The First Great Air War

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  One late autumn day an offer came from the Chemnitz Flying Club for two of them, as a consolation, to have a preliminary taste of aviation, on a balloon flight. Lots were drawn. “In compensation for my recent bad luck in love,” Haupt-Heydemarck writes, “I was lucky in gambling and won.” The ascent was set for All Saints’ Day, with Professor Beuermann, of the Chemnitz Technical Institute, as pilot; but when the two passengers reported to him, he had to disappoint them. “Unfortunately we can’t take off today, gentlemen: we have an eighty kilometres an hour wind.”

  “So we’ll fly all the faster,” suggested Haupt-Heydemarck.

  “And the landing?” the Professor said.

  “I kept pressing him,” and eventually, from a sheltered place, up they went. The lift-off was pleasant. The wind was strong. “I felt myself the Lord of the Air and was content to have had my way. Landing? Oh, Beuermann was an experienced pilot and would bring us down safely!” The strong wind bore them eastwards. “After two hours of hedonistic enjoyment to the full, we met snow clouds.” The Professor released some gas and down they went until the ground was in sight again. “The view was indeed not gratifying: we were being wafted towards a chain of three long lakes.

  “‘We must land at once,’ Beuermann said, ‘or we’ll have a horrifying end in this bitter cold.” He does not sound the optimistic sort who would be one’s first choice as companion on a risky venture, but H-H seems not to have been much perturbed. Most people would probably have had reservations in the first place about a pilot who allowed his passenger to talk him into going up against his better judgment of weather conditions; but this passenger, as will be seen, was preternaturally cool in temperament.

  They descended rapidly. “From a height of 1000 metres, the ground had seemed to slide past beneath us slowly, but now that we were so low over them, the trees were rushing by. The storm had not abated. At a speed of 80 k.p.h., ought Beuermann to put the basket down on the frozen ground? That could result in matchwood and splintered bones. Last instruction: ‘On landing, bend your knees deeply!’

  “What came now happened so quickly that it was almost too swift to comprehend. One more piece of luck, that the ground was fairly level. The first lake was looming critically closer. Beuermann energetically pulled the ripcord. It tore a great panel out of the balloon, so that the gas could escape fast. With no buoyancy, the balloon should touch down in a moment. Unfortunately, things did not work out according to plan. The high wind caught the empty envelope and drove it upwards house-high. Then we were dragged down in its damp folds.

  “Alarmingly, we rushed earthwards — now the aforementioned knees bend — ‘Rumps!’ cracked the basket. Its broken pieces were scattered over the frozen soil. It turned over and by good fortune stopped.

  “We were catapulted out and lay bruised and battered. Beuermann had hit his head on the basket’s hard rim and was wiping blood from his ankle. I tried painfully to stand up but my left leg hung limp and I couldn’t. An unpleasant certainty grew on me: a broken thigh! With a resigned laugh I lay down again. Swinish luck!

  “My comrades put a splint on my leg and bedded me down on a straw-packed farm cart. In a mild snowfall the wagonload jolted off on its unpleasant way to Gitschin. There I was given medical attention and on the next morning went back to Chemnitz by train. At the railway station I was treated with curiosity and respect; rumours buzzed: ‘Officer wounded in a duel!’

  “In the garrison hospital a medical officer put on a grave face: my right leg had shrunk a full ten centimetres! Uniform, farewell!

  “But his skill stretched the broken bones apart so that finally a shortening of only three centimetres remained. So, by slouching a bit on the other hip, I was able to remain a soldier.

  “Three months later I made my second balloon flight: this time with a smooth landing.”

  In August 1914 he was sent as Adjutant to a brigade at the Front. He says that his prospects of flying hung by a thread, but he did not give up hope. In the summer of 1915 he was called to a short course at the Aviation Replacements Section. There were several fatal accidents and he would be happy to return to the Front. When 1915 came to an end he was still wondering to what type of Flying Section he would be sent: artillery co-operation; a Battle Section that dropped bombs; a Corps Section; or one that did long-range reconnaissance?

