World War I produced two contradictory threads in history. One included the “war poets”, a generation of writers who faced the horrors and senseless waste of a lost generation. The other produced heroic fiction, whose best-known exponent was Captain WE Johns, creator of Biggles, who joined the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in 1916 as a 17-year-old.
Biggles first appeared in The White Fokker in Popular Flying magazine. The first collection of Biggles stories, The Camels Are Coming, was published in 1932. Johns produced nearly a hundred Biggles books, set in both world wars. Aerial dog fights in fragile non-metal planes established Biggles as the epitome of British military bravery. Sopwith Camels were his fighting plane of choice.
If Biggles was real, he would have been New Zealander Keith Caldwell, who preferred the single-seater SE5 biplane built by the Royal Aircraft Factory.
Caldwell’s biographer, history academic Adam Claasen, says he survived “more aerial battles that any other Empire airman, including a heart-pounding tussle against Germany’s most accomplished pilot, Werner Voss, and members of Manfred von Richthofen’s ‘Flying Circus’”.
Johns flew in WWI and began his writing career at a time when the exploits of wartime airmen, on both sides, had reached mythical status. It was further burnished in the 1960s and 1970s in movies such as The Blue Max (1966), The Red Baron (1971) and Aces High (1976).
Hundreds of New Zealanders joined the RFC. Caldwell was a typical example, but these weren’t ordinary young men.
His family co-owned a national drapery business that included the original Cambridge clothing brand. Born in Wellington, he attended Whanganui Collegiate; most pilots came from private and elite schools.
A basic flying course cost £100, the annual average wage in 1916. Caldwell had a letter of introduction from then-prime minister William Massey that eased admission to Oxford University’s flying school. This was mainly theory, as pilots had to master reconnaissance, read maps, fire machine guns, drop bombs, take aerial photographs and do engine maintenance. The practical side was high risk: a fifth of cadets died in accidents before they completed training.
Flying the aircraft of the day was described as a choice between “a wooden cross, the Red Cross or a Victoria Cross”. “Grid” was a Kiwi term for equipment used by upper-class boys to describe their equipment, such as a bicycle. Caldwell’s habit of referring to an aircraft as a grid meant it became his nickname among the other pilots. Within six months, Caldwell was posted to France, where he did his first bombing run in August 1916. By November, he was at 60 Squadron, where he earned a Military Cross. The following year, he was promoted to major in command of 74 (“Tiger”) squadron and 200 personnel. He was 22.
Wartime action makes up the best part of this bulky (400-plus pages) and flawless piece of scholarship. Claasen previously wrote Fearless: The Extraordinary Untold Story of New Zealand’s Great War Airmen (2017). It took him five years to complete the story, accumulating material from family and military institutions here and in the UK.
Back in New Zealand, Caldwell’s life as a farmer and family man was hard. But he maintained his aviation connections, participating in early commercial airlines and the fledgling air force as commanding officer at Woodbourne and then Wigram.
Pilots, along with wireless and radar operators, were trained for service in WWII. Caldwell visited New Zealand airmen in India in 1944, before heading to London as air commodore to help repatriate the several thousand New Zealanders who served in the Royal Air Force.
Ironically, returning to his farm at Papatoetoe, Caldwell waged a campaign against an international airport at Māngere because of its proximity. The airport opened in 1965, on his 70th birthday. Within months, he and wife Dorothy left on a lengthy world tour. Caldwell had finally moved on to retirement, dying in 1980, aged 85.
