WWI air combat wasn't romantic — it was a meat grinder with a two-week life expectancy
When the war began, aircraft were still a joke to the officer class. In four years the sky became a meat grinder of reconnaissance, bombing and dogfighting, and by 1917 a new pilot's average life expectancy was roughly two weeks.
The video won't play here. Listen to the audio instead:
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
Britain's first aeroplane came from a Wild West show performer
When the war began, senior officers still treated cavalry as the primary reconnaissance arm, and were both snobbish and impatient about aircraft: airships were seen as a gentleman's way to travel, while heavier-than-air machines were dirty and noisy, needed mechanics to fuss over them, and were regarded as something ‘not our sort of people’ played with. Britain's first aeroplane came from an American, Samuel Cody — he had originally come to Britain with a Wild West show, passing himself off as Buffalo Bill's cousin and performing an act shooting an egg off his wife's head, before turning to flying. The big machine he built was called the ‘Flying Cathedral’ — in the source, the ‘flying birdcage’ — because it was large enough to keep a canary inside. Cody himself later died in a flying accident, which was the norm in early aviation.
— Joshua LevineThe commander-in-chief only wanted to know if it was cold up there
The Royal Flying Corps' first job was to fly over France and observe German movements, but the opening was close to farcical: two pilots both got lost, one landed and was nearly captured, then was recognized and instead taken to dinner by the mayor; the other lost his bearings completely and only realized, after flying over a large city, that it was Brussels. Yet they soon began reporting genuinely useful intelligence. One pilot sketched what he had seen on his knee pad and reported back to Sir John French, but French had no interest in the intelligence — he only asked whether it was cold up there and how far you could see. French's scepticism was later proved completely wrong, and only then did aircraft come to be taken seriously, step by step.
— Joshua LevineAircraft changed the war through their eyes, not their machine guns
The most important air-war result of the First World War was not the kill, it was seeing. On 13 September, the observer Atkinson's report twice recorded ‘trenches being dug in the fields’. Joshua says this was the beginning of everything — from that point the Western Front moved into trench warfare, and the reconnaissance aircraft went from an optional ornament to genuinely indispensable eyes and ears. Later that same day, Sir John French formally issued a commendation to the Flying Corps. Put another way, aircraft changed the war not because of the machine gun, but because they were the only thing on the battlefield that could see the whole picture.
— Joshua LevineBombing wasn't designed by generals — pilots improvised it
Bombing and air fighting were not designed by generals; the pilots worked them out themselves. At first they threw steel darts down from their aircraft, then grenades, and only later strapped on bombs. One pilot cut a hole in the belly of his aircraft and lined it with a tin chute, intending to drop his bomb that way, but the slipstream squeezed the tin narrow and jammed the bomb, leaving the detonator exposed under the fuselage. He passed Louis Strange a note reading ‘We are going to die’. The two chose to land and wait for the explosion — and the tall corn growing in the field tore the detonator off, leaving them unharmed. Louis Strange went on to a long life and died in his bed — that was everyday life in early flying.
— Joshua LevineOne mechanical device made every Allied aircraft obsolete overnight
To fire a machine gun forward through the propeller, the Dutchman Fokker first took the idea to the Allies; they turned it down, so he went and built aircraft for the Germans instead. The mechanical device he invented let the bullets pass only through the gaps between the blades, so German pilots could suddenly aim head-on, and the Allies' existing aircraft were instantly obsolete — going up in one meant going up to die. That moment is the equivalent of drones on the Ukrainian battlefield today becoming obsolete within weeks of reaching the front — the First World War air war was itself an arms race measured in months, even weeks.
— Joshua LevineTwo weeks of life on average, but with batmen and a roller-skating rink
Fighting pilots lived a life of ice and fire at once. During the Battle of Arras in 1917, the average time from a new pilot's arrival at the front to his death was only about two weeks; many were sent into combat badly under-trained, and there emerged conditions like ‘flying sickness’, a form of mental breakdown that was treated more leniently. At the same time, they lived behind the front line, had batmen, could go into town to drink, had favourite restaurants — one squadron commander even poured concrete himself and built a roller-skating rink. Comfort and terror side by side: that was the fighter pilot's daily reality.
— Joshua LevineThe most famous aces may have chosen the timing of their own deaths
Both Richthofen and McCudden wrote down their own rules for air fighting — for example, ‘don't follow an aircraft you've shot down into a dive over enemy lines’, because at low altitude you become a target for rifles and machine guns on the ground. Yet these two, the most elite and most symbolically charged pilots of all, died precisely by breaking their own rules. Joshua does not accept the explanation that ‘they felt they were exempt from the rules’, and offers another possibility: because they were so famous, they were kept at the front continuously, and knew subconsciously that they would be killed sooner or later — so they chose to end it at a time and place they could control, rather than wait for the enemy to pick the moment.
— Joshua LevineIn their own words · checked verbatim
I was so frustrated because I was trying to get him back down to earth, but he wouldn't listen.
Joshua Levine13:41
there were a lot of airmen who felt they had more in common with the airmen on the other side
Joshua Levine15:52
the lack of event was just astonishing
Joshua Levine19:07
He was in an aircraft that could fire directly ahead. This is terrifying. This is, this is you know, it's a game changer.
Joshua Levine29:30
when you suit someone down, do not follow them down.Because you make yourself vulnerable.And he died doing precisely that.
Joshua Levine41:54
Figures
| Heavier-than-air flight appears | late 1903 | 3:57 |
| Italy first drops a bomb from the air | 1911 | 8:10 |
| Date of observer Atkinson's report of trenches being dug | 13 September | 14:51 |
| Average survival time of a new pilot at the 1917 Battle of Arras | about two weeks | 37:24 |
Glossary
- Pusher
- The engine sits behind the pilot, so a forward-firing machine gun can be mounted in the nose with nothing in the way.
- Tractor
- Engine and propeller are in the nose; performance is usually better, but a forward-firing gun has to shoot through the propeller.
- Interrupter gear
- The mechanical device that lets a machine gun fire only through the gaps between the propeller blades; Fokker used it to change the air war.
- Scout
- The early-WWI name for a fighter aircraft, whose job was to intercept enemy machines and protect friendly reconnaissance aircraft.
- Flying circus
- Richthofen's mobile fighter unit, which moved between sectors of the front by train.
How to listen
Defense and hard-tech investors, founders studying the speed of technological iteration, and team leaders trying to understand why top talent destroys itself.
Skip the channel promo and the ad breaks; the episode proper has almost no filler.