Marked for Death Read online

  Alas, Farnborough’s response betrayed a very British attitude that combined ingenuity with foot-dragging conservatism. Instead of designing a brand new aircraft from scratch that could meet the Fokker menace with some hope of survival, the Royal Aircraft Factory’s designers clung to their basic B.E. shape and produced variants in swift and exuberant succession. The fundamental problem for all British aircraft designers at the time was the lack of any home-grown interrupter or synchronising gear for a forward-firing machine gun to match the Germans’. In a move that now looks either like a boffin’s solution or a gesture of despair, Farnborough came up with the extraordinary B.E.9. Their solution was to stick the gunner right at the front of the aircraft in a box ahead of the propeller, the engine being moved back a few feet to occupy the former position of the B.E.’s front cockpit. In this little nacelle, which was hardly more than a rickety plywood tea-chest, the gunner perched with the propeller whirling lethally only inches behind his back. The box was supported in front by struts attached to the undercarriage and in its rear wall by the lengthened propeller shaft that slotted into a ball-race bearing. This type, which immediately became known sardonically as the ‘Pulpit’, went to France in the autumn of 1915 for evaluation by 16 Squadron. By any standards it was an abortion of an aircraft but Farnborough must have thought it a viable solution because draughtsmen went on to sketch a single-seat fighter version for 1916, the F.E.10. Those who flew the B.E.9, however, had very different views. 16 Squadron’s Duncan Grinnell-Milne was one:

  There was no communication possible between front and back seat; if anything happened, if the pilot were wounded, or even if nothing more serious occurred than a bad landing in which the machine tipped over on its nose, the man in the box could but say his prayers: he would inevitably be crushed by the engine behind him.

  One of these machines was attached to the Squadron in which I served; but by the merciful dispensation of Providence it never succeeded in defeating an enemy craft. Had it done so I have no doubt that the brains of the Farnborough Factory would have rejoiced in their war-winning discovery, hundreds of ‘Pulpits’ would have been produced and in a short while we should not have had a living observer left in France to tell the experts what it was like in that little box – for I feel sure no civilian expert ever risked his own life in it. However, even in 1915 when almost every new machine was looked at with delighted wonder, it was recognized that in the B.E.9 unsuitability of design had reached its acme. The ‘Pulpit’ was soon returned to the depot.11

  This damning assessment from a pilot who finished the war with six confirmed ‘kills’ and who was himself shot down and escaped from Germany to fight again, does reveal the deep scepticism RFC aircrew often felt about what looked to them like an unbridgeable chasm in understanding between those ‘brains’ back home in Farnborough who had bright ideas about design, and the men who had to fly the resulting aircraft each day against deadly opponents with superior machines. The question of how much consistent feedback there was between front-line airmen in France and the designers with their drawing boards back in England remains perennially moot. It is also likely that what airmen wanted for themselves did not necessarily coincide with Hugh Trenchard’s demand for machines to wage an ever-more aggressive air war. There is reason to think that privately owned aero companies like Sopwith and Bristol were more speedily responsive. Certainly Farnborough’s apparent stubbornness in clinging to a basic design that was obsolete – particularly by keeping the observer in the front seat for so long – does seem wilful.

  Yet at the same time Farnborough was well on the way to producing possibly Britain’s best fighting aircraft of the war, the S.E.5. As proof that O’Gorman and his designers had indeed foreseen the possibility of air combat even before war broke out, in 1914 the S.E.4 prototype had flown at an astonishing 131 mph – then an unofficial world speed record. Was Mervyn O’Gorman to blame for the Royal Aircraft Factory’s failure to come up with the sort of aircraft the RFC so desperately needed in the first two years of the war? Or was the organisational chaos and indecision caused by the Army having a separate air service from the Navy and both having to compete for the same funds and supplies simply too much for one man to deal with? The question is still debated in air historians’ circles to this day, all of a century later.

