Visual Geographies/Emotional Topographies: Coping with the Terrors of First World

War Aerial Combat*

Although the First World War highlighted human vulnerability through the terrors of

mechanised warfare ravaging the male body in new ways, it also fostered moments of tenderness

and camaraderie that reshaped martial masculinities (Bourke 1996; Roper 2009). This paper

explores such intimacies as shared in letters and diaries written by British airmen of the Royal

Flying Corps (RFC) at time of combat on the Western Front. I discuss the ways the sensual

geographies of aerial combat, the ‘eye in the sky’ as compared to the claustrophobic geographies

of trench warfare, promised a mastery and expanded vision that shaped the emotional

topographies of airmen’s combat lives.

The RFC was founded in 1912 and entered World War I as the aerial arm of the British

Army. Initially providing infantry support through photographic reconnaissance, after 1915

aeroplanes (or ‘machines’ as they were called at the time) were going into combat and bombing

enemy troops and infrastructure (Morrow 1993). Capturing the imagination of a British public,

airmen invigorated nationalist discourse through exciting representations of military

masculinities and daring acts of heroism represented as combining flying and shooting skills in a

single act of courageous combat (Frantzen 2004; Mackersey 2012). However flight was in its

infancy, parachutes were never allowed, and flying was a difficult and dangerous, albeit

exclusive, practice with planes (made out of linen, wire, and wood) prone to stalling and tipping,

especially on landing. One airmen noted, for example, it was ‘so windy that machines actually

went backwards’ (Garland, 21 December 1916, D/IW).

Yet, despite life expectancies of pilots being relatively short, young officers barely out of

their teens clamoured to join the RFC, lured by the opportunity for higher pay and better

conditions, more active, engaged combat, and to avoid or leave the monotonous and relatively

passive horrors of the trenches (Norris 1965; Winter 1983). The RFC promised romance and

adventure and a certain amount of prestige because having the right pedigree was often the

shortest route to a commission. As a result, with recruitment from elite public schools and

universities, the RFC was very much a hierarchical, socially-exclusive, and class-based

organisation that functioned in relatively autonomous ways within the military establishment * Excerpted from ‘“Eye in the Sky”: Visual Geographies and Emotional Topographies of First World War Airmen’, Gender, Place and Culture 24. 8 (2017): 1127-1144.

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(Francis 2008; Hynes 2014). The rhythm of service was also unique with intense periods of

combat duty followed by long stretches of unsupervised inactivity, with the result that squadron

life often resembled a fraternity or gentleman’s club with a spirit of rowdy camaraderie or esprit

de corps emerging as a central aspect of the glamour of the organisation. Such camaraderie

facilitated ‘a hegemonic masculinity linked to revivals of chivalry and elite athleticism in British

culture’ (Collins 2015, 1).

My hope in this paper is to follow Cheryl McGeachan’s (2014, 825) call for scholarship

in historical geography that ‘nuances’ the ways subjects inhabited militarised spaces battered,

bruised and sometimes broken, as well as empowered and energised. This exploration of the

spatial politics of airmen’s emotional lives thus addresses the ways imperialist practices shaped

affective dimensions of masculinities in militarised spaces. Following Santanu Das’s scholarship

on the haptic geographies of trench warfare where sight becomes a superfluous sense, this paper

addresses the following question: If the claustrophobia of the trenches and the impoverishment

of visual experience facilitated certain geographies of senses that produced male intimacies, what

might similar emotional terrains look like for airmen exposed to more expansive visual

practices?

In late 1917, for example, after transferring his commission from field artillery to the

RFC, William Lidsey basked in the ‘glorious sensation’ of flying among ‘clean white clouds’.

Having survived the Battle of the Somme interred in what he described in his diary as ‘the filthy

liquid mud of the trenches’, Lidsey declared flight ‘perfectly lovely up there’. Illustrating the

ways ‘up there’ was a metaphorical as well as geographical space, the air promised purity and

freedom from the harrowing experiences of war, just as the white clouds were contrasted against

the dirt and confusions of combat (6 July 1916, 21 November 1917, D/IW).1 Compare this to

Santanu Das’s narratives in Touch and Intimacy about the visual geography of the everyday

world being replaced in the trenches by a geography prioritising touch, smell, and sound over

vision. Das (2005, 83) suggests trench warfare created an atmosphere of ‘darkness, danger and

uncertainty’, a ‘war of materials over masculinity, the triumph of chance over agency’, which

fostered emotional topographies associated with touch.

