerable influence on [the] proposed scheme and there was strong popular feeling against any “caste” or “old school tie” attitude’, the RAF internal narrative recorded.6 It was ‘visualized as a collection of young men drawn from the middle class in its widest sense and with no suggestion in its organization of a pre-determined social hierarchy’. In time it would be hailed as a great RAF innovation but the credit for the initial concept belongs as much to the imagination of an Air Ministry bureaucrat as it does to the progressive instincts of the Air Staff.

W. L. Scott was working for Air Commodore Arthur Tedder in the Air Ministry’s training department when he was set the problem of finding pilot material from new sources. He had won a DSC with the Navy during the previous war and went on to be knighted for his labours in the Civil Service. Despite his conventional background, he seems to have had a sympathetic understanding of the contemporary mood. He realized that to get the numbers it needed the Air Force would have to reach beyond the social groups it felt comfortable with and embrace the young men growing up on the suburban streets of modern Britain.

Britain in the 1930s was changing shape. Towns that had not altered for centuries were being transformed by giant cinemas and blocks of flats. The surrounding fields filled up with new housing, arranged in ‘crescents’, ‘avenues’ and ‘drives’ lined with mock-Tudor houses. The people who lived in them often also owned them. They worked in modern jobs in offices and factories and when they wanted fun looked to America to entertain them. They watched American films at the Odeon and danced to American music at the local Palais, which they drove to in small cars mass-produced by Morris and Austin. They had little reason to regret the passing of old Britain. They were interested in the future, and determined to have a place in it, and not on terms of deference or inferiority.

It was to this generation that the RAF now turned, but with some caution.7 Scott’s initial memo warned that the sort of men they were looking for were unlikely to take kindly to strict military discipline. Instead, ‘the desire to fly, patriotism, and retaining fees large enough to count in a young man’s weekly budget will be the means of attracting our reservists’. In addition, he proposed, it was important that the whole experience was fun. ‘Socially the reserves must be a great success,’ he wrote. ‘The young men must enjoy their evening meetings and their weekends.’8

This concept was a major departure from conventional military structures and a lot for the Air Staff to swallow. Its members had spent their lives inside an institutional cocoon where they kept company with each other and followed traditional leisure pursuits: riding, shooting, fishing and sailing by day, dining and playing bridge together by night. They knew those below them on the social scale only as servants or other ranks. They were unfamiliar with the new world emerging beyond the gates of the base and were not sure how much they liked it. To them the growth of mass consumerism was an affront in a time of crisis. ‘If even a fraction of the energy, material and organizing capacity now being diverted to such non-essential channels as the production of unnecessary motor-cars, luxury cinemas and blocks of flats were directed … to the production of modern aircraft, we could overcome our present dangerous difficulties …’ complained an Air Staff paper in November 1937.9

Nonetheless, after a few initial queries, the Director of Training Arthur Tedder backed the scheme. Tedder came from a conventional establishment background. He was the son of a senior civil servant, went to Whitgift School, then Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he studied history. He entered the Colonial Service but volunteered for the Army when war broke out. An accident resulted in a serious knee injury which seemed likely to keep him out of the fighting. Desperate to escape the tedium and ignominy of a cushy rear echelon job, Tedder harassed the authorities until he was finally accepted for pilot training with the RFC. In the summer of 1916, while the Somme offensive was raging, he was a flight commander with 25 Squadron which was carrying out constant bombing raids and reconnaissance missions and suffering heavy losses. On 17 July they were inspected by the RFC commander Hugh Trenchard, whose policy of all-out aggression was driving the high casualty rate. In a letter to his wife Rosalinde, Tedder reported that he ‘had to go round with him while he looked at our machines. He asked a lot of questions, but made absolutely no comments, except “Yes.”’10 Trenchard had seen something he liked in the twenty-six-year-old officer. He would ‘foster many careers during the next 30 years’ among the men who served under him on the Western Front, wrote his biographer, Vincent Orange, but ‘none more so than Tedder’s’.11

With Tedder’s support the basic format was adopted. Putting the scheme to the Treasury, the Air Council proposed ‘to open the new force to the whole middle class in the widest sense of that term, namely the complete range of the output of the public and secondary schools’.12 Until now, anyone seeking entry to the RAF would have been initially graded as to whether or not they were officer material primarily on the grounds of their social class. In the new circumstances this was considered ‘inappropriate’. Instead entry was to be ‘on a common footing, airman pilot or observer and promotions to commissioned rank will be made at a later stage in accordance with the abilities actually displayed’.

