James Aldridge (1918- 2015) was an Australian journalist and war correspondent who covered the Second World War in Greece, Crete and North Africa 1940-1941. Signed With Their Honour was his first novel.
Aldridge enjoyed a period of considerable success in the late-war to post-war period and his biggest-selling novel was The Diplomat published in 1949. In the early post-war era, Aldridge was one of Australia’s most successful novelists in international terms. Yet by the early 1960s, his prestige was on the decline with his novels receiving increasingly poor or indifferent reviews and afterwards Aldridge devoted most of his writing to producing work for children or young adults. By the time of his death in 2015, none of his works were still in print and Aldridge’s writing was virtually forgotten (when he died in London three years ago, none of the Australian media even bothered to notice).
Aldridge chose a variety of settings for his novels. Early works such as Signed With Their Honour and The Sea Eagle (1944) were set in the Second World War, The Diplomat was a political drama set in the Azerbaijan Revolution in Iran, The Hunter (1950) portrayed fur hunters in Canada’s north, The Last Exile (1962) was set in the Suez Crisis and A Captive in the Land (1962) was a Cold War drama. A common thread among his novels is the conflict between an individual’s desires, morals and conscience and his obligations, demands and duty to the state and its political structures.
Signed With Their Honour was one of Aldridge’s more durable works, remaining in print off and on until the 1980s unlike many of his other novels. Set in Greece and later in Crete, it depicts the British Royal Air-Force and its participation in the Italian invasion of Greece in 1940, followed by the German invasion in early 1941. Although the author was Australian, the novel’s central character, a young pilot named Quayle, is English. One of his fellow pilots is Australian but is only a minor character. Whether Aldridge chose this device to help improve potential sales in the UK is unclear.
The title of the novel is a line from a Stephen Spender poem ‘The Truly Great’, a work that celebrates the individual that seeks greatness, glory and achievement even if the price is a life cut short. Aldridge no doubt considered the line apt for a novel about fighter pilots in wartime. This novel depicts the pilots of a British fighter squadron equipped with out-dated Gloster Gladiator biplanes, isolated in the heat and dust of Greece with few supplies and facing a powerful enemy invasion. The novel is closely based on the exploits of a real-life unit, No 80 Squadron, which fought in Greece during that campaign and, despite possessing out-dated biplanes, inflicted heavy losses on their Italian and later, their German opponents.
For a wartime novel, there is a surprisingly bitter tone which possibly reflects the feelings of many towards Britain’s role in the Greek and Cretan campaigns which ended in defeat. Characters in the novel complain about the too-little supplies they have been given, the indifferent Allied leadership, the false promises and hopes given to the Greek people and the in-adequacy of their equipment, being allocated old biplanes while fleets of more modern fighter-planes sit on airfields back in England.
The central character Quayle develops a relationship with a Greek girl and his feelings towards her and the longings of his inner self, combined with his bitterness of the Allied bunglings of the war around him, leads him to consider desertion. But his conscience and sense of duty in the fight against Fascism compel him to remain in the air.
The novel received considerable attention when it was first published in the US and the UK, earning some positive reviews and it became a best seller in both countries. Not all reviews were positive, Time Magazine dismissed it as ‘clumsy fiction’ for example. But the novel received a lot of attention. Rank Studios in Britain purchased the film rights and in 1943 embarked on production of a film version. However the project was abandoned after three Gladiator biplanes were written off in accidental crashes and the funding dried up.
The novel owes a big debt to Ernst Hemingway and the master’s obvious influence was pointed out by the book’s more negative critics. But despite its’ flaws, I believe this novel deserves to be better known still today. It vividly portrays aerial combat and the sights and smells of the Greek campaign. And, unlike his later works, it moves along at a smart pace and doesn’t allow itself to become bogged down in the details. Aldridge’s later novels, although perhaps more ambitious, became bloated in their own self-importance. Even his 1944 follow-up to Signed With Their Honour, the novel The Sea Eagle, about Australian soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in German-occupied Crete, now looks rather dated and pretentious with its heavy-handed symbolism and references to Greek mythology. This novel is slimmer, easier to digest and deals with a subject that obviously fired the author’s imagination without stretching his writing abilities too thin.