Wings (7 page)

In early September the German breakthrough was halted at the Battle of the Marne. Again, the reconnaissance reports of the RFC helped the Allies’ analyse German movements and guide their
reactions. But the Allied counter-attack launched immediately afterwards failed after a few days. The war of manoeuvre was over and the armies began digging in along a
line
that by the end of November stretched, with a few gaps, from Nieuport in the north to the Swiss border. The war had changed decisively. It was stuck in the mud of Flanders and henceforth would be a
ghastly battle of attrition that would define the future function of the air force.

It was clear that the RFC had an important, possibly crucial, part to play in the land war. The same could not be said of the Royal Naval Air Service and the war at sea. In August 1914 the War
Office had insisted on control of the country’s air defences, even though almost all of its aircraft were already earmarked for France. At the Admiralty, the First Lord, Winston Churchill,
took advantage of the army’s predicament to move in. Soon the Royal Naval Air Service had taken over the responsibility and a rudimentary aerial defence system was put in place. The RNAS set
up a string of seaplane bases in east coast ports, facing Germany. In early September the army grudgingly accepted the situation and – for the time being at least – ceded the air over
Britain to the navy.

The admirals’ conviction that the special needs of the navy made close co-operation with the army impossible had led them to ignore the amalgamation the creation of the RFC was supposed to
bring about, and had carried on their own course, training their own pilots and buying their own aircraft. Such was their power and political prestige that their disobedience went unpunished and
was accepted as a fait accompli with the official recognition of the RNAS in July 1914. The navy’s headstrong attitude, however, was not easy to justify. Wresting control of the domestic air
space from the army was
an empty victory, as in the first months of the war the German air force stayed away. Effort concentrated instead on how to put the navy’s
aeroplanes to use at sea. Flight brought huge potential advantages to the prosecution of naval warfare. In theory, aircraft could carry out reconnaissance from ships at sea, launch offensive and
defensive operations against hostile aircraft and bases, attack enemy weak points on the ground and patrol the seas in search of enemy forces, in particular submarines. Huge logistical and
mechanical problems had to be overcome, however, before the simplest tasks could be attempted.

Navy aviators were nonetheless innovative and daring. It was the RNAS that carried out the first offensive action by British fliers, a bold if ineffective attack launched on 22 September 1914
from its base at Ostend against the Zeppelin sheds at Dusseldorf. On 8 October, having fallen back to Dunkirk, the navy tried again. This time Flight Lieutenant Reggie Marix, aboard a Sopwith
Tabloid, succeeded in dropping a couple of bombs on a hangar. They were tiny, weighing only twenty pounds each, but the results were sensational. Inside the shed was a just-completed Zeppelin and
the explosions ignited the hydrogen, generating a fireball that leapt 500 feet.

Another big operation was in the planning. Four Avro 504s were dismantled, shipped to Le Havre, then driven to an airstrip at Belfort on the Swiss–French border. On the freezing morning of
20 November, three of them set off to bomb the Zeppelin factory, 120 miles away, at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance in southern Germany. Once again the results were
impressive. A hydrogen-generating plant erupted, workshops were blown up and an airship badly damaged, delighting Winston Churchill, who described it as ‘a fine feat of
arms’.

This was another land-based effort and the RNAS could be said to be encroaching on operational space that logically belonged to the RFC – although at this time the army had no interest in
long-range bombing. Then, on Christmas Eve 1914, the RNAS launched another imaginative operation that pushed the boundaries of the new technology and provided a glimpse of where the combination of
warplanes and warships could lead. At the heart of the operation were three ships –
Engadine
,
Riviera
and
Empress
. They were large, fast, cross-channel ferries that
had been converted into seaplane carriers. They set sail from Harwich at 5 p.m., escorted by two cruisers, ten destroyers and ten submarines. Their destination was a point forty miles off the
Friesian island of Wangerooge. From there, the nine Short ‘Folders’ on board the carriers were to set off to bomb the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven. The airships were not the primary
target, however. The main intention was to lure at least some of the German High Seas Fleet lying at Wilhelmshaven, just down the coast to the south, out into the North Sea where battle could be
joined.

The mission began in the icy dawn of Christmas Day. In the freezing conditions, two aeroplanes failed to start and the others sputtered along on misfiring engines towards the target. The clear
conditions quickly gave way to dense cloud and the pilots failed to see the objective, let alone bomb it. On the way back they dropped a few bombs on ships moored
in the
Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven, then tried to rejoin the fleet at a pick-up position off the island of Borkum. It was a hugely perilous exercise. Fuel was running low and four of the aeroplanes
that had been hit by anti-aircraft fire had to ditch. By a stroke of luck three landed near a submarine, but the rescue was interrupted by the arrival of a Zeppelin, which proceeded to bomb. One of
the raiders was picked up by a destroyer and two more by the carriers. Another put down near a Dutch merchantman. Astonishingly, no one was killed in the operation. Although the mission had failed
in its aims it had nonetheless been an important event. The episode had demonstrated that ships could work with aircraft to project force in a way that land-based aeroplanes at that time could not.
This development was in keeping with the underlying principle of British sea power, that by possession of a large navy, a small island was able to amass wealth and power, while enhancing its own
security by its ability to hit its enemies at long range.

The significance of what had happened was clear to the man who planned the raid, Squadron Commander Cecil L’Estrange Malone. ‘I look upon the events which took place on 25 December
as a visible proof of the probable line of developments of the principles of naval strategy,’ he wrote in his official report. ‘One can imagine what might have been done had our
seaplanes, or those sent to attack us, carried torpedoes instead of light bombs. Several of the ships in Schillig Roads would have been torpedoed and some of our force might have been sunk as
well.’ L’Estrange-Malone, a
remarkable figure who would go on to become Britain’s first Communist MP, had grasped that at some point, the success or failure,
in fact the very survival of a naval force, would depend on the strength and efficiency of its air forces and air defences.

