Falcon (19 page)

dive bomber . . . Here were two superb fighting machines indulging in mock battle for the sheer joy of movement.
¹¹

In such passages, airpower evangelism meets falcon in the his- torical consciousness of the Romantic Right. From the dawn of the air age, a strand of thought had seen the fighter pilot as an aristocrat pitting his skill and courage in single combat with a worthy opponent, high above the messy realities of infantry and mud. Aerial combat was commonly conceived of as a throwback to an age of chivalry, the pilots as ‘knights of the air’. Such dreams are beautifully articulated in the opening of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s 1944 film
A Canterbury Tale
. Powell saw the film as a crusade against materialism, a paean to English historical continuity and to the eternal nature of spiritu- al values. It opens with a recitation – by falconer Philip Glasier’s cousin Esmond Knight – of the Prologue to
The Canterbury Tales.
Tracing a map of the medieval pilgrim’s route, the screen dis- solves to a scene of Chaucer’s pilgrims riding along the high downland paths to Canterbury. A falconer unhoods and casts off his falcon. His upturned face is followed by footage of the falcon in flight, its flickering wings a drawn bow against the grey Kentish skies. A sharp cut that prefigures Kubrick’s famous bone-to-spaceship cut in
2001: A Space Odyssey
by twenty years, and the falcon is transformed into a diving Spitfire. We return to the upturned face of the falconer – who is now a soldier watch- ing the plane above – and instead of a line of medieval pilgrims, a military exercise crosses the downs towards Canterbury. The conflation of falcon-as-military-aircraft with falcon as symbol of a mythical English past enabled its image to connect powerfully the idea of the nation’s heritage with its recent defence through aerial battles; an essential, continuous national identity recover- able through the image of a bird.

‘Is it a bird? Is it a plane?’ Stills from the opening sequence of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s
1944
film
A Canterbury Tale
.

While
A Canterbury Tale
attempted to show wartime Americans why they should defend Britain, in the us the weaponization of falcons was assuming bizarre forms. ‘Real Warbirds for Uncle Sam’, ran the headline in
American Weekly
in 1941. ‘If the Time Comes When They Are Needed, the Fighting Falcon and the High-Flying Eagle May Take the Air to Put the Enemy’s Homing Pigeons Out of Action.’ It continued:

While the nation’s airplane factories are busy turning out bombers and fighters for Uncle Sam’s growing air armada, the officers of the Army’s Signal Corps . . . are thinking seriously of pressing another type of warbird into service. Known to the military mind as ‘the original dive-bombers’ . . . two or three hundred falcons will be trained at Fort Monmouth under direction of Lt Thomas MacClure, of the pigeon-training center.
¹²

With his assistants, Privates Louis Halle and Irwin Saltz, MacClure aimed to ‘reinforce the falcon’s natural armament with razor-sharp knives attached to the talons, wings and body’. Not only would these trained birds be used to kill enemy carrier pigeons and take ‘the dead messengers and their message to headquarters’, but ‘the Army believes further that the falcons can be taught to dive at enemy parachutes and either rip them or cut the cords’.
¹³
He explained in the
New Yorker
that although retrieving prey to the falconer was unheard of in traditional fal- conry, orthodoxy was not to stand in the way of efficiency. ‘War is different from falconry’, he stated firmly.
¹⁴
MacClure sent out letters soliciting donations of falcons and held a publicity talk, complete with hooded falcons, in Times Square. His rousing call did not impress one of the onlookers, falconer George Goodwin. Goodwin was the curator of mammology at the New

York Museum of Natural History. He was appalled. ‘If McClure [
sic
] is a sample of the Army, thank God we have a Navy!’ he wrote in high dudgeon to a friend:

Did you know that the Army has developed a method of teaching peregrines to distinguish between their own pigeons and the enemy’s? Well it has but that’s a Military Secret that cannot be divulged! Hallelujah! . . . it drives me nuts just to think of it. I’m glad to have some first hand information on the Pigeon Blitz Patrol and on McClure, but I wish to hell I hadn’t seen the show they put on. I’m scared to go to sleep now for fear I’ll wake up dreaming about it.
¹⁵

Other us falconers sprang into action ‘Something
must
be done’, wrote anatomy professor Robert Stabler to the chief of the us Fish and Wildlife Service. ‘Can’t you give this man and his group something of an investigation? Is there no
limit
to what a man may do under the guise of defending America?’
¹⁶
And falconer and army aviator Colonel Luff Meredith took

immediate steps at the War Department to ensure that MacClure’s programme never got off the ground.

Meredith recruited falcons into the military in a far subtler fashion than MacClure: no Times Square event was required. He was a friend of General Harmon, who was to head the newly created us Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. A few years after the end of the Second World War, recalled Robert Stabler, he and Meredith ‘grabbed a couple of peregrines, hopped in Meredith’s Jaguar’ and drove down to Lowry Air Force Base; Meredith was convinced that the Air Force needed the peregrine falcon as its mascot. Harmon ‘had us to lunch and we had the peregrines sitting on the back of a chair – Mrs Harmon there –

we put newspapers on the floor’. Harmon sent them over to show the birds to General Stillwell and Colonel Heiberg; they ‘picked up the birds and became immediately consumed with the peregrine’. Stabler remembers Stillwell saying:

‘well we will certainly present this bird as one of the things’ . . . I think they were considering a tiger and a hawk of some kind and so on. ‘So we’ll present a pere- grine and so on to the Cadet wings and let them vote on what they want.’ And they did that . . . and they voted on the peregrine as being the mascot of the Air Force.
¹⁷

On election day, the officer lobbying for the falcon succinctly concluded his speech: ‘the falcon has a speed in level flight of approximately 165 mph. Its dive speed is classified information. The golden eagle is a scavenger! You will now vote.’
¹⁸
On 5 October 1955 the first mascots duly arrived at the Academy.

The press seized gleefully on Lieut. Thomas MacClure’s scheme to use falcons as ‘real warbirds for Uncle Sam’. Here MacClure points into the sky with his right hand – perhaps he has seen an enemy pigeon?

Band of Brothers: three
usafa
mascot peregrines, bound and taped to prevent injury while travelling to their new homes, have their first taste of fame.