  When making a roll call of great airmen, the names Heinrich (Heini) Gontermann, Ritter Fritz von Röth and Leo Leonhardn do not spring at once to mind. Yet all were eminent enough to win their country’s highest decoration, the “Blue Max”, the Pour le Mérite. Why a designation in the language of Germany’s most hated enemy? Because Frederick the Great, King of Prussia in 1740-86, who instituted the decoration, could speak only French.

  Von Röth and Gontermann were famous for destroying balloons: balloon-busters, as the RFC called the specialists in this dangerous expertise. Von Röth was known as “die Fesselballoon-Kanone”, “the Captive Balloon Cannon”, and “Cannon” was the name the Germans gave to their “aces”. Gontermann was dubbed “der Ballonkiller”. But at the beginning of 1915 observation balloons were still scarce and the British had not begun to use them at all. Gontermann began the war as an eighteen-year-old officer of lancers and went to the Front on 13th September. The year 1915 saw two changes of direction in his military career. In June he was sent to a machinegun school and thence to the machinegun company of the Both Fusilier Regiment. In November, he began the pilot’s course for which he had applied. Von Roth was an artillery officer, twenty-one when war was declared. His regiment went to the Front immediately and on 10th September he was gravely wounded in the head and a lung. During his long spell in hospital he heard that he would be released from the Service. The anxiety that his part in the war was over haunted him, and as soon as he was discharged from hospital he volunteered for flying duties. Towards the end of 1915 he began his pilot training.

  Leonhardn is particularly interesting because of his age. Born on 13th November 1880 in East Prussia, he was on the threshold of his middle years when the war began. Photographed four years later, he looks the Briton’s mental image of a typical Prussian: square-skulled, balding, close-cropped, barrel-chested. But there is no cruelty about the set of his lips; his expression is quite cordial: perhaps from pride at the newly awarded Blue Max at his throat and the medals on his chest. He was a hard man, known as “der eisener Kommandeur”, “the Iron Commanding Officer”.

  At nineteen he was an ensign in the Pomeranian Fusiliers. From 1908 to 1912 he was Adjutant of the Queen Victoria of Sweden Regiment, then spent a year with the 138th Infantry before going on a pilot’s course on 1st February 1914. He must have received a rude shock nine days later, for it is on his records that on 10th February he executed an involuntary loop and “his year-long desire to join the Air Service almost came to a premature end”.

  The record goes on: “A collision with an aeroplane from another flying school nearly caused Leonhardn to quit this life. Coming in to land from the opposite direction, it caught the propeller of his Taube, which somersaulted several times and hurled him to the ground.”

  Leonhardn himself wrote: “With this I established an unusual world record: I broke my spine in two places, breastbone, nose, the base of my skull again, suffered concussion, lung and liver ruptures, and crushed my left knee so that the bones splintered badly. Generally, nobody survived such injuries!” No wonder he wears a hint of a smirk in his photograph.

  The will to live and fly soon put him back on his feet. He was in hospital in Berlin until 7th June and then in Wiesbaden, where his promotion to Hauptmann came through. On 5th December he left his wheelchair in Wiesbaden to become Adjutant at the Flying Units Inspectorate in Berlin.

  “By careful avoidance of doctors,” he says, with a dry humour that prompts one’s liking as well as admiration for his fortitude, “I contrived to get away from there and back into the war.” He was posted as Adjutant to the Southern Army’s Aircraft Park. Thence, on 1st May 1915, he
went to Flying Section 59 as an observer. On 13th August he took command of Section 25.

  *

  The Italian nation knew from the moment war broke out on two Fronts that it would not for long remain neutral. On the Western Front, Germany was soon in stalemate with France and Britain. On the Eastern Front, where Germany and Austria—Hungary faced Russia, and distances were far greater than on the west, a conventional war of mobility and fluid lines was being fought. Where opposing forces did establish trench lines, these were temporary.

