Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (3 page)

But in the years leading up to World War I no one really gave serious thought to armed aircraft. In fact, the U.S. War Department turned the Wright brothers down on three occasions for a military version of their contraption, and the British secretary of war stated in 1910, “We do not consider that aeroplanes will be of any possible use for war purposes.”

No, it was in the fields of reconnaissance and scouting that the first military applications of airpower debuted. But the gradual and peaceful progression of aviation was about to change meteorically. During the brief Italian-Turkish War in Libya, the Italians took several balloons and nine aircraft along for reconnaissance and on November 1, 1911, they claimed the first bombing mission from the air. In 1912 the French used aircraft in Morocco, and several Morane monoplanes were lent to Rumania during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13. Flown by foreigners, these apparently weren’t used offensively; still, the Turks declared that captured airmen would be executed.

IN LATE JUNE
1914, a man pulled out a pistol and shot another man in Sarajevo. Unfortunately for the millions who would subsequently die, the assailant with the pistol was a radical Yugoslav named Gavrilo Princip. He was a member of Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a secret society dedicated to Slavic liberation, and the man assassinated was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg emperor of Austria-Hungary. Though this event is often cited as the
casus belli
, in truth no single event provoked the Great War. Four years later, with 10 million dead and some 20 million scarred for life, certainly no one was thinking about Sarajevo.

The four decades following the 1871 Franco-Prussian War had been known for technological developments and relatively peaceful coexistence. The telegraph, telephone, and railroad expansion brought people together as never before, leading to increased trade, education, and, in some cases, true cultural enlightenment. This long period of peace and prosperity also yielded a population explosion, and between 1850 and 1900 Europe’s population grew more than 50 percent.

One way to control such a surge of young males was through compulsory military service, which became commonplace. Cheap, high-grade steel and weaponry advancements, including bolt action rifles, gas artillery shells, and machine guns, exponentially bolstered the lethality of armies. There was also a groundswell of fervent nationalism to encourage the use of these armies. Europe in 1914 was a collection of fiercely prideful countries with large standing militaries armed with new and exciting weapons—a perfect storm waiting for the spark that came along with Gavrilo Princip and his pistol.

None of the great powers tried too hard to avoid the war, and in fact they had already chosen sides. Britain and France, two imperial powers that had fought each other for centuries, decided in 1904 that cooperation better served their national interests. London wished to deal with Egypt without interference, and Paris wanted to expand in North Africa, specifically Morocco, so the Entente Cordiale was established. Furthermore, the French had become alarmed at Germany’s militancy and figured an alliance with the British was prudent. England had a similar motive, calculating that a large standing French army placed squarely between Germany and the Channel was a wise strategic move.

In response, Germany joined with Austria-Hungary and Italy to form the Triple Alliance. There were minor players, too, which continued to complicate matters. The Ottoman Empire, a moldering, disparate collection of territories, sought German protection against Russia. Tributaries such as Arabia angled for British or French help in gaining their freedom from the Turks, while Egypt and Libya wanted independence from their colonial masters. In short, it was a tangled mess.

Then the dominoes began to fall.

On July 28, 1914, one month to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, the Austro-Hungarians declared war on Serbia. Russia, still smarting from a defeat by Japan and the 1909 loss of Bosnia-Herzegovina, began mobilizing to defend her Slavic “brethren.” Germany retaliated with her own mobilization, belligerently demanding French neutrality and, for good measure, the capitulation of two fortresses on their shared border.

Germany then declared war on Russia, invaded Luxembourg, and demanded the right of transit through neutral Belgium. On August 3, following Paris’s rejection of neutrality and surrender, the Germans declared war on France and invaded Belgium. Britain answered the next day with her own declaration against the Kaiser, and four days later, on August 7, 1914, the first English troops landed in France.

FLYING SIX DIFFERENT
types of motley, unarmed aircraft, four squadrons of the British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) left Dover on August 13 and landed in Amiens, France. Little more than mechanized kites, their canvas wings lacquered with varnish and wired together, these Parasols, Blériots, Avros, and Farmans were leftovers from the post–Kitty Hawk world of experimental aviation. The first RFC casualty in the combat zone occurred on August 16 when 2nd Lt. E. W. C. Perry stalled his plane on takeoff and was killed.

The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was initially given the job of patrolling England’s eastern coastline. However, the Eastchurch Squadron (later No. 3 Squadron, RNAS) was sent to Ostend, Belgium, with a few Blériots, Farmans, and assorted biplanes.

Such was the infancy of the RFC, and the dire need across the Channel, that City of London vans, still advertising Peek Frean biscuits and Lazenby’s Sauce, had to carry the flying equipment, ground personnel, and baggage. Within months there would be more than sixty British aircraft and a hundred pilots in France, supported by eight hundred mechanics.

The early pilots either were self-taught or had completed widely varying courses at civilian flying schools. They knew very little theory, only the most basic flight maneuvers, and certainly no gunnery. Observers were officers who were already expected to know how to read a map, so they were simply tossed in the rear cockpit. Later, if a gun was added, they might be shown how to shoot it and clear a jam, but there was no formal training. In any event, both sides expected a short war and figured they could make do with the personnel they had.

Now, as early as 1905, the Imperial German Staff had anticipated a two-front war, and Count Alfred von Schlieffen devised a strategy to fight it. In accordance with his plan, the German army would make an end run through Luxembourg and Belgium, avoiding the fixed fortresses along the French border. Reaching the open land of northern France, they would seize the Channel ports and prevent reinforcements from England. This done, they could then encircle Paris and cut apart the French from behind. With France out of the way, the Germans would be free to deal with Russia.

