The Guinea Pig Club: Archibald McIndoe and the RAF in World War II - Softcover

Emily Mayhew is a military medical historian and was the featured historian on a new documentary on the Guinea Pig Club, which was screened on BBC Four. She was also an adviser on an award-winning Canadian documentary about the club and a consultant on ITV’s award-winning drama Foyle’s War.

Chapter One: Fire

Although the men of the RAF saw their service transformed in the interwar years, their two most deadly enemies never changed: the German Air Force and fire, and for obvious reasons this book focuses on the latter. Fire is the most opportunistic of enemies. It can strike an aircraft at any time, not just in combat, but during take-off and landing, or training or routine non-operational flight. In particular military aircraft, where ammunition so often encounters high octane fuel, make easy, combustible prey.

In any aircraft, fighter or bomber, the fuel tank is the most vulnerable component. This vulnerability had been recognised from the outset of air combat in the Great War — even the earliest aircraft had been able to absorb a surprisingly large amount of ammunition, incendiary or otherwise, but it only took one hit on their tanks to finish them. Fuel tanks could threaten an aircraft in two possible ways: their contents could explode on contact with incendiary ammunition, tearing apart whatever section of the aircraft they were housed in, and in all probability destroying the entire machine; or tanks punctured by ammunition, incendiary or otherwise, could leak fuel into the aircraft which could combust if struck by bullets during combat, or simply drain away the pilot’s ability to fly back to safety.

One Royal Flying Corps observer wrote of what happened when:

‘... the machine to our left was suddenly hit by a shell, full in the main petrol tank! The thing happened so quickly that for a moment I was unable to realise fully what had happened, and remained horrorstricken, watching our companion machine slowly dissolve in the air astern of us.
A second before I had been sitting looking backwards over our tailplane and regarding what was then evidently a substantial British aeroplane. A fraction of a second later and I saw it hanging in the air before me, its wings floating away from the fuselage whilst a dense black smoke completely obscured the centre section and its occupants. Then, quite slowly, the whole framework twisted sideways, crumpled up, and dived headlong earthwards, wrapped in a sheet of flame.
I sat watching the trail of smoke and fragments which followed it and my companions, down on their two mile journey to the ground and thought many things... it is strange, but at the time I was not so much impressed by the tragic element of the spectacle which I had just witnessed, as by the extraordinary neatness and quickness with which it seemed to have been done. There was something deliberate about it almost suggestive of “legerdemain,” and it was only gradually that I realised the significance of that blank space in the formation following, and the gap at the mess table which would be caused by two stout fellows and comrades of whom fate had robbed us.
I had been actually looking at the machine at the moment of impact, and this, coupled with the fact that the occupants were my friends, left a picture in my memory which I do not often care to revive.’

RFC pilots were only too well aware of the dangers of fire, nicknaming petrol ‘infernal liquid’, ‘the hell brew’ and ‘orange death’. Britain’s leading air ace in the Great War, Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock, was obsessed with this form of death, describing to new recruits to his squadron the horrors of ‘flamers’ and how he would shoot himself rather than endure the grisly fate he had arranged for at least six enemy pilots during one month alone in early 1918. On hearing of the death of his main rival in the German Imperial Air Service, Manfred von Richthofen, he was heard to say that he hoped the Red Baron had, ‘roasted all the way down’. One of Mannock’s fellow aces, James McCudden, met just such an end, trapped in his aircraft, but leading American ace Major Raoul Lufbery preferred to take his chances with gravity. After failing to put out a fire by switching off his engine and sideslipping his aircraft (whilst balanced on the head faring so he could keep hold of the joystick), Lufbery finally gave up and leapt from his burning Nieuport aiming hopelessly for a small stream 200 feet beneath him. Horrified onlookers saw his body slam into the ground.

Pilots continued to dread the effects of fire on both themselves and their aircraft. In 1935 students of the RAF Staff College composed essays on how they saw the future of the air services. The winning entry described how a pilot at ‘Cranwell 1985 AD’ was, ‘injected yesterday with a heavy dose of anti-crash asbestos mixture and... had not quite got over the effects yet.’ Back in the real world, Sholto Douglas, who commanded 43 and 84 Squadrons in France in the First World War and was later Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, recalled in his memoirs how terrifying the threat of fire was to all airmen:

‘On one patrol early in 1917 I was flying formation with my squadron when we were suddenly attacked by some Huns. After the first flurry was over I glanced across at the next aircraft beside me in our formation and I saw that the observer, poor devil, was standing up in the back seat agitatedly trying to call the attention of his pilot to a glint of flame that was just starting to appear along the side of their aircraft. A moment later there was a violent explosion and the whole aircraft disintegrated.
Such a sight was all too common in our flying of those days, and so far as I was concerned it was one of the most horrible that one could witness.’

By 1916 efforts were under way in both the British and French air services to try and reduce such ‘all too common’ horrors. The search for a solution was based on the principle of wrapping the tank in some sort of elasticated material, such as rubber, that would slow incendiary bullets down sufficiently so they would not ignite the contents of the tank. The material would be constituted in such a way so that it could be expected to swell and stretch on impact so as to close or seal any ruptures and prevent leakage, as well as absorb the shock wave caused by the effect of ammunition striking the unit. This system of ‘self-sealing’ fuel tanks became the model for all subsequent investigations into aircraft fuel safety by both Allied and German air services and remains the model today. (As a result of the destruction of Concorde AFR 4590 on 25 July 2000, tanks of the remaining Concorde fleet were given extra self-sealing layers of Kevlar to avoid the danger of their combustion by flying debris.)

In July 1917 the first trials of ‘non-leaking petrol tanks’ were made at the behest of the French Air Service. They had been invented by a Belgian Army engineer, Lanser, and were constructed from a doublehulled metal casing which sandwiched a patented fibrised rubber compound. They had proved successful when the French fired Brock incendiary ammunition at them and had been passed on to the British to undertake similar tests.

The British Air Board tested two of these ‘Lanser’ tanks the following April but they did not perform to RFC or Admiralty satisfaction. Despite this British reluctance, by 1918 the Lanser tank was standard in the majority of French aeroplanes, and some had even found their way into RFC aircraft, action undertaken unilaterally by British squadron commanders in France ( just as some British airmen took to equipping themselves with parachutes in the late summer of 1918, spurred on by the offer of a 20 per cent discount on their life insurance from Lloyds of London if they did so).

Dissatisfaction with the performance of the Lanser gave a tremendous momentum to Britain’s own tank protection research, and further momentum was given by the realisation of the possible application of satisfactory measures in airships. Soon Orfordness, the joint forces experimental research station in Suffolk, overflowed with engineers from the Army and Navy blasting away at tanks wrapped in petrol-resisting cloth, tanks with fireproof covers and non-metallic petrol tanks made of plywood and chemically treated fabric. By 1918 all this effort resulted in a tank evolved from the Lanser model with three layers of felt, three of India rubber, soft soap between each, and a cage of iron gauze to resist expansion shock. Known as the M.I.D. pattern, this tank became standard issue in all two-seater aeroplanes (except trainers) from 1918.

Research into tank safety did not end with the war. The newly independent RAF took over responsibility for a variety of investigations into the problem, and moved the entire programme from Orfordness to the former aircraft factory that had become the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough. Here the relationship between tank safety measures and aircraft design became complicated, as RAF technologies — especially fighter technologies — evolved to meet the very specific strategic demands of a newly-conceptualised air war.