The Aviation Historian — Issue 21 (October 2017)

120 THE AVIATION HISTORIAN Issue No 21

aces? Sensitive fighter pilots don’t last long.

This is an interesting and useful book — but

unfortunately a flawed one.

ADRIAN ROBERTS

Charles Pratt of Belmont Common: A Life in

The Air — Geelong’s Pioneer Aviator, Aerial

Photographer and Flying Instructor

By Kevin O’Reilly; self-published, 12 Kimber Court, Dingley

Village, Victoria 3172, Australia (available via e-mail jillor6@

bigpond.com); 8½in x 12in (216mm x 305mm); hardback;

288 pages, illustrated; AU$35, AU$60 with postage. ISBN

978-0-646962-02-3

I SUSPECT THAT few TAHTAHTAH readers will even readers will even

have heard of New Zealander Charles Daniel

Pratt, but, as the subtitle of this book says, he

was a pioneer aviator in Geelong, Australia, and

also an aerial photographer and flying instructor.

It must be said that this is a specialised subject,

but the content is fascinating. The author

has assembled an impressive collection of

documents, photographs and diary extracts

which provide a very comprehensive coverage

of Pratt’s long career in aviation.

Pratt was an Australian & New Zealand Army

Corps (ANZAC) officer in the Royal Flying

Corps in Egypt during the First World War.

After the war’s end, while he was sailing home

to New Zealand with two Airco D.H.6s, an

Avro 504 and a Sopwith Pup with the intention

of establishing a flying school at Wellington, a

strike by shipping engineers stranded him in

Melbourne. Short of money, he unloaded one

D.H.6 on the wharf and used it to give joyrides

to boost his finances. He then settled in Geelong,

where he was joined by his three brothers.

Pratt never looked back. Newspaper reports

and his own diary and logbook entries trace

his subsequent flying career in detail, and a

gamut of fine, well reproduced photographs,

overview. However, there are a few errors
and oversimplifications. For example, Karl
Allmenröder was probably shot down by
groundfire, not by Raymond Collishaw, and,
less forgivably, the aircraft in the photograph
on page 184 is captioned as a Sopwith Camel
but is a Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5. If there
are errors that even a non-specialist reader can
recognise, how can they be sure that there are
none within information that is new to them?
The biographies of the aces are interspersed
within the narrative history of the air war,
which is is fine, but a book using such a format
needs an index. There is none here, which is a
serious flaw, making the book difficult to use if
looking up a particular airman.
The book was originally written and
published in German, and it is probably
no bad thing for readers more used to an
Anglocentric view of history to be exposed
to another point of view — but here the bias
merely becomes the reverse. The section on
Manfred von Richthofen is predictably long,
whereas that on McCudden is disappointingly
short, despite the latter frequently being
described as the former’s British equivalent.
The author gives a reasonably balanced view
of Albert Ball’s death, but concludes that
he was probably shot down, and that Max
Immelmann was killed accidentally; books
from the British perspective generally draw
the opposite conclusions.
There are occasional glitches with the editing
and translation. There are some interesting
first-hand accounts, but the authors are not
always identified. The UK publisher, and/or
its editorial staff, appear to express opinions
of their own, which they have no place doing.
The author’s view of von Richthofen is fairly
balanced, but the photograph caption suggests
that he may have been a “proto-Nazi”, which
is speculative at best. Even the dustjacket flap
describes him as “infamous”. Why? Was he a
more ruthless killer than the British or French