The First Great Air War

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Military aviation began with balloons. It was a paradox that such romantic, slightly frivolous, quasi-scientific objects, which provided a hobby for the unorthodox and were by custom gaily coloured, often garish, should be put to so serious a purpose. There was an aura of the fairground about them, not the battlefield, of jollity, not aggression.

  Aviators, too, from the first, were distinguished by their high spirits and informality, and a special kind of eccentricity: a high degree of curiosity, and boldness in abundance, tinged with audacity. Anyone who took to the air had to be different in nature from the vast humdrum prudent majority of mankind in his craving for excitement; had to have an enquiring mind; had to be more than courageous: rash to the point of thinking it well worthwhile to break a limb or even his neck for the pleasure he enjoyed from being airborne.

  The modern fighter and bomber, supersonically fast, formidably armed, capable of climbing from earth into the stratosphere in the time it takes a Wimbledon champion to win a love game, are the direct descendants of those sedately moving spheres that first drifted across the sky: lifted there by hot air or gas, driven only by the wind and at the mercy of its whims, incapable of being steered. Their pilots and crews are the progeny of those who cheerfully took off suspended in baskets beneath the huge bags of air or gas, not knowing to which point of the compass they would travel, how many involuntary changes of direction they would make, or, most daunting of all to normally conventional beings, where they would come down.

  The airmen and aircraft of the Great War were the first modern links in the chain of evolution from the inception of aerial mobility to its culmination in space flight. Like all pioneers, the pilots and observers of that era had to be endowed with an even greater intellectual curiosity, love of adventure, and willingness to take risks that had a substantial prospect of proving fatal, than those who succeeded them. Balloonists were, in the British armed Services, soon known as “balloonatics”: the ground-grippers looked on them — actually, stared up at them; probably with envy, wishing they had the courage to emulate them — as lunatics let loose with dangerous playthings. Two generations later, the adjective most often applied to Royal Flying Corps pilots was “wild”; and that also was used in admiration, and wistfulness at being excluded from what had quickly become an exceptional company, rather than pejoratively.

  In Britain, the first Army balloon unit was formed by the Royal Engineers in 1878. By the next year it had a few trained officers and men, with, the archives state, “five reliable balloons”. There is a pleasantly optimistic, Corinthian note about that “reliable”, which makes one wonder just what vagaries and frustrations of performance and quality had to be put up with. That Easter, its Commanding Officer, Captain H. Elsdale, took Captain J. L. B. Templer, with a squad of troops and a balloon, to the Volunteer Review and manoeuvres in Sussex; and astonished the inspecting General as much as the spectators by “marching past” — the first recorded fly-past — at 250 feet; thus distracting all eyes from the columns of earthbound horse, foot and guns plodding past the saluting base.

  In 1880 and 1882 reconnoitring balloons took part in the Aldershot manoeuvres. In 1884, Elsdale, now a major, led another officer with fifteen rank and file and three balloons to Bechuanaland as part of General Sir Charles Warren’s expedition, but saw no fighting. However, the following year Major Templer went to Sudan with a couple of balloons and nine men, where he made some useful reconnaissances.

  Artillery spotting from the air with tethered balloons was now tried. When the gas that inflated them deteriorated so much that they could not rise high enough for captive observation, training in free ballooning continued. Major Elsdale also experimented with aerial photography, using small free balloons carrying a camera operated by clockwork to expose the plates, then to destroy the balloon, so that it fell back to earth. Here again were the elements of what became, during the Great War, a sophisticated technique.

  Italy formed an Army Aeronautical Section in 1884, and used its balloons during the Eritrean War of 1887-88.

  In Germany, military ballooning was being tested on a small scale and with avoidance of publicity. Progress in France provided an incentive which soon led further: to fervent German interest in airships.

