Sixty Squadron R.A.F.: A History of the Squadron from its Formation — Text and Context

Waiting and Wandering

The excerpts repeatedly emphasize waiting. A pilot writes of “waiting, waiting, waiting for a flight” over several days, and after a brief practice flight he loses sight of the aerodrome, following another machine east toward the front. The tension between the desire to fly and the reality of delays is a persistent thread. The narrative does not skip from action to action; it records the frustration of a “temporary shortage of machines” and the anticlimax of a first flight that ends in confusion. This attention to downtime—to the boredom and uncertainty that precede combat—gives the history a texture absent from more polished accounts.

Ground-Level Details: Phonographs, Dogs, and Chinese Laborers

The letters include observations that have little to do with flying. The squadron’s phonograph draws a crowd of Chinese laborers, who are kept out by a sign painted in Chinese characters. The mess boasts five dogs, and the squadron as a whole sixteen canines, along with six pigs and twenty-five hens—enough for a steady supply of eggs. Moving picture shows are held in a Church Army hut. These details are not decorative; they anchor the narrative in a specific material world. The author records the presence of Chinese coolies in blue padded uniforms, the use of caterpillar tractors to haul howitzers, and the cobbled streets of a nearby town. Such observations suggest a history attentive to the full social and sensory environment of the squadron.

Navigating by Relief Maps and Ruins

A striking passage describes a pilot recognizing a town from a “great relief map” studied at Oxford—a town reduced to “shell-holes in all directions” and “practically all the buildings in ruins.” The contrast between the abstract map and the actual desolation is sharp. The pilot notes that a shell bursts “with a blinding flash” but that he could “hear nothing of the explosion.” This detail—soundless violence observed from the cockpit—captures the peculiar sensory isolation of early air combat. The narrative does not dwell on the horror; it moves on to the relief of finding the way back to the aerodrome. The episode exemplifies how the history juxtaposes technical training with the reality of destruction, often in understated prose.

The Social Life of a Scout Squadron

Beyond combat, the excerpts reveal a squadron deeply engaged in the social and political currents of the war. Canadian pilots discuss the coming general election, with authorities “openly urging everyone to vote against Laurier.” The mess acquires a phonograph that attracts Chinese laborers, and the interpreter paints a sign in Chinese to keep them out. Dogs, pigs, and hens are counted with pride. Moving picture shows provide nightly entertainment. These details, drawn from letters home, show a community trying to maintain normalcy amid the disruption of war. The history does not separate the fighting from the living; it presents them as intertwined, with the same matter-of-fact tone applied to both.

Readers should approach this history as a composite document, one that mixes official records with personal correspondence. The letters are not retrospective analyses but immediate impressions, and their inclusion gives the narrative a provisional, day-to-day quality. The book rewards attention to its margins—the asides about dogs, phonographs, and lost pilots—as much as to its set-piece actions. It is a history that, in its accumulation of small details, offers a fuller picture of what it meant to serve in a scout squadron than any purely operational account could.

I finished Sixty Squadron R.A.F. the other evening, and something about the letters home stayed with me—the way loss and ordinary days sit so close together. It made me think of how we piece together truth from fragments, and then I stumbled on A searchlight on Germany: Germany's Blunders, Crimes and Punishment — Reading Notes. That same quiet ache, the effort to understand what happened, lingers there too.