His wheels almost touched the ground. That was the citation for his Distinguished Service Order, awarded for his actions on 29 October 1918 - the very last week of the war between Italy and Austria-Hungary. Captain Harry King Goode of No. 66 Squadron, flying a Sopwith Camel over the Veneto, returned alone to the enemy aerodrome at San Giacomo and attacked it at an altitude so low that his wheels brushed the grass. He destroyed one parked aircraft with a bomb, set fire to another with machine-gun fire, and drove the ground crew back into the village. By the end of the day he had flown three patrols, strafed troops, balloons, hangars, and a train, and earned one of the rarer combinations in British military aviation: the DSO and the DFC on the same man.
He was born Harry King on 22 October 1892 in Handsworth, Staffordshire, the son of Florence Annie King, a dressmaker. He was adopted as a child by Thomas and Margaret Goode of Ryton, Bulkington, Warwickshire, and took their surname. A bright scholar, he won a local education authority scholarship in 1907 and entered King Edward VI Free Grammar School in Nuneaton. He was awarded a Cambridge local honours degree in 1912. Teaching was the expected path - the scholarship had bound him to serve as a student teacher - but Goode had no taste for it. He took a job instead at Alfred Herbert's machine-tool works in Coventry, where he might have stayed for the rest of his life. The war intervened.
Goode enlisted in the Royal Engineers on 8 September 1914 - just over a month after Britain declared war on Germany. The sappers were unglamorous work: tunnelling, bridging, demolitions, the engineering backbone of trench warfare. By late 1917 he had transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and was training as a pilot. In January 1918 he was posted to No. 63 Training Squadron at RAF Joyce Green near Dartford for advanced flying instruction. On 1 April 1918 - just over a week after the RFC and Royal Naval Air Service merged to form the Royal Air Force - Goode was a junior officer in the world's first independent air arm. In early May he was sent to the No. 2 School of Aerial Fighting and Gunnery at Marske in Yorkshire to complete his training. Within months he was over Italy.
No. 66 Squadron flew Sopwith Camels in support of the Italian Army on the Asiago Plateau. Goode arrived in the summer of 1918 and quickly found his form. His targets were the usual mix - Austro-Hungarian fighters, two-seat reconnaissance machines, and the slow-moving observation balloons whose flammable hydrogen made them dangerous and decisive prizes. Goode shot down fifteen enemy aircraft and balloons during the war's final months, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross for what his citation called "a brilliant fighting pilot who sets a fine example of courage and determination." The DSO citation, awarded for his sustained low-level work in the breakthrough of late October, called his utter disregard of personal danger "inspirational to all who served with him." On 4 November 1918 the armistice of Villa Giusti ended the Italian-Austrian war.
Goode stayed in uniform. His next two decades read like an atlas of imperial postings - India, Egypt, Aden, then back to Britain. He served at the No. 1 School of Technical Training RAF at Halton, taught at No. 2 Flying Training School at Digby, instructed at the No. 4 Flying Training School in Egypt, and flew with No. 45 Squadron RAF. In 1927, on a sight-seeing trip to the pyramids, he met Ena Marshall Scales, a teacher from Bosham in Hampshire. They married in Bosham on 2 February 1930. Their only child was born in November 1930 and died two weeks later. The grief shaped the rest of their lives. In 1931 Goode was posted to No. 502 (Ulster) Squadron based at RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland - a cadre squadron of Vickers Virginia heavy bombers and Avro Tutor trainers. This was his first connection to County Londonderry.
He continued to rise. Squadron Leader in 1935 commanding No. 24 (Communications) Squadron, which provided VIP air transport. He flew General Viscount Gort, then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, on an inspection tour of the Maginot Line in April 1939. Promoted to Wing Commander in 1938, awarded the Air Force Cross in 1939. He made Group Captain on 1 March 1941. He commanded No. 60 Operational Training Unit from late April, then resigned his commission in December 1941 to work for the Air Ministry's Accidents Investigation Branch - the kind of role you give to someone who has flown enough and seen enough to know what kills pilots. He died on 21 August 1942, aged 49. He is buried at Tamlaght Finlagan churchyard, Ballykelly, County Londonderry - a small country graveyard not far from the airfield where wartime Coastal Command crews flew Atlantic patrols against the same U-boats whose wrecks now lie off the coast a few miles north.
Grave at Tamlaght Finlagan churchyard, Ballykelly, County Londonderry, approximately 55.05°N, 7.01°W. Nearest airports: City of Derry (EGAE) 10 nm west; Belfast International (EGAA) 35 nm east-south-east. The former RAF Ballykelly airfield, where Coastal Command flew during the Second World War, lies immediately south of the village. Lough Foyle is visible to the north. The graveyard sits on the flat coastal plain between the Sperrin Mountains and the sea - the same landscape Goode would have flown over during his Aldergrove years.