Wings
Page 5
‘Sometimes we’d be extremely close, it seemed to be almost touching,’ Rabagliati remembered. ‘Other times we’d be out of range. We couldn’t shoot through the propeller in front so we had to shoot sideways.’ He ‘knew nothing whatever about the question of lay-off’ – the science of shooting ahead of your opponent so he flew into your fire. ‘Not only was the other aeroplane going fast, but our own aeroplane from which I was shooting was also going fast . . . it was a purely hit-and-miss effort.’
They circled each other, blazing away, with Rabagliati firing a hundred rounds. Then, ‘suddenly, to my intense joy, I saw the pilot fall forward on his joy stick and the machine tipped up and went down. I knew that either I had hit him or something had happened. We were of course completely thrilled. We’d had our duel and we’d won! We watched him going down. We circled round and he finally crashed.’5
The pilot escaped with his life. Nonetheless, this probably counts as the first dogfight fought by British fliers. It would be repeated tens of thousands of times over the coming years, in this war and the next. It was a form of combat that had disappeared from the terrestrial battlefield. It seemed to herald a return to classical times with champions pitted against each other, but now relying on skill, mixed with luck, rather than strength to bring their opponent down. You feel in Rabagliati’s account his mouth drying, his senses sharpening as he realizes he is engaged in what could be a duel to the death. In the conduct of this first engagement are many of the elements of all the dogfights that followed: the tightly circling, high-speed chase as each pilot tries to get a bead on the other, the jinking and manoeuvring, the shifting of advantage and then the moment of victory, as definitive as the slump of the bull’s head as the torero’s sword pierces his spinal nerve.
Even with the puny ordnance at their disposal, the crews were also determined to inflict any damage they could on the streams of field-grey uniforms pouring along the roads below. They carried improvised petrol bombs and bundles of fourteen-inch-long steel darts called flechettes to shower on any troops they encountered. During the retreat, Eric Conran, an Australian subaltern with 3 Squadron, had James McCudden fit his Blériot ‘Parasol’ monoplane – an oddity among the biplanes – with wooden racks to carry hand grenades. While on reconnaissance he noticed two German columns converging on a main road. He dived down over the closely packed men and horses and showered them with bombs, then flew off leaving a chaotic scene filled with angry soldiers and plunging animals.
It was the routine business of observation and reconnaissance that gave the RFC its raison d’être, however, and when the retreat was over General French gave fulsome recognition to the role the Corps and its commander, Henderson, had played in enabling his forces to escape.
‘Their skill, energy and perseverance have been beyond all praise,’ he wrote in his despatch. ‘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.’
Within a few weeks the RFC had established a fighting posture that it would maintain through the long years of what soon felt like an interminable war. Whatever the odds, whatever the weather, it was committed to answering every call the army issued. Part of the airmen’s determination stemmed from the desire of newcomers – still regarded as upstarts in some quarters – to prove their worth. But it also reflected their sympathy for their earthbound comrades whose plight they saw with bitter clarity from what seemed like the relative safety of the air. The aviators felt themselves privileged and, in the months ahead, even pampered as they settled down in comfortable bases, while the soldiers endured the squalor of the trenches. It was a perception they never lost sight of, even when the demands placed on them by the generals brought appalling casualties.
In early September the German breakthrough was halted at the Battle of the Marne. Again, the reconnaissance reports of the RFC helped the Allies’ analyse German movements and guide their reactions. But the Allied counter-attack launched immediately afterwards failed after a few days. The war of manoeuvre was over and the armies began digging in along a line that by the end of November stretched, with a few gaps, from Nieuport in the north to the Swiss border. The war had changed decisively. It was stuck in the mud of Flanders and henceforth would be a ghastly battle of attrition that would define the future function of the air force.