But several assumptions had been made that turned the plan into a house of cards. First, the Germans counted on six weeks for a slow, disorganized Russia to mobilize. Second, they calculated a continuously successful westward advance of about 20 miles per day even with ongoing combat against the Belgians and the French. Third, to paraphrase Napoleon, an army marches on its stomach, and the Germans grossly underestimated the logistical difficulties in keeping such a fast-moving mass of men resupplied.

In fact, the Russians mobilized in about ten days rather than six weeks and the Belgians fought much harder than anticipated, effectively using natural chokepoints to slow the onslaught. Britain also reacted very quickly and landed troops before the Channel ports could be seized. Logistically, the Germans had no special units to repair railroads and bridges, nor did they possess an effective transportation corps. Most units ceased receiving supplies once they crossed the German border, and thus had to rely on foraging.

Even so, by August 23 the German First Army had advanced as far as Mons, on the Belgian-French border, where it first made contact with the British Expeditionary Force, forcing it into a 200-mile southward retreat. On the twenty-fourth, Capt. G. S. Shephard and Lt. I. M. Bonham-Carter of No. 4 Squadron discovered that the Germans would outflank the BEF unless the retreat was continued. This news undoubtedly saved the British Army from being cut off and destroyed.

Nevertheless the Germans, despite their problems, advanced to within 10 miles of Paris. The French Fifth Army and the BEF then counterattacked, pressing into service some six hundred Parisian taxicabs to bring up reinforcements. By September 9, 1914, the exhausted Germans began a withdrawal north back across the Marne and Aisne rivers.

From late September through October, both sides moved northwest, trying to get around each other to the coast during the “race to the sea.” On October 18, the British V Corps and remnants of some French cavalry ran smack into the German Fourth Army outside the western Belgian town of Ypres. In October’s final days the German Sixth Army approached from the south, so the Belgians opened the sluice gates built to hold back the sea. This flooded the area east of the Yser River and brought the offensive to a halt for the winter.

There were some smaller battles that finally ended on October 22 as surviving BEF units were replaced by the French. Mobile operations effectively ended and trench warfare took their place. The Germans, having thrown vast numbers of raw recruits into the battle, suffered enormous losses and were in no mood to pull back, and the Allies also refused to withdraw. More than 250,000 men lost their lives during the First Battle of Ypres, and each side realized the prospects of a short war had disappeared. They dug in for the winter to lick their wounds, take stock, and resupply.

The resulting stalemate hardened the lines into the Western Front with massive armies facing each other across a network of trenches stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. Both sides were led by generals from another era, fighting on a scale they’d never imagined, with weapons they didn’t truly understand. In point of fact, no commanding general in 1914 had experience leading anything larger than a division into battle. As mobility on the ground ended, new means had to be found to scout enemy positions, gather intelligence, and take the fight to the enemy. This had always been a cavalry role, but there was no way to deploy cavalry in the spiderweb of trenches, hidden machine gun nests, and minefields.

Once the fortifications became fixed, balloons rose from tethers over the trenches of the Western Front and the German soldiers nicknamed the huge phallus-shaped balloons
das Mädchens Traum,
or “the maiden’s dream.” From such a vantage point, often as high as 5,000 feet, an observer might see 15 miles on a clear day. With a field telephone, he could immediately describe what he was seeing and, in a limited way, direct the artillery fire that was becoming so vital to trench warfare. The balloons were a threat, but reconnaissance aircraft became a worse danger to miserable infantry huddled in their holes.

With initial ceilings up to 12,000 feet, aircraft had what the mobility balloons lacked. The tactical implications for directing artillery fire were obvious, and the army that controlled the sky had the edge on the ground. Throughout the winter, pilots and observers on both sides fired flare guns and pistols, and sometimes even threw bricks at each other. Grenades and grapnels were towed behind aircraft in absurd attempts to bring the enemy down. Sometimes they laughed so hard that no one even came close. Sometimes they did. Planes were lost to rifles and shotguns, bad weather, poor flying, and anti-aircraft fire. As the importance of reconnaissance grew, so did the need to deny it to the other side. Everyone knew that the times were changing.

As losses mounted and friends perished the initial camaraderie of flyers lessened somewhat. It was not, after all, a game between gentlemen and those in the other planes were still the enemy. This fundamentally changed how aviation was viewed, both by those who flew and by those who needed aircraft to make war. So it was here, caught between the cavalry lance and the machine gun, that the age of the fighter pilot dawned.

CHAPTER 2

KILLER SCOUTS: 1914–1916

TO KILL IN
the air from an aircraft . . . how to do it and survive to kill again?

Lt. Jacob Fickel, an American army officer, fired the first shot from the air in 1910, hitting a three-by-five-foot target with a rifle from an altitude of 100 feet. Two years later another American, Capt. Charles deForest Chandler, fired the first machine gun from an airplane. The following day, from 500 feet, he fired forty-four bullets and scored fourteen hits. Despite the possibilities, an Army staff officer declared that “airplanes were suitable only for reconnaissance and that thoughts of air battles were purely the product of the young flyers’ fertile imaginations.”

Yet two years later, in October 1914, a French observer downed a German reconnaissance aircraft using a Hotchkiss machine gun.
^*
The next day the Germans claimed to have knocked off a French plane by throwing a brick through its propeller. Weaponry and how to employ it with lethality were the immediate problems. Early aircraft were frail, lightweight contraptions; not very maneuverable and relatively underpowered. Any extra weight had to be considered carefully, and guns weighed a great deal. The main weapons available for aircraft in the Great War were the Browning, Maxim, Hotchkiss, and Lewis machine guns—all designed by Americans.