The First Great Air War Read online

  THE FIRST GREAT AIR WAR

  Richard Townshend Bickers

  © Richard Townshend Bickers 1988

  Richard Townshend Bickers has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1988 by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd.

  This edition published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2014.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  CHAPTER 1 - Going to War

  CHAPTER 2 - Origins

  CHAPTER 3 - The Build-Up

  CHAPTER 4 - 1914. At the Front

  CHAPTER 5 – 1915. Warming Up

  CHAPTER 6 - 1915. In Action

  CHAPTER 7 - 1915. Gird Up Now, Thy Loins Like a Man

  CHAPTER 8 - 1915. The Slaughter Starts

  CHAPTER 9 - 1916. The Very Dead of Winter

  CHAPTER 10 - 1916. A Hard Life

  CHAPTER 11 - 1916. The Crucible

  CHAPTER 12 - 1916. Beyond the Somme

  CHAPTER 13 - 1917. The Climacteric

  CHAPTER 14 - 1917. Crisis

  CHAPTER 15 - 1917. The Darkening Days

  CHAPTER 16 - 1917. Equal Poise of Hope and Fear

  CHAPTER 17 - 1917. The Allies Resurgent

  CHAPTER 18 - 1918. Fury in the Firmament

  CHAPTER 19 - 1918. Victory

  Aircraft Performance

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Extract from Fighters Up by Richard Townsend Bickers

  Foreword

  I do not remember the Great War, now called the First World War, but its reverberations are among my oldest memories.

  In early childhood in the 1920s, when Iraq was under British mandate, I lived in Baghdad. Our expatriate community was small and the majority of my parents’ friends were serving officers who had flown in the Royal Flying Corps, later the Royal Air Force, in 1914-18. The aerodrome at Hinaidi became almost as familiar to me as our own garden. There, I saw aeroplanes that had won fame on every Front, going about their peacetime duties.

  I gazed up at them flying over our house. I waved excitedly in response whenever one made a jovial dive across our roof; and once, to my ecstasy, a message pouch attached to a red, yellow and blue streamer was dropped; as though it were a despatch for some infantry company beleaguered in a Flanders salient. Enviously, I watched the fighters at air displays: formation flying, aerobatics (still known as “stunting”), mock combat; and the bombers making dummy attacks on tanks lumbering across the desert. There were Bristol Fighters, Sopwith Snipes and Camels, de Havilland DH9As and the giant Handley Page O/400 with its hundred-foot wingspan.

  People often referred to the RAF as “the RFC”, from old habit. Domestic entertainment in the outposts of empire was still Edwardian, late Victorian, even. Host, hostess and guests provided it musically for themselves. After a dinner party, if there was an impromptu concert around our drawing-room piano, my mother at the keys and leading with her trained contralto, my father adding his fine baritone and other ladies and gentlemen the whole range from soprano to bass, I used to hear, as I lay awake, that “Old King Cole was a merry old soul”, who “called for his fiddlers three”, and there was “none so fair as can compare with the men of the RFC”: “RAF” would not have rhymed.

  Successive Air Officers Commanding were Air Vice Marshals Sir John Salmond and Sir Robert Brooke-Popham — both later Marshals of the Royal Air Force — who, as junior officers, appear in the following pages. Small boys of my generation were taught to shake hands with adults, so I have felt the grip of distinguished hands that had shifted the joysticks of the earliest Service aeroplanes and fired Lewis guns at the enemy.

  When I joined, in the next war, many of those with whom I served had been 1914-18 pilots and observers, and some were flying still. Coaxed to reminisce about their war time experiences in France, Mesopotamia or Italy, they enthralled me. The majority, of course, were workaday aircrew who wore no decorations: although they had survived many dangers, shot down their fair share of the enemy, repeatedly dropped bombs on heavily defended targets, strafed trenches at nought feet in the face of withering machinegun and rifle fire; exactly as their successors were doing in 1939-45.

