Chapter Twenty-Four
‘Winnie’
My feelings towards Mr. Winston Churchill, the First Sea Lord, may seem a trifle irrational. However, I had my reasons. Winston was not a particularly brilliant thinker. What he was good at was rhetoric.
In the period immediately preceding the Great War, and in the early stages of the war, the Admiralty had monopolized the best aircraft builders in Great Britain. The Admiralty, and to a lesser extent, the Army, attempted to stifle the Royal Flying Corps, to prevent its birth, and to limit its development. The Naval Wing had all the best planes, the best engines, and the best equipment.
The Army never put a thought into aircraft other than for cavalry-like reconnaissance.
Yet even the cavalry are armed.
The idea that aircraft, like cavalry, might be able to turn a flank, never occurred to them. Handwritten notes taken by riders, or carrier pigeons, was their way of thinking. The Navy got wireless in 1907. The Navy had no horses, essentially. The Army had a lot of horses. They quite liked horses, and had a huge investment in them.
Aircraft don’t graze while waiting a reply and further directions. This counted against them. Occasionally cavalry is used in the charge. The shock of a charge is considerable.
Aircraft could also be used for shock. Military minds, once made up, couldn’t easily reconsider a question already settled. Genghis Khan’s army was all cavalry.
Geoffrey De Havilland was one of the designers in the early days at Farnborough, and his aircraft helped to stem the German tide. Still, his planes weren’t that agile, powerful, or even particularly well thought-out. Even his most effective planes were underpowered, like the DH-9 types.
Some of our early aircraft, like the B.E. 2 (Bleriot, Experimental) were outright rip-offs of French designs. It took him a while to learn how to design a plane.
In the meantime, his factory had orders to crank out planes as fast as they could.
This is how wars are always run, essentially.
It is an old axiom of war, ‘Never use cavalry against an unbroken infantry square.’
Air power alone could not win a war. That mistaken idea came later. Essentially, wars are won by, ‘short, wiry men carrying huge loads over awful trails,’ as some pundit put it.
Wars are not won by axioms. Wars are won by planning, which requires thinking.
The military mind is what limited aircraft in the first place. They thought aircraft were useless. It was their own minds that were useless. Especially the Army.
The Admiralty, with a tradition of independent-minded officers, often faced with spot decisions far removed from ‘Authority,’ could handle the boys at Eastchurch when they experimented with bomb dropping. The Admiralty initially thought of aircraft as good for sea-borne artillery-spotting for the Fleet. Other experimental work was looked upon as an eccentricity, and tolerated as such.
The idea of a plane attacking a ship was seen as ludicrous—the product of ‘a diseased mind.’ For an airplane to attack a submarine was ‘fantasy.’
They were pretty dull-witted. When they developed the H.M.S Dreadnought, about the turn of the century, it was hailed as a harbinger, the shape of things to come, the ‘all big-gun Navee.’
It was clearly superior to anything the French, the Germans, or the U.S. had in service at the time. The press, always tame and wanting more crackers, parroted it as a major coup, literally crowing it from the rooftops in some cases. The Germans saw it as a dagger pointed at the heart of their Imperial ambitions in Africa, Asia and the South Seas.
There was only one problem. ‘John Bull’ types were too slow on the uptake to see it, but cooler heads prevailed in Berlin. Admiral of the Fleet Von Tirpitz noticed something funny going on.
The British had just made their own entire fleet obsolete. And they only had one dreadnought.
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| Winnie: a symbol of hidebound thinking. |
Now the first major arms race of the industrial age could begin. He had a quiet word in the ear of the Kaiser, and the German shipbuilding program began with alacrity. You might even say with relish.
The British could be breathtakingly stupid at times. The Canadians slavishly imitated them, mealy-mouthing all the time, ‘Thank God we’re not Americans.’ Fucking idiots. The same mentality that would send three companies of redcoats to subdue twenty thousand screaming Zulus. The son of a ship’s captain told me that. His dad died a violent and predictable death at sea.
