James Patrick Hynes - Lawrence of Arabia’s secret air force : based on the diary of Flight Sergeant George Hynes

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Pen & Sword Aviation
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Copyright James Patrick Hynes 2010

ISBN 978 1 84884 266 3
ePub ISBN: 9781844683383
PRC ISBN: 9781844683390

The right of James Patrick Hynes to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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I am most grateful to my cousin, Ellen Gannicott (ne Hynes), for preserving and making available her fathers memoirs.

In a foreword written in Cranwell on 15 August 1926 and signed T.E.S. Lawrence he paid tribute to a number of named persons but there he also wrote:

And there were many other leaders or lonely fighters to whom this selfregardent picture is not fair. It is still less fair, of course, like all warstories, to the un-named rank and file who miss their share of credit, as they must do, until they can write the despatches.

The exploits of Lawrence of Arabia have been well documented in his own books, Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Revolt in the Desert, for example, and indeed in many of his writings including his prolific correspondence. Among the many surviving letters written by him are two received by my uncle, Number 3064, Flight Sergeant George Samuel Hynes who served with the secret X Flight of the Royal Flying Corps in close support of Lawrence and his Arabs. Air Mechanic G.S. Hynes, of No. 14 Squadron, met and spoke with Lawrence on several occasions. In fact on one occasion he was called upon to repair an aircraft downed in the desert with Lawrence as passenger.

More often than not books about war service have been written by commissioned ranks and/or politicians but the memoirs presented in this book have been written by a ranker whose skills, along with those of his comrades, kept pilots and machines in serviceable order in the most adverse conditions.

George Samuel Hynes was born in 1895, in Liverpool. There, he served an apprenticeship as a marine engineer and joined the Royal Flying Corps at the beginning of the First World War. Three of his brothers also served in the army, on the Western Front. His career with the RFC began at Farnborough and after several postings he travelled out to Egypt with No. 14 Squadron. Within a year or two he was living in the deserts of Arabia in either canvas hangars or bell tents in advanced landing grounds from which X Flight aircraft flew on reconnaissance, bombing and strafing missions.

Few histories of the early wars in the desert recount the contributions made by men other than the commissioned officers. Often their individuality and their contributions are lumped together in expressions such as the following as it was applied to No. 14 Squadron, to which X belonged. As well as the necessary Air Mechanics and Fitters, the party included Royal Army Medical Corps and Army Service Corps personnel. In fact, to be fair, the officers, the fliers, have seldom been mentioned either because there is so little in the public domain about X Flight itself.

On the other hand, in his famous books, Lawrence occasionally mentions other ranks by name. For example in Revolt in the Desert, he did pay particular tribute to his sergeants, Stokes and Lewis, for whom he had particular admiration. Nevertheless, Lawrence confessed in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom that their real names were not Stokes and Lewis Their names may have been Yells and Brooke, but became Lewis and Stokes after their jealously-loved tools (the Stokes 3-inch portable mortar and the famous Lewis machine gun). George too writes about other ranks as well as the officers, the pilots whom he admired and whose aircraft he scrupulously serviced to keep safe.

In his memoirs, George writes about Lawrence over and over again, mostly in a spirited defence of the great mans reputation; but here, in this account, I have mentioned the great man only in relation to X Flight. I have selected only those pages relating to Georges actual personal experiences with X Flight in order to present a narrative account of the deeds of that covert group of men and machines.

Although as a boy I visited Uncle George, along with my father, his brother, listening to both mens war stories and looking at his notes and his drawings, it was not until 2008 that I heard of his memoirs. Years later, in the late 1950s, he had laboriously typed some 220 pages of them. For the privilege of reading through them I thank my cousin, his daughter, Mrs Ellen Gannicott who gave me copies. Although I knew of the letters which T.E.L. had written to George, we had no idea where they had ended up until I discovered that they are now held by the Houghton Library of Harvard University along with a sixteen-page synopsis written by my uncle. Ellen had retained photocopies and typescript copies of those letters but none of the surviving family had known that the originals had been sold at Sothebys in 1961 to an American buyer.

Although George had met with, spoken with and sometimes worked with Lawrence, he was no closer to that enigmatic man than any other person had ever been. He wrote much in defence of Lawrence but others have done that and George would not have known anything about the behind-the-scenes politics. On the other hand, Georges recollections of his service in the air force have the immediacy of personal involvement. They are written in unpretentious language, the language of one who left a senior elementary school at age fourteen and went on to take City and Guilds qualifications in marine engineering. I have edited his writings but in so doing, out of respect for him, I have tried to retain his style. Therefore in editing and presenting Georges script I have tried to keep as closely as possible to his vernacular and personal narrative style.

Whilst he, the son of a man who had himself served as a regular soldier, was serving in the Middle East, his three brothers were serving on the Western Front and George was well aware that they were having a worse time than he was. His eldest brother John served with the Liverpool Irish right through major battles from 1914 to 1919 and in his post-war years suffered from the effects of gas poisoning. A slightly younger brother, James, served first with the Connaught Rangers until after they had sustained extraordinarily high casualties, when he was transferred to the Inniskillings, dying of wounds in Germany in the last week of the war. Their younger brother Richard, my father, served in the trenches for two years with the Lancashire Fusiliers, sustaining a trench knife scar.

There is such a wide variety of different renditions of place names in books and documents relating to the war in the Middle East that, in the interests of consistency, I have favoured the spellings used by X Flights commanding officers in their weekly reports. For example, George uses the place name Desi whereas it is written, DECIE, in capitals, as were all place names in X Flight reports. Georges Guweira gives way to GUEIRA. In fact, back in 1926 arguments about the spelling of Arabic place names took place between Lawrence and his publishers proofreaders, one of whom complained that the manuscript of Revolt in the Desert was full of inconsistencies in the spelling of proper names, a point which reviewers often take up.