Sir Walter Raleigh and the Air History: A Personal Recollection

At a meeting of a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence which met in the middle of July, 1918, to consider the question of the official history of the Air Force, Admiral Slade welcomed Sir Walter Raleigh as the prospective author of a history which would be both interesting and unique--unique in the sense that no history of the kind had ever been written before. “Almost too good a chance,” was the interjection of Sir Walter.

Sir Walter took up the history with enthusiasm. At Oxford throughout the war he had been chafing under the inactivity which was imposed on him by his age. Oxford was empty of men. There was not even a lot of lecturing to do. The Air History gave him just such an opportunity as he loved. It was an adventure, and he looked upon life itself as an adventure. He was possessed of a fine imagination, and the story of the air had for him a great appeal. He had the heart of a boy. In a fine passage on the temper of the Air Force he says in his book:

“The recruits of the air were young, some of them no more than boys. Their training lasted only a few months. They put their home life behind them, or kept it only as a fortifying memory, and threw themselves with fervour and abandon into the work to be done. Pride in their squadron became a part of their religion. The demands made upon them, which, it might reasonably have been believed, were greater than human nature can endure, were taken by them as a matter of course; they fulfilled them, and went beyond. They were not a melancholy company; they had something of the lightness of the element in which they moved. Indeed, it would be difficult to find, in the world’s history, any body of fighters who, for sheer gaiety and zest, could hold a candle to them. They have opened up a new vista for their country and for mankind. Their story, if it could ever be fully and truly written, is the Epic of Youth.”

Sir Walter had something of the lightness of the element of which he wrote, otherwise he could never have written such a passage. He had seen the Air Force at work on active service. His month in France was a source of inspiration which produced some of the finest passages in his book. He went to France at a time when the victorious Allied armies were driving the Germans back towards the Rhine. His journey lasted from August the 14th to September the 8th, 1918. He spent a great part of his time at the Royal Air Force Headquarters, but also visited many squadrons and was taken over the numerous parks which ministered to the wants of the service. He flew about the Ypres salient, and other parts of the line. The story is told of him that whilst staying with one squadron he was already dressed in flying kit and on the point of starting as a passenger on a night bombing raid. He was stopped in time. I do not know whether the story is wholly true, but certainly he wrote home:

“I had the opportunity of going in a Handley Page on a night bombing raid, but had not the General’s permission, and as the pleasure would have been mine and the responsibility for any mishap would probably have fallen on the pilot, I felt bound to refuse. But I want to say that I think it important that I should see one of these raids from the air, and if I revisit France, I trust I may have leave to go.”

During his tour he was living in a world of new wonders. He was put to school to the air. All the mysteries that go to the making of the efficient fighting or reconnaissance machine were explained to him.

“I had the whole mystery of sound ranging explained and demonstrated to me, though if the art were lost, I doubt if I could superintend its recapture,” he says in a letter.

His visit was invaluable: it gave him perspective. Returned to England he went straightway to Oxford and started on the Introduction to his history. That Introduction in its final form is a beautiful piece of writing. But the writing of it did not come too easily. Sir Walter wrote with pain. The subject was new. The author was modest and conscientious. Nothing but his very best would satisfy him. Indeed he was seldom satisfied with what he wrote. “It goes heavy, so far, and I am destroying much of what I write,” he says in a letter written when he was finishing the Introduction. “False starts,” he goes on, “but it will get smoother soon.” And a few days later, “I am cobbling the Introduction; you shall have it by Monday morning.”

Statistics did not excite him. Long unwieldy committee names and strings of facts tired him. In the Introduction he was able to let himself go a bit. “It may seem rather a high-pressure start--opening out the engine at once,” he wrote. “But it will be only now and then in the course of the book, that I shall get a chance to say what I think.”

He brought his manuscript to the office and the staff sat around him whilst he read it. He was very sensitive. He felt himself an amateur in the midst of a body of experts. It must have been a new experience for him to come and submit his work to a tribunal of ordinary people like ourselves. As he read on he warmed to his work. He forgot us. We forgot him. His fine voice held us. We were taken, as it were, over the world on the wings of the wind. The whole meaning of air warfare was made plain to us. We were looking down now on this battle-field, now on that, and the whole vast organization was seen clear cut as through a diminishing glass. Now and again the glass was reversed and focused on to any individual member of the force. His feelings were laid bare to our gaze. We seemed to understand everything. We did not notice when the reading finished. The spell would hardly break. Perhaps it was not so much what was read to us, although it was inspiring; it may have been the spell cast by the author himself. Perhaps it was that the sight of him, offering himself to our judgment, flattered us to wonder. I do not know. I know that the officer who was then in charge of the Air Branch, expressed very diffidently something of what we felt at the reading. Sir Walter was immensely pleased. “I should be pretty sick if the public liked my work, and the men who have been in the air didn’t,” he wrote back.