It was clear that the RFC had an important, possibly crucial, part to play in the land war. The same could not be said of the Royal Naval Air Service and the war at sea. In August 1914 the War Office had insisted on control of the country’s air defences, even though almost all of its aircraft were already earmarked for France. At the Admiralty, the First Lord, Winston Churchill, took advantage of the army’s predicament to move in. Soon the Royal Naval Air Service had taken over the responsibility and a rudimentary aerial defence system was put in place. The RNAS set up a string of seaplane bases in east coast ports, facing Germany. In early September the army grudgingly accepted the situation and – for the time being at least – ceded the air over Britain to the navy.
The admirals’ conviction that the special needs of the navy made close co-operation with the army impossible had led them to ignore the amalgamation the creation of the RFC was supposed to bring about, and had carried on their own course, training their own pilots and buying their own aircraft. Such was their power and political prestige that their disobedience went unpunished and was accepted as a fait accompli with the official recognition of the RNAS in July 1914. The navy’s headstrong attitude, however, was not easy to justify. Wresting control of the domestic air space from the army was an empty victory, as in the first months of the war the German air force stayed away. Effort concentrated instead on how to put the navy’s aeroplanes to use at sea. Flight brought huge potential advantages to the prosecution of naval warfare. In theory, aircraft could carry out reconnaissance from ships at sea, launch offensive and defensive operations against hostile aircraft and bases, attack enemy weak points on the ground and patrol the seas in search of enemy forces, in particular submarines. Huge logistical and mechanical problems had to be overcome, however, before the simplest tasks could be attempted.
Navy aviators were nonetheless innovative and daring. It was the RNAS that carried out the first offensive action by British fliers, a bold if ineffective attack launched on 22 September 1914 from its base at Ostend against the Zeppelin sheds at Dusseldorf. On 8 October, having fallen back to Dunkirk, the navy tried again. This time Flight Lieutenant Reggie Marix, aboard a Sopwith Tabloid, succeeded in dropping a couple of bombs on a hangar. They were tiny, weighing only twenty pounds each, but the results were sensational. Inside the shed was a just-completed Zeppelin and the explosions ignited the hydrogen, generating a fireball that leapt 500 feet.
Another big operation was in the planning. Four Avro 504s were dismantled, shipped to Le Havre, then driven to an airstrip at Belfort on the Swiss–French border. On the freezing morning of 20 November, three of them set off to bomb the Zeppelin factory, 120 miles away, at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance in southern Germany. Once again the results were impressive. A hydrogen-generating plant erupted, workshops were blown up and an airship badly damaged, delighting Winston Churchill, who described it as ‘a fine feat of arms’.
This was another land-based effort and the RNAS could be said to be encroaching on operational space that logically belonged to the RFC – although at this time the army had no interest in long-range bombing. Then, on Christmas Eve 1914, the RNAS launched another imaginative operation that pushed the boundaries of the new technology and provided a glimpse of where the combination of warplanes and warships could lead. At the heart of the operation were three ships – Engadine, Riviera and Empress. They were large, fast, cross-channel ferries that had been converted into seaplane carriers. They set sail from Harwich at 5 p.m., escorted by two cruisers, te
n destroyers and ten submarines. Their destination was a point forty miles off the Friesian island of Wangerooge. From there, the nine Short ‘Folders’ on board the carriers were to set off to bomb the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven. The airships were not the primary target, however. The main intention was to lure at least some of the German High Seas Fleet lying at Wilhelmshaven, just down the coast to the south, out into the North Sea where battle could be joined.
The mission began in the icy dawn of Christmas Day. In the freezing conditions, two aeroplanes failed to start and the others sputtered along on misfiring engines towards the target. The clear conditions quickly gave way to dense cloud and the pilots failed to see the objective, let alone bomb it. On the way back they dropped a few bombs on ships moored in the Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven, then tried to rejoin the fleet at a pick-up position off the island of Borkum. It was a hugely perilous exercise. Fuel was running low and four of the aeroplanes that had been hit by anti-aircraft fire had to ditch. By a stroke of luck three landed near a submarine, but the rescue was interrupted by the arrival of a Zeppelin, which proceeded to bomb. One of the raiders was picked up by a destroyer and two more by the carriers. Another put down near a Dutch merchantman. Astonishingly, no one was killed in the operation. Although the mission had failed in its aims it had nonetheless been an important event. The episode had demonstrated that ships could work with aircraft to project force in a way that land-based aeroplanes at that time could not. This development was in keeping with the underlying principle of British sea power, that by possession of a large navy, a small island was able to amass wealth and power, while enhancing its own security by its ability to hit its enemies at long range.
