Royal Flying Corps

And he recruits a chap called Major Albert Carter.

Now, he's a Canadian who'd been serving in the Royal Flying Corps before he was taken prisoner.

And Rees says this.

Most of our chances of escape depended on the slackness of some of the inside sentries, who did not come round my hut much more often than about every 35 minutes, which gave a good chance of getting on the paling and locating the outer sentries.

He was also, depending on how you count these things, one of the luckiest young pilots of the First World War.

April 21, 1918, May was a brand new Royal Flying Corps pilot on just his second combat flight over France.

He'd been told specifically, do not engage experienced enemy pilots.

Stay out of the main fight.

That's right.

And then the Royal Flying Corps, obviously, after the war, became the RAF.

Yeah.

Via air force.

Weren't actually RAF uniforms originally made out of captured German army cloth? They

could have been, for all I know.

It was the Royal Flying Corps.

There was no RAF until later.

So this was not something that a regular Joe Schmo could get into.

Uh, since there was not much infrastructure and training for naval aviation in the US at the time, he was trained in Canada with the Royal Flying Corps, and he was passed as a, uh, ensign, I believe, naval aviator number 154 in the Navy, and he returned to the United States to receive his commission.

Now, the Navy got wind of his, uh, accomplishment here and his motivation, and decided that due to his business credentials, he was best suited at the Office of Naval Operations in Washington, DC.

And so he worked at a desk job and made first lieutenant by the armistice, uh, at the end of World War I.

As you were saying that, I was thinking of in the First World War where they banned...

The Royal Flying Corps banned the use of parachutes because it would encourage people to jump out of their planes before-

[laughs]

...

So by 1918, he went to the Royal Military Academy with one specific goal.

He wanted to fly for the Royal Flying Corps.

Which makes total sense for him.

Right.

He had a really severe stammer.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it was something he struggled with his entire life, and it actually caused him to fail the final medical exam for the Flying Corps.

That is such a heartbreaking twist of fate.

But despite various marriage proposals there, Agatha instead fell in love with one Archibald Christie.

Archie, as he was known, was a dashing aviator in the Royal Flying Corps and from a lower social class.

Shortly after the two began dating, Archie was sent to France to fight in World War I.

When he came home for just a few weeks in December of 1914, the couple hastily married.

He wound up his remarks by saying, "...the chief reason why I particularly want to survive the finish is that I'm so keen on comparing notes with our opposite members in the German Navy." That is the answer to those who ask, as an important official gentleman asked recently, why this English translation of Rittmeister von Richthofen's book should be published.

It gives our flying people an opportunity of comparing notes with one of Germany's star-turned fighting pilots, just as that excellent book by contact gives the Germans the chance of gathering the atmosphere of the Royal Flying Corps as it was in 1916 and 1917.

The Red Battle Flyer has evidently been carefully censored by the German authorities.

Also, it has possibly been touched up here and there for propagandist purposes.