The First Great Air War

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Born on 24th May 1887, he was the son of a regular soldier, a drunken Irish corporal in the Royal Scots Greys and later in the 5th Dragoon Guards, whose own father, of all incongruous occupations for one with such progeny, had been editor of a Fleet Street newspaper.

  At the age of ten, in India, Edward Mannock went blind in both eyes for two weeks, from a dust-borne amoebic infection. He recovered his sight, but there was corneal damage to his left eye, whose vision remained poor. His brutal sot of a father used to taunt him about his eyesight and tell him he would never be a real man, i.e., a soldier. He found that a determined show of aggression was enough to unnerve the bully. When his father threatened to beat him and advanced with raised fist, the boy did not shelter behind his mother, but stepped forward, inwardly quaking, to confront the man, who would desist. He said it proved to him that even a bogus display of fearlessness discouraged an adversary.

  After the Boer War, Corporal Mannock, having served his time, was unemployed. When he had spent all that he and his wife had scraped together, he deserted her and their three children. The boy Edward had to go to work: first for a greengrocer, at two shillings and sixpence a week, then for a barber at five shillings. In 1903 he became a clerk in the National Telephone Company. Three years later he transferred to the Engineering Department as a labourer, which meant climbing telegraph poles to repair wires in all weathers. He also joined the Territorial Army, in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and rose to sergeant.

  He was a ranting, proselytising Socialist, which was not surprising in view of the penurious circumstances of his youth. But he was also deeply patriotic to Britain, despite his Irish ancestry, and would verbally attack anyone who expressed anti-monarchist or anti-British sentiments.

  Taken by an urge to go abroad, he sailed for Turkey on 9th February 1914, in the hope of finding work in a new cable-laying operation there. He did so and was made a supervisor.

  When war broke out Germany began to negotiate an alliance with Turkey, but the work of building new telephone exchanges and laying cables went on. In November, the British Ambassador and his staff returned to England. Germans were in control and all British expatriates were declared prisoners of war. The Turks arrested them and imprisoned them in a communal cell. They intended to deport the prisoners, but the Germans objected. After Mannock and others had made several attempts to escape, the British were moved to a concentration camp.

  Mannock, who had led his companions in hammering on the cell door and singing, now arranged that a Turkish visitor, who had worked for him, would cut the wire and get him out of the window every night to go and buy food for them all. He was caught and put in solitary confinement. He was as persistent a nuisance to his captors as that other great pilot and leader, Douglas Bader, some thirty years later.

  Thanks to American intervention the British were repatriated in January 1915. Mannock arrived emaciated and ill with malaria, another legacy from childhood years in India.

  His closest friend, Jim Eyles, a civilian and militant Socialist, described Mannock’s intense hatred of the Germans. “When I told him of the most recent actions, especially the German gas attacks, his blood ran hot. Even his waxy complexion could not conceal it. His face reddened and I saw his knuckles growing white as he clenched and unclenched his fists in a growing fury.” Fellow prisoners also said that he had declared the intention to “get into the Army and kill as many of the swine as possible”.

  In July 1915 he rejoined the RAMC and was soon a sergeant again. He thought that his comrades lacked aggressive spirit, but if they understood more about Germany and Turkey, they would acquire it. He used to harangue them about this. When demonstrating how to treat wounded, his lectures were lurid. He described front line dressing stations in gruesome detail — mud, filth, enemy bombardment, blood and mangled limbs — which whipped up his own imagination at the same time. When it occurred to him that he might have to attend to a German battle casualty, the idea so repelled him that he went to his CO and asked for a transfer to the Royal Engineers as an officer cadet. Nobody, not even himself, would have suspected, as 1915 drew to its close, that Edward Mannock, known, on account of his Irish birth, as “Mick”, would go down in history as perhaps the best fighter leader of the Great War.

  *

  James McCudden, who was later to be one of Mannock’s flying instructors, and to spot him as a future star performer, was still waiting to be released from his duties as a sergeant air mechanic and air observer, to go on a pilot’s course, when 1915 came to its end. In July he had been home on ten days’ leave, after eleven months at the Front without even one day off duty. On his return, he was employed more as an observer than as a technician and had some comments to make on some pilots that reveal as much about himself as about them.

