Marked for Death Read online

  Similar dismissive opinions were initially also common in the French and German armies – especially among cavalry officers, an elite caste who bitterly resented the very idea that these noisy, smelly and unreliable new contraptions might usurp their beautiful horses and centuries of glorious tradition. However, as will be seen, the French had already established a clear lead in aeronautics and could field better aircraft backed up by better organisation than anybody else at the time, and there were influential factions in the French Army with an imaginative grasp of aviation’s potential in war. Although by September 1914 German aircraft outnumbered French, the German General Staff was for the moment less forward-looking. ‘Experience has shown that a real combat in the air such as journalists and romancers have described should be considered a myth. The duty of the aviator is to see, not to fight,’ as one of their reports put it.7

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  The ensuing four years of war were to produce as profound a change in military attitudes and strategy as the aircraft themselves were to show in development. By the Armistice in November 1918 cavalry had gone the way of bowmen and it had become an article of faith that domination of the air above the battlefield was henceforth crucial to success. Only fifteen months after the war in Europe had ended Britain’s new RAF would intervene decisively in what was then British Somaliland to overthrow the rebellious Dervish leader known as the ‘Mad Mullah’. In early 1925 bombing and strafing alone enabled the RAF, without the loss of a single airman, to quell a revolt by tribesmen in Waziristan, today’s still-restive borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan. From that moment on, such policing of the British Empire using aeronautical terrorism (under the bland title of ‘air control’) was to maintain an unbroken lineage up to and beyond enforcing the ‘no-fly zones’ in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from 1991.

  The extraordinary thing is the speed with which this new order came into being. A mere eleven years after a British Army general had rated aircraft as less useful than horses, the future of air power with global reach was assured and Britain had the world’s biggest air force. Exactly how war had driven technology, and then technology war, is worth examining in some detail.

  1

  Air War and the State

  The design, manufacture and supply of aircraft in Britain during the First World War were from time to time critically affected by social and industrial upheaval, as also from the first by political indecision and military rivalries. This needs explaining.

  In 1960 Philip Larkin wrote ‘MCMXIV’: a poem both sentimental and disingenuous, which no doubt explains its popularity. Like a black-and-white period photograph it is full of the tokens of a supposedly immemorial time: old coinage (farthings and sovereigns), enamelled tin advertisements, dusty unmetalled roads, a pre-industrial countryside. Together with its refrain of ‘Never such innocence,/Never before or since… Never such innocence again’ it plays to a trope so popular among the English middle classes it has become an article of faith. This is that the high summer of British Imperialism (Durbars, Pomp and Circumstance and all) coincided with a secure world of Edwardian certainties that war was about to sweep away abruptly and for ever: the ‘watershed’ theory of social history. Countless documentary films have pandered to this version by emphasising the exceptionally beautiful summer of 1914, with plenty of grainy old black and white footage showing people swimming and boating beneath skies in which not even a metaphorical cloud was to be seen. The voice-over assures us that prosperity was on the up-and-up in Europe generally and that war was the very last thing on anybody’s mind.

  The facts are rather different, above all in Britain. By the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign German industrial output had overtaken British and was seen in London as a clear strategic threat. At the turn of the twentieth century both countries embarked on huge naval programmes of submarine- and warship-building, each warily eyeing the other, which doesn’t look much like Larkin’s ‘innocence’. That a national fantasy of Edwardian tranquillity is historical nonsense has never dented its appeal, sedulously reinforced as it has been by popular TV series like Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, complete with butlers, wing collars, parasols and Rolls-Royce landaus drawn up in Mayfair or on scrunchy gravel drives. Larkin explained that for his poem’s title he had copied the style adopted on war memorials, so there is no doubting its valedictory intent. It is hard to tell from his poem that he is talking about a largely urban and industrialised country with severe social problems where a third of the population was living in wretched poverty. His version is part of a literary myth fervently believed by the British middle class to this day. Modern students of the period might instead do better to take their cue from Kipling’s short poem ‘Recessional’, which in 1897 caused a stir with its intimation of national weakness and undercurrent of profound unease.