  Austria was Italy’s traditional enemy. The city of Trieste and the district of Trentino had once been Italian but had become Austrian centuries earlier. This cut off nearly half a million Italians from their homeland and was a smouldering grievance.

  The right man to stoke the embers and stir them into flame was ready and waiting to do just that. Gabriele d’Annunzio, born in Pescara in 1863, was by no means too old at fifty-one, when Germany marched against the Allies of the Entente Cordiale, to be actively belligerent. A fiery little man with a scrawny physique and plain features, he wore a moustache whose upward-curving ends gave him a comical, even clownish, rather than aggressive, look. His appearance did not suggest an esteemed writer and poet, a duellist or notorious lover: all of which he was.

  A fervent — and verbose — patriot, at the age of thirteen he had written to one of his school masters: “My first mission on this earth is to teach the people to love their country and to be honest citizens. The second is to hate to death the enemies of Italy and to fight them always.”

  Due for military service in 1883 when at university, he obtained a six-year postponement; then, in 1889-90, he served as a Reserve officer in the 14th Cavalry Regiment (the Novara Lancers), stationed in Rome. Flying interested him from its inception and in 1909 he attended Italy’s first important international air display and competition, at Brescia. Many of the great pioneers of aviation took part: Wilbur Wright, Glenn Curtiss, Louis Blériot, Henri Rougier, Alfred Leblanc; and, among the Italians, Mario Calderara and Umberto Cagni. The “Gran Premio Città di Brescia”, for five circuits of the ten-kilometre course, was won by Curtiss in 51 minutes and 52 seconds; with Calderara second and Rougier third.

  D’Annunzio asked Curtiss to take him up. The American did not usually grant this request, because of the risk involved; and at Brescia there had been some accidents, one fatal. But, for d’Annunzio, he consented and gave him an eight-minute flight. The next day, d’Annunzio flew with Calderara.

  The official account of his military flying career in the archives of the Italian General Staff says: “The great poets, if they are real genii — and d’Annunzio was — have also the faculty of prophecy. The fact is that the Pescaran poet recognised the inevitable revolutionary importance that the conquest of the air would have on the destiny of the world, in peace and war. And at once propagated his convictions.” On 21st February 1910 he held his first conference on aviation, at the Lirico Theatre in Milan, at which he “recounted the short but extraordinary story of the conquest of the air, starting with Wright’s first flight on 17th December 1903”.

  In his discourse, d’Annunzio urged the development of flying and recommended that prizes should be offered for flights from Milan as far as Genoa, Turin, the peaks of Generoso and Mottarone.

  “We are celebrating today,” he added, “a game of audacity; we are on the eve of a great change in social life. The code of the air is being established. The frontier invades the clouds.”

  He was among the first and the few who saw the flying machine as a new arm that would influence warfare with increasing decisiveness until it became the determining factor. He would, in the future, express this intuition of his by originating for the bomber squadrons the proud motto “Suis Viribus Pollens”, “possente di sua forza sola” (Powerful in its unique might).

  “This,” the archives say, “because he understood that the air weapon lent itself more than any other arm to multiplying and extending offensive power immeasurably, more than guns, more than ships; so that, when the authorities of the great nations were determined on the supreme importance of their navies, he dared to say [marrying Greek to Latin]: ‘Uranocrazia is about to replace thalassocrazia: that is, naval supremacy is about to give way to aerial supremacy.’”

  In March 1912 the National Air League was founded in Italy, with the purpose of diffusing a knowledge of flying throughout the country. D’Annunzio, in voluntary exile in France, hastened to give his support, extolling the initiative with a telegram of good wishes: “May the Naval League and the Air League be the two indefatigable arms of the new power.”

  On the outbreak of war in 1914 d’Annunzio returned from France. In Genoa on 5th March 1915 he gave an inflammatory interventionist speech. Italy declared war on Austria on 24th May. Fifty-two years old, he voluntarily rejoined the Army.