Following Das, my point here is that promises of an expanded vision and masculine

agency encouraged by technologies of flight, which aligned with the imperatives of British

imperial hegemonies, collided with a host of vulnerabilities resulting from aerial combat and

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produced anxiety as an emotional constant. I am suggesting that flight exacerbated notions of

power and mastery, promising to expand masculine hegemony, at the very same time that the

actual material conditions of flight invoked vulnerability, fear, and anxiety. Just as the horrors of

trench combat fostered certain expressions of male intimacy according to Das, the sensuous

geographies of flight, which promoted isolation and separation in the context of extreme risk,

influenced men’s emotional lives. I explore two dimensions of this emotional topography:

domesticity and rowdy play, focusing on the ways emotions as embodied social performances

are enacted through various emotional communities shaped by militarised spatial practices

(Rosenwein; Scheer).

In this sense emotions are embodied practical engagements with the world. They are what

people do rather than have, emerging from bodily dispositions shaped by cultural politics (Reddy

2001; Scheer 2012). As Tine Damsholt (2015, 113) reminds us, emotions are ‘staged, practiced,

enacted, categorised, gendered, and experienced; they are lived in body and mind’. And a focus

on emotional communities helps consider relationships between personal and collective

emotions, for example, including the ways communities like the RFC have mobilised particular

emotions for specific ends (such as the willingness to sacrifice for a cause).

My focus here is thus informed by a narrative perspective that assumes subjects are

interpretive beings in the phenomenological sense, active in the interpretation of their everyday

lives and in the attribution of meaning through stories or self-narratives. For airmen this implied

negotiating the cultural ideals of the soldier hero as frameworks from which to narrate their own

emotional lives. Airmen were constituted by the stories they lived and told; they actively

constructed their worlds and created symbolic and representational stories to make sense of their

lives. However, although such ‘stories’ as represented in letters and diaries provide rich analytic

sources, they also impose significant challenges and limitations. As officers, RFC airmen were

expected to censor their own letters and were not subjected to external censorship, but their own

practices of self-censorship associated with expectations of martial masculinities shaped the

content of their letters and what they deemed to disclose in private diaries. Anticipating a reader,

men might write how they wished to be perceived. And because the rhetorical purpose of letters

was to reassure as well as provide emotional connection, information and entertainment, they

tended to exaggerate their physical safety and often resisted describing experiences provoking

alarm or contradicting traditional ideals. At the same time, however, because letters in particular

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were mostly written (or at least these are the ones that survived) to parents and especially

mothers, and their intent was emotional connection and support, airmen were quite frank in their

articulation of various levels of emotional well-being and might speak of fear and anxiety, for

example, in ways they would not share elsewhere (Crouthamel 2014). Diaries allowed more

negative emotional disclosure as relatively personal documents even though diaries of this era

often comprised only brief jottings of day-to-day logistics. Although proximity to events does

not imply such accounts represent a transparent window into emotional lives, memoir and

autobiography are excluded here as formal re-narrations of war experiences over time (Watson

2004).

In the sections below I focus on both visual geographies and emotional topographies,

making the case that heightened agency promised by the novel and expansive technologies of

flight collided with debilitating realities of aerial combat to foster vulnerability, fear, and anxiety.

These sensuous geographies of flight, which promoted isolation and separation in the context of

extreme risk, thus shaped men’s emotional lives. I explore two dimensions of this emotional

topography: airmen’s practices of domesticity and their performances of rowdy play.

Visual Geographies of Aerial Combat

Scholarship on the emotional lives of First World War combatants has tended to focus on

the particular conditions of trench warfare remembered and represented as a time of darkness and

claustrophobia, where sight became a superfluous sense and constraint and disempowerment

shaped soldiers’ emotional lives (Das 2005; Leed 1979). Eric Leed (1979, 124, 78) for example,

describes the ‘radical curtailment of vision’ in the trenches as a ‘peculiar narrowing of

comprehension, a stripping away of any sense of periphery, a fixing of their gaze to a narrow

strip of uninteresting ground’ that created anxiety and uncertainty, ‘confusion and psychic

fatigue’. He writes eloquently about soldiers who looked to the boundless sky, whose dreamy

beauty is ‘charged with intense significance’ (137). Instead of trench claustrophobia, writes