  O’Gorman also managed to make an influential enemy. This was Charles G. Grey, who in 1911 had founded the magazine The Aeroplane and was to remain its able if idiosyncratic editor until the outbreak of the Second World War. Some time before 1914 Grey had paid a visit to Farnborough and O’Gorman, refusing to see him, had had him turned away at the main gate. The reason for this snub can only be guessed at now, although it may be worth noting that both men had been born and schooled in Dublin, and the enmity was possibly of boyhood standing even though O’Gorman was four years older. Far more likely, though, the feud grew from Grey’s criticisms in The Aeroplane of Farnborough and O’Gorman personally. At any rate, from that moment Charles Grey seldom lost an opportunity to denigrate Farnborough in speech and print. The main burden of his frequent barbed editorial remarks was that as a government institution the Royal Aircraft Factory enjoyed unfair patronage and public funding at the expense of the private aero companies. Once war had been declared Grey pointed out that the place with its ‘official’ imprimatur now had a near-monopoly of aircraft production and, like all monopolies, this led inevitably to gross inefficiency in getting new and improved designs of aircraft into service; and if anybody doubted this they had only to look at the awful example of the B.E.2c.

  Charles Grey soon acquired a powerful ally in the extraordinary figure of Noel Pemberton Billing, whose name was sometimes hyphenated and sometimes not. He bears scrutiny since, for better or worse, he became a critic of political significance in Britain’s first air war which had got off to a poor start. Born in 1881, he was an imposing man of six feet four with a monocle that he needed after injuring an eye in a fight in South Africa. PB, as he was conveniently known, was an eccentric of amazing energy and considerable charm, as his many female admirers could attest. He was also a remarkably fertile inventor of some originality and imagination, as witnessed by his own pioneering efforts in aviation as well as in many other fields where he had numerous patents to his name. Many of his inventions were frankly daft, like his idea for what in a modern aircraft is known as the ground proximity warning system. This involved the pilot lowering a rod below the aircraft ‘which, when the machine was fifteen feet above the ground or water, operated a gong and electric bulb simultaneously – the former to attract the attention of the pilot and the latter to project a beam of light to aid his vision for landing.’12 Flight magazine thought this ‘decidedly simple and ingenious’ while apparently ignoring the difficulty and consequences of a pilot lowering a rod to touch the ground while trying to land an aircraft at night.

  Well before the war PB had designed and built several floatplanes. These either refused to fly or did so without much promise, which is small wonder given that he had had no formal training whatever as an aircraft designer. But he was not a man who was easily discouraged and in June 1914 he began trading as an aero company, Pemberton-Billing Ltd., whose confident telegraphic address was ‘Supermarin’ (he coined the word as the antonym of ‘submarine’, knocking off the final ‘e’). Under the pressure of his many other activities PB was to sell the company barely two years later to its works manager, Hubert Scott-Paine, who renamed it Supermarine Aviation Works Ltd.: the same company that in due course went on to produce the S.6B floatplane that in 1931 won the Schneider Trophy outright for Britain, then the Spitfire, the Swift jet fighter of the early 1950s and finally the Scimitar Fleet Air Arm fighter of the same decade.

  On the outbreak of war Pemberton Billing joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. In November 1914, wearing civilian clothes that would have got him shot as a spy had he been caught, he personally reconnoitered the German Zeppelin sheds at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance and planned a d
aring raid there by three Avro 504s. Owing to the distance involved the aircraft were crated and secretly transported by ferry and road from Britain to Belfort in France. Once reassembled, and each carrying four twenty-pound bombs, they managed to find their way to the target without maps, the French having banned these from the cockpits for security reasons since their airfield at Belfort was supposed to be secret. The raid was a partial success and a new hydrogen plant the Germans had just built disappeared in a huge fireball easily visible across the lake from Switzerland.

