Note: The Stearman was a '30s aircraft, but it gives some flavor of aerobatics in a biplane.
Chapter Twenty
Hints and Kinks
In addition to writing up the course notes at night, always staying a step or two ahead of the class, now I had to find time to shop for Christmas. I had a certain very special gift in mind, one that would likely require much shopping. My skin crawled.
There are lots of things I don’t do well, in spite of statements that may lead the reader to think otherwise. Shopping is one of them. The idea of shopping for any kind of gift for a girl like Betty, or any woman for that matter, was frightening.
It evoked a sense of dread.
My mom once remarked, ‘Poor Will. He’s all hard edges and sharp corners.’
Often wondered what she meant by that. I’m not insensitive. I just can’t shop.
Betty deserved something really special.
Resolving to go out early Saturday morning, I concentrated on my notes. Early on, once I had a little manpower, I had our special mechanic make a series of models. Some of the models were enemy aircraft, reconstructed from photographs and drawings of captured enemy machines. Some of them were simple models of our own machines.
Those were all colored blue, or red, or green, with a number on the side in white.
That mechanic couldn’t be trusted with real aircraft. But he made very good models.
I put him to work on special projects where no one would get killed.
Everyone appreciated this move.
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| This is the one our 'special' mechanic made for me. |
We also had smaller models that clamped together in groups of flight size, and the bases clipped together, which made it possible to maneuver the squadron on a table, or to hold it in the hand, and ‘fly’ it around a room full of students.
When it rained, or if it was too windy for flying, snowing, whatever, we wouldn’t fly.
One big hangar tent had been reserved for this purpose. We threw straw on the floor and covered it with tarps. We had a floodlight set up on a long pole. It had a heavy base with an extension cord. A man could go up a short stepladder and slide the light up and down the pole, then clamp it tight. This simulated different times of day. It was warm enough in there, as well.
Gill pissed me off one day. I had him stand on the ladder holding a little red tri-plane, all fucking day, and I mean it. He did fine, too. He didn’t fall off the ladder, and all day long he held that plane out on the end of a stick.
The other men took it kind of strange. Imagine four grown men holding their little models, walking along with them held up in front, about four feet above the ground. Gill up on the ladder, holding the Hun in the Sun. Me and a couple of others walking up with our models, and then patiently talking them through every type of engagement that I could think of. And all the time poor Gill was holding the Freiherr, Manfred von Richtofen, over their heads.
They got the message, and Gill didn’t lip off again.
Theory is a good thing. Having them act it out was a new approach. If I could get them to imagine the engagement inside their own heads, thinking in three dimensions, and then back it up with the kind of flying that builds confidence, I would have made a pretty good start with these men. I heard of a guy who ‘envisaged,’ a successful javelin toss, and that helped him to make ‘the perfect throw.’
He practiced it in his head. I heard of another guy, who spent a few years in jail, much of it in solitary confinement. He played three games of golf inside of his head, every day. He was a pretty good golfer when he got out. I kid you not. I wrung my head inside out for every idea I ever had regarding aerial combat. And I think it helped, in that I had gentled a few horses over the years.
(My horses didn’t do ‘tricks.’ They did their jobs, and I had to train them. But then, horses are smart, aren’t they?)
One of the most satisfying things was when one of the boys made a suggestion, and we adopted it straight away. And I remember teaching them the weave one day. That’s where two fighters flying about a hundred to two hundred yards apart break into one another, and shoot the bad guys off of each other’s tail. Then they reverse turns and take on two more planes.
To see the recognition dawn on their faces.
“Yes, that’s you and your wingman I’m talking about.” I instructed. “The same tactic will protect you from the enemy wingers, and you could probably shoot them down as well.”
“Simply reverse your turn, and try not to shoot each other down.” I added with a smile. “Remember who’s who, and you can deal with six or seven on your tails.”
That was satisfying. Also good for my peace of mind was to take them up, with Blue Section trying to shoot down Red Section, and to see that the boys in Blue Section did exactly what I told them to do. They had no trouble at all. Once back on the ground, the boys in Red Section were all clamoring for their turn.
It was good to see them laugh, and slap each other on the backs and say things like, “I got you, Snotty. Hah. Hah.”
It was still just a game to these fellows.
But they were learning.
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| A photo from another guy's book. My name is Will, not Bill, incidentally. The three guys behind are standing on a box. I was what, sixteen and a half or something... |
***
It takes more than we have some days just to get the job done. We had a lot of trouble early in the war. We had more men than the enemy. They had more soldiers. This is an important distinction.
Flying hurts. You dive ten thousand feet in five or ten seconds, see how your ears feel. Eat the wrong little thing. Get up before dawn. Fly up to 18,000 feet. See how your guts feel. It’s not just the expanding gas in your bowels, ingested at 14.7 pounds per square inch. It’s the tension. (God, I used to love bangers and mash, but the sausages are full of bread and air, and the spuds whipped up to a froth. Tastes good, but it hurts like hell at high altitude.)
