Marked for Death Read online

  The F.E.2b Strange ferried to France was soon acclaimed as an able fighter and was badly needed at the front. Yet it took a scandalously long time for the type to be built and delivered in any quantity. For all that production was contracted out to several aircraft companies, a mere thirty-two machines had been delivered to the RFC by the end of that year – by which time the Fokkers had been doing their worst for some six months. Evidently Pemberton Billing and Charles Grey had been wrong in their repeated assertions that the private companies were so much more efficient than Farnborough.

  On the other hand PB was right that General Henderson’s Department of Military Aeronautics was doing a poor job of overseeing the industry and ensuring that the RFC’s aircraft were built and delivered on time. Because aviation generally had remained low on the Army’s list of priorities for so long, the supply of new aircraft – and particularly of engines – was slow and disorganised. In the first year of the war the RFC was almost completely reliant on French engines to power its aircraft, and even in 1916 roughly a quarter of the air force was still French-powered. The companies shuffled their feet and muttered about strikes at engineering works up and down the country, especially in Glasgow where Beardmore engines were produced. The national deficiency in machine-tools had delayed essential supplies and what could they have done? Such inefficiencies merely added to the scandal in 1915 known as the ‘Shell Crisis’. This had caused a Cabinet split over the continued shortage of shells for the artillery in France, a shortage partly caused by industrial action. Yet the Munitions of War Act and the Defence of the Realm Act (‘DORA’) had given the army and police draconian powers to remove male strikers and send them straight off to the trenches. True, many factory workers were women, especially in munitions, but that was part of the problem because the government had had to promise male workers that once the war was over they would get their old jobs back again – which in turn made it clear to the women that they had no job security. Yet even with these bitter undercurrents, it still seemed inconceivable that in a time of national emergency things were so badly organised that the RFC should have to wait seven months to get a derisory thirty-two F.E.2bs that were, after all, of very basic wood-and-canvas construction.

  Production of the otherwise excellent Bristol Fighter (the ‘Brisfit’) was also to be seriously delayed because Rolls-Royce failed to turn out its Falcon III engine in sufficient quantity and Bristol was obliged to substitute a less powerful Hispano-Suiza engine, built under licence, that considerably reduced the aircraft’s performance. Many of the engines were also seriously defective mechanically. And the Sopwith company’s failure to ensure its designs were built on time turned out to be at least partly down to poor standards in its Kingston drawing office as well as to sloppy supervision of its subcontractors. Such things led to a state of affairs (sadly familiar even a century later) when bought-in parts were found not to fit. The Royal Aircraft Factory, by contrast, did at least make painstakingly accurate drawings and keep a keen supervisory eye on its suppliers. It made sure that wings from one factory would exactly fit a fuselage built at another, and they almost invariably did.

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  The more the industry expanded, the more its work was farmed out to concerns both large and small throughout Britain, just as it would be in the Second World War. The actual construction of all these aircraft was often severely affected by shortages of materials, as well as by the sheer logistics of organising adequate supplies to factories up and down the land. The job of building the wooden frames of the fuselage and wings went most naturally to the motor industry’s coachbuilders, to furniture makers and even to piano factories. The wood used was principally Sitka spruce and Douglas fir, although since these were imported from the USA and Canada supplies were affected as German U-boats took an increasing toll of shipping. Not only that, but as production grew and great swathes of forest were felled in Oregon and Washington states, the increased haste led to imperfectly kilned or seasoned wood being used, with subsequent warping. Other woods were resorted to, including white pine. The different woods with their varying characteristics and strengths could produce marked differences in durability and handling between aircraft of the same type, and it was often difficult for aircraft manufacturers to ensure uniformity.

  Some of the textile industry’s capacity was diverted to making fabric to cover the frames. This was chiefly cotton- or linen-based as well as canvas, and shortages occurred because of the regular Army’s rival demands – to say nothing of the Navy’s. (By 1918 30,009 miles of flannelette had been produced as pull-throughs for cleaning rifles: enough to girdle the Earth with another 6,000 miles to spare.) There also seemed no limit to the amount of canvas needed for the millions of tents and awnings and haversacks, as well as enough webbing to reach to the moon – quite apart from the acres of canvas required for the RFC’s Bessonneau hangars.

  There were even pressing health issues to take into account. Once the frames of the aircraft’s fuselage and flying surfaces were covered with fabric they were varnished with dope. This waterproofed and preserved them while at the same time the tautening effect added to the strength of the whole. A factory’s doping area needed to be kept warm at around 20°C because the fabric was very susceptible to damp and mildew. Six coats of dope were applied, each being allowed to dry thoroughly before the next. The dope itself was a syrupy, colourless liquid consisting of cellulose dissolved in acetone, benzene and tetrachloroethane, and had a pungent smell vaguely reminiscent of chloroform. It remained extremely flammable even when long dried on an aircraft in service, where it added materially to the fire hazard so feared by aircrew. In the warm atmosphere dope vapour had a dizzying effect on the workers involved. These were usually women and they frequently needed to stumble outside into fresh air to recover.