  Such exploits gave Pemberton Billing public visibility as some sort of authority on aviation matters. He began making noisy denunciations of Farnborough even before the RFC began taking heavy casualties in the ‘Fokker Scourge’ in the autumn of 1915 – indeed, it was he who duly coined that phrase, perfectly contrived as it was to be taken up by the newspapers. When in 1916 he resigned his commission in the RNVR and became the MP for East Herts he was able to use the House of Commons as a soap-box for his increasingly vehement views about the Royal Aircraft Factory’s supposed incompetence and the way Britain was bungling its air war. In his maiden speech in March he went straight to the point, referring to the RFC as ‘a subject of almost tragic mirth in its efforts to defend this country’, a piece of rhetoric nicely calculated to shock its hearers. Having got their attention he went on to challenge A. J. Balfour’s statement (as First Lord of the Admiralty) that ‘the lack of material is responsible for our present policy of masterly inactivity and deplorable delay in answering the challenge of the enemy in the air,’ saying:

  For the first six months of this war our Air Service was rich in leadership and poor in material. During the last six months we have been somewhat richer in material, but infinitely poorer in leadership. The six months gap between these two definite periods was devoted to internal intrigue and consequent service bitterness. This deplorable condition of affairs is directly responsible for the present impotence and inefficiency of the service.13

  In the charged emotional atmosphere of the time, when the appalling casualties of the infantry in France were a daily topic, any allegation of poor leadership, intrigue and impotence inevitably struck home. There was already talk that the centuries-old rivalry between the Army and the Navy – and now that between Farnborough and the private sector – were a perfect formula for inefficiency and chaos in the RFC and RNAS. Such things were taken up by the press and especially by Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. PB guaranteed the widest coverage by quoting an intemperate accusation made by Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Faber, the MP for Andover, that RFC airmen were being ‘murdered rather than killed’ by not being given good enough aircraft. This was very shocking to the House of Commons even though by then the phrase had become a near-cliché among squadron commanders in France who daily and reluctantly sent out undertrained boys still in their teens, many of whom never returned. Those were the aircrew PB described as ‘Fokker fodder’. And how could it be otherwise? he demanded. Their commanding officers were constantly sending urgent requests back home for better aircraft, and all they got was more of the same or even worse. Farnborough was hidebound and sclerotic. Mervyn O’Gorman and General David Henderson should both be held to account for their blunder in clinging to the B.E.2c and the rest of their outmoded aircraft. Farnborough’s near-monopoly of supplying the RFC should at once be broken and the inventiveness and energy of the private aircraft companies properly exploited. More heads were better than one and (PB managed to imply) almost any head was better than one wearing an Army hat… There was a good deal more in the same vein, and for many months to come.

  As he had calculated, such remarks caused frequent uproar in Parliament as well as in the press. In the ensuing official enquiry both Mervyn O’Gorman and Sir David Henderson defended Farnborough in the most spirited fashion. Far from having a monopoly that excluded the private sector, O’Gorman said, half his establishment’s work came from dealing with the aerodynamic and design problems the private companies encountered and which, by nature of the place’s remit as Britain’s main centre for aeronautical research, he was both obliged and happy to try and solve. A good deal of Farnborough’s time and effort was being taken up by having to design the various gadgets and accessories requested by aero companies up and down the country. Although the enquiry exonerated him, O’Gorman’s contract was not renewed and he duly left Farnborough in October 1916, simultaneously vilified and lamented, while remaining behind the scenes as an adviser to both the War Office and the government.

  From that moment dates a strand in the writings of aviation historians that sides with Pemberton Billing and Charles Grey in lambasting O’Gorman for Farnborough’s shortcomings, and singles out the B.E.2c as a hopeless and even disgraceful aeroplane. An example of this taken at random would be Alan Clark’s denunciation of the B.E.2c as ‘a bad and dangerous aircraft’ (neither of which it was) in his 1973 book Aces High. His description of O’Gorman as an ‘empire-builder… at pains to ensure by the placing of contracts and other means that no other aspirant manufacturer could produce a design – still less an aeroplane – whose merits might rival or eclipse those of the Royal Aircraft Factory’14 ignored the reality of the various aero companies such as Sopwith, de Havilland, Bristol and Short doing exactly that, especially for the Royal Navy. Clark was, of course, merely extending to the war in the air his popular if overstated thesis that the British Army in the First World War had been ‘lions led by donkeys’, in General Ludendorff’s alleged phrase.

