Wings (6 page)

As the British Expeditionary Force embarked for France in August 1914, the RFC ranked low among its concerns. The airmen were left to make their own way to the war. There were
four formed squadrons: Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5. Two more – 6 and 7 – were being assembled and No. 1 Squadron was in the process of switching from balloons to aeroplanes. Two squadrons
– Nos. 2 and 4 – were equipped with BE2s. The rest flew with the ill-assorted array of machines acquired in the first rush of growth.

The first great test was to get to the battlefield. Between them and the plains of northern France, from where they would operate, lay the English Channel, still a formidable obstacle. When the
order came to move to a temporary encampment at Swingate on the cliffs above Dover, the squadrons were scattered around the country. No. 2 Squadron under Burke was in Montrose on the east coast of
Scotland and got there without mishap. The journey of No. 3 Squadron, based at the new
Netheravon aerodrome on Salisbury Plain, began disastrously. On the morning of 12 August,
James McCudden, the former boy bugler who had now joined the RFC’s ground staff, swung the propeller of an 80 hp Blériot carrying Lieutenant Bob Skene, a renowned aerobat, and Air
Mechanic Keith Barlow, and watched ‘the machine flying very tail-low until it was lost to view behind our hedge up at about eighty feet’.

Then the engine stopped. There was silence, followed by the rending noise of a crash, ‘which once heard is never forgotten’. McCudden ‘ran for half a mile and found the machine
in a small copse of firs, so I got over the fence and pulled the wreckage away from the occupants and found them both dead.’ Despite all the carnage McCudden was to see in his short life, he
wrote later that he would ‘never forget . . . kneeling by poor Keith Barlow and looking at the rising sun and then again at poor Barlow who had no superficial injury, and was killed purely by
concussion, and wondering if war was going to be like this always.’ Barlow and he had shared a tent earlier that summer while Netheravon was being built and McCudden had found him ‘an
awfully interesting fellow . . . a really genuine soul and moreover a philosopher’. Despite the experience, McCudden’s determination to move from ground duties to flying was
undiminished.
¹

Other mishaps complicated the departure. No. 4 Squadron suffered two non-fatal crashes on the way to Dover. No. 5 Squadron was held up in Gosport and would have to follow later. But at 6.25 on
the morning of 13 August the aircraft that had made it began, on schedule, to take off. First away was
Lieutenant Hubert Harvey-Kelly, of 2 Squadron, at the controls of a BE2a.
Like a number of the early aviators, ‘Bay’ Harvey-Kelly was of Anglo-Irish stock, hailing from Roscommon in County Mayo, and radiating an insouciance that made him stand out even in the
risk-loving company of his peers. He was followed by Burke, who led his men over the French coast, then turned south towards the mouth of the Somme, which pointed them towards their destination,
Amiens aerodrome. Harvey-Kelly was determined to touch down first and broke formation to cut across country, arriving at 8.20. The pilots of 2 Squadron all landed safely and by nightfall there were
forty-nine aircraft on the base. The local people – who had been in some doubt as to whether the British would come to their aid – gave them an ecstatic welcome.

Henderson was to command the RFC in the field and went to France by boat with his deputy Sykes and the stores and ground staff. They left behind Major William Sefton-Brancker to represent the
RFC in the War Office and Trenchard, who, to his intense frustration, was ordered to take over the rear organization, charged with overseeing the planned great expansion and maintaining the flow of
equipment and new squadrons to the front. When the headquarters group arrived at Boulogne they, too, received a warm welcome. James McCudden remembered crowds apparently chanting ‘Live Long
and Tear!’ He later realized they were shouting ‘
Vive l’Angleterre!
’ On their way to Amiens, whenever they stopped, they were ‘piled up with fruit and flowers
and kissed by pretty French girls’.
²

On 16 August the fliers moved forward to Maubeuge, seventy miles to the north-west on the border with Belgium and about twenty miles south of Mons. They left behind the
crocks, including an old Blériot, acquired from the
Daily Mail
, which had been flown around Britain for an advertising stunt and still carried the newspaper’s name painted in
large letters under the wings. Even so, some of the machines they retained were treacherous. Second Lieutenant Evelyn Copeland Perry of 2 Squadron, an experienced pilot who had taught Trenchard to
fly, was climbing away after takeoff when his aircraft stalled, appeared to catch fire and plunged to earth, killing him and his passenger, air mechanic Herbert Parfitt. The machine was a BE8, the
last of the variations on the Blériot Experimental that emerged from the Aircraft Factory and regarded by those who flew it as a vicious contraption. Another ‘Bloater’, as the
pilots called them, belonging to the newly arrived 5 Squadron went down shortly afterwards on the way to Maubeuge, seriously injuring the pilot Lieutenant Bob Smith-Barry and killing Corporal Fred
Geard.