Until you let a ripping fart go in your cockpit, and wonder briefly as you search the sky, was it wet? Was it dry? Hope I didn’t shit myself. God, that feels good. And then the smell comes out around your neck when you land and open up the flight suit.
“Oh, yeah. I remember that one.” Said Snotty once.
“I won’t forget it in a hurry either, Snotty.” I griped. “Open a window in this place.”
At the time, many aspects of aviation were still a mystery, and many students found it difficult to understand control movements. I know it sounds too simple, right foot, right rudder, right turn, but it is the truth. Men were not birds, born to fly, but had to be trained, by someone who knew what they were doing. Smith-Barry was producing results, and my students were from that training system. They probably were vastly improved, even above and beyond where I was at that stage. But I was supplied with mostly rejects.
Think of Black, an older, intelligent man. He had no aggression, and no curiosity. Yet when I told him to do something, he tried this best to do it, and eventually he got better. Or Snotty, a scruffy little lad who always looked dirty, unshaven. Hair always uncombed, his feet always stank.
“Snotty.” I might ask. “How do you turn when you’re upside down?”
“Very carefully?” He would say.
“Look both ways?” And on, and on.
Was Snotty playing some kind of a game? I never did figure it out.
Maybe that’s why he got shoved onto me.
“Use the rudder, Snotty, use the rudder.”
It wasn’t a trick question.
And what about Andrew? Did he have an attitude problem, not the first one I ever ran across? The little bugger could fly like he was hatched from an egg, yet at times his smirk made me want to hit him. Sonny boy, there is nothing that you know that I don’t know.
Powell was fine. With him I couldn’t figure out why he was shoved off onto me.
Wrong religion, maybe. At that time, and for many years after, a Catholic could never go higher than sergeant in the Royal Army, no matter how competent, dedicated, even decorated.
Maybe somebody saw something that they didn’t care to put on his record. That does happen, oddly enough. He was a likeable guy, and he tried hard. But none of these men were what I would have chosen to work with. And maybe that was the point. Maybe that was the point. In any case, my job was to get them interested in their own training. To be their bloody father if necessary.
Not exactly hero material, most of us.
Smith-Barry’s school was the elite. Bob’s standards were very high. He expected the rest of us to live up to them. People who didn’t measure up were posted away. Maybe that was what had happened to me. Not the smartest career choice, but to make the best of it was the only option. It was sink or swim time.
The pressure built up as we went along. I had other problems as well, including maintenance of our aircraft, a shortage of fitters, riggers, metal-smiths, senior NCO’s, we had no non-flying officer to help with the paperwork. It all took too much time to organize. In the meantime, we concentrated on individual flying skills. We practiced spot landings.
Over and over, we practiced landings.
We practiced formation flying. We practiced with pairs of aircraft in combat with a single, ‘enemy,’ aircraft, (me,) and the truth was, the Germans were going to fly circles around some of these lads. I had no illusions about that, and I told them so. We began to fly at dusk and dawn, working towards night flying. We began with simple aerobatics, then strung them together in a little routine, like a dance. I set up a grading system and instituted Friday afternoon aerobatics competitions.
I brought in VIP’s, including our local Member of Parliament, the Vicar of the nearby village, a couple of lady singers from London night clubs, anything I could think of to motivate them. I seriously considered having a review put on for their parents, but these weren’t supposed to be schoolboys.
Here’s an example of rules for aerobatics:
‘A loop must have a constant radius. It must be flown in the vertical plane throughout. It starts and ends with a well-defined line. For a complete loop, this line is considered to be horizontal.’
A pilot isn’t proficient if he can’t read.
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| A Sopwith Pup, relegated to training duties. |
I divided up our little aerodrome into areas, with, ‘no-fly zones,’ and a ‘flight-line,’ which was parallel to and above the main runway. Before you can toss your plane all over the sky like a mad demon, you have to learn to control it with ease and precision. When you make it look easy, then your instructor may begin to think you might, just possibly, become competent someday.
When they came close to achieving my standards, I raised the bar just a little higher. I was the best-son-of-a-bitching instructor anyone ever had in that war.
The boys worked it all out in their heads. They had to take their little models and work it out in front of each other and with each other’s help. No one taught me how to teach.
Simple act: when you do a loop in a cross wind, in order to stay over the flight line, use the rudder to correct for the crosswind. It sounds easy. People ‘agree’ with what you say. But do they do it? A man isn’t competent, until he can follow a simple instruction like that. My fliers were sloppy in some areas. It takes time. Under pressure, it couldn’t be a review of memory. It must become second nature. To always be aware of what you were doing. To instinctively know what the plane was doing at all times, and why, and to know what it was going to do next.
I honestly don’t give a shit if the student agrees or not. Does he understand? Does he really get it? Can he, or will he, follow a simple instruction? Does he listen, or is he a dangerous fool?
Another rule: ‘The entire flight must be flown within the aerobatic zone to avoid being penalized.’
You might be surprised by just how often people get lost doing aerobatics.