Leed, ‘[airmen’s] machines enabled them to rise to a height where, once again, war was a

unified, human project. The aviator had eyes that had been removed from the front soldier’

(136). Similarly Das (2005, 7, 80) writes of the ‘safe distance of the gaze’ and compares it to

trench geography that ‘sever[s] the link between sight, space, and danger’. Compared to the

trenches where ‘the absence of vision is a recurring theme . . . [and] night was the time of

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movement and action’ (Das 2005, 75), airmen prioritised light, and daytime (especially dawn)

was their active time. This ‘cavalry of the clouds’ (McKee 1964, 29) with its aerial perspective

above the chaos of ground combat produced a synthetic view of the landscape as a whole scene:

a novel, unique, and essentially ‘modern’ view. ‘The ground seems smaller [and] . . . you can see

quite a lot,’ wrote Second Lieutenant Phil Haarer several weeks before he was killed at the

tender age of twenty. ‘[You can see] mine holes, barb wire, an old tank stuck in the mud . . .

when the infantry advances you can see them, in fact you can see everything including gas

attacks and shells bursting’ (28 October 1916, L/RAF). Landscape, of course, as suggested in

this quote, is metaphorical, highlighting the ways cultural ideas and practices define the sensual.

Given this context, how might such visual geographies have operated in the emotional lives of

First World War combatants?

In addressing this question it is first important to recognise the ways aerial combat

aligned with the cultural celebration of sight (‘you can see everything’) as well as with early-

twentieth century fascination with technologies of speed and optimism for an invigorated

nationalism (Virilio 1989; Wohl 1994). The British public was intrigued by the risks and dangers

of flight and valorised the exploits of the First World War ‘knights of the air’ (Bowen 1980, 3).

They also looked to the aeroplane as a harbinger of progress: a powerful ‘instrument of

transcendence’ that would provide new ways of coping with natural and social environments

(Rieger 2005, 127). Indeed, in Technology and the Culture of Modernity, Bernhard Rieger (2005,

128) discusses ‘the sense of absolute freedom’ the public associated with flight that was ‘exalted

over earthly existence’. Rieger claims First World War pilots ‘invested themselves with a

mystique of freedom and claimed to be revitalized by the liberty they found in the air’ (128).

Certainly Squadron Leader Bernard Rice recognised the extraordinary geographical

powers opened up by flight when he described the view from his plane:

All the hills, and downs, seem to have flattened out. The earth looks like a great

saucer . . . coming up to meet the sky on the horizon all round . . . [and the]

narrow strip of brown unbroken earth winding down nearly the centre of all that

conglomeration of trenches. I feel like you could just go on like this forever and

ever (no date [c. early 1916], L/IW).

Vision thus references both sense and meaning (Adey 2010). In other words, it is

associated with the physicality of the body and its relationship to the environment, as well as

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with cultural practices and technologies of specific communities that define sensuous experience

in meaning-making and function to mediate environmental encounters. However, because sight

provides scenes ‘out there’ beyond the eye, suspended in some hypothetical distant space, it

allowed the pilot to position himself as a detached observer at the very same time that his sight

gave a synthetic view of the landscape below (Rodaway 1994, 118). This ‘view from above’,

suggest Adey et al. (2013, 4), is produced as ‘a scientific, rational and calculative space’. To see

was thus to control, detaching the observer from what was viewed and invoking a masculinist

rendering of spatial geographies, for as Cresswell (2006, 265) reminds us, the ‘social baggage’

associated with mobility always concerns gendered power and produces uneven resources. It is

no surprise that the ‘gaze’ of the elite male pilot while at once illustrating how sensuous

experiences are culturally defined, was normatively accepted: it fit with prevailing social

hierarchies about who might access, own, and operate this new spectacle of sight (DeLyser 2011;

Rose 1986). In addition, of course, because aeroplanes would transform military strategy, this

‘view from above’ (Adey et al. 2013) was not only culturally revered but also militarily

indispensable in ways that would help shape pilots’ identities as empowered soldier heroes. The

enemy could be seen from the air; their space potentially penetrated.