‘It was a classic case of British arrogance.’
When Beatty beat the Germans at the Battle of Jutland, it seemed to vindicate all the theorists, guys like Admiral Jackie Fisher, and even Tirpitz to a certain extent. The fact that they had a naval battle at all with the British, justified the German High Seas Fleet’s very existence. And the existence of the admirals. They claimed Jutland as a victory for the Germans too.
Jutland was hailed as a victory by the British, due to the notion that the German Navy was now bottled up in harbor. But so was the British fleet. It was nothing more than a huge expense, good for nothing and hard on food. Trench warfare…with ships. The Germans figured their fleet was a threat to the convoys which were the only thing that could sustain the British war effort, and the idiots never gave a thought to their own lines of supply.
Threats don’t destroy convoys, either. That takes guns on target.
The plain truth was the German convoys simply didn’t exist. They could say anything they wanted. They relied on that myth of modern war, a quick victory.
Propaganda could say anything. The facts spoke for themselves.
The British battleships in harbor turned out to be useless for convoy duty. They simply burned too much fuel to accompany a convoy any distance, except in home waters. At the slow speed of a convoy, battleships were very vulnerable to submarines.
Battleships were meant to be used in battle-lines. Not as single units.
Winston symbolized hidebound thinking. Although he wasn’t the worst of a bad lot, he presided over them, and that was enough.
A lot had changed in three years of combat. ‘Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,’ or, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
***
We were doing a lot of work on the engines.
That involved a spot of high-altitude test flying. This was excellent air-time for my boys. Quite frankly, if you want to climb the highest mountain in the world, you need to acclimatize for it. The air gets thin up there. It hits you. You feel weak, woozy, and the plane feels the same way. It needs to breathe, just like a person. Anoxia leads to lethargy, loss of attention and coordination, loss of intellectual capacity. It’s like being drunk.
It’s oxygen starvation, and the brain runs on oxygen.
The wings need to push on the air, to deflect it, or it cannot hold the plane up. To turn is to lose altitude. I had to teach the pilots to turn with the rudder and keep the plane level with the ailerons. You couldn’t just bank it and yank it. With more powerful engines, tuned to run at high altitude, we would go faster, generate more lift, and have more positive control.
This would be a real edge in combat, against an enemy who had been our superior up until now. Some engines, and some planes were better than others. The boys learned to compare them. We invented a whole new language just so we could talk to each other.
Nibbling at the edge of a stall, or, energy state, or, ‘angle of attack versus angle of incidence.’ (The wings are bolted on at an angle of incidence. Pull back on the stick, and you change your angle of attack in relation to airflow.)
It’s nice to know these things, to make them instinctive.
We were becoming a profession. When the war ended, the Army and the Navy would do everything in their power to demolish the RFC. But that wasn’t my problem. Neither was it Winston’s. Maybe my dislike of Winnie wasn’t very rational. He was born in Blenheim castle. I was born in a two-room cabin with a dirt floor. Our differences were too great, no matter how many classic books I tried to jam into my head. We would always have a different perspective. Winnie was always thinking of the good of the bourgeoisie. Our family was always suffering the result of those mercantilist policies…but I digress. (It was a social difference.)
Boiled down to its essence, it was a mercantilist war.
The man had no rational perspective on living in the real world, something many of the ruling class suffer from. When he needed a job, he went to a bank and they made him a director. That kind of little shit. Out of work? Go to the Sorbonne, and become a doctor of philosophy, or run off and be a fucking glamourous foreign correspondent.
***
Winston did get us clearance to interrogate a number of relatively high-ranking German officers. My German is not good, but it was learned, as may be imagined, while interrogating prisoners.
An intelligence officer escorted me on a little side trip. He would interpret, and I took it that the Army guys were up to their old tricks again. He would dash off a thorough report to someone important just as soon as we got back to London. That knowledge could be useful. Howard-Smythe didn’t arouse such suspicions. Mind you, he had formally transferred into the RFC.
