To remind us of how hard it is for people to grasp the attitudes of even two or three decades ago, let alone a century, in 2012 Andrew O’Hagan interviewed the veteran broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell about the BBC’s former internal culture that underwrote the sexual abuses of celebrities like the late Jimmy Savile. She wisely observed: ‘You can’t recreate the mood of an era. You just can’t get into the culture of what it was like, transfer our sensibilities backwards from today. It would be like asking Victorian factory owners to explain why they sent children up chimneys… What we now find unacceptable was just accepted then by many people.’189 The same will of course be true in a hundred years’ time, when people look back at this era, at a loss to understand our antediluvian codes of taboo and licence.
It should be added that certain prevailing attitudes in 1914–18 were determined by urgent priority. In Britain the overwhelming preoccupation of the government, the War Office and the public generally was with the way the land war was going, and its unprecedented slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men for no apparent gain or purpose. By comparison the air war’s casualty figures were insignificant, and therefore irrelevant. What gave the air forces everywhere a claim to public attention beyond that of their military uses was the still-novel status of flying and of aircraft in general. A mysterious aura of futurism and romance undoubtedly attached to men who flew. The idea of pilots as knights of the air was very appealing. But just as they fought as individuals, so did they die. Entire streets of industrial towns were not left grieving by an airman’s death as they often were by a wholesale massacre of infantry. In Britain the RFC, with its vociferous advocates in the House of Commons and the press, undoubtedly attracted an amount of public attention quite out of proportion to the size of its fighting force. In the khaki fastness of the War Office, however, the generals made bleak logistical calculations. In their brisk daily triage the lives of those few hundred airmen who might have been saved by parachutes had no weight.
1* Sopwith Salamander. See Chapter 4, p.106.
10
Home Defence
Sundry references have already been made to Hugh Trenchard’s strategy of using his air forces aggressively, with the implication that compared to the RFC flying daily over the German lines, the Luftstreitkräfte flew much more rarely over the British lines in France. However, it would be a big mistake to conclude from this that the German Air Force was reluctant to take its own fight to the enemy (and remembering that for much of the war it was fighting on several fronts simultaneously). In fact, German air strategy was every bit as forward-looking as Trenchard’s and in many respects a good deal more so because it formed part of the concept of total war. The German Army had been reared on Vom Kriege (On War), the classic treatise by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. This makes clear that it is futile going to war other than with an absolute determination to win. Anything else is an irresponsible sacrifice of lives and matériel. A real war – as distinct from a campaign or a local skirmish – presupposes the involvement of the combatants’ entire nations, civilians as well as military, for reasons of psychological as well as of material back-up. In this view an army in the field needs robust supply chains and hence the full support of the electorate and politicians back home.
It was in this spirit that from the turn of the century Germany had built up a highly competent U-boat fleet that was to prove most effective in blockading the merchant shipping that brought Britain its vital supplies, resulting in periodic shortages of raw materials and food throughout the war. It was fortunate that in 1901 the Royal Navy had founded a submarine service of its own that was to have a far-sighted champion in Admiral John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, at a time when it really needed one. In general, the Admiralty’s attitude towards this new weapon was analogous to that of the British Army’s towards aircraft a decade later. As the then-Third Sea Lord, Rear-Admiral Arthur Wilson VC, memorably put it, ‘The submarine is an underhand form of warfare, unfair, and a damned un-English weapon.’ It is not known what he thought a truly ‘English’ weapon might be: possibly a cricket bat. However, it is clear that the ‘Christian gentleman’ ideal of Dr Thomas Arnold’s public school system was not an adequate weapon for tackling bounders who had been brought up on Clausewitz. Luckily, despite the attitudes of many gold-braided old sea dogs who had served their apprenticeships in the days of sail, the Admiralty’s younger and more progressive element realised the new technology of submarines was not going to disappear merely because it was un-English. Consequently the Royal Navy’s submarines were steadily developed in the shadow of its grander and far more visible fleet of destroyers and dreadnoughts – symbols of Britain’s global maritime hegemony. The Royal Navy’s submariners were to cover themselves in glory throughout the First World War, especially while maintaining their own economic blockade of Germany; but so were the German submariners as they steadily disrupted British shipping.