It amounted to a near-revolutionary challenge to the assumptions that governed the closed world of the British military. In the previous war, death and injury had cleared a path for lower-class men to receive the King’s commission. In peacetime the old barriers were quickly re-erected. In principle at least, the RAFVR established a new universal criterion for officer selection: it meant that candidates would be chosen, not on the grounds of which school they went to and which accent they spoke with, but on the basis of whether they were any good or not.

Expansion also created a need for more short service officers. To attract the numbers needed, advertising campaigns were mounted and standards relaxed. The results were unwelcome to some career officers who preferred the old exclusivity.

The gentleman fliers of the Auxiliary Air Force had been similarly dismayed by the creation of the RAFVR which opened the club doors of weekend service aviation to Tom, Dick and Harry. All AAF Squadrons were exclusive to a certain extent, some ludicrously so. Outfits such as 601 (County of London) were founded in 1926 by Lord Edward Grosvenor who recruited the first members from the White’s club bar. Originally the Auxiliaries were all bomber squadrons and in the words of the RAF narrative ‘truth to tell, not very highly rated as such’.13 However ‘they had no inferiority complex: very much the opposite in fact. Indeed, some of the squadrons were inclined to look down on the regulars, as the cavalry in the army used to look down on the infantry.’

When planning for the RAFVR began it seemed that the AAF provided a natural nucleus around which to build an organization to train the newcomers. It resisted all pressure to do so, being ‘reluctant to sacrifice its exclusive character to serve wider interests’ as its ‘standard of expenditure and social rigidity were incompatible with a democratic reserve’.14 Frederick Bowhill, the Air Council member responsible for personnel, thought the Auxiliaries might be open to recruiting a reserve of accountant and stores officers ‘who might have been thought socially acceptable’. Instead opposition ‘was so violent that the suggestion was hastily dropped’.15

Some AAF members and some regular officers saw themselves as the paradigm of the upper-class warrior, bold and courageous but taciturn and emotionally restrained. These types populate the quasi-autobiographical stories of John Llewellyn Rhys, son of a Welsh rector who, after public school, in the early 1930s gave up a place at Oxford to join the RAF. He combined a love of flying with literary ambitions and began publishing short stories in 1936. In one, ‘Too Young to Live’, the narrator is in hospital recovering from an unspecified injury. In the neighbouring bed is a young pilot, dying slowly from the effects of a crash after only his second solo flight.

That afternoon he began to talk to me again, telling me about his people, who were in India, and how they hated him flying and how his mother had prophesied that his career as a pilot would end in disaster … it seemed they had a place in England, a house in Suffolk in the lovely wooded country on the Norfolk border. There was a lot of game there and he wanted me to promise to come up for some shooting … ‘The riding’s grand too; you could have Magpie, and there’s bags of hunting and we’d go into market on Wednesday and drink with the farmers …’16

England Is My Village, which appeared in 1940, describes the atmosphere in the officers’ mess as the Wing Commander briefs his men on the eve of a big operation.

Robert heard his instructions and memorized them with an ease born of practice, but the words seemed meaningless, rattling like hail on the roof of his mind.

‘Any questions?’

But they were all old hands and no naïve youngsters among them wanted to make themselves heard.

‘Well … good luck! I know you’ll put up a good show,’ his voice was suddenly shy, ‘I wish they’d let me come with you.’

They went back to the ante-room, went on talking, reading … Robert sat down by a friend. They had been together for years but were in different squadrons.

‘If anything,’ Robert’s voice was quiet as he flipped the pages of a magazine, ‘if anything were to happen to … slip up … tomorrow, would you attend to the odd detail?’

‘Of course, old boy.’ The other puffed his pipe alight, swung the match until it was extinguished.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tough show?’

‘Tough enough.’17

Robert does not return from the op. Rhys, a flight lieutenant in a bomber squadron, was killed on active service in August 1940.