“Dave, I don’t know much about the German warrior caste.” I told Captain D. Dawley “What are they like?”
Our footsteps echoed down the highly-polished corridor. God, I hated these places. I was in jail for three days once, awaiting a bail hearing. The charge was later dropped.
“The Prussians? What do you call ‘em? Junkers?” I prompted my companion in an affable tone.
Hollow echoes rebounded through the building, reflecting back seconds later from some unseen cul-de-sac, from around several corners away. He was obviously well-known here. Otherwise we would be trailing guards by the half-dozen. Dawley was well-dressed. His uniform was impeccably tailored, he was perfectly groomed, and yet he managed to be totally nondescript.
“You’ll see.” He quipped, with a gleam in his eye.
But then he relented.
“Some of them are quite charming. But not this one.” He reported. “This one has got to be one of the most arrogant sons of bitches in the whole wide world.”
“Have you been hanging around with Americans?” I asked.
He grinned.
“It’s just an expression, Anyway, you’ll see.”
One of the things that annoyed me, was going before the Inter-Services Board and getting approval for the mission. What was the point of the mission being vetted by the Navy? The Foreign Office? Winston didn’t have the same priorities, but it’s obvious that the RFC should be independent of the other services, and I suppose some of us had told them that once or twice. With all due respect to Mr. Churchill, he wasn’t exactly known as a tactical and strategic genius, in spite of his carefully-dramatic word-play in the House. He wasn’t even very good at naval strategy.
We should have the resources to mount our own operations, and we should have proper authority to do just that. Hopefully, the formation of the Royal Air Force, which went into effect only days previously, wouldn’t be a total fuck-up from the onset.
I got the chance to ask the General-Oberst Heinzer a few things.
Through my interpreter, I asked him a great many questions. Now, these guys don’t want to betray their country, but this one’s arrogance could be used against him.
You can’t blame a fellow soldier for trying to do his duty, and I made Dawley tell him that.
Oh, he knew the game all right. He knew his duty was to escape, and being an intelligent man, I got the impression that he was watching and reading us just as surely as he was being watched and read by myself, and quite frankly by Dawley. Why not throw him a bone or two? Dawley was primed with some ideas of what I wanted to do.
Without giving him too much to chew on. We’re all on the same side, but security is an issue even with Military Intelligence. (Often noted as a contradiction in terms.)
Dawley was professional enough to want to watch another man’s interrogation.
Poor old Herr General was starving for intelligent conversation.
Held in close custody for many weeks. Constantly surrounded by his inferiors. He was just dying to talk to somebody. No one listened to him anymore. They told him what to do and when to do it. He had to eat, drink, sleep, shit, shower, shave and exercise according to someone else’s schedule.
“I’m awfully glad to meet you at last.” I told Herr General through Dawley.
Dawley’s deferential tone was soothing. I silently approved. I reached into my big coat and pulled out a bottle of the very best Napoleon brandy. Dawley grunted and produced a trio of small glasses from his pocket, all wrapped up in paper.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be here sooner, but as you understand, things are very busy around here lately.” And his ears perked up at that.
“To be honest, this whole Russian business has thrown us into a flap.” And I saw Dawley’s shoulders twitch in shock.
So did the German. This guy has been isolated for a long time, yet he thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. Normally, you don’t tell a prisoner a damned thing. Don’t even let him have a newspaper. A Bible, maybe, but not a newspaper. But there was an even more subtle message.
‘You ain’t going nowhere, Bud.’
I knew the date of his capture. He’d been stupid enough to ride in a Gotha bomber under his command, lucky enough to survive being shot down, fortunate enough not to be lynched by the villagers of Spittlegate or wherever the hell he landed. He knew the Russians had collapsed, but he could only speculate as to the effects on the war. He didn’t know the outcome. Why not let him think the enemy was winning?
People can’t resist the urge to brag.
By knowing myself, it was a reasonable deduction.
