The First World War had shaken the old values of Europe to their core. An Emperor had been deposed, a Kaiser arrested and a Tsar and his family killed, alongside millions of dead soldiers on each side.
Generations of young men, the flower of European society, were gone. Entire villages and landscapes were wiped off the face of the earth, and the slow path to rebuild the shattered lands would take decades. Many things would never be the same again.
Huge advanced had been made in technology, in weapons of war and tactical considerations such as camouflage and projectile accuracy. Plastic surgery allowed those disfigured by combat to live relatively normal lives, and the need for logistical support at home gave women a role in the factories and the fields they had never experienced before.
But perhaps the greatest advancement occurred not on the battlefields, but above them. Air power and aerial combat came of age above the trenches of Belgium and France, from a few reconnaissance planes dropping grenades to a fully-fledged theater of combat.
Planes were the future, or so John Hume Ross thought.
A Suspicious Application
And so it was that in 1922, after the war, Ross walked into the RAF recruitment offices in Covent Garden, London, and applied to join as an airmen. When questioned, he told the recruiters that he saw air power as the future of warfare, and wanted to involve himself in this cutting edge method to bring the battle to the enemy.
By chance, he had a famous interviewer: Flying Officer WE Johns, later made famous by the series of novels he wrote about the WWI flying ace Biggles. Johns felt something was up with Ross’s application almost immediately, and rejected it: he believed “Ross” was a false name.
However Ross was not so easily dissuaded. He left the recruitment offices, only to return shortly with an RAF messenger carrying a written order: Ross was to be admitted, and no further questions were to be asked.
And so Ross entered military training to be an airman. But by now you must be also highly suspicious of this man, who refused to be drawn on his patently false name but who had friends in high places. You would be right to harbor suspicions: Ross was not who he seemed.
To his credit, he managed to remain undetected for 6 months, during which time he completed much of his training. However, in February 1923 he was finally exposed. He was not John Hume Ross at all, he was Colonel T E Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Apparently preferring anonymity to ensure he was treated on his merits as an airman, Lawrence was nevertheless immediately thrown out of the RAF for his deception. After trying a spell in the Tank Corps (another innovation of the Great War) where he found the large, ungainly machines noisy and cumbersome, he finally achieved his dream and was readmitted into the RAF in 1926.
Strangely, his expertise in the RAF was not in planes but boats, and he served until 1935 when his enlistment ended. It seemed that the RAF was truly what Lawrence had hoped it would be and although he had failed to maintain his anonymity he still served well.
One is left to wonder how Colonel Lawrence could have turned this decade in the RAF to advantage with the outbreak of WW2 in 1939. Sadly this was not to be. Six weeks after his departure from the RAF, while riding his motorcycle near his home in Dorset, Lawrence swerved to avoid two boys in bicycles and crashed heavily on the roadside. He died of his injuries 6 days later, aged only 46.
Top Image: John Hume Ross was not who he said he was, but was allowed to join the RAF anyway. Source: Riko Best / Adobe Stock.
By Joseph Green
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