“Gloriously, Generously, Dangerously”

A Ninetieth Birthday Tribute to the Incomparable Sopwith Camel. By Charles Hamlin.

“Aircraft, which in my youth trembled like living things, if they trembled today, they would be sent back to servicing for overhaul. We shrug and say: It can’t be helped; but what captain of a transport aircraft, hedged in with courses, corridors, controls, does not long to send them all to the devil, vault into the cockpit, flip a switch and take-off, bareheaded, into the wind? Perhaps not, perhaps the breed has changed—but I know which I would choose!”

So lamented Cecil Lewis in the foreword to his classic memoir, Sagittarius Rising, an aviator’s insight into the beauty of life that ranks with the inspired works of Saint-Exupéry. Lewis wrote of an earlier, more brutal time than the beloved Saint-Ex: one of war in the air when flight itself had not yet been fully mastered. Yet for that, he was privileged, and he knew it; especially in that one of those aircraft that he had felt “tremble like a living thing” was the Sopwith Camel. The Camel, which celebrated its ninetieth birthday in December 2006, is more than just the iconic aircraft of the first war in the air. It is, above all, the final statement of the age that won the mastery of flight—an age when aviators lived, in Lewis’ words, “gloriously, generously, dangerously.”

In late 1903, as the Wright brothers were tentatively stepping into the air and into history, Europe was drunkenly stumbling from one diplomatic crisis to another. Scarcely a decade was to pass before the Great Powers inevitably fell into their long planned-for clash of arms, whereupon their elaborate paper stratagems degenerated into a war of bloody stalemate upon the fields of France.

Gradually, it was realised that the new machines of the air offered the potential to outflank the entrenched armies from above, there to effect reconnaissance, artillery ranging and attack. Machines were accordingly developed for these roles, and to counter the threats they posed, the fighter aircraft was born.

Soon, massive aerial armies were competing for air superiority above the shattered landscape. In this literal new dimension of warfare, pioneering pilots confronted a new order of risk. No longer was their survival simply dependent on machines that could merely stay in the air and stay together as they pursued records and fame. If they were to live, let alone win, in the airborne mêlée over France, they needed aircraft that were utterly unfettered in flight and balanced upon the limits of agility.

The finest solution to that need was arguably the Sopwith Camel. All-or-nothing, hell-for-leather, full of promise but always on the edge of disaster, the Camel was both the end and the embodiment of the adventure that won the mastery of flight. That adventure, as the war that accelerated its conclusion, was principally a European affair.

The Wright brothers’ early flights had been largely ignored in America, a lack of acclaim in which they were complicit. Europe simply greeted their achievement with an arrogant disbelief as her own pioneers struggled into the air over the next few years. Disenchanted, the brothers even gave up flying for a time. In 1908, however, Wilbur Wright journeyed to France, the nation that had taken to aviation with a passion, and his flying demonstrations there were a revelation. Inspired, French pilots and engineers were the first to set out to truly master flight.

In 1909, Blériot successfully undertook the first great flying exploit, the crossing of the English Channel, and the first great gathering of aviators and aircraft was held at Rheims. That same year, the words fuselage, aileron and nacelle—all French—entered the Oxford English dictionary.

By 1913, French pilots and French aircraft held the records for speed (126.67 mph by M. Prevost in a Deperdussin), distance (634.54 miles over a closed course by A. Seguin in a Henri Farman) and altitude (20,079 feet by G. Legagneux in a Nieuport). Most tellingly, perhaps, at a time when the aircraft’s raison d’être was straight-and-level flight, Adolphe Pégoud executed the first intentional aerobatics.

However, in early 1914, the British challenged France’s aeronautical superiority with the elegant Sopwith Tabloid (so named for its diminutive size). This product of the newly formed Sopwith Aeroplane Company was a small, advanced sporting biplane intended to interest the British military as a reconnaissance aircraft.

To promote the Tabloid’s qualities, Sopwith entered a floatplane version in the Schneider Trophy, the seaplane race instituted in 1913 by the industrialist Jacques Schneider—a Frenchman, naturally. In the April race off the coast of Monaco, the Tabloid completely outclassed the competition, not only with its speed but also with its extraordinary agility around the course.

Six months after the victory, the British military, now waging war against Germany, placed an order for the nimble little aircraft and the Sopwith Aeroplane Company set about fathering a lineage of superb flying machines. The Tabloid’s subsequent “bloodline” extended over six decades to include some of the greatest fighting aircraft ever created, eventually culminating in the Hawker Siddeley Sea Harrier.