This portrayal of an Air Force staffed by strong, silent men from good county families was more an expression of how some airmen liked to see themselves rather than a reflection of reality. The illusion was unsustainable. The social distinctions that marked the pre-war RAF soon became blurred when the fighting began. As the first clashes thinned their ranks and veterans were posted away, the AAF squadrons could no longer maintain their exclusivity and had to accept whoever they were sent as replacements. By the end of the Battle of Britain only five pilots remained from 601’s pre-war strength. The sixty-one men who washed through the squadron in the months of the Battle made up what was by then a typical Fighter Command motley of RAFVR sergeants, former SSC pilots and Czech and Polish airmen rejoining the fight.18

Even so, some important aspects of the pre-war style survived to become embedded in the Air Force ethos and form a salient part of its image. British airmen, whatever their origins, disliked show-offs and insouciance and understatement were the form. Air Ministry officials who during the war organized morale-boosting visits by veterans to aviation factories had to urge them to speak vividly about their experiences. An official account noted that ‘the reluctance of the aircrew personnel to “shoot a line” as they called it, had to be overcome’.19 Above all, pre-war professionals, auxiliary amateurs and the citizen fliers of the wartime service were united in an all-but-unquestioned willingness to face any odds and accept any risk.

Scott and Tedder identified the desire to fly as the most powerful inducement in attracting aircrew candidates. Nowadays it is quite hard to appreciate the fascination with aviation that gripped young men – and women – growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. The jeremiads preached by politicians about the huge potential for evil created by the invention of the aeroplane had little effect on the young. In their minds, it was the magic of flying that prevailed.

In the 1920s and 1930s aviators, male and female, enjoyed the celebrity and sometimes the rewards of film idols. The British couple Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison were world-famous. Amy was small, dark and gamine and looked as good in the severe fashions of the day as she did in leather helmet and sheepskin flying jacket – a paradigm of modern womanhood. She was born in Hull in 1903, where her father was a prosperous businessman, and studied economics at Sheffield University only to end up as a secretary in a solicitor’s office in London.

She found her métier when she joined the London Aeroplane Club, gaining a ground engineer’s as well as a pilot’s licence. Backed by her father and wealthy air enthusiasts she made a record-breaking solo flight to Australia in 1930 inspiring a popular hit, ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’. In 1932 she met and immediately married Mollison, a Glasgow-born flier and former RAF short service commission officer and instructor at the Central Flying School. They competed as a team in air races and were fêted as ‘the Flying Sweethearts’. The marriage crumbled after four years, due it was said to Mollison’s drinking and inability to cope with his wife’s fame. When the war came she joined the RAF as an Air Transport Auxiliary pilot delivering service aircraft around the country and died in mysterious circumstances after baling out from an Airspeed Oxford over the Thames Estuary in January 1941.

Aviation attracted the wealthy, fashionable and aristocratic but it was also promoted as a marvel of the new democratic age that should be open to everyone. No one pushed this message harder than Alan Cobham. Even in an industry not lacking energetic egotists, Cobham stood out. He flew with the RFC in the First World War, then joined de Havilland as a test pilot before making a series of flights to Australia and around Africa for which he was knighted by King George V. He played himself – the starring role – in a 1927 silent movie, The War Commander. In 1929 he set out on an air tour of Britain to encourage a trade-boosting programme of municipal airport building under the slogan ‘Make the Skyways Britain’s Highways’. His great achievement, though, was to get a generation of British boys and girls airborne. Cobham believed that ‘air-mindedness’ was best started early. The airliner he flew around the country was called ‘Youth of Britain’ and on the first tour of Britain the Castrol oil magnate Lord Wakefield paid anonymously for 10,000 children to get a first taste of ‘going up’ in it.

His proselytizing drive, as well as a keen business instinct, led him to dream up an event which he hoped would ‘embed itself in the public consciousness as deeply as Pancake Tuesday or Fireworks Night’, by persuading hundreds of towns around the country to host their own National Aviation Day.20 Cobham provided the spectacle with a team of ‘aces’, dashingly kitted out in white flying overalls manning up to fourteen aircraft. They laid on exhilarating displays, putting the aircraft through rolls, inverted loops, and ‘falling leaf’ manoeuvres as well as clambering out of the cockpits for displays of wing-walking. In 1933 they visited 306 venues in the British Isles and 800,000 people paid to see them. Ticket prices were low – 1s. 3d. for an adult and 6d. for a child – but, to Cobham’s exasperation, many others watched for free from what he called the ‘Aberdeen Grandstand’ – neighbouring high ground.21

Part of the huge appeal of Cobham’s Flying Circus was the chance for punters to get airborne and about one in four of those who attended did so. This could be done sedately, in a multi-seat airliner or, more thrillingly, in the rear cockpit of one of the smaller planes. The tickets were priced for a wide range of pockets: a pound for a white-knuckle full aerobatic flight (about £60 today), 10s. for a seat in the opening Grand Formation Flight or 4s. for a four-minute flip.

