Wings of Empire by Barry Renfrew

Author:Barry Renfrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.

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Despite the hardships and privations, many men valued their time in places like Iraq as a pristine world of male camaraderie that allowed them to shake off the cloying constraints of modern life and find their true natures. ‘I suppose it is natural for a man’s lonely thoughts to turn to a woman, but I think it is a pity, for when men get together in the wilds one meets the best form of communal happiness,’ Keith said.24

Even some happily married men shared the idea that men were at their best in the wilderness without women. ‘People say you must be out in the “Blue” [desert] with a fellow to discover his real worth. Funny this, but strangely perfectly true, the desert somehow or other brings out a man’s real self,’ Howard told his adored wife.25 It was a concept held by both officers and men. Sydney Sills, an enlisted man, thought that ‘men are happiest when they are suffering’, and only hardship could build true character and comradeship.26 Samuel Wentworth, another ranker who served in Iraq, said quite a few men volunteered for a third year because of the close camaraderie.27

Alcohol was the easiest escape from the stress and miseries of Arabia, and heavy drinking was a pillar of RAF life wherever its squadrons went. Men were expected to drink, and those who did not were seen as odd or laughable. Sills had a drink for the first time when he arrived in Basra, and was knocking off eight pints of beer a day when he left two years later. Carr said drinking destroyed or sublimated the need for sex.

There was resentment that the lower ranks could only buy beer in the base canteens. Stanley Eastmead, an enlisted man in an armoured car company, said this meant that senior NCOs in their 40s with a row of campaign medals did not have the same rights as a teenage officer to buy a whisky.28 Carr recalled times when normal duties would be suspended, and the officers would go on a drinking binge that lasted for days and from which nobody was excused.

Young officers were expected to limit their bar bills to £5 a month to conserve their slender salaries and moderate their drinking, but alcohol was duty-free and £1 would buy eight bottles of whisky or thirteen bottles of gin. Many flight crews said there were no formal bans on drinking and flying, although men who crashed because they were drunk were punished. Robert Goddard, who thought he had seen everything as a naval airship officer when he dropped agents behind German lines, had a flight commander in Iraq who sobered up before operations with a self-administered enema.29 Goddard later became an air marshal.

Extravagant efforts were made every Christmas to ease the sense of homesickness and isolation by recreating a little bit of England or Scotland in the middle of the desert. Rather than putting up a tree or a few ornaments, the men of each hut selected a theme

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