In his review of a biography of a County Galway fighter ace, military historian PADRAIG LENIHAN finds both local interest, and a welcome counterweight to the notion that aerial dog fights were anything but bloody and brutal
A biographer must resort to writing a ‘life and times’ to broaden the scope of their story when the documentary material for a biography is scant. This works out rather well here in Robert Jocelyn’s The Life and Times of Major Thomas Falcon Hazell DSO, MC, DFC and Bar: Connemara’s Fighting Ace of the First World War (Troubador, 2026 )
The reader is not suddenly cast up into the skies over Arras or Ypres, but learns a lot about family backstory which will be of particular interest to Galway readers.
The Hazells were agents for a Scottish firm buying kelp. Robert Jocelyn describes the process of gathering seaweed that grew in profusion along the rocky shores of Bertraghboy and Cashel Bay. The kelp was next dried, burnt and the ash pressed into blocks to be shipped to Glasgow for iodine and other extracts for commodities such as glass, soap, and cosmetics.
The Hazells prospered: Thomas, the ace’s grandfather, built Cashel House on what had once been part of the vast Martin estates.
The appropriately named Thomas Falcon Hazell joined No. 1 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps in late December, 1916. He had missed the ‘Fokker scourge’ when the antiquated RFC aircraft were outpaced and outfought by more up-to-date German machines.
Hazell flew the agile Nieuport Scout that was faster and more manouvreable than the Fokker monoplane. Four months later, Lieutenant Hazell notched up his first kill.
Jocelyn debunks the notion that aerial combat was at all glamorous or chivalric: you shot your opponent - still described hatefully as the ‘Hun’ - down in flames, or shot his plane to pieces. In contrast, the Germans could be performatively chivalric: Hermann Göring shot down a pilot in Hazell’s flight, and out of admiration for his ‘brilliant, skilled and dashing’ fight, hung his Iron Cross around the neck of a ‘young, rather bemused Australian’.
In his after-action report of June 19, 1917, Hazell describes diving on an enemy fighter and emptying a full machine-gun drum into the plane which "went down in an uncontrollable spin. I could not watch it down owing to the presence of five other hostile aircraft coming up from different directions".
Hazell was either employing stiff-upper-lip understatement here or, Jocelyn reckons, he was growing dangerously reckless. Hazell was sent away from active service for eight months (from August 1917, to June 1918 ).
The author has nothing with which to fill this hole in Hazell’s biography, but the intermission surely saved his life. Hazell was the only one of the four Irish ‘aces’ to beat the odds: Mick Mannock and George McElroy were shot down, and James McCudden fatally crashed in July, 1918.
Jocelyn deftly integrates Hazell’s story to the broader strategic picture, so we see that when he joined 24 Squadron in June, 1918, the last German offensive had faltered, and the tide was about to turn.
Hazell made his name shooting down observation balloons which seems rather easy until Jocelyn reminds us that they were heavily guarded by anti-aircraft guns and swarms of Fokkers. Hazell limped back from one mission with his plane riddled with holes after pursuit by Ernst Udet, the most celebrated German ace after the ‘Red Baron’.
In the words of his citation for a Distinguished Flying Cross, Hazell displayed ‘disregard of personal danger in a marked degree’. Indeed.
Like many younger veterans, Hazell evidently could not settle down to civilian life. After a broken engagement (details of this are frustratingly sparse ) he commanded RAF squadrons bombing and strafing ‘wild tribes and war parties’ in Iraq, and on India’s North-West Frontier through the 1920s.
For some unexplained reason, Hazell ended up managing Irish Aluminium in Nenagh, set up by a Birmingham metal company, in 1934, to manufacture cooking utensils behind Ireland’s recently erected tariff walls. The factory ceased production temporarily during the Emergency for want of raw materials, and Hazell went to England where he served in the Home Guard during the latter stage of World War II.
Jocelyn is quite cross about the portrayal in Dad’s Army of the Home Guard as a ‘blundering group of elderly misfits’. Duty done, Hazell retired, and spent much of his time fishing near Newport, County Mayo. There he died, in 1946, at a relatively young age of 54, probably of ‘cardio-vascular disease’.
The arc of Hazell’s life is such that his fourteen months of active service forms the highpoint of this gripping tale, well told. The aftermath is something of an anti-climax. Rather like his life.
Pádraig Lenihan is editor of The Irish Sword, the journal of the Military History Society of Ireland
Robert Jocelyn's biography of Major Hazell is in bookshops now, and the author has recorded a podcast for the Clifden Arts Festival