I opened by asking him where he was born. Did he have any children? All of these questions had been asked before. Dawley and I sipped, and sooner or later, as I went along, the German took a little gulp of the liquor. I poked Dawley in the ribs with my elbow.
The General was going to unbend a little.
“Sorry.” He said, and picked up an envelope.
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| Can't resist a bit of a brag... |
He opened it and gave the contents to the General. A photograph in a silver locket, some other photos. A nice gold ring. A big, fat, pocket watch. I took a minute to pick it up and admire it. It looked like an anniversary gift, for it was inscribed, near as I could make out ‘Love, Gretchen.’
It was curiously moving. This guy had a wife and kids somewhere. He must have missed those photos. It looked like good old Dawley felt bad for the old fart. The stuff was taken upon capture. It was pretty unusual to return stolen property like that, but this was a high-ranking officer. Someone was using a little foresight. Dawley? Might be a useful man. (I had a report to write later, as well. I had someplace important to send mine, too.)
“My humble apologies, and the men responsible have been punished.” Said Dawley.
Herr General’s hands lovingly caressed the locket. He picked up the photos, small wallet-sized ones, and examined them one by one. He was pretty quiet.
“Das ist cute kinders.” I ventured in barbaric German.
Dawley and the Fritzie smiled at my attempted linguistic foray. The enemy prisoner pointed at the youngest child and pronounced a name.
“Anna.”
The baby of the family. He must miss her. She was a very beautiful child. I nodded and smiled, all innocuous-like.
I whipped out my smokes, and Dawley got out another package. Special German ones for the General. Nice Turkish-blend smokes, with the Imperial excise label on them. The General’s eyebrows rose. They were fresh smokes too. I could smell them from where I sat, searching for a match in my voluminous pockets.
Whether they were real or not, I couldn’t say. But they sure fooled the general.
For some reason I was wearing a big leather trench-coat, but then one never knew whether it would be warm or cold in the English winter. Winter, what the English thought was cold, sometimes turned out not to be so cold at all, and in summer, what they thought was warm, wasn’t all that warm, either. Dawley translated, amusing the general with my remarks. Dave appeared to be amused himself, with the irony of being in the middle of all that.
“General, my experience in the infantry shows that while our own propaganda says the German soldier is a mindless automaton, in reality…” (I could see his neck getting darker.)
Dawley jabbered away for a moment…
“…in reality the German soldier seems to be able to recover quickly and engage in local counterattacks. Small unit tactics are far better than our own…yet these men for the most part don’t have the benefit of a military academy education…”
Dawley painstakingly translated.
“The junior NCO’s have more leadership qualities, and show far more initiative when senior leadership breaks down under battlefield conditions.”
How did he account for it? Well, he didn’t. He didn’t say much at all. But then, he really didn’t have to. And I could see him thinking about the Russian remark.
He made a brief comment, “…something-something-soldaten—” which I couldn’t quite catch.
“They are better soldiers.” According to Dawley’s translation.
Simple and true. A good beginning.
Did he have any political connections?
‘Some, but not many.’ He replied with a gleam in his eye?
Poor bastard. I could read him like a book.
The room became very warm and I removed the big coat, allowing him to see the medals ranked up there on my chest. He seemed to appreciate the fact that a genuine, decorated war hero had been sent to talk to him. He mellowed out considerably as the booze began to take its inevitable effect. The guy hadn’t had a drink in three or four months.
“Now, the General, very correctly, does not wish to talk about his own forces.” Dawley translated. “But perhaps he would be good enough to discuss ours?”
Short, tight grins all round the table.
The General chewed on that thought for a while, as he and we sipped our drinks and smoked our cigarettes.
He didn’t say, ‘Nein.’
Why not try him?
“What’s his impression of our staff organization?” I asked.
The general hesitated. Was Tucker plotting a military coup? The poor guy’s mind was jumping all over the place. Isolation, a kind of paranoia.
‘Very rigid.’ He finally answered.
I nodded. That was my impression exactly. And it also told me that in comparison, the German staff organization, at least in this gentleman’s opinion wasn’t, or perhaps it was merely less rigid.