They get all intent upon their routine and then they just sort of drift off over the horizon. Imagine how an instructor feels when that happens.
‘Argh,’ doesn’t quite express it properly.
The rules were nice and easy to apply for our impromptu judges. The fact that we were so open about what we were doing, helped with security concerns. Any leaks would not come from here. I was the only one who knew our true mission, and it was a tenuous one at best. We had nothing in writing about being ‘out to get von Richtofen.’
That way the historians of the future cannot sit in judgment upon us.
If I fire a fourteen-inch shell and kill fifty men ten miles away, that’s a nice, anonymous little massacre, and the fact that so many die, regardless of skill or merit, that is horror.
If I ‘joust’ with a man like Lowenhardt, or Goering, or Voss, like some, ‘knights of the air,’ and if we see each other at the same time, and choose to engage, that’s a fair fight? Right? It’s, ‘gallant,’ and, ‘courageous.’
But if we send out three squadrons to shoot down the Red Baron, people will be shocked. Because it’s ‘un-fucking-sportsmanlike.’
Such is the insanity of war. Was it fair when von Richtofen shot down my friends?
Billy, with eleven hours on Pups? Jerry, with his observer, falling in flames over Bapaume? That was their first mission. Was that fair? I say kill the fucking bastard and have done with it.
Don’t have the stomach? Let me help. I’ll kill him. Let me do it. I don’t care if I rot in hell. He deserves it. I deserve it. We both deserve it.
Richtofen, von Krumholtz, a couple of others taught me the meaning of fear. And hatred. Too many good men were killed by their guns, for me to have any mercy on their souls.
I was prepared to play God. Especially with the Germans. As for my own boys, that was the price of leadership. Nothing can prepare you for that.
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| Manfred. |
***
Our days were full.
After a long and exhausting search, with much burning of the candle at both ends and in the middle, I finally found what I was looking for. Zavitz, my good friend, tipped me off when I stopped into the old shop in London.
He was looking better, actually. Maybe our short little talks were a kind of catharsis.
Somewhere in the world was a person who understood him. Maybe he just functioned better as a drunk, or maybe just as a man with a couple of drinks in him...
After a brief visit, I walked out with a few names, one of which was a Captain Wheatley of the Military Aeronautics Directorate. This was an independent branch of the War Department. Another guy over at the Society of British Aircraft Constructors, but I’ve forgotten his name now. One of the contacts was of a more personal nature.
It was two days or so until Christmas. I sent all the team home, leaving our little aerodrome under the watchful eye of the twenty-odd soldiers provided for the purpose.
I wouldn’t be gone for long. The other men only had a few days off, just long enough for the train ride home. They got two days at home, then back again. Half of their leave was spent on a train.
All I wanted for Christmas was someone to do the paperwork. On the way to London, the cold just seemed to soak into my bones. I was on my motorbike. A stupid move. Be that as it may, my mind was racing all the time. You have to get away from people sometimes. Just to think, to work things out without distractions. The boys were nothing if not a distraction. After all those missions, freezing my ass off as an observer, then as a scout pilot, maybe I just thought better when I was half-frozen.
I was going to ask Betty to marry me. That was one hell of a step, for one such as I.
There are times when I must be the stupidest man in the world. I didn’t have a clue. I never saw it coming. It was like a machine gun bullet to the head. When I got home, she was in the parlor. He who hesitates is lost, and I didn’t hesitate. After taking off my coat, we kissed, and as she sat down, maybe something was different in retrospect, but I didn’t notice it at the time.
“How was your day, Will?” She asked.
There was hot food in the kitchen. It smelled good, but then so did she.
“Fine. Listen, there’s something I want to ask you…” I began. “Um, how was your day? (See. I’m not insensitive.) Honey, I was wondering, um…”
“I had a bad day, Will.” She murmured with downcast eyes.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing is wrong, Will.” She sighed.
Everything was wrong, I could tell that much.
“What the hell is wrong?” I asked.
She sighed, very deeply, but did not speak. She was avoiding my eyes.
Pulling the little blue velvet box out of my pocket, going down on one knee, the whole rigmarole. And I meant it, too. Maybe this would cheer her up.
“Betty, will you marry me?” I asked, which only proves just how slow I can be on the uptake sometimes.
I opened the box and took out the ring.
She said, “Oh, Will,” again.
It was not a good one, not a good, “Oh, Will…” as tears flowed.
Right about then her mom walked in from another room.
And another one bites the dust.
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| ...and another one bites the dust. |
END
Images. That Louis guy, with a bit of help from the internet.
Author's Note. In the past, I might have used one GIF and maybe one video clip, in total. Clearly that's not good enough. We are with Captain Tucker after all. With this serialization, I made a conscious decision to more fully exploit all of the wonderful resources available, free to all, that are currently available. This includes Wikipedia, Youtube, personal or business websites when I link to an artist or other publisher. I would prefer not to have everything in grainy black and white, hence the colorful Stearman video. With pictures and sound, some solid story-telling, we are halfway to making our own movie. #Louis
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