  But there were also prodigies whose feats I had admired since boyhood: one of whom, Louis Strange, DSO, MC, DFC, added a bar to the last of these in 1940, flying a Hurricane; and was one of the most electrifying personalities I ever knew: only Douglas Bader made the same instant forceful impact. And many of our highest rankers were such as Sholto Douglas, Collishaw and Coningham, who had been dazzling in youth on their squadrons and were brilliant now in command of great air forces.

  Lord Chesterfield, writing to his son in 1748, declared “… there never were, since the creation of the world, two cases exactly parallel; and … there never was a case stated, or even known, by any historian, with every one of its circumstances; which, however, ought to be known in order to be reasoned from … Take into your consideration, if you please, cases seemingly analogous; but take them as helps only, not as guides.”

  His Lordship had never seen action. If he had, he would have known that there are many common factors between one war and another: the appalling din, which stunned soldiers at Waterloo, the Somme and Alamein, sailors at Trafalgar and Jutland, airmen among bursting anti-aircraft shells and the noise of their own guns in an air fight, ground strafe or shipping strike; the reek of cordite; the sizzling streaks of tracer bullets, whether on land, at sea or in the air; the stress and fear, and grief at the loss of comrades. Above all, for airmen, in 1914-18 as in 1939-45, and every subsequent war, is the horror of fire.

  The threat of being burned alive is not unique to aircrew. Tank crews know it and so do ships’ companies. Infantry are menaced by flamethrowers. Civilians are roasted by incendiary bombs. But there are some dangers and some brands of suffering, some attitudes towards the enemy and the job one has to do, to situations, experiences and reactions to these, that are peculiar to those who defy the law of gravity when they go to battle. The affinity between the First and Second World Wars is, in that respect, close.

  The First World War had run two-thirds of its course by the time I was born, but I have had the good fortune to know many brave men who fought in it and to see, in flight and simulated action, some of the aircraft they flew. I have always felt that, although I was not there, I have a fairly accurate idea of what it was like; and of the attitudes and characteristics of those who pioneered aerial warfare. It helps to understand those times and those people, if one has some experience of what war in the air is like and of escaping from a burning aircraft. In my teens I went sometimes to the flying club at Brooklands, the cradle of British aviation. In the late 1940s I knew Netheravon, where the officers’ mess was the same building where Mannock, McCudden, Ball, Rhys-Davids, Hawker and most of the other heroes of the RFC and its offspring, the RAF, had found recreation and rest after strenuous hours of flying the recalcitrant, dangerous aeroplanes of their day. One felt their presence.

  CHAPTER 1 - Going to War

  On a fine spring morning, 1st April 1915, a French pilot flying a two-seater Morane-Saulnier L over Flanders fired seventy-two shots at a two-seater German Albatros and radically transformed the whole lineament of air combat.

  The Great War was eight months old. The Morane had a Hotchkiss machinegun which, for the first time in history, could fire straight ahead between the blades of a spinning propeller. The pilot of the Albatros was armed with an automatic pistol and his observer with a rifle. The Morane was alone. The Albatros was in a formation of four.

  When Lieutenant Roland Garros had emptied three magazines of ammunition there was no need to reloa
d and shoot again. One Albatros was in flames and spinning earthwards. No parachutes were carried then: its occupants, if alive, were trapped.

  The other three Albatroses, their crews aghast at this astounding new phenomenon of a front-engined aeroplane that fired a machinegun through the propeller, and bemused by the swiftness of the killing they had witnessed, did not tarry. They dived as fast and steeply as they could, heading for their aerodrome to report this scourge of the skies that had burst upon the Western Front.

  Suddenly the first eight months of war were relegated to a past that would henceforth seem to have been Arcadian, almost playful, by comparison. At one stroke the life expectancy of every man flying on any battle front henceforth was shortened many-fold.

  Garros was as shocked as the enemy by the cataclysmic spectacle. When he went to see the wreckage the revulsion he felt was a reaction that would be shared by thousands of other victorious pilots in that and every future war.