The significance of what had happened was clear to the man who planned the raid, Squadron Commander Cecil L’Estrange Malone. ‘I look upon the events which took place on 25 December as a visible proof of the probable line of developments of the principles of naval strategy,’ he wrote in his official report. ‘One can imagine what might have been done had our seaplanes, or those sent to attack us, carried torpedoes instead of light bombs. Several of the ships in Schillig Roads would have been torpedoed and some of our force might have been sunk as well.’ L’Estrange-Malone, a remarkable figure who would go on to become Britain’s first Communist MP, had grasped that at some point, the success or failure, in fact the very survival of a naval force, would depend on the strength and efficiency of its air forces and air defences.
That time was still some way off. The Cuxhaven raid was not repeated. Instead the RNAS would soon be preoccupied with one of its consequences. The fright that the Germans had received produced a strengthening of the anti-aircraft batteries around ports and bases, but also persuaded them to press ahead with air attacks on England. Rather than wait for long-range aeroplanes capable of doing the job, it was decided to use Zeppelins, and when the raids began early in the New Year it was naval pilots who had the task of hunting them down.
The results of the attacks on the Zeppelin sheds did not justify the effort and expenditure of manpower and resources that went into them. It was accepted that there might be future benefits in developing what was essentially a doctrine of strategic air warfare, but for the time being they were theoretical. The army’s needs were obvious and pressing. It was inevitable that in the battle for resources the RNAS would lose out.
With the Western Front frozen it was clear that the war would not be over by Christmas. Many more soldiers would be needed. The British Expeditionary Force began to swell, and at the end of December divided into First Army, under Haig, and Second Army, under Sir Horace Lockwood Dorrien-Smith, while in Britain the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, issued a call for volunteers that brought tens of thousands flooding in. If the RFC was to do its job it would have to match the expansion. Plans were made for fifty new squadrons – more than ten times the number that had gone to France in August. Its structure was reorganized to harmonize with the new army arrangements. The squadrons were now divided into wings, which were teamed with the First and Second armies, with the expectation that there would be many more to follow.
Chapter 3
Archie
By the spring of 1915 the life of a British aviator on the Western Front had settled into a steady, if hazardous, routine. The first squadrons operated mainly from the aerodrome at St Omer, just inland from Calais, where the RFC set up its headquarters and which would remain its home in France until the end of the war. The fliers lived surrounded by a much larger force of ground staff and administrators. Maurice Baring, in peacetime an urbane man of letters who served as Henderson’s aide-de-camp, remembered ‘a stuffy office, full of clerks and candles and a deafening noise of typewriters’, with a ‘constant stream of pilots arriving in the evening in Burberries with maps, talking over reconnaissances’.1The two-man teams of pilot and observer could expect to make two trips a day over enemy lines, usually to carry out the photographic reconnaissances which were becoming the norm, or spotting for the artillery batteries whose bombardments made up the main business of war in between ‘pushes’.
The day began with the crew, insulated against the extreme cold of high flying in an open cockpit by layers of leather, fur and wool, climbing into their aeroplane. A mechanic swung the big, double-bladed wooden propeller, the engine coughed, spurted a plume of dirty exhaust smoke and the machine trundled out onto the grass field to take off. The prevailing wind was westerly. On the outward journey it whisked the aeroplane rapidly towards the German lines. On the return, if blowing hard, it could slow progress to what felt like a standstill.
There was less to fear now from friendly fire on the way to no-man’s-land. The Germans were the first to identify their aircraft with large black crosses on white grounds and the Allies soon followed suit.
