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Aviation History
1951
1951 - 0985.PDF
6i6 FLIGHT T. E. LAWRENCE AND THE R.A.F. . . . also have forbidden him to reap any advantage from his name or reputation when taking employment; but whatever his secret, we can rejoice that he kept it well. What is of greater interest to us is why he should have joined the R.A.F. It is true that his valuable experience, though on a small scale, of air co-operation in war had made him aware of the possibilities of air control; on account of this he had supported Lord Trenchard's advocacy of the scheme for Iraq and other mandated territories in the Middle East: There may also have been a sentimental reason, in that he had lost a brother in the Royal Flying Corps. Pro- bably the factor which had more influence upon his choice than any other, however, was that he had such a profound distrust of orthodox military training and, having decided on ranker service, saw in the newly formed R.A.F. an opportunity for it to be unhampered by older traditions. To him the R.A.F. seemed imbued with a spirit of readiness and vigilance combined with the desire for new horizons of influence in peace and war; he was "on fire with the glory which the air should be."3 Yet blindly he seemed to imagine that, since its ranks were composed of technicians who must be held personally responsible for their work (and who were therefore more individualistic than infantry soldiers), the R.A.F. would evolve a suitable discipline for itself to replace older and less appropriate forms. It is evident that he was not unaware that there were special difficulties inherent in the R.A.F. structure, for he wrote to John Buchan as late as 1928 that "the R.A.F. has not yet found the way out between the rocks of discipline and individual intelligence,"4 Yet in spite of his tremendous military knowledge and the fact that he was a model of punctilious discipline himself, he often complained bitterly in private letters that R.A.F. domestic life was founded upon basic military law. Of course, he did not enter the R.A.F. either to study it or consciously to improve it, and the letters were written in many moods; but he might almost have been the originator of the oldest and most illogical of false maxims—that an airman will do anything for his aircraft except guard it with a rifle. Swagger canes, compulsory church parades, breeches and puttees, kit inspections, and the incursions of the orderly officer; all were attacked and generally described as being twenty years behind in matters of common decency, and as having been designed for the immature.3 Lawrence on Discipline Undoubtedly, regular airmen of that time, as now, were of a high standard, and, unlike most private soldiers, had entered their Service for a career. The devotion they felt for their aircraft, as far as it went, is the earliest and best of all R.A.F. traditions, but the cohesion stimulated by being at grips with an untrustworthy natural element has never proved quite sufficient to permeate every moment of air- force duty in the same way that it is evident in naval duty aboard a man-of-war. Duller metheds are necessary to solve those air-force problems which are not actually aero- nautical. In spite of being technicians and not normally combatant, air-force troops are ground troops and must be kept mentally aware that one day, no matter how unlikely the event, they may have to defend an airfield and its equip- ment against enemy forces, and must therefore be trained as infantry in order to be able to do their share of fighting, with a stiffening, perhaps, of proper combatant ground troops. Yet Lawrence could write, with mischievous ir- responsibility, at a time when there was not even the R.A.F. Regiment, "discipline itself is not necessary, we fight better without it."6 With his background he must have known that what he calls "the restrictive"7 in the discipline of all arms- bearing troops is not, like battle training, intended directly to improve their ability to fight; that there is another, equally important, side to discipline. At Tafas, in Syria, he and his Arabs had seen the frightful results of deeds perpetrated by a demoralized Turkish army in rout : deeds which led to that army's eventful annihilation.8 They had admired, in con- trast, the behaviour of a column of Germans and Austrians who, though thousands of miles from home and with their war lost, had remained faithful to their military ideals until the end.9 This is the other need—to ensure morale restraint in times of disorder, when the privations of the siege have given place to either the gluts of victory or the opportunities of retreat, and, as always, the means to riot and murder lie close at hand. ; In less personal matters than these, however, Lawrence felt so strongly for the good of the R.A.F., that it ought to have been possible, without vulgarity, for him to have been one of its greatest assets in public relations for recruiting. Whatever the private motive of his enlistment may have been, his gesture could have been represented as a noble one, instead of his being regarded as a skeleton in the Air Ministry cup- board.10 Fortunately Lawrence's sense of humour often allowed him to play the administrative machinery at its own cheerless game. A Tank Corps N.C.O. relates how, soon after his enlistment at Bovington following the Famborough "scandal", Lawrence received a telegram from the Air Ministry requesting him to report there temporarily at once. It happened that for a small domestic offence as a recruit he was "confined to barracks" at the time; so, instead of in- forming his new commanding officer that he had been summoned by a Ministry, he wired back with great relish "unable to comply with request as am a defaulter."11 Years of Adventure Those were the years of the Schneider Cup, and of R.A.F- participation in expeditions to Everest and to Greenland, as well as a more thrifty and humane Pax Britannica, with its strength in the air, over the mandates in the Middle East— activities which combined to bring to the new service those idealistic Elizabethan enthusiasms which are so valuable in our national life. It was also the era of the first world flights on route-survey, and in July, 1929, we find Lawrence petitioning Lord Trenchard to divert the airship R.101 from her proposed route to Karachi to allow her to pass over Rub' al Khali, the then untraversed "Empty Quarter" of Arabia.12 To the Secretary of State, Sir Philip Sassoon, he confided on another occasion that it was his ambition to take part in one of the flying-boat cruises then being projected and write a log of it so that he could contribute to a new collection in the literature of travel, a Hakluyt of the air.13 What a pity that his remarkable powers for observation and description could not have been used to relieve the dreariness of air-route books, like that sense of wonder and curiosity with which Mathew Flinders and other 18th century hydro- graphers seem to have set and illumined the style of the Admiralty Pilots. Lawrence's feeling for the air was not limited to the tasks of the R.A.F.; he could see much scope there for endeavour in other forms, for he recognized the peculiar British genius in handling the new medium. His later years in the R.A.F. seem to have given him some relief from the torments of memory and conscience from which he had originally suffered, for although he had so successfully fulfilled his destiny in Arabia, he had seen and known almost too much for any man to bear. Through being associated with flying boats and the Schneider Cup floatplanes, he became interested in planing-bottom design for R.A.F. marine craft, and in the use and maintenance of these boats. His Notes on handling the 200 Class Seaplane Tender would do credit to a master mariner.14 The manned, armoured, bombing-target craft owes its conception to him. The emblem of 204 Squadron, "A cormorant with wings displayed," was designed from a photograph submitted by Lawrence, although the motto which his scholarship devised had to be abandoned for a shorter one when the design en- closing R.A.F. crests became standardized.* In conclusion, it is gratifying and humbling to realize how much "T.E.L., who should sleep among kings"15 was loved and respected by the decent generous men with whom he chose to spend more than twelve years of his life. BIBLIOGRAPHY (i) "Letters", p. 26a. (2) "Seven Pillars", p. 161. (3) Letters, No. 205. (4) Ibid., No, 367, ($) Ibid., Nos, 390, 424, 352, 353, 354- (6) Ibid., No. 414. Lawrence's coffin (buried Moreton, Dorset).'The present writer served in No. 204 Squadron from 1937 and helped to obtain advice on a new motto, at Mount Batten.
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