Questions & Answers: RFC/RAF Special

In this special and extended QnA Episode we look at Parachutes in the Air Services in WW1, the Ground Crew who kept the planes in the air, what are the best RFC/RAF memoirs of WW1, how the filming of the Red Baron's funeral was received, and how men applied for transfers to the Air Services and what was the selection process for Pilots and Observers.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to some more questions and answers here on the old front line. These are questions submitted by you, the podcast listeners, and each month we select some of the best questions that have been submitted via email and the Discord server to answer here and hopefully give us all fresh perspectives and new knowledge of this vast subject of the Great War. So let's begin. Welcome to this special edition of our regular Q&A episodes, and as part of Air War Month, in this extended Q&A, we'll look at some of the questions, your questions, about the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force that you've submitted. Now I've received an awful lot of questions for this one, some of them will have been answered in the main episodes we've already put out, but here I've chosen five of the best of them, in fact some of these questions featured here were suggested by more than one person. So thanks to all of you who've sent these questions in. And there's one or two that I haven't been able to feature in this, but I'm going to keep them back for future Q&A episodes. So the flying core aspect, the air war aspect hasn't quite gone away. And I hope that Thank you for watching. And this whole thing really has been an experiment to feature one subject over the course of multiple episodes. And it's something that I hope to repeat again down the line in the next season of the podcast, perhaps focusing on a particular army or a particular battle. Let's see. Anyway, let's get down to these special Q&As that have been submitted by you, the listeners, for this special episode on the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force. So question number one comes from Mike Roberts and Andrew Warren and indeed quite a few other people as well. And this question asks, has it ever been proven that a decision was made not to provide parachutes to British aircrew in the First World War as it would lessen the fighting spirit of the pilots? Why did First World War pilots not get provided with these parachutes? and lots of variations of that question. So let's begin with some facts. First of all, parachutes did exist as technology on the outbreak of the war in 1914. And parachutes had been used by different militaries because many of them had balloons for observation. And if a balloon is up there above a battlefield and it gets shot down or it collapses during training, it doesn't even have to be at war. How do the men in the basket beneath it get out? parachutes had been developed so they could get out of those baskets and come down safely or relatively safely because this is fairly early parachute technology it's not like the parachutes even of the second world war let alone parachutes that exist today and when the war began from a raw flying corps point of view the raw flying corps did have parachutes and these parachutes were issued to the balloonatics the men who were in these balloon companies of the rf spotting from the baskets often at quite high altitudes and once the enemy armed their aircraft they began to attack these balloons to try and shoot them down so the men in the baskets had to have some possibility of getting out of them and this was via a parachute now these were static line parachutes so that meant that the parachute would deploy as the airmen As the balloonatic jumped out of the balloon, there was a cord connecting the parachute to the balloon, so there was something to pull against. And as the soldier jumped out of the basket, that cord would pull against it, pull open the parachute, and as he dropped, the parachute would deploy. Now, it was not a perfect piece of technology, and if you read any accounts of the Balloonetics, then you'll come across accidents and incidents where the parachutes did not deploy. One of their famous officers was Basil Hallam Radford. He'd been a music hall star before the war, and his stage name was Gilbert the Filbert, the Nut with a K, and that kind of had overtones with Kitchener's Army. K of K Kitchener of Khartoum formation of Kitchener's Army it all got kind of embroiled in the culture of that early Kitchener's Army anyway that's probably a Q&A for another day but Gilbert the Filbert Basil Helen Radford was spotting over the Somme in 1916 when his balloon got attacked he bailed out with his static line parachute and it failed to deploy properly and he came down in what was known as a Roman candle where the parachute did not operate correctly and he hit the ground at high speed and was killed instantly so this was by no means any kind of perfect technology the parachutes were bulky they were heavy and because of this there was difficulty in getting them into first world war cockpits and also they added a considerable amount of weight to the aircraft which was a big consideration in aircraft of that period so the static line as well that didn't help because if you could jump out of a first World War aircraft going at speed it's not like a balloon and a basket from a balloon which is kind of suspended