However, because vision’s masterful perspective relies on knowledge from other senses

and from memory, intuition and speculation in subjective ways, sight may be the ‘most easily

fooled’ of the senses (Rodaway 1994, 124). This possibility of illusion is ever present because

visual geographies invoke creative interpretations of appearances that are grounded in cultural

codes, illustrating what Adey et al. (2013, 13) call the ‘architectures of myth-making’ associated

with a ‘panoptic culture of scopic mastery’ (Kaplan 2013, 24) that emerged in modernity. In

other words, because pilots looked out onto across a broad expansive landscape with the sense of

a stable background and a more detailed foreground, their ‘worldview’ was simultaneously

synthetic and detached, and the possibility of illusion ever-present, especially, according to

Baudrillard (1983), in terms of the illusions of mastery. Such illusions, I suggest, were

increasingly shattered by collisions between the promise of an expanded, controlling vision and

the vulnerabilities and risk associated with its operation. Because hand in hand with the

empowering promises of flight came the realities of aerial combat that caused considerable

emotional stress (Collins 2015). As Mackersey (2012, 2) explains,

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The Flying Corps may have provided a more civilised existence on the Western

Front . . . But for most it proved a much shorter life than the awful one they had

left amid the terror, mud and sickening sights of the front line. Nor did it offer the

hoped-for escape from the psychological traumas of war. Several times a day the

pilots and observers were ordered into the air to attack fellow human beings with

whom they had no quarrel – encounters from which, almost daily, some would

not return. Few of these aerial warriors on either side remained unaffected by the

fear and stress.

Indeed, the particular effects of killing, facing death, and surviving, which cannot be pursued

within the confines of this paper and are discussed elsewhere (Lee 2017), caused intense

emotional trauma. Even though most airmen enjoyed the visual geographies of flight, aerial

combat was extremely hazardous and inherently multisensual.

Lieutenant Len Richardson, for instance, was particularly unnerved by the physical

conditions of flight, especially the deafening noise from engines and shells that caused incessant

hearing problems. ‘I thought my ears would burst and the top lift off my head’ he wrote (21 June

1918, L/IW). After a long bombing raid Hugh Walmsley also wrote he had ‘no ill effects beyond

headache and temporary deafness’ (27 September 1917, L/RAF), but a week later was declaring

‘[i]t was awfully cold to the face and most of us are suffering from frost bite . . . If you put too

many gloves on you can’t work the gun, and too many face masks too, you can’t see to fly up in

formation!’ (6 October 1917, L/RAF). By the end of the winter he was declaring ‘[I] thought my

nose was going to come off today’ (19 February 1918, L/RAF).

Not surprisingly, the most serious obstacle to an expanded human agency was the

increased risk of injury and death and the fears this provoked, especially the fear of lack of

courage itself (Bourke 2005). Flying ace Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock wrote in his diary of his fear

of ‘crack[ing] up’. ‘[W]hat [will] my friends will think if I do? Old Paddy, the “devil may care”,

with nerves. I feel nervous about it already’ (14 May 1917 D/RAF). For indeed, the sensuous

geographies of flight were so well aligned with the ideals of heroic martial masculinities and the

promise of independence and adventure that it gave limited public vocabulary to fear or any

other emotion that might transgress the notion of the soldier hero (Frantzen 2004). As many

scholars have emphasised, in the years preceding the war a willingness to die and sacrifice the

self in pursuit of a noble objective was celebrated as the ultimate act of bravery. But in their

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letters and diaries airmen did share these fears. ‘Come and see me as I don’t expect to last long’

wrote Thomas Hughes in a letter to his romantic partner, an infantryman in the trenches (26 July

1915, L/IW). ‘The dreariness here [in the RFC] is more pleasant than that of the trenches but the

frightfulness, although occurring less frequently, is quite as frightful and more certain’ (Hughes,

28 July 1915, L/IW). As Denis Winter (1983, 40) describes, death in the RFC was ‘constant . . .

utterly predictable, stunningly quick’.

One of the most serious liabilities of these early aeroplanes included the ways they were

prone to catching fire. ‘I would sooner be killed outright than roasted alive’, declared Frank

Haylett (27 September 1917, L/IW). Mick Mannock felt similarly and always carried a revolver

with him to hasten his own death should his plane catch fire (Oughton 1966, 154). The numerous

ways airmen faced death, and the extraordinary mortality rates among them, were well-known,

and caused serious anxiety from assertions of occasional ‘wind up’ as illustrated by Guy

Knocker describing himself on patrol ‘sitting in my bus shivering [with] wind up, waiting for old

man Fritz to dive’ (26 Feb 1918, L/IW) to Garland’s deep-seated terror: ‘I confess to a great

depression these last few days and tonight is so much in evidence as to drip from my pen onto

this paper . . . Just can’t shake off the feeling that I’m condemned to death’ (23 April, 1918

D/IW).

