Neill Atkinson reviews Adam Claasen’s Grid: The life and times of First World War fighter ace Keith Caldwell for New Zealand Journal of History:
‘YOU SHOULDN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER, but this one definitely stands out from the crowd in a bookshop. Keith Caldwell’s close-cropped portrait fixes the viewer with a steely gaze, above its bold single-word title: Grid (a reference to the subject’s wartime nickname).
Caldwell’s story centres on his 27 months of frontline service with the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and its successor, the Royal Air Force, between 1916 and 1918 – itself a notable feat at a time when pilots’ life expectancy was often measured in days or weeks. Though regarded as a better flyer than marksman, he became the outstanding New Zealand fighter ‘ace’ of World War I, credited with destroying or forcing down 26 German aircraft. He was also an inspirational leader. In 1918, still only 22, Major Caldwell moulded No. 74 ‘Tiger’ Squadron into one of the best fighter units on the Western Front.
Despite these accomplishments – and the enduring glamour of dashing aviators, from the Red Baron to Top Gun – Caldwell has never enjoyed the name recognition of figures like Charles Upham, Keith Park, or William Malone, or even World War II airmen like Al Deere and Cobber Kain. Neither has he been completely ignored. He featured in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1996, appears in life- size diorama form at Sir Peter Jackson’s Knights of the Sky exhibition at Omaka, and is prominent in Claasen’s excellent World War I centenary history, Fearless: The Extraordinary Untold Story of New Zealand’s Great War Airmen (2017).
Fearless laid the groundwork for this book, but Claasen admits he wasn’t initially convinced there was sufficient source material to justify a full biography. Unlike some contemporaries, the notoriously humble Caldwell shunned publicity, deplored the popular fixation with aces, and never wrote a memoir. While air battles offer knife-edge drama, the best biographies must provide deeper insight into a subject’s personality and motivations. In addition to Claasen’s extensive archival research in New Zealand and Britain, the availability of rich family material, including wartime letters, help us see ‘Grid’ as more than a one-dimensional hero figure.
Claasen is a fluent, engaging writer, skilled at weaving together official and personal accounts, deploying vivid quotations, and explaining technical aspects of aviation and warfare to a general readership. Chapter 1 begins in 1918 with an account of Caldwell’s most famous escapade, but otherwise the book’s structure is conventional. Caldwell may have been modest, but his background was not. He was born into a wealthy Auckland family, attended Wanganui Collegiate School, and was immersed in tradition, manly sports, cadet training, and muscular Christianity. As Claasen demonstrates, the societal, educational, and religious influences of the era help explain why so many young men of Caldwell’s generation (and social class) eagerly volunteered for war.
Relatively few New Zealanders had the opportunity to join the RFC, a specialist, elite branch of the imperial war effort. Caldwell’s tuition at the Walsh brothers’ Auckland flying school cost £100, a substantial sum in 1915. His wartime experiences were very different to most of his compatriots. Instead of enduring cramped troopships and grim barracks, he sailed to England first-class, accompanied by his mother and sister (who later worked at the New Zealand Soldiers’ Club in London), booked into the Regency, then began his RFC training at Christ Church College, Oxford. Many of his fellow pilots were seriously posh: Etonians, barristers, expert cocktail-makers. When not dispatching ‘Hunnerinoes’ (Germans) and dodging ‘Archie’ (flak), they toast fallen pals in riotous mess-hall knees-ups, ‘stroll about in pyjamas and play tennis’ (p.261).
In this regard, Caldwell’s war mirrors the experiences of wealthy New Zealand sons who sailed to Britain to join famous regiments, some of the well-connected women profiled in Jane Tolerton’s Make Her Praises Heard Afar (2017), and, more broadly, educated New Zealand expatriates who made their mark at ‘Home’. Canadians, Australians, and South Africans of similar class backgrounds were also prominent in the RFC. What does Grid reveal about how dominion elites navigated English society, and about relationships and movement between the imperial centre and its periphery? How did Caldwell see himself, and others see him – as ‘wild colonial boy’ (p.80), a Better Briton, or something else? How did war shape his identity? We get some glimpses, but these aspects could have been more fully interrogated.
In biographies of war heroes, where high drama is typically condensed into a short, intense period, the subject’s later life can sometimes feel like a postscript, even an anti-climax. Here, Claasen does a commendable job traversing Caldwell’s long, active post-war life: his contribution to interwar aviation, significant World War I command postings in New Zealand and Britain (plus a demanding stint in India), his involvement with the 1914–18 Airmen’s Association, farming, and family life in Waikato and Papatoetoe. Even so, it’s no surprise that around 60% of the text focuses on 1916–1918.
This superbly researched, well-illustrated, and highly readable biography should certainly achieve its aim of restoring ‘Grid’ Caldwell to a prominent place in New Zealand’s military history.’