  In his own words: “It was tragic, frightful. At the end of perhaps twenty-five seconds, which seemed long, of falling, the machine dashed into the ground in a great cloud of smoke. I went by car to see the wreck. Those first on the scene had pilfered souvenirs: sidearms, insignia and the like. I took energetic steps to retrieve them. The two corpses were in a horrible state, naked and bloody. The observer had been shot through the head. The pilot was too horribly mutilated to be examined. The remains of the aeroplane were pierced everywhere with bullet holes.”

  This repugnance at what he had had to do in the line of duty has been expressed by many pilots who have shot down enemy aircraft. It did not noticeably deter any from repeating the performance; nor should it have. There was no hypocrisy there. What they had done was unavoidable. The regret they admitted was matter-of-fact and unsentimental; but it was a sign of the instinctive respect which fighting airmen of all nationalities have shown each other from the outset.

  Garros scored his second victory on 15th April and his third on the morning of the 18th. That afternoon he himself was shot down by ground fire near Courtrai and taken prisoner. His aircraft fell into the hands of the enemy and the secret of how he was able to fire a machinegun through the propeller was revealed.

  After Garros had proved the efficacy of his invention, the French Military Air Service began to modify its tractor aeroplanes to fire through the airscrew, or mounted a machinegun on the upper wing to fire outside the propeller disc. The British emulated them, but slowly. The Germans adopted and improved on Garros’s device. On 20th May, less than five weeks from the day Roland Garros was shot down, there were two Fokkers at the Front equipped with both an interruptor gear that synchronised propeller revolutions with rate of fire, and deflector wedges on the airscrew blades for those rounds which did not pass cleanly between them.

  This radical innovation and the developments it provoked, however, were still in the future when the Royal Flying Corps set off to war. All that preceded it will appear in chronological order. Meanwhile, to put the arrival of the RFC at the Western Front in August 1914 in perspective, the sequence of events to which the present Royal Air Force owes its origin must be set in order.

  *

  When Germany declared war on France on Sunday 4th August 1914, her alleged justification, that an aeroplane of the Aviation Militaire had bombed the railway near Nuremberg and Karlsruhe, was more than a lie; it was the harbinger of a new weapon, a fresh element, a third dimension in warfare.

  The Germany Army invaded Belgium, which Britain, France’s ally, had promised to support. An hour before midnight the British Empire went to war. The British Expeditionary Force prepared to cross the English Channel and embarked six days later.

  The Royal Flying Corps made ready to send all four of its squadrons to the Front, with the Headquarters Unit, and an Aircraft Park that held spare aeroplanes and parts. Sixty-three aeroplanes, rear-engined Henry Farman F20s with a pusher propeller, and front-engined Blériot XIs, BE2s, Avro 504s, and BE8s with a tractor airscrew, which took off from Dover on the 13th and 15th, assembled by the 17th at Maubeuge.

  They appeared out of the summer sky, engines clattering and stinking of castor oil: flimsy structures of wood, canvas and bracing wires; many of them primitive-looking contraptions with a naked fuselage of ribs and spars.

  They had flown across the Channel from Dover to fight the first great air war in history. They landed at varying intervals, according to how well their engines had functioned, how much the wind had affected them, how many forced landings they had made and how accurate their pilots’ navigation. One had crashed in England and killed its pilot and his mechanic.

  France confronted the enemy with twenty-five escadrilles, based at aerodromes across the country from Ostend to Nancy, equipped with a total of 142 aeroplanes: rear-engined two-seater Farman Longhorns, Voisins, Caudrons and Farman F20s; front-engined, single-seater Blériots and Morane-Saulniers. The twenty-one two-seater escadrilles each comprised six machines and were for general Army co-operation. Each of the four single-seater escadrilles, which operated with the cavalry, had four machines.

  Germany sent thirty-three Field Flying Units to the Front. Each consisted of six tractor types. The Taube and Fokker were single-seater monoplanes. The majority, Albatros, LVG, Aviatik, AEG, were two-seater biplanes.

