Winged Victory

This masterpiece of pathos and poetry, published in 1934, provides a detailed account of the activities of a squadron of the Royal Flying Corps (later Royal Air Force) on the Western Front. Although it is a work of fiction, it is based largely on the author’s own experience as a pilot. The central character, Tom Cundall, is one of the few pilots to survive the months of combat described in the novel; not only are many planes shot down but many crash due to mechanical faults or pilot inexpertise.

The author, Victor Yeates (born 30 September 1897), grew up in suburban London and attended the same school as another author, Henry Williamson, a close friend. He entered the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps in 1916. Serving as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps from May 1917, after training he was posted to 46 Squadron in February 1918. Like the central character of the novel, Yeates flew Sopwith Camels. He had 248 flying hours on the Western Front. He died in 1934 of tuberculosis understood to be brought on by war fatigue. In the novel, one of his friends in the squadron (Miller) is invalided home suffering from tuberculosis resulting from the influenza epidemic. The prognosis for Miller was cautiously optimistic:
“The colonel says I'll need six months’ or a year’s rest and then I'll be all right as long as I take care of myself.” Many, however, like Yeates, never recovered.

The central character, Tom Cundall, does not usually see himself as a hero even though he is a successful pilot. He often expresses a lack of desire to kill the enemy and a sense of remorse when he does so. On the other hand, he feels some wry satisfaction twice when unreasonable superior officers are killed in action:
“There was no escaping the fact that he was glad, profoundly glad, that Yorke had gone. He was a swine to be glad but there it was. It was the old Beal business over again; though without the racking element of hero worship. Then he remembered what Williamson had said on that occasion: that it wasn't Beal’s death but his removal that he had been glad of. And that was true.”

Towards the end of the novel he is plagued by depression, alcoholism and nightmares, each brought on by the trauma of combat and the fatigue of war:
“He felt as if broken glass was in his blood-stream. The darkness was terrible with visions of Fokkers in formations towering to terrible heights over the Somme and Chaulnes. He flew infinite dream-distances over nightmare battlefields; telling himself all the while that this was merely the early morning ebb of vitality. But the knowledge did not help him; his blood carried the broken glass into his brain; he lay impotent against the forces of night. He must endure. Death seemed waiting in the darkness. He must endure. He dozed and dreamed that he was wandering and searching, always wandering and searching.”