Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop

Frustrated at the delay in being sent to the front he took private flying lessons to improve his chances of entering the RFC. Ball fell instantly in love with flying, despite the hazards. ‘It is rotten to see the smashes,’ he wrote in one of his frequent letters home. ‘Yesterday a ripping boy had a smash and when we got up to him he was nearly dead. He had a two-inch piece of wood right through his head and died this morning.’ He added, without apparent irony, that he would be ‘pleased to take you up any time you wish’, if his parents felt like a flip.⁶

      He arrived in France, now a lieutenant in the RFC, in time for the great Somme offensive. He flew a French Nieuport, one of the new generation of single-seater scouts. His methods marked him out immediately. He would fly straight into packs of enemy aircraft, getting in as close as he could, firing off a Lewis gun at point-blank range, breaking off an inconclusive attack only to change the ammunition drum and bore in again. It was simple, effective and desperately dangerous. He would return from sorties with his machine shredded by enemy fire.

      On the ground his behaviour struck his fellow officers as odd. At his first base, Savy Aubigny aerodrome, north-west of Arras, he turned down a billet in the village, preferring first a tent, then a wooden hut he built for himself at the edge of the airfield, two miles from the squadron mess. He sent home for packets of seeds to plant marrows, lettuce, carrots, cress and flowers. He spent hours in the hangars, chatting with the riggers and fitters, making constant adjustments to his aeroplane to improve its capabilities, yet he seemed less interested in flying for its own sake than as a means of fighting. The camaraderie of the mess held little interest for him. Nor did women.

      His main relaxation was the violin, which he would play after dinner while walking around a red magnesium flare. Another fellow pilot, Roderic Hill, described him sitting outside his hut, playing his gramophone and brooding. ‘He had but one idea: that was to kill as many Huns as possible, and he gave effect to it with a swiftness and certainty that seemed to most of us uncanny. He nearly always went out alone; in fact he would not let anyone fly with him, and was intolerant of proffered assistance.’⁷

      For all his oddness, he was respected. A young New Zealander pilot, Keith Caldwell, saw him as ‘a hero…and he looked the part too; young, alert, ruddy complexion, dark hair and eyes. He was supposed to be a “loner”, but we found him to be friendly…One felt that it could only be a matter of time before he “bought it”, as he was shot about so often.’⁸

      Looking now at the photographs of Ball, at the thick, glossy hair and the black eyes set in the taut, uncreased skin, one senses fatalism behind the easy smile. Almost from the beginning the mild bragging in the letters home is matched by disgust at what duty had led him into. By the end of August he was yearning for home. ‘I do so want to leave all this beastly killing for a time,’ he sighed in a letter.⁹ Yet even when complaining of nerves he would still take every possible opportunity to get airborne.

      In October his superiors ordered him back to England for a rest and a new posting as an instructor. He was already famous, the most successful pilot in the RFC, with an MC, DSO and bar. The prime minister, Lloyd George, invited him to breakfast. He went to Buckingham Palace, where King George V presented him with his medals.

      Despite the peace and the nearness to family that he had yearned for when in France, he was restless and unhappy and soon agitating to go back. The pressure worked. In February he was posted to 56 Squadron, which was being formed as an élite unit to fly the new SE5 fighters against the best of the German air force. While waiting he fell in love, with an eighteen-year-old florist called Flora Young, who an old friend had brought with him when he drove over to visit him at the base. The attraction was instantaneous. He offered to take her up in an aeroplane and she gamely accepted. That night he was writing to thank her for ‘the topping day I have had with you. I am simply full of joy to have met you.’¹⁰ On 7 April 1917 the squadron left England. Ball’s tour was supposed to be for a month only. He sent daily letters to Flora detailing his successes and setting himself a target. Once he had overtaken the German champion Oswald Boelcke, he would come home.

      At 5.30 p.m. on Monday, 7 May, he lead a squadron of SE5s on an offensive sweep aimed at seeking out enemy fighters, believed to be led by the German ace Manfred von Richthofen, who were operating in the Arras area.

      Cecil Lewis described the chocolate-coloured fighters flying into a ‘May evening…heavy with threatening masses of cumulus cloud, majestic skyscrapes, solid-looking as snow mountains, fraught with caves and valleys, rifts and ravines’.¹¹ Suddenly, high over the Cambrai-Douai road, out of these clouds came the Albatross D111 scouts they were looking for. Richthofen was not among the pilots, but his brother Lothar was. The formations rounded on each other in a confused mêlée of individual combats. Lewis described how Ball ‘flew straight into the white face of an enormous cloud. I followed. But when I came out the other side, he was nowhere to be seen.’ Four German officers on the ground heard aircraft engines and looked up to see Ball’s machine slip out from low cloud upside down with its propeller stopped and trailing black smoke. It disappeared behind a stand of trees and crashed into a shoulder of farmland. By the time the officers reached the wreckage a young Frenchwoman had pulled the pilot clear. There were no marks on the fresh features, but Ball was dead.

      Lothar von Richthofen claimed the victory, though no one on the British side believed him. The most likely explanation was that Ball became disoriented inside the cloud – a common hazard – and emerged to find he was flying upside down too low and too late to correct the error.

      ‘The mess was very quiet that night,’ Lewis wrote. They held a singsong in a nearby barn to try and raise morale. The squadron band played and the men sang the hits of the time: ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’, ‘Way Down upon the Swanee River’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. Then Lewis sang the Robert Louis Stevenson ‘Requiem’.

      Under the wide and starry sky,

      Dig the grave and let me lie.

      Glad did I live and gladly die,

      And I laid me down with a will.

      A month after Ball’s death the London Gazette announced the award of a posthumous VC, noting that ‘in all Captain Ball has destroyed forty-three German aeroplanes and one balloon and has always displayed most exceptional courage, determination and skill’.

      A new hero was already emerging from the ranks of the RFC by the time of Ball’s demise, a man of very different background and character. Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock had been in France for just over five weeks when Ball crashed. He knew all about him. Ball’s exploits, read about in the newspapers, had been one of the reasons he had applied to transfer to the RFC from the Royal Engineers. By the time he arrived at the main depot in St Omer he was already twenty-seven, oldish to be a pilot. He had reached the air force by an erratic route. He was born on 21 May 1889 to Irish parents. His father had been a non-commissioned officer in the Second Inniskilling Dragoons, who drank, beat his wife and disappeared, leaving her with two sons and two daughters who she brought up in poverty in Canterbury. Mannock left school at fourteen to work as a clerk. His hard early life converted him to socialism and throughout his military career he enjoyed alarming conventional comrades with his views about class and privilege. He was also an Irish nationalist.

      When the war came he was working as a labour supervisor in Turkey with a cable-laying company. He was interned until the Red Cross intervened, returned to England and, with his technical background, ended up in the Royal Engineers with an ambition to be a tunnelling officer. But the training bored him and he was irritated by his fellow officers and their talk of cricket, girls and dances. No one was sorry when he applied for the RFC and went off to learn to fly, managing to bluff his way through the medical despite being blind in one eye from a childhood illness.

      By the summer of 1917 the brief period of air superiority the RFC had enjoyed during the Somme offensive,