  The disparities between the air forces were typical of divergent national characteristics, but all had recognised reconnaissance as the first function of an air Service: an extension of the cavalry’s business. The British and French had also practised artillery spotting, and one type of aeroplane might have served both purposes. All three countries sought at least to provide for their needs with the smallest possible variety of aeroplanes. The sheer inventiveness of designers, however, had foisted a plethora of choices on both Britain and France. Each also had a military aircraft factory as well as private factories building aeroplanes for the approval of the RFC and l’Aviation Militaire. Naturally the Royal Aircraft Factory and le Service des Fabrications de l’Aéronautique were resentful if their products were not chosen. The Germans had left all their requirements in the hands of civilian manufacturers, who also provided all flying instruction.

  The British had had little success in encouraging the indigenous manufacture of aero engines. Wolseley, Beardmore and Rolls-Royce were the leading makers, but in quantities too small to meet demand; and only the last-named was reliable. The RFC therefore had to depend on the French for Le Rhone, Clerget and Renault engines. The needs of l’Aviation Militaire obviously had priority. In consequence, deliveries to the RFC were slow and the engines often second-hand, reconditioned. Germany enjoyed high-volume production of excellent Mercedes and Benz. The nature of the power units strongly affected the design of airframes. The French built small rotary air-cooled ones, which meant that their aeroplanes had to be light. The Germans’ were heavy in-line water-cooled and suited heavy aeroplanes.

  The Germans had given some attention to mounting machineguns on their machines; and, although the British and French had been experimenting since 1913, neither had made much progress.

  The three air contingents that converged on the Western Front were the precursors of the huge air fleets that would be familiar over Europe a quarter-century in the future.

  But men, not machines, win or lose battles. Those who brought these first frail military contraptions to war were equally the forerunners of a new tradition, a mystique: a fraternity who met their opponents in an entirely new kind of combat and formed with them an empathy, shared a gallantry, that transcended national animosity. They created their own personal brand of conflict, with its private ethos and mores. From the beginning of time men had shown compassion and chivalry in battle on land and sea. This new breed, airmen, created a unique brand of good manners in mortal conflict and of wry, sardonic, understated fortitude that was to distinguish their successors in every war.

  From whatever country had bred them, on whichever side they fought, they brought to their basic task common qualities o
f character: they flew for the sheer love of flying; they relished adventure; they enjoyed risks, and testing themselves and their aircraft to their limits. They were bold and adventurous far above the average.

  Their special characteristics were evinced when Wilbur and Orville Wright took to the air. It imbued the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain; the bomber crews, of whom only one-third survived a tour of thirty operations; the Coastal Command torpedo strike crews, who had a mere seventeen and a half per cent chance of completing their first tour and three per cent of surviving a second. That was the significance of those few aeroplanes’ appearance at the Western Front in 1914.

  The RFC’s arrival was the fruition of only twenty-seven months’ planning, organisation and growth since its birth on 13th May 1912. It was a mere ten years and eight months after man’s first flight in a heavier-than-air flying machine, which had lasted three and a half seconds, covered barely a hundred feet of ground and risen just fifteen feet above it.

  This first overseas campaign by an air force might reasonably be likened to sending an army abroad with rifles, machineguns and shell-firing artillery less than eleven years after the invention of gunpowder; or a fleet of destroyers and cruisers to sea as short a time after the launching of the earliest sailing vessel.

  CHAPTER 2 - Origins

  In France, in 1783, Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier ascended in the world’s first hot-air balloon and covered a mile and a half. The next year, their first hydrogen balloon rose from the centre of Paris and descended fifteen miles deep in the country. On its next sortie, it climbed to 1500 feet.

  Ballooning became a craze which soon spread throughout Europe. It was an Italian, Vincenzo Lunardi, secretary to the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Naples at the Court of St James, who made the first aerial voyage in Britain, when he took a hydrogen balloon of 32-foot diameter up from the Artillery Grounds in London’s Moorgate and landed some twenty miles away, near Ware. The date was 15th September 1784.[1]