Marked for Death
Page 9
This set-up contrasted strongly with ‘tractor’ biplanes (like practically all the German types) with the engine and propeller in front. This arrangement soon proved hopeless if the observer remained in the forward cockpit, as convention at first seemed to demand in British two-seaters. Sandwiched between the upper and lower wings the gunner had no field of fire at all, hemmed in as he was by the birdcage structure with its delicate struts and the vulnerable propeller immediately in front of him. Close behind him was his pilot and, further to the rear, the aircraft’s fin and tailplanes. In fact, if one had set out expressly to design an aircraft for a machine gun that could never be safely fired, something like the British B.E.2c or the Avro 504 with their observer-gunner in the front seat would have been it. Yet this was no more than a reflection of the fact that the Royal Aircraft Factory had designed the B.E.2c before the war for the express purpose of observation and photography rather than for fighting.
Here it is worth noting that in the German air force the observer was usually in the back seat. He was generically known as ‘Franz’ and was almost always an officer, while the pilot (‘Emil’) was his subordinate, no matter that with experience both men would form comradely bonds of mutual trust. By contrast it seemed logical to both the French and the British that the pilot should be in command of the aircraft, regardless of rank. German culture evidently saw things differently, perhaps by analogy with an officer in the back seat of a staff car giving directions to the driver/chauffeur, who was also expected to double as a mechanic in case of breakdown.
With remarkable swiftness the RFC’s new commander in France, Hugh Trenchard, appreciated that the attack must be taken to the enemy and that, used correctly, aircraft were nothing if not offensive weapons. For this they needed to be properly armed. The Lewis gun initially deployed by the RFC and the RNAS was air-cooled. Its .303 ammunition, which was identical to the standard round used in the infantry’s rifles as well as in its Vickers machine guns, came in flat drums that revolved on top of the weapon. When it didn’t jam the Lewis achieved a rate of fire of about 550 rounds per minute. The French had already settled on their 8 mm Hotchkiss, a reliable design that was also air-cooled and at first belt-fed until it too was converted to a drum feed with a rate of fire of about 450 rounds per minute. The Germans’ drum-fed 7.9 mm Parabellum MG 14 could fire up to 700 rounds a minute. In terms of airborne offensive weapons the three main air forces were thus fairly evenly matched at the outset. That is, until the next great step, which was devising a way to fire a machine gun through the aircraft’s propeller arc without reducing the propeller itself to matchwood: the Holy Grail of early air warfare.
The value of a pilot being able to deploy his own machine gun rather than relying on his observer’s was self-evident. The obstacle in a front-engined aircraft was obviously that of the propeller, and worse could result from damaging it than merely losing motive power. According to German accounts the early ace Max Immelmann died when, through a mechanical fault, his gun shot a single blade off his propeller. Before he could throttle back the severely unbalanced engine tore itself off its bearers and the Fokker monoplane broke up in the air. (This is eminently possible, although Allied accounts suggest this was a face-saver and Immelmann was actually shot down, which in Germany would have been a severe blow to morale since by then he was a public hero.) Sundry efforts had been made to devise gun mountings that ensured the stream of bullets missed this vital part. As already mentioned, one had the machine gun mounted outside the cockpit beside the pilot but pointing outwards at an angle, which obviously required flying an oblique line at an opponent. Calculating the angle of deflection according to range and speed also made for very difficult shooting, although the future British ace Lanoe Hawker VC became famously adept at this with a single-shot rifle. The more usual solution in a biplane was to mount the gun above the pilot on the centre section of the upper wing, firing just over the arc of the propeller. The advantage of this arrangement was that the gun aimed where the aircraft was pointed. The drawback was that if the gun jammed (as machine guns of the period frequently did) or needed reloading, it was beyond easy reach. In the early days the pilot would have to stand up in the cockpit in a seventy-mile-an-hour gale to hammer at the cocking handle or wrestle with a spare drum of ammunition, all the while trying to control the aircraft. In combat this was all but suicidal.