  In September 1915 C Flight of No. 3 Squadron had four officer pilots and one sergeant pilot. There were four officer observers, one corporal; and Sergeant McCudden, who recorded, after a short flight with Lieutenant Ridley: “I did not enjoy it much, for the pilot was one of the most dashing and enterprising kind. Such flying is all very fine for the pilot, but not always for the passenger.”

  McCudden had a different opinion of Major Ludlow-Hewitt, the squadron commander. On 13th December 1915, artillery spotting at 7000 feet, they were under constant anti-aircraft fire for two hours. “I can see the pilot now,” he recorded three years later, “tapping away at his key, with a shell bursting out on a wingtip and then one just ahead, not flicking an eyelid, and not attempting to turn or avoid the numerous shells that were continually bursting. As for myself, I was in a terrible state of funk, as I could do nothing but keep a look out for enemy machines, and watch the ‘Archie’ bursts.”

  At the end of December he noted: “By now, having flown a good deal with Major Hewitt, I intensely disliked ever going up with anyone else, for I can assure you that I knew when I was flying with a safe pilot, and I had now so much faith in him that if he had said ‘Come to Berlin,’ I should have gone like a shot.” An airman’s view of what makes a safe pilot is not perhaps understood by others; Ludlow-Hewitt had subjected him to two hours of intense danger at least once.

  It was also in December, in an L type Morane-Saulnier, that he had his first encounter with a Fokker firing through its propeller. It approached head-on and above. There was no gun mounting on the Morane for firing over the propeller, so he had to shoulder the Lewis gun: which demanded a fair amount of strength at that height, with the lungs short of oxygen, and at any altitude with the aircraft pitching and swaying. He fired as the Fokker flew overhead and past on the right. It came in again from astern and beneath. He told Captain Harvey-Kelly, his pilot, to turn, then shot at their attacker again. “The Fokker appeared rather surprised that we had seen him, and immediately turned off to my left rear as I was facing the tail.” Next, it climbed 300 feet above and dived to fire, but pulled out at once when McCudden let fly with the Lewis. It retired to a distance of 500 yards and withdrew there each time it came close and was met with a burst.

  That was the first air fight of a man who won the VC, DSO and MC in the next three years. It made his successful repelling of the Fokker all the more remarkable that its pilot was the redoubtable Max Immelmann.

  *

  Among those who would achieve less distinction, but render service that was equally valuable in its way, Algernon J. Insall deserves a place. Although he was at school in England, his home was in Paris, where his father was a doctor. On the declaration of war, Dr Insall closed his practice and returned to England with his wife and two sons.

  When, with his elder brother Gilbert, Algernon Insall volunteered for the infantry on 25th August 1914, he was only seventeen. The recruiting officer told him he would have to add a year to his age. He returned next day and did so. Both young men were accepted by the Public Schools and Universities Brigade, in the 18th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers.

  Early in 1915, the RFC called for volunteers to be trained as pilots, and they applied. Th
eir reception at Brooklands was typical of the spirit that prevailed throughout the flying world. The Adjutant greeted them, put them at their ease “in a few cheery sentences”, and they left his office as probationary uncommissioned second lieutenants. They would be treated as cadets and enjoy the privileges of their rank (few enough for the lowest form of officer life in any Service) without being entitled to a uniform.

  They were accommodated in a pub, the Blue Anchor, where the pupil pilots messed in a private dining room. “A pleasanter start to a new life it would be hard to imagine,” Insall recorded. He and his brother were welcomed by their fellows.

  Among the many reminders of sudden death to which pupil pilots have always had to accustom themselves, Insall experienced a particularly unnerving one when a senior instructor joined him for early breakfast. Affable and chatty, but pressed for time, the instructor bolted his food and hurried off to air test a Blériot. Insall, dawdling over his hard-boiled eggs, was surprised by the sudden entrance of the Station Sergeant Major, pale with shock; to announce that the Blériot had crashed and the windscreen had “sliced the top of the pilot’s head off as though it were an egg”. Insall, who was due for a lesson after the air test, found his appetite for boiled eggs gone, and for flying not quite as sharp as it had been.

