The First Great Air War

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  On 15th June 1916 Hartney sailed for France with nineteen hours solo flying in his logbook. He spent only twenty minutes at the Pilots’ Pool in St Omer before continuing to his squadron, No. 20. The squadron was replacing its 160-h.p. Beardmore-engined FE2Bs by FE2Ds. As well as a more powerful engine, these had three machineguns: one intended for the pilot but accessible to the observer. There were six aircraft, eight pilots and eight observers on each of the three flights, all officers. They slept in wooden-hutted dormitories and each flight had its own mess. He and the other new arrival were “greeted with great courtesy but with a peculiar kindly derision”, which he found was the custom with “Huns”, new untried arrivals: the same derisive term with which the British referred to the enemy.

  In a flight, he says “was an atmosphere something like college fraternities”, and the whole idea of a flight in a British air squadron was “to have the officers live closely together and to associate closely at all times and to instil a sort of single minded unity in the entire group, on the ground and in the air, with a smooth chain of responsibility from the top down to the newest officer.” So impressed was he with this principle, that he introduced it to the US Air Corps.

  He praised his squadron commander: “Major Malcolm, as fine a soldier as I ever met, a six-footer from the Regular Army and every inch a man.” When Hartney and the other new pilot came in, the CO promptly rose to greet them. He had other qualities than courtesy and manliness, as Hartney was about to discover.

  The second new arrival was an American, who on the train had confided to Hartney that it was madness to send them to France “to fly in old untried kites”, with only nineteen hours solo. If he was required to do this, he declared, he was going to crash deliberately on his first flight. To Hartney this sounded pusillanimous, but his companion had the courage to cut short Major Malcolm’s greeting, with: “Major, I’m sure glad to meet you, sir, but I’m afraid I’m in the wrong church. You know, I’m a scout pilot.”

  The Major rewarded this frankness by ordering him to leave the squadron at once. Hartney’s thought on this has a blurred sort of logic about it and just a touch of the self-righteous: “This was extremely embarrassing to me but secretly I rejoiced over the fate of the youth who had threatened to crack up his first machine, when planes were so scarce and, to me, so wonderful.”

  In contrast, Malcolm welcomed him warmly. “You have nineteen hours solo, I see, but hours mean nothing.” This statement alone would have disquieted most pilots. “All you’ll need are guts and loyalty.” The guts, presumably, so that they could be spilled by a burst from a Fokker’s Spandau the first time he showed his nose over the enemy lines with a mere nineteen hours’ experience, and loyalty not to have any hard feelings in the next world towards his CO or the RFC’s inadequate training programme.

  Hartney did harbour one adverse criticism: the airfield was not flat, but saucer-shaped, small, with woods on two sides and a small lake at one end. On his first take-off, the Beardmore engine cut out and the Fee’s nose dropped. He risked turning back and was lucky to glide in without stalling and killing himself and the observer. A few minutes later he took off again. The following morning he was sent, with an escorting aircraft, to look at the Front. After several more familiarisation flights he flew on his first operation on 30th June. To his astonishment he was allocated a brand new Fee with a Rolls-Royce engine. “… the proud possessor of one of the finest two-seaters on the whole Allied front … my morale went sky-high … I, the little mouse, began to yell ‘Bring on them cats!’”

  Thirty bombers were to attack balloon sites. Three fighter squadrons were each to provide ten aircraft so that every bomber would have its own protector. The fighters landed at the bomber aerodrome to refuel and have lunch. As the first bomber taxied for take-off across the bumpy ground, one of its phosphorus bombs detonated with a vivid flash and a loud noise. A moment later there was another sheet of blinding light and a loud explosion from the second bomber. A roaring conflagration spread. Exploding ammunition and flaming pieces of aeroplane slashed through the boiling smoke like rockets going off in every direction. Hartney rushed to move his own aeroplane to safety. Two hangars and five machines, including one of 20 Squadron’s, had been destroyed. The remainder took off and carried on with the operation.

