‘Every man who went aloft was marked for death, sooner or later, once his wheels had left the ground.’
—Anthony Fokker
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 Air War and the State
2 Why Biplanes?
3 Armed to the Teeth
4 Combat and Other Missions
5 The Making of a Flying Man
6 How they lived
7 Aces
8 Airmen and Medics
9 Parachutes and Fatalism
10 Home Defence
11 Balkans and Mesopotamia
12 Postscript
Chronology of the First Air War
Note on the Classification of Aircraft Types
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Endnotes
List of Illustrations
Illustrations
Index
To Chris Royle, with grateful thanks
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There are several scholarly histories of the Royal Flying Corps and the first war in the air, all of which treat the subject chronologically. I have chosen a less exhaustive approach by means of chapters dealing with aspects that particularly interest me – such as the medical issues of flying, how aircrew were chosen and behaved, and the relationship between the design of early aircraft and the tasks the military increasingly demanded of them. I hope by this means to give a vivid overall sense of the air war, together with its consequences for the aviation age that followed it.
In each of the chapters I have tried to preserve a rough sort of chronology. However, from time to time readers may find it helpful to refer to the Chronology on p.311 that puts some of the aviation milestones into a timeline of events on the wider battlefield in Europe and beyond.
This book does not pretend to be any sort of comprehensive survey of the hundreds of different aircraft types the various combatants flew during the war. This has already been admirably done in the specialist literature.
INTRODUCTION
SCARCELY TEN YEARS after powered aircraft had first left the ground they were pressed into service in the First World War, which consequently also became the world’s first-ever air war. Seen from a purely military point of view, aviation in that vast conflict was little more than a highly visible sideshow. Historians generally agree that it had limited influence on the war’s outcome, even though by the end it was clearly going to change the nature of warfare and ensure its own future. Air power developed to have a decisive strategic function in the Second World War and thereafter was destined to reign supreme down to the present day, when air dominance above a conflict is considered essential.
Out of the 65 million men mobilised between 1914 and 1918 by the Allies and the Central Powers combined, it is now generally estimated that some 9 million were killed outright and 21 million wounded. Even allowing for the first-ever air war’s restricted dimensions, the toll it took of flying men was minuscule compared to that of the trenches. Nearly lost in the overall statistics are the 6,994 British and Empire aircrew who were casualties on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 – a figure that includes those killed, wounded, or missing in action.1 Such statistics are contentious and often vary wildly from source to source, but comparable figures would presumably be true for France and Germany. In all, it is estimated that some 50,000 aircrew died in all the various nations’ fledgling air forces – a total that includes many thousands killed in training and accidents. Assuming this to be roughly accurate, it still represents little more than a half of 1 per cent of the war’s total combatant deaths. Nevertheless, airmen shared with the infantry an identical 70 per cent chance of injury or death.2 Flying was an extremely hazardous affair in the First World War.
The grip aviation held on the public’s imagination at the time was remarkable. This was partly because flying itself was still a novelty and widely seen as daring and glamorous, and partly because most people understood – and still understand – so little about it and how it was used in the war. Newspaper coverage at the time did much to promote this ignorance by tending to concentrate on the air ‘aces’, whereby a handful of particularly successful combat pilots were singled out for propaganda purposes to become bemedalled national heroes. This system was clearly an instinctive response to the wholesale slaughter of the infantry battles. It promoted publicly visible examples of individual heroism, gallantry and self-sacrifice. But it also promoted a myth that has endured to the present day. The impression took hold that pilots in the air above the trenches were conducting a throwback to a ‘cleaner’ sort of war: gladiatorial, personal, even romantic. This careful skewing of reality has made it easy for later generations to retain a very limited and trivialised version of the first war in the air and, indeed, to misunderstand its significance ever since.
