In Sally Gordon’s inner city villa in Auckland, the central hallway is lined with photographs of four generations of her family. Among them are two striking images: one a studio portrait of a serious air commodore, all braid and ribbons, and the other a Kodak Brownie snapshot of a newly married groom and his bride, all smiles and unrestrained joy. They’re photographs of her late grandfather Keith Caldwell, airman extraordinaire and family man.
I’m here to interview Sally’s mother — and Keith’s only surviving child — Mary Gordon (née Caldwell). Well into her nineties, she is a window into the life and times of one of the First World War’s most important airmen and one of New Zealand’s most significant contributors to its Second World War effort.
‘Grid’, as he was universally known on the Western Front, was widely acknowledged to have survived more aerial bales than any other Empire airman, including a heartpounding tussle against Germany’s most accomplished pilot, Werner Voss, and members of Manfred von Richthofen’s Flying Circus. Caldwell’s miraculous and famous ‘leap’ from his doomed aeroplane in September 1918, which opens the first chapter of this book, was just one of six crash-landings he survived over an incredible 27 months in a service in which many men’s lives were counted in mere days.
His longevity as a pilot, from 1916 to 1918, meant he was one of the few airmen to witness first hand the rapid development of the war’s single-seat fighters and aerial fighting tactics. While flying some of the war’s most recognisable biplanes — the rudimentary Maurice Farman, the ubiquitous Royal Aircraft Factory BE2c, the French designed Nieuport 17, the twitchy Sopwith Camel and the fleet-footed Royal Aircraft Factory SE5a — he served with and befriended a constellation of luminous individuals, including Albert Ball, Robert Smith-Barry, Frank Soden, Robert Chidlaw- Roberts, Henry Meintjes, William Fry, Alan ‘Jack’ Scott, Spencer Horn, William Molesworth, Sydney Pope, Billy Bishop, Benjamin Roxburgh-Smith, Ira Jones and Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock. In the final year of the war, aged 22, he was given command of a newly formed fighter formation: 74 ‘Tiger’ Squadron. In France, under his leadership, this became, by many measures, the most successful British squadron and Caldwell one of the war’s most effective commanders.
The Tigers accumulated victories in aerial combat more quickly than any other British fighter squadron in the same period: 225 (including 15 balloons) in only 206 days. And all of this was achieved with only 10 killed in action, four in accidents and eight taken as prisoners of war — one of the lowest casualty rates for a fighter squadron on the Western Front. Along the way Caldwell and his men accumulated a clutch of decorations: a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) medal and two bars; a Military Cross (MC); nine Distinguished Flying Crosses (DFC) and three bars; a Military Medal and three Belgian Croix de guerres. The large number of DFCs led at least one unit historian to dub the Tigers the ‘DFC Squadron’.
Caldwell was central to all of this. ‘Major Caldwell had more guts than any other three men,’ wrote 74 Squadron pilot Len Richardson. ‘[He was] without doubt the fairest, squarest and most beloved C.O. of any squadron in France.’ Fellow airman Ira Jones was emphatic:
Major Caldwell’s success as a C.O. lay in example, both by words and deeds he inspired us to fight to kill. There were no half measures about him. He always led squadron patrols and his fearless leadership invariably took us far over the enemy’s lines regardless of opposition. The more the enemy the more he revelled in the attack. Like the German [Oswald] Boelcke he had the rare ability of picking out promising fighters, while not hesitating to get rid of duds; by patience, practice and leadership, he welded together a unit which feared no foe. He possessed that indefinable quality called Personality.
After taking command of 74 Squadron, Caldwell’s modest personal tally in aerial combat rose prodigiously. During 1918, in disregard of general prohibitions against squadron commanders flying on operations with their men and specific orders he’d received, Caldwell regularly led late-afternoon offensive squadron patrols. Seventeen of his 26 victories in the First World War were at the helm of the Tigers, a remarkable achievement that made him not only his nation’s highest scoring pilot of the war but also the fourth-highest in the British air service in victories acquired over the enemy while commanding a squadron.