  The next day the Battle of the Somme began and he was on dawn patrol with AMI Stanley as gunner, with four other machines. His position was at the left rear — “outside left” — of the V. At 13,000 feet, as the flight began a left turn, he saw two enemy aircraft diving on Callender, who was flying ‘outside right”. He fired a warning Vérey cartridge. The enemy streaked past, firing, then climbed to come in again. Hartney turned into them. One Fokker broke away. Callender did an Immelmann turn onto the other’s tail. After some skirmishing he shot it down in flames. Hartney had lost 4500 feet and was under attack. Bullets crackled past his head. Stanley signed that both his guns were jammed. Hartney did a rough turning sideslip to the left, then another to the right. He couldn’t see the enemy. He dived to gain speed and pulled up steeply. The controls went mushy and he kicked on hard right rudder to come heavily down and round in a stalled turn, a heavy-handed Immelmann. The Fokker was dead ahead and slightly below. Stanley had corrected the stoppages and was shooting: tracer, ball, incendiary and armour-piercing in sequence. Bullets riddled the Fokker and its pilot. The fuel tank burst into flames. Hartney’s imagery becomes unexpectedly grisly for so kindly and prosaic a man: “I once saw a kitten, its head run over by an automobile, jump up in the air, then dive to the ground and roll over and over. Our enemy was doing just that. In addition, he was afire.”

  They were far behind enemy lines. Hartney turned for home. Stanley began to make agitated signals which meant that enemy aircraft were ahead and astern. Hartney saw two more Fokkers. Twisting, climbing, skidding, the three aeroplanes milled around dodging each other and trying to get their sights on a target. One Fokker was cautious and kept breaking off. The other was bolder, crossed ahead of the Fee, and Stanley shot it down. The Fee’s engine was misfiring and Hartney had to make a forced landing close behind the British front line.

  Later that day Major Malcolm was killed when his engine failed on take-off and he stalled in. He was replaced by Mansfield, whom Hartney said was “The typical high type of regular British Army officer, the same calibre as Malcolm, just as understanding, fair and helpful to budding young pilots.”

  On 21st July he was on the periphery of a tragedy of the kind that recur to one’s mind in sombre moments for the rest of life. A sore throat and temperature kept him in bed instead of going on patrol. He listened to five aircraft of his flight, B, take off, and worried about the thickening fog. At lunch time the patrol had not returned. Nor did they return that afternoon. They had flown into a hill and all ten pilots and gunners were killed.

  Early in September his face was so badly frostbitten at 14,000 feet that he was sent on a few days’ leave in St Omer. On the l0th he went to England on leave. Three hours after rejoining his wife and baby daughter he received a telegram recalling him. Early next morning he ferried a Fee from Farnborough to his squadron and found that he was now deputy flight commander. On 8th December, with his statutory six months at the Front almost completed, he was offered the choice between joining a Home Defence squadron in Britain, or ten days’ leave from l0th December and command of a flight on the next vacancy. He went on leave and returned on Christmas Day 1916 as commander of A Flight, with the rank of captain. As a result of casualties, he was already fourth in seniority on the squadron.

  *

  Nineteen-sixteen also saw the graduation into prominence of a strong personality who has been called “the man who taught the world to fly”, on account of his revolutionary ideas about the training of embryo pilots. Robert Smith Barry was an Irish Old Etonian of rich landed family. When he joined the first course at the Central Flying School on l0th August 1912, he was a second lieutenant in the RFC Special Reserve, and an instructor
at the Bristol Flying School.

  In August 1914 he crossed the Channel as a member of No. 5 Squadron, crashed a couple of months later and was sent to hospital in England. The letter his squadron commander, Major J. F. A. Higgins, wrote him there is a model of the sort of letter every crashed pilot would be gratified to have from his CO. “My dear Smith Barry, I am awfully sorry about your smash but hope you will be alright in a few weeks and that in the meantime your breakages will cause you as little pain as possible. I am sending on the rest of your kit. Let Rabagliati [a squadron comrade] know if there is anything else we can do. Don’t worry about the smash. I am quite sure it was not your fault. These things are bound to happen sometimes. It is lucky that it was no worse.” Those were the days when a squadron CO could give a reassuring exoneration from blame, unfettered by the complications of a Court of Enquiry into the cause of an accident.