The origins of this remarkable lineage lay in a time when the design of aircraft was far more black art than emerging science. Even in 1936, Cecil Lewis could write that “the design of aircraft [then] was a very much more fluky business than it is today. Although war was a tremendous stimulus, aerodynamical data was almost non-existent. Every new machine was an experiment, obsolete in the eyes of the designer before it was completed, so feverish and rapidly did knowledge progress.”

Thus the Tabloid evolved swiftly through several generations during the 1914–17 period, though each bore a distinctive family resemblance. Furthermore, all maintained the Tabloid’s definitive character of clean lines attuned to superb agility and the elegant use of power.

First to appear were the Baby and 11/2 Strutter, the latter one of the most important and versatile aircraft of the war. Next to emerge from Sopwith’s works at Brooklands, early in 1916, was the Pup, by all accounts a delight to fly and described by some as a “masterpiece” and “the perfect flying machine”. Then, in a daring experiment based on the Pup, the Sopwith Triplane took to the air in mid-1916.

“Of all machines,” wrote Lewis, “the Triplane remains in my memory as the best—for the actual pleasure of flying—that I ever took up.

“It was so beautifully balanced, so well mannered, so feather-light on the stick, and so comfortable and warm. It had what was then a novel feature, an adjustable tailplane to trim the machine fore and aft. Set correctly, with the throttle about three-quarters open, the Tripe would loop, hands off, indefinitely. Not for this, but for its docility, the lack of all effort needed to fly it, and yet its instantaneous response to the lightest touch, it remains my favourite.”

The “Tripe” was the progenitor of the Camel, but where the Triplane was a pleasure and the Pup a delight, the Camel was a demanding test of skill. By late 1916, Sopwith’s Herbert Smith, designer of the Pup and the Triplane, had evolved the Tabloid into a flying machine on edge.

The Sopwith F.1. Biplane Fighter, the type’s drearily official designation, was a machine of similarly minimal dimensions to the Tabloid: span 28 ft. (8.53 m.), length 18 ft. 9 in. (5.71 m.), height 8 ft 6 in (2.59 m.)—and an empty weight of 929 lb (421 kg). Its loaded weight was 1,453 lb (659 kg), lifted into the air by a wing area of 231 ft2 (21.46 m2). Many find it an unattractive aircraft, “pugnacious” being the adjective commonly used, but its lines possess a certain cruel, compact beauty. Service pilots gave it the name “Camel”, inspired by the forward “hump” on the fuselage that housed the twin Vickers .303 machinegun armament.

As with its peers, the Camel was a simple yet intricate structure of wooden frames, wire-braced and fabric-covered—fabric only giving way to plywood panels around the cockpit and the light alloy of the engine cowling. What set it apart, and set it on edge, was the positioning of engine, fuel, armament and pilot, all of which were closely concentrated in the nose and sandwiched between the mainplanes, giving a well forward centre-of-gravity.

This arrangement supplied ailerons and—especially—elevators and undersized-rudder with the maximum of authority and hair-trigger response to command: “very lively”, was the understated phrase used by one Camel pilot. It was a liveliness no doubt responsible for the Camel’s propensity to spin at the mildest provocation.

“In spite of all the care we took,” wrote Lieutenant-Colonel L. A. Strange in his Recollections of an Airman, “Camels continually spun down out of control when flown by pupils on their first solo.” Strange served at the Central Flying School throughout the Camel’s tenure as the finest Allied fighter, and he managed to squeeze dual controls into several examples in an attempt to alleviate the unacceptable accident rate. The measure went some way to addressing the problem, but the Camel continued to kill many an inexperienced pilot—at a time when inexperienced pilots were many.

There is an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, the Rowan Atkinson comedy series set in the First World War, in which the soldiering protagonists join the Royal Flying Corps’ “Twenty Minuters”—so called, they believe, after the length of time the average pilot spends in the air each day. Only belatedly do they find the name refers to the average pilot’s life expectancy. It was comic exaggeration, but not far from the tragic reality. The 17-year-old Cecil Lewis, two weeks after having gone solo with a mere one-and-a-half hours of instruction, was sent to war in early 1916 with just thirteen hours of total flying time. He faced a life expectancy at the front of only two or three weeks.

No wonder, then, that the “lively” Camel took so many young lives in training, but dangerously sensitive handling and precarious centre-of-gravity were not the half of its liveliness. It was the engine that made the Camel a real killer, to both the enemy that faced it and the inexperienced pilot at its controls.

