"Captain Robert Alexander (Alec) Little, our greatest fighter ace, has fallen off our radar of almost all Australians.
Today it is usually only WWI aviation enthusiasts and students at Scotch College, Melbourne, his old school, who recall the remarkable record of the young Melbourne pilot who claimed 47 victories and won a chestful of medals before his death at 22 in May 1918.
Melbourne writer Mike Rosel (a MHHV member) hopes that publication of his Little biography—UNKNOWN WARRIOR: The search for Australia's greatest ace—may win Little wider recognition.
Little's formidable achievements with the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) meant that he is not on the commemorative walls at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) reserved for those who died in Australian units. Alec is one of seven Australians listed in the AWM Commemorative Book (a Roll of Honour of those who served in non-Australian forces) as having been killed flying with the RNAS during the First World War.
His medals (DSO and Bar, DSC and Bar and Croix de Guerre) temporary Celtic cross marker and other memorabilia were donated by descendants to the AWM in 1978. Medals and cross are prominently displayed opposite relics of Baron von Richthofen, whose pilots he faced above the Western Front.
Little's father, a Canadian of Scots descent, came to Melbourne in the late 1880s and became an importer of medical textbooks. Alec, one of four children, was born in Hawthorn in 1895. He and his younger brother James attended Scotch College, where he failed to impress academically, leaving school while still 15 to join his father as a commercial traveller. At school he took extra lessons in boxing and French; his fighting spirit was confirmed in battle, and even schoolboy French would have been useful seeking entertainment behind the lines. There's no evidence to confirm one story that Alec painted his Sopwith Triplane in Scotch College colours, although it appears he did (once only, as a young pilot) fly with the school colours fluttering from his wingtips.
Alec always wanted to fly, descendants say. He was 14 when the showman Harry Houdini, best known as the great escapologist, became an Australia celebrity as the first man to fly in Australia, at Diggers Rest just outside Melbourne.
Given the Imperial indoctrination of the age (a Scotch College historian described the school as ‘ultra-Imperialistic'), it is no surprise that Alec Little wanted to join the tens of thousands volunteering to fight. Unsuccessful in an attempt to join our infant air force, he was still a teenager when he planned to sail P&O to London in July 1915.
He paid a hundred pounds to learn to fly at Hendon in northwest London, then volunteered for the Royal Naval Air Service. He quickly earned the ire of his superiors: ‘As an officer is not very good, and has a bad manner' was one comment on his service file. He also earned a reputation for luck, racking up a startling number of forced landings, some due to poor flying or inattention, most the fault of poor quality training aircraft and primitive engines. Another file annotation: ‘Has a trick of landing outside the aerodrome…"
Full article here.
mhhv.org.au/?p=3250
Hope you enjoy!.
Amicalement
Armand
snapped some photos of games he didn't get a chance to play in at Council of Five Nations.