  For in reality the years preceding the First World War were a period of increasing social turmoil in Britain. Crucial British industries like steel and shipbuilding had already been overtaken by their counterparts in Germany and the United States. In particular, shipbuilding in Britain had become seriously dysfunctional, where a mass of different craft unions dating from the days of wooden ships led to constant quarrels over demarcation in building the Royal Navy’s all-steel dreadnoughts. On Tyneside alone between 1890 and 1893 there was an average of one major strike every month. From then on, strikes throughout industry became increasingly frequent. In 1901, the year of Edward VII’s accession, the notorious Taff Vale Judgement (over a strike by a railway union in South Wales) made the government’s draconian anti-union stance very clear. It ushered in years of labour unrest until in 1911, the year after the king’s death, nearly a million workers nationally were involved in stoppages, totalling a loss of 10,319,591 working days.8 That year troops had to be sent to quell riots. The passions aroused shocked even a seasoned industrial arbitrator like George Askwith. When the dockers struck in Goole and Hull there was an outbreak of looting and rioting. He later wrote: ‘I heard one town councillor remark that he had been in Paris during the [1871] Commune and had never seen anything like this, and he had not known that there were such people in Hull – women with hair streaming and half nude, reeling through the streets, smashing and destroying.’9

  Nor was the unrest restricted to labour issues. Studies written at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Charles Booth’s Life and Labour in London (1889), the sociologist Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty (1901) and Wilson and Hawarth’s West Ham (1907), did not shock the enlightened middle classes alone with their detailed descriptions of the disgusting conditions of life in the London slums. They were also read by some of the slum-dwellers themselves, who increasingly decided that their squalid warrens of grimy brick, reeking of urine and excrement, had not after all been ordained by God but were the logical outcome of their inhabitants being treated as expendable coolie labour. Union membership grew and by the summer of 1911 London’s East End was restless with discontent. This was the area where the docklands workers lived, and it finally became clear to Westminster that if ever the dockers became organised enough to withdraw their labour all at once, the great Empire’s capital city would be crippled. Within four years this was to become a serious threat when East Enders felt themselves completely undefended against German air raids targeting the docks.

  In addition there were politically divisive struggles with Irish nationalism and the militant women’s suffrage movement that polarised opinion throughout the land. The savage reaction to this last issue by government, police and prison officers culminated in the infamous ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ in 1913 that further exacerbated ill feelings. In early 1914 the Curragh Mutiny over Irish Home Rule forced the resignation of the Secretary for War, J. E. B. Seely (who as General Jack Seely would lead what was probably history’s last great cavalry charge in 1918). On the labour front, between January and July of 1914 there were 937 strikes, including industrial action by the munitions workers at Woolwich Arsenal. Worse still, in addition to the c
ivil war looming in Ireland a General Strike was called for September that was only pre-empted by the timely outbreak of war in August. In short, far from Larkin’s roseate innocence prevailing in the land, by the year MCMXIV there was a strong sense of calamity in the air and people up and down Britain were talking nervously of revolutionary fervour in sections of the working class. The fervour may not yet have been truly revolutionary, but it was certainly highly rebellious.

  In the context of aviation this increasing social unrest and the questioning of class and political relationships might seem like a mere historical footnote. Quite the reverse, however, since the processes already begun were to have a direct bearing on industrial attitudes, practices and the production of aircraft. Among these were the strikes by women munitions factory workers and popular reaction to the night raids by German Zeppelins and the later Gotha bombers, especially in London. It was public demonstrations of panic and anger at these seemingly unopposed air raids that eventually obliged the government, in the teeth of strenuous opposition from the Army, to withdraw experienced pilots from the battlefront in France in order for them to set up a credible Home Defence force in squadrons based around London. Strikes and go-slows were also to have crippling consequences for the industries supplying the RFC, in particular with its aero engines and armaments. There were times when chronic alcoholism among factory workers as well as widespread drug-taking (chiefly opium and cocaine) had seriously deleterious effects on both the quantity and quality of their output.