During the interwar period he helped to develop military and civil aviation, and he played important roles in New Zealand’s nascent air force and the Auckland Aero Club before contributing to the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s (RNZAF) efforts in the Second World War. As commander at RNZAF stations Woodbourne and Wigram he dispatched more New Zealand-trained air service personnel to Europe and the Pacific than any other antipodean, and in the war’s latter stages he went on two important overseas postings. In India, he came to the rescue of forgotten and abandoned countrymen and in Britain he organised and managed the largest repatriation of New Zealanders from service in foreign forces in the nation’s history. In the three decades that followed, Caldwell was a prominent figure in the remembrance of those who had served and fallen in both wars and in the global community dedicated to recalling and retelling the stories of the Great War airmen. His life is both a gripping tale and an illuminating study in leadership and resilience across two world wars.
Given all of this, it is surprising Caldwell had never been the subject of a biography, especially when memoirs and biographies of airmen of far lesser stature proliferated after the war and in the decades that followed. Towards the end of his life, surviving airmen of the Great War and air-power enthusiasts, researchers and historians begged Caldwell to give the world of military aviation a memoir. He demurred, citing declining memory, pedestrian typing and the difficulty of reconstructing the story from a hodgepodge of incomplete and scattered documentation.
Despite his protestations, by the 1970s he was one of the few airmen of his stature left who had their wits about them. Some suggested he record his story to cassette tape for later transcription but he was having none of it. Part of this was simply that in his advanced retirement he lacked the motivation for the demanding task. He was also possessed of excessive modesty. Caldwell was far more at ease talking about the brave deeds of his comrades-in-arms than of his own endeavours and, although he championed the publication of books about others, was not about to blow his own trumpet with a Caldwell memoir.
Caldwell’s concern about his ability to locate, gather and order a sufficient body of materials to reconstruct his life was not misplaced. The biographical attempts of several researchers and historians wanting to tell this story have floundered on these rocks. For international writers, the tyranny of distance in the pre-internet age was a significant impediment to acquiring adequate material from far-flung New Zealand. Letters to his descendants were met with replies that hinted at assistance and possible sources but never bore fruit to bring a project into full focus.
Consequently, all that had been published on Caldwell during his lifetime and after his death in 1980 was a handful of short articles in aviation-related publications, and of course these were narrowly focused on his military exploits. In other words, although Caldwell was an eminent candidate for a rich biography, it was uncertain whether sufficient material existed to produce one that captured the times in which he lived, the forces that shaped him, and the institutions and people on which he had an impact in his public and private life.
My subsequent research involved locating and gathering materials from New Zealand and British archives and members of the Caldwell family. Domestically, the most important source was the Air Force Museum of New Zealand (AFMNZ), which not only holds Caldwell’s all-important logbook but also a large collection of his personal photograph albums. Both bear Caldwell’s imprint: he overwrote his fading wartime logbook pencil notations in ball-point pen after the Second World War and many of his snapshots are plastered with Dymo Label Maker black tape embossed with relevant information.
Among other important pieces of the Caldwell puzzle was a confidential file, held by the AFMNZ, that he compiled during his postings to Woodbourne and Wigram. The manila folder is surprisingly thick with paperwork and controversy. Crises and conspiracies abound alongside mundane matters. Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga (ANZ) holds Caldwell’s ‘Base Records’ personnel file, which contains sketchy but useful materials on his post-First World War life with the New Zealand air service in its various guises and his involvement in the Second World War RNZAF.
In addition to ANZ’s files on the establishment and running of the New Zealand Flying School, where Caldwell first learnt to fly, the Auckland Museum of Transport and Technology’s (MOTAT) Walsh Memorial Library had useful material on the local instruction of men like Caldwell before their embarkation to Britain. Whanganui Collegiate School archives has details of Caldwell’s academic and sporting records, photographs and copies of the school’s magazine. The Wanganui Collegian proved a rich source for Caldwell’s formative years. The Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira, while lacking much in the way of Caldwell documentation, had two objects closely associated with him: his flying suit and a war trophy — a German machine gun extracted from a ‘downed’ Fokker DVII.
