Keith Miller was an iconic all-rounder who lit up the post-war cricket fields of England and Australia after RAAF service as a fighter-bomber pilot. Asked once how he handled the pressure of Test cricket, he replied “I’ll tell you what pressure is. Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse. Playing cricket is not.” I remembered Miller’s remark while reading Typhoon Pilot and One More Hour, the wartime memoirs of Desmond Scott. A decorated ace and the youngest-ever Group Captain in the RNZAF, Scott’s books are a testament to an age we see only on the screen, one where arbitrary death and destruction stalked everyday life. Those days are long gone, hopefully never to return, but they provide some much-needed perspective on some of our contemporary complaints by teaching us some historical lessons particularly about maturity, mortality, and our common humanity.
At the same age Scott became a Group Captain, my lawyer peers and I were barely trusted with handing up a consent memorandum in the High Court or writing an unedited letter to a client. Adulting is hard now though maybe, just maybe, not quite as hard as it was in the days when leaders in their 20s held the lives of dozens or hundreds of others in their hands. As a Group Captain, Scott was responsible for four squadrons operating as a mobile ‘wing’ and attacking the German army as it counter-attacked and retreated across Europe. It’s a stark contrast to the contemporary phenomenon of extended adolescence characterised by delayed marriage and family formation, and grown men in thrall to gaming.
A clear picture emerges from Scott’s account of life on the edge of death. A photograph shows Scott with five contemporaries at his initial training course. Four were killed, and the other taken prisoner. The casualty rate was horrendous and witnessed up close: “When hit, most pilots were too low to bale out and crashed their burning Typhoons into the ground without so much as a whisper.” Pilots weren’t just lost to enemy action, but to accidents. He tells of a young pilot who, overshooting the runway, somersaulted his aircraft in soft ground and drowned upside down in the mud. A stricken bomber damaged in training crashed in flames; the one crew member able to be rescued “had lost his eyelids and his sightless eyes looked like white marbles set deep in his blackened and swollen face. … He was quietly sobbing and as the ambulance drove away I could hear him calling for his mother.” Would our lives be different if we, too, lived with constant reminders of our finitude? Would we make different choices, pursue meaning and significance in transcendent rather than temporary purposes, if we were more mindful of our end?
Scott loved the machines he flew, first the Hawker Hurricane and then its successor the Typhoon. Finishing his last tour in a Hurricane, he writes of sitting in its cockpit to say goodbye to the aircraft and to give thanks to God “for delivering us both from the perils of the past.” Of the Typhoon, the RAF’s first 400 mph fighter, he writes that it had “a very determined chin, its 20 mm Hispano cannons stuck out like ramrods, and its gigantic three-bladed propeller gave it a pugnacious air which few other aircraft of its time possessed. Head on, it was not unlike a bulldog.” Despite the alarming tendency for early models to shed their tail units in flight, with fatal consequences for their pilots, in Scott’s estimation the Typhoon was “the greatest low attack aircraft of the Second World War,” and “the nightmare” of the German army. In this bond between man and machine, we might recognise our own experience of meaning-making with the objects we depend on.
We might also recognise a common need for confession and absolution in a story Scott tells not once, but twice. In both his books he recounts this victory over a Messerschmitt 109:
As our victim dropped his nose into a slow shallow dive towards the sea, I throttled back in formation with him. He was trying to climb out of his cockpit and I could see quite clearly the terrified expression on his round young face. … For reasons which I have never been able to analyse, I pressed the firing button again, and he and his aircraft hit the sea almost simultaneously in a fountain of spray, framed only by the pattern of my own cannon fire. … Why had I fired that last burst? It had not been necessary. I tried to console myself with the fact that he was the author of his own destruction, and had been far too low to bale out. Yet why could I not have kept my bloody fingers out of his final moment? The passing years have not erased the magnitude of this brief encounter. I often see him looking back at me—and well may he ask, “Who won?”
Contemporary debates look different in the light of all this; “silence is violence,” we’re told, as we tiptoe around trigger warnings and micro-aggressions. Compare this to the actual violence meted out by and to Scott and his fellow airmen in the form of explosive cannon shells, underwing rockets packing the same punch as naval artillery, and “murderous” German flak. I wonder what they might have made of our culture of safetyism, of our intolerance of dissent, and of the newly-minted cardinal sin of causing offence. Our aggressions might be micro; theirs were macro.
Histories like this help me to see things more clearly. Unlike Scott, my grandfathers, and millions of their contemporaries, no-one’s asked me to go into combat and risk everything. Almost everything I might worry about looks smaller when I imagine it through their eyes. And I can imagine it through their eyes because these histories resonate—they reveal people like us, ordinary people asked to do extraordinary things. Perhaps this reminder, that we’re the same creatures as our ancestors, is the most important lesson that these tales of the past have to teach an age obsessed with progress. Lest we forget.
It is a common pattern historically that as civilizations come to the end of their term, the populous become hedonistic and "soft". But despair not: a time will come when our future youth will need to stand and fight again (No, it won't be tomorrow). The more they now learn about the world that former generations lived in, the better prepared they will be for a future world suddenly without cotton wool padding.