Once the war had started the clash of the Clausewitzian idea of total war versus some very idiosyncratic British ideas of morality could be seen in action. Yet from the first the German General Staff’s position had never been a secret. In 1902 it had published a handbook for its officers, Kriegsbrauche im Landkriege (The Waging of Land War) in which it stated ‘The conduct of war allows any belligerent state to employ any means to bring about the war aim,’ and went on to make it clear that this might quite properly entail attacking civilian targets. On 16th December 1914 six German warships suddenly appeared off the coast of northeast England and shelled Scarborough and Hartlepool. They killed 147 outright, with many badly injured, besides causing much damage. Such an attack without warning on mainly civilian targets produced general outrage in Britain as well as anger directed at the Royal Navy’s failure to prevent it. British citizens struggled to accept that total war meant exactly that. They might indeed have found this abhorrent; yet before long it became anybody’s guess who was holding the moral high ground.
In 1915 a tactic known as The Tethered Goat was introduced, whereby a British submarine would remain submerged beneath a trawler fleet, connected to one of the vessels by a covert telephone link. Trawlers were a favoured target of U-boats, if only as a means of obtaining fresh food whilst on patrol, and they would surface rather than waste a precious torpedo on such insignificant vessels and instead sink them with explosives or their deck guns. Once an enemy was spotted, the British submarine was informed and it would attempt to sink the surfaced U-boat. This worked on several occasions, but was obviously not a long-term strategy since the Germans soon got wise to this arguably underhand and morally dubious tactic.190
Even as the Royal Navy were staking out their tethered goats they were also deploying the first of the ‘Q’ ships: vessels disguised to look like innocent merchantmen that tempted a German submarine to surface in order to investigate its cargo and see if it was worth stealing. As soon as the U-boat appeared, hinged panels would drop open in the ‘Q’ ship’s side to reveal heavy guns that opened fire on the submarine. The Royal Navy, like the Kaiserliche Marine, understood from the first that there were to be no holds barred in their sea war. The British were much too aware of their islands’ dependency on overseas supplies to give any quarter. This ‘Q’ ship ruse was soon used by both sides, as it would be again in the Second World War.
Initially, at least, the first air war did not offer quite the same opportunities for ruse and trickery, and tactics were more open. Aerial bombing was one such measure. A fortnight after the shelling of the northeast ports, German aircraft dropped the first small bombs on British soil, hitting Dover and Sheerness, although with little damage. Three weeks later came the first raid by an airship that bombed Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn on 19th January 1915. Predictably, this caused further outrage in a Britain taken by surprise and there came the first squalls in what was to develop into a four-year deluge of press rhetoric about German ‘frightfulness’ invoking the bucolic peace of British towns and villages and, of course, the sanctity of
unarmed civilians and especially of women and children. This was promptly matched in the German press by accusations of British ‘Schrecklichkeit’. Yet you didn’t need to be Clausewitz to know that in war people have always used whatever weapon confers superiority. Only ever in duels of honour in Hyde Park or Heidelberg were two combatants solemnly handed identical weapons with which to fight while their seconds monitored fair play. Once Giulio Gavotti had dropped his little bombs over Libya in 1911 it was inevitable that sooner or later the same technique would be used again. Given that at the outbreak of war Germany was the unchallenged world leader in airship technology, it was obvious the Zeppelin would become a weapon in wartime if only because in 1915 no German aircraft yet had the range to fly as far as London with a bomb load and return to Belgium. The rhetoric of ‘frightfulness’ was something of a smokescreen to cover the British public’s impotent fury that as yet there seemed to be no reliable means of countering the Zeppelin raids. There was also fear that H. G. Wells’s dire predictions in his 1898 proto-SF novel The War of the Worlds might actually be coming true. There was something primordial in the dread of attack from the sky.
