Hurrah for Biggles!

Like many men of my age, I was mesmerised by Captain W.E. Johns’ tales of Biggles as a child. Looking back I had no idea that he had written 160 of them but at the time didn’t seem much to care: in far off New Zealand I just tried to get hold of every copy I could. The tales held me spell-bound as I read them under the blankets of my bed with my torch after lights out. Most of my pocket money doing my newspaper round was spent on batteries. I still have 25 of these precious tomes in a dusty box in the attic: I still can’t seem to be able to part with these well-thumbed relics of my early adolescence. My mother in Australia knew this and kept them, giving them to me a few years ago when she was moving house. I had no idea they had survived my journey into adulthood, far across years and oceans.

It is no surprise that generations change their tastes and this doughty old warrior is hardly known today across the Anglosphere. This might be about to change as the publisher Canelo is slowly reprinting the most popular of these volumes for a new audience. ‘Wonderful’ I thought’ as I got down to re-reading stories I hadn’t read for probably fifty years. What would I find? Captain W.E. Johns has been airily dismissed by those dismissive of the popular culture of the past, especially that which brought reading to the British masses, as full of the racist imperialism of our benighted past. Rubbish. Looking back over fifty-years of my life, Biggles represents to me the singularity of the men and women who made our world. They fought for King and Country in two devastating wars for a cause that they believed was, on the whole, right and honourable. They opposed evil, bullyboys and totalitarianism, however construed. Johns was a representative of this group of people, and he wrote about the men with whom he had served as a fighter pilot in the Royal Flying Corps in 1917 and 1918. In other words, he was a hero, who wrote about heroes for small boys in the hope that they would recognise true heroism for what it was (rather than selfish vainglory) when they eventually emerged from the chrysalis of innocence into manhood. Flicking the pages now I can forgive the ‘preposterous verbal tics (“By Jove, Bertie!”)’ as one critic has described them, and the sometimes formulaic, clunky writing. He never set out to be an exponent of literary exactitude but instead told brilliant stories to small boys (mainly) that in addition to helping teach them how to read, explained something of the difference between an upright person and the cads and bounders they would one day have to meet in the world of grown-ups. His unconscious messages encompassed the virtues of duty and sacrifice, for underneath everything Biggles was the proto-Christian, the valiant saviour of his generation. For this he has been castigated by modern relativists who try to tell us that good and bad is relative to one’s culture and the so-called progressives (often the same people) who try to persuade us that our great-grandparent’s generation were all inveterate racists. Stuff and nonsense, on both counts.

The truth is that Johns wrote about his world and his experiences of life in a way that was comprehensible for young adolescents at the time (and in my era as a child in the 1960s) viewing the adult world around them through a glass darkly. The stories he told were of a world of violence, war and terror, which could be survived only by personal discipline, loyalty to family, flag and country, church and school and by the bonds of friendship amid shared peril. Remember the old virtues of discipline, service and sacrifice? These were those that Johns attempted to transmit through his tales. These tales were a once-real world - his world - and are only dismissed today by ignoramuses who appear to delight in embracing all the opposites of those which Johns stood for.

To gain some sense of what drove Johns as a person and as a writer one needs go no further than the Foreword to ‘The Camels are Coming’, first published in 1932, fourteen years after the guns fell silent on the Western Front. His ‘Biggles’ books were in truth autobiographical stories from a man of his time, who fought in the great crusade against militarism in Europe in the Great War and who wanted those who followed to understand what made his generation tick and the bravery, selflessness and courage which enabled them not merely to survive but to rebuild their world from the ashes of the past.

Captain James Bigglesworth is a fictitious character, yet he could have been found in any R.F.C. mess during those great days of 1917 and 1918 when air combat had become the order of the day and air duelling was a fine art. 'Biggles,' as I have said, did not exist under that name, yet he represents the spirit of the R.F.C. — daring and deadly when in the air, devil-may-care and debonair when on the ground.

To readers who are unfamiliar with the conditions that prevailed in the blue skies of France during the last two years of the War, it may seem unlikely that so many adventures could have fallen to the lot of one man. In those eventful years, every day — and I might almost say every hour — brought adventure, tragic or humorous, to the man in the air, and as we sat in our cockpits warming up our engines for the dawn 'show', no one could say what the end of the day would bring, or whether he would be alive to see it.

