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  In the summer of 1915 the British air force seemed to be at least holding its own in the battle for the air. Improved machines were arriving at the front, as well as a supply of new airmen – though the training they received was a poor preparation for operational realities. The engine of expansion was turning, albeit rather slowly – there were still only twelve squadrons in France at the start of the autumn. Above all there was energy and purpose, emanating in pulsing waves from the inarticulate but passionate figure of Trenchard, who had taken command of the RFC in the field in August when Henderson went back to London to become Director General of Military Aeronautics. ‘Boom’ Trenchard would remain in charge for most of the rest of the war, driving the new force forward, stretching and exposing his men and machines, with a fervour that impressed all, while at times seeming to border on the inhuman.

  The life-and-death demands of war forced the pace of technological innovation. As the summer progressed, a new development emerged that was to alter the balance dramatically in the enemy’s favour. It ushered in a period of the air war that became known as the ‘Fokker menace’ and it began in an almost accidental fashion. Roland Garros was a French aerial trailblazer, the first man to fly the Mediterranean. In 1915 he and the designer Raymond Saulnier set about trying to solve the problem of how to fit a machine gun to an aeroplane that could be fired straight ahead without the gymnastics required to operate a wing-fixed weapon. The main difficulty seemed to be the obstacle presented by the whirring propeller, oscillating at 2,000 revolutions a minute. But the pair decided that, unlikely though it might seem, most of the bullets could pass through its arc without striking the twin blades. Those that did hit could be deflected without doing damage by fitting wedge-shaped metal plates.

  On 1 April Garros tried out a prototype and promptly shot down a two-seater. In the next seventeen days he repeated the performance twice. The device was fitted to other aircraft and other pilots repeated his success. Then Garros was shot down. He was too late to set fire to his machine and the wonder gadget fell into German hands. The propeller was handed over to a Dutch aircraft designer, Anthony Fokker, who was working with the Germans. On examining it they were reminded of a pre-war patent – which almost incredibly had been overlooked – for a synchronized gun with an interrupter gear, which timed the stream of bullets so they passed through the spaces between the blades. They revived it and tested it. It worked. The deflector plates became instantly obsolete.

  Fokker developed a new aeroplane, the Eindecker E1 monoplane, on which to mount the new weapon system. Now a pilot had only to point his machine in the direction of his enemy to threaten him. Fokker had developed what was, in effect, a flying gun – the first efficient fighter aeroplane. The first few Fokker Eindeckers or E1s began to appear in July 1915, operating in pairs as defensive escorts for patrol aircraft. It was a little while before the Germans realized their offensive capability. It was pilots, rather than commanders, who grasped their potential. They were led by Oswald Boelcke, who had worked with another soon-to-be famous airman Max Immelman, with Fokker on the development of the E1.

  Historians later claimed that despite its reputation the Eindecker was nothing special. However, Ira Jones, a young Welsh mechanic who went on to fly with 56 (‘Tiger’) Squadron and was credited with shooting down forty enemy aircraft, saw it in action and had a due respect for its qualities. It was a ‘fast, good climbing, strong-structured, highly manoeuvrable aeroplane – all essential qualities of an efficient fighting machine. When flown by such masterly, determined pilots as Boelcke and Immelmann it was almost invincible.’13During the autumn British pilots came to fear these two names.

  Max Immelman was born into a family of wealthy industrialists in Dresden. He perfected a manoeuvre of diving, climbing and flicking over, ready to attack again, which became known as the ‘Immelmann turn’. Oswald Boelcke was the son of a militaristic schoolmaster. He overcame childhood asthma to become an excellent sportsman. He was as diligent in the classroom as on the playing field, and most enjoyed mathematics. According to Johnny Johnson, one of the great British aces of the next conflict, he was ‘a splendid fighter pilot, an outstanding leader and a tactician of rare quality . . . his foes held him in high regard.’14Boelcke brought a scientific coolness to air fighting, codifying tactics in a book called the Dicta Boelcke. He laid down four basic principles: (1) the higher your aeroplane, the greater your advantage; (2) attack with the sun behind you, so you are invisible to your opponent; (3) use cloud to hide in; and (4) get in as close as possible. They sound simple, but in the sudden chaos that characterized fights, these rules were easily forgotten.