In fact, as early as February 1913 there had been reports of strange airships seen over Britain’s east coast and on the 28th the Whitby Gazette ran a headline that read:
WANTED: AN AIR MINISTER
ENGLAND AT GERMANY’S MERCY
This laid out the respective positions of both future combatants eighteen months before the war began. Nobody could reasonably claim Britain hadn’t been warned. The idea of the country being at anybody’s mercy was shocking enough to emphasise how unprepared and inadequate its defences actually were: a common theme in public debate ever since Erskine Childers’s enormously popular ‘invasion’ thriller The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903. Winston Churchill later claimed that this single novel had led directly to the Admiralty’s building three major naval bases in north-eastern Britain (Scapa Flow, Invergordon and Rosyth). But with the coming of airships and aircraft the Grand Fleet was suddenly no longer enough to protect the British Isles, just as the journalist Harold Wyatt had predicted when Blériot first flew the Channel in 1909. Winston Churchill, ever the politician, had tried to allay fears in a speech on 17th March 1914 in which he predicted that ‘Any hostile aircraft, airships or aeroplanes which reached our coast during the coming year would be promptly attacked in superior force by a swarm of very formidable hornets.’191 At the very least this absurd piece of bombast implied ignorance: Zeppelins could not only fly far higher than any aircraft Britain had in 1914, they could also carry out raids at night.
However, it was one thing for the German military to embrace the idea of total war and quite another for ‘Kaiser Bill’ (Wilhelm II) to agree to all that this implied. As Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson he realised that bombing London would not only escalate hostilities to a new, unheard-of level, it would also risk killing his own cousins in Buckingham Palace. To pacify his generals he reluctantly agreed to bombing raids outside London. That first Zeppelin raid on King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth ‘was greeted with wild acclaim in Germany, where “Gott strafe England” was already a national rallying cry, daubed on walls, fences and lamp-posts and recited by German schoolchildren in their daily morning assemblies’.192 As always, once the principle of bombing had been established it became easy to continue, and Zeppelin raids were soon extended to London and continued for the next two years until airships at last became too vulnerable to fighter aircraft and the defences Britain could belatedly muster. They were superseded by big twin-engined Gotha bombers, whose first raid took place in May 1917.
The psychological effect on Britons of being bombed in their own country, and especially in their capital city, was immense. They were quite used to the idea of sending troops and warships overseas to outposts of the Empire in order to bring uppity natives into line; they were absolutely unprepared for this sort of treatment to be meted out to themselves on home ground. Worse still, for a long time they were powerless to stop it. In the first place every available RFC aircraft and anti-aircraft gun was needed in France; and in the second combat flying was in its adolescence at best while night combat flying was not even in its infancy. This sense of national impotence was probably an important contributory factor to the VC awarded to Flight-Sublieutenant Reginald Warneford, a young RNAS pilot stationed in Belgium. On 7th June 1915, flying his Morane-Saulnier Type L monoplane, he chased Zeppelin LZ.37 over Ostend and dropped bombs on it until it blew up. The explosion flipped his own aircraft upside down and stopped the engine. Warneford managed to land in German-held territory, work feverishly on the engine, fix a fuel leak with his cigarette holder, restart and take off again before he could be captured. Almost immediately King George V awarded him the Victoria Cross and he was acclaimed in Britain as a national hero. A mere ten days later Warneford was killed while flying an American journalist over Versailles in a new Farman F.27, a pusher biplane, apparently because of mid-air structural failure. Both men were thrown out and fell to their deaths.