Again, it may seem improbable that any one man could have been involved in so many hazardous undertakings, and yet survive. That may be true; sooner or later most War pilots met the inevitable fate of the flying fighter. I sometimes wonder how any of us survived, yet there were some who seemed to bear a charmed life. William Bishop, the British ace, René Fonck, the French ace and prince of air duellists, and, on the other side, Ernst Udet, and many others, fought hundreds of battles in the air and survived thousands of hours of deadly peril. Every day incredible deeds of heroism were performed by pilots whose names are unknown, and had the Victoria Cross been awarded consistently, hundreds instead of a few would have worn the coveted decoration.

Nowhere are the curious whims of Lady Luck so apparent as in the air. Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the famous ace, shot down forty British machines; he was killed in a simple cross-country flight shortly after the War. Nungesser, the French champion of forty-five air battles, was drowned, and McKeever, Canadian ace of thirty victories, was killed in a skidding motor-car. Captain 'Jock' McKay of my Squadron survived three years air warfare, only to be killed by 'archie' [anti-aircraft fire] an hour before the Armistice was signed. Lieutenant A. E. Amey, who fought his first and last fight beside me, had not even unpacked his kit! I have spun into the ground out of control from 6,000 feet, yet I am alive to tell the tale. Gordon, of my Squadron, made a good landing, but bumped on an old road that ran across the aerodrome, turned turtle, and broke his neck.

Again, should the sceptic think I have been guilty of exaggeration, I would say that exaggeration is almost impossible where air combat is concerned. The terrific speed at which a dog-fight took place and the amazing manner in which machines appeared from nowhere, and could disappear, apparently into thin air, was so bewildering as to baffle description. It is beyond my ability to convey adequately the sensation of being one of ten or a dozen machines, zooming, whirling, and diving among the maze of pencil lines that marked the track of tracer bullets. One could not exaggerate the stunning horror of seeing two machines collide head-on a few yards away, and words have yet to be coined to express that tightening of the heart-strings that comes of seeing one of your own side roaring down in a sheet of flame. Seldom was any attempt made by spectators to describe these things at the time; they were best forgotten.

It is not surprising that many strange incidents occurred, incidents which were never written down on combat reports, but were whispered 'with wrinkled brows, with nods, and rolling eyes' in dim corners of the hangars while we were waiting for the order to start up or for the 'late birds' to come home to roost. It was 'H', a tall South African S.E. pilot who came in white-faced and told me that he had just shot down a Camel by mistake. It was the Camel pilot's fault. He playfully zoomed over the S.E., apparently out of sheer light-heartedness. 'H' told me that he started shooting when he only saw the shadow; he turned and saw the red, white, and blue circles; but it was too late. He had already gripped the Bowden [the trigger for the gun, usually fitted to a pilot’s column] control and fired a burst of not more than five rounds. He had fired hundreds of rounds at enemy aircraft without hitting one, but the Camel fell in flames. He asked me if he should report it, and I, rightly or wrongly, said no, for nothing could bring the Camel back. 'H' went West [was killed] soon afterwards.

What of 'T—L—' still in the Service, who was attacked by a Belgian scout? For ten minutes he endeavoured to escape, and then, exasperated, he turned and shot the Belgian down, narrowly escaping court-martial as a consequence. Almost everybody has heard the story told by Boelcke, the German ace — and he was a man to be believed — of how he once found a British machine with a dead crew flying a ghostly course amid the clouds. On another occasion he shot down an F.E. which, spinning viciously, threw its observer out behind the German lines and the pilot behind the British lines. What of the R.E.8 that landed perfectly behind our lines with pilot and observer stiff and stark in their cockpits! The R.E.8 was not an easy machine to land at any time, as those who flew it will bear witness.

René Fonck once shot down a German machine which threw out its pilot; machine and man fell straight through the middle of a formation of Spads below without touching one of them! The German pilot was Wissemann, who had just shot down Guynemer, Fonck's friend and brother ace, but he did not know that at the time. The coincidence is worth noting. Madon, another ace, once attacked a German two-seater at point-blank — his usual method. A bullet struck the goggles off the Boche observer and sent them whirling into the air; Madon caught them on his wires and brought them home. When Warneford shot down his Zeppelin one of the crew jumped from the blazing airship, and after falling a distance generally believed to be about 200 feet, crashed through the roof of a convent and landed on a bed which had just been vacated by a nun. He lived to tell the tale. When it comes to pure coincidence the following tale goes rather farther than a fiction writer would dare to venture. It was told to me by the principal actors themselves shortly after they had been led into the prison camp where I was confined. They themselves were still finding the thing difficult to believe.

It came about through Pat Manley losing his propeller. For the benefit of the reader who is not conversant with air jargon, to lose one's propellor does not mean that it fell off, or anything like that. It is said to be 'lost' when it stops turning round.

