Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Nevertheless, pushers were not as efficient as were front-engined aircraft and the British had yet to make the breakthrough of coming up with a suitable way of allowing a machine gun to fire safely through the propeller arc and installing it in a fighting aircraft. From the first, German pilots flying the Fokker Eindecker had been forbidden to venture over the British lines for fear the secret of their synchroniser might be revealed. At last, on 8th April 1916 one was downed on the British side of the lines and Anthony Fokker’s mechanism could be taken apart and examined in detail. But although a British equivalent had lagged behind both the Germans and the French, the engineers had not been idle and six weeks later the first RFC machines equipped with synchronising gear, the new Sopwith 1½-Strutters of 70 Squadron, arrived in France. The gear was made by Vickers and the aircraft mounted a single Vickers machine gun on the cowling in front of the pilot. In the long run this particular gear proved less significant than the type of gun. Because of the way its action worked the ubiquitous Lewis gun was impossible to synchronise, and from now on the Vickers took its place as a forward-firing machine gun.

  Meanwhile the Royal Navy, individual as ever, favoured a synchroniser called the Scarff-Dibovski. ‘Scarff’ referred to Warrant Officer F. W. Scarff of the RNAS who had already invented the ‘Scarff ring’ mount for the gun of the observer/gunner in the rear cockpit of two-seaters. As the name suggests this was circular, and by means of bungee suspension to cancel the weight of the gun it enabled the gunner to swivel the weapon quickly through 360 degrees. As with most other advantageous developments it was swiftly copied by other air forces and the Scarff ring and its derivatives went on being used in aircraft long after the First World War.

  Like the Vickers, the Scarff-Dibovski synchroniser was not a great success and the British tried other types including one made by the Sopwith company, the Sopwith-Kauper gear. But like the Fokker system, all these variants were purely mechanical. The synchronising gear the British finally adopted, and which was to remain in service until the Second World War, was the so-called Constantinesco [sic] or ‘CC’ gear. It was the invention of a Romanian scientist with a fertile mind, George Constantinescu, who had settled in London in 1912. It employed his theory of sonics, which used hydrosonic impulses transmitted through oil-filled tubes to synchronise the gun with the propeller. The theory behind the system remained an official secret until after the war even though it used the same basic principle as that of hydraulic brakes in a car (which the American Fred Duesenberg had pioneered for his racers in 1914).

  Unfortunately the sheer speed of development and the hectic pressures of wartime manufacture did not allow for much in the way of re-equipping existing aircraft with better weapons and weapon systems as they became available. Thus Arthur Gould Lee, in a letter to his wife from France dated 29th June 1917, could still write:

  Scott left us because he’d shot away half his propeller. The Sopwith-Kauper interrupter gear with which the [Sopwith] Pup is fitted is complicated mechanically and sometimes goes wrong, and then the bullets go through the prop. It’s this gear which slows down the rate of fire of the Vickers. In the air when you press the trigger, instead of getting the fast rattle of a ground gun you have a frustrating pop! pop! pop! pop! The Huns have a much more efficient gear, for the Spandau fires very fast. In fact, when you hear the twin Spandaus of the Albatros opening up on your tail they sound like some vast canvas being ripped by a giant. And your answer is pop! pop! pop!45

  Even the Constantinesco gear was not infallible, being highly dependent on correct maintenance, as were all the synchronisation systems. The ease with which guns jammed, invariably at a critical moment (otherwise why would a pilot be firing?), was a permanent source of complaint in all the air forces in the First World War. One of the commonest reasons was a swollen or split cartridge. Cockpits were usually equipped with a small pouch containing a hammer with which the wretched pilot could bash away at the gun’s cocking handle until the cartridge was cleared. This usually happened when under attack, the pilot cursing and hammering at his gun even while trying to dodge about and avoid collision. It was noticeable that many of the pilots who became ‘aces’, or others who realised that being an accurate shot was every bit as important as being able to fly well, would spend time before sorties hand-loading their own machine gun belts and checking each round rather than going off to the mess and leaving the job to some ack-emma (air mechanic, in the Army’s phonetic alphabet). They would then taxi their machine over to the testing butts (the ‘gun pit’) on the edge of the airfield and zero the guns afresh, according to the range they preferred for attacking. Any gun they found unsatisfactory they would take to the Armaments Officer’s hut and swap for something better. On such attention to detail their lives depended. As the ace Mick Mannock succinctly advised anyone posted to 74 Squadron: ‘Sight your own guns. The armourer doesn’t have to do the fighting.’ He was unequivocal about the importance of constant shooting practice, of going up in a spare half hour to try to hit a petrol tin in a nearby field at various distances and speeds. ‘Good flying never killed a Hun yet,’ he would say. ‘And when you shoot, don’t aim for the plane – aim for the pilot.’46

