The Empire Air Training Scheme: Identity, Empire and Memory

was linked directly to the aviator hero the embodiment of masculine dominance. 55 Theadventure of flying, the conquest of speed and space, the technology, the loneliness ofthe pilot and the conquest of the sky, where the gods lived, had the makings of amyth. 56 The image of the airman was equated with that of the chivalric knight. Airmenpersonified the new idealised masculinity. 57 George Mosse has argued:the conquest of the skies was one important way in which the reality ofwar was masked and made bearable, though its implications reachedmuch further, to a way of looking at the nation and the world which, inturn, made confrontation with modern war that much easier. Wartime58aviation presented a climax of the myth of the war experience.Despite this, air warfare that ensued was new. There was no precedent onwhich to base expectations. Recruits carried with them images given in glorifiedaccounts such as those given by World War I official British historian WalterRaleigh. 59 He equated the pilot with a Greek sculpture in its rendering of ‘life andpurpose.’ 60 To Raleigh and others, air power introduced a new theatre to war, a ‘placeof vision, and speed and movement. A great highway for the traffic of peace.’ 61 ‘If themachines were good, the men in them were better. Was there ever such a company ofheroes as that Air Force of ours,’ were the seductive calls. 62 Yet lacking any precedentthe men were totally unprepared for the challenges of war found in the new technologyand it still remains almost impossible to recreate the physical and psychologicalconditions that were confronted by the challenges of air war that were so linked withtechnological advances of aerial war. The literature, capturing the individualexperiences of aerial combat is quite thin. The human dimension is given little focus.Histories of all aerial war relate to an analysis of the success of tactics, the importanceof aerial war to victory, specific battles, and stories of individual feats of daring. Theydo not relate the actual trials that were experienced by the airmen. Personal memoirs55 George Mosse, The Image of Man, (links of masculinity to nationalism, and image of the masculinebody).56 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 120.57 Ibid. 122.58 George Mosse, ‘The Knights of the Sky and the Myth of the War Experience,’ in Robert A. Hinde,Helen E. Watson, ed. War: A Cruel Necessity. The Bases of Institutionalized Violence London: I. B.Travis Publishers 1995, 132.59 Walter Raleigh The War in the Air, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.60 Ibid. 14.61 Ibid. 489.62 Ibid. 17.36