Superstitious luck charms, parachutes, helmets, and goggles: these are the objects that local author and historian Bill Howard used to chronicle the stories of British Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots during WWII for his latest novel “What the RAF Airman Took to War.” With photographs and essays, Howard uses the things these men carried to war to form a historical narrative of their struggles and victories.
“In this book I didn’t just want to just tell the story of the battle. I wanted to take these larger than life personas and take them back to who they were as people. I thought the best way to do that was to use the artifacts that remain – the things that they touched – the things that they used”.
As Howard described at his book signing at The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza on Thursday, June 25, these British pilots were revered almost as the knights of old. So few of these elite pilots existed, and their role was so vital to the war effort they were known as “the few” after the famous Winston Churchill quote, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few,” taken from the speech he gave following the Battle of Britain. RAF victory in that battle, the first major battle to be fought entirely by air forces, is considered by most historians to be the turning point of the war.
Fifty separate objects are featured in the book, most of which come from Howard’s large personal collection of wartime memorabilia he has been amassing for more than 20 years. For him, seeing his collection finally published is something of a great personally achievement. According to Howard, “In the end, the most fulfilling aspect is when you look at the pieces you’ve collected over the course of a lifetime and seeing the story they tell when they come together.”
A lifelong RAF enthusiast, Howard first began interviewing RAF pilots as a young boy growing up in Delmar. It was this boyhood enthusiasm that led to the passion you can find in the historical essays that accompany the photos in “What The RAF Airman Took to War.” As this year marks the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, it seemed a fitting time for Howard to release his collection of RAF fighter materials.
Like all WWII soldiers, the RAF pilots are often either renowned for their heroism and skill or pitied for the brevity of their lives and the struggles they faced. And while Howard expressed both of these views toward the RAF fighters, to him their objects also show that, “Despite the things that they did, they really were people just like us.”
Of the 2,917 RAF pilots that fought during WWII, 544 were killed during the Battle of Britain and another 800 were killed by the end of the war. The personal objects and war equipment that remain of these men now “stand for the life of a guy who is otherwise forgotten by history.” Rather than simply reducing their struggles to tragic numbers, Howard hopes their objects will help give the reader a more realistic sense of what the war was like.
“You think of them as heroes,” said Howard. “You think of them as people who were larger than life. But these people – 18,19, 20 year-old kids – fought and died tragically,” said Howard.
Objects like a teddy bear an RAF took on every fight he ever flew; dog tags with engravings remembering loved ones; and the twisted wreckage of an airplane that ends the book, help show this dichotomy of heroism, tragedy and reliability.
While only a handful of “the few” are still alive today to remember their trials and triumphs, one of the last remaining RAF fighters who fought in the Battle of Britain, Jeffrey Wellum, was able to write the forward for the book. Wellum is also an author in his own right, having written the autobiographical “First Flight: The Story of the Boy Who Became a Man in the War” which is now a classic in WWI history literature.
Howard’s latest novel “What the RAF Airman Took to War,” now adds to his extensive anthology of historical works that also includes “The Civil War Memoir of William T. Levey” and “The Battle of Ball’s Bluff: The Leesburg Affair.” All three of his novels can be found in local bookstores and on Amazon.com.