there for a while and you've got a moment where you can pull against it with an aircraft at high speed, possibly the amount of force needed to actually deploy the parachute just wouldn't be there and the parachute could get tangled up in the aircraft and the pilot would be dragged down with it. So there was all kinds of issues in deploying those kind of parachutes. So there was no way and there was no technology to issue these pilots with the type of parachute where they could jump and then free fall and then open their parachute like that that just did not exist at the time of the first world war so there were practical considerations how the parachutes worked and the weight of the parachutes in these early aircraft and how they would fit into the cockpits of the aircraft as well the idea however which you see in quite a lot of accounts of the flying services in the first world war that they were not issued as they were bad for morale or encouraged coward us I mean I've seen all kinds of phrases like that I think that's a bit overstated but it is said that Hugh Trenchard the so-called father of the RAF thought they might undermine offensive spirit with pilots which is a kind of crazy idea really because you could be the best pilot on the Western Front and some aircraft could easily get into uncontrollable nose dives and spins and you had no way of getting out so it meant that very experienced pilots could be essentially wasted their experience and their lives wasted because they had no means of getting out the aircraft. Now there were those practical considerations with the technology but there was also no effort to improve upon that technology except on the part of the Germans. So the Germans in 1918 did develop a parachute that could be used by pilots in the aircraft that existed at that time. This was a parachute that could be deployed as you exited the aircraft and it was known as the Heinicke system developed by Unteroffizier Otto Heinicke who had served in the ground crew of a German squadron on the western front and this was a parachute in a backpack fairly smallish sized backpack that formed part of a wider waistcoat harness system that the pilot put on war as he got into the cockpit with the parachute flush with the kind of upper level of the aircraft so it protruded and he he had to bail out he could unbuckle himself from the seat he was in and from the cockpit area and then get out the aircraft and deploy his parachute now it did operate with a static line but tests showed that it did operate reasonably successfully not a hundred percent successfully because again this was new technology so it did have some success but it wasn't universally issued in the German flying services and on the British and Commonwealth side that kind of thing was never issued to their pilots and the Germans found as well that it didn't work at low level so there wasn't literally enough time with a fast moving aircraft at low level for a pilot to get out and the parachute deploy and then he safely hits the ground so with the exception of balloon personnel parachutes really remained elusive until they were widely issued to air forces by the 1930s which also went in tandem with the development of parachute forces military forces using parachutes by the Germans for example at that time as well but all of that of course was too late for the Great War and too late for those pilots that flew over the battlefields in the First World War so while there's a bit of mythology about this generally speaking the technology to give pilots parachutes didn't exist for that generation of the Great War so great question one not infrequently asked about the air war and thank you Mike and Andrew and all the others who sent that one in So on to question number two, and this one comes from David Keeley. Well David, this is something we've hinted on on and off throughout this Air War month, in the introductory episode and also in some of the chats with our experts, because it is a really important part of our understanding how the Air War operated from the perspective of the RFC and the RAF. It wasn't just the pilots. Even from the very beginning, the bulk of the personnel in the RFC that went to war in August 1914 were ground crew, not pilots. people in the air and when the Royal Flying Corps together with the RNS became the RAF on the 1st of April 1918 they did a big survey of the personnel that worked for those institutions that became this big nominal role effectively of the RAF on formation that is now part of the archives of the National Archives and I'm pretty sure it's been digitised it doesn't tell you any more than it's in their service records but it's a useful document and from that we discover that there was a About 150,000 men serving in the Royal Flying Corps. but 10% of them, less than 10% of them, were actually air crew, were pilots or observers. So what that meant was that the vast majority of those who wore raw flying core and then went on to wear RAF uniform were not in the air, not carrying out air combat, they were on the ground. And to keep one pilot and his machine in the air, it needed 15 to 20 personnel working on it full-time, on the ground to make that possible. So their role was absolutely vital. The pilots couldn't take the machine up. They couldn't get it to where it needed to be if it didn't have enough fuel in it. They couldn't fight their air battles if it had not been rearmed and