Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (82 page)

At first, the unfamiliarity of aircraft caused innocents on the ground merely to marvel when they appeared in the sky. In Belgium, Britain’s Sister Mayne thought Taubes looked like ‘beautiful little birds’. But soon soldiers and civilians alike understood that flying machines posed a direct threat to their welfare, and contrived their destruction when they could. Late on the afternoon of 6 August, the citizens of Freiburg were shocked by the spectacle of two French aircraft flying above their city, having sailed serenely over the Kaiser’s frontier and his armies. Some affronted citizens fired sporting guns skywards, as did those soldiers on guard duty who had been issued with ammunition. Frankfurt’s militia likewise opened a brisk fusillade at clouds in which, so they were told, French aircraft were hiding.

Austrian Dr Richard Stenitzer, besieged in Przemyśl, took exception to the intrusions of airborne Russians: ‘It is a strange unpleasant feeling if an aeroplane appears above oneself high in the skies. You get the impression it tracks you personally although it is not able to distinguish individuals because of its height of 2,000 metres.’ Though planes of different nationalities were soon marked with distinguishing symbols – a German cross, a tricolour cockade and suchlike – these were usually invisible from the ground. French soldier François Mayer wrote: ‘when any aircraft passes overhead, we bury our heads like ostriches’. On 27 October at Ypres, every rifleman in the Black Watch emptied his magazine at an overhead aircraft, then cheered wildly when it burst into flames and tumbled to earth; better-informed witnesses found this ‘a dreadful sight, as we … realized it was British’. Austrian Lt. Constantin Schneider described the sensation created by the appearance of the first aircraft over his division in Galicia: there was a barrage of musketry which officers had difficulty in suppressing, even when they saw that it was one of their own. Three Austrian planes were brought down by friendly fire in the first days of the campaign.

The public became fascinated by the new art of aerial warfare. Herbert Asquith, displaying the wonder of a Victorian, referred to the revolutionary machines as hyphenated ‘aero-planes’. Pilots, initially armed only with
revolvers or rifles, became national heroes: their voyages into the sky empowered them to rise above the squalor of the battlefield figuratively as well as literally. They appeared to resurrect the glories of personal endeavour in a repugnant new era of industrialised slaughter. Twenty-seven-year-old Pyotr Nesterov, a famous Russian pioneer aviator and the first man to loop the loop, was at the controls of a Morane-Saulnier monoplane over Poland on 25 August when he encountered an Austrian Albatros BII biplane, flown by pilot Fritz Malina and observer Baron Friedrich von Rosenthal. Having emptied his revolver at them without effect, Nesterov resorted to ramming, which brought down the enemy plane. Unfortunately his own Morane was severely damaged in the collision, and followed the German machine down; next day Nesterov died of his injuries. His funeral, in Kiev cathedral, became a major public occasion: the coffin was adorned with his leather helmet and the catafalque was almost submerged in flowers, some brought from the field in which his plane had come down. Nesterov’s conduct reflected the suicidally undisciplined ethos of the Russian air service, which had by far the worst accident rate of any combatant, because of its insistence on sending almost untrained pilots into the air.

Maurice Baring, an RFC staff officer, waxed lyrical at the beauties of autumn at a French airfield among young British fliers, despite the incongruities of the ground headquarters in which he served: ‘I remember the clicking of the typewriters in our little improvised office, and a soldier singing “Abide With Me” at the top of his voice in the kitchen. And the beauty of the Henry Farmans sailing through the clear evening, “the evening hush broken by homing wings”, and the moonlight rising over the stubble of the aerodrome, and a few camp fires glowing in the mist amid the noise of the men singing songs of home.’

A significant consequence of the war’s early campaigns was to cause every nation’s commanders to recognise the importance and potential of their air arms. Joffre, impressed by the contribution of aerial reconnaissance to his victory on the Marne, demanded an expansion of the
Aviation Militaire
to sixty-five squadrons. By October French orders had been placed for 2,300 aircraft and 3,400 engines, and other nations were thinking equally ambitiously. Kitchener was told of a plan to give the RFC thirty squadrons, and growled laconically, ‘Make it sixty!’ All the air forces had too many different types of aircraft, which created severe difficulties for training, maintenance and spares. The French were the first to categorise their squadrons explicitly into fighter, bomber and reconnaissance types.
As early as September, the RFC began to experiment with taking primitive radio sets into the air, to signal to the artillery.