For thousands of the young men who flew with the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, this was their initiation to the air and for many it was as powerful and unforgettable as a first sexual encounter. Charles Fenwick, son of a captain in the Royal Engineers, was in his early teens when Cobham’s circus came to Rough Common just outside Canterbury. His aunt Edie took him to watch the show. Fenwick had never seen an aeroplane before. What followed was a coup de foudre. ‘Soon after we arrived the first plane taxied out and flew off into the lovely clear morning sky,’ he recalled, ‘and sitting behind the pilot was a young boy.’22

Fenwick was ‘green with envy’. Then Edie offered to treat him to a ‘flip’ and a few minutes later he was climbing into the rear cockpit of an elderly Avro 504. He had barely time to strap himself in ‘before we were rumbling across the field. After a final frenzied race across the meadow the rumbling suddenly stopped and my heart followed suit as I left the earth for the first time.’ Many years after the event he wrote: ‘the thrill as we climbed up and away from the solid old Earth will never fade. I was dumbfounded … we sailed over Hall Place and peered down into the rookery as the inmates squawked their way to safety … there was our home, the Claverings, looking for all the world like a doll’s house. On, on we flew. This was utterly stupendous …’ When he left school Fenwick went to the aircraft manufacturer Short Brothers as an apprentice, joined the Volunteer Reserve six months before the outbreak of war and flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain.

Boys who were not lucky enough to take a joy ride could fantasize about flying, their imaginations stimulated by a vast range of juvenile literature featuring aeroplanes and aviators. Lively mass circulation comics like Modern Boy were full of now-forgotten flying adventurers such as Jaggers of the RAF and Scotty of the Secret Squadron. The greatest of them all was James Bigglesworth. Biggles was the creation of W. E. Johns who had a brief but dramatic career as a bomber pilot with the RFC on the Western Front. Shot down in the last weeks of the war, he was captured but managed, briefly, to escape. He stayed on in the post-war RAF as a recruitment officer. On leaving he turned to editing, writing and illustrating on aviation themes. In 1928 he became editor of Popular Flying where Biggles appeared in the first of many short stories. In September 1932 a collection appeared called The Camels Are Coming. It was the start of a literary phenomenon. Johns was prolific and Biggles books flowed from his pen sometimes at the rate of four a year.

The characters were reasonably close to life and the detail and plots rang true. The young readers were not spared the realities of air fighting including the prospect of a ghastly death burning alive in a slow descent. But against this was set the camaraderie and gaiety of squadron life and the compelling figure of Biggles himself. Cool, technically competent and skilful yet understated, full of pluck and vitality, he was a hero made for his time.

Before long he would have a female counterpart. In 1941 Johns followed up with the first in the ‘Worrals’ series featuring the adventures of Joan Worralson of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and her sidekick Betty ‘Frecks’ Lovell. Johns revealed that the character was based on two women fliers of his acquaintance, Amy Johnson and Pauline Gower. As well as setting up her own joy-riding and air taxi service in Kent, Gower wrote stories with air themes for the Girl’s Own Paper. She would go on to head the Air Transport Auxiliary during the war.

The Air Ministry exploited the glamour of aviation to burnish the RAF’s reputation and appeal. The annual Hendon Air Display and the Empire Air Days put on at RAF stations around the country from 1934 to 1939 emphasized the excitement of flying rather than the realities of aerial warfare with spectacular demonstrations of stunt and formation flying. Sometimes they included mock imperial policing operations in which aircraft dropped flour bombs on villages inhabited by rebellious ‘Whatnot’ tribesmen or on fake wooden battleships. The main purpose, though, was to impress and entertain.

