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    The Boy Airman: An Absolute Stranger to Fear
    The Boy Airman: An Absolute Stranger to Fear
    The Boy Airman: An Absolute Stranger to Fear
    Ebook188 pages1 hour

    The Boy Airman: An Absolute Stranger to Fear

    By Richard Petty

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    About this ebook

    The life of many combatants in The Great War was often short and brutish. But there were choices for some. Taking to the air was an attractive alternative to the slime, stench and gore of the trenches. The prospect of flying in the Royal Navy, the Senior Service, Nelson's Navy, must have been irresistible to any adventurous teenager the best aeroplanes on the best ships with the best sailors that ever existed or so he might have been led to believe. The Royal Naval Air Service was sorely tested, and not necessarily by the enemy. The casualties of the sea and its perils, and of accident and mechanical failure, were catastrophic. But this critical battle between young pilots in their infant flying machines and unpredictable events forged the pathway for our modern conceits of war missiles, drones, giant aircraft carriers, weapons of space. A hundred years ago a young pilot took illicit photographs with his pocket camera and left a personal account of his life at sea with his 'kite'. This book tells his story illustrated by his long-lost 'snaps'.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateNov 30, 2015
    ISBN9781473849068
    The Boy Airman: An Absolute Stranger to Fear

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      Book preview

      The Boy Airman - Richard Petty

      Depot.

      1

      War, Germany, Act.

      – The War Telegram, 4th August 1914

      To make war on Germany started as a truly popular, even populist, concept.

      Swarms of enthusiastic young men swamped recruitment offices, lemming-like, shoulder to shoulder, in dense cheering crowds, desperately anxious to fight for King and Country – to the very death: God save the King, long live the King.

      By the end of September, 750,000 had enlisted, goaded by the humiliating retreat of the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle of Mons, the revelatory first contact with the swarming armies of the Hun.

      This was not a religious or ideological war: it was not a war between belligerent dynasties. No clear explanations were on offer: perhaps a militaristic but weak German Kaiser manipulated by overweeningly ambitious Prussian generals? Perhaps the ineptitude of elderly plutocratic Liberal politicians distracted by a mutinous Ireland? One too many intricate treaties, the infamous ‘scraps of paper’? France still rancorous after a century of defeat, dishonour and disorder?

      Certainly not fortuitous pot shots by a disaffected teenage Serbian student in Sarajevo.

      Further to confound any reasonable rationale, Britain’s royal family had been Hanoverian – German – since 1714, since King George I, who spoke no English.

      Arrest of Gavrilo Princip, age 24, one of nine children of a Serbian postman, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, 28th June 1914.

      His Majesty King George V, Emperor of India, Defender of the Faith.

      Seine Majestät Kaiser Wilhelm II, Deutscher Kaiser und König von Preussen.

      HMS Dreadnought, 1907.

      Louis Blériot in flight, 1909.

      More recently, Queen Victoria had married her first cousin, the love of her life, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, ‘Albert the Good’, the dedicated protagonist of Great Britain and its Empire.

      The current head of state was King George V, disciplinarian parent and distinguished philatelist, scion of the same blood, King and Emperor, Defender of the Faith.

      Kaiser Wilhelm II, ‘Kaiser Bill’, the son of the self-appointed German Emperor, and King of Prussia, was Queen Victoria’s first grandson, diminutive and palsied, loathing his English mother, bristling with self-glory and bombast – intensely jealous of Britain’s empire.

      But it was perfectly evident that the man on the street, the hoi polloi, was up for a scrap whatever the reason. This was going to be a people’s war – everybody’s war.

      We have won every other war, haven’t we? – Why not this one?

      Britain’s last major conflict had ended in 1815. The Napoleonic Wars had been conducted with manoeuvre, musketry, cannon, cavalry and sailing ship. This new war was to be fought, rat-like, in troglodyte trenches and tunnels – with high explosive, poison gas and machine gun – latterly with the tank.

      Further novel dimensions were added to the industrialised armamentarium.

      The sailing ships, Nelson’s ‘wooden walls’, metamorphosed through ‘iron-clads’ into monstrous ‘dreadnoughts’, heavily armoured battleships carrying awesome fire power in rotating turrets.

      The Wright brothers launched their ‘flyer’ successfully in 1903. Blériot ‘flew’ the 22 miles of the English Channel in 1909. Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic non-stop in 1919. Between times, the canvas and wood ‘kite’ – the ‘aeroplane’ – developed into a sophisticated weapon carrying machine guns, bombs and cameras.

      ‘Flying machines’ fast became a serious nuisance, and attracted substantial private investment – and ‘daring young men’.

      2

      To Germany –

      You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

      And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

      – Charles Hamilton Sorley, killed aged 20, 1915

      It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

      – H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, 1916

      The short cut from Germany to France was through Belgium.

      The unheralded invasion of Belgium accommodated the massive outflanking right hook of the covert Schlieffen Plan; it was essential to the quick capture of Paris and the subjugation of France.

      To dominate all Europe was the objective of the All-Highest, der Allerhöchster, the Kaiser, to impose the rule of the Übermenschen, and the Kultur of his superior German nation – ‘the desperate delusion’ of Hegel and Nietzsche.

      The self-absorbed and irresolute British government had failed to anticipate the well-timed German strike, but the press propagandists reacted promptly to the outrageous violation of a neutral state.

      Initially the Belgian Army had offered some stubborn defence, but this was soon overwhelmed. With ruthless and ferocious efficiency, the Germans suppressed any civilian complaint, initiating a reign of terror throughout the tiny country.

      Belgium was typically depicted as a shackled, bound and gagged lissome beauty about to be sullied at pistol point by a jack-booted, leering, obese Hun.

      If the British public by now had any remaining doubts as to the purpose of this war, they were swept aside by an astonishingly ill-conceived act of callous violence.

      Nurse Edith Cavell was executed by a German Army firing squad.

      She had been the English Matron of the Red Cross Hospital in Brussels.

      At her summary court martial, she had not deigned to answer the charge of helping Allied soldiers to escape to the neutral Netherlands.

      The pervasive image of the filthy, pitiless, despicable Hun was given sharp and vivid focus – the epitome of a vile enemy, to be curbed and crushed without hesitation.

      King George V changed his family name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.

      Furious public reaction to

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