That time was still some way off. The Cuxhaven raid was not repeated. Instead the RNAS would soon be preoccupied with one of its consequences. The fright that the Germans had received produced a
strengthening of the anti-aircraft batteries around ports and bases, but also persuaded them to press ahead with air attacks on England. Rather than wait for long-range aeroplanes capable of doing
the job, it was decided to use Zeppelins, and when the raids began early in the New Year it was naval pilots who had the task of hunting them down.

The results of the attacks on the Zeppelin sheds did not justify the effort and expenditure of manpower and resources that went into them. It was accepted that there might be future benefits in
developing what was essentially a doctrine of strategic air warfare, but for the time being they were theoretical. The army’s needs were obvious and pressing. It was inevitable that in the
battle for resources the RNAS would lose out.

With the Western Front frozen it was clear that the war would not be over by Christmas. Many more soldiers would be needed. The British Expeditionary Force began to swell, and at the end of
December divided into First Army, under Haig, and Second Army, under Sir Horace Lockwood Dorrien-Smith, while in Britain the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, issued a
call for
volunteers that brought tens of thousands flooding in. If the RFC was to do its job it would have to match the expansion. Plans were made for fifty new squadrons – more than ten times the
number that had gone to France in August. Its structure was reorganized to harmonize with the new army arrangements. The squadrons were now divided into wings, which were teamed with the First and
Second armies, with the expectation that there would be many more to follow.

By the spring of 1915 the life of a British aviator on the Western Front had settled into a steady, if hazardous, routine. The first squadrons operated mainly from the
aerodrome at St Omer, just inland from Calais, where the RFC set up its headquarters and which would remain its home in France until the end of the war. The fliers lived surrounded by a much larger
force of ground staff and administrators. Maurice Baring, in peacetime an urbane man of letters who served as Henderson’s aide-de-camp, remembered ‘a stuffy office, full of clerks and
candles and a deafening noise of typewriters’, with a ‘constant stream of pilots arriving in the evening in Burberries with maps, talking over reconnaissances’.
¹
The two-man teams of pilot and observer could expect to make two trips a day over enemy lines, usually to carry out the photographic reconnaissances which were
becoming the norm, or spotting for the artillery batteries whose bombardments made up the main business of war in between ‘pushes’.

The day began with the crew, insulated against the extreme cold of high flying in an open cockpit by layers of leather, fur and wool, climbing into their aeroplane. A
mechanic swung the big, double-bladed wooden propeller, the engine coughed, spurted a plume of dirty exhaust smoke and the machine trundled out onto the grass field to take off. The prevailing wind
was westerly. On the outward journey it whisked the aeroplane rapidly towards the German lines. On the return, if blowing hard, it could slow progress to what felt like a standstill.

There was less to fear now from friendly fire on the way to no-man’s-land. The Germans were the first to identify their aircraft with large black crosses on white grounds and the Allies
soon followed suit.

‘We tried to decide on some kind of mark for our own,’ remembered air mechanic Cecil King. ‘Well the first thing was, they painted Union Jacks on the underneath of the plane,
but that just looked like a smudge. Then they tried painting a bar, but that didn’t seem much. Then we painted the target, as we used to call it [and] there was no more firing at our own
machines.’
²
The ‘target’ of concentric blue-and-white rings with a red bullseye became known as the ‘roundel’ and soon
symbol of Britishness.

The main hazard now was anti-aircraft fire. The shells could reach 10,000 feet and burst in the air, rather than on impact, as did the much-derided British ordnance. The aviators called it
‘ack-ack’ (from the phonetic alphabet for AA or anti-aircraft) or ‘Archie’. The latter name seems to have been the invention of Lieutenant Amyas ‘Biffy’ Borton
of 5
Squadron. According to his account, on 19 September 1914 he was on a reconnaissance flight west of Soissons with his observer Lieutenant R. E. Small. They were aware that
a four-gun anti-aircraft battery was located in a quarry just north of the town.

‘Over the town I turned into the wind and at once saw four flashes from the quarry,’ Borton remembered. ‘I turned forty-five degrees and drifted to the left and in due course
up came four bursts to my right front, where I should have been had I not altered course. The next time they fired I repeated the manoeuvre to the right and the shells burst harmlessly to my left
front. There was a music-hall song at the time called, “Archibald, Certainly Not!”
²
My observer and I sang it each time the ruse was
successful.’
³

‘Archie’ affected aviators in different ways. By early 1915 McCudden had been promoted to corporal and had begun accompanying pilots on missions. He was flying with Eric Conran at
8,000 feet over Violanes when he ‘heard a c-r-r-r-mp, then another then another, and looking above we saw several balls of white smoke floating away. The pilot turned to mislead Archie, of
whom I was having my first bad experience. However, I can honestly say that I did not feel any more than a certain curiosity as to where the next one was going to burst.’
⁴

This seems a remarkably cool reaction. Trundling at a top
speed of little over 70 mph it was easy for a battery, once it had found its range, to keep up with its prey.
‘Marsh and myself went on reconnaissance at dawn and were told to have a look right into Wervicq [just north of Lille],’ recorded Captain Harold Wyllie of 4 Squadron. ‘Before we
could say knife, a battery of guns opened on us from two sides. The shells were bursting under, over and on both sides . . . I never could have believed it possible to be under such fire and
survive. The noise was deafening and the air full of smoke.’
⁵
The pair made for home after being hit six times by bullets and shell
splinters.