Six men were already dead from the tiny force and they had yet to encounter the enemy. The Germans were only forty miles away and the soldiers of the BEF were flooding up the road to Mons to
block their path. The airmen spent the next few days checking engines, tuning flying wires, adjusting struts and studying maps, while they waited for the chance to show their worth. Their job was
observation and reconnaissance. They had practised it in training on the BE variants that de
Havilland had specifically designed to provide the stability to allow them to note
enemy movements and strengths.

On 19 August the RFC received its first order to launch a reconnaissance. The British army had taken up positions along a twenty-five-mile sector around Mons, there to make a stand against the
advancing Germans. Any information about enemy dispositions would have a high value. The mission was given to Philip Joubert of 3 Squadron and Lieutenant Gilbert Mapplebeck of 4 Squadron.
Liverpool-born ‘Gibb’ Mapplebeck, an unhelpful six-foot three inches tall and not quite twenty-one, was known for his crashes and stunting and had been disciplined for defying a ban on
pilots risking their necks and their aircraft by ‘looping the loop’.

They were operating with tiny scale maps and Joubert got lost almost immediately. He was forced to land close to some friendly troops to ask for directions. None of the aviators had been issued
with identification documents and it took some time to persuade the soldiers that he was not a spy. He returned with no useful information to impart. Mapplebeck did better, carrying out a limited
air search and spotting a small cavalry force at a place where a large concentration was thought to be assembled. It was an uninspiring start.

Flights over the next two days had more success and some German units moving westward towards Mons were located and reported. On Saturday 22 August the squadrons flew twelve missions and this
time they were able to build up a clear picture of a large enemy movement which appeared to be attempting to outflank the British line at Mons. This
information played an
important part in the development of the battle and helped Sir John French in his deliberations as he moved to escape envelopment.

This was a memorable day in other respects. The RFC recorded its first enemy-inflicted loss when the Avro 504 flown by Lieutenant Vincent Waterfall of 5 Squadron, with Lieutenant Gordon Bayly as
observer, was brought down by enemy fire just inside Belgium. Bayly was killed, though Waterfall survived to be taken prisoner. Later that day a German aircraft appeared, approaching Maubeuge
aerodrome at about 5,000 feet. The sight of the enemy sent the crews racing to intercept. One of the pilots was Louis Arbon Strange, the son of a wealthy Dorset farmer who had shown an immediate
natural aptitude for flying and, after obtaining his certificate, had been commissioned directly into the RFC in 1912. He had become convinced early on that aircraft would make viable gun platforms
and had mounted a weapon on his machine as an experiment. Now the chance had come to put his theory to the test. He climbed into his Henri Farman with another pilot, Lieutenant Leslie da Costa
Penn-Gaskell, whose job was to operate the Lewis gun. It was fixed in the nose, where, as the Farman was a ‘pusher’, there would be a clear field of fire unobstructed by the propeller,
which was mounted behind the pilot. The aeroplane was woefully underpowered with a top speed of under 60 mph. By the time it had struggled to 1,000 feet the German was on his way back to his lines.
‘Its occupants must have enjoyed a good laugh at our futile efforts,’ Strange recorded wryly.
³
The commander of
5
Squadron, ‘Josh’ Higgins, blamed the weight of the gun for the failure to close on the enemy and the pair were told to use rifles in future.

The British stand at Mons gave way to a long retreat and the RFC fell back with them, setting up makeshift camps at Le Cateau-Cambresis, then St Quentin, then Compiègne, sleeping wherever
they stopped, sometimes in a hotel bed, more often in a hayloft or even in the open under the wings of their aircraft. Despite the chaos they managed to maintain a flow of reports to headquarters.
The main hazards came from the vagaries of their machines and from ground fire, which rose to greet them indiscriminately no matter which side of the lines they were over. Joubert described later
and without rancour ‘the playful habit of the British soldier of firing at everything that flew, regardless of its appearance and nationality’.
⁴
The French troops were no more fastidious and in the early days the crews were as much at risk from friend as they were from foe.