  1889 was a decisive year for the eventual formation of a British military air arm. Lieutenants G. E. Phillips and C. G. Close, with a small detachment of Sappers, took part in that year’s manoeuvres, at which the German Emperor was present. They operated with a force that set out to attack the enemy camp, and were asked whether there were any outposts to the rear of this. Balloon observation at dusk reported that the enemy was posting pickets only on the nearer side. A victorious night attack planned on this intelligence so impressed General Sir Evelyn Wood that an Army balloon section was formally created within the Royal Engineers the following year.

  At the conclusion of the 1889 manoeuvres, Lieutenant Ward emulated Captain Elsdale eleven years earlier, with equally astonishing effect on the spectators: in the parade past the Kaiser, he was also towed at 300 feet in the basket of a balloon tethered to its wagon.

  The South African War of 1899-1902 gave the balloonists the first protracted and most important opportunity to justify themselves. Hitherto, despite their demonstrations of tactical usefulness, they had been regarded rather as an exclusive club that demanded of its candidates certain standards for admission: predominantly, a touch of lunacy and a disregard for conformity, which promised to jeopardise their careers. Conventional soldiers looked on them with bemused ignorance. Many senior officers were prejudiced against them simply because their trade imported an experimental element into military operations. Innovations aroused suspicion in the often obtuse brains of field commanders; who were traditionally engaged in perpetual internecine strife to protect their own interests. The high-ranking officers in the War Office and their counterparts at the Admiralty were each perpetually scheming to obtain the largest share of the annual Defence Budget: while within the Army, those who commanded the artillery, infantry, cavalry, engineers, ordnance, supply and transport were as bitterly engaged in promoting the claims of their own arms. When confronted with a startlingly new concept, such as balloon reconnaissance and observation, it was easiest to condemn it, untried.

  To justify scorn or mistrust of the new-fangled ancillary, there were many legitimate faults to find. As is not uncommon with any novelty, other arms had not been properly trained in co-operation. The method of signalling by flag between ground and air was inefficient. The balloon observers were often unable to engage the attention of the gunners for whom they were spotting. The hydrogen for inflating the balloons was in steel containers that were heavy and bulky.

  Despite prejudice, lack of preparation and difficulties in handling and transporting the equipment, balloons proved their worth. At the Battle of Lombard’s Kop they reported the enemy positions and directed artillery fire. At Magersfontein they ranged the howitzers onto Boer cavalry in a gully concealed from viewers on the ground. At Paardeberg they reported General Cronje’s dispositions, which enabled these to be attacked successfully.

  In 1894, Farnborough, now famous in the history of aviation, entered the scene as the site of the Army balloon factory. The Superintendent, Templer, by then a colonel, was succeeded in 1906 by Colonel Capper, a prophetic protagonist of aeroplanes, who, lecturing at the Royal United Service Institution, said:

  “In a few years we may expect to see men moving swiftly through the air … such machines will move very rapidly … up to a hundred miles per hour … they will be small and difficult to hit … their range will be very large.”

  Balloons were about to be superseded: in 1907, the British Army’s first airship, 120 feet long, made a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Farnborough and circled London.

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  “It is the work of a lunatic,” exclaimed one of the admirals who set eyes on the Royal Navy’s first airship, the 512-foot Mayfly. He might well have made the comment whatever her size and p
erformance, in reactionary revulsion from any vessel that presumed to navigate the sky rather than the sea. But in this instance there was some justification for his obloquy. Size she had in ample measure; but performance, literally none: except, embarrassingly, as an unintentional tragi-comic turn.

  The gigantic aircraft had been under construction for two years. Interest, in the Service and among the general public, was intense, expectations were high. But, calamitously, she never flew. Brought out of her hangar in May 1911, she spent four days undergoing mooring trials tethered to her mast. It was found that her buoyancy did not sufficiently exceed her weight to give her the lift she needed to rise further aloft. So she was taken into her shed again and modified. In September, she emerged; and promptly broke her back. The wreckage was incapable of reassembly. Thus ended the first attempt to provide the fleet with a vantage point higher than a crow’s nest.