Once again Louis Strange supplies a vivid example. On 10th May 1915 he was at 8,500 feet in his single-seat Martinsyde biplane trying to shoot down an Aviatik of Bruno Loerzer’s squadron with the Lewis gun mounted on his upper wing. Strange was annoyed by the German ‘Franz’ taking rather too accurate pot shots at him with his pistol. Provoked, he shot off an entire drum of ammunition at the Aviatik but without discernible effect. When he tried to replace the empty drum it jammed and refused to come loose. What happened next is best told in Strange’s own words, bearing in mind that like every other airman of the day he had no parachute:
After one or two fruitless efforts I raised myself out of my seat in order to get a better grip, and I suppose my safety belt must have slipped down at the critical moment. Anyhow, my knees loosened their grip on the stick just as the Martinsyde, which was already climbing at its maximum angle, stalled and flicked over into a spin.
As I was more than half out of the cockpit at the time, the spin threw me clean out of the machine, but I still kept both my hands on the drum of the Lewis gun. Only a few seconds previously I had been cursing because I could not get that drum off, but now I prayed fervently that it would stay on for ever. I knew it might come off at any moment, however, and as its edge was cutting my fingers badly I had to get a firmer hold of something more reliable. The first thing I thought of was the top of the centre section strut, which at that time was behind and below the Lewis gun, but as the machine was now flying upside down I had sufficient wits left to realize that it was behind and above me, though where exactly I could not tell.
Dare I let go the drum with one hand and make a grab for it? There was nothing else for it but to take the risk. Having achieved this firmer handhold I found my chin rammed against the top plane [wing] beside the gun while my legs were waving about in empty air. The Martinsyde was upside down in a flat spin, and from my precarious position the only thing I could see was the propeller (which seemed unpleasantly close to my face), the town of Menin, and the adjacent countryside revolving apparently above me and getting larger with every turn.
I kept on kicking upwards behind me until at last I got first one foot and then the other hooked inside the cockpit. Somehow I got the stick between my legs again and jammed on full aileron and elevator. The machine came over the right way up and I fell off the top plane into my seat with a bump. I grabbed at the stick with both hands but to my surprise found myself unable to move it. I suddenly realized that I was sitting much lower than usual inside the cockpit; in fact, I was so low down I could not see over the edge at all. The bump of my fall had sent me right through my seat, with the result that I was sitting on the floor of the machine as well as on the control cables, which I was jamming.
Something had to be done quickly as the engine was roaring away merrily and taking me down in a dive which looked likely to end in the wood to the north of Menin. So I throttled back and braced my shoulders against the top of the fuselage and my feet against the rudder bar, pulled out the broken bits of seat and freed the controls. I was then able to put the machine’s nose up and open the throttle again. I rose and cleared the trees on the Menin road with very little to spare. I felt happy to be alive and thought it simply marvellous that I was still able to control the machine.
I went to bed early that night and slept for a good solid twelve hours, but Lord! how stiff I was the next day! It took a long time before I was able to move about with any comfort.43
It was not long before the over-wing ‘Foster’ mounting was devised that enabled the pilot to pull a Lewis gun back and down to him on a downward-curving rail. It didn’t make the ja
ms any less frequent but it did make it a good deal less hazardous to clear stoppages and change magazines. It also enabled a pilot to shoot at an aircraft from beneath it. Both the German and French air forces devised similar mounts. Even so, this solution was still not as good as having the gun fixed accessibly in front of the pilot and firing through the propeller, and everybody knew it. In fact, this problem had been widely considered well before 1914. The pioneer aviator August Euler (who held the first German pilot’s licence) tried in 1910 to patent the idea of fixing a machine gun to a ‘pusher’ aircraft’s nose so the gun would be aimed by pointing the entire aeroplane at a target. It seems doubtful that a patent would have been awarded simply for an idea, especially one that must have been obvious to many, and in fact Euler’s ‘invention’ was really no more than a copy of the French Voisin designs already mentioned. At the time the German Army, having concentrated so much of its inventive prowess on airships, had little interest in arming aircraft. Furthermore, its aircraft designers favoured tractor rather than pusher types, being especially keen on their ‘Taube’-type monoplanes. These were unusually stable, and as we know in those early days of aviation stability was prized over agility. Thus the Germans were faced with an urgent technical challenge: where on a monoplane with the engine in the nose could one accessibly fix a weapon without it firing through the propeller arc? It was no good putting machine guns out on the wings because once they had jammed or needed reloading the aircraft would be defenceless.