machine gun ammunition added to the weapons on it and bombs added to those that were being sent forward to drop bombs on targets. So the role of the ground crew was absolutely pivotal. And the pilots, of course, are the ones that... get all the glory they're the ones that come back to the mess and tell the stories they're the ones that are picked on by the newspapers and become heroes of that generation and then the kind of backroom boys the ground crew don't get that level of fame but pilots within those squadrons of course knew that they couldn't do anything without those men and if you were a wise pilot a clever pilot then obviously you'd cultivate a good ground crew team to make sure that your aircraft was in tip-top shape and you could go off and do all the things that you wanted to do and indeed were required to do as part of that air war strategy, whether it was attacking enemy aircraft in the skies or taking the war over the battlefield to gather intelligence, drop bombs, whatever. So the Royal Flying Corps ground crew, they were really this essential force pivot in how this whole thing worked and there were aircraft mechanics doing general repairs to the aircraft riggers and fitters working on the airframe and the mechanics of the engine to make sure that functioned properly because you didn't want to take an aircraft up and then the engine stopped in mid-air given the fact as we've already mentioned there were no parachutes to get out you had to have armourers who were specialists in the weapons that would eventually be added to these aircraft machine guns and and special machine guns that operated with the turn of the propeller, synchronised machine guns, so you needed specialists to do that kind of work. You had wireless operators that worked on the eventual small-scale radio sets that could transmit morse that were put into the cockpits of some of the later aircraft. You had signalers that were all part of that as well, plus clerks, drivers, logistical support, and then, of course, medical staff, cooks, and all kinds of other ancillary staff that was essential to the functioning of a squadron wherever that was based behind the Western Front. So it was a big team and an essential team to make sure that squadron functioned, the wings within that squadron functioned, and the individual pilots had everything that they needed to get up into the air. Now back in the 80s and 90s when I interviewed Great War veterans, I interviewed three men that flew in the First World War, but one of the very first veterans I interviewed was a chap who lived in my hometown of Crawley and he'd served on the RFC ground crew. He was an aircraft mechanic, second class. And he'd originally been employed to work on the engines of different aircraft within his squadron because he'd done work like that in civilian life before the war on motor cars and then buses. And he also got a transfer within the squadron at one point because he kind of found that kind of work monotonous to a certain degree. It was his speciality. But he got into a team that went out to recover crashed aircraft. So what would happen is pilots would go up over the battlefield they'd have mechanical problems engines would cut out they'd be hit by enemy fire and the aircraft would crash now they wouldn't be necessarily killed or wounded but the aircraft wreck would be there and you didn't want to leave it on the battlefield you wanted to recover it probably it would never fly again but you could recover it for spare parts because i'm sure any mechanic will tell you the more spare parts you've got the more likelihood you've got of repairing any kind of equipment so they would go out and do that and he found himself across these kind of moonscapes of the Somme and Passchendaele going out to recover aircraft. The Royal Flying Corps also trained quite a lot of signalers. I mentioned wireless operators and signalers who were trained up to do that kind of work, to receive signals from the aircraft, transmit signals, and were generally signalers, specialists and the Royal Flying Corps found at one stage in 1916-17 that it had a surplus of them now the Royal Artillery Royal Garrison Artillery, Royal Field Artillery probably the Royal Horse Artillery as well they didn't have enough because casualties among signalers was pretty high in the gunners so the Royal Flying Corps transferred a lot of men who had trained as signalers in the RFC to the gunners to work in artillery units. So across the battlefields today, you will find the graves of RFC men who never flew, were not in aircraft, but were serving with artillery units on the battlefield. And again, one of the veterans who lived near me in Sussex, that's exactly what he'd done. He trained as a signaller, never thought he would go into the trenches, and then found himself transferred to a raw field artillery brigade, and he served with them at Arras, and during the third battle of it, before he was eventually sent back to an RFC squadron and what it meant was that these men those who worked in these ground crews they were highly skilled they didn't just take anyone for these jobs it's not like the infantry whereas if you had two arms two legs two eyes and a trigger finger you were kind of in I mean that's a bit unkind to the infantry but you get what I mean with these men you had to be skilled you had to already have these skills so they were much more independent thinkers technically