Of the British archives, three London-based repositories were extremely important for Caldwell’s First World War service: the Imperial War Museum (IWM), the Royal Air Force Museum and The National Archives (TNA). The laer two institutions were foundational for fleshing out Caldwell’s activities in 8 Squadron, 60 Squadron and 74 Squadron. For example, materials at TNA revealed that for all his bravery and leadership skills, Caldwell was never a stickler for personal record keeping. Caldwell’s logbook records only a single sortie between 11 September and 11 October 1917, while his squadron officer record book details nearly 40 flights. Conflicting dates over engagements with the enemy and other important maers charted in his logbook required considerable checking against other materials.
Given the large number of individuals with whom Caldwell rubbed shoulders and who fell under his leadership in 74 Squadron, a significant number of War Office personnel files were collected. To put Caldwell’s activities in context of the larger air war effort, I gathered the war diaries of relevant wings and battalions under which these respective squadrons operated, as well as the daily ‘routine orders’ that deal with such matters as personnel departures and arrivals, leave provisions, discipline enforcement and the myriad official strictures covering everything from sexually transmitted diseases and the treatment of French farmers’ crops to the use of the squadron’s motor pool. These orders have seldom been utilised by researchers and historians and they open a window to the difficulties and demands faced by squadron commanding officers.
Even with thousands of pages of documents, there were still gaps in his military service in both world wars and in his private family life. Mercifully, I discovered that although other writers had made little progress in locating documents from the family, I had a strong ally in Caldwell’s granddaughter Sally Gordon. She was able to introduce me not only to her mother but also to other grandchildren, family members and individuals with links to her late grandfather.
It gradually became apparent that ‘Werfer’, as he was affectionately known among his descendants, had in fact le a considerable collection of personal papers and photographs and that these had been dispersed among his four children (Mary, Peter, David and Virginia), and subsequently handed on to the next generation. Sally supplied me with a very large trove of long and fulsome letters written by Caldwell that filled in the details of his time in India and London between 1944 and 1946.
When I visited David’s son, Andrew Caldwell, on his Glen Murray farm, he regretted that some materials had been lost in flooding on the farm decades earlier, yet he still produced two large suitcases filled with an eclectic range of indispensable documents and items related to his grandfather’s civil and military life, including correspondence with family members, solicitors, government officials and First World War airmen; old passports charting world trips; papers associated with membership in the Auckland Aero Club and the Northern Club; and a vast amount of documentation to do with Caldwell’s farm at Glen Murray and Papatoetoe.
Virginia’s daughter Deborah Stovell was able to answer a question that lingered long into the project: Had Caldwell written letters during the First World War and, if he had, where were they? Deborah produced a cache of over two dozen letters written from the Western Front to his mother and sister when they were living in London in 1918. All this substantial primary material was supplemented by published and unpublished diaries and memoirs from airmen who had flown with Caldwell; extracts from interviews and letters that appeared in the journal dedicated to First World War aviation, the British and international editions of the Cross and Cockade; and correspondence between Caldwell and his former squadron members in the last two decades of his life.
I would encourage readers of this biography to set aside misapprehensions and easy tropes about the Great War and early military aviation. The term ‘victories’ used throughout this book covers a broad range of achievements over the enemy and not simply ‘kills’, as popularly conceived. During the 1914–1918 war, success against Central Power airmen in aerial combat encompassed a much wider range of possibilities including ‘destroyed’, ‘out of control’, ‘captured’ or ‘forced to land’. In other words, a victory did not necessarily entail the death of the enemy airman. Nonetheless, all the proceeding categories were unquestionably ‘victories’ of one kind or another over the enemy and were seen that way during the war.
When fighting took place high up, between 12,000 and 18,000 feet, it was not always possible to confirm the result of what appeared to be a successful encounter, especially in a continuing dogfight or with low cloud cover. Undoubtedly, on many occasions enemy pilots feigned fatal injuries only to pull out of a death spiral at low altitude and flee east to fight another day. Moreover, given that the fighting took place for the most part on the German side of the lines, it was often impossible to conclusively verify a pilot’s claim.
