Much has been written about how Europe went to war in August 1914 according to railway timetables.2 When the mobilisation of great armies began and the troop trains started to move, the diplomats could no longer control events. Tied together by alliances, the states and empires of Europe slid inexorably into conflict. Austria-Hungary was the first. After a Serbian terrorist assassinated the heir to its empire in Sarajevo at the end of June, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum, declared war on Serbia and bombarded Belgrade. Russia then announced a general mobilisation to defend its Serbian ally.
Germany feared war on two fronts against both Russia and France, who were united in an alliance. The only way to prevent a two-fronted war was for Germany to strike and knock out France -who the Germans knew would be quicker to mobilise – while the great Russian bear was slowly limbering up. According to the Schlieffen Plan, prepared in detail a decade in advance by the German General Staff, Germany must immediately invade France before attacking Russia. And to avoid the heavily defended French border they would cross through Belgium. But Britain was pledged to defend Belgium’s neutrality. So, as German troop trains moved into Belgium to attack France instead of Russia, Britain declared war on Germany.
There was nothing inevitable about this rapid progression to war. Previous crises in the Balkans had not led to a general European conflict. Recently historians have stressed how ‘improbable’ was the sequence of events that led to war.3 Everywhere, general staffs had resolved that to defend their countries they must mobilise their armies to attack. Diplomats assumed this would deter the others, and in earlier crises the tactic had succeeded in defusing the situation. But this time deterrence did not work, and everything moved so fast. On 28 July the Great Powers of Europe were at peace. By midnight on 4 August every major European nation, except Spain and Italy, was at war.
According to the plans laid down by Haldane in his army reforms, Britain now prepared to send its expeditionary force, the BEF, not to protect Belgium but to serve on the left flank of the French army. In the first weeks of August, the small British Army mobilised. Regiments requisitioned entire trains and moved south. Men were recalled from summer holidays and rushed by train to the Channel ports. Here in mid-August the army began to cross to northern France, where it seized yet more trains in order to take up its position.
In some ways the armies that marched off to war in the hot summer days of 1914 were similar to the armies that had gone to war in Napoleon’s day. All European armies moved with the support of thousands of horse-drawn carts and wagons. The infantry still marched on foot. Horses hauled the guns of the artillery. The cavalry were armed with sabre and lance. And the French infantry in their blue coats, bright red trousers, képis and white puttees could easily have belonged to a previous era. But that was as far as it went. In other ways the armies that went to war in 1914 were very much of the twentieth century. The men had been transported towards the front by railway. The rifles that the infantrymen carried were now breech loaded and capable of a rapid fire impossible a hundred years earlier. The field guns of the artillery were also more accurate and able to fire far more rapidly than in earlier conflicts. The invention of cellulose nitrate (at the time called gun cotton) had launched the development of a new generation of high explosives. Furthermore, the Germans in their field grey and the British in khaki looked far more modern than had their counterparts in the brightly coloured uniforms of previous eras. And the British and German armies went to war with huge supplies of canned food. Tins kept the food fresh and made it possible for armies to range over long distances without having to resort to foraging as in previous wars. Alongside each troop of foot soldiers was a curious mix of slow-moving vehicles, some with solid tyres, bumping along over tracks and roads. Then, in addition, there were the strange-looking aeroplanes of the Royal Flying Corps that accompanied them.
The Royal Flying Corps was mobilised along with the rest of the British Army. On 13 August, in a variety of aircraft, the first pilots flew across the Channel, landing in Amiens. This was the first time British military pilots had accompanied an army marching off to war. When the squadrons had assembled in France they joined a fast-moving, mobile army and followed the BEF as it took up its position alongside the French forces. Each army corps was allocated a squadron of aircraft.