  No doubt Smith Barry thought his injuries bad enough: he was still hobbling on sticks in the spring of 1915 when instructing at Northolt. Later that year he was instructing by day and flying anti-Zeppelin patrols by night. In November he was promoted to captain. In April 1916 he was posted as a flight commander to 60 Squadron, commanded by Major “Ferdie” Waldron, a fellow Etonian; who had chosen three of the same ilk to command his flights.

  On 25th May the squadron went to France, equipped with Morane parasol biplanes. Next month six of these were replaced by the Morane Bullet, an aeroplane of dubious quality. Waldron was shot down and killed on 3rd July and command passed to Smith Barry. With his majority, the charming and popular Irishman was able to display his already notorious eccentricity regardless of criticism; not that he had ever taken much notice of higher authority. It had always been his pleasure to frighten his passengers into fits by subjecting them to extravagant aerobatics. Now, when an enemy single-seater mistakenly landed on 60’s airfield in thick mist, he went beyond the bounds of the hospitality shown by both sides to captured fellow aircrew, and kept the bewildered pilot as a mess guest for a whole week.

  He detested Trenchard, whom he condemned as a butcher. When pilots arrived on the squadron with as little as seven hours’ solo, he refused to send them on patrol until he had brought them up to a standard which gave them some chance of surviving longer than the three weeks that were the average at the Front whenever the enemy had air dominance. Trenchard always insisted that he looked on the RFC as a family and tried to consider aircrews’ feelings. That was why he had dead men replaced immediately: so that the others would have no time to brood over missing faces, but be more concerned with getting to know new ones. His family feeling did not deter him, when he sent three volunteers to attack balloons, from saying: “Good luck. But remember, it is far more important to get those balloons than to fail and come back.” Using Le Prieur rockets, which had a 200-yard range, three between the wings on either side, they shot down all the balloons without loss.

  From 1st July to 27th November 1916 on the Somme, the RFC lost 308 pilots, 191 observers and 782 aircraft. It destroyed 164 and drove down 205. There were many who felt as Smith Barry did.

  He was also outspoken in his criticism of training methods and in November wrote a paper suggesting improvements. Trenchard neatly hoisted him with his own petard and had him posted to command No. 1 Reserve Squadron. Smith Barry was dined out by 60 Squadron on Christmas Eve 1916. Immediately on arrival at Gosport he set about ridding the training squadron of its antediluvian Shorthorns and Longhorns and forming one flight of Avros, another of BE2Cs and a third of Moranes and Bristol Scouts.

  *

  The last word on this turbulent year of 1916 belongs to Henderson, who, at the start of 1917, summed it up in a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

  “The success of the Royal Flying Corps in the Field is not to be measured by the relative casualties to our and to the German aeroplanes; although this method of calculation would show a distinct balance in our favour, it does not bring out the great superiority which has been manifested by the Royal Flying Corps throughout the past year. The work of our Air Service is work done for the Army, and it is only by the success of that work — which nowadays is almost the same thing as the success of the Army — that the value of the Air Service should be measured. It would be easy enough to reduce the casualty list if we would consent to limit reconnaissance, to limit Artillery observation, to give up bombing, to concentrate all our available strength in fighting aeroplanes for the purpose of killing Germans in the air. No doubt our casualties would then be still fewer, and the German casualties still greater. For long periods at a time this policy has been adopted by the Germans with disastrous results to their operations on the ground. Throughout the Somme offensive last year, almost no German aeroplanes were seen, except fighting aeroplanes and they mostly operated ten miles behind the trench lines, and all through this period the German communiqués boasted of the success of their Air Service, and tried to measure that success by the number of British and French aeroplanes they had brought down; but the German Army was not to be taken in by those communiqués, the German Flying Corps was completely discredited in its own country, with the result that it has been completely reorganised, and is now making an effort to meet us on our own lines, but even now the work which is done for the German Army by its aeroplanes is very small compared to the value which our Army gets out of the Royal Flying Corps.