  For all his professionalism he enjoyed the kill, as is apparent from his description of the downing of an unsuspecting Vickers ‘Gunbus’. Boelcke was flying at 3,500 feet when he saw the enemy aircraft fly over the lines at Arras and head for Cambrai. He crept in behind it unseen and followed for a while. His fingers were ‘itching to shoot’, but he controlled himself.

  ‘[I] withheld my fire until I was within 60 metres of him,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘I could plainly see the observer in the front seat peering out downward. Knack-knack-knack . . . went my gun. Fifty rounds, and then a long flame shot out of his engine. Another fifty rounds at the pilot. Now his fate was sealed. He went down in long spirals to land. Almost every bullet of my first series went home. Elevator, rudder, wings, engine, tank and control wires were shot up.’15Surprisingly, both the pilot, Captain Charles Darley, and the observer, Lieutenant R. J. Slade, survived.

  As the war entered a new year, it was vital to come up with a means of countering the German challenge if the British and French air forces were not to be cleared from the skies. Trenchard was determined that patrols should continue despite the threat. His solution was to provide a cluster of escorts for each reconnaissance flight. The method soaked up resources. On one flight, on 7 February 1916, a single BE2C from 12 Squadron took off, accompanied by twelve other aircraft. The approach was unsustainable.

  Eventually Allied technology came up with an antidote to the Fokker and the menace subsided. In the spring of 1916 the trim French Nieuport 11, nicknamed the ‘Bébé’, began to arrive on British squadrons. Its Lewis gun was fixed on the top wing, but it was more agile than the E1 and good pilots could get the better of it. The ‘Bébé’ was joined by another French type, produced by the French firm JPAD, which carried a synchronized Vickers gun. The second-generation pusher types – the DH2s and robust FE2 ‘Fees’ also learned how to cope and even prevail, exploiting the fact that the gunner, perched in the front nacelle, had a wide field of fire and his weapon laid down a more rapid stream of bullets than the armament of the Fokker, which was slowed by the interrupter gear. It was a Fee that did for Max Immelmann, who was brought down by the fire of Corporal J. H. Waller, an observer with 25 Squadron, on 18 June 1916 over the village of Lentz, shortly after he had scored his seventeenth victory. The appearance of the excellent two-man Sopwith ‘1½ Strutter’, which combined a synchronized Vickers for the pilot and a Lewis for the observer, helped to turn the tide.

  But no advantage lasted for long. The respite was short. The RFC’s ascendancy faded with the appearance of the Albatros, a sleek, fast biplane with twin, fuselage-mounted Spandaus, which in ‘Bloody April’ of 1917 would generate a new crisis. Each season brought another frightening novelty. This fear was not confined to the combatants. Across the Channel, civilians were learning what the birth of military aviation meant for them.

  Chapter 4

  The New Front Line

  With the invention of aeroplanes a new anxiety entered the lives of European civilians. As the prospect of war grew, fear began to erode their initial enthusiasm for aviation. It seemed increasingly likely that far from benefiting mankind, freeing humans from the shackles of gravity, shrinking distances and drawing the world more closely together, powered flight carried almost limitless potential for destruction. Never before had attackers struck from the air. Popular literature played
up the nightmare of bombers reaching across seas to shower death on non-combatants, who, in Britain, had been largely insulated from the violence of outsiders for hundreds of years.

  Politicians and soldiers shared the alarm. An attempt was made at the 1907 Hague Disarmament Conference to prohibit the use of bombing aircraft. It failed. But when Britain went to war no practical system of aerial defence was in place. The absence was due to a conflict – of interests and perceptions – that would affect the development of British military aviation for the next three decades. The rapid conquest of the sky created a new dimension in which wars could be fought, one that stretched over the traditional battlegrounds of land and sea. This reality forced a reassessment of the historical responsibilities of the army and navy. Earth and water created a natural division of duties. The air overlapped everything, creating endless possibilities for confusion and duplication. Soldiers and sailors anyway viewed the advent of aviation through the lens of their own particular needs, which, often, were not easily reconciled. The traditional rivalry between the services ensured there would be no smooth solution to the resulting problems.