  Far worse, the vapour slowly poisoned them. Once the war began and production increased, so did the number of aero industry workers reporting ill with nausea, back pain, headaches and jaundice. Several died, and fear and disquiet began to spread among the work force. Late in 1914, as the result of another death at a Hendon factory, Britain’s leading pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was called in. He was already known nationally for giving the forensic evidence that had sent Dr Crippen to the gallows two years earlier. He now set up a classic experiment with rats, exposing some of them to dope and others to just one of dope’s several constituents. After eight days he killed and examined the animals and found that the worst damage, especially to the liver and kidneys, occurred in the rats that had been exposed to tetrachloroethane. Back at the Hendon factory Spilsbury discovered that every one of the workers showed some symptoms of poisoning. He noted that dope fumes were heavier than air and tended to sink, so the air extractor fans mounted high up in the wall were useless. He recommended building separate, properly ventilated sheds exclusively for the doping process, as well as instituting twice-weekly medical examinations for dope workers.

  The real difficulty was that although it only constituted 12 per cent of the dope, tetrachloroethane seemed to be the one vital ingredient. Dope made without it resulted in a much less tight, flexible and durable coating. While chemists searched for a substitute, Bernard Spilsbury’s recommendations had a beneficial effect, if only for bringing the problem to wider recognition. No doubt factories took what precautions they could, but the urgency of the war’s requirements must have taken priority since the reports of illness and occasional death persisted. The phrase ‘toxic jaundice’ became common and was also used in connection with the exposure to TNT dust of ‘munitionettes’, the women workers in munitions factories who, because it turned their skin yellow, were also nicknamed ‘canaries’. ‘Even though women workers wore rubber gloves, mob caps, respirators and leggings and coated their faces with flour and starch to protect them, their skin still turned yellow and there were fifty-two deaths from “toxic jaundice” in 1916 alone.’16 In its 1st July issue of that year, The Lancet noted questions being asked in the House following the dea
ths of two women dope workers. The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, a Mr Brace, replied that ‘The Admiralty and the War Office are developing as fast as they can a non-poisonous dope. They are doing their best.’ A week later he assured the House that a non-poisonous dope would be available ‘within a very short time.’ On 12th August he was pleased to announce that non-toxic dope was now available and in wide use. Also, that notification of cases of toxic jaundice due to tetrachloroethane poisoning was now compulsory. As a footnote to this it would be interesting to know whether the Admiralty and the War Office had pooled their researches to discover a non-toxic dope or if, as so often, they worked separately in an atmosphere of mutual disdain.

  Pemberton Billing was certainly right that a situation where the Army and the Navy competed with one another for Treasury funds and aircraft was ridiculously counter-productive. A good example was the Sopwith Triplane. In June 1916 the company sent its new prototype fighter to France for evaluation. This was a revolutionary aircraft with its three pairs of wings, good pilot’s vision and manoeuvrability that rivalled that of their highly successful Pup. The design of the ‘Tripe’ was so influential it was quickly copied by no fewer than fourteen German and Austro-Hungarian manufacturers, and Richthofen’s red triple-decker Albatros would probably never have existed had it not been for Sopwith’s designers. However, it was the Navy that had a contract with Sopwiths and ordered it for RNAS squadrons, later cannily exchanging their old French SPADs with the Army for the RFC’s own order of ‘Tripes’. Thus it was that every one of the best new fighters wound up with the RNAS and the type never did see service with the RFC.

  All things considered, then, it is a pity that Pemberton Billing and Charles Grey should have mounted so many ad hominem attacks on the wretched Mervyn O’Gorman when they would have done better to concentrate on the continuing failure of the military and the government to organise a properly unified air service. In fact, in April 1916 the far-sighted PB published an outline of his own for what he called an Imperial Air Service (a memorandum of which he sent to the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith) that in many respects bore a considerable resemblance to the plan that was adopted for the Royal Air Force when it was finally created by amalgamating the RFC and RNAS two years later.

  These days Noel Pemberton Billing’s reputation has to some extent been made hostage to the more lurid episodes in his wartime career as an MP. He once had to be carried bodily out of the House of Commons on the Speaker’s orders, and he had a bout of fisticuffs with a fellow MP, Lieutenant-Colonel Archer-Shee, that Punch gleefully described. ‘Palace Yard was the scene of the combat, which ended in Archer downing Pemberton and Billing sitting on Shee. Then the police arrived and swept up the hyphens.’17 Most notorious of all was PB’s claim that an unnamed German prince had a ‘black book’ containing the names of 47,000 British homosexuals of both sexes (reaching, as always, to ‘the very top of society’ – not to mention government, since veiled gossip hinted that Asquith’s wife Margot was a lesbian). PB’s allegations in print resulted in a libel suit at the Old Bailey in which he defended himself and against all odds won. This earned him considerable popular acclaim. As the war dragged on in an apparently endless stalemate an increasingly fractious public was casting about for scapegoats, and it was easy for such papers as Horatio Bottomley’s jingoistic rag John Bull to whip up paranoia about Germans blackmailing ‘sodomites’ into spying for them. (Barely forty years later a similar moral panic would surface in the Cold War, although this time it was Soviet Russia that was ‘turning’ homosexuals to spy for it.)