The example of Manfred von Richthofen, the war’s top-scoring fighter ace (with a tally of eighty victims of whom fifty-four were downed in flames), offers a case in point. Until the last months before the Armistice no airman other than observation balloon crews wore a parachute in the First World War, and fire was the chief nightmare that haunted them awake and asleep. During his pre-eminence Richthofen became known as ‘The Red Baron’ partly because he actually was a baron and partly from his later affectation of flying an all-red aircraft. In recent decades this nickname has been appropriated for films, a pizza chain and a motorbike franchise, as well as for arcade and video games (one internet advertisement reads ‘Fly your biplane in air battles of the First World War and defeat the Red Baron . . .!’). The jokey title of Britain’s early seventies TV comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus was also a direct reference to the nickname given to the ‘Jasta’ formations in which Richthofen flew. Probably the most extreme example of this stone-cold killer being tamed into a cuddly fantasy is afforded by the comic-strip dog Snoopy, who now and then sits atop his kennel pretending to fight the Red Baron, wearing a leather flying helmet and goggles with a scarf blowing behind him in an imaginary slipstream. There are even stuffed toys of Snoopy in this guise. This is surely one of the strangest trajectories in all contemporary myth, stretching as it does directly from a modern child’s bedroom back to a war in which many a nineteen-year-old victim of Richthofen, his flying gear soaked in petrol, fell wrapped in flame from 8,000 feet, trailing smoke and screaming for the thirty-odd seconds it took him to hit the ground. Richthofen once observed: ‘When I have shot down an Englishman my passion for the hunt is satisfied for fifteen minutes.’
A similar conversion of the horror and agony of aerial warfare into near-jocularity can be followed in what happened in Britain to the fictional character of ‘Biggles’ or Major james Bigglesworth, RFC, the creation of W. E. Johns. Having served in the trenches on two fronts, Gallipoli and Salonika, Johns retrained as a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps and by 1918 was in France flying two-seater Airco (de Havilland) 4 bombers with 55 Squadron out of Azelot, near Nancy. In D.H.4s the main fuel tank was between the two cockpits and very likely to be hit by an attacker aiming for either the pilot or the observer. On 16th September 2nd Lieutenant Johns and his observer, 2nd Lieutenant A. E. Amey, were shot down over the German lines. By some miracle the machine did not catch fire even though, as Johns described it later, it was trailing a grey plume of petrol vapour and ‘my cockpit was swimming in the stuff’.3 Amey was killed in the attack. Johns crash-landed in a belt of trees and was knocked unconscious. On coming round he was told by his captors he was to be executed: his aircraft had been mis-identified as one that had bombed a village Sunday School some days earlier, killing many children. He was saved from death only by the timely intervention of the pilots who had shot him down and he was harshly interned for the remaining months of the war.
In early 1932 Johns became the editor of a new monthly magazine, Popular Flying. For its April edition he published his first story featuring the fictional Biggles in order to tell British readers what war flying was really like, drawing on his own experiences in the Army, the RFC and the RAF. He did this partly to offset the absurdly US-centric accounts of the air war in imported American pulp magazines, and partly as a corrective to what he saw as Europe’s gradual slide towards another war facilitated by mythologised memories of the previous one. Johns’s hard-hitting editorials warning the government of Britain’s unpreparedness for air war and Nazi Germany’s ever-expanding Luftwaffe were eagerly and widely read, although little welcomed in Whitehall.