‘The General Staff runs the civilian government,’ in my own rather snarky opinion. ‘Here we have the opposite problem…haw.’
Flattery will get you everywhere with the Junkers. This was the little crack that we needed. We soon had him comparing our great aces with their great aces, which was exactly what we were hoping for.
Dawley kept prodding him back to ‘the subject,’ ostensibly staff organizations.
Yet, we always managed to interject some little comment or question about their great fliers, and filled in when appropriate with anecdotes about some of our boys.
Oh, yeah, we had a merry little kaffee-klatsch. I was creating the impression in the German’s mind that I was some lucky bastard, to be given a staff job that frankly bored me. He thought our superiors felt that I was too valuable a ‘hero’ to risk any more combat exposure. The losses on both sides, guys like Guynemer and Ball, just flying off into the sunset, for some reason upset the news-hungry rabble.
I had a big mouth and I liked to talk…Dave was embarrassed for me, and even to be seen with me.
‘The unwashed proletariat, who paid the taxes to pay for the weapons to use in the war that was killing their husbands and fathers. Their sons, brothers, uncles and nephews.’
Convinced I was a fool, all of a sudden the General was talking about Richtofen, and like any good listener I hitched my chair a little closer to him, and leaned forward, hanging on every word. It seems little Manfred was a child of the lesser nobility. He grew up on his father’s estate. From an early age young Manfred was fascinated by firearms, hunting and riding. By all accounts he was very good at it. He liked trophies. I swear to God, I was biting my nails as I listened, enraptured.
That bit about hunting, stuck in my mind. I refilled the General’s glass and kept going.
“But what is he like as a man?” I kept prodding, but only in the most gentle way, the implied reproof in my questions a spur to the General to justify his hero, and to maybe mythologize to a certain extent.
After composing his thoughts, the General went on.
A man’s mythology is important to him. It helps to define him.
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| The Baron Manfred von Richtofen was a hunter, not a dog-fighter. |
'The Baron von Richtofen doesn’t care if you live or die. It is nothing personal.” We were told. “He’s like nature itself, indifferent.”
What mattered most to the Baron was his personal loyalty to the Kaiser. He was chivalrous towards women, (albeit mostly to women of his own rank,) and absolutely ruthless towards the enemy. There were no known sexual dalliances in the Baron’s past, and while the General would never discuss such a thing with an outsider, his reaction to the question told me there was nothing in it.
The Baron doesn’t care if you live or die. He wants your head as a trophy.
“So, he is discreet.” Dawley grinned.
“He could hardly be without some passion or other.” I pointed out.
The General drank, assuming Dawley’s comment to be part of the translation.
“Why doesn’t he come down and challenge us, face to face?” I asked.
Apparently he did, from time to time, but he felt it beneath him to ‘feud,’ like some ‘McCoys und Hatfields,’ in some ‘Appalachian hill-farming area.’
He just waited till someone made a mistake. Then he took the shot. We were like stags, or wild boars to the Baron. While this wasn’t exactly news, it did tend to confirm my theory. The Baron could be manipulated, if we could ‘safely’ predict his reaction to our ‘stimulus,’ to use a word that was popular before the war.
The General also confirmed my impression that the Baron wasn’t known as a dog-fighter. It was unlikely we would be able to spark him to anger, but perhaps some other way? The idea of ‘driven game,’ stuck in my head for a while. Why not use his own tactics against him?
The Baron was a good shot…but not necessarily a dog-fighter.
My mind racing, I had a mental picture of a moose, caught on the frozen expanse of some nameless northern lake. Harried by wolves until it could run no longer…run him in shifts…now there’s an idea.
We gossiped along for a while, enjoying ourselves, and got another interesting tid-bit.
A couple of years before the war, D.H. Lawrence, whose novels were suppressed due to their frank treatment of sexual matters, bloody well eloped with the Baron’s sister.
Simply scandalous.