Meanwhile the Zeppelins attacking Britain came at night – huge, stealthy and terrifying. 1916 saw the introduction of the ‘R’ types that were over 200 yards long. Silent newsreels could not record the menacing drone of their six immense Maybach engines, nor how they might fall quiet as they drifted almost unopposed above London as though picking out something choice at which to take careful aim. By now there were searchlights and anti-aircraft guns that put up a fine show of activity, although mostly with few results. The spectators milled excitedly in the streets, staring upwards. The airships’ ability to hit a specific target with their bombs was practically nil, but in a way this made it worse for those below as it turned the raids into a kind of sinister lottery by high explosive. Silver blades slashed the dark sky, criss-crossing feverishly as though in a hectic fencing match. None drew blood, however; and generally the sparkling blooms of shells sent up by the gunners in Hyde Park, for all the visible effect they had, might have been a benign firework display. The blow to British self-esteem is not recorded on film, but it soon had immense political impact.
To be sure, the numbers of casualties caused by the German raids on London and elsewhere in the First World War were not remotely comparable with those in the Second. The entire year’s campaign by German bombers between May 1917 and May 1918 killed 836 Britons up and down the country and injured 1,965: figures that for much of the war would have represented light casualties for a single day on the Western Front. (In World War II the Luftwaffe’s raids on Coventry alone were to kill 1,236.) But the panic the bombing inspired was quite out of proportion to the number and size of the bombs dropped and the damage they caused. A spirit of ‘Britain Can Take It’ or ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was often notably absent. Small wonder, since not only were the British public completely unprepared but they could all too plainly see that ‘the authorities’ were as well. For a long time there were no organised and co-ordinated civil defence measures: no air raid warning sirens, no official bomb shelters. Policemen wearing sandwich boards with messages in red capitals reading POLICE NOTICE: TAKE COVER or, alternatively, ALL CLEAR would pedal through East End streets on their regulation bicycles, ringing their bells.
The difficulties involved in setting up adequate defences against aerial bombing raids in 1915 should not be underestimated. Even giving the public an early enough warning was problematic. Telephones were still comparatively rare and every call had to be hand-connected by operators pushing plugs into switchboards at the few exchanges. The most reliable form of quick communication was probably by telegraph. (There were of course no household radio sets.) Observers stationed on the North Foreland or the Essex coast might – if they were extremely lucky – succeed in raising someone at a local airfield or in London by telephone or by ‘sending a wire’ if they heard what they thought were a Zeppelin’s engines overhead; but what then? In those days aircraft climbed with painful slowness. Zeppelins could easily out-climb any of th
em and go as high as 15,000 feet, way beyond any defender’s capability. It might take a single-seater scout half an hour to reach a mere 8,000 feet even before it began looking for the intruder. True, the airships had a top speed of only about 60 mph; but within two years the big Gotha bombers that succeeded them could reach 21,000 feet and a speed of 87 mph, a difficult challenge for any interceptor even in 1917, especially at night and without oxygen.
Meanwhile the British government, worried as they already were by the war’s dismally slow progress in France, became increasingly concerned about unrest at home. The anger caused by food shortages and bad working conditions, especially in the armaments factories, was increased by the panic induced by air raids. Particularly in London’s East End, where the docks were an obvious target and there were no proper air raid shelters, this led to spectacular public funeral parades for the victims and also to strikes and rioting in the face of which the police were sometimes helpless. In fact, air raid casualties were often split along class lines since to the west and south of Holborn, and particularly in the West End, the numerous underground stations at least afforded a network of deep shelters. This inequity was exploited by union and strike leaders to reinforce their message that the whole conflict was a capitalist war, deliberately waged to enrich international bankers and arms manufacturers: one in which the British working class were mere cannon fodder in France and bomb fodder at home. The largely right-wing press countered with denunciations of official incompetence over civil defence and appeals to Britons’ innate bulldog patriotism. Propagandists like Horatio Bottomley, the crooked proprietor of the jingoistic newspaper John Bull, foamed with virulence against the Germans. Similarly, the otherwise socialist journalist Robert Blatchford fulminated at book length about the enemy’s ‘Cult of Frightfulness’:
Marked for Death Page 26