‘The Germans,’ wrote Caldwell to an aviation researcher in the 1970s, ‘could be much more accurate in their claims because, as most of the air fighting was over their side, they were able to confirm the destruction of Allied aircraft.’ The character qualities of the British air service claimant, the supporting evidence from fellow airmen or observers on the ground all fed into the decision by a squadron’s commanding officer to sign off and forward combat claims to higher authorities for addition to an airman’s score.
Caldwell’s total of 26 victories is chiefly derived from his ‘combat in air’ reports. Where possible, these were corroborated with other primary documents and compared with Caldwell’s tallies that appear in several published works. With a few qualifications regarding dates and locations of claims, the list at the end of this book is close to the number given in the widely respected, if dated, work on the subject: Christopher Shores, Norman Franks and Russell Guest’s Above the Trenches: A complete record of the fighter aces and units of the British Empire air forces, 1915–1920. Given the gaps in the surviving records and the assertion by several of his contemporaries that Caldwell passed some of his victories on to newly arrived airmen in 74 Squadron, it is entirely possible that his own calculation of ‘27 enemy machines down’ — written in the last few pages of his logbook — is conservative.
Modern readers tend to place a lot of importance on the ‘ace’ status (five or more victories) and leaderboards of the war’s top pilots, but Caldwell always emphasised that the total ‘score of victories to this or that airman in the air lists of books . . . should not be regarded as the “be all” or “end all” of an airman’s worth’. On a number of occasions after the war he expressed his frustration with aviation buffs whose narrow focus on such matters ignored the greater body of men (air and ground crew) who made any victories possible and argued that an individual’s contribution to a squadron could not be measured in such a crude manner. The ability to knock the enemy from the sky was extremely important but it was not the defining or sole quality of a good airman in Caldwell’s eyes.
Moreover, the war was neither Rupert Brooke nor Wilfred Owen — idealism and glory versus cruelty and horror. As readers will discover, there is considerable truth to W. E. John’s portrayal of the wondrously adventurous life on the Western Front of the airman he dubbed Biggles, but there was also an unequivocal ruthlessness to killing the enemy. Death and grief were as close as the next patrol. Through all of this, bonds were formed that would last a lifetime. For many, including Caldwell, the war proved to be the pivotal event of their lives, simultaneously marring and surprisingly enriching.
Likewise, it is fashionable to see the First World War aeroplanes as rickety wood, wire and fabric death-traps. Although there is considerable truth to the impression that early in the war great numbers of poorly trained airmen flying unreliable and unstable machines were quickly dispatched both at home and over the Western Front, and that throughout the war, fire was an ever-present danger in a service in which parachutes were inexplicably absent, it is also true that by mid-war the aeroplanes were extremely robust and purposeful in their lethality.
Stronger airframes, more powerful engines and increased weaponry meant Caldwell’s SE5a of 1918 bore only a passing resemblance to the machines he learnt to fly in 1915. In preparation for writing this book I was fortunate to be offered the opportunity to fly in a First World War two-seat BE2c from Sir Peter Jackson’s collection at Hood Aerodrome, Masterton. Unbeknown to me, my pilot, Dave Horrell, had arranged for us to be ‘jumped’ by an SE5a and Fokker DVII from The Vintage Aviator Limited’s large aeroplane inventory. The rapidity and aggressiveness of the two single-seat fighters as they mercilessly swooped in behind us and peeled away at speed was as frightening as it was exhilarating. Make no mistake, these were the premier machines of their era and not the stuff of Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines and popular imagination. Think of them as the Supermarine Spitfire of the Second World War or the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightening II of our own time.
The war was far from sepia-toned, and in the air even less so. The surviving photographs of the First World War mislead us. The multi-coloured fields and green forests of northwestern France fought with the riotous yellows, blues and reds of the German machines for the attention of the British air service pilots. As the inclusion of photographs of machines from The Vintage Aviator collection in the colour section of this book demonstrates, the air war was as colourful as its participants.
Little did I realise when I finished my interview with Mary Gordon that four years of research and writing lay ahead of me. I had planned to place the published copy of this book in her hands but, sadly, as the completion of the manuscript drew near, Sally told me that her mother had died, aged 98. It is my hope that this book will bring the story of Mary’s father to life for a new generation.