adept and they came with existing skills and trades that were applicable to the work that they would do in the Royal Flying Corps and then eventually the Royal Air Force and that probably made them a cut above those who were in other parts of the army in terms of training in terms of skill because there's far more skilled than the average soldier and that also went with pay they got paid more because of this skill and I think that probably behind the lines You occasionally read of a bit of friction between the army, the men, the PBI, the infantry in the trenches, and the Royal Flying Corps guys who've got much more money, and possibly the prices in the estaminets and all kinds of other institutions might go up as a consequence of that. But what it meant was that these men who had... tough jobs. They weren't in combat. They were sometimes quite near the front. If you look at the aerodrome at Mont Sainte-Loire near Arras, which is in sight of Vimy Ridge, you can see there that they were not thousands of miles behind the front. And they had long days, long, long days keeping these aircraft in the skies. But it wasn't as romantic, it wasn't as poetical and all the other things that the kind of war, the experience that the pilots had. And it's easy to forget their work. And it's something that I was very keen to make reference to in this series. So thank you, David. And thanks for the others who wrote in about your relatives who did exactly this kind of work behind the lines at these Royal Flying Corps aerodromes during the Great War. So we move on to question number three, and this one comes from Tim Osborne, who asks, with the special series on the air war, I wonder if you could mention a few published memoirs relating to this subject. There is Winged Victory, of course, but many of your listeners may not know it. I've just read War Story by Derek Robinson, published in 1987, which is good fiction. I expect you know it. But what else is there? Well, this is a great question, Tim. And as all of you know who listen to this podcast, memoirs of the First World War, fiction of the First World War is something that really interests me. And I think it's really a kind of gateway to understanding so many aspects of the experience of the First World War by looking at these memoirs. And there's a whole load for the war in the air, far too many for one question, which is part of a general Q&A episode. But these that I'm going to talk about now are some of my favourites and top of that list is the book that you already mentioned which is Winged Victory by Victor Yeats Now, this is a great classic to start with. Yeats flew with 46 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps, and the novel is based on his experiences. It was first published in 1934. Unfortunately, Yeats didn't live very long after that. He never really kind of lived to see the fame and success of the book. And it follows the fictional character, Tom Cundall, through an often difficult war. It's a very honest book. It's an incredible read. It is fascinating. fiction but it's based on real life situations that Yeats went through and I think it really gives you a sense of the mental strain the psychological issues that pilots had and air crew had during the First World War. The book has an introduction by Henry Williamson and of course that is one of the things that first brought me to this book. Williamson and Yeats were at school together before the Great War and Williamson by then famous novelist the winner of the Hawthornden Prize for his book Tarker the Otter 1928 was asked to write the introduction to this book to kind of give it a push forward I mean it didn't really need one it's fantastic literature but Williamson's introduction is also worth reading as well so I would say start with this I mean there's many many editions of this first editions are obviously going to be expensive but there's recent paperbacks of it and cheap paperbacks and have a good search on the internet with this and all the ones I'm going to mention here and you'll find them without having to spend a lot of money. So that's fictionalised memoirs which have an important place in our canon if you like of Great War literature but in terms of actual memoirs the next few are written in that style and the top of that list is Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis. Now this is probably one of the best known and indeed one of the best actual memoirs of pilots in the First World War. Cecil Lewis joined the Royal Flying Corps underage and he flew over the Somme, Arras and Ypres until he was wounded, burned and forced down in 1917. The book was also from that similar kind of period to Wing Victory. It was first published in 1936 but Lewis lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1997 and I attended an Imperial War Museum event that he did in the early 90s when I worked in London he was quite a well known character and the book itself is beautifully written it reads like a novel in places so many of these men they were able to confront their memoirs their memories by semi-fictionalising them whether he had a bit of that approach I don't know but certainly his description of air combat of being in that war in the air and if nothing else his description of seeing the Loch Naga mine go up at La Boiselle on the first day of the Somme it's worth reading Sagittarius Rising just for that alone so that's a fantastic memoir to