  In August 1914 the army had conceded that it would not be able to both defend Britain and support the army in France and it had grudgingly allowed the navy to take over responsibility for domestic air space. The difficulties of protecting a huge target like London were overwhelming and Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, accepted from the start that ground and air defences should concentrate on protecting vital military and war-industrial targets. He favoured a ‘forward’ strategy, attacking enemy aircraft as close to their point of departure as possible from bases on the French and Belgian coast. It was for that reason that the RNAS had set up a string of seaplane bases in east coast ports, facing Germany. Secondary interception forces based in London and its approaches would deal with the aircraft that got through. At the same time, civil-defence precautions were imposed. In central London street lamps were partially extinguished, illuminated shop lights banned and householders were forced to draw their shades after dark. Dummy lights were strung across the big parks to deny German aviators a landmark. The cautious began filling buckets with sand and water. Bolder spirits were amused at first, but soon everyone was doing it.

  Airships were the only German aircraft capable of reaching Britain. They became known by the generic name ‘Zeppelins’. They were about 150 yards long, held aloft by gigantic hydrogen-filled gasbags sewn from cows’ intestines. About 200,000 were needed for each craft. By the beginning of 1915 the German army and navy had fourteen of them. The raids began in December 1914, not on London but over Dover and Sheerness, and did little damage or harm.

  The first attack on the capital came as midnight approached on 31 May 1915. A Zeppelin arrived over Stoke Newington in north-east London and dropped an assortment of grenades and incendiaries on the terraced houses below. The resulting fires and explosions killed seven people and injured thirty-five. Among the dead was a three-year-old girl, Elsie Leggat, who lived in Cowper Road. Her little body was found curled up under her bed where she had vainly sought protection from the German bombs. Her eleven-year-old sister May died later of her injuries.

  Looked at coolly, the results were less awful than both officialdom and the public had imagined. The bombs were scattered haphazardly and hit nothing of strategic importance. The anonymous New York Herald Tribune correspondent felt it ‘fell short badly on the spectacular side’. The raid had ‘caused excitement in a certain section of London, but the inhabitants of the rest of its 609 square miles came home from theatres and picture shows undisturbed, to learn nothing of the . . . raid until they opened their morning papers.’

  Public reaction, however, was out of all proportion to the scale of the event. Starved of real information until the Government issued an official bulletin at 5 p.m. the following day, rumour ran riot. The Herald Tribune reported that ‘as the story of the raid passed from man to man on the streets, in public houses and on street cars it grew amazingly. Several hundred had been killed, churches destroyed, a theatre audience massacred and hundreds of fires started.’

  It was this aspect of the raid, rather than the fact that bombs had dropped within a few miles of the Bank of England and Buckingham Palace, that most alarmed the authorities. To Londoners and city dwellers throughout Britain the attack seemed to be the beginning of the fulfilment of prophesies that had been uttered even before aeroplanes had been invented. The smashed-up houses and the dead girls were the tragic proof that henceforth civilians stood on a new front line. On 6 June Hull was hit. Twenty-four people were killed and forty injured and many homes destroyed. The following day there was some good news when, over Belgium, Lieutenant Reginald Warneford of 1 Squadron, RNAS, shot down a Zeppelin which crashed in flames onto a convent.

  In British skies, however, the ‘Zepps’ seemed to operate with near-impunity. Anti-aircraft fire forced them higher rather than bringing them down. Even with the help of searchlights the paltry fighter forces deployed around London had no luck finding their targets. ‘You had about as much chance of spotting a black cat in the Albert Hall in the dark,’ said one RNAS pilot, Flight Lieutenant Graham Donald.1After a while only token efforts were made to intercept the attacks. Two raids on consecutive nights in September 1915 killed forty. The death tolls were tiny compared with what was to come in the Blitz. The anticipation, though, was unnerving, and the sense of violation deepened anxiety, which, in turn, stoked a hatred of the Germans. The Kaiser had asked his airmen to spare civilian areas and – in deference to his British relations – royal palaces, but this pious hope was soon forgotten. Everyone knew that precise targeting was impossible and the men in the airships had no idea where their bombs would fall.

