Jenny Nicholls reviews Grid: The life and times of First World War fighter ace Keith Caldwell by Adam Claasen for Waiheke Weekender:
‘“Crackle! Crackle! Crackle! There’s a Hun on my tail... The blighter is making my grid [plane] into a sieve... I managed to pull the machine out, just scraping over the trenches. The engine was still running, though the petrol was pouring out all over my legs...”
Although this reads like some pre-WWII boy’s own yarn – Biggles Goes to War, perhaps – it is a real anecdote from a World War I pilot who lived to tell the tale. Bullets fly in this gripping, beautifully illustrated tale of along-forgotten New Zealand fighter ace, barely out of his teens when he first faced equally young German pilots in fabric covered wooden contraptions (with no parachutes) thousands of feet in the air.
Keith ‘Grid’ Caldwell (the nickname is slang for airplane), the book’s subject, had many close shaves. In one long-forgotten story resuscitated here, he manages a crash-landing worthy of Biggles himself.
“The German trenches appeared and receded as the SE5a [Caldwell’s plane, wrecked in a collision at 5,000 feet] crossed no man’s land, the roar of the engine alerting British infantry, who looked up as the aeroplane careened barely above them. Impact was moments away.
“Caldwell leapt. As the machine ploughed into the ground, he tumbled free, over and over. Then he stood up, flicked the dirt from his aviator’s suit and strode to the nearest trench in search of a telephone.”
The airman survived six crash-landings to become New Zealand’s highest scoring pilot of the First World War (although he was, at first, a miserable shot).
In February 1918, at the age of 22, he was given command of 74 ‘Tiger’ Squadron, which went on to win so many Distinguished Flying Crosses (DFCs) one historian called it ‘the DFC squadron’. It scored more victories (downed enemy aircraft), but also fewer casualties than any other British squadron in the war.
Caldwell, widely adored by his men for ‘leading from the front’, emerges as a decisive natural leader, mature enough to feel compassion for an enemy reduced to caricature in the propaganda of the time. He was shocked, for example, to see two German airmen gunned down after they had crash landed.
“The Hun crashed but not badly, and most people would have been content with this — but not Mick Mannock. He dived half a dozen times at the machine, spraying bullets at the pilot and observer, who were still showing signs of life ... On being questioned [later], he heatedly replied, ‘The swines are better dead – no prisoners for me!’”
The author, a senior lecturer in history a tMassey University, includes enough detail to plunge his readers deeply into the life of a WWI fighter pilot, but not enough to be boring. Early war machines, he explains, were primitive and underpowered, and prone to engine and structural failure. By 1917 and 1918, after feverish factory improvements (and the deaths of many test pilots), they were much tougher, faster, and could fly higher. The plane Caldwell jumped out of, says Claasen, could exceed 320 kilometers per hour in a dive and climb to 5,200 meters – hard to imagine in an open cockpit.
By seeing out the war, Caldwell was among few surviving aviators to experience the extent of development in airplane technology and aerial fighting tactics. At the end, he walked away from his beloved SE5a with a string of honours, including a Croix de guerre. Although Claasen largely focuses on his twenty-seven months of military air service in WWI, Caldwell’s later life as a New Zealand farmer was interrupted by a WWII busy enough to earn him the rank of air commodore, a CBE in 1945, and two more chapters in Claasen’s biography.
The book gives a thoughtful account of the world which produced Caldwell, a New Zealand strikingly different from our own. Not long before enlisting, he graduated from Wanganui Collegiate, a school “well suited to creating young men fit and eager for war. God, king and country were the holy trinity to which the boys were wedded. Sports were often seen as more important than classroom teaching because they created gentlemen of good character steeped in the virtues of sacrifice, honour, hard work and teamwork.”
Although Claasen doesn’t sugar coat the horrors of WWI, the line about teenagers “eager for war” reminds me of a masterpiece of literature, written by a poet who died a week before the war’s end.
“[the] children ardent for some desperate glory / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Propatria mori.”’