Soldiers, increasingly conscious of their own predicament as prisoners of an unlovely ground environment, readily succumbed to enthusiasm for the exploits of their comrades in the sky. Everything to do with aircraft seemed worthy of awe: on 17 September Belgian Charles Stein’s entire battalion was given the afternoon off, in the manner of a successful school football team, for shooting down a German plane of which the crew were made prisoners. Capt. Robert Harker of the BEF wrote with unashamed wonder in November: ‘I have had some talks with men and officers in the Flying Corps here and it is most interesting. One of them told me that he had been fired on for half an hour at a time and felt like a driven pheasant – he says that [guns aimed at] aeroplanes can shoot up very high and accurately. He says one minute you may be watching a great battle and within an hour be having a good meal in some peaceful place right away as aeroplanes can move about so quickly.’

Caroll Dana Winslow, an American who trained as a pilot at the French flight school at Pau, identified three categories of airman: gentlemen; pre-war aviators and mechanics with specialist qualifications; and civilian chauffeurs and mechanics, admitted to the aristocracy of the air because they were thought to have relevant expertise. Almost all the best pilots were aged between twenty and thirty; those younger were dangerously immature, while older men proved too cautious, their reflexes slowing. Every nation found itself struggling hastily to train riggers, fitters and mechanics to service and repair machines constructed of canvas, wire and plywood. Many French ground crews were recruited from Indochina – these were known as ‘
les Annamites
’.

All fliers were volunteers, and a growing number of army officers offered their services: some to escape from the trenches; others because as cavalrymen they now had little fighting to do; others again because wounds had incapacitated them for ground duties. All soon learned that flying was no less perilous than soldiering: far more airmen perished in accidents than from enemy action. Twelve-year-old Elfriede Kuhr witnessed two crashes a day at her local training airfield at Schneidemühl, and wrote fatalistically in her diary about the pilots: ‘When they make their first solo flight they are often nervous, and then an accident happens.’

Fliers had a one-in-four chance of surviving a crash, and none were equipped with parachutes. Everything had to be learned by experience: the perils posed at low altitude by telegraph wires and the cables of captive
observation balloons; the case for unbuckling seat straps before a crash, because the risk of breaking one’s neck on being thrown clear seemed less than that of being crushed by the engine in a wreck; the menace of clouds, which could hide hostile machines. Gas-filled airships were soon restricted to night operations in the immediate battle zone, because of their vulnerability to both sides’ ground fire – French troops repeatedly shot down their own dirigibles. Airships proved useful in the dark, because neither side had yet accepted the necessity to black out military installations behind the front.

One November morning in Hamburg, little Ingeborg Treplin announced, ‘When I grow up I’ll march far away to war!’ Her mother asked, ‘Well, what would you do there?’ ‘Shoot sailors and Zeppelins.’ Frau Treplin was ‘a little bit shocked’, and pleaded in favour of sparing Zeppelins. ‘Yes, not our Zeppelins’ – the child had seen one over Hamburg a few days earlier – ‘but if it comes from France then it will drop bombs on my head.’ Her mother exclaimed, ‘What such a small child picks up!’ Her husband answered that letter by saying: ‘the war should not last long enough for our daughters to grow up … to shoot Zeppelins. The reason we are now over here is to finish this conflict in such a way that none of our daughters have to experience war again!’

Unfortunately for Dr Treplin’s hopes, energetic efforts were already under way to advance the primitive art of aerial bombardment, which made possible assaults on targets in an enemy’s country far beyond any battlefield. There had been several pre-war experiments – France’s Michelin Aero Club held a bombing competition. Rudolf Martin, an early German evangelist for bombardment from the air, argued in 1908 that Zeppelins and aircraft could destroy Britain’s island security, and ‘soften it up’ for an invasion: eighty Zeppelins, he pointed out, could be built for the same cost as a single dreadnought. Germany’s industrial capacity made it possible to build 100,000 aircraft, each of which could carry two infantrymen to England by night in no more than half an hour. Martin believed that a great German air fleet could become a decisive strategic deterrent to his nation’s enemies. Like many prophets, he correctly grasped the importance of the new technology, but underrated – by more than a generation – the time-lag before it would attain maturity, along with the destructive power to fulfil his battlefield expectations.

