Marked for Death Read Online Free

richer in material, but infinitely poorer in leadership. The six months gap between these two definite periods was devoted to internal intrigue and consequent service bitterness. This deplorable condition of affairs is directly responsible for the present impotence and inefficiency of the service. 13
    In the charged emotional atmosphere of the time, when the appalling casualties of the infantry in France were a daily topic, any allegation of poor leadership, intrigue and impotence inevitably struck home. There was already talk that the centuries-old rivalry between the Army and the Navy – and now that between Farnborough and the private sector – were a perfect formula for inefficiency and chaos in the RFC and RNAS. Such things were taken up by the press and especially by Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail . PB guaranteed the widest coverage by quoting an intemperate accusation made by Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Faber, the MP for Andover, that RFC airmen were being ‘murdered rather than killed’ by not being given good enough aircraft. This was very shocking to the House of Commons even though by then the phrase had become a near-cliché among squadron commanders in France who daily and reluctantly sent out undertrained boys still in their teens, many of whom never returned. Those were the aircrew PB described as ‘Fokker fodder’. Andhow could it be otherwise? he demanded. Their commanding officers were constantly sending urgent requests back home for better aircraft, and all they got was more of the same or even worse. Farnborough was hidebound and sclerotic. Mervyn O’Gorman and General David Henderson should both be held to account for their blunder in clinging to the B.E.2c and the rest of their outmoded aircraft. Farnborough’s near-monopoly of supplying the RFC should at once be broken and the inventiveness and energy of the private aircraft companies properly exploited. More heads were better than one and (PB managed to imply) almost any head was better than one wearing an Army hat… There was a good deal more in the same vein, and for many months to come.
    As he had calculated, such remarks caused frequent uproar in Parliament as well as in the press. In the ensuing official enquiry both Mervyn O’Gorman and Sir David Henderson defended Farnborough in the most spirited fashion. Far from having a monopoly that excluded the private sector, O’Gorman said, half his establishment’s work came from dealing with the aerodynamic and design problems the private companies encountered and which, by nature of the place’s remit as Britain’s main centre for aeronautical research, he was both obliged and happy to try and solve. A good deal of Farnborough’s time and effort was being taken up by having to design the various gadgets and accessories requested by aero companies up and down the country. Although the enquiry exonerated him, O’Gorman’s contract was not renewed and he duly left Farnborough in October 1916, simultaneously vilified and lamented, while remaining behind the scenes as an adviser to both the War Office and the government.
    From that moment dates a strand in the writings of aviation historians that sides with Pemberton Billing and Charles Grey in lambasting O’Gorman for Farnborough’s shortcomings, and singles out the B.E.2c as a hopeless and even disgraceful aeroplane. An example of this taken at random would be Alan Clark’sdenunciation of the B.E.2c as ‘a bad and dangerous aircraft’ (neither of which it was) in his 1973 book Aces High . His description of O’Gorman as an ‘empire-builder… at pains to ensure by the placing of contracts and other means that no other aspirant manufacturer could produce a design – still less an aeroplane – whose merits might rival or eclipse those of the Royal Aircraft Factory’ 14 ignored the reality of the various aero companies such as Sopwith, de Havilland, Bristol and Short doing exactly that, especially for the Royal Navy. Clark was, of