Close Encounters in War Journal (Dec 2022)
Fighting on Flying Machines. Wonders and Horrors of Aerial Warfare in Pilots’ Personal Narratives (1915 1918)
Abstract
The advent of aeroplanes during the Great War gave birth to an unprecedented form of interrelation between the human and the machine. Like cavalrymen, who had to be expert riders before becoming soldiers, pilots were supposed to master their machines before they could fly them into battle. Therefore, their military drilling included engineering, mechanics, flying theory, and aerial tactics as well as shooting practice. However, as the pilots began to take part in the battles public interest more and more focused on the romantic aspect of flying and duelling. Unlike infantrymen, who barely managed to see their opponents, the pilots were able to engage their adversaries in close-range duels over the trenches, thanks to the technological means of the aeroplane. Thus, the new ‚aerial cavalry‛ depicted in papers and posters and the heroic figures of aces soon became instruments of propaganda. The crude reality of flying and fighting aboard the fragile and often unreliable planes emerges, instead, from the memoirs of the pilots, who were both fascinated and terrified by that new technological warfare. This paper will compare a number of memoirs of pilots from different countries (e.g. Baracca, Bishop, Collishaw, Fonck, Immelmann, Mannock, McCudden, MacLachanan, Richthofen, Udet, and others) to understand how the new aerial warfare was perceived, elaborated and depicted by those who experienced it directly. It will also analyse the rhetorical strategies that the authors of the selected memoirs used to harmonise the legend of the ‚air cavalry‛ with the harsh reality of the new-born warfare, oscillating between wonder and horror. Eventually, the paper will claim that the reference to chivalric honour was only a way to embellish a new brutal form of technological warfare.