  “Our casualties are heavy, but we must beat the Germans in the air, and the Flying Corps must carry on the work of the Army. Last year we beat the Germans in the air as soon as we had a sufficient spell of continuous good weather, and, in spite of the improved efficiency of the German Air Service, there is no reason why we should not beat them again this year. But there is no such thing as ‘command of the air’ at present, all that can be done is to press the air fighting further back behind the German lines, and try to keep the battlefield clear.

  “With regard to the relative efficiency of British and German aeroplanes, a great many false comparisons have been made, and a great many discouraging statements made. It is most undesirable to quote in public either the specific types or the number of aeroplanes of different kinds in our possession, such information would be of the greatest value to our enemies. The facts at present are that in design and in improvement of design, we are now ahead of the Germans, but owing to the extraordinary rate of increase in the Royal Flying Corps, we are still behind the enemy in the matter of supply, and particularly in the matter of the replacement of types which are becoming outclassed. The circumstance is that our best machines, which are daily increasing in number, are better than the German best, but a certain number of ours are becoming outclassed by the average German machine. The necessary examination having, for the time being, been completed, our whole energy is now given to replacement, which is proceeding at a rapid rate.

  “The continual attacks on the Air Services which are made in the Press and in Parliament, do an infinite amount of harm. They give information to the enemy, they discourage the officers and men, and they have a serious effect on the discipline of the Corps. No other branch of the Service, either Naval or Military, is exposed to this continual criticism from those who profess to be experts, and yet have no knowledge of the conditions at the Front.”

  He is loyal to Trenchard’s policy in France, he puts air operations in perspective, and gives all categories of aircrew their due.

  CHAPTER 13 - 1917. The Climacteric

  Not only was 1917 the climacteric, the period in which the greatest changes took place, but it was also the vintage year. During these twelve months all but a few of the most famous pilots reached their peak. The most conspicuous exceptions were the outstanding Americans, who did not feature until the next year.

  So far, among those who were to shine in the US Air Service, only Hartney — who was still a Canadian citizen — and some of the Escadrille Lafayette had distinguished themselves. Lufbery was the sole member of the escadrille who was destined to figure among America’
s highest-scoring pilots. Of its original seven Americans, Chapman and Rockwell had been killed in action before the New Year dawned and Prince had died from injuries received in a crash when making a night landing. At the Armistice, Hall and Thaw were the only survivors.

  The word “climax” is commonly misused to mean “the highest point”. It is in fact a rhetorical figure in which the sense rises gradually in a series of images, each exceeding the other. In that, the correct, sense, 1917 qualified also as the year of climax. It was the year in which aviation advanced from the shadow of its beginnings into the effulgence of its future; from the era of the Wright Brothers to that of R. J. Mitchell, who fourteen years hence would design the Schneider-Trophy-winning Supermarine S6B from which he derived the Spitfire.

  In the early 1800s Sydney Smith, clergyman and journalist, unwittingly summarised the practical philosophy of fighting airmen a century later in their attitude to life: “Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God.” The first two articles in this creed were forced upon them by the circumstances of war. The third, they mostly amended to “trust in yourself”. It was by experience combined with natural ability that pilots in the two great wars might achieve longevity. Observers and gunners had to trust in their pilots.

  The physical and mental ravages of combat flying, whether on reconnaissance, artillery co-operation or fighter patrols, can be seen in contrasting photographs taken of airmen at the start and towards the end of their operational tours. By the time that Louis Strange and Hawker were transferred to the Home Establishment after their first eleven months at the Front, they looked weary, haunted, stunned and brittle. Boelcke, fleshy-faced and youthful in 1914, died hollow-eyed and gaunt. Guynemer was always delicate-looking. By the time the Somme battles were done with he had dark circles under his eyes and looked as though he might collapse from exhaustion. Fonck, Ball, Immelmann, all bore the same signs of over-stressed nerves, lack of sleep, the erosion of long hours in arctic cold with the brain bemused, heart and lungs labouring, from lack of oxygen.