  In fact many of the most successful pilots like Mannock and McCudden spent a good deal of time tinkering with their aircraft’s engines and guns, trying out various modifications of their own invention for improving performance. Each gun – like each aircraft and each engine – had a log or record sheet of its own on which the armourer noted its history: whether and when it had jammed, the total number of rounds it had fired, plus any mechanical defects such as barrel wear. Mannock is reported to have increased his Vickers’ rate of fire by the judicious addition of a washer somewhere in its mechanism. But none of these critical tweakings and tunings was proof against a substandard load in a single cartridge, or a primer cap whose mercury fulminate failed to ignite the charge.

  Often behind such things lay the labour problems in Britain’s munitions factories. There, the predominantly women workers would be working long shifts doing repetitive and heavy tasks with potentially dangerous explosives. As time went on they became increasingly unionised and despite emergency legislation mounted ever more frequent go-slows and walkouts. Endemic alcoholism and drug-taking hardly helped the situation, and under the intense pressure to maintain and increase production quality checks could be variable or skimped altogether. Since working conditions – and especially lighting – were often poor and there was increasing panic over German air raids and the toxicity of the chemicals the munitions workers were using, it is hardly surprising that some of the millions of cartridges they churned out varied in quality.

  Aside from that, though, a common reason for guns stopping in the air was extreme cold, particularly at high altitude. The various kinds of grease and oil, so vital to the proper functioning of these high-speed mechanisms, thickened and sometimes froze solid. The RFC’s Chief Armament Officer, Major J. L. T. Pearce, devised an electric heater to keep a gun warm and Mannock enthusiastically adopted it. Low temperature oils and lubricants were also introduced but they didn’t work at the subzero temperatures of patrols at very high altitude (from 1917 up to 20,000 feet). Then, a pilot’s only recourse was to fire half a dozen single shots every so often to keep the breech warm in case of a sudden attack. It was wasteful of ammunition but better than being caught defenceless.

  *

  The First World War saw the rapid development of existing types of bullet such as armour-piercing (AP), tracer, incendiary and explosive, most of which occasioned moral outrage and accusations of ‘frightfulness’ at one time or another. It should be pointed out that all of them had been produced before the war by this or that country. Only one type of bullet had already been outlawed by the Hague Convention in 1899. This was the notorious creation of the British Military Arsenal at Dum-Dum, Calcutta, a few years earlier. The dum-dum was not an explosive but an expanding bullet. The problem with sharp-nosed jacketed bullets designed for max
imum range is that they tend to go straight through a target and carry on beyond. It was obviously better to devise a round that gave up all its energy on impact to cause maximum damage. The British military achieved this by cutting a slit in the nose of the bullet so it would mushroom on hitting anything. It was this type that was outlawed, as well as other soft-nosed bullets designed to expand, such as hollow points. As the First World War progressed, so new propellants were adopted and the velocities of bullets greatly increased. Particularly if they tumbled after a ricochet they could cause gross injuries that field doctors wrongly but excusably assumed could only have been caused by ‘exploding’ bullets.

  True exploding bullets were not really practicable simply because they were too small to contain a significant explosive charge. But tracers (‘sparklers’) were devised that left a smoke trail and glowed in the dark to tell the gunner where his shots were going. However, not only did they quickly become erratic as their charge burned, often misleading the gunner as to whether the rest of his shots were on target, but their corrosion and residues fouled gun barrels and jammed mechanisms. Pilots usually had their own private preferences for the best combinations of bullet types in their machine gun belts, selecting from a mixture of ordinary rounds, tracer, armour-piercing and incendiary.

