Читать книгу Winged Peace - William Avery Bishop - Страница 19

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Along with our failure to see the Air Age in focus as it has unfolded before our eyes—or, if we saw it, to act upon our knowledge—there has lurked in men’s minds the ineradicable fallacy that the final phase of aviation’s development and utility has always just been reached. Here is a means of human communication and a weapon of human destruction which functions in a new element, the air, and which has added a new dimension, depth (or height, if you prefer the term) to our world.

When the first flights of a few moments’ duration took place, most people saw nothing to these feats but what may be called their “stunt” quality. When the air scientists of World War I developed aircraft capable of wreaking havoc upon the enemy, the politician onlooker saw nothing but a new and minor weapon restricted in its use to short ranges. When the oceans were first crossed by air, we acclaimed these successes solely as testimony to the pioneering spirit of our young aviators, not as the impending dawn of global flight. When airlines expanded across the seven seas we were sure aviation at last had reached its peak, that all we could add would be the occasional amenity for the traveler. We remained sure that air routes would never be able to compete with those which lie on the surface of the sea. We were, in short, the twentieth-century replicas of those maritime merchants of Genoa and Venice who laughed Columbus out of court when he announced his intention of discovering a westward passage to the East. As our transocean airlines have been increased a thousandfold under the impact of World War II, most people have chosen to regard what has happened as a development which will be laid aside as soon as Peace breaks out again. To the average democrat and his political leaders the mass-bombings of our enemies’ fortresses and cities mark the final stage of the use of the airplane as a weapon. It is final in exactly the same sense that a pocket-dagger is as great as a cavalryman’s saber. When such people read about rockets and jets they jeer again, simply because their minds cannot be projected beyond the power capacities of the stationary engine. We have been, in short (and this goes for all of us, on the democratic side, at least), a pack of stupid fools.

There is only one way to bring home the possibilities inherent in the immediate future. That is to survey the whole course of aviation’s history. We must turn back, then, and see what has happened—how aviation began and how it was received by “solid men of sense”; how it surged forward under the tremendous impact of the first war in the air; its gigantic development in spite of the political imposts placed upon it between two wars; and, finally, its second great forward surge under the shattering driving power of a second world war.

A great deal has been written in the past about the pioneers of flight, of the struggles of the brothers Wright and the belittling of their effort, as derision is always showered on the heads of innovators by hidebound and ignorant people who walk in terror of change because they fear the adjustments they may have to make to meet it. Those were the days of Blériot, Graham-White, de Lesseps, and all the band of gallant pioneers who ventured into the new element, the air, in contraptions which looked like strange bugs mounted on bicycle wheels. The story of Orville and Wilbur Wright is part of every American boy’s folklore. So is the legendry of Santos-Dumont and others to the European.

In my own country, Canada, where the first flight ever made from British soil began and finished at Baddeck, N.S., on February 23, 1909, a young gaffer, J. A. D. McCurdy, took off from and landed on the frozen surface of one of the Bras d’Or Lakes in a funny-looking equipage called the Silver Dart. I can think of no better way of calling attention to the extreme youth of flight than by saying that this same young man, the first to fly in the British Empire, as this is written is still involved in aviation as one of the high officials of the Air Production Branch of Canada’s Department of Munitions and Supply, which has equipped our mammoth Air Training Plan with the aircraft in which tens of thousands of young Canadians, Americans, Englishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Poles, Hollanders, Czechs, and Fighting Frenchmen have learned to fly, and from the schools of which they have gone forth to knock the Hun out of the skies and to bomb his cities into heaps of rubble. In other words, aviation’s whole lusty history has been recorded within the memory of men still alive and active, which stresses not merely the extreme youth of aviation itself, but the speed of the world revolution it has caused. Like all youngsters it has always been up to something its elders look upon with distrust, disapproval, and sometimes scorn. Like all youngsters it has made great mistakes, usually owing to youth’s lack of judgment. But, like the young everywhere, it is up and coming, always going places, and full of the spirit of never-say-die, and we cannot hold it back simply by telling it to behave.

I would give a lot to have been with McCurdy and his friends on the ice at Baddeck that February day. Probably none of those present realized that history was being written, but what was set down that morning was the opening paragraph of one of the most important chapters of Canadian and aviation history. That was the day when all the great Canadian pilots of World War I were born, and it was the day when the huge Canadian bases from which men now fly over the new map to India, Africa, Burma, to anywhere in the world, were first conceived in the spirit of high adventure.

