Start Reading
About Marked for Death
About James Hamilton-Paterson
Reviews
Also by James Hamilton-Paterson
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
‘Every man who went aloft was marked for death, sooner or later, once his wheels had left the ground.’
—Anthony Fokker
Cover
Welcome Page
Epigraph
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1: Air War and the State
Chapter 2: Why Biplanes?
Chapter 3: Armed to the Teeth
Chapter 4: Combat and Other Missions
Chapter 5: The Making of a Flying Man
Chapter 6: How They Lived
Chapter 7: Aces
Chapter 8: Airmen and Medics
Chapter 9: Parachutes and Fatalism
Chapter 10: Home Defence
Chapter 11: Balkans and Mesopotamia
Chapter 12: Postscript
Picture Section
Endpapers
Chronology of the First Air War
Note on the Classification of Aircraft Types
Glossary
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Endnotes
List of Illustration
Index
About Marked for Death
Reviews
About James Hamilton-Paterson
Also by James Hamilton-Paterson
An Invitation from the Publishers
Copyright
To Chris Royle, with grateful thanks
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 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.
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 civil 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.
*
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 that 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.
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 daring 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
––’Daily Mail‘’‘’’’