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  Well before the war British officialdom had struggled to decide what attitude to take toward the new-fangled flying machines. Nowhere was this more evident than at Farnborough, the home of the Army’s Balloon School. In October 1908 the American showman and pioneer aviator, Sam Cody, achieved Britain’s first powered flight at Farnborough in an aircraft of his own design. Whitehall’s instinctive response to this historic landmark was to order the immediate abandonment of all further work there on aircraft in favour of airships and balloons. Nevertheless, a small section of pioneer aircraft enthusiasts like the Irishman J. W. Dunne continued their work at Farnborough despite the mockery of the favoured ‘gasbag aeronauts’. In April 1911 the War Office formed an Air Battalion of Royal Engineers to continue Farnborough’s work on observation balloons and man-carrying kites. But by now, two years after Blériot had flown the Channel, glacial shifts in army thinking were at last taking place and the military possibilities offered by aircraft were grudgingly recognised. In May 1912 the Air Battalion became the Royal Flying Corps and any further experimental work with airships and floatplanes was hived off to the Navy. From that moment the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough (confusingly abbreviated at the time as the R.A.F.) became the official government aircraft establishment. The military wing of Britain’s air services now comprised the RFC, a Central Flying School for training instructors, a Reserve and the Royal Aircraft Factory, while the naval wing became the Royal Naval Air Service. Traditional inter-service demarcations meant that the RFC and its adjuncts were controlled by the War Office, while the RNAS and its facilities came under the aegis of the Admiralty: an administrative formula that was to prove disastrous.

  The new Royal Aircraft Factory was told it would become the sole supplier of aircraft for the Army, whereas the Navy was to be supplied by the private sector. Since late 1909 the Superintendent of the Balloon Factory at Farnborough had been Mervyn O’Gorman, himself an accomplished engineer of considerable charm and even artistic talent. Given that his employers at the War Office were still thinking in terms of balloons and cavalry, he was also remarkably far-sighted. He believed in aircraft; and in 1910 he set up departments specialising in physics, chemistry and fabrics, engines and instruments, as well as a main drawing office. Over the next seven years he staffed these and later departments with some of the country’s ablest technicians and scientists. He also forged close links with the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. From the start he saw that despite its name, the new Royal Aircraft Factory’s most valuable function was as a centre of aeronautical research and design rather than as a factory in the conventional sense of mass-producing aircraft. At the most it would build experimental types and tinker with them, while any real production would be contracted out to the private sector. Unlike his bosses O’Gorman had recognised from the first that the future lay with aircraft rather than balloons and kites, and accordingly he nurtured and encouraged young pioneers like Geoffrey de Havilland. He was thus in the odd position, as a War Office appointee, of working to subvert what the Army believed it wanted in favour of what he knew it needed.