  Incendiary rounds were originally devised for use against hostile airships (Zeppelins, for instance) or observation balloons. A frequent and unloved mission – usually rated by airmen on all sides as semi-suicidal – was to shoot down enemy balloons that were directing artillery fire. These were always heavily protected by nests of machine guns and anti-aircraft guns as well as by aircraft waiting high overhead. It was wrongly believed that incendiary ammunition would easily set fire to the hydrogen in the balloon and several different British types of bullet were invented, among them the Pomeroy, the RTS, the Brock and – best-known of all – the Buckingham. They all contained phosphorus in one form or another, were sensitive to heat and could be quite hazardous to the user in a highly flammable aircraft. The Buckingham incendiary round achieved notoriety because it was soft-nosed and at the beginning was officially made available for use only against Zeppelins flying over Britain. Nevertheless it became widely employed in France against balloons, although with trepidation as it was said that any pilot who was downed over the German lines with Buckingham ammunition would be shot out of hand. Station commanders sometimes gave a pilot an official letter in English and German stating that his Buckingham rounds were for use exclusively in sorties against gas-filled balloons.

  As usual in war, complaints by one side of ‘inhuman’ weapons used by the other were purely hypocritical. As early as 1914 the French pioneered the use of tear gas in artillery shells. This seemed to constitute a carte blanche for the use of chemical agents by all sides and it was only a matter of months before both the Germans and the British adopted the mass release of chlorine, and later mustard gas, phosgene and worse on the battlefield. That all these contravened the 1899 Hague Declaration as well as the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare knocked none of the combatants off their self-claimed moral high ground. Compared to the horror of young men trapped in trenches being burned alive with flamethrowers (a German invention), the Buckingham bullet now looks almost humane.

  *

  How these basic component parts – the assorted weaponry and the aircraft themselves – were brought together and deployed for an ever-widening variety of hazardous military purposes is the subject of the next chapter.

  4

  Combat and Other Missions

  ‘By this time we were near the trenches and as we approached – still of course with the sun behind our backs – I saw an enemy scout machine diving into our trenches and firing at the troops. It was easy to take him in our stride for home, and diving steeply I met him nose-on as he turned to make another dive. I nearly hit this machine, for we were approaching each other at something like 300 miles per hour. After firing I saw a burst of steam come from his radiator and he took a steep dive towards the River Scarpe. At the time I thought I had set him on fire and he was going to try to come down in the water to extinguish the flames (this fight took place at under 1,000 feet), but I was attributing thoughts to a dead man, for he bit the earth in No Man’s Land, sending up a great cloud of dust, since he fell with the velocity of a shell. This was one of the few occasions when I was sufficiently near to the ground to feel sick at the sight of a vertical plunge to earth of what was, but a few seconds previously, a breathing fellow-man mounted on wings of silk, but now unrecognizable amidst the twisted mass; death dealt to him while he was dealing death.

  And so we flew home, landed and made our report. Four, possibly five of the enemy had been brought down before breakfast. We ourselves were untouched save for a few small holes in our wings from the anti-aircraft fire and, by virtue of living on the surface, by turning away our faces and refusing to acknowledge death, by casting off that thin veneer of civilization with the excuse that we were, after all, hired assassins in the cause of patriotism, we were able to sit down and enjoy a good breakfast. How marvellously can the human mind adapt itself, how easily persuade itself that its course is right, from a nation to the individual; so that all experience, all knowledge, even religious beliefs can be laid on one side until the lust to kill is satisfied, leaving a charred and blackened earth and the sweet sickly smell of blood.’47

  This is part of an undated account by an RNAS flight commander of a dawn patrol that took place over Flanders, somewhere between Arras and Douai, probably in late 1917 or early 1918. It is merely one of hundreds of such descriptions of First World War combat left by aircrew of all nations. The sentiments, too, were clichés even at the time. It was a very blunt sensibility that failed to appreciate the thinness of civilisation’s veneer and did not at some point think itself no better than a hired assassin.