The RFC had virtually no ground transport and rapidly assembled a set of unusual vehicles that made it look more like a travelling circus than a military convoy. There were one or two 30 cwt army Leyland trucks, but the other vehicles were all commercial lorries that had been quickly requisitioned. These included two Maples furniture vans, a Peek Frean Biscuits delivery truck and a large red van used to deliver HP Sauce, which had the words The World’s Appetiser’ emblazoned in gold letters on its side.4 There were large vehicles carrying fuel, while a range of private limousines followed, lent by officers and civilians ‘for the duration’, included Sunbeams, Renaults, a Mercedes Tourer and, most bizarrely, a Rolls-Royce two-seater coupé. At their head was a Daimler in which Major Robert Henry Brooke-Popham carried a supply of gold, which he used for buying spares for the squadron and provisions for the officers’ mess. Sometimes the convoy stopped overnight at a chateau, sometimes at a farmhouse where the men slept in barns; sometimes they pulled in to a hotel. On other occasions they just stopped at the side of the road, where the men slept under hedgerows.
Airfields were known as landing grounds’ and often consisted of nothing more than a flat, open field. Preparing a new landing ground might involve simply carting the sheaves of harvested corn to one side of the field. The aircraft were still of course remarkably primitive, wooden frames covered with canvas and held together by wire, while pilots still flew largely by instinct. A naval aviator, Captain Ivon Courtney, one of the officers who had taught Winston Churchill to fly, wrote: ‘We had no headphones in those days. Once airborne we would shout at one another and hope the wind carried something approximating to what we said across to the other fellow. One didn’t normally use instruments; they were all in a box but we “old” fliers scorned them, we liked to fly on “ear” as it were.’5 Navigation was even more rudimentary and relied upon recognising distinctive features in the landscape below. If a pilot got lost he would simply land and ask where he was. Despite advances in the science of aeronautics, flying was still very much a seat-of-the-pants type activity.
That year a beautiful summer turned into a glorious autumn, and many young soldiers reflected on the incongruity of going to war on days of such warm, delightful weather. Maurice Baring of the RFC remembered:
The time passed in a golden haze. Never was there a finer autumn … I remember the heat on the stubble on the Saponay Aerodrome; pilots lying about on the straw; some just back from a reconnaissance, some just starting … And then the beauty of the Henry Farmans sailing through the clear evening … the moonlight rising over the stubble of the Aerodrome, and a few camp fires glowing in the mist and the noise of men singing songs of home.6
In fact the hot weather offered less than ideal conditions for flying in the flimsy, light, underpowered contraptions that the RFC took to war. The heat of summer created sudden thermal updrafts that tossed the aircraft around in the sky. Sometimes the heat generated thunderstorms and flying became impossible. On one occasion, a summer storm wrecked many aircraft that were parked on a landing ground. They were literally picked up and thrown about in the wind. However, despite such adversities the RFC began to fly reconnaissance missions within a week of arriving in France.
The first ever reconnaissance flight was flown by Captain Philip Joubert de la Ferté on 19 August in a Blériot XL He had no observer but was asked to check if enemy troops were present in an area to the west of Brussels. Struggling with cloudy weather and with very little knowledge of the countryside, Joubert soon found himself lost but was reluctant to come down in order to discover his location. However, when he spotted what seemed to be a parade ground in a military garrison in a large town he decided to land and ask
where he was. He discovered he was in the town of Tournai, and after an ‘excellent lunch’ with the commandant of the garrison he flew on in the afternoon. Once more he quickly became lost and when short of fuel had to land again. But this time the local gendarmes came out and threatened to arrest him, as he had not been issued with identification papers and they thought he was a spy. He was helped by a linen manufacturer from Belfast who happened to be visiting the town. The salesman draped a Union Jack over the aircraft. Once the locals understood who Joubert was the mood changed. He was able to buy petrol and eventually get on his way. He returned to his landing ground near Mauberge to deliver his report at 5.30 that evening.7
Despite the haphazard nature of some of this early flying the reconnaissance pilots of the RFC soon began to establish their worth. On 22 August, aerial scouts flying ahead of the advancing BEF spotted what they correctly identified as the massed troops of the German First Army marching south. On the following morning, the British Army had its first major encounter with German troops at what became known as the Battle of Mons. A furious engagement took place along the Mons-Condé canal, where the well-drilled British soldiers fired their Lee Enfield rifles so rapidly into the phalanxes of enemy troops that the Germans believed the British were firing machine guns at them. As the battle raged, the reconnaissance pilots flew beyond the battlefield and spotted large German troop movements attempting to outflank the British line. They also reported on a fierce engagement with the French army and observed that the French, on the British right, had started to withdraw.