Like the Wright brothers, the gentlemen whose money, plans, and determination made the flight of Silver Dart possible had their troubles. As far as the residents of the immediate vicinity were concerned, the innovators were all lunatics who would undoubtedly break their necks and richly deserved to do so for daring to attempt to override the purposes of the Almighty. As was true of aerial experimenters everywhere in the world, they could not have taken a single dollar away from any so-called responsible citizen to further their strange and God-defying purpose. But, like pioneers everywhere, they went ahead anyway.

They had begun to tinker with their great idea two years earlier. Its principal backer was Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and he was actually only backer-by-proxy, in that he had managed to persuade Mrs. Bell to let him and his associates have $35,000 with which to build their first flying machine. The associates called themselves the Aerial Experiment Association and one of their number was the great Glenn Curtiss, the others being Dr. Bell (then living at Baddeck), Thomas Selfridge, J. A. D. McCurdy, and a renowned Canadian character by the name of Casey Baldwin. Almost two years elapsed between the day when Dr. Bell persuaded his wife to write a check and the great moment when Silver Dart took off to the dismay and chagrin of the scoffers.

I have spent a great deal of time since I became associated with aviation wondering how McCurdy ever managed to climb up from the ice and seat himself in the Silver Dart. Sometimes nowadays I hear people wondering aloud how the young pilots of today ever manage to squeeze themselves into the cockpit with all the gear and gadgets they wear, from parachute packs to Mae Wests, but to me their problem looks like child’s play compared to the one which faced McCurdy, for, as I look at the snapshots of the skintight trousers he wore that morning, I persistently wonder how he could lift a foot six inches above the ground or, having climbed up to the level of the wings, could have managed to assume a sitting position without bursting his seams. That in itself was a great pioneering enterprise and, as far as I am concerned, just another of those things which constantly call attention to the undying courage of our intrepid flying men.

Meanwhile all the backers of the enterprise stood closely huddled together on the ice, some wearing beards and others mustaches which looked like bicycle handle-bars. They were sticking together for the identical reason for which children huddle in the dark, for the comfort and spiritual sustenance they could draw from each other in a world in which everybody else thought they were totally crazy. Finally McCurdy broke away from the group and walked out to the strange contraption he was about to take up into the air. About that time, I am credibly informed, some of the more serious burghers present had it in mind to gang the young man to keep him from committing suicide, or from interfering with what they probably would have described as God’s will. Probably because they were not unanimous as to how this should be done, or lacked leadership, the idea was not put into effect. McCurdy climbed up, managed to sit down without tearing his pants, tied himself to the machine, and was ready for the great adventure. Silver Dart rolled slowly along the ice. The young man at the controls waved to his partners. The machine picked up speed and took a hop, skip, and jump, while everybody held his breath. Miracle of miracles, it took to the air!

McCurdy flew straight along over the lake for a matter of minutes which must have felt like years. All those who have ever soloed and enjoyed that tremendous sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach followed by the greatest sense of exhilaration man will ever know, will have some idea as to what was going on inside McCurdy about that time. But this was no ordinary first solo. It was the first solo ever performed from Canadian soil, or in the British Empire, and one of the first performed anywhere.

The great question mark in everybody’s mind (including McCurdy’s, no doubt) now became how he could get back to the ground without breaking his young neck, which some of the more cynical unbelievers below no doubt secretly hoped he would do, simply as a means of bearing out their conviction and assertion that what was going on constituted something pretty close to mortal sin. There was an audible crowd-gasp as the pilot went into a turn and began to fly in the other direction. Silver Dart flew gently and slowly along, continued to frustrate the fundamentalists by not falling to pieces in the air, turned again, glided gently downward toward the lake, and landed softly on its surface. That was the beginning of flight in a country which, for the size of its population, has produced more flying men than any nation on the green footstool, which pioneered the use of aircraft in opening up undeveloped hinterlands, a country which is the home of the most air-minded race on earth.

Such were the beginnings of aviation.