In official publications the RAF naturally emphasized its defensive and deterrent role. The bomber force was designed for a counter-offensive not to launch aggressive war. This was a British version of air power framed by national characteristics of restraint and reserve, with rearmament presented, reasonably enough, as a reluctant necessity. A pre-war recruiting poster showed a young family picnicking on the cliffs on a sun-drenched summer day. Father and son are looking upwards at a flight of twin-engine bombers heading out to sea while mother and daughter prepare tea. The copy reads ‘Air Defence is Home Defence’.23

When it came to attracting the specialist ground tradesmen needed to service the expanded squadrons, the RAF used a different approach, which ignored the prospect of war and made no appeal to duty and patriotism. The competition for skilled men was fierce, and there were plenty of well-paid jobs available in war industry factories. Advertising campaigns played up the prospect of travel and adventure and the attractions of outdoor life over a dreary works in the Midlands. A poster that appeared in 1939 showed a smart, confident figure in side cap and overalls, probing efficiently at an aero engine above the exhortation: ‘Come on, skilled fitters! Your experience will earn you the finest job ever: and with it – security, good prospects and a grand outdoor life.’24

The inducements on offer were strong even in supposedly prosperous parts of the country. Len Hayden was brought up in Henham-on-the-Hill in Essex, one of nine children who lived in a three-bedroom house without running water. He left school at fourteen and did a series of menial jobs in local haulage and engineering companies which offered little pay and no security but where he picked up a knowledge of mechanics. One winter morning early in 1939 he arrived at work after pushing his bike for eight miles through thick snow only to be sent home for turning up late.25

It was then that he made up his mind to respond to a newspaper advert seeking air mechanics for the RAF. He decided against telling his parents. His father Billy had been a reasonably prosperous coal merchant and dairy farmer before the previous war. He volunteered for the Army in 1916 and served in the trenches where he was poisoned by mustard gas. His health, and his prosperity, never returned. ‘Time after time he would return home [from hospital treatment] and try and rebuild his business, each time only to succumb to bouts of pneumonia and pleurisy caused by his wartime service,’ Hayden remembered.26 He scraped a living as a middleman buying cattle for local farmers and a 19s. 6d. weekly pension, squeezed out of the War Office after the intervention of the local MP. His son reflected that it was ‘no wonder tears trickled down his cheeks’ when he called home late in 1940 to say goodbye before following his squadron to North Africa. ‘He must have been thinking how a grateful nation would treat us when we returned from “our” war.’

The recruiting campaigns were almost too successful. In March 1939 Charles Portal, then in charge of personnel at the Air Ministry, reported that there was a shortfall of fitters, wireless and electrical mechanics, instrument makers and armourers. However, he concluded, ‘basically the problem is not volunteers but the facilities in which to train them’.27 The inability of the training machine at every level to keep pace with the increase in men and machines would contribute much to the RAF’s multiple failures in the opening stages of the war.

Like their Army and Navy counterparts the men who ran the RAF regarded their service as a manifestation of British identity and a repository of British virtues. They were wary of outside attempts to portray it, no matter how great the resulting publicity might be. In July 1937 the weekly meeting of the Air Council which brought together the Air Minister Lord Swinton, his deputy and the top staff officers discussed a Hollywood proposal to make a movie with an RAF theme. British settings were popular with American audiences and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recently set up a subsidiary, MGM-British, to develop co-productions.

One of the first projects was Shadow of the Wing. It had a screenplay by a Briton, Sidney Gilliat, but box office considerations demanded an American lead and Clark Gable, already a star, had been picked by Louis B. Mayer himself to play the hero. The minutes of the meeting record have Swinton stating that he was ‘strongly in favour of films as valuable recruiting agents’ – both the Navy (Brown on Resolution) and the Army (OHMS) had already co-operated with film makers in an effort to boost their appeal. However, he was ‘in some doubt in this case as to whether we could or should acquiesce in an arrangement whereby the leading role – that of a Royal Air Force pilot – was to be taken by an American actor, Mr Clark Gable, who might prove to be possessed of a strong American accent’.28

He was followed by the CAS, Air Marshal Edward Ellington, who in a characteristic contribution affirmed that ‘he too was opposed to such an arrangement but added that he did not know whether the actor in question had such an accent’. The senior civil servant at the Air Ministry, Sir Donald Banks, raised the possibility that MGM might be prepared to accept a British actor, though he warned that if they insisted on this point ‘he feared that the company would abandon the project’. This prompted a discussion as to possible British stars. Leslie Banks (no relation to Sir Donald), a well-known character actor of domestic stage and screen but with no pretensions to stardom, was ‘generally felt to be the most suitable’. The item concluded with Swinton proposing that he sit down that evening with his deputy to study a Clark Gable film and decide whether or not his accent was acceptable.

