Anders Parker - The Black Flight (2023)

"Don’t worry about me. They say that I have a charmed life.”
- Flight Lieutenant Leslie Hunter Parker, France, October 14, 1916


My great uncle Leslie Hunter Parker was a fighter pilot in World War I, the so called "Great War.”

Born December 8, 1895 in Leeds, Quebec, Canada, he was the second of four boys. By all accounts he was an intelligent and dynamic boy, for indeed he was a boy, as he joined the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force in the year 1915 at the age of 19. Leslie flew in the Royal Naval Air Service of Great Britain, as Canada did not have its own air force at the time. He was assigned to the 10th Squadron of the RNAS, flying in the legendary “Black Flight” — legendary for those interested in the somewhat esoteric subject of WW1 flying aces. He died in battle on June 14, 1917 in Belgium during a dogfight.

Family lore is that Leslie and his squadron went on patrol to the Front, and as they were returning they encountered an enemy squadron. Not having much fuel, they tried to get back to their lines instead of dogfighting. Leslie turned back to confront them and give his comrades a chance to escape, and was shot down. The after-action report dryly states that he “drove down enemy machine out of control," and "shot down an enemy machine in an engagement with four."

Leslie loomed large in my imagination as a child. To me, he was a mythic hero... A young man from the backwoods of Canada flying a primitive open cockpit airplane made of wood, wire, and canvas with a giant machine gun strapped to it, battling enemy aircraft in the skies over the trenches of Belgium and France. My youthful fascination was kindled by the fact that I grew up not far from the Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York’s Hudson Valley, a place where every summer I would go with my father, Leslie’s namesake and nephew, to watch WWI era biplanes and triplanes take to the skies in mock battles. Eventually I got to fly in one of those biplanes and while it was thrilling, it also reinforced the fragility of the whole endeavor. These were simple machines that were difficult to fly, and many died just learning how to handle them.

My father was born 20 years after Leslie was killed in WW I. When my father passed away in 2001, a cousin gave a eulogy and contextualized the Parker family over the two decades before my father’s birth: One of Leslie’s brothers had died as a child, and then Leslie was killed in the war. Not long after, Leslie’s mother died in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, though it is said she really died of a broken heart. My great-grandfather eventually remarried and my grandfather, the baby of the four boys, did not get along with his step-mother. This led to a somewhat feral young life, living with relatives and attending boarding schools to avoid his step-mother. It was a family living with the trauma and the legacy of their losses.

It is difficult to fathom the scope of mayhem and death that the human race has wrought on each other throughout millennia. Looking back, one often asks, "For what?" I hope that humanity someday finds a way to free itself from the seemingly endless impulse to kill each other. But the stories, like that of my great-uncle, hold great power and gravity. His is just one of an infinite number throughout history... tragic and audacious, mundane and legendary. The death, grief, pain, extremes, and heroics that people experience during war cascades down through generations, and is a thing to be reckoned with.

Over the years I have written songs about my great uncle but they never
previously satisfied. A while back I had the idea of trying to tell his story from different perspectives: his own, his girlfriend (Bertha Bain... what a name!), his parents, fellow flyers, and finally, me — and the music flowed. These songs are ones of daring, braggadocio, fear, longing, lust, memory, action, insouciance, terror, heartbreak, inspiration, and legacy.

It seemed fitting to do these songs starkly, the way that I wrote them. One day in late July of 2022, I played the songs through a number of times while Eric Heigle recorded the takes. I played each song 3 or 4 times. We chose the best takes and that’s what you have here: a document and a tribute.