  The road that led to this disaster had been a short one since, in 1908, the Director of Naval Ordnance had proposed to the First Sea Lord that Vickers, Son and Maxim, who had satisfactorily designed and manufactured submarines, should be asked to build a rigid dirigible similar to the Zeppelin. Here was naval loyalty, feeling for tradition, and general conservatism finding typical expression in its own peculiar form of logic.

  Characteristically, the Navy and the Army had gone their separate ways in developing an eye in the sky. While the Navy had turned to private industry, the Army had relied on His Majesty’s Balloon Factory at Farnborough. The two Services’ requirements also differed. The land forces needed balloons and aeroplanes, and had flirted with airships. At sea, balloons would have been useless, but both aeroplanes and airships were necessary. These last enjoyed several advantages. They had far the greater range. They could carry the heavier load, so wireless equipment that sent and received across hundreds of miles was installed. They could stop engines and hover, to detect mines and submarines. Their crews could be accommodated for long periods in enough comfort to ensure decent rest and the maintenance of efficiency.

  But, in the Army at least, the day of the aeroplane was at hand. Captain Bertram Dickson, Royal Field Artillery, wrote a far-sighted and liberal-minded memorandum to the technical sub-committee created by the Committee of Imperial Defence to advise on measures that would ensure Britain an efficient aerial Service:

  “In the case of a European war between two countries, both sides would be equipped with large corps of aeroplanes, each trying to obtain information of the other, and to hide its own movements. The efforts which each would exert in order to hinder or prevent the enemy from obtaining information would lead to the inevitable result of a war in the air, for the supremacy of the air, by armed aeroplanes against each other. This fight for the supremacy of the air in future wars will be of the first and greatest importance, and when it has been won the land and sea forces of the loser will be at such a disadvantage that the war will certainly have to terminate at a much smaller loss in men and money to both sides.” Wise sentiments and an advanced concept. The Captain was, it seems, also an optimist of no small dimensions; to judge from his concluding sentence.

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  The first airship, like the first balloon, was also French. Forty-four feet long, with a three horsepower steam engine, it flew on 24th September 1852 at six miles an hour.

  All over the Continent, progress in the design of dirigibles was slow. After many vicissitudes, the first, still non-rigid, was La France, built for the Army in 1884. Shaped like a fish, 165 feet long, it was driven by an 8½ h.p. electric motor.

  Its successful flights prompted Germany to surpass the rest of the world, and in 1897 the first rigid airship took off, its 12-h.p. Daimler engine driving twin airscrews. In 1900, Lieutenant Colonel Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin flew the first of the huge dirigibles that were to bear his name. It was 420 feet long and had two 16 h.p. Daimlers in tandem, each driving two airscrews. In 1907, he made an eight-hour 211-mile flight in his third Zeppelin. By 1914 Zeppelins were making even longer and trouble-free flights.

  The evolution of dirigibles from 120-foot non-rigid to rigid craft of over 400 feet, and through various shapes, was accompanied by frequent wreckage and much loss of life. Some caught fire while airborne, others burned out on the ground. Each country had its failures and tragedies and the German experience is typical of all. Of twenty-five Zeppelins built between 1900 and 1914, nine were wrecked while going about their peaceful occasions. Three were destroyed by fire. In the five months following the declaration of war, four were shot down by anti-aircraft guns and one wrecked itself.

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  Clearly, it was on the aeroplane that development must concentrate; and it was in the United States that the swiftest and furthest progress was expected, since it was there that Wilbur and Orville Wright had flown the world’s first aeroplane, on 17th December 1903. But once more it was France that forged ahead of the rest of the world.

  That aviation evolved at all beyond the balloon is in itself remarkable, in view of the hazards that attended its practitioners on every hand. As if the disappointment — often felt as the disgrace — of failure, the threat of cataclysmic accidents and mid-air conflagration, the permanent shadow of death or severe injury hovering over every enterprise, were not discouragement enough, to all these was added the violent hostility of onlookers when some technical defect or meteorological adversity deprived them of the spectacle for which they had assembled; always in their hundreds, often by the thousand. In the USA, France, Germany, and Britain, in Spain and Scandinavia and Latin America, crowds fell upon aeronauts who failed to provide them with a sight of the wonders they had come to see. Looking back on it several decades later, the behaviour of disappointed spectators has its humorous side, despite their assaults on blameless airmen and mechanics.