  Having qualified on pushers, he was posted to Netheravon to convert to tractor aircraft, on No. II Squadron, which was equipped with the Vickers Fighting Biplane, VFB5, commonly known as the FB5 Gunbus, preparatory to field service. This was the first homogeneously equipped squadron in the Service and its aircraft, although a two-seater and a pusher type, was the first purpose-designed fighter in the RFC. An instructor there, who had served at the Front and sported an enormous goatskin greatcoat of the type some French officers wore, was evidently in the same class as the instructor who used to bawl at Collishaw and other pupils in Canada. “Use your flaming rudder,” he would bellow. “Your rudder, I said. Are you bloody well deaf? Go on, turn her round. Round, I said, not over, you bloody idiot.”

  Being taught by others was unalloyed bliss. Having asked “Anything I must not do, sir?” Insall was told “You go ahead and do just what you like. But for your peace of mind and mine, don’t hold her nose up when you see the air speed fall below, shall we say, forty-eight miles an hour, or let it drop beyond, say, sixty. If you do anything silly or dangerous I shall probably belt you over the head.”

  He was doing well until, practising landings, he came in short, touched cart-wheel ruts in the grass and the aeroplane somersaulted. He hurt his knee and was grounded for ten days. When he resumed flying, he found he felt physically sick when approaching for a landing. He went up with one of the best instructors, made seven attempts to land, but found he could not overcome his inhibition. The squadron was almost ready to go to France. Insall ceased pilot training and remained with it as an observer. In the last week of July 1915 he arrived at the Western Front.

  *

  Corporal Georges Guynemer, one of the earliest French aces, was already at the Front. Serious, ascetic and religious, he had been suspected, as a boy, of being tubercular and still looked frail at the age of seventeen years and eight months when war broke out. For this reason he was twice rejected when he tried to enlist. At the third attempt, in November 1914, he was admitted as an apprentice aviation mechanic. Having achieved that important step, he pressed on until he was accepted for flying school. In April 1915 he got his wings. The next month he was posted to Escadrille MS3, which flew both one- and two-seater Morane-Saulniers. In July, with Private Guerder as air gunner, he scored his first victory and was awarded the Médaille Militaire. Four months later he had added a kill in a single-seater to his tally and was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

  The air war was still a fairly casual and leisurely affair. One Sunday forenoon Guynemer shot down an enemy machine over Compiègne, where his parents lived, and was not sure where it had hit the ground. Seeing people coming away from Mass and knowing that his parents would be among them, he landed in a roadside meadow, hailed his father and asked him to search for his victim. Soon after, he brought down another aircraft in flames, near an artillery battery. He landed, as pilots often did, to have a look at his handiwork. The captain commanding the battery ordered a complimentary salvo to be fired, then tore gold braid off his képi and gave it to Corporal Guynemer “to wear when you are also a captain”.

  But the pace and ferocity of aerial combat were about to become much hotter.

  CHAPTER 8 - 1915. The Slaughter Starts

  Henderson had fallen ill in March and after a spell in bed was ordered to convalesce in the south of France. He returned two months later to find that Sykes, whom he had trusted despite his unsavoury reputation, had been intriguing against him, insinuating that the RFC ought to be commanded by a younger man in the best of health; and, of course, lobbying for his own usurpation of the post of General Officer Commanding.

  He also learned that Trenchard was in bed with one of the severe migraines that had afflicted him since he was badly wounded in the Boer War. He went to see him, told him that he had discovered Sykes’s turpitude and was dismissing him, and invited Trenchard to take on the vacant post.

  Trenchard refused. He admitted that he had criticised the organisation and the policy of the Corps, and would do so again if he thought it justified; but this was not because he was scheming to replace Henderson. He suggested Brooke-Popham, whom he praised as loyal and able. Henderson concurred.