The Camel was powered by a nine-cylinder rotary engine of various makes and outputs, from the 110 hp of the prototype’s Clerget 9Z to the 150 hp Le Rhône 9R or Gnome Monosoupape of later models. Original 1917 Gnome engines can still be found in modern replica Camels, such as that owned by film director Peter Jackson, providing them with a near-as-damn authenticity and, according to one pilot, the roar of “undoubtedly the loudest engine of its period.”

The Gnome and its peers were not only loud but were also voracious consumers of castor oil, the preferred lubricant of the time. Oil was mixed liberally with the fuel, and what wasn’t burnt was spat out into the slipstream and over both pilot and machine. In a 1998 article for Flight Journal, Richard King, an experienced replica Camel pilot, wrote evocatively of bringing such a beast to life:

“After pulling the prop through six or seven compressions, the mechanic calls for ‘Switch on’. Since my hands will be busy after the engine has started, I make sure my helmet is snug, and I pull my goggles over my eyes. I call out, ‘Switch on’. He gives a mighty tug of the propeller and, in an instant, the Camel and several hundred feet of the area surrounding it are drowned by the tremendous roar…

The aroma of burnt castor oil is swirling through my nostrils, and I know I have oil pressure. I can double-check that by observing the oil droplets on the windshield. The mechanics release the chocks; I take a deep breath, push the stick forward and let out on the blip switch. With the roar of the 160 hp Gnome (it is not muffled by an exhaust system), the usual cloud of blue smoke from the engine and dust from the runway, the Camel begins to roll.”

The “blip switch” mentioned is connected to the rotary engine’s interesting, and for the Camel, appropriate, characteristic of having only two “settings”: off and “full throttle”. The pilot could only reduce power temporarily by “blipping” the engine using an ignition-cutting blip switch mounted on the control column, so producing that distinctive intermittent growl of an engine seemingly about to stall. Otherwise, he rode the whirlwind—and such the rotary was.

The rotary takes its name from the fact that, while it disposes its cylinders in the same circumferential layout as the radial, the cylinder block actually revolves at speed around a fixed crankcase for cooling. The Camel rotaries spun at around 1,200 rpm, meaning that large and sudden loads were transmitted through the airframe every time they were “blipped”. Richard King observed: “A rotary engine is always trying to disassemble itself”.

Nonetheless, the rotary found favour in the early years of aviation because it offered both compact dimensions and an excellent power-to-weight ratio, due to the weight saved in the crankcase and the cylinders (which needed only a minimum of cooling fins). For the engineer, the rotary was attractive; for the pilot, on the other hand, it provided the fascinating and often fatal challenge of dealing with what was, in effect, a massive gyroscope spinning in the nose of his lightweight Camel.

One such pilot, quoted in Robert Jackson’s 2005 book, Infamous Aircraft, provides this insight into the nature of that challenge:

“Some people, particularly learner pilots on Camels, regarded this mysterious gyroscopic action—it was very fierce on Camels—as a species of black magic malevolently exercised by a venomous aircraft to imperil the safety of the pilot; but if one took the trouble to understand it, this bogey of personal malevolence faded out and was replaced by a comforting knowledge of what was going on and what had to be done about it.

A gyroscope is any sort of spinning mass—like an ordinary spinning top—and the whirling mass of 350 lb of engine at 1250 rpm constitutes a gyroscope of quite sizeable proportions. The outstanding feature of a gyroscope is that it likes to stay in the geometric plane in which it is spinning. If the axis of rotation is turned, as in turning the aeroplane, the gyroscope, following its urge to stay put, registers a strong protest by tilting on an axis at right angles to the desired axis of turn. In practical terms of flying, this means that if, with an engine rotating clockwise as seen from the pilot’s seat, you turn to the right, the gyroscopic effect will give a nose-down reaction; or, if you turn to the left, it will give a nose-up effect. Similarly, a sudden climb produces a strong swing to the right and a dive produces a swing to the left. These effects are, of course, present in a small degree on any propeller-driven aircraft, but in some rotaries, they were really fierce.

So much was this so, with the heavier engine, that gyroscopic effect became quite a problem and on sudden changes of direction, the Camel could, and with unwary pilots often did, run out of rudder control—sometimes with disastrous results.

The Camel, then, could hardly have been more finely balanced—but that was its essence. Even lowering the pilot’s seat, and thus slightly shifting a tenth of the aircraft’s loaded weight (the pilot himself), significantly changed the centre-of-gravity, allowing a pilot to enter a dive more quickly. The Camel was the Archimedean point that every fighter pilot craves: a precarious fulcrum upon which he might move the world… providing, of course, that he doesn’t kill himself first. Although the Camel killed many who flew it and faced it, move the world it certainly did.