start with there's a book called Combat Report by Bill Lambert, DFC Lambert was an American who joined the Royal Flying Corps in Canada in 1917 and he flew in the final year of the Great War with 24 squadron and during his time in the air he had an incredible 22 victory making him the second highest scoring American born ace of the First World War. So a really important pilot. Published after his death in the 1970s, it's a great account of aerial warfare by a decorated veteran, but less literary than the previous two books that I've mentioned. But he does not ignore the terrible stress placed on pilots. I mean, that is a common theme through all of these books. The next one I'd recommend is No Parachute by Arthur Gould Lee. This was one of the very first Royal Flying Corps memoirs that I ever read when I picked up a second-hand copy many, many years ago in one of those Sussex bookshops. And he flew with 46 Squadron, the same as Yeats, but the book is made up of his letters and personal photographs, so a very different kind of book. It's more of a chronicle than a memoir, but it gives great insight into the life of a pilot and what comrades meant to pilots and the loss of those comrades when they got shot down. So a really important memoir in our understanding of RFC experience. And the last one I mentioned is Fighter Pilot on the Western Front by Wing Commander E.D. Crundall, DFC, AFC. Now this is another 1970s published memoir by a pilot who in this case flew with the Royal Naval Air Service with the Naval 8th Squadron. We haven't mentioned enough about the RNAS in this mini-series because I decided to concentrate on the RFC-REF experience and we will return to those naval aviators in a separate episode down the line. That's one we will definitely come back to. And the 70s was a kind of golden period for the publication of First World War memoirs and this kind of very much fits into that. Dudley Crum gives a detailed often quite technical account of his experiences as a pilot which is good for those who are interested in the technical aspects of the aircraft that flew in the First World War and his account takes him to that point where he shot down near Arras flying out of the aerodrome at Mont Saint-Éloi where Naval 8th was for quite some time and he then went after recovering from that episode went on to fly with 210 Squadron Royal Air Force in France and Flanders in the final phase of the Great War. And again, it's a book that's got a lot of personal photographs in it. Most of these do, which kind of adds another layer, I think, to what we get from accounts like that. Now, I don't know War Story, which you mentioned, but I see it's been compared to Catch-22. So that's another one for me to add to my list. But these few that I mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to memoirs and accounts by those who were in the flying services in the First World War. And we haven't mentioned American flyers, and we haven't mentioned the German side of things. So there is this mass of material out there. If this is something that interests you, you're not going to find it difficult to find all kinds of accounts. And I looked through specialist booksellers like Tom Donovan, and there's many others besides, and reprints by Naval and Military Press, then you could easily build up quite a good Royal Flying Corps library, really. So I hope, Tim, that that kind of gives you a bit of an indication, a path to follow with these. And I'm sure in our many episodes looking at books on the First World War, then we'll probably mention some others down the line. Question number four comes from John Thompson. John asks, I watched the documentary Aces Falling again, featuring your good self and Peter Hart. This prompted me to ask, when Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, was shot down and killed, he was given full military honours at his burial and it was filmed, which was great to watch. Did this sit well with your average pilot and Tommy due to the amount of kills that Manfred had? On the British side... with the greats like James McCudden and Mick Mannock giving the same pomp and ceremony at their burials. Well, good question, John. And Aces Falling was a BBC Time Watch documentary that we did in 2008, which featured quite a few aviation historians. And I'm pretty sure it's available on YouTube. It's certainly no longer on iPlayer. But coming back to the Red Baron, when he was shot down on the Somme on the 21st of April 1918, he was buried at Bertangles, which was a very small communal cemetery close to a squadron aerodrome. and a lot of pilots because of who he was because of his fame because of his reputation came to attend that funeral and you rightly say it was filmed one of the cinematographers was there and he filmed the coffin being brought in and then the Red Baron being laid to rest now that was eventually sent home it wasn't censored it was put out and it appeared in cinemas across Britain and at home it caused a lot of upset they didn't think it was right that an enemy who as you say had been responsible for the deaths of so many pilots over the battlefield they didn't think civilians who had no sense of what the war was all about in many ways didn't think it was right that the enemy should be honoured in this way so that kind of thing was never really done again and I think it kind of all adds we talk about layers but there's layers of mythology as well and