  It is all good emotive stuff; but as usual the truth was very much more complicated. For one thing, Pemberton Billing’s accusation about Farnborough existing at the expense of the private aero companies was specious. At the very least he could be accused of sour grapes, given that he himself had until recently run just such a company, scarcely a single one of whose aircraft designs had yet managed to fly, still less had gone into production. Secondly, his diatribes conveniently ignored the fact that companies in the private sector were not only doing their own original design work but were also building Farnborough’s machines by the hundred, and being well paid by the government for doing so. And thirdly PB, with firm loyalties to his late service the Royal Navy, was only too happy to see the rival War Office get any blame that was going.

  There was also a good deal that PB could have told the House that he did not, such as that British losses in the air at the time were not so very different from those of the French, who were always cracked up to be so much more advanced in aviation. He also failed to mention that it was not so much the wrong aircraft as the lack of a British version of synchroniser gear that was giving the Germans such a huge advantage, and anyway that was for the professional armaments companies like Vickers to produce and not Farnborough. He might also have pointed out that a high proportion of the British casualties during the six months of the ‘Fokker Scourge’ had little to do with German air supremacy and a great deal with the RFC’s inadequate training for its pilots and poor maintenance by its ground crews which led to unnecessary accidents.2* Furthermore, although the RNAS was getting all its aircraft from private companies there was no reason to suppose it was getting superior machines. As of March 1916, the month of PB’s maiden speech, the first truly effective fighters from stables such as Sopwith and Bristol were not yet in service. It was not until May that the first Sopwith 1½ Strutters with synchronised machine guns were at last delivered to 70 Squadron in France. In fact, the ‘Fokker Scourge’ was effectively combatted on the British Front by the Farnborough-trained Geoffrey de Havilland’s Airco D.H.2 and the Royal Aircraft Factory’s F.E.8 and F.E.2b fighters: all three having been developed under O’Gorman’s administration. However, the aircraft that probably did most to end the Fokker’s supremacy in the early months of 1916 was France’s Nieuport ‘Bébé’ even though it was still only armed with a Hotchkiss machine gun mounted on the upper wing. From the very first this beautiful little aircraft comprehensively outflew the Fokker and did much to redress the balance of t
he air war temporarily in the Allies’ favour.

  *

  It cannot be denied that a good deal of Pemberton Billing’s fiery indictments were justified. The way in which aircraft were commissioned, designed and built for the British war effort was indeed inefficient, the delays often grotesque. In 1915 thirty-four different companies produced 1,680 aircraft.15 This might sound like a lot but wastage was extremely high. Actual combat aside, training and ordinary accidents (which in those early days of aviation were very frequent) accounted for at least half the casualties. What happened to the F.E.2b is revealing enough of how the industry lacked a sense of real urgency. This aircraft was a development of Geoffrey de Havilland’s early design. Its first version, the F.E.2a, had been planned as early as August 1913 as a fighter: itself an indication that O’Gorman’s Farnborough was capable of forward thinking since at that time hardly a military aircraft anywhere was being built for any role other than observation. It will be remembered that this was a ‘pusher’ type with the gunner/observer sitting at the front of the nacelle with an outstanding field of forward fire. In due course, with modified wings and a more powerful Beardmore engine, it became the F.E.2b. The future memoirist Louis Strange flew the first of four examples to France in May 1915, just before the start of the ‘Fokker Scourge’. Having already survived at least one pre-war flying accident, Strange was destined to continue a charmed and distinguished career as a pilot throughout the First World War. He was to survive active service in World War Two as well, finally leaving the RAF as a Wing Commander in 1945.