In the evening this vital information was brought to Sir John French, the commander-in-chief of the BEF. Most military reconnaissance up to this point had come from light cavalry. Although Sir John was a cavalry man he quickly realised the value of the intelligence that his airmen were bringing him. His troops had performed well and had held up the German advance, but French saw that he was now in an isolated position, with the French army withdrawing on one side and the Germans about to outflank him on the other. He ordered an immediate withdrawal. This at least led to the survival of the British Army. Had the BEF been surrounded and wiped out in its first engagement it would have been a catastrophe for the Allied cause. Although their intelligence resulted in the famous ‘retreat from Mons’, the reconnaissance pilots had saved the day for the British Army. Sir John French acknowledged that ‘their reports proved of the greatest value.’8
One of the many problems that faced these brave early fliers was rifle fire from the ground. Unused to seeing aircraft and lacking understanding of their role, most soldiers assumed they must be enemy craft of some sort and opened fire on them. It rapidly became essential for aircraft to carry a form of national marking to prevent such friendly fire incidents. The French put a blue spot on the underside of the wings of their aircraft, surrounded by a red ring; the Germans marked their machines with a black cross. The RFC’s initial response was to paint a union jack on each wing, but these were too small and so they adopted the symbol of a red spot, surrounded by a white ring and outside that a blue ring. Thus was born the roundel that would identify all British military aircraft for the next hundred years.
Over the following weeks, RFC reconnaissance flights continued to provide the Allied leaders with vital intelligence about the enemy. The aerial observers scribbling on their notepads were the first to spot the German army’s change of direction at the end of August. This resulted in the Allied decision to stand firm on the river Marne, an action that eventually succeeded in halting the German advance and forcing their troops to turn back. In the rapid manoeuvrings that followed, the reconnaissance crews were able to keep their generals well informed both of enemy movements and the location of the Allied armies’ advanced units. They could pass the information back to headquarters staff more quickly than it could be carried over land. They could report on the status of bridges, on the road network and provide other vital information about the landscape through which the armies were passing. Captain Joubert once described a report that his observer wrote up on landing as being as extensive as ‘an early Victorian novel’.9 In September, Sir John French paid tribute to the RFC pilots and observers when he wrote: ‘They have furnished me with the most complete and accurate information, which has been of incalculable value in the conduct of operations. Fired at constantly both by friend and foe, and not hesitating to fly in every kind of weather, they have remained undaunted throughout.’10 It was only five years since Blériot had crossed the Channel, but reconnaissance aircraft had already proved themselves vital agents of modern warfare.
In the last two months of 1914, the nature of the fighting was transformed from a mobile to a static war as both sides dug in. For four years they were to face each other in two lines of trenches that meandered from the Belgian coast, across north-east France and down to the Swiss border. Between the two opposing front lines was the barren landscape of no man’s land, thick with barbed wire and at times only a few dozen yards wide but providing a gulf that was increasingly difficult to cross. It was soon apparent that troops well dug in and protected by machine guns and a formidable mass of wire were able to beat off almost every form of attack that could then be thrown against them. The Germans from the first saw the Western Front as a defensive line and took the high ground, or whatever territory was easiest to defend. As a consequence, from ground level, the Allies could rarely see beyond the German front line. So the aerial observers soon became vital in trying to see behind the German lines, to study their trench layouts, to identify where their artillery was positioned and to watch for reinforcements of men and material being brought up to the front line. Since this information was too detailed for a pilot or observer to record during a patrol, the time was ripe for the next major advance in aerial reconnaissance.