Germany started aerial bombing trials in 1910, though two years later a report described results as ‘very bad’, even from a height as low as three hundred feet. In 1914 a secret bomber squadron was created, under the
cover-name of
Brieftaubenabteilung Ostende
– the ‘Ostend carrier-pigeon unit’. This was disbanded because it proved unable to hit anything, but the experience of war dramatically accelerated the development of both aircraft and bombing techniques. On 18 September, an RFC officer named Maj. Musgrove conducted the first British experiment on dropping a bomb from his aircraft. ‘It exploded,’ noted an observer laconically, ‘but not exactly where nor how it was expected to.’ Three weeks later a German plane dropped the inaugural bomb to land on an RFC field – without effect. In December the Russians formed a squadron of Ilya Muromets, the world’s first four-engined bombers, which regularly if ineffectually attacked German and Austrian positions.

By the winter of 1914, all the belligerents save the British had staged at least modest raids on each other’s accessible cities; the battlefield use of aircraft to spot targets for artillery was also being urgently explored. During the ensuing four years, radio-controlled aerial direction of gunnery would become one of the most important tactical innovations of the conflict. The Germans helped their enemies to celebrate Christmas Eve by mounting the first air attack on British soil – a biplane dropped a small bomb on Dover. This did no harm, but the auguries were plain: a new kind of campaign against civilian populations had become possible, and no moral scruples would impede its prosecution as soon as means permitted. Next day – Christmas – the Royal Naval Air Service launched a seaplane raid against reported new Zeppelin sheds near Cuxhaven. The raid was wholly abortive, and three aircraft had to be abandoned at sea on their return to the fleet. But Erskine Childers, who flew as an observer in one machine, wrote exultantly: ‘We are fortunate to have witnessed this remarkable event which is but a foretaste of a complete revolution in warfare.’ In 1914–18, what airmen could see beneath them of the enemy’s movements proved much more important than the destruction they could inflict. But little more than a decade after man’s first powered flight, the blitz era was already at hand.

15

Ypres: ‘Something that was Completely Hopeless’

In Belgium in mid-October, even as King Albert’s soldiers were falling back from Antwerp, further west allied and German forces surged and milled in open country, hampered by chronic uncertainty about each other’s movements. Joffre had been uneasy about accepting Sir John French’s demand to move his contingent to the allied left flank: if a new strategic crisis erupted, proximity to the sea might encourage the British to scuttle home, as their C-in-C had been eager to do in August. But there was little chance they would achieve any big advance on the Aisne, whereas in the north-east their strong cavalry could make itself useful. It would be much easier to supply the BEF from England through the Channel ports. Thus, Joffre acceded to the shift of front. Britain’s continental army spent the second week of October in transit towards Flanders. The infantry travelled by train, while the cavalry enjoyed a leisurely week-long ride through Picardy in balmy autumn weather, halting in hospitable French villages. Those who survived the year afterwards recalled this as a last brush with relative comfort and happiness before the shades closed in upon them.

On the 13th, the Germans marched into Lille, singing ‘
Die Wacht am Rhein
’ accompanied by their regimental bands, and bewildered to find trams clattering along the streets beside their columns. Joffre afterwards nursed a grievance about losing the great industrial city: he claimed that if the railway system had not been committed to shifting the British to suit their own convenience, French reinforcements might have reached and held Lille. This is implausible, however, and the BEF arrived in the north just in time to play a critical role, though its C-in-C had no inkling about the nature of this. Experiencing one of his spasms of optimism, Sir John persuaded himself that the Germans were weak in north-west Belgium. He thought that the three corps he now mustered might make a rapid advance, capturing Bruges then pushing for Ghent.

As well as delusions, there was a new epidemic of rumours. One of French’s divisional commanders, Charles Monro, who might have been expected to know better, asserted confidently: ‘large Russian reinforcements are on their way and have already landed in the north of England’. A junior officer, Lionel Tennyson, was somewhat more cautious, writing after a glimpse of a newspaper on 11 October: ‘we heard Antwerp had fallen but that the French and Russians were still gaining victories, a thing we have heard now so often that we are rather beginning to disbelieve it’. But the ebullience displayed by the BEF’s C-in-C was also in evidence among journalists who frequented the Café Napolitain in Paris, a favourite rendezvous for gossip. A
New Statesman
correspondent reported from its terrace: ‘A month ago everyone was grave and preoccupied; today everyone was gay. There [is] victory in the air. I trust we are not giving way to premature optimism, but we cannot help thinking that things are going very well indeed.’