In the event neither was able to make the screening. However, at the next meeting Ellington reported that he had since seen Gable play the English seaman Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty and found him ‘not offensive in any way’. The consensus remained that a Brit would be better. Seven months later there was still no progress. Sir Donald ventured that ‘he rather suspected that our modest display of enthusiasm for Mr Clark Gable who had been Mr Mayer’s selection might to some extent account for the film proposal to have hung fire …’ (Clark Gable went on to fly several combat missions as an air gunner with the USAAF.)

Shadow of the Wing never made it to the screen but there were plenty of other air movies to keep audiences happy. Doom-mongering efforts like Things to Come were outnumbered by productions that showed military aviation in a heroic light. The Dawn Patrol was so popular it was made twice in the space of eight years. The second version starring Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone and David Niven was a box office hit when it came out in 1938. It was an unsparing account of the life of Royal Flying Corps pilots operating on the Western Front in the summer of 1915 when German Fokker eindecker fighters were winning the battle for air superiority over the trenches. The men of 59 Squadron are a hard-drinking, fatalistic bunch. Among them are two friends, Dick Courtney and Douglas Scott, played by Flynn and Niven. They are at odds with their leader Major Brand (Rathbone) who has lost sixteen of his pilots in the previous fortnight, most of them greenhorns fresh from flying training school. The mental strain on a commander forced to send novices to almost certain death is convincingly depicted. But it also reinforces the propaganda message broadcast by both sides during the real war, which presented air fighting as a clean, almost chivalrous business in contrast to the industrial carnage going on in the mud below. Courtney is killed after shooting down the German ace von Richter. The film ends with an image of inescapable duty as Scott orders the remnants of the squadron off on another dawn patrol.

To many British boys who watched it, the film acted not as a dire warning about the perils of life in the Air Force but as a call to their spirit of courage, sacrifice and adventure. ‘It may sound a bit odd and unlikely but this film really did have a tremendous influence on me,’ remembered Charles Patterson.29 ‘It struck me that though casualties were very heavy it was much the most wonderful and exciting way to go to war … some strange, but as it turned out accurate, instinct told me that if I was going to fight, this was about the only way that there was any chance of my doing it successfully.’ As a Mosquito pilot with Path Finder Force, Patterson would take part in some of the most audacious daylight raids of the war, dropping his bombs and then filming the results of the operation for later analysis.

The multitudes who read aviation magazines and followed the air races and the fortunes of celebrity aviators had little chance of becoming pilots themselves. Flying instruction at most clubs and commercial schools during the 1930s cost two pounds an hour when a young man starting out in a clerical or factory job would be pleased to get two pounds a week. A course aimed at securing a basic ‘A’ licence cost anything from £15 to £35.

The RAFVR offered a passport to the enchanted domain. It was open to any male between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five with a reasonable level of secondary education. Those accepted would receive flying training gratis as well as an annual grant of £25. The educational requirements were a barrier to a large proportion of British males, most of whom left school at fourteen. Many who came forward were from the ranks of the comfortably off. But there were also large numbers of bank clerks, shop assistants, and minor civil servants eager to seize what seemed a God-given chance to break out of their dull existences and realize their fantasies.

Despite the obvious attractions of the offer, the Air Staff felt the mood of the country was tricky. They detected a hostility to ‘militarism’ and were alarmed by the prevalence of pacifist sentiments. At an Air Council meeting in May 1936 Frederick Bowhill complained that ‘at present the Press give great prominence to pacifist manifestoes, particularly those from seats of learning, but make no attempt to inculcate a feeling among the youth of the country that service in its defence was a fine thing’. He proposed that ‘we ought … to aim at bringing about a change of heart in the Press’.30

Sensibly, the tone remained sotto voce, with publicity stressing adventure rather than patriotism, a wise approach given the mood of the times. In 1936 the Peace Pledge Union, inspired by a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, was in its heyday, attracting hundreds of thousands of supporters across the political spectrum, united in their renunciation of war and determination to work to remove its causes.