From the start Popular Flying was a great success and Johns wrote sundry more stories about Biggles that became a feature in themselves. Almost from the first they attracted the attention of a children’s editor who spotted Biggles’s potential as a pilot hero of boys’ adventure fiction, and Johns duly became a children’s author even as he went on writing editorials and technical articles about aviation for his magazine. Given the period, Johns’s hero was remarkably un-jingoistic. Biggles consistently condemned war, was often cynical about authority and officialdom, and was not chauvinistic about the enemy pilots he flew against unless they had first earned his moral condemnation. This was probably a fair rendering of attitudes that prevailed among airmen, who by 1918 were frequently nihilistic and sometimes downright mutinous. One early story for Popular Flying had Biggles suffering from burnout and combat fatigue, often close to tears and hitting the whisky bottle before flying on early morning patrols. The description fits exactly with many non-fiction accounts (including those by squadron medical officers), and the spectacle would have been all too familiar to Johns and his contemporaries in a front-line squadron. When the story was republished in book form the publisher wanted the whisky removed. Heroes in boys’ stories were not allowed to have a drink problem, no matter how shattered their nerves. Johns refused, although he did judiciously suppress some of the other details of life on the front such as airmen’s swearing, whoring and gruesome injuries. Even so, this is hardly a description of a conventional storybook role model:
a slight, fair-haired, good-looking lad still in his teens but an acting flight commander. His deep-set hazel eyes were never still and held a glint of yellow fire that somehow seemed out of place in a pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines. His hands, small and delicate as a girl’s, fidgeted continually with the tunic fastening at his throat. He had killed a man not six hours before. He had killed six men during the past month – or was it a year? – he had forgotten. Time had become curiously telescoped lately. What did it matter, anyway? He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it. His careless attitude suggested complete indifference, but the irritating little falsetto laugh which continually punctuated his tale betrayed the frayed condition of his nerves.4
Johns’s realistic flying sequences – especially those of combat – were left as they were and remained the stories’ centerpiece. To judge from other ex-pilots’ accounts and reminiscences, they were entirely accurate. Years later, several pilots who flew in the Second World War wrote gratefully to him claiming they were still alive because they had read his stories and had survived by using some of the tricks of air combat their author had himself learned the hard way and had passed on to Biggles.5 Even so, Johns must inevitably stand accused of having played his part in romanticising the first war in the air: Biggles and his pals did manage to down an awful lot of Huns with remarkably little damage to themselves. Such are the conventions of juvenile fiction. But there is a difference between romanticising and blithe falsification, of which Johns was never guilty, except perhaps in harmlessly affecting for himself as an author the army rank of captain, whereas at the war’s end he had actually left the RAF as Pilot Officer Johns (the rank given those who had been 2nd lieutenants in the RFC). Otherwise, in matters that were all-important to him such as war and flying, Johns was firmly on the side of truth.
At the polar opposite, it is difficult to imagine a less accurate rendering of the First World War generally than that portrayed in Blackadder Goes Forth (1989), the final six episodes of the BBC’s hugely popular TV comedy series. In particular, the fourth episode with Rik Mayall as Lord Flashheart and Adrian Edmondson as Baron von Richthoven [sic] is grotesque in its caricature of the airmen of the RFC and the Luftstreitkräfte. Apart from the fatuous antics of all concerned, Captain Blackadder is seen already sporting his RFC ‘wings’ on his uniform even before his first day of training; and immediately afterwards he is shown impossibly piloting his ‘observer’, Private Baldrick, in a single-seat S.E.5a fighter. Maybe this pantomime version of war would scarcely matter were it not now apparently taken as having some historical accuracy by those paid to know better. In October 2013 the BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman told the Cheltenham Literary Festival that some schoolteachers were showing their pupils episodes of Blackadder Goes Forth as an aid to teaching the First World War. If true, it does explain how some young Britons are encouraged to fall giggling ever further down the international rankings of the uneducated.
Maybe where flying is concerned the more recent Second World War, with its own heavily mythologised aerial warfare (the Battle of Britain, the ‘Dam Busters’, the Blitz, Pearl Harbor and the Allies’ saturation bombing campaign in Germany) has supplanted the previous war by retaining a degree of seriousness. Certainly at the level of popular culture Biggles and his comrades have long since acquired a faintly risible aura, a shorthand for outdated public school chaps indulging in derring-do in antiquated biplanes. If the aircraft themselves earn indulgent smiles it is perhaps because people conflate them to some extent with their earlier counterparts in the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. Although this internationally popular British comedy was supposedly set in 1910 and concerned a wholly fictitious air race from London to Paris to prove Britain was ‘number one in the air’ (very far from the truth, as we shall see), it probably did much to embed an association in the popular imagination between early aviation and comedy. To that extent it was the airborne counterpart to the 1953 film Genevieve, an equally farcical story about the London to Brighton veteran car run. To audiences in the new supersonic Jet Age, machines from the dawn of the internal combustion era were deemed funny in themselves. Those spruce, wire and fabric flying contraptions were ‘wonderful’ but a joke, too, as they puttered about the sky; and so by extension were ‘the intrepid bird-men’ who flew them. The film’s jaunty Ron Goodwin title song and Ronald Searle posters merely set the seal on this image. There is even a brief cross-reference in the script of the Blackadder episode to the 1965 film’s song. For ever after, this merry fantasy has somehow preserved itself untouched by the grim daily realities of early and wartime flying: of men falling to their deaths through a mile of air because their aircraft had without warning shed a wing at 5,000 feet, or of a pilot blinded by the entrails of his front seat observer who’d been cut in half by shrapnel.
