However, the outpouring of inventions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – electricity, new chemical industries, the internal combustion engine, radio, cinema, powered flight – all began to challenge the nature of military thinking. The industrialisation of war and the introduction of new military technologies is one of the most striking features of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The British Army that went to war in the Crimea in 1854 was armed with muzzle-loading rifles designed at the end of the seventeenth century. These fired smooth-bore pellets and were reliable only up to a range of about eighty yards. The artillery fired spherical cannonballs to a range of about two miles. Sixty years later, Lee Enfield rifles firing conical bullets from a magazine were accurate up to 400 yards and a well-trained soldier could fire at the rate of fifteen rounds a minute. The newly invented machine gun, with a rate of fire of up to 600 bullets per minute, would soon prove to be a mass killing machine. Meanwhile, the artillery had been transformed. Breech loading and steel barrels, rifled to provide greater accuracy, enabled field artillery to hit targets at a range of up to seven miles. Heavy mortars could throw incredibly powerful ordnance over a considerable distance.
The American Civil War of 1861–5 has been called ‘the first Great War of the Industrial Revolution’.10 Railways played a key part in transporting troops to the front. Trenches were dug and barbed wire used extensively. The employment of armoured trains, land mines, balloons, the field telegraph, ironclad ships, submarines and sea mines began to transform the nature of war. Countries at the forefront of these technological changes, like Germany with its huge Krupp steel works, or Japan, had a great advantage. The Prussians defeated Austria in a ten-week campaign in 1866 and France in six months in 1870–1. Japan overcame Imperial Russia in a campaign that stunned the western world in the war of 1904–5. Britain’s prowess was in its navy and the fifteen-inch guns installed in the latest of the huge steel-armoured dreadnought battleships had a range of nearly nineteen miles. And the Royal Navy was as large as the next two biggest navies combined.
What was different about the First World War was not only the level of industrialisation but also the scale of the conflict. The mass armies that assembled in 1914 were equipped with the latest scientific and industrial offerings but in addition, after several decades of rapid population growth, were of an unprecedented size. The population of Germany increased by more than one half between 1870 and 1910, from 41 to 65 million. Germany could assemble an army of 5,170,000 men including reserves in 1914. The French mobilised 4 million men at the outbreak of war. Russia, with a population of 161 million, also had 4 million trained men available. But of course every army also had to be fed, watered, uniformed, provided with boots, communications and transport as well as guns and equipment. So, when war came in 1914 it would be the first ever fully industrialised, scientific war. The big question was, were the military classes ready for this? And would it be the soldiers or the scientists who would discover what was needed to win a twentieth-century war?
The first application of science to the new technology that would go to war in 1914 came in what contemporaries saw as the extraordinary new science of aviation. Although the first dramatic developments in powered flight had happened elsewhere, it would not be long before the excitement of the first pioneers would spread to the British shores.
Part One
Aviators
2
The Pioneers
On Friday 30 April 1909, an event of great historic importance took place in a field near Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey, where the Thames widens into a broad estuary. A young racing driver and mechanical enthusiast by the name of John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon climbed into a fragile canvas-and-wire structure. With huge biplane wings and parallel vertical panels on either end, it looked rather like a large box kite. The structure had an elevator in the front and an enormous biplane-like tail. In between the two wings was a 10 hp engine with a crude three-ply wooden propeller. To fly this contraption, Moore-Brabazon had to lie flat on the lower wing and operate the limited controls with his arms stretched out in front of him. The wind was blowing very gently from the south when he climbed in, checked the rudder controls, started the engine and, once happy that it was running smoothly, instructed his friends who were clinging on to the wings to let go. He moved gently forwards. The engine pulled well and after a few yards a sudden gust of wind hit the craft head on. With so much lift from the large wings, the contraption took off and ascended perfectly into the air, to a height of about fifty feet.
Moore-Brabazon was just beginning to enjoy the experience when another gust of wind caught the aircraft from the side. It tipped suddenly off balance and the right wing rose higher in the air. Moore-Brabazon heaved the rudder control as strongly as he could to try to rebalance the aircraft, but to his dismay the pressure he exerted broke the control line. He was now in the air with no control over his machine. All he could do was to tilt the front elevator and glide slowly back down to earth. But the field was full of ditches and dykes and he now had to worry about finding a smooth spot on which to land. Only a few seconds later, still out of balance from the gust of wind, the left wingtip hit the ground heavily. The aircraft shuddered under the impact. Wires and struts snapped viciously. As the machine crashed into the ground, the shock of the impact forced the engine from its moorings and it shot forwards, missing Moore-Brabazon by inches, and buried itself in the earth. The pilot, bumped and bruised and a little dazed but otherwise unhurt, was trapped on the wing, tied down by the wires that had come loose and wrapped around him. The first sensation he felt was being licked by his two dogs who had run after the aircraft. The previous few moments had been neither impressive nor heroic. The aircraft had only travelled 150 yards and had never attained a height of more than about fifty feet. But Moore-Brabazon had made history. For this was the first powered flight by a Briton in Britain. It was, as he later said, ‘an adventure into the unknown’.1 For his efforts, Moore-Brabazon was awarded Certificate No. 1 from the English Aero Club, the first ever pilot’s licence issued in Britain.
Although this was a British first, fliers had been taking to the air for some years in fragile canvas devices powered by one of the new generation of motor engines. After the Wright brothers’ first, famous heavier-than-air flight on 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, it had taken three years for flying to come to Europe when on 12 November 1906, in France, the Franco-Brazilian pilot Alberