Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

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  Given the various armies’ more or less dismissive attitudes to aviation at the outbreak of war, it is ironic how quickly they came to rely on aircraft as engines and airframes improved. It is now possible to view the whole development of aviation during the First World War as a direct consequence of the static trench and artillery warfare on the ground, with rapidly escalating demands for aircraft to fill different and more demanding tactical roles. By early 1915 more accurate anti-aircraft defences were forcing pilots up to 8,000 feet or so, over twice as high as they had been used to flying a mere six months earlier. But at 8,000 feet accurate observation by eye of what was happening within the intricate network of trenches was very difficult, particularly as so much was increasingly disguised from aerial spying by the burgeoning art of camouflage. An observer peering over the side of his cockpit, attempting to stop his goggles being torn off his face in the seventy-mile-an-hour gale while trying to draw maps and take pencil notes on flapping paper with frozen fingers – this was clearly no way to conduct a vital military survey. Thus cameras became more and more important while gaining in intricacy, size and weight, which in turn necessitated better aircraft performance at altitude.

  Aeroplanes became increasingly vital for artillery observation, too, which meant it was essential to have quick and accurate communication with the gunners on the ground. No longer could an airborne spotter rely on signalling their hits and misses by shooting off a series of colour-coded flares from his Very pistol. He needed to carry a wireless transmitter, which in turn meant still more weight and improved engine and airframe design to cope with it. In time, aircraft with bombing capabilities were expected to fly to more distant targets with a heavier bomb load, which also meant having to fly higher to avoid anti-aircraft fire. Once aircraft were armed with effective machine guns, observation machines and bombers also needed them for their own defence, as well as increased speed and the ability to climb fast in order to avoid trouble. By the war’s end combat aircraft were regularly reaching 22,000 feet, an unimaginable height only four years earlier.

  In this escalating fashion the developing war on the ground fed directly into the way aircraft were built, and it all happened at a breakneck pace. The rival air forces watched each other closely for any new technology, eagerly tore apart their opponents’ latest downed aircraft for its secrets, tried always to keep one step ahead. Serious aeronautical institutions like that at Farnborough did their best to work out the intricacies of flight theory; but in the companies that actually built the aircraft, practice was often more the product of hunches and bright ideas than of theory, and not all the hunches worked. Thus, aviation from 1903 to at least the end of the First World War can be seen as a constant series of experiments as little by little the basics of twentieth-century aerodynamics came together in a solid body of knowledge. The science of flight certainly did not stop there; but a good deal of the raw spadework was achieved in that first air war, albeit at prodigious cost in money and lives.

  Many aspects of aircraft design were dictated by factors that had nothing to do with aerodynamics. The sundry French – and particularly British – ‘pusher’ machines were made necessary simply because at the time they had no synchronisation gear allowing a machine gun to fire forward through the propeller arc, therefore the propeller was most easily placed behind. They were not beautiful, those pusher biplanes with a blunt nacelle sticking out in front like a canoe while behind that an open trellis-work of bare metal tubing enclosed a yawning space wide enough to accommodate a whirling eight- or nine-foot diameter propeller. This trellis joined together some fourteen feet behind to support a fabric-covered tail. Pusher aircraft like the D.H.2 were often good for what they were, and usefully manoeuvrable, and at any time other than war they probably offered a pilot the most pleasant flying experience of the day, with all the noise behind him, no prop-wash blowing into his face, and wonderful visibility. But pushers also had inherent disadvantages. One was that any hard object sucked rearwards out of the open cockpit in front – as a pair of goggles or even a pencil might be – could damage or even shatter the propeller. But the chief disadvantage of the pusher type was that the open framework of the ‘fuselage’ caused a good deal of drag that would always put a limit on performance.

  Another measure forced upon aircraft designers of the period (not to mention the pilots) was that no ordinary machine had wheel brakes. This was, of course, to save weight; but it did mean that landing in a restricted space could be tricky indeed. Instead, there was a tail-skid (sometimes steerable) that dragged along the ground and slowed the aircraft after landing: always crude but not always effective, especially if the ground was frozen. To limit the run-out trainees were taught to make ‘three-point’ landings: touching down on the main wheels and tail-skid simultaneously. If the machine’s attitude at rest on the ground was at a particularly steep angle, this took practice. The propeller’s size sometimes dictated how a tractor aircraft sat on the ground. A nine-foot propeller at the front of a typically stocky Sopwith design meant the aircraft sat at an angle that left the pilot staring up into the sky. This not only made the view ahead when taxiing almost non-existent without weaving from side to side, but until a pilot got used to it doing a ‘three-pointer’ could go badly wrong.

  The same applied to the Royal Aircraft Factory’s generally awful R.E.8, or ‘Harry Tate’ two-seater observation machine. This had been designed to sit with a very nose-high attitude on the ground, not to provide propeller clearance but so that the upward angle of the wings would produce more drag on landing and hence a braking effect when touching down in small fields. It took a lot of getting used to, and no-one was keen to botch a landing in a Harry Tate, an aircraft that already had an evil reputation for catching fire in a crash. (The fuel tank was sited immediately behind the engine, so when – as usual – it split on being forced forward, petrol promptly gushed over the red-hot exhaust manifolds.) Nothing could have made plainer the gulf between the boffins at Farnborough who designed this detail and the wretched men who had to fly the aircraft:

  I well remember one very windy day when I had been forced to land on an R.E.8 aerodrome owing to having received a bullet through my petrol tank. Flying conditions were abominable, and I watched four R.E.8s land, all within half an hour. Two pulled up safely, one crashed on landing, and the fourth turned over on the ground. In both latter cases the machines immediately burst into flames, killing pilots and observers. A tribute is due to the squadrons using these machines, and while we scout pilots laughed at them to their faces, behind their backs we heartily respected and admired them.28

  On the other hand one Harry Tate became famous as a ‘ghost’ aircraft that never did catch fire. It was doing artillery observation one day in December 1917, flown by two Australians from No. 3 Squadron, Lieutenant J. L. Sandy and his observer, Sergeant H. F. Hughes. Hughes managed to shoot down an Albatros D.Va scout that attacked it and a larger battle ensued when two more R.E.8s from 3 Squadron turned up as well as some more German machines. In the end the Germans broke off the attack and one of the R.E.8s, noting that Sandy and Hughes looked fine, gave a wave and let them get on with their ‘art. obs.’

  Somewhat strangely, no further wireless messages were transmitted from Sandy’s R.E.8 and apprehension increased as the evening approached and the aircraft had not returned. To all intents and purposes the aircraft and its crew seemed to have vanished from the face of the Earth. The perplexing mystery was not solved until 24 hours later, when a telegram was received from a hospital at St. Pol, stating that the bodies of Sandy and Hughes had been found in a crashed R.E.8 in a nearby field. It was ascertained that both men had been killed instantly during the aerial combat, when an armour-piercing bullet had passed through the observer’s left lung and thence into the pilot’s head. They had not been injured in the crash-landing, and the R.E.8 itself was only slightly damaged. Apparently, after the crew had been killed, the aircraft had flown itself in wide left-hand circles until
the petrol supply ran out. This theory was supported by the fact that a north-easterly wind was blowing and the aircraft had drifted south-west before crash-landing about 50 miles from the scene of the combat. This extraordinary occurrence provided a striking example of the inherent stability in the flying characteristics of the R.E.8 – the aircraft had flown and landed itself without human assistance.29

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  The R.E.8’s inherent stability regardless, few would dispute that overall it was a bad aircraft. How else describe a machine notorious for burning its crews alive? Statistics seem to bear this out since it sustained the second highest losses of all British aircraft on the Western Front, 661: a figure exceeded only by that for the Sopwith Camel at 870.30 Debate becomes heated over the issue of which of all these dozens of First World War aircraft were good. Bar-room and internet forum discussions still take place between armchair aviators bickering over which was the ‘greatest’ aircraft of a hundred years ago. Given that few of these people are qualified to fly aircraft of that vintage, and even fewer have ever flown a Fokker D.VII or an S.E.5a or a SPAD S.XIII, the discussion is about as meaningful as those similarly impassioned debates about the greatest-ever Formula One car that regularly occur in pubs between stout and opinionated men who would never fit into one, still less be given the chance to drive it. In one sense there was no truly ‘great’ aircraft in the whole of the first air war, and for a very good reason. At the time, the development of aircraft was everywhere so rapid that almost none escaped becoming obsolete after six months’ active service. Thanks to production delays many a type was already outmoded even as the first squadrons took delivery of it, having been leapfrogged in the interim by a new enemy machine: a syndrome that would reappear in both the Second World War and the Cold War. A combination of materials (or engine) shortage, battlefield emergency and administrative incompetence obliged several aircraft such as the B.E.2c to plod on above battlefields long after they should have been grounded.

  The criterion for true ‘greatness’ surely has to reside in something more than a short-lived combat advantage, no matter how impressive that was at the time. A genuinely great aircraft must offer a more enduring quality such as longevity and all-round reliability (like the Douglas DC-3), utterly transcendent performance (like the Lockheed SR-71 ‘Blackbird’), overwhelming aesthetic beauty, like Concorde, or the capacity for constant uprating of its basic design like the B-52 bomber which, by the time the last one is scheduled to leave USAF service in 2040, will have racked up an astounding ninety years’ active service. None of the First World War’s aircraft comes close to measuring up to any of these yardsticks. That being said, a Sopwith Pup might still afford a skilled pilot immense pleasure even today, but the same could be said of a pre-1920 racing car without either machine qualifying for the timeless accolade of greatness.

  This is obviously not to deny that hundreds of WWI pilots often found a new type wonderful and exhilarating to fly, usually because it was so much better than the machine they were used to and which had increasingly been feeling like a deathtrap when confronting the enemy. On the British side Sopwith’s Pup, Triplane and Camel, as well as the Royal Aircraft Factory’s S.E.5a, were a revelation to those who first flew them in combat; and at the time, as also today, each aircraft had its dedicated supporters. W. E. Johns’s punning title for an early collection of his stories, The Camels Are Coming, shows that fighter still had a certain legendary quality to it fourteen years after the war’s end, even though its active service life lasted a scant eighteen months after its introduction in the summer of 1917.

  The stumpy little Camel was neither beautiful nor easy to fly. In fact it was notoriously tricky, ‘a fierce little beast’, as one airman described it, although those who mastered it found it a highly effective fighting machine. All the same, by late 1917 many German pilots reckoned their new Pfalz D.III was easily the Camel’s equal and in less than a year the Fokker D.VII was plainly the better fighter. One aviation historian, the late Peter Grosz (son of the German Expressionist painter Georg Grosz and an acknowledged expert on German aircraft), described the Camel baldly as ‘probably the most over-rated and accident-prone fighter in the Allied inventory’, going on to add that ‘surprisingly, only the D.H.5 was superior to the Pfalz in speed, climb rate and manoeuvrability’.31 ‘Accident-prone’ the Camel certainly was, which must partly explain why it so easily heads the list of British types lost. Many an experienced British pilot dreaded having to convert to it:

  They were by far the most difficult of service machines to handle. Many pilots killed themselves by crashing in a right-hand spin when they were learning to fly them. A Camel hated an inexperienced hand, and flopped into a frantic spin at the least opportunity. They were unlike ordinary aeroplanes, being quite unstable, immoderately tail-heavy, so light on the controls that the slightest jerk or inaccuracy would hurl them all over the sky, difficult to land, deadly to crash: a list of vices to emasculate the stoutest courage, and the first flight on a Camel was always a terrible ordeal. They were bringing out a two-seater training Camel for dual work, in the hope of reducing that thirty percent of crashes on first solo flights.32

  Nevertheless, once in the air the Camel had an agility all its own, partly down to the lightness of its construction and the weight of engine, guns, tanks and pilot all being concentrated in the nose. The gyroscopic effect of the engine was very marked, as might be expected with a mass of 350 lb whirling around at 1,250 rpm. Seen from the pilot’s little wicker seat the propeller rotated clockwise. This meant that if he climbed or turned to the right the nose would drop sharply, and if he dived or turned to the left the nose would rise. It also meant that lightning-fast right-handed turns were easily performed. Left-handed turns were another matter, however, and pilots found they could often turn 90 degrees left quicker by making a right turn of 270 degrees. This is not an ideal characteristic in any aircraft, but the most skilled pilots eventually found ways of instinctively going with rather than against the engine’s gyroscopic pull. The Camel is credited with being the top-scoring fighter of any side in the war, with 1,294 victories.33 On the other hand it killed 350 trainee pilots, or more than one non-combat death for every four enemy aircraft downed (but not necessarily with a fatality): a high price to pay.34 Like the contemporary French SPAD S.XIII, it stalled readily and spun viciously. Because of its tail-heaviness it could never for a moment be flown ‘hands-off’ and was therefore a very tiring aircraft to fly. Its combat success rate unquestionably makes the Camel one of the best fighters – and by that sole yardstick the best – of WWI. Yet that still does not make it a great aircraft because it so obviously could be improved, as was demonstrated by Sopwith’s next aircraft, the Snipe, which came late in the war and was willy-nilly adopted as the RAF’s first postwar standard fighter because there was nothing else available at the price. The Snipe was derived from the Camel and was equally manoeuvrable (hence its name), but it was much easier to control while affording the pilot far better all-round visibility. It was also slightly faster, being fitted with Bentley’s powerful BR.2 rotary engine.

  Some biplanes were undoubtedly a good deal more elegant than others, and aircraft with the longer stationary (especially in-line) engines often looked more streamlined and better-proportioned. In this the German machines predominated because their designers were less wedded to rotary engines than were the French, the British, the Italians or the Russians. But the Royal Aircraft Factory’s S.E.5a with its stationary Hispano-Suiza or Wolseley Viper V-8 engine had the look of a serious modern fighter and was much respected by German pilots. Once initial problems with the supply and reliability of the engines had been overcome, the S.E.5a was looked on as the equal of the new Fokker D.VII, which ended the war with a fearsome reputation for all-round competence. After the Armistice the Allies, in punitive mood, impounded Germany’s entire fleet of Fokker D.VIIs as being too dangerous to be allowed to fall into others’ hands. This was really pure superstitiousness because by then the Fokke
r was already dated. Its top speed was only about 118 mph whereas Britain’s new Martinsyde F.4 ‘Buzzard’ was capable of a top speed at low level of 146 mph and was technically the fastest aircraft of the war. Unfortunately, it came too late to make the game-changing impression it otherwise might have done.

  Long before then the war had determined the trajectory of aviation and of flying itself. A quirk of history ensured that what had started out as an entirely civilian enterprise had been comprehensively hijacked by the military. This is why considerations of a pilot’s pleasure – or even of his safety – did not figure on the list of specifications to which aircraft designers worked. This was also made clear in the matter of how to arm aeroplanes, where guns and bombs soon became the most significant part of many an aircraft’s payload, outweighing the aircrew both literally and metaphorically. The next chapter deals with this subject which, in the case of machine guns, was to afford a turning point in aerial warfare.