Trophies of war: British flying officers' photograph albums and the memory of air operations in Egypt, 1915—1918

Abstract

AbstractThis paper addresses the impact of technological modernity on the tactical conduct of the First World War and on how it was subsequently remembered. Specifically, it considers a now lost archive that has received scant historical attention: the collection of photographic intelligence material, comprising negatives and prints, housed on airfields and in military headquarters in Egypt, generated during photographic reconnaissance missions flown during combat operations over enemy held territory in the Middle East. In the absence of the archive itself, the paper asks: what did veteran flying officers who had employed military imaging technologies while on duty, do with the prints they chose to retain, examples of which abound in their private photograph albums. The paper argues that veterans’ photograph albums served as condensers, crystallising personal memories of wartime experience in Egypt through a process whereby their makers ordered the material at their disposal as they saw fit in order to give shape to memories, and thereby construct a privatised sense of their wartime past. It addresses three categories of image: those sourced from the military intelligence archive; photographs of British flying stations and aerodromes (used as airborne navigation aids); and training mission photography of locations in Egypt associated with Nile tourism. It concludes that while albums made by flying officers might contain images more commonly associated with Nile tourism, the inclusion of salient images from the military intelligence archive elevated them to the status of trophy objects: private trophy albums owned by former air warfare practitioners signposted their membership of a wartime in‐group defined by its mastery of state‐of‐the‐art technologies, the conduct of an unprecedented type of combat, and of quotidian life on a new type of military installation‐the aerodrome, a restricted place in which a gated community of high‐value specialists went about its professional duties. Moreover, flying officers’ trophy albums were constitutive of a post‐war fictive kinship in the British veteran community, and informed the cultural construction of a family of remembrance without precedent.