The first use of aircraft in war arguably represented the steepest learning curve of any innovation in the history of warfare because it was constantly accelerated by technological advances. In 1914 little of aerodynamics was well understood. Engines were generally so weak and weight so crucial that a pilot could reduce his chances of getting off the ground in time to clear the trees at the edge of the field simply by donning a heavy sheepskin flying coat. Maximum speeds of fifty or sixty miles an hour were the norm, and in a strong enough headwind it was quite common for an aircraft to fly backwards relative to the ground. A mere four years later many fighters could reach more than 200 mph in a dive and altitudes of well over 20,000 feet. They could also be thrown about the sky with g-forces that would have reduced earlier models to instant matchwood. Indeed, the chief strain was increasingly on the humans who flew them, and medical understanding lagged behind the technology, particularly where the effects of altitude, disorientation and g-forces were concerned.
It is perhaps not so strange that when war broke out across Europe in the summer of 1914 none of the armies involved had given much thought to aerial combat as such, although it was widely recognised that aeroplanes had potential for observation. It was, of course, hardly news to the military anywhere that an army’s ability to ‘see over the hill’ could be decisive. In fact the history of airborne observation already stretched back well over a century. In 1794 the newly formed French Compagnie d’Aérostiers had used a balloon for observation at the Battle of Fleurus, when two officers remained aloft in their basket with a telescope for nine hours, dropping notes about the Austrian Army’s movements that greatly aided a French victory. Seventy years later balloons were similarly used in the American Civil War; and towards the end of the nineteenth century the British Army in South Africa employed them extensively during the Boer War. But it was generally agreed by the military everywhere that tethered balloons were bulky and inconvenient to deploy in a mobile campaign, dependent on large supplies of hydrogen gas as well as highly vulnerable to wind and weather.
It was therefore possible to see the far more manoeuvrable and independent aeroplane as being potentially useful for spying on enemy movements and maybe even for helping an artillery battery to get its shells on target. But despite H. G. Wells’s prophetic 1908 novel The War in the Air, the idea of aircraft actually fighting each other remained for a while the stuff of fiction. Most existing aircraft could scarcely lift the extra deadweight of a gun and ammunition, and still less could they safely perform much in the way of evasive manoeuvres. But it was not only their physical limitations in the air that needed to be overcome. Resistance on the ground was also considerable. In 1914 there was no independent air force anywhere. Whatever military air arm did exist was part of a country’s army or navy and very firmly under its control. Since armies everywhere tend to be conservative in outlook, high commands mostly viewed the new airborne machines with the deepest scepticism and even disgust.
In 1911 Field Marshal Sir William Nicholson, the Chief of Imperial General Staff, who had taken a few cautious steps to reorganise the British Army after the humiliations of the Boer War, delivered a withering verdict on the subject: ‘Aviation is a useless and expensive fad advocated by a few individuals whose ideas are unworthy of attention.’ That same year Sir Douglas Haig confidently asserted that ‘Flying can never be of any use to the Army.’ He may have regretted this dictum the following year when he was soundly beaten in manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain by Lieutenant-General Sir James Grierson, who had made extensive and intelligent use of reconnaissance aircraft. If so, there was little sign of repentance when Haig addressed his officers in 1914: ‘I hope none of you gentlemen is so foolish as to think that aeroplanes will be able to be usefully employed for reconnaissance purposes in the air. There is only one way for a commander to get information by reconnaissance, and that is by the use of cavalry.’6 Four years later he was relying heavily on air support as he began the Battle of Amiens.
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
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 tide 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.
CHAPTER 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 warshipbuilding, 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 ...
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