  As a result of such escapades, PB is generally written off as a publicity-seeking crackpot. It is a vanishingly rare MP who shuns the limelight and PB undoubtedly courted it better than most, zealously and effectively. However, though often foolish, he was not stupid. In 1916 in the wake of the early Zeppelin bombings he published a book called The Air War: How to Wage It in which there was a section entitled ‘The Protection of England. A Dream that MUST Come True’. This included a vision of how the country might be defended against aerial attack and invasion. He foresaw an operations room with one wall entirely covered by a map of Britain on glass divided into squares, with a smaller replica on a large table. The country was divided into sectors, all of which were linked to the room by telegraph and telephone. A reported sighting of enemy aircraft from any of them instantly lit up that sector on the wall and table maps. In addition to spotters on the ground was a network of 500 listening posts: wooden towers with large cones attached to microphones for detecting the sound of aero engines (a technique that was already in use by both Britain and Germany). In a way this was an almost uncanny foreshadowing of the Chain Home defence system eventually built in the 1930s with PB’s acoustic ‘ears’ replaced by the new technology of radar. His visualised ‘ops room’ was also remarkably similar to that of the future Bentley Priory, the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command from where Britain’s Second World War air defences would be directed.

  Whatever else, PB did act as both lightning rod and stimulus for growing public dissatisfaction with the war’s conduct as well as impatience with politicians’ inability to break the apparent stalemate that was costing the country, and the rest of Europe, a fortune in blood and treasure (as he frequently put it). Indeed, by 1916 the war was costing Britain £5 million a day – something like £215 million at today’s values. He was unquestionably right to keep on pointing out the absurdity and inefficiency of having the Army and Navy run competing air services, and for this reason it is perhaps not far-fetched to argue that he played a small but vociferous part in ensuring the RAF was finally created when it was, on 1st April 1918, rather than after the war was over. It is true that both the French and German armies, faced with much the same problem, also managed to create independent air forces before the war’s end. Doubtless they had Pemberton Billings of their own: civilian public figures desperately trying to instil a little reason into the military and political maladministration of an insane war.

  At any rate the inflammatory rhetoric in Westminster and the press had its effect. Together with the military impasse in France and the failure of the British authorities at home to make provision to counter the German air raids, it helped unseat Asquith as Prime Minister and install Lloyd George in December 1916. The new coalition government at once put the Ministry of Munitions in charge of the aircraft industry and made the new Air Board responsible for allocating resources. From 1917 onwards British aircraft improved markedly in both quality and quantity – and this despite 281,600 working days being lost that year to strikes. The number of different types of aircraft was cut from fifty-three to thirty, a process of rationalisation that continued until the war’s end. (It was much needed. In four years of war the Sopwith Aviation Co. alone produced some thirty different types.) By the time of the Armistice the British aircraft industry had 347,112 employees and in that final year of war it produced over 30,000 aircraft. In a little over four years and after a very poor beginning it had become the world’s biggest aircraft industry.18,19

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  The sheer proliferation of early aircraft shapes and types that Britain flew in the first air war is examined in the following chapter. This variety can be construed as partly the result of administrative disorganisation. But even more, it was a product of the still experimental nature of flying itself, when ‘suck it and see’ designs and piloting techniques were often improvised with more optimism than understanding of aerodynamics. Merely getting airborne could be hazardous enough; staying there was by no means guaranteed. Powered flight using wings rather than gasbags to stay aloft took place in a realm that was new to Homo sapiens, who was obliged to deduce its laws from scratch the hard way.

  1* For an explanation of this classification system see the Note on p.319

  2* In the following year, 1917, nearly 800 pilots would be killed in the UK in training accidents alone.

  2

  Why Biplanes?

  It happened
during the spring of 1914, at one of the famous Hendon Saturday afternoons. A very strong, gusty wind was blowing… The first machine to be brought out was an 80 h.p. Morane monoplane piloted by Philippe Marty, a Frenchman, who asked me whether I would like to accompany him as his passenger. With the enthusiasm of youth, I agreed to do so.

  Marty taxied out to the far side of the aerodrome in order to take off into the wind; but the machine left the ground all too quickly, with the result that a strong gust lifted us up about forty feet in the air and then left us in a stalled attitude, with practically no forward speed. The machine staggered for an ominous moment and then stalled.

  I have never forgotten the horrible sensations of the next few seconds, and I don’t suppose I ever shall. The left wing seemed to drop out of sight, and I saw the right wing sweep round the sky above us like a sort of windmill vane. Then the roar of the engine stopped.

  I thanked heaven that Marty had switched off in time, for a second later the Morane’s nose hit the ground with a bang and a crash, just as she had settled into the position of a vertical nose-dive. As she cartwheeled over on to her back I ducked well down inside the fuselage, and there we were – upside down, unable to move an inch and fairly soaked with petrol from the burst tank.