A fear of flying: diagnosing traumatic neurosis among British aviators of the Great War

Abstract

In the last two decades, historical scholarship has challenged the argument that British soldiers fighting the First World War found Victorian principles of masculine heroism wanting in modern warfare. However, these researchers have neglected to examine military aviation in their studies. Recruitment patterns, training guidelines and media coverage of the earliest British airplane pilots idealized a normative model of aviators as courageous and physically strong, a hegemonic masculine identity linked to a recent revival of chivalry and elite athleticism in British culture. Yet, numerous British aviators who flew during the Great War faced bodily harm and psychological strains, resulting in disillusionment with wartime leadership and with media portrayals of ideal manhood. Despite such scepticism, the masculine archetype endured because the British War Office, prominent medical officers and the administrators of the air forces claimed that symptoms of traumatic stress fundamentally originated in a failure of physical and moral character. During the war and in its aftermath, as these experts and bureaucrats forged the cult of the aviator as a military hero, they also reinforced stigma associated with mental disability when treating or disciplining fliers who complained of psychological distress. Hence, the intersection of ideology with experience led to tensions between veterans of air combat and the medico-military establishment over understandings of gender and disability.