As the threat from Germany mounted attitudes hardened and the service chiefs’ concerns about the willingness of the younger generation to fight would prove unfounded. When looking back, few would cite the worsening international situation or a sense of duty as a compelling motive for volunteering. ‘I was walking down the Strand and there was an RAF recruiting office with a poster in the window and it said “London businessmen join the RAF and fly aeroplanes at the weekend”,’ said Maurice Leng who was just starting out in the advertising business. ‘There were no patriotic reasons. I was interested in motor-racing but it was an expensive sport and I couldn’t possibly afford the cost of a decent car … here was this wonderful opportunity for flying these super aeroplanes provided by the government and that is exactly what I did.’31 Brian Considine was a trainee at Unilever when he joined in January 1939. ‘I was nineteen and I don’t think I was bothered by [the political situation],’ he recalled.32 ‘It was a way to learn to fly which was an expensive thing to do. In fact instead of paying out of one’s own pocket one was actually going to be paid to do it.’

Some who went on to have gallant wartime careers enjoyed emphasizing the unheroic motives that had impelled them into the Air Force in the first place. Christopher Foxley-Norris, who flew Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain, liked to claim that his main reason for joining the Oxford University Air Squadron was the £25 signing-on fee. It enabled him to buy a car which his older brother had told him was essential if he was to have any chance of attracting a girlfriend.33 But he also admitted that though life in the squadron was ‘enormous fun, at the same time most of us realized there was going to be a bust up … but at least some of us were doing something about it while the rest were just sitting around’.34

Tony Smyth, a graduate chemist working at the paint manufacturer Manders, did not ‘join the RAFVR … from patriotism, but only to increase my pay and show me the world’.35 Like Foxley-Norris he soon learned that the fun came at a price. When in the spring of 1937 he began his basic training as part of the first intake of volunteers at Prestwick elementary flying school near Glasgow, the CO in his welcoming address left them in no doubt as to what it was they were being trained for. ‘He told us … that the remilitarization of the Rhineland by Hitler had showed the world that German expansion as proposed in “Mein Kampf” was serious. An enlargement of the RAF was essential … to produce a reserve of civilian aircrew.’ As time passed the truth that they were learning to fight as well as fly became increasingly apparent.

If war was coming, the Air Force seemed a good place in which to spend it. Almost everyone eligible to fight had someone close to them who had been killed or maimed in the previous war and most of the casualties had been suffered in the trenches of the Western Front. Reluctance to repeat the previous generation’s experience was a powerful factor in choosing to serve in the relatively clean-seeming element of the air.

Tony Iveson’s police inspector father had been ‘shot on the first day of the Somme and very badly wounded. He had a huge scar on his chest … All my generation knew how horrible it had been.’36 Growing up in York he heard his elders talk in ever more pessimistic terms about the crisis in Europe. ‘I knew that there was going to be a war and I knew who it was going to be with so I came through my teens with that in my mind.’ Early on he resolved that when it came ‘I just wanted to fly’. Iveson joined the RAFVR and flew in the Battle of Britain before eventually joining 617 Squadron – the Dam Busters.

There was also the question of comfort. The RAF seemed to offer a cushier existence than you could expect in the Army or Navy. Sir Edwin Lutyens had been among those consulted on the design of the stations that sprang up in the 1930s. They were built to high specifications and airmen, or at least officers, were thought to live well. Charles Patterson was self-aware enough to know he could ‘never have stood up to the rigours of fighting on land and in the dust and heat and dirt’. When later at a recruiting interview he was asked why he wanted to be a pilot he boldly replied, ‘because the only way that I could consider it possible to fight was if one was provided with central heating and constant hot water’.37 The group captain heading the panel ‘gave me a broad smile and nodded approval and said: “Accepted. Recommended”.’