  It was as well that Headquarters was rid of Sykes. A more dangerous and difficult period than any yet was about to assail both the RFC and the Aviation Militaire.

  *

  It was a paradox that as the arming of British, French and German tractor aeroplanes with forward-firing machineguns proliferated, the lethality of air fighting became greater and the kind of death that pilots and observers suffered became increasingly horrible, so the courteous generosity of spirit displayed by both sides grew more pronounced.

  On 15 May 1915, Rothesay Stuart Wortley noted: “A curious kind of comradeship appears to be developing between the two opposing Flying Corps; more especially since fighting in the air has become rule rather than exception.” He was prompted to this by the fact that each side dropped notes on the other’s aerodromes to report when a machine had come down behind enemy lines, and the fate of its occupant(s). He added: “One would imagine that the German Air Service has attracted the pick of the German officers,” because they were behaving with courtesy and consideration, even tacitly offering commiseration.

  British pilots frequently dropped challenges to single combat in some appointed place and at a set time, but these were not being accepted. This contradicts his praise by implying cowardice; which could hardly be a trait found in the pick of any nation’s officers. One RFC pilot, after many attempts to spur someone up to fight, contemptuously dropped a pair of old boots with the insulting note: “Herewith boots, pairs one, German flying officers on the ground for the use of.”

  The mutual behaviour of adversary airmen did not really amount to chivalry. The word implies the good sportsmanship and manners of a fencer who, having disarmed his opponent, steps back to allow him to pick up his weapon and fight on. It was certainly displayed on the battlefield when an eighteenth-century French general invited the British enemy to fire the first volley. Between pilots and observers who were trying to kill each other, not merely prove who flew or shot better, true chivalry would have meant sparing an enemy’s life. That enemy might very well kill the man who had spared him, or someone else on his side, in a later encounter.

  The consequences of the Germans’ capture of Garros’s invention spread quickly. Fokker’s monoplane, the Eindecker, the E1, introduced large-scale slaughter into air fighting, in comparison with which the killing and wounding done with carbine or handgun seemed trivial. With it, it brought an increased danger of fire, the most dreaded cause of death.

  The E1 was no dazzling performer, with its top speed of 81 m.p
.h. and rate of climb that took it to 3000 feet in seven minutes. It was not even original: pretty much a copy of the Morane-Saulnier Type N, which could attain 90 m.p.h. and climbed rather more quickly. It was only a few miles an hour better than the BE2c, and 10 m.p.h. faster than the Gunbus. But it was nimble, and, above all, extremely difficult to see in the sky. It had such thin wings that, head-on, they became visible only when it was probably too late to take effective evasive action. Even then, it was the round shape of the fuselage that made it identifiable, while the wings still appeared to be faint streaks across the background of clear sky or cloud.

  Fokker, with Leutnant Parschau, demonstrated two of “his new” machines, which were really a rehash of others’ inspirations, to Feldfliegerabteilung 62 at Douai, on which were serving Boelcke, who was already making a name for himself, and the still unknown Max Immelmann. Fokker and Parschau fought mock combats and fired at ground targets. The spectators were impressed. GHQ had told the Dutchman to find an enemy aeroplane and give the most convincing display possible of the El’s superiority by shooting it down. He found a potential victim, but, to his credit, was too squeamish to make the kill and turned away without having violated his neutrality any more than he was already doing by aiding and abetting the Germans. He was soon virtually a prisoner in Germany, with citizenship forced on him and his life forfeit to his masters if he tried to return to Holland.

  By July, eleven E1s had been delivered to the Western Front. The German Air Service made an error of judgment that was fortunate for the Allies. Instead of forming whole units completely equipped with them, it spread them around the existing Abteilungen so that soon each had two. On Flight Section 62, Boelcke was charged with doing most of the proving.

  If the Fokkers had been formed into homogeneous units and used to punch with maximum force on successive parts of the Front, both the French and British air forces would have suffered even worse casualties than they did. Nevertheless, their appearance began a dire period for the Allies.