Pat Manley and Swayze were friends who joined the infantry and came over with the Canadian contingent. They were hit on the same day, went to different hospitals and completely lost touch with each other. A year later Pat, heeding around over the line in a Bristol Fighter, saw another Bristol going down under a cloud of enemy aircraft. He throttled back and put his nose down in a steep dive to join the party; but he was too late and he saw the other Bristol crash in a field. Perceiving that no good purpose could be served by hanging around, Pat was about to make for a healthier quarter of the sky, when, as previously stated, he lost his propeller. Being very low he was unable to dive to get it back so he landed beside the crash, just in time to see Swayze crawl out. Thus, they were both taken prisoner within one minute of each other on the same field in France.

Here is another story which illustrates the sort of thing that could happen to a pilot in those days. It happened I believe to Carter, who told me the story when we were prisoners of war together. I see he is now commanding the Iraqian Air Force. He was a Camel pilot then, and was so tickled to death one day at finding a column of enemy troops on the march that he could not tear himself away from them.

He amused himself for a time by unloading his 20-1b. Cooper bombs on them, and when this began to pall he came lower and sprayed them with his gun. So fascinating did this pastime become, and so vastly entertaining were the antics of the warriors below in their frantic haste to remove themselves from the locality, that he quite failed to notice the telegraph wires which, as so often happens, accompanied the road on its winding way. He hit the wires at the bottom of a zoom and took them, together with a snapped-off post or two, for a short joy-ride. It was a pity he could not have given the troops a treat by taking them all the way home, but the Camel, not being designed for such work, gave up the ghost and spread itself over the landscape.

The tables now being somewhat turned, his erstwhile victims proceeded to amuse themselves by battering him to pulp with their rifle butts, a comparatively tame pursuit from which they were only compelled to desist by the arrival of a senior officer, Carter was taken to the same hospital as the men he had wounded, where a state of affairs prevailed for the next week or so that can be better imagined than described!

One could go on with such stories indefinitely, but these should be sufficient to show that, in the air at least, truth is stranger than fiction.

Many of the adventures that are ascribed to Biggles did actually occur, and are true in their essential facts. Students of air history will have no difficulty in identifying them. In many cases the officers themselves are still alive and serving in the Royal Air Force.

Finally, I hope that from a perusal of these pages a younger generation of air fighters may learn something of the tricks of the trade, of the traps and pitfalls that beset the unwary, for I fear that many of the lessons which we learned in the hard school of war are being rapidly obscured by the mists of peace-time theory. In air-fighting, one week of war experience is worth a year of peace-time practice. In peace a man may make a mistake — and live. He may not even know of his mistake. If he makes that same mistake in war — he dies, unless it is his lucky day, in which case, the error is so vividly brought to his notice that he is never guilty of it again.

No one can say just how he will react when, for the first time, he hears the flack! flack! flack! of bullets ripping through his machine. The sound has turned boys into grey-faced men, and even hardened campaigners who learnt their business on the ground have felt their lips turn dry.

In the following pages certain expressions occur from time to time in connection with the tactics of air combat which may seem to the layman to be out of proportion to their importance. For instance, he will read of 'getting into the sun.' It is quite impossible for anybody who does not fly to realize what this means and how utterly impossible it is to see what is going on in that direction, particularly when the sun is low and one is flying west. To fly into the face of the setting sun can be uncomfortable at any time, but the strain of trying to peer into the glare, knowing that it may discharge a squadron of death-spitting devils at any moment, becomes positive torture after a time; at least, I found it so.

It should also be remembered that an aeroplane is an extremely small vehicle and difficult to see. When one is on the ground it is the noise of the engine that almost invariably first attracts attention, and but for the unmistakable tell-tale hum few would be seen at all. In the air, the roar of one's own engine drowns all other sound, and one is therefore dependent upon sight alone for detecting the presence of other aircraft. This fact should constantly be borne in mind when reading stories of the air, and particularly of air combat.

Constant reference is also made to 'archie.' Most people know by now that this was not an old friend whom we called by his Christian name, There was nothing friendly about archie. On the contrary, he often bit you when you were least expecting it, but on the whole his bark was worse than his bite. Archie was the war-pilot's nick-name for anti-aircraft gun-fire. During the War archie batteries stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss Frontier; his appearance in the sky was accepted as a matter of course, and dodging him was part of the daily round. After a time one became accustomed to it and ignored it unless it was very bad.

Lingfield, 1932

W.E.J.

Johns couldn’t write? Balderdash! This ‘old’ man enjoys them every bit as much as when he was a boy. So will you.