The first RAFVR entrants began training in April 1937. Tedder saved money by using the network of flying clubs across the country to supply the infrastructure, with the instruction being supervised by the RAF’s Central Flying School.38 The reservists did basic training at an initial six- or eight-week course, at the end of which they were expected to go solo, then returned to their regular jobs and kept up training at weekends at local airfields operating under contract with the Air Ministry. The volunteers had only a semi-detached relationship with the RAF. They did not wear uniform and were part of a mass reserve rather than organized into squadrons like the Auxiliaries.

They started flying on Tiger Moths and similar easy-to-master aircraft and gradually progressed on to new types like the Avro Cadet before finally getting to grips with aircraft then in service in the squadrons. They also attended night classes in local towns to study basic aeronautics and navigation.

For those who had never flown the initial trip could come as an unpleasant surprise. Bob Doe, who, despite having left school at fourteen with no qualifications was accepted into the RAFVR, got his first taste of flying in June 1938. He worked as an office boy at the News of the World and took the train from Fleet Street to Hanworth aerodrome in south-west London for his first ‘air experience’. The machine was a Blackburn B2 in which pilot and pupil sat side by side. His instructor, a former stunt pilot with the Cobham circus, was, like him, a big man and they had to ‘sit a bit sideways’ to make room for each other. ‘I remember thinking how thin the sides of the airframe were and that it would not take much to fall out,’ Doe remembered.39 ‘I was afraid of falling through it. When he banked the thing to turn round, looking down at the houses about four hundred feet below, it was a weird feeling. Quite frankly I was petrified …’

When they first got their hands on the controls novices learned that simple aircraft were delicate creatures and the sensations of handling were both disturbing and thrilling. Edward Hearn, a trainee estate manager from Folkestone, ‘was surprised to find the joystick extremely sensitive and even slight pressure had an effect on the machine’.40 He felt he was ‘handling something so delicate that even a slight touch would send us tumbling earthwards’. Repetition brought familiarity and then confidence until the day came to go solo, a great, never-to-be-forgotten moment in every pilot’s life.

Hearn was a slow learner. The average time taken by pupils to go solo was ten hours. In his case, it was fourteen. Decades later he could still ‘distinctly remember this first venture alone in the air … strapped in, propeller swung, goggles down, I opened up the throttle and it was the feeling of power as speed was gathered over the grass that gave me assurance and stability’. Hearn made three careful left-hand circuits without mishap. This was the easy part. Getting down was the problem. The training school canteens buzzed with stories of pupils who had come in to land fourteen or fifteen times before summoning the courage to put the aircraft down. Some finally had the decision made for them when they ran out of fuel. A rough landing did not qualify for ‘that would mean a bounce and if the bounce was a real banger that would have meant opening up the throttle and going around again’. Hearn eventually brought the machine in smoothly, cutting the engine a few feet from the ground and drifting in to roll smoothly over to his relieved instructor.

The plan was to recruit 800 potential pilots a year but it soon became clear that the quota would easily be filled. The supply of pilot recruits, particularly in the London area, much exceeded the demand.41 The problem was that everyone wanted to be a pilot. Few were interested in the less glamorous roles of observer – the contemporary term for navigators – and wireless operator/air gunner. The difficulty was solved when surplus pilots were diverted to fill the gaps in aircrew needs. By the time the war began there were 6,646 pilots in the ranks of the RAFVR; 1,623 had been trained as observers and 1,948 as wireless operators/air gunners.

The function of the RAFVR as a reserve did not last long. When the war started it became an administrative designation and the principal route for aircrew entry into the RAF. All those who applied for aircrew duties on their own initiative or chose the RAF when registering as required by the National Service (Armed Forces) Act which came into force in September 1939 joined its ranks. They were identified by a brass and cloth ‘VR’ worn on tunic lapels and shoulders. In 1943 the badges were phased out as they were considered divisive, though the surviving Auxiliaries were allowed to keep their distinguishing ‘A’.

The airmen who went into battle with the Luftwaffe were a compound of professionals and amateurs and represented a broad social and geographical swathe of Britain. The fusion was remarkably successful. In the judgement of the internal narrative, borne out by and large by the testimony of the participants, ‘so complete was the amalgamation that the distinctions of peacetime between the component parts ceased to be discernible and the memory of them failed to have any significance’.42

Those leading the force in the rush to war had managed to create a solid identity for a hugely expanded organization that would only get bigger with time. It was shared not only by the fliers but by the much larger number of men and women who kept them in the air.