  In 1910, a British Army pilot, Lieutenant Lancelot Gibbs, who had trained in France, was about to give a flying demonstration at Durango in northern Spain. He kept the 30,000 crowd waiting more than an hour while his Farman biplane, which had come crated, by train, was being assembled. The mob became restive. To placate them, it was wheeled into the open so that they could see the work being done. This had the opposite effect. They damaged it so badly that it had to be taken back under shelter: whereupon they hurled stones, smashed the shed and disabled the mechanic. Someone pulled a knife on Gibbs, yelling that it was impossible for man to fly. This inflamed the rest of the thirty thousand, who screamed “Down with science! Long live religion!” and burned down the shed and the aeroplane in it, while the police escorted Gibbs — who had remained cool throughout — to safety.

  The first aeroplane flight in France was made by a Brazilian expatriate, Alberto Santos Dumont, when he flew eighty metres on 23rd October 1906. Among those who competed with him were some whose names were soon illustrious in aeronautical history: Henry Farman, who lived his whole life in France and spoke little English, but had a British father; and native Frenchmen such as Blériot and the brothers Voisin. On 13th January 1908, Farman won a prize of £2000 for being the first in France to fly one kilometre around a closed circuit. In that year, Wilbur Wright visited France. His many flights, including the demonstration of figures-of-eight, helped to educate his rivals as well as breaking the national records for endurance, distance and height. He finally covered seventy-seven miles in two hours and twenty minutes.

  In America, in May 1909, Glenn H Curtiss flew 120 miles in two hours and a half. On 25th July of the same year, Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel in forty minutes. In Germany, while the design and manufacture of airships drew worldwide attention, secrecy covered the work being done on aeroplanes in the Ago, Albatros, DFW, Halberstadt, Rumpler, and Harland factories, and the one belonging to the Dutch designer, Anthony Fokker.

  On 8th June 1908, A. V. Roe made the first flight in England: of sixty yards at a height of two feet. Thus was the distinguished Avro marque founded; and soon T. O. M. Sopwith and Geoffrey de Havilland and the Short brothers were building aeroplanes and flyi
ng them. In those days, any Briton who aspired to being a pilot had either to teach himself or go to France to be taught. Flying caught on as swiftly as had motoring; although not, of course, on so wide a scale. The British, naturally, were quick to see the possibilities of a new form of sport in aviation, rather than its military potential or its contribution to science. Flying appealed largely to the type of man whose idea of bliss was to hurl himself down snowy mountains in the infant pastime of skiing, to hurtle through the bends of the Cresta Run on a skeleton toboggan, to drive at the highest speeds yet attained by man around a motor racetrack.

  In 1909, the world’s first international flying meeting was held at Reims. When one of the pilots who had been admired there, Monsieur Louis Paulhan, came to England to display his prowess, the Manager of Brooklands had the ground in the centre of the racing circuit cleared for his use. Paulhan’s performance, culminating in a ninety-six-mile flight that lasted nearly three hours, so impressed the Brooklands Automobile Racing Club committee that a permanent aerodrome was laid out. In the following spring a busy community of aeroplane builders and pilots began to establish itself in a colony of wooden huts. A Mrs Hewlett, who had learned to fly, started a flying school there in partnership with a French pilot named Blondeau. By 1911 The Bluebird restaurant had become the social centre: taking, in fact, the place of that indispensable English institution, the local pub.

  Brooklands attracted people from a great variety of occupations and incomes. Common interest bound them all in an easy sodality free from snobbery. Informality, friendliness and mutual help characterised it. Tools were readily lent. An outsider could not easily distinguish between the mechanics and those who employed them. Everyone wore overalls. In hot weather they preferred to work in pyjamas.