  It seemed to those on the receiving end that the attacks had no purpose except to sow fear. ‘Zeppelins are intended as weapons of moral suasion,’ said the Evening Standard and Saint James Gazette. The airship, it went on, ‘has been built with the idea of spreading panic over as wide an inhabitant area as possible. It has been devised as the terror of the air, the very quintessence of frightfulness.’ The Germans’ motivations were mixed. They had always planned to launch operations on British soil against industrial targets of military significance, but lacked an aeroplane with the range and power to carry them out. Frustration at the impasse in the ground war hastened the decision to use Zeppelins, which continued even after it became clear they were incapable of causing significant material damage. Instead, the effect on civilian morale was used to justify the attacks. It was an argument that – despite its patent falseness – would be used by the British in the war to come.

  Official propaganda tried to capitalize on the thirst for revenge. ‘It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb’ ran the message on one recruiting poster, below an image of a looming Zeppelin. ‘Join the army at once and help stop an air raid.’

  Going off to the trenches would not stop the attacks. What was needed was an effective air defence system at home. Public anger spurred official action. Early winter weather at the end of 1915 forced a suspension of Zeppelin activity. During the lull, the number of mobile anti-aircraft batteries, mounted on lorries and trailers and supplemented by searchlights, was expanded. Fixed batteries were also in place at important points around the capital.

  The Germans returned in the new year to more dangerous skies, yet they were still able to create havoc, killing seventy in raids on the industrial Midlands on the night of 31 January 1916. Calls for action and revenge rose to a crescendo, led by the Daily Mail urging ‘Hit Back! Don’t Wait and See!’ The mood could not be ignored. This raw public sentiment pushed both politicians and military planners down a strategic path that was to stretch into the next world war. Among those who responded to it was Winston Churchill, now out of government since his sacking from the Admiralty following the Gallipoli debacle of 1915, and William Joynson-Hicks. The latter was chairman of a new Parliamentary Air Committee, which press
ed for Britain to launch punitive air raids against Germany.

  Demands for action added to the pressure for a reorganization of the air forces to overcome army and navy rivalries and rationalize equipment and organization. In February 1916 a committee was set up under Lord Derby, the Secretary of State for War. It had no executive powers and was merely asked to report on how best to develop and supply aircraft to meet the needs of the RFC and the RNAS. Within a few months Derby resigned, having concluded that the best way to improve matters was to amalgamate the two services – a bureaucratic challenge he judged to be too difficult for wartime.

  In May 1916 the problem was handed to Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India, who was put in charge of the first Air Board. He, too, took the view that a separate air service, controlled by an air ministry, was the way forward. The idea was opposed by the older services – and with particular vehemence by the navy. The organizational wrangling would drag on for two more years under successive committees until an agreement was ground out.

  By now the RFC’s rapid expansion had put it in a position to reclaim its place as defender of the home airspace. On 10 February 1916, after much vacillation, the navy agreed to a reversion to the original division of duties. It would be responsible for enemy aircraft approaching Britain. Once they crossed over land it was the army’s job to deal with them. The RFC set up ten home-defence squadrons around the country. No. 39 Squadron, based at Sutton’s Farm airfield, just south of Hornchurch in Essex, was charged with defending London.

  It is hard to believe now that a target the size of a Zeppelin should prove so difficult to locate, stalk and shoot down. As was to be demonstrated in the next war, it is almost impossible to find anything in a night sky with the naked eye when there is no moon shining. Even if an interception was achieved, airships were surprisingly nimble and not much slower than an aeroplane. In the event of a pilot getting an airship under his guns, the results were liable to be disappointing. The .303 bullets of the Lewis guns pierced easily the steel skin of the Zeppelins and passed through the gasbags, but failed to ignite the hydrogen, causing only minor leakages that were easily patched up.