Biggles: Comment for Roads to the Great War
Biggles was primarily responsible for my own life-long interest in aviation and the Great War. As a boy, I learned of places such as Cambrai, Polygon Wood, Arras , Amiens etc from the Biggles books. W E Johns flew DH4s with 55 Sqdn before being shot down and made a POW for the last few weeks of the war; his 19 year-old observer 2/Lt Alfred Amey was killed. Johns does not glorify war; at several points he has Biggles musing on the "futility of it all". The original WW1 books were originally written for adults. In one story, the General orders a particularly troublesome Kite Balloon to be shot down, and promises that the squadron that does so will receive a prize of a crate of the "finest lemonade"! Even as a boy this didn't sound right to me, and much later I learned that in the original story, it was a crate of whisky! It isn't quite true that no WW1 fighter pilots flew in action in WW2. One pilot was an ace in both wars - Theodore Osterkamp was a 35 v...