Worse, she was married at the time, to D.H.’s former professor. They married two years later. Their stormy and tempestuous relationship provided material for some of his books. Lawrence was not popular in England, due to his outspoken opposition to the war.
In his books, ‘The Rainbow,’ and ‘Women In Love,’ he explored with candor the sexual and psychological relationships between men and women. (Actually written later. – ed.)
Anyhow, we’ve all heard of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ He wrote it. I doubted if Mrs. Lawrence would speak to us. They’d been harassed by authorities in England since the war began. Too bad, really. It might have been an interesting conversation…did Manfred wet the bed? That sort of thing.
Did they dress him up like a girl? Any pictures?
It didn’t seem to have caused the Baron to unnecessarily hate the British. We were just targets to him. It was nothing personal. Manfred wasn’t a bloodthirsty maniac. He was just good at his job.
Dawley gently steered us back to the main topic, staff organizations. But, for whatever reason, the General lost his co-operative mood.
Three brandies, and the self-doubts creeping in.
He decided he shouldn’t be talking to us after all. That was fine. I had more Fritzies to interview when this one was over. The information, unfiltered, might not mean much at the time, but an ancient rule of war is, ‘respect for the enemy.’ You cannot assume he is a mindless, slavering, rabid dog. Our side was lucky to keep the General’s capture out of the papers. Presumably, his own side thought he was dead. A lonely position to be in. Get to know him. He has a weakness. He is a human being, after all. As we closed the door and walked down the hall to the prison guard’s canteen, Dawley asked a question or two.
“What he said about Goering being a transvestite, do you believe it?”
“In vinas veritas,” I began. “In wine there is truth. However, I’m more interested in Bruno Loerzer and him being close friends.”
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| Impeccably tailored, totally non-descript. |
Expanding further, I told Dave, “I’m more interested in Von Krumholtz being a drinker, more interested in Aristides, this Renegade Greek, and his motivations. More interested in Lowenhardt’s mother-in-law’s hemorrhoids.”
He raised an eyebrow at that one.
“I’m more interested in German staff organizations than you or he would give me credit for.” I added. “Our own too, actually.”
Dawley remarked on my kid-glove handling of the Fritzie officer.
“Where did you learn that trick?” He asked.
“Peter the Great,” I replied. “Once, on some kind of impulse, Peter showed kindness to a man he was torturing. Suddenly the man broke down and told him everything. Yet the streltsy endured agonies of torture, out of a sense of honor.”
“What did he do? What happened, really?” asked Dawley.
“Peter smothered the man’s wounds in kisses. He hugged him, and apologized for torturing him. He offered to look after the man’s family, and give him a merciful death. He wept over him, bemoaning his duty as a sovereign, and the personal hell of having to deal with threats to the state.”
“Nice fellow.” Was all Dawley could say, face screwed up in concentration.
“Any man kisses my wounds.” I muttered and Dawley burst out laughing.
“Better confess before it gets out of hand.” He joked. “Yeesh.”
We both grinned stupidly. Nuts. We had been at war too long. We had lost all sense of proportion by then, I should think.
“I’ll bet a hundred pounds, if you visit the General once a week, and listen to his woes, the silly old bugger will tell you anything you want to know.” I mentioned. “How often does he get a visitor?”
Routine questioning, perhaps trying to build a biography of some figure under study. You could only get so much out of that sort of thing. A different uncaring flunky every time.
“Once every two, three weeks.” Admitted Dawley.
We went on to have our coffee, and several more interviews, where we managed to pick up a few more juicy tidbits. In between cells, the conversation continued along these lines.
“Once he begins to look forward to your visits, he’ll actually begin to think of stuff that he safely can tell you, without violating his code of personal conduct. It’s a kind of professional oath.” I observed.
“You have enough prisoners. You can afford to experiment a little.” I suggested, which sounded pretty bloody-minded, but he laughed just the same.
At the end of the day, Dawley dropped me off at my hotel.
“You need anything else, we’re always glad to help out.”
I said, “Thanks,” and went on in.
END
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