At the time the Introduction was written the Air Force was in the throes of the disintegration which followed the armistice. There were criticisms in the press against the conduct of some of the members of the service. Sir Walter was impatient of these criticisms. “Critics who speak of what they have not felt and do not know, have sometimes blamed the air service because, being young, it has not the decorum of age. The Latin poet said that it is decorous to die for one’s country; in that decorum the service is perfectly instructed.” That is the spirit of his book.

At first he intended to devote a longish chapter only to the early history of flying, but as he dipped into the subject he found himself committed to something fuller. The first flight in a power-driven heavier-than-air machine was made on December the 17th, 1903. Eleven years later the question of war in the air was beginning to agitate the minds of half the world. The development of air power in those few short years was amazing. The movement had started with extreme sluggishness. The feat of the Wright brothers attracted little attention at first. The world which is often slow to recognize the significance of contemporary events, did not know that a new era in its history had already opened. Certainly the few years immediately following the flight over the Kill Devil sand hills were years of scepticism and witticism. Only a handful of men laboured in whole-hearted enthusiasm for the cause of the air because they had vision and knew what it meant to the future of the world. But recognition forced itself on the nations of the world. Once interest was aroused it spread with amazing swiftness. People felt uneasy. The aeroplane was taken up as a weapon of national defence. The movement was under way and gathering increasing momentum. The progress of the art must have a share in the record of the war in the air, otherwise the story would not be understood. Sir Walter soon saw this. “If the battle of Trafalgar had been fought only some ten short years after the first adventurer trusted himself to the sea on a crazy raft,” he writes, “the ships, rather than the men, would be the heroes of that battle, and Nelson himself would be overshadowed by the Victory.”

The shape of the book was a worry. “I’m having a dreadful time,” he wrote early in 1919, “all by myself, struggling to get a shape for the book. However, I had ten days or so useless with a vile cold. And I dare say I shall cheer up soon.” The shape began to come, and as soon as a part of the first chapter on the Conquest of the Air was written he was anxious to come up to the office to read it to us. But he didn’t want to inflict himself on us. “You will see to it, won’t you, that attendance is voluntary and not a parade? It must not be like family prayers.” He read it to us, to our great delight, and then took it away to finish. But he was soon finding difficulties as to the length of the early history. “From the cormorant in the Garden of Eden to 1903 will be longish--too long, I think, to be part of a chapter,” and so it became a chapter to itself. This was written during the Easter vacation, and then Oxford claimed him again until the summer. But when June came he was back at work on his history, and the second chapter on the Aeroplane and the Airship was being written. He progressed well. On June the 8th, 1919, he wrote, “I shall have most of a chapter ready when I come, such a chapter full of riddles and shoals.” By the middle of August, Chapters II and III were ready. “I have got another bit done,” he wrote announcing this fact, “completing (but for a tail to be added) Chapter II. It is too long, so Chapter II will have to be Chapters II and III, thus: Chapter II. The Aeroplane and the Airship. Chapter III. The Beginnings of Flight in England.... I have been terribly slow. Some quite small things have cost me hours of turning over pages, not to speak of letters or waiting for answers.”

But when the chapters were written they were by no means finished. The Air Ministry had come into being only towards the end of the war. The Royal Air Force itself was formed on April the 1st, 1918, by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The records telling of the early history of those two services were scattered. The collection and collation of those records took time. But it was soon seen even in the early days that there would be sad gaps. Some important records were definitely lost. Others were missing. But apart from this even where they were complete, Sir Walter found much difficulty in weaving his story from official records. He wanted so much to get the personal element into his book. Official records he discovered were invented to conceal interesting facts. They were packed in wool and cut no ice. He once complained that he asked for butter and received a cow. So we were always trying to supplement the records with first-hand evidence. Much of this material came late. Many important facts turned up after the chapters had been written. They were constantly being touched up (alas!).