Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (7 page)

Obscene losses at Verdun and on the Somme ended any hopes for a negotiated peace, and both sides were now fully aware that the war would not end soon. The month also brought changes to the governments of Britain, France, and Germany—all promised new thinking, new strategies, and an end to the stalemate. Germany and Austria were collapsing internally due to the naval blockade of their ports. Food prices in Berlin jumped 600 percent in two years, and in Vienna people were eating their dogs. Neither empire had anticipated a protracted war, and they were ill prepared for it when it happened. Any available rubber and copper went to the war effort, with spoons, church bells, and door latches melted down for their metal. Germany’s sources of fertilizer, grain, and animal fodder dried up, and agricultural production fell by 50 percent. Germans were drinking coffee made from tree bark and surviving on turnips augmented by a weekly allowance of two ounces of butter with a single egg. The wet, cold fall of 1916 yielded a miserable harvest, so by Christmas the people were starving on 1,200 calories a day.
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Ten thousand Viennese women had become part-time prostitutes.

Great Britain was nearly as badly off. More than 60 percent of prewar foodstuffs had been imports, which now were severely curtailed. Malnutrition, infant mortality, and a critical shortage of doctors all contributed to the misery. Following the death of his son on the Somme, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith lost his motivation and was replaced by David Lloyd George. A fiery Liberal reformer, Lloyd George had swayed with the political breeze in 1914 and joined those who wanted England to fight. He’d solved the munitions shortage of 1915 and now instituted mandatory rationing, with compulsory conscription soon to follow. He was strong-willed, decisive, and politically astute.

France had also replaced the commander-in-chief of her army, Joseph Joffre. Blamed for the disaster at Verdun, he was first promoted to Marshal of France and then fired. Despite several very competent choices, his replacement was the cosmopolitan, bilingual, and inexperienced General Robert Nivelle.

The Russians had always produced enough food to feed themselves, but a decrepit infrastructure and corrupt, inefficient government left food rotting in the fields. A million tons of grain was piled up on ships and wharves in Black Sea ports because the Ottoman Turks, a Central Power ally of Germany, had closed the Dardanelles passage. Fuel was scarce; wages, when they were paid at all, couldn’t begin to keep up with the price of necessities. Riots had erupted and Russian troops were siding with the people. The Tsar, never very capable, was living in a state of detached, vacillating fear.

This, then, was the big picture in the fall of 1916 as the old ways and the old leaders were replaced. In these grim days, after the deaths of Oswald Boelcke and Lanoe Hawker, the time of the scout aircraft passed and the era of the true fighter pilot began its ascent. The men who came next possessed little of the idealism of prewar flyers. That high-mindedness was long forgotten amid the reality of freezing air, burning death, and the loss of so many friends to a war dragging on into 1917.

CHAPTER 3

THE CRUCIBLE

ON BOTH SIDES
of the Western Front men stared at each other, bloody, cold, and exhausted. Heavy rain-filled clouds sagged down from a flat, pewter-colored sky. The soft rolling fields of Flanders had been turned into a pockmarked, sticky mess by millions of pounds of high explosives. Ice gleamed from barbed wire strung across no-man’s-land between the trenches, and water-filled shell holes had hardened into jagged brown death traps. Rats gnawed on limbs from thousands of frozen corpses splayed across the mud.

Germany’s military leaders had been replaced by two men who knew they couldn’t win a war of attrition. Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff also realized that time was running out as the United States would soon enter the conflict. Victory, or some type of negotiated peace, had to be won—now. Germany’s only hope against the Royal Navy blockade was the U-boats prowling the Atlantic. Many of the ships bringing supplies to England were neutral; in fact, most were American. As they began sinking, there was enormous political pressure on Washington to respond. Woodrow Wilson had won the November election with the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” but now he had a free hand to act. Germany now had a narrow window of opportunity to force a conclusion before being overwhelmed by Yankee troops, planes, and industrial might.

Through the winter of 1917, under atrocious weather, von Hindenburg and Ludendorff quietly constructed new defensive fortifications 20 miles behind the current central section of the front. More than 350,000 Russian prisoners and German reservists made concrete, hauled steel, dug trenches, and erected pillboxes—all in secret. During a gueling four-month period they shortened the line by 25 miles between Arras and St. Quentin. Then, on February 9, Operation Alberich, a strategic pull-back, was activated.
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The withdrawal caught the Allies completely by surprise. Aerial reconnaissance had failed to detect either the movement or the construction of the new defenses. In fact, the first real awareness came from British patrols encountering empty German positions. Later, German artillery opened up on their former front lines to destroy anything left behind, and the entire area became a wasteland, devoid of life or usefulness. The new Siegfried-Stellung Line (called the Hindenburg Line by the Allies) was designed to preserve German resources, to be impregnable, and therefore to give the Entente powers a problem they could not solve but by negotiated peace.

To the men on the lines and in the aerodromes, this was quite beside the point. They all lived day to day, trying to stay alive in their trench or cockpit. Despite the cold, lice were everywhere. A bluish haze hung over the Allied lines from countless braziers, and curved sheets of rusting corrugated tin covered the trenches wherever possible. Field kitchens churned out meals, but food had to be carried forward and arrived cold. One particular favorite of British soldiers was Maconochie’s, a vegetable and beef stew, though they usually settled for corned beef. French soldiers suffered less acutely from food shortages, benefiting from short supply lines and local connections—they always seemed to have their essential chocolate and alcohol rations.

