Take the politics out of warplane writing? Impossible
This week on Twitter I shared an anti White supremacist post. I know this is hardly akin to George Orwell signing up for the Saklatvala Battalion but I guess we must all do something, even if mutual support sometimes feels like vain tokenism. One reply to my post noted that my feed was normally “a welcome relief from politics so please keep it that way”. I understand that. But warplanes or rather how they described in writing and film has always been deeply political. The fighter pilot myth of the noble dashing maverick, that still persists, was born as First World War propaganda. The celebratory tone of warplane books celebrating military or engineering achievements at the very least normalises the military-industrial complex and at worst acts as a - generally unpaid - advertisement for both the specific products and the vision of reality that weapon manufacturers would like to project. The now sadly deceased former Red Arrows pilot and Falklands veteran Peter Collins once said to me “when writing about warplanes be careful not to become a useful idiot”. Every time an overworked aviation writer unquestioningly shares or rewords a press release I worry he or she becomes that useful idiot.
The canon of warplane literature tends to be pro-military and right wing, the prolific and widely respected Bill Gunston being a prime example.
Military pilots when not tasked with directly defending their own nation are often motivated by professionalism, to support their comrades or most commonly the need to see if they are any good at the task they have trained for so long to do. Blind patriotism in the style of ‘my country right or wrong’ is not something I have heard much during hundreds of interviews with military pilots.
Engineers of war
Why do engineers make brilliant warplanes for terrible governments? It’s easy to be blasé in answering this: it’s not their job to make moral decisions; they don’t think they’re terrible; the ethical code of your society is ‘right’; they haven’t time to make a moral assessment; the money; the social pressure; if they didn’t someone else would. All play parts but you could also generalise the kind of people many engineers are: many are specific problem solvers. If we wish to buy into ideas of specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain, then they could be described as ‘left brained’. They are more interested in specific problem solving than the wider context. Solving a particular problem is thrilling to an aeronautical engineer. Everything else is secondary. But in studying engineering history we need not wear the same blinkers. Nor do we need to ascribe to the fun view of war shown in manufacturers’ videos.
Nothing about warplanes is apolitical and pretending this to be the case is wilfully blind.
All of which seems terribly judgemental and negative to our shared love. So where can we turn to for solace? How about that cheeky Dalai Lama? This was sent to me by this man. A New York Times interview with the Dalai Lama, a rather peaceful man, who digs warplanes. Over to his holiness:
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Yes indeed, warplanes are political. I wrote a book a couple years ago about the air war during the Korean War. Most of what passes for "fact"regarding that benighted conflict is 70 year old unexamined wartime propaganda, which has fossilized into "fact-like material." It wasn't hard to get the information to disprove the USAF "10:1" victory claims for the F-86. The war was much more closely-fought, against an equally-proficient enemy, Soviet pilots in full V-VS/PVO units. As the US pilots themselves put it, "there was no ten-to-one ratio, and every fight was hard-fought." To me, such information makes the story better - if you're covering a football game, winning by one point with a field goal in the last 10 seconds is far more interesting that a 50 point lead at the end of the first quarter, that expands further on. The book got a significant number of 5-star reviews by former fighter pilots who read it, for its honesty. It also got one review that garnered the most "likes"of all the reviews, that castigated it as "woke history" and called it "distasteful."
The funny thing a lot of the winger readers don't know is that a fair number of the authors they read are informal members of what a leading member has called "The Lefty Military Historians Association."
Who else is going to engage in examining propaganda and separating it from the facts to get a true picture?
I did however love Bill Gunston, and have re-read "Early Supersonic Fighters of the West" several times as an example of excellent aviation journalism.