Not much happened during the years which preceded World War I. The designers—men like the Wrights and Santos-Dumont—had to build their own machines with what little money they could scrape together. Every now and then some hardy madman pulled off some new glittering stunt. The London Daily Mail dangled a huge cash prize before the eyes of anyone who could span the English Channel by air and Blériot collected. On December 18, 1910, T. O. M. Sopwith, whose name has been closely identified with British aviation in two wars, flew from Eastchurch in Kent to Tirlement, Belgium, a matter of 161 miles. The world acclaimed the feat. Today there are plenty of young Spitfire and Fortress pilots who would have almost as much money as Blériot won if they were given a ten-shilling note for every time they have crossed the Straits of Dover to do the chores of the United Nations’ war in the air.

Certainly, when World War I came along, aviation showed little improvement over the planes of Wright, Blériot, and McCurdy. Only a handful of machines were available in England or France when the shooting started. The pilots of that day were sportsmen, leaning a little toward madness, and there was no knowledge in any of them of what may be termed military flight, or of the possibilities of using aircraft as weapons of war. Airplanes were not armed. If they had any use at all it was that of being able to get up where horizons are wider, to observe the course of events below, and to come back to tell the military gentlemen what was going on. The military gentlemen, from all I have ever heard, did not think much of this. It constituted a definite interference with the running of the war by people who had spent their lives learning how to run wars (with Napoleon and Wellington as their mentors), and they wanted no innovators butting into an honorable profession. So the aviators took off and observed and came back and every once in a while one of them brought home valuable information which enabled the military men, albeit unwillingly, to confound the enemy. At that time nobody had fired a shot from one airplane toward another. The machines in use were rickety death-traps tied together with what the latter-day pilot usually speaks of contemptuously as haywire, and not even the most serious-minded survivor of that era will ever deny that both he and his machine were completely haywire, in the cynical sense in which the term is used in North American idiom. Probably that is how the phrase found its way into the language.

The first armament ever carried by the fliers of World War I seems to have been the short Lee Enfield rifle and it was carried by some unsung sprat who thought it a good idea to smuggle a gun into the cockpit and surprise the first Jerry he met by taking a potshot at him. So far as I have heard, nobody was ever hurt by it. But it was the birth of a world-shaking idea, which has since resulted in the pouring down of death and destruction on German cities, and the highly skilled trade of aerial combat.

Before the war was many months old, however, all sorts of revolutionary events had taken place. The most important of these, without question, was that the first groups of scientific aircraft designers to be equipped with tools and ample money had locked themselves away from the sight of man and were working day and night, in Germany as in France and Britain, to evolve airplanes which would fly more efficiently and faster, and which could be utilized as weapons of war. Paralleling this activity was the tremendous interest of youngsters who had just donned the uniform in this great new arm of warfare. They could see its possibilities even if the generals could not.

We had strange reasons for joining, we kids who were amongst the early members of the old Royal Flying Corps. Take myself. I had crossed from Canada to England as a Cavalry Lieutenant, and by the time I had been there a month it seemed to me I had never seen anything but mud. I would stand fetlock deep in it in the horse lines looking up as the occasional airplane passed overhead, saying to myself, “What a grand clean way to go to war.” Right then I decided to find out how a man went about the business of getting away from horses, baled hay, and mud—in short, how he acquired wings. But nobody I met in camp seemed to know anything about it. Then I went up to London for a weekend, and somewhere in the West End (it must have been the Savoy Bar because that was the place to which we all gravitated as soon as we hit town, and, therefore, the place to run into your friends or to hear on the Canadian grapevine who might be around) I ran into a couple of Englishmen who had recently joined the Royal Flying Corps. In the course of our conversation, I learned that if you applied to be sent to the Royal Flying Corps, and you had the necessary qualifications, your senior officers could not block the move. I asked them how to make the applications and the answer staggered me. It was to go direct to the War Office and see Lord Hugh Cecil. If he approved, the transfer would be made. This was Saturday night.

With great fear I went A.W.O.L. on Monday, staying over in London, as broke as any junior officer is in honor bound to be after a weekend in town. Early on Monday morning I advanced timidly into the front door of the War Office in Whitehall. After a short delay, I was led through the rabbit warren it was, and eventually arrived at a very small office where sat Lord Hugh in solitary majesty.

I explained to him that, although I was a trained cavalryman with three years’ experience prior to the war, it was my desire to get into the Royal Flying Corps and told him of my conversation with the two young Englishmen. He could not have been more kind, and immediately took down in longhand, on an ordinary scratch-pad, my name, rank, regiment, and other vital statistics. My knowledge of the air was, as I have previously said, just one of youthful dreams born of the sight of a few airplanes passing over our muddy outdoor stables. Actually in my heart I was probably horrified by the thought of flying, but, even so, anything seemed better than the mud in which I was bogged down.