‘We tried to decide on some kind of mark for our own,’ remembered air mechanic Cecil King. ‘Well the first thing was, they painted Union Jacks on the underneath of the plane, but that just looked like a smudge. Then they tried painting a bar, but that didn’t seem much. Then we painted the target, as we used to call it [and] there was no more firing at our own machines.’2The ‘target’ of concentric blue-and-white rings with a red bullseye became known as the ‘roundel’ and soon symbol of Britishness.
The main hazard now was anti-aircraft fire. The shells could reach 10,000 feet and burst in the air, rather than on impact, as did the much-derided British ordnance. The aviators called it ‘ack-ack’ (from the phonetic alphabet for AA or anti-aircraft) or ‘Archie’. The latter name seems to have been the invention of Lieutenant Amyas ‘Biffy’ Borton of 5 Squadron. According to his account, on 19 September 1914 he was on a reconnaissance flight west of Soissons with his observer Lieutenant R. E. Small. They were aware that a four-gun anti-aircraft battery was located in a quarry just north of the town.
‘Over the town I turned into the wind and at once saw four flashes from the quarry,’ Borton remembered. ‘I turned forty-five degrees and drifted to the left and in due course up came four bursts to my right front, where I should have been had I not altered course. The next time they fired I repeated the manoeuvre to the right and the shells burst harmlessly to my left front. There was a music-hall song at the time called, “Archibald, Certainly Not!”2 My observer and I sang it each time the ruse was successful.’3
‘Archie’ affected aviators in different ways. By early 1915 McCudden had been promoted to corporal and had begun accompanying pilots on missions. He was flying with Eric Conran at 8,000 feet over Violanes when he ‘heard a c-r-r-r-mp, then another then another, and looking above we saw several balls of white smoke floating away. The pilot turned to mislead Archie, of whom I was having my first bad experience. However, I can honestly say that I did not feel any more than a certain curiosity as to where the next one was going to burst.’4
This seems a remarkably cool reaction. Trundling at a top speed of little over 70 mph it was easy for a battery, once it had found its range, to keep up with its prey. ‘Marsh and myself
went on reconnaissance at dawn and were told to have a look right into Wervicq [just north of Lille],’ recorded Captain Harold Wyllie of 4 Squadron. ‘Before we could say knife, a battery of guns opened on us from two sides. The shells were bursting under, over and on both sides . . . I never could have believed it possible to be under such fire and survive. The noise was deafening and the air full of smoke.’5The pair made for home after being hit six times by bullets and shell splinters.
Many did not mind admitting that the experience rattled them badly. Comparing the accounts of airmen in the First and Second World Wars one is struck by the greater willingness of the pioneers to acknowledge fear.
‘I wonder how long my nerves will stand this almost daily bombardment by “Archie”,’ wrote Lieutenant William Read of 3 Squadron. ‘I notice several people’s nerves are not as strong as they used to be and I am sure “Archie” is responsible for a good deal. I would not mind so much if I were in a machine that was fast and that would climb a little more willingly. Today we both had a good dressing down by “Archibald” and some of the shells burst much too near and I could hear the pieces of shell whistling past – and they have to burst very close for one to be able to hear the shrieking of loose bits of shell above the noise of one’s engine. Well, well, I suppose the end will be pretty sharp and quick if one of Archie’s physicballs catches one. I think I would rather it caught me than crumple up Henri [his Henri Farman aeroplane], because one would have too long to think when falling from 4,000 feet.’6
There were several ways to die in an aeroplane. All must have shared Read’s view that death by bullet or shrapnel was the best. The alternatives, burning up or a long, conscious descent to collision with the earth, did not bear too much reflection. Grotesque accidents abounded. Captain George Pretyman of 3 Squadron was returning from a reconnaissance when his aeroplane was rocked by turbulence. He looked behind to check on his observer only to see that the seat was empty. When Pretyman looked down, his comrade was turning somersaults on his way earthwards.