Photography was well established by 1914. It had grown from a means of portraiture to a popular and accessible hobby for millions. George Eastman had revolutionised amateur photography by introducing the box brownie camera in conjunction with flexible roll film. Lenses had grown enormously in quality with improvements in optics in the late nineteenth century, but to take advantage the professionals still relied on cumbersome glass plates that had to be exposed one at a time. In the latter part of 1914 the French began to make extensive use of aerial photography. They had good cameras and lenses and were soon able to take excellent photographs of the enemy trenches, labelling the photos that resulted as ‘aerial maps’ and forwarding them as a courtesy to British headquarters. With the cavalry unable to carry out reconnaissance patrols across no man’s land, the British commanders soon realised that aerial photographs could provide invaluable information about what was going on in the enemy trenches and behind his lines. But hardly anyone within the RFC had any knowledge of photography.
In November 1914, John Moore-Brabazon, now aged thirty, who had given up flying after the fatal accident of his friend Charles Rolls in the summer of 1910, decided to join up to do his bit for the war effort. Still at heart an aviator, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the RFC despite his lack of recent practice, and because of the extent of his flying experience, which pre-dated even the formation of the corps, the War Office sent him out immediately to France. He joined 9 Squadron at St Omer, which was not an operational squadron but was tasked with servicing aircraft and exploring new technologies to aid military aviation. Though he had undergone no basic training of any sort, he was told on his first morning, as the newest officer present, to march the men from their billets to the aerodrome. With no knowledge of drill he pretended to the sergeant-major that he had lost his voice and asked him to carry on with the men on his behalf. As the sergeant-major got the men in line, yelled out the appropriate orders and marched them to the right place, Brabazon realised he had a lot to learn to adapt to life in the army.11
Brabazon did however have some knowledge of photography and, with another officer, Lieutenant Charles Campbell from the Intelligence Corps, was soon selected to find out what the Fr
ench were up to and how the British Army could best copy them and keep up. Joining their small team was Sergeant-Major Victor Laws, who had experimented with aerial cameras before the war and was the only person within the RFC who had any understanding of how such equipment functioned. Along with its use for mapping, Laws also noticed that the movement of men or vehicles crushed grass or soft ground in a way that was still noticeable as shading on a black and white aerial photograph taken a couple of days later. This marked the beginning of photo interpretation and the science of reading movements across land by the study of aerial photographs. Together Brabazon and his team were to lay the foundations for photo intelligence within the British Army.
It seems incredible now, when the use of aerial imagery is so widespread, that the army should have been reluctant to take it up. But some officers thought there was something ‘unfair’ or ‘ungentlemanly’ about photographing the enemy behind his lines. Brabazon noticed that officers always wanted to ‘play by the rules’, feeling that the use of such photography to expose what one’s opponent was up to seemed to ‘invade a privacy that had always been accorded to the enemy’. Others simply objected to aerial photography because it was new and they had never used it before. Brabazon recalled that when he and his two colleagues were allocated to the recently created No. 1 Wing to develop new techniques for aerial photography, they were ‘about as welcome as the measles’.12
Nevertheless there were some senior officers who saw the potential, and one of these was Colonel Hugh Trenchard, the commander of No. 1 Wing. Trenchard had learned to fly, at his own expense, at Brooklands before the war., One of the principal pioneers of military aviation in Britain, Trenchard was to become leader of the RFC and later of the RAF. At the start of the war he was forty-one years old, a giant of a man, very tall, broad shouldered and with an enormously loud voice from which he acquired the appropriate nickname of ‘Boom’. He was however not an easy communicator and could be taciturn to the point of appearing rude, especially to junior officers who were often met with total silence when reporting to him. Like many senior figures in the RFC, he had an almost crusading passion for the air arm and regarded it as his task to preach the gospel of aviation to the often unbelieving generals. A great enthusiast for aerial photography, he used always to carry a few photos in his pocket, taking any opportunity to try to persuade a sceptical general of their value.
Secret Warriors Page 9