What might it mean to provide the opportunity for a dynamic and expanded human

agency that transcended this ‘static’ geography but without transcending the trauma it caused?

For indeed, although in a world of mud and anonymity pilots’ adventures represented the

possibilities of freedom, the trauma of aerial combat had much in common with the horrors of

the trenches. Infantrymen might be constrained in the closed spaces of the trenches, but airmen

were also contained in the small, separate compartments of their aeroplanes, and while they

looked out across vast amounts of space with open rather than closed horizons, they did so alone

with possibly an accomplice out of arms’ reach. ‘So far nerve, and wind are sound’, reported

Bernard Rice. ‘It is a bit trying though going out all alone, though one does have an observer in

the front seat’ (11 April 1917, L/RAF). The spatial and temporal conditions of flight thus

isolated and separated, providing terrifying scenarios of dying alone. Stephen Sanford was

relieved to hear a missing colleague was now a prisoner of war. ‘I couldn’t bear to think of the

poor chap being done in all alone out there, you know’ (17 January 1916, L/IWM). What then

might it mean for airmen’s emotional lives to be unrestrained by trench warfare yet singularly

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restrained by new combat conditions, the emotional consequences of which were little

understood by officials, the public, or the airmen themselves?

Emotional Topographies and Everyday Intimacies

The conditions of war were brutal, but they also facilitated tenderness and compassion

among men. Second Lieutenant George Coles illustrated this when he wrote in his diary after a

raid where almost half of all the planes that crossed the German line that morning were shot

down. ‘We fought our way back shattered and sad . . . The few of us who were left sat down at

mess . . . and cried like children as we looked around at the vacant chairs. Our squadron – our

family disrupted’ (9 August 1918, D/IW). Emotions such as these, shared by airmen like Coles,

were contained and shaped by the practices of wartime homosociality. Such institutionalised

male bonding was founded on a long ancestry in pre-war Britain in spaces where intimacies

embodied loyalty and chivalry and were often valorised in spiritual, transcendent forms. As Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) explains in Between Men, conduits for male entitlement required

institutionalised bonding among men – and in the context of war as in other cultural spaces --

this involved intimate, emotional interaction between men in which the individual defines

himself as an integral part of an all-male group with particular traditions and functions. Honour

was an important aspect of this discourse, reflecting the classical masculine virtues of honesty,

integrity, bravery and courage that encouraged group commitments to duty and service (Dawson

1994; Mangan 2012). Such homosociality therefore encouraged operational efficiency in a

military sense.

Male intimacies were tested by war, however, with the result that scholars have been

divided in their summation of its effects (Bourke 1996; Cole 2003). Certainly changing cultural

conditions subverting idealised male fraternities, the troubling of potentially homoerotic

masculine intimacies, and the creation of ‘homosexual’ as an ontological identity associated with

both effeminacy and the criminalisation of male homosexual practices at this time served to

support what Sandra Gilbert (1983, 443) has named ‘the disintegration of male love’. Others

have emphasised that despite lessons in brutality said to make men savage and weaken their

capacity for empathy, were real opportunities for compassion and care, nurturing and domesticity

that redefined masculinity through expansions of male intimacies (Crouthamel 2014; Meyer

2011). Michael Roper makes this point in The Secret Battle where he writes about the intimate

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practices among men that sustained them both physically and emotionally despite limits of

‘mateship’ across class, race, and rank. Roper (2009, 18) links these twin aspects of anxiety and

intimacy implicitly and makes the case that male homosociality gained much of its intensity from

anxiety. ‘It was because [orig. emph] conditions in the trenches were so primitive and because

men looked onto horrible scenes together, that they needed each other’s help and comfort’, he

explains. I focus now on two aspects of these emotional topographies: domesticity and rowdy

play.

Domesticity

Although the case has been made that war separated combatants from the home front

(Fussell 1975; Leed 1979), the actual significance of the domestic -- defined as relating to the

social relations of family and the home, especially practices of caring and maintenance -- was

often enhanced by the conditions of war (Crouthamel 2014; Roper 2009). In Dismembering the

Male Joanna Bourke explains that even though men might provide imperfect substitutes in male

intimacy, there was a re-creation of the domestic sphere in all-male environments that fostered

emotional survival (1996, 126). She makes the case that such domesticity provided a source of

stability and helped soldiers cope with the anxieties of war.