It was a major decision I faced, and I was as nervous as a kitten. Looking back from here, the conversation had qualities of divine comedy.

The questions Lord Hugh asked became more and more frightening as I visualized in my imagination the dreadful things that must happen to people who fly. First, he asked me if I could ride a horse. That was easy. I replied that I had been in a Cavalry Regiment for several years. Point one for Bishop. Then he asked if I could “she.” This being the English idea of how to pronounce the word “ski” (for the same reason that Cholmondeley is called “Chumley,” no doubt), I had no idea what he meant, unless it had something to do with sex. I played safe and simply answered, “Yes, sir.” I got away with that one. Point two. The next question was how well I could drive a motor car. Never having had a wheel in my hand I simply replied, “Very well.” Could I ride a motor bike? Again the answer was yes. Then, “How well can you skate?” At last a question I could answer truthfully. Any young Canadian who can’t skate and play ice-hockey should be shot. Then Lord Hugh wanted to know if I had done any running, if I had any experience on the track. By this time I had all the answers, simply by couching them in the affirmative. I told him of the many races and cups I had won. After all he’d have to go a long way from Whitehall to check up on me!

In the meantime, I was wondering: What sort of a game is this flying anyway? Am I going to land on the lakes of Switzerland, or high in the Alps? Am I going to be chased by battalions of German Infantry, diving in and out of canals, or what? Where was the flying to come in?

To this day I have no idea what the destination of Lord Hugh’s cross-examination was. I can only believe his examination stemmed from the belief that you must ask the candidate something, if only to impress the young man with the importance of the occasion and that, having no dossier on flight statistics on which to base a questionnaire, Lord Hugh was simply doing what he could to make the occasion seem important.

Finally he pointed out that there were two classes of air crew, pilots and a new type just coming in, to be called “observer,” and that it would be easier to join as an observer than as a pilot, as the need was great and I would get to France more quickly.

By this time I was so afraid of flying that I felt I would sooner trust somebody else to pilot the aircraft than do it myself, so I said quickly, “I’d like to be an observer, sir.” That is how I went into the Royal Flying Corps. All very scientific!

In a matter of days, after returning to my regiment in Kent, my transfer came through and I reported to Salisbury Plain, there to join the first class of embryo observers and to discover that I was one of the few Canadians in the whole R.F.C., a fellow with an accent and a language which baffled his comrades. They were grand fellows for all their strange ways, and in those days I formed friendships which will never die. That is youth’s genius in wars—and the only good that comes of them.

Our training was not quite what the boys of today would call training. Those were the first days of the use of wireless by airmen—and by wireless, I mean something far different from the science today’s fliers know. We had small Morse transmitting sets in our machines with which we could send to the ground for a very short distance, while carrying out artillery observation and directing the guns on their targets. The only answer we could receive upstairs from the gunners was given by means of strips of cotton laid on the ground, each of which had a cryptic meaning of its own. It was not until the war was almost over that telephonic communication between the air and the ground was introduced. I well remember being present, in the autumn of 1917 at Dayton, Ohio, while home on leave, when Henry Ford gave the first demonstration in the United States.

To return to the training we had as observers, I always recall that none of us was so hot with our Morse. No wonder. We were sent off every afternoon with huge searchlights, and, on arrival in a field, divided into two groups which were established about a thousand yards apart on the level plain. The procedure was always identical. We memorized our messages before we went out, sent them to the other fellows while an instructor watched and checked. They were always correct, of course. Then he would leave us, with instructions to practice. Whereupon we would find the nearest haystack and sit chatting and dozing behind it while one member of each team kept flashing the lights to convince any “spy” that we were busy. However, some way or other we learned a soupçon of Morse.

After a brief course, in which no flying was done, my class received the single wing which denoted our status. The baker’s dozen of us who were graduated became the first observers ever known in the honorable annals of flight. Of aviation we knew nothing, but we were going to find out very quickly. A few days later we were on our way to France (being fliers we went by water, of course), and I was en route to the great adventure of adventures. It was still 1915. The war in the air was just beginning. Thenceforward I was to sit in a ringside seat and watch the science of flight grow from the infant it then was into the giant it has since become.