  General Luigi Cadorna, Chief of the General Staff of the Italian Army, wrote to d’Annunzio on 25th May: “Illustrious Sir, I have received with great pleasure the expression of your wish to participate directly in the enterprise to whose preparation you have brought a contribution of high ideals. I have therefore interested His Excellency the Minister of War, so that he may take steps to recall you for service as an officer in the Novara Lancers.”

  The general also arranged for d’Annunzio to be posted to the Army Headquarters commanded by His Royal Highness the Duke of Aosta. There, he would be able “to render a valuable contribution both practical and advisory”. He would also be authorised to visit all the other Army Headquarters “to witness the events which will occur on the whole Front”.

  This effusive and flattering reception of d’Annunzio’s return to uniform did not offer what he sought. “I did not expect propaganda work of a journalistic nature,” he said. He wanted to fight. He accepted the appointment, but, on 30th July, wrote to the Head of the Government, Antonio Salandra:

  “You know with what impatience I have requested the honour of serving my country in other fields. And for your solicitous kindness in seconding my desire, I have not yet ceased to give thanks.

  “You know that I have awaited this hour all my life. Having lived with sadness and wrath among a people careless of glory, at last I witnessed a miracle, which responded to my implacable expectations. Glory has become the very sky of Italy. The hour of great deeds has sounded for this nation, the hour of my blood has come for me.

  “I arranged, with the most valorous Lieutenant Giuseppe Miraglia, an enterprise to Trieste. Experienced in aviation, having already flown many times and at high altitude, being gifted with a certain ability for observation, and knowing the topography of Istria, especially the layout of Trieste from my numerous visits, I was thinking of the usefulness and the beauty of a flight which would carry a message to the tortured city and, possibly, some damage to military installations adjacent to Santa Teresa dock.

  “Everything was prepared with the severest discipline. The probability of success was great. The aeroplane could climb higher than three thousand metres …” But a newspaper heard of the enterprise and not only compromised it but also “provoked various remonstrances from the Ministry”. Whereupon d’Annunzio was forbidden to take part in “so dangerous a venture. I cannot tell you how saddened, stupefied and offended I was.”

  Although he romanticised warfare and his own part in it, in the manner of one who has never been in action, so does not know the reality of war and its horrors, and longed to be acclaimed a hero, he was sincere in his wish to fight. “How is it possible in my regard to speak of ‘a precious life’ and ‘a duty not to expose myself’? I am not a literary man of the old sort in a skullcap and slippers. It is perhaps easier to restrain the wind than to restrain me. I am a soldier, have wished to be a soldier, not to spend my time in cafes and the mess, but to do what soldiers do.”

  On 7th August 1915 d’Annunzio was authorised to fly on operations.

  CHAPTER 6 - 1915. In Action

  As the pilots of both sides shared many attitudes
and felt a mutual understanding while they set about doing their utmost to kill each other, so the most senior officers who commanded or otherwise influenced the air forces had, among their many disparities of character, one quality in common: an early appreciation of the importance of air power.

  It was because of the intimacy created by the RFC’s small size that Henderson, as its Commander-in-Chief, and Trenchard, commanding a wing, had an advantage over those who held corresponding offices in the French and German air forces. Among the Germans and the French there were colonels and generals whose existence the flying men registered but did not entirely notice. With the British, it was different. Henderson’s and Trenchard’s frequent visits to the squadrons made everyone aware of who led them at the summit. They well knew Henderson’s gentleness and compassion, his total imperturbability and subtle penetrating intellect. They knew equally well Trenchard’s energy, the stentorian voice which had given rise to his nickname, “Boom”, and the visceral trembling his presence or his orders occasioned them: especially when he succeeded Henderson. Then, like Haig, whom he so much admired, Trenchard did not let loss of life deter him. He kept them flying in machines inferior to, and in smaller numbers than, the enemy, despite a casualty rate that Henderson might not have countenanced. But, at the beginning of 1915, that black period was still to befall the squadrons.