  Geoffrey de Havilland had taught himself to fly and had already built two aircraft to his own designs. With a young family to support he was now badly strapped for cash and hoped to impress O’Gorman enough that Farnborough might buy his latest design and even perhaps give him a permanent job. On a freezing winter day in 1910 he successfully flew his brainchild for an hour in front of O’Gorman who duly took him on and, because the aircraft was a ‘pusher’ type, O’Gorman awarded it the classification F.E.1. This was according to an idiosyncratic system that he had himself devised and referred to an aircraft’s layout, everything being named after established foreign designs.1* De Havilland’s F.E.1 was followed in early 1911 by the B.E.1, the first in a long series of B.E. machines, most of which looked fairly similar to the casual eye. They were two-seater tractor biplanes with the engine at the front and a slender-hipped, rather elegant fuselage. The B.E.1 was designed expressly as the observation and photographic machine the Army had by then ordered. Even though the pilot in the rear cockpit had a much better view than the observer in the front, it had the advantage for aerial photography of being so stable it could be flown ‘hands off’ for extended periods. This was demonstrated by Major Sefton Brancker in June 1914 when he claimed to have flown the prototype B.E.2c most of the way from Farnborough to Netheravon without touching the controls. Once he had reached 2,000 feet and set his course Brancker spent his time writing notes about the countryside he was overflying at a stately 65 mph. The aircraft’s stability was ideally suited to photo-reconnaissance. The pilot could almost forget about flying the aircraft while he leaned over the cockpit’s edge trying to steady his heavy wood-boxed aerial camera with its gelatin-coated glass plates. However, this same stability was about to become notoriously less valuable in war flying when the pilot needed to defend himself against attack in the air.

  For suddenly, barely two months after Sefton Brancker’s flight, Britain was at war. At Farnborough the leisurely pace of experimentation and scholarly research was banished by urgent demands for new aircraft capable of matching whatever the Germans could put into the air. The RFC’s demands for new and better aircraft had to percolate through official bureaucratic channels staffed by senior Army officers, many of whom were old cavalry types still unconvinced that aircraft had any military role: men whose priorities lay far more insistently with the early disasters even then befalling the infantry in France. O’Gorman quickly found himself enmeshed in the politics of wartime aircraft production. He was dealing directly with the Director-General of Military Aeronautics, General Henderson, who was then also commanding the RFC in France.

  Henderson was sympathetic to aviation, having learned to fly in 1911 aged forty-nine (at that time he was the world’s oldest pilot). Indeed, many people think he has better claims to be considered as the father of Britain’s air force than his successor in France, Hugh Trenchard, who took over as commander in August 1915. O’Gorman’s unenviable task was to interpret Henderson’s requirements as relayed by the Army, and then to ensure that Farnborough’s designs not only met them but were built by competent factories. It hardly helped that two of Britain’s most able and effective private aircraft companies, Short and Sopwith, were by now designing and building orders exclusively for the Navy’s RNAS. Nor did it help that the Royal Aircraft Factory itself had meanwhile fallen victim to the popular ‘white feather’ hysteria th
at had Farnborough’s ribald tram conductors stopping at its gates to shout: ‘Alight here for the Home of Rest with Army Exemption thrown in.’10 Members of O’Gorman’s large work force were hastily given a military rank and he himself was made a lieutenant-colonel.

  Farnborough’s B.E. aircraft, and in particular the B.E.2c, fell victim to a political debate that was tragically to dog O’Gorman until his death in 1958. The B.E. series as a whole was destined to be built in quantity – some 3,500 machines – by several factories up and down Britain, and over time the different aircraft were fitted with a variety of engines and modifications; but in all versions the aircraft retained the characteristic stability for which it had been purposely designed. The B.E.2c was never intended to be agile, and certainly not for air combat. The pilot was hard pushed to take quick evasive action, while even with a machine gun the observer in the front seat between the wings was virtually unable to use it, surrounded as he was by the most vulnerable parts of his own aircraft. The result was that for the first eighteen months of the war in the skies above France this most ubiquitous of Britain’s home-grown aircraft grew ever more vulnerable to attack until in the autumn of 1915 it became a sitting duck for the Germans’ new Fokker Eindecker (the E.1 monoplane) with its synchronised machine gun able to fire through its propeller arc. Yet at the same time aircraft capable of observation and artillery spotting were more and more in demand by the respective armies, now sightlessly bogged down in the trenches. Consequently that autumn Trenchard’s RFC Headquarters in France sent to the War Office in London a list of urgent basic requirements for a next-generation observation aircraft to replace the B.E.2c. They demanded an aircraft that was well able to defend itself. Ideally it should even be manoeuvrable enough to be capable of attack as well.