The top speed of the 130-hp Clerget 9B-powered Camel F.1 was 100 knots at 6,000 ft: not fast even for the time, but its advantage was a ferocious, neck-snapping agility. The Camel dominated the skies of France for a year from its entry into service in early 1917. With the SE5, it won back the sky from the German Albatros scouts, and then it went on to destroy more enemy aircraft than any other Allied type.

Officially among the 1,294 “kills” of its final tally is the most infamous of them all: the Fokker Triplane of Manfred von Richtofen. There is, however, an equally infamous debate about who did indeed bring down the “Red Baron”, and it is now agreed by historians that Richtofen was killed by a shot through the heart fired from the ground. Some even suggest the identity of the lowly Australian footslogger who pulled the trigger.

Be that as it may: it hardly tarnishes the Camel’s formidable reputation. Nor does the fact that the Camel became outclassed in mid-1918 by newer German types, particularly at altitude by the fine Fokker D VII, lessen the Camel’s reputation. The Camel’s day in the sun inevitably passed, to be replaced by costly employment not far above the mud of the trenches in low-level attack, but for a year, its fearsome agility had eclipsed everything else in the sky. In the right hands, it continued to hold its own, however precariously, until the end of the war.

So the Camel claimed its place in history and in the popular imagination, beloved by Biggles and Snoopy and young boys who—like W.E. Johns and Snoopy themselves—daydreamed dogfights in a semi-mythical, Arthurian-like golden age. Of course, the golden age never was, and the war in the skies above France was as bloody and terrifying and wasteful in its own way as the industrial slaughter below.

Flying a Camel was, one way or another, perhaps a more sure ticket to a sudden and violent death than many in the First World War (413 pilots were killed flying Camels in combat; 385 died in accidents). Among those who survived the ride, the Camel was allegedly said to offer the choice between the “wooden cross, Red Cross or Victoria Cross”.

But better that than no choice at all. “There is not one pilot in the squadron who would not argue to the end for a Camel,” wrote the Australian ace Edgar McCloughry. “Although slow, she could get round anything; also, one could not run away from anything, which rather aimed for success.”

He meant, of course, that in a Camel, one had no option but to fight; and once in a fight, no option but to keep on fighting. And though it took an experienced pilot to control its vices and exploit its virtues, in such hands, the Camel—in the words of Cecil Lewis, who flew it into battle by day and night over England and France—“could best any other scout in a fight”.

One Camel above all is testament to this: that flown by Major William Barker, a Canadian RFC ace who gained most of his 50 victories as an exponent of the Camel’s remarkable qualities. His particular aircraft, Camel B6313, remains the most successful fighter in history, bringing down 46 enemy aircraft and balloons in 404 operational flying hours.

Alas, this unique record didn’t stop the aircraft from being scrapped in October 1918. The authorities denied Barker even keeping the clock from it as a memento. Instead, they gave him another legacy of the Camel: its successor, the Sopwith Snipe—arguably the definitive Allied fighter of the First World War.

The Snipe was effectively a heavyweight variant of the Camel. It was easier to handle than its illustrious predecessor and not quite as agile, but it was just as deadly in the right hands. Barker demonstrated that himself in one of the most extraordinary dogfights in history when, on October 27, 1918, he single-handedly fought 60 Fokker D VIIs in a hard-manoeuvring mêlée that spiralled from 20,000 feet to ground level.

Barker’s Snipe took 300 bullets, three of which wounded the pilot; Barker in return destroyed four enemy aircraft and two “probables”, survived the subsequent crash strapped into his bloodied cockpit, and was awarded the Victoria Cross.

An insight into the character of men like Barker can be found in the pages of Lewis’ Sagittarius Rising:

I suppose everyone who saw him would agree that Armstrong was the finest pilot in the force. He was a past master at that most dangerous and spectacular business of stunting near the ground. He would take his Camel off and go straight into a loop. The Camel, if the engine held, gained about ten feet on it. If the engine spluttered or missed, he was for it. His luck held until now, only a fortnight, had we known it, before the end of the war. Then, one day, he was spinning down to the ground, with him a favourite method of descent; but he left it too late, pulled out, thought he had not enough room, jerked back the stick before the machine had flying speed, went into another spin, and struck the ground. He was killed outright. They found his tongue on the engine.

Such was the spirit of the first pilots to master flight, a spirit embodied in the Sopwith Camel: a finely balanced recklessness that could only lead to either magnificence or disaster. It is long gone now, though replica Camels and the precious seven authentic examples still left in the world keep its memory. Ninety years on, perhaps the breed has indeed changed—but I, too, know which I would choose. “You should live,” wrote Lewis, “gloriously, generously, dangerously. Safety last.”