there's so much reputation and myth and so many other layers to the history of the Red Baron the fact that his funeral was actually filmed and that he was honoured more by his enemy the pilots of the RAF than by his own side at that particular point in that moment of death then I think this all kind of adds to that great historian and there's certainly a part on the story of the Red Baron. And that would also have included men in the trenches as well who would have read those popular magazines where there were stories of him. But I'm not sure that their idea of honouring the enemy in 1918 after four long years of war, I'm not sure that that would have been well received. And when, as you rightly point to, when we contrast that to the funerals of Jimmy McCudden and Mick Manick, there is a big contrast. I mean, Jimmy McCudden crashed on an aerodrome so it wasn't on a battlefield his body could be recovered from the wreckage and he was buried in a military cemetery on the slopes of a valley in a very picturesque location fairly small cemetery at Wawa which we're going to talk about when we take that journey across the landscape of the western front today and see what we can find of the flying services on that landscape but he was buried there with full military honours there's quite a few other pilots buried in there as well it wasn't on the skyline of the Red Baron, I have to say, and it wasn't filmed. There's photographs of the cemetery, of his cross, but I don't think, unless there's private photographs out there, I don't think there's any official photographs of the burial of Jimmy McCudden. Mick Mannock, which by the time this goes out we'll have talked to Andy Saunders about, is a completely different prospect and typical of so many pilots and observers who were shot down over the Western Front in that he does not have a known grade he has a potential grave in his body was recovered from the wreckage of the aircraft buried by the Germans on the battlefield and an unknown aviator was recovered from that area and then placed in a British cemetery after the war but his name is listed on the Arras memorial to the missing the special flying services section of that that remembers nearly a thousand air crew who were shot down over the battlefields and do not have a known grave that was the sad reality of aerial combat the grim reality of aerial death being in aircraft that could catch fire very quickly descend from a great height hit the ground with a massive explosion so many of those men who died under those circumstances their bodies were completely unidentifiable and unrecoverable really from the wreckage that was left when that aircraft hit the ground I mean it's a terrible stark element of the war in the air in aerial combat. But just to end on this subject, John, I think it's also worth saying that the Germans afforded a lot of respect to British and Allied pilots when they crashed behind German lines and were killed. They buried them with full military honours as well. I visited quite a few scattered graves of RFC pilots that are in communal cemeteries across northern France and I know that they were recovered from their aircraft and the local Germans brought them into a plot of their own cemetery and they buried them with full military honours with respect and put up often quite elaborate grave markers on their grave with details of who they were Albert Ball VC who crashed behind German lines in 1917 is still buried in a German military cemetery at Anneluin he is a very good example of that and there are some photographs that do purport to show Germans attending the ceremony of the burial of Albert Ball and I've seen in quite a few German photo books and postcard albums similar kinds of ceremonies taking place for far lesser known pilots so I think that respect that chivalry that was spoken about in this series on the air war it did exist on one level and I think with the burial of the dead both sides did show respect for those pilots and observers of the great war so a great question John and I I think highlights yet another fascinating element of this war in the air. Our fifth and final question is kind of a two-parter, but talking about very similar subjects. And these come from Ian Reekie and Nick Jenkins. So the first one of these reads, I have a question relating to the air war. At the start of the movie, The Blue Max, George Pepard's character is seen running between the trenches in no man's land under fire. It's hell on earth, but he makes it to the relative safety of a deep trench where he turns on his back and looks longingly up to the sky where a dogfight is taking place. He obviously then realises that fighting in the air is where he wants to be, away from the hell of trench warfare. I just wondered then how both sides viewed soldiers wishing to transfer to air combat. I guess there must have been many soldiers who thought a life with the German air services or the Royal Flying Corps RAF with all the so-called attractions offered an enviable alternative to trench warfare. Was it encouraged or frowned upon when soldiers requested that transfer? Well, the film that you mentioned, The Blue Max, is about a fictionalised kind of version, I guess, of... Red Baron von Richthofen, Blue Max is the Paul and Marie, the German highest decoration for gallantry in the First World War, and Pepard plays a German aviator who flies over the Western Front. It's a great film, one