This is certainly what I have found represented in the letters and diaries of RFC airmen.

The spatial and temporal conditions of aerial combat, which suspended them in periods of

intense and stressful solitude, seemed to facilitate the homosocial domesticities of everyday life

in ways that provided a grounding (literally, in terms of their respite from the air) in the mundane

acts and relative comforts of community life. In this sense isolation in the air united men on the

ground. As Winter (1983, 174) emphasises, ‘pilots were among the most isolated of fighting

men’ who found intense respite from aerial combat in these domesticities. ‘In the mess, men

wanted chiefly to forget’, he explains (179). Such practices of domesticity, of course, were not

unique to airmen, although the physical conditions and privileges of RFC service, and their

relative independence from military scrutiny, allowed airmen to establish and sustain ‘homes’ in

makeshift quarters in ways that soldiers confined to the trenches could not.

Airmen wrote at length about creating homes by decorating the mess, making it liveable,

and enjoying its comforts with comrades. For example, Charles Dixon wrote the following in his

diary:

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Been working on the mess. It’s going to be jolly comfortable. The bar

particularly. We’ve got some comfortable cane chairs around the fireplace and the

. . . mess room we shall do in blue and the anteroom painted white -- with comfy

benches all around (17 November 1917, D/IWM).

Similarly, Bernard Rice wrote to his father about their work turning huts into homes. At

the top of every letter Rice designated his location as ‘Quirk Cottage’ (a Quirk was a

slow reconnaissance plane and reflected his squadron’s identity as a reconnaissance unit):

We have glass in two windows [and] . . . painted the walls green – tacked with

white fabric over the ceiling. Erected a veranda outside, with green canvas top

and scalloped edging . . . flower beds all around (10 May 1917, L/RAF).

Although letters home might over-indulge in these discussions about the domestic

because it was a way for men to connect with their domestic/family identities, narratives

about such aspects of domesticity were also exceedingly frequent in diaries too. A focus

on the domestic allowed men to connect with the familiar and participate in providing

and experiencing support and comfort as a group – or pair as was often the case where

two men shared a room within the mess – and also to remedy or disrupt the isolation and

separation invoked by their martial identities. As Bourke (1996, 135) emphasises,

whether such domesticity was ‘nostalgically reminiscent of the public school or scouting

camp’, it basically ‘drew men together’.

Airmen also wrote about the pleasures of getting ‘home’ to the family they had created in

the squadron – which often included pets – dogs usually, and once even a wood rat. These

relationships provided emotional support against vulnerability even while their disruption

reminded airmen of their own potential fate. Arthur Turner, for example, was upset by separation

caused by a comrade’s death: “My tent chum was badly hit . . . I shall have the tent to myself,

worse luck.’ Several days later when he knew this friend had died and his next roommate had

also just died in combat, he wrote the following: “Again I return to an empty tent. All his kit is

packed up, very depressing’ (16 October, 17 October 1918, D/RAF). The following month

another friend moved in and Turner took to caring for his wounds. ‘[W]ashing my chum like a

baby (he can only use one hand just yet)’, he explained (8 November 1918, D/RAF).

A key aspect of creating and managing these domestic spaces was the various structured

entertainments the airmen created, which sometimes included dances and teas with women in

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such auxiliaries as the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD) or the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry

(FANY), but more likely in all-male activities like variety shows, pantomimes, and talent shows

that were organised in squadron headquarters or in larger gathering places like aeroplane

hangars. In such a homosocial environment some men might dress as women (‘for a lark’). ‘One

of our hangers has a stage,’ wrote Second Lieutenant Yvonne Kirkpatrick, ‘and the 13th Battalion

of Canadians has been giving performances’. He explained,

they are all jolly good, and two of their men make jolly good girls. One is so good

in fact that one of our officers wouldn’t believe she was a man and wanted to be

introduced (27 May 1918, L/IW).

Again, although such entertainments were not unique to the RFC (Bourke and others

write of the ‘delight that many found in impersonation’ [Bourke 1996 133]), airmen

enjoyed ‘more indulgent shows’ reflecting the ‘tight camaraderie’ produced as a result of

the terrors of aerial combat (Mackersey 2012, 187).

Cross-dressing occurred in less structured gatherings too. ‘We had a dance last night [in

the mess]’, wrote Bernard Rice,

carriages at 1am. Some came in silk drawers, and pink ribbons, others in silk

nighties . . . we danced hard to the gramophone, and my collection of rags, and

had a thoroughly cheerful evening despite there were no ladies present (7 August

1917, L/RAF).