British trenches were built in a series of “firebay” sections that ran continuously but were never straight. There were front, support, and reserve lines all running parallel to each other and intersected by communications trenches. The whole arrangement was about 500 to 800 yards deep, and many ran through low ground that flooded easily. “Dead Man’s Road,” “Ale Alley,” “Bond Street”—prosaic names for a thoroughly miserable existence where a man had a 50 percent chance of being wounded or killed.

The Germans built better fortifications, using reinforced concrete to construct deep, ventilated redoubts, or fortified emplacements. These were drier and easier to heat. Since they’d been able to choose the terrain, many of their positions were on high ground or even in caves. Germans generally utilized the three-line system as well, but it was much, much deeper, often with three miles between the front and the reserve area.

On both sides the pilots lived better. Aerodromes among all the air services were fairly similar and had the same basic needs. Typically at least five miles behind the lines, an airfield was usually located near a town and constructed around a flat, smoothed-out field about a half mile square. Repair shops, junk piles, and fueling areas were all necessities. In the beginning these were relatively haphazard arrangements given the fluidity of the ground situation and lack of experience with aviation operations. This changed rapidly, as huts and shacks were replaced by dugouts, wooden buildings, and canvas hangars whenever possible.

There could be up to four squadrons per airfield, which meant approximately eighty planes. British units listed about twenty-four pilots each and needed two hundred enlisted men to service, repair, and load the aircraft. Then there were cooks, anti-aircraft gunners, and radio and administrative personnel. In total, upwards of a thousand people, with a variety of specialties, lived and worked on each little self-contained airfield. This uniqueness remains the same today.

British flyers typically lived on the aerodrome with separate quarters for living, socializing, and eating. Each had an orderly—a “batman”—to look after his personal needs. French and German pilots were usually quartered in private homes or a commandeered hotel in the nearby town.
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Meals were often taken in local restaurants, though large airfields such as Douai had their own messes. Food also varied widely. British pilots seemed to dress the best but eat the worst. One Frenchman, naturally, remembered English food as “everything boiled to death in live steam, then covered with a white sauce made of wall paper paste.” The Germans purloined their food from the French whenever possible. They favored soup, sausage, and lots of pork when available. In fact, many soldiers and pilots ate better at the front than their families did back in Germany. French food was the best. Supplies from the Mediterranean were unhindered by the U-boat threat, and locals were obviously sympathetic to their own countrymen. Fresh fish was often available, along with soup, mutton, and real coffee.

Aerodromes always had some type of officers’ lounge. The décor was heavy on propellers, captured machine guns, and other war souvenirs. Pictures of women, nude if at all possible, festooned the walls. Blackboards were scattered about for notices, weather sheets, and rhyming verses. In British lounges there was likely to be a piano or at least a gramophone. They all had bars stocked with whiskey, cognac, brandy, and whatever else could be found. Brits were the hardest drinkers, a tendency that would continue in the wars to come. Many Germans, contrary to the stereotype of the martinet with a shaved head, drank and sang a good deal. Canadians, ANZAC pilots,
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and the late-arriving Americans all knew how to throw a party when they weren’t flying. Singing and drinking helped take the edge off, something that continuously offended the rear-echelon types. What really angered them was that they couldn’t do a thing about it—something else that hasn’t changed.

Keep the home fires burning

While your hearts are yearning,

Though your lads are far away

They dream of home,

There’s a silver lining

Through the dark clouds shining,

Turn the dark clouds inside out,

Till the boys come home.

And why drink, sing, and chase women? Typically, the pilots were young men with a testosterone-charged warrior spirit who had an excellent chance of dying horribly within weeks. They
knew
this, yet they continued to fly into the bullets every day. Their discipline was in the air, where it counted, and they had little use for it on the ground or for the institutional trappings of military life beloved by noncombatants. Gambling in its various forms was always popular, as, of course, were girls. Frederick Libby, an American who flew with the RFC, summed it up neatly: “Girls weren’t expensive, all of them trying to do their bit for King and Country. What more could a fellow ask?”

But by early 1917 the pilots themselves were changing. The war had lost its glamour, and the survivors were battered, cynical, and much more businesslike. Flight training schools had been established, and veterans at least attempted to create a curriculum that would give a young pilot a chance. At this point, the Royal Flying Corps course included a ground school for both prospective pilots and observers. The two-month school taught basic military indoctrination, useless close-order drill, and rudimentary navigation, with practical mechanics related to engines and machine guns. Qualified pilot candidates then went off to preliminary flight training at smaller airfields such as Waddington, outside London.

A student pilot was expected to solo after a few hours of dual instruction. If he couldn’t solo, he was sent to observer school or back to the regular army. Following about five hours of post-solo flight, he would take a flight check and go on to advanced training at fields such as Upavon or Lincoln. A demonstrated ability to handle faster aircraft, more solo time, and training in aerobatics were all required before earning the coveted wings of a pilot. In 1914, pilots went into action with less than ten hours of solo flight time; in British schools this was a result of the resistance to a formal flying curriculum, as initially it was believed that any sort of rigid training would inhibit pilots. By 1917, flyers had about twenty-five hours when they went off to war, ideally including some time in the plane they’d use in combat. Toward the end of the war, a man usually had nearer to fifty hours before he first crossed the Channel.