  As we know, this was emphatically not how the air war began. For the first few months the respective armies were mostly content for their aircraft to ‘see over the hill’, to use their own jargon. But it was not long before it became obvious that with the infantry largely bogged down this would primarily be an artillery war, and the need became urgent for artillerymen to have an eye in the sky to tell them what to aim at and whether they were hitting it. At the same time it was obviously necessary to attack the enemy’s observation balloons, just as in time it became imperative to carry out patrols, take photographs, spot for the artillery gunners, prevent hostile aircraft from doing the same, shoot up troops in their trenches, drop bombs, and finally do much of this work by night as well as by day. In short, to adopt the modern military cant, it was a good example of generalised ‘mission creep’. Airmen and aircraft laboured to keep up with the armies’ expanding demands, while the armies themselves struggled to deal with what they saw as aviation’s shortcomings. Behind this lay a real difficulty that aggravated both parties’ problems: that of communication. The situation would have been utterly transformed had there been a reliable way of talking to each other during operations. This one great lack must indirectly have cost hundreds of thousands of infantry lives, as well as those of many hundreds of airmen.

  The trouble was that radio, or wireless as it was then known, was almost as much in its infancy as were aircraft. The great Italian pioneer Guglielmo Marconi had sent the first Morse transmission across the English Channel in 1899, almost exactly ten years before Blériot became the first man to fly it. The first dots and dashes faintly crossed the Atlantic only in late 1902 – a year to the month before the Wright brothers first left the ground in their ‘Flyer’ – but such transmissions were unreliable and weather-dependent in that a kite needed to be launched first in order to pull a couple of hundred feet of aerial wire into the sky. Not only was Marconi’s spark transmitter crude, he knew little about wavelengths and nothing about how radically the range of a transmission could be affected by whether it was sent by night or day. But knowledge grew and by 1912 wireless was installed on most oceangoing lin
ers; and in the sinking of the Titanic that year the technology proved serviceable enough to summon RMS Carpathia belatedly to the scene.

  However, it was one thing to install a wireless room aboard a ship and quite another to reduce the equipment in size and weight so it would fit into an early aircraft. It was a real achievement in August 1910 when John McCurdy in the United States transmitted the first Morse message from an aircraft to the ground, a feat that was repeated a month later in Britain by the pilot-actor Robert Loraine, flying a 50 h.p. Bristol Box-kite above Salisbury Plain during the Army’s autumn manoeuvres. By the end of 1911 the British Army had designed a wireless transmitter suitable for its aircraft and in June 1914 the RFC Lieutenants B. T. James and D. S. Lewis flew from Netheravon to Bournemouth with transmitters and receivers in their two B.E.2s. They flew ten miles apart and kept in touch with each other by Morse the whole way. This seemed auspicious.

  Yet as the Army soon discovered, there was a big difference between experimentally installing wireless equipment in a couple of aircraft and gearing that up to widespread use, together with aircrew well enough trained in Morse code to be able to send and receive messages while flying. Airborne wireless telephony – the transmission of speech – was not achieved until 1915; and although by the end of that year a British transceiver capable of both telephony and Morse, the TWA Mk.1, was produced in small numbers, it was never more than experimental. For the duration the war, and for the overwhelming majority of aircraft on all sides, airborne wireless was by Morse. As has been amply indicated, weight in those early days of aviation was critical and wireless equipment was bulky. It also required an external power source: an accumulator fed by a generator bolted beneath a wing or on a strut and driven by a little wooden propeller. Apart from its extra weight the equipment caused significant drag. Although it only provided 6 volts with an output of 30-40 watts, the system was also potentially dangerous. The Morse key was wired directly into an induction coil that stepped up the voltage to produce a spark across a gap when the key was pressed (the origin of the later generic name for radio operators, ‘Sparks’). This was less than safe in a flammable aircraft with petrol vapour seeping into the cockpit, and the problem was only solved, presumably many fireballs later, by encasing the spark gap in a sealed box. An additional weight was the spool of copper aerial wire the observer needed to lower before he could transmit. This had its own drawbacks, and not only when the aircraft needed to take evasive action.