of many films looking at air combat in the First World War, and there was almost an episode on films about that for this series, but maybe again it's one we'll come back to. So in terms of men transferring from the infantry or from ground forces into an air service, no matter what that air service would be whether they're German whether they're American whether they're British and Commonwealth French whatever now certainly in the British Army men were encouraged to join the Royal Flying Corps because there were heavy losses and pilots needed to be replaced but it took time to train a pilot and you couldn't just get in a simulator learn all about it and then safely learn how to fly it That, as we've said in some previous episodes of this air war series, that was dangerous in its own right. And in terms of who applied, I mean, I think it depended on which period of the war. At the beginning, the RFC was pretty much an unknown entity within the army and probably seen as a bit odd. So men were not queuing up to join it. But as the war went static and they could see dogfights in the air and the whole kind of idea of knights of the air and the chivalrous activity I'm sure those of that kind of inclination were drawn into it and wanted to volunteer. And it wasn't difficult to request a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. But unlike certain parts of the army, you had to come with some degree of skill and aptitude for what you were being asked to do. And I think as well, it also kind of depended on the unit you were in. The 46th North Midland Division, which fought at Luz in 1915, suffered heavy losses, was at Gomercourt on the 1st of July, suffered very heavy losses. After those two, which were seen by many senior officers as failed battles, it was considered a failed division and was sidelined and just held the line for a very, very long time. From the end of the Battle of the Somme right through to the battles on the Hindenburg Line in September 1918, it was shuffled around bits of the Western Front, not really taking part in major operations again and men within that division tried to get out of it because they didn't want to be associated with that inverted commas failed formation failed division so there were quite a few in some units quite a few transfers to the Royal Flying Corps men ordinary soldiers if they had the skills they could transfer to the ground crews and officers put in for transfers to squadrons where they could become pilots or observers so I think it again depends on a period of the war I And certainly over Arras in 1917 where British aircraft were being shot out of the sky left, right and centre, did that affect the number of men stepping forward to join the RFC? I'm sure there's a fascinating study in that. So I'm not sure that there was necessarily a sense that it was kind of a cushy number that we see in Blackadder. I referenced that right at the beginning of this air war month, the 20 Minuters when Blackadder and his chums go off to join the Royal Flying Corps. I don't think that men at the time saw the RFC as any easy route out of the trenches because each element of combat, whether it was in the air, whether it was on the ground, whether it was under the Western Front, whether it was at sea, it all came with its own problems and challenges. And I think anyone who'd spent any time anywhere near any of those battlefields would probably have at least some understanding and awareness of that. But I think to many it appealed because it was different to that war on the ground. Malcolm Vivian, who I've spoken about many times on this podcast, was a gunner officer, commissioned in the Royal Garrison Artillery in 1914, served on the Somme at Arras and up in the northern part of Flanders around Pervis. And then in 1918, he transferred, put in for a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. Then that became the RAF. He trained as an observer because he'd done a lot of cooperation as a forward observer with aircraft in the sky. He went through that pretty quickly. That wasn't good enough. He wanted to actually fly and pilot an aircraft. So he put in an application for that and was accepted. But the war was over before he ever flew in combat. So I think that all of this, it depends on the individual. not every soldier in the trenches is going to want to be up there in an aircraft the realities of their war their known war on the ground perhaps they feel safer there than in those skies but there were others with adventurous spirits determination and a flair for something different who this would appeal to and I'm sure that was a route to it and I'm sure as well that there were some pilots just like the fictional George Pepper character who laid back on a battlefield somewhere and saw aircraft buzzing around in the sky above them and thought that's me that's where I want to be so that's part one of this question part two is kind of linked to it and this one reads my paternal grandfather joined the RAF in 1918 and no doubt like most 18 year olds applied to be a pilot he was turned down for that but was accepted as an observer given that I suspect most RAF recruits wanted to be pilots how were they selected would my grandfather have been rejected on any particular grounds or was it that too many men wanted to be pilots and not enough wanted to be observers was it just a lottery and was there any difference in casualty numbers between pilots and