Charles Dixon also remembered one fellow officer ‘under the influence of hot rum’ who was

known to give a fine rendition of Gaby Deslys (a sultry French actress/singer of the period) (9

December 1917, L/IW). Dixon also helped put on a mock bullfight for entertainment: ‘We all

dressed up, [and] I was the beauteous lady who sits in the box and is queen of the festival’ he

explained (25 December 1917, L/IW). These homosocial activities expanding categories of

gender compliance while mimicking traditional gender and family relations facilitated emotional

support as well as entertainment. Against the solitude, isolation, and relative separation of aerial

practices, they provided grounding in homosocial emotional community.

Rowdy Play

Alongside domesticity as an antidote against personal vulnerability, RFC revelry and

rowdy play provided opportunities for touch and intimacy and served to normalise danger and

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risk. Rough-housing allowed men to touch one another as well as test their strength. At a

juncture when men’s homoerotic intimacies were beginning to be understood as representative of

ontological identities (Foucault 1978), men’s need for touch and intimacy was often channelled

into physically rough interactions. Such playful aggressions thus resulted in intense moments of

human contact modelled on the homosocial norms of British public school culture (Mangan

2012). For example, Charles Dixon wrote about a ‘very deuce of a rag’:

[We] ended up with Patrick [another Squadron Commander], myself and one of

Patrick’s fellows taking on the whole of Bryant’s crowd. Of course we got sat on

in the end but not before I had nearly killed Bryant by throttling him -- he was

actually blue in the face -- and we had torn the coat and shirt clean off another. I

came off fairly well with a cut lip. Patrick had a bruised nose and a black eye,

Bryant a stiff neck and an awful bump on the forehead. We all met on Saturday

and compared notes on the damage we had respectively sustained (13 December

1917, D/IW).

Boisterous play also served to offer relief from the stresses of flying, to create solidarity

and group spirit, and to normalise the terrors of combat. ‘Another ‘dud’ day’ wrote Guy Knocker

in a letter home,

and the feeling of the squadron having overflowed and everyone gone mad. This

morning a party of us digging potatoes [they had taken to planting vegetables

around the makeshift homes] turned into a bombing party and we proceeded to

hurl clods of earth at each other.

The very same afternoon they amused themselves putting Verey lights down the chimneys of the

huts to smoke out their inhabitants (Knocker 4 March 1918, L/IW).

Such boisterous play was initiated not only when they were unable to fly and were

waiting for orders, but also when they had been in combat. On airman witnessed a terrible crash:

‘We had to just stand by and hear them shriek to death’, he wrote in his diary, ‘the boys were

charred to cinders before we could get near them’. The next night they were ‘up until 2am’ when

‘the boys got drunk and smashed up every bit of crockery ware in the mess. They then cut the

guide ropes of each of all the tents and pulled out those who had gone to bed’ (Coles 30 July, 1

August 1917, D/IW). Similarly, two months before he was killed in combat, Wilfred Durant

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wrote that ‘[we] all got back to the mess dead drunk . . . someone is always crashing and getting

hurt or missing or having problems’ (1 May 1918, D/RAF).

Survival was also occasion for rowdy play, imbued as it was with euphoric relief as well

as with survivor guilt, remorse, and sometimes renewed motivation for revenge in the face of a

comrade’s demise (Lee 2017). After a particularly stressful raid George Downing wrote,

we had a magnificent dust-up [with another squadron as a celebration of victories

in combat]. They raided us with smoke bombs, etc. and some scrap ensued . . .

We had a counter attack later on and raided their mess, bagging their gramophone

[and] playing a triumphant tune on the way back’ (3 November 1917, L/IWM).

Often such rough horseplay would result in someone getting hurt. ‘Another rag in the mess’,

wrote Mannock, ‘cracked my knee and arm’ (20 April 1917, D/RAF). In this way reckless play

was a technique for domesticating terror. Through rowdy behaviours airmen familiarised

themselves with danger and in a sense ‘rehearsed’ – and therefore desensitized themselves -- to

pain and loss.

