'Winged Victory', by V M Yeates, is one of the greatest books about First World War aviation - that oft mythologised aspect of the war, in which young men made up the rules as they went along about aerial combat and clashed with each other in machines made of wood and fabric. Although it could be argued that the horror of being an infantry soldier in the trenches was without equal, the life of a Western Front pilot was brutish and short, with more pilots dying in training than in combat, victim to a mode of warfare in technology that was barely a decade old.
The novel describes a few months in the life of a young pilot, Tom Cundall, during the final stages of the war in the Western Front, as the fledgling Royal Flying Corps morphs into the Royal Air Force. The novel is set against the final set piece battles, with Cundall taking part in suicidal ground-strafing missions during the Spring Offensive and the later battles of Amiens.
I grew up being fascinated with aviation in the Great War, and I was a keen reader of Biggles. However this novel is very different to the work of Captain W E Johns, where Biggles seems to treat the war as a great game and escapes all kinds of tricky situations by the skin of his teeth. In comparison, Cundall is a mess, as he tries to blot out the stress of ever-more dangerous missions with 'binges' in the mess that often result in him throwing up and having to complete missions with a hangover, or even in one instance, completing a sortie while 'tight' (drunk). Cundall is far from being a hero, and indeed his main pre-occupations are with avoiding unnecessary danger and staying alive, as one by one his friends disappear in a mess of flame and smoke around him.
What I found interesting about the novel was the sense of 'keeping up appearances'. Cundall clearly has had enough of the war, but appears to keep him motivated is not just the will to survive, but also not to appear 'windy' (cowardly) in front of his friends, particularly when Cundall repeatedly, but accidentally, crashes his Sopwith Camel, until he realises, with some mortification, that his comrades are suspicious that he is doing it on purpose. On one memorable occassion, Cundall is found out by a new C.O who sees through Cundall's avoidance of fighting, to his anger and shame.
The novel is clearly a thinly veiled autobiographical account of the author's own experiences. Yeates also flew Camels during the last year of the war on the Western Front, and was also invalided home. One can only speculate how many of the characters and incidents are based on real incidents that Yeates experienced. Unfortunately, the author died of tuberculosis while still in his thirties, his novel a commercial failure. I have to admit that I had never heard of it before. However, having read it, I now consider it to be one of the greats, not just of literature about those early days of aviation, but of Great War literature as a whole. I highly recommend it.