observers both look pretty dangerous to me Well, you're absolutely right. Both are very, very dangerous for all the reasons we have discussed in this series. These were aircraft that were fragile, could catch fire easily and death was brutal and terrible in the air services of all nations over those battlefields in the Great War. But in terms of men putting in for a transfer, being successful in that transfer, in terms of the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF, pilots needed to have good eyesight so their eyes were tested if you didn't have very good eyesight and you're flying a fast moving aircraft then your chances of not surviving your first mission I would guess are pretty high there was also quite a high level of physical fitness required because this was raw flying and you needed strength often to control the aircraft that you were flying so fitness was an element in it but I don't don't get the sense that there was very little screening, not like a generation later when all kinds of tests were put in place to choose the best people to become pilots and bomber crews and all the other aspects of the World War II side of the RAF. But in the First World War, there were kind of essential things that were needed and also a desire to fly. Now, I don't think everyone wanted to fly. Some thought that it was beyond them. perhaps and observers was the kind of easy element of getting into the rfc because you didn't have to fly the aircraft you didn't have to have any of that kind of knowledge you got into the observer seat and you're observing taking photographs operating a machine gun dropping bombs making notes drawing maps kind of whatever it was but of course it didn't come with the romance of being a pilot and again looking at the kind of men that applied to join the fly services the ones that are going to be pilots are going to be one type of man and possibly the ones that want to be observers are another type perhaps those who trained as observers like Malcolm Vivian it wasn't enough and they wanted to get behind the control stick of that aircraft and actually fly it so why your grandfather was turned down I don't know it could be all kinds of reasons something as simple as eyesight but observers their role was incredibly important because and the skill sets that they needed were incredibly important as well because they were doing the more technical side of it the flying was one element but they were operating cameras taking aerial photographs using maps understanding maps orientating maps they were doing observation they were doing ground cooperation with the infantry on the battlefield and they were gathering all kinds of intelligence as well that had to be made sense of so theirs was a kind of broader kind of job really when it came to being in that aircraft and in terms of casualties I don't think there's ever been any kind of real study looking at those two roles and which had the higher casualty rate but certainly for observers by 1917-18 where in most aircraft they were behind the pilot and in most cases when there was aerial combat the enemy aircraft came from behind the allied aircraft and opened up on it then the observer was the one that was in the direct line of immediate fire and that must have meant that their potentially their casualty rates were a lot higher than the pilots but it's clear that neither of these roles were safe in any kind of way that the selection process often particularly in the early years of the war was based on where an airman where an officer in the RFC had been educated either at public school or university was not related to his ability to fly or understand aircraft in any kinds of way that changed as the war went on as more ordinary men went on to become pilots and McCudden and Mannock are two examples of that but the casualty rates amongst all of these men were high and in terms of actual flying hours when you read stories of the battle of britain and new pilots turning up and they've only got a few hours of flying experience in the great war i suspect that was no different and perhaps even less that inability to train pilots without putting them putting their lives at risk and those thousands of pilots and air crew who were killed or injured before their aircraft had even left great britain killed in train Then I think we can see how early and embryonic in many ways the whole aspects of the utilisation, pilots, observers and the aircraft themselves are. how that was still very much in its early stages throughout the war. This was the first proper air war, the first great air war in which aircraft had played such an important role above and beyond the battlefield and so essential to our understanding of the Great War. So thanks for all these excellent questions about the war in the air. Thanks too for the ones that we haven't featured in this special episode episode I'll save some of those for another day keep your general questions coming in for the Q&A episodes that we have on a regular basis and as always you can send those in via email via the discord server and also via fan mail as well and if you do it via that route remember to put your name at the end of the message otherwise I won't know who's sending it in so thanks and see you again soon for some more questions and answers on the Old Front Line. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. 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