To entertain each other, provide physical contact, and to normalise the terrors of combat

airmen indulged in a variety of games that included formal activities like tennis, football, cricket,

and rugby, as well as informal games made up by the airmen. One of the latter was called ‘Over

the top’, which in the context of World War I had serious connotations, but her implied scaling

and usually destroying various sofas (Dixon, 4 April 1917, D/IWM). Another game and another

imitation of deadly activities, although this time rather closer to home, involved flying their

aeroplanes to the top of a nearby hill, switching off their engines, and then sliding down the other

side (Kirkpatrick, 31 December 1917, D/IW).

Not surprisingly, alcohol played a central role in all these activities and the bar was

usually an important feature of the mess with cocktails offered liberally. Dixon commented on

visiting another squadron and being offered ‘an awful mixture [consisting of] the contents of

every bottle of drink they had, mixed anyhow, and served in a tumbler’ (24 December 1917,

D/IW). Such close-knit mess life (what Jack Hay called a ‘priceless mess [with] a most excellent

cocktail’ [19 February 1917, D/RAF]) meant that all officer ranks often imbibed together: ‘Low

cloud and mist – no flying’, wrote Kirkpatrick. ‘We had some tennis – after dinner had a damn

good rag, all got pretty muzzy, major included [who was quite] lit’ (9 September 1916, L/IW).

Such narratives also often included descriptions of having to fly with serious hang-overs. ‘Great

14

doings [last night], retired to bed at 2am and to be called at 5.30am’, wrote Mannock. ‘[F]eeling

like a wet rag. Mouth felt like the bottom of a parrot cage’ (20 April 1917, D/RAF). Alcohol, of

course, deadened the pain and stress, as articulated by Len Richardson who wrote about the

many casualties in his squadron. ‘[A] hellish day for No. 74 squadron, so I mix a bucket of

‘Vipers’ on Grid’s orders [his superior, Caldwell] and we drink to the 4 empty chairs’ (8 May

1918, D/RAF). In this way, although various kinds of boisterous play occurred in most fighting

units, the geographies of ‘hell in the air [followed by] total relaxation on the ground’ (Winter

1983, 179) seemed to produce rowdy drunken games facilitating homosocial and homoerotic

intimacies at a level far exceeding those encouraged by the sustained tension of combat in the

trenches.

Conclusion

Reinforced by the priorities of a masculinist visual culture, the promise of expanded

vision and agency associated with First World War aerial combat was negotiated through

conditions of risk and danger that promoted vulnerability rather than mastery, and doubt and fear

rather than assurance, and which ultimately produced conditions of separation and isolation.

Analysis of these performances of aerial life contribute to studies of militarisation in modernity

by gesturing towards the complex struggles and political possibilities surrounding the emergence

of a visual logics of control and dominance that was produced by these early aerial technologies.

Although such focus on flying as affective practices of mobile time and space contributes to

historiographies of the First World War through its attention to soldiers in the air rather than on

the ground, it also nuances the experiences of trench warfare by theorising differences between

air as a ‘modern vertical fantasy’ (Adey 2014, 61) and the trench as ground that

absorbed/resisted the aerial gaze. In this sense both are important spaces of performance,

functioning as projections of power.

This paper has made the claim that coping with the realities of aerial combat shaped

airmen’s emotional lives through practices of domesticity and rowdy play: twin aspects of male

homosociality that functioned to sustain emotional survival against the isolating conditions of

aerial combat. In attending to the material and symbolic landscapes of space through a focus on

what Currie (2001, 3) calls the ‘material architectures’ of aerial life, I demonstrate the potential

for building new connections within existing theoretical landscapes by contributing to

15

interdisciplinary scholarship on the gendered relationships between space and emotions,

especially concerning the ways real and imagined spaces work to shape social relations and

generate subjectivities.

Here I have employed the twin impulse of the material and the testimonial to attend to the

sensuous world of First World War aerial combat through an intimate history of emotions in

times of crisis. This temporal embodiment of space in masculine bodies, a process that facilitates

an understanding of affective masculinities embedded in the social fabric of specific emotional

communities, gestures towards the ways martial subjectivities are shaped and potentially

resisted. By witnessing the body in stress and emotional trauma, as well as in relative comfort

and in play, ultimately I hope to contribute to knowledge about the ways visual geographies and

emotional topographies help produce knowledge about human vulnerability and about moral

survival in war.

___________________

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1Notes Sources include letters (L) and diaries (D) written during combat, hereafter designated as (L) and (D). Source material is located in collections under authors’ names, housed in the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Air Force Museum, hereafter designated as (IW) and (RAF) respectively.