Their duties did not prevent them from trying whenever possible to take the war to the enemy. On 25 August Lieutenant Euan Rabagliati, the short, energetic Yorkshire-born son of a prominent
nutritionist, was flying as observer at 3–4,000 feet with his pilot Lieutenant C. W. Wilson – known as ‘Daddy’ on account of his venerable thirty-seven years – when
they sighted a German Taube monoplane in the distance. They had already encountered several enemy aircraft, but the Germans appeared to be under orders to avoid combat and stick to their
reconnaissance duties. Rabagliati recorded that
‘this chap stayed and we immediately joined in and manoeuvred around’. Rabagliati was armed with a service rifle.
The German appeared to have a Mauser pistol with a shoulder stock. Wilson manoeuvred their Avro ‘tractor’ into a position where his observer could get in a shot.

‘Sometimes we’d be extremely close, it seemed to be almost touching,’ Rabagliati remembered. ‘Other times we’d be out of range. We couldn’t shoot through the
propeller in front so we had to shoot sideways.’ He ‘knew nothing whatever about the question of lay-off’ – the science of shooting ahead of your opponent so he flew into
your fire. ‘Not only was the other aeroplane going fast, but our own aeroplane from which I was shooting was also going fast . . . it was a purely hit-and-miss effort.’

They circled each other, blazing away, with Rabagliati firing a hundred rounds. Then, ‘suddenly, to my intense joy, I saw the pilot fall forward on his joy stick and the machine tipped up
and went down. I knew that either I had hit him or something had happened. We were of course completely thrilled. We’d had our duel and we’d won! We watched him going down. We circled
round and he finally crashed.’
⁵

The pilot escaped with his life. Nonetheless, this probably counts as the first dogfight fought by British fliers. It would be repeated tens of thousands of times over the coming years, in this
war and the next. It was a form of combat that had disappeared from the terrestrial battlefield. It seemed to herald a return to classical times with champions pitted against each other, but now
relying on skill, mixed with luck, rather than
strength to bring their opponent down. You feel in Rabagliati’s account his mouth drying, his senses sharpening as he
realizes he is engaged in what could be a duel to the death. In the conduct of this first engagement are many of the elements of all the dogfights that followed: the tightly circling, high-speed
chase as each pilot tries to get a bead on the other, the jinking and manoeuvring, the shifting of advantage and then the moment of victory, as definitive as the slump of the bull’s head as
the torero’s sword pierces his spinal nerve.

Even with the puny ordnance at their disposal, the crews were also determined to inflict any damage they could on the streams of field-grey uniforms pouring along the roads below. They carried
improvised petrol bombs and bundles of fourteen-inch-long steel darts called flechettes to shower on any troops they encountered. During the retreat, Eric Conran, an Australian subaltern with 3
Squadron, had James McCudden fit his Blériot ‘Parasol’ monoplane – an oddity among the biplanes – with wooden racks to carry hand grenades. While on reconnaissance he
noticed two German columns converging on a main road. He dived down over the closely packed men and horses and showered them with bombs, then flew off leaving a chaotic scene filled with angry
soldiers and plunging animals.

It was the routine business of observation and reconnaissance that gave the RFC its
raison d’être
, however, and when the retreat was over General French gave fulsome
recognition to the role the Corps and its commander, Henderson, had played in enabling his forces to escape.

‘Their skill, energy and perseverance have been beyond all praise,’ he wrote in his despatch. ‘They have furnished me with the most complete and accurate
information which has been of incalculable value in the conduct of operations. Fired at constantly both by friend and foe, and not hesitating to fly in every kind of weather, they have remained
undaunted throughout.’

Within a few weeks the RFC had established a fighting posture that it would maintain through the long years of what soon felt like an interminable war. Whatever the odds, whatever the weather,
it was committed to answering every call the army issued. Part of the airmen’s determination stemmed from the desire of newcomers – still regarded as upstarts in some quarters –
to prove their worth. But it also reflected their sympathy for their earthbound comrades whose plight they saw with bitter clarity from what seemed like the relative safety of the air. The aviators
felt themselves privileged and, in the months ahead, even pampered as they settled down in comfortable bases, while the soldiers endured the squalor of the trenches. It was a perception they never
lost sight of, even when the demands placed on them by the generals brought appalling casualties.