Greetings Ron,
I don't know who Mannock's batman was, it might be he didn't have one, he hated the British class system and professed to be a socialist (no not a commie as we know it, it was just a reaction to his underpriveldged childhood)anyway where was he in 1915/16? He went to Turkey(of all places)in Feb 1914 and got work with the British telephone company who he had worked with in Canterbury. The company had won the contract to lay telephone lines in Constantinople. When the war broke out Mannock was arrested with 300 other British ex-pats and treated as POWs. He (and the others) had a very bad time of it, think Midnight Express a la 1914. He apparently escaped the prison to pick up food for his fellow inmates and break back in again. He was quite a brave man. He was caught one night on his way back in and brutally treated. The American Red Cross had him repatriated in April 1915. He returned to England and took up his prewar posting as a sergeant in the Royal Army Medical Corps (he was essentially a pacifist) but one day while explaining to his squad that they could expect to be tending to the wounded under fire he suddenly realised that he may have to tend to German soldiers too.He blamed the Germans for having advised the Turks in imprisoning the English at Constantinople and for his horrible experience in the Turkish prisons and he blamed the German socialists for having abandoned theworld wide socialist call for peace and supporting the Kaiser's call for war-the upshot was he hated the Germans and being a bit slow on the uptake realised the best way to win the war was to actually kill Germans. In March 1916 he was posted to the Royal Engineers for officer training. Here he mixed with the young men of the upper classes. This only heightened his hatred for the class system, his fellow trainee officers seemed more engrossed in the cut of their uniforms than the fact that there was a war going on and he realised that he would be subject to the command of 'upper class twits'on the battlefield. He was depressed. By chance he met an old friend who had joined the RFC who advised him to join explaining that once in the air a pilot was not under the direct command of anyone. This obviously appealed to Mannock. He started reading about
Albert Ball who was at the height of his fame at the time and as soon as he graduated as an officer in the Royal Engineers transferred to the RFC. In August 1916 he was posted to the School of Military Aeronautics in Reading and on 31 March 1917 left England for France and No. 40 Squadron. The rest they say is history.
Cheers Bruce.
10 September 1999, 09:56 PM
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