In 1911 the Swiss engineer Franz Schneider was working in France for the Nieuport aircraft company where he devised an ingenious scheme for mounting a gun that fired through the hollow propeller shaft of an inverted inline aero engine. Turning the engine upside down had the additional advantage that the six bulky cylinders were now underneath and no longer obstructed the pilot’s view. The following year Schneider was offered and accepted a job at the German aircraft company LVG, based at Johannisthal airfield, Berlin. He suspended work on his idea of firing through the engine’s prop-shaft as being better adapted for a cannon than for a machine gun. (The principle was adopted later in the war for the cannon in the French SPAD XII fighter and in the Second World War for arming such high performance designs as the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the French Dewoitine D.520 and the Russian Yak-9U.) In 1913 Schneider published a patent for a different approach in which a cam activated by the crankshaft would block the trigger of an automatic weapon so that it couldn’t fire if a propeller blade was directly in front of the muzzle. He installed this in one of LVG’s two-seater E.III monoplanes but unfortunately the aircraft was almost immediately lost in a crash.
The epithet ‘unfortunately’ is appropriate because the whole subject of synchroniser (or interrupter) gear has since turned into an aviation historian’s battleground. The engineering problem was complex enough: how to make a machine gun’s set rate of fire coincide with the gaps offered by however many propeller blades were spinning in front of it (generally either two or four) and regardless of the engine speed. The matter has become contentious because there are several other claims to have been the first practical design, by far the best known being Anthony Fokker’s own account in his ghosted autobiography, Flying Dutchman (1931), a book that is probably not much more self-serving than are most of its kind. In a chapter modestly headed ‘I Invent The Synchronised Machine Gun’ he alleges that ‘the invention and development had all been completed in forty-eight hours of day and night work, after I had hit upon the essential idea’. Just how disingenuous this description is can be judged by recalling that, like Franz Schneider, Fokker was himself based at Johannisthal and in 1915 as a young aircraft designer and engineer of growing reputation he would have been privy to the projects of the various companies based around the same Berlin airfield. There is no way he could not have known about Schneider’s work.
Meanwhile in France the pioneer Morane brothers had formed the Morane-Saulnier aero company with the engineer Raymond Saulnier, who invented and built a synchronised gear mechanism for which he took out a patent just before the war. The late British aviation historian Harry Woodman is unequivocal on the matter: ‘There is no doubt in this author’s mind that Saulnier invented and built the first practical gun synchronisation gear in April 1914.’44 Roland Garros, the pioneer French aviator who in 1913 had flown the first-ever crossing of the Mediterranean (Fréjus to Bizerta), joined the army as a pilot at the outbreak of war. On 1st April 1915 he took off in his Morane-Saulnier Type L ‘Parasol’ (high-winged) monoplane fitted with a machine gun using Saulnier’s system to fire through the propeller. Because variations in individual loads meant that some cartridges fired fractionally quicker or slower than others it was still not possible to guarantee that the occasional bullet might not hit the propeller. So Saulnier fitted protective steel deflector plates to the inside of the propeller blades. That day Garros made history by shooting down a German aircraft, the first-ever aerial combat victory by an aircraft using a machine gun firing through its propeller. He thus has claims to be the first true fighter pilot and his single-seat Parasol the world’s first real fighter aircraft. During the course of the same month he went on to shoot down two more German aircraft, causing consternation in the Fliegertruppen. This French aircraft clearly represented a technological leap forward that they urgently needed to understand and master. Luckily for them they didn’t have long to wait to learn the secret of Garros’s success. On 18th April he was obliged to force-land behind the German lines and failed to set fire to his machine before he was captured. A team led by Anthony Fokker soon pulled the Parasol apart and all was revealed.
Within three months Fokker had designed a monoplane fighter of his own, the E.1 Eindecker which he fitted with a forward-firing machine gun using his own synchronising system that was efficient enough not to require deflector plates on the propeller blades. This can now be seen as arguably the single most revolutionary aircraft of the entire war, a true game-changer in that in its primitive way it set the pattern of the typical attack aircraft that in one form or another was to last for the next hundred years: a highly manoeuvrable monoplane with a reliable system of fixed guns firing forward. That summer of 1915 began the six months of German air supremacy that Noel Pemberton Billing described as the ‘Fokker Scourge’. It was not that Fokker’s aircraft was itself so superior or, indeed, original in design (it was very closely modelled on Morane-Saulnier’s pre-war Type H). It had good manoeuvrability but a tendency to shed its wings in dives. What gave it terrifying superiority was its forward-firing Spandau machine gun. A development of Hiram Maxim’s original design, this was the 7.92 mm IMG 08 whose ammunition came in cloth belts each containing 250 rounds. For a good half-year the French and especially the British air forces could do little to counter it.
Fokker’s Eindecker was a good example of how a new technology can enforce a radical change in military thinking. Once the single-seat fighter was established as an effective type it took on specific functions for itself that were to endure for at least the next half-century, well beyond the Second World War, to be modified only when advances in aerodynamics, jet engines and avionics made it possible to revert to the 1914 idea of a non-specific, multi-role aircraft equally useful according to mission as a fighter or bomber, in ground attack or reconnaissance.
The ‘Fokker Scourge’ effectively lasted from July 1915 until early 1916. Like other monoplanes of its day the E.1 at first proved a tricky aircraft to fly, but once the German pilots had mastered its foibles it took a toll of RFC aircraft that made it vital for Britain to acquire its own synchronising gear as quickly as possible. The German tactics with the new Fokker were to hunt in pairs or even in threes, to climb to 10,000 feet and then swoop down on Allied aircraft, firing continuously before passing them at speed and climbing back up again. Britain’s Vickers ‘Gunbus’, a two-man pusher aircraft, won German respect for its sturdiness as well as for the machine-gunner in its nose with an excellent field of fire; but it was not really a match for this sort
of tactic. Neither were other two-seater ‘scouts’ of its generation, the ‘Fee’ (the F.E.2 series) and the R.E.7. The Fokker held too much of an advantage in speed and climb. The RFC had to resort to formation flying with Fees and Gunbuses escorting the fatally defenceless B.E.2c observation machines over enemy lines, but this did little more than make it easier for the Germans to spot them and pick them off.
From early 1916 the RFC at last began to reorganise its squadrons according to dedicated roles so that each flew the same type of aircraft. Hitherto, any squadron might field a motley assortment of types and vintages to which sorties were assigned somewhat at whim. But the coming of Fokker’s single-seat fighter made this amateurish approach impossible to sustain. In February 1916 24 Squadron, under Major Lanoe Hawker VC, flew to France as the first RFC single-seat fighter squadron. They were equipped with the de Havilland D.H.2. This was still a ‘pusher’ type of aircraft in which the pilot had both to fly and aim his gun: a type of design that synchronisation gear had made old-fashioned at a stroke even though the D.H.2 was probably the best of all the pushers in terms of performance and toughness. Like many another true fighter it at first proved difficult to fly for pilots used to the almost bovine stability of the old Avros and the government’s aircraft from the Farnborough establishment. It had a tendency to spin, and following one occasion when a spinning D.H.2 caught fire it was dubbed ‘the Spinning Incinerator’. As we know, in those days spinning was hardly understood and less confident pilots tended to be almost superstitious about it. However, among those who mastered it the D.H.2 gradually lost its fearsome nickname. It also helped that it was fully aerobatic, which naturally appealed to the better pilots who, once in France, began systematically to deal with the Fokker Scourge. By late May Sir Henry Rawlinson, General Officer Commanding the Fourth Army, could report that ‘the de Havilland machine has unquestionably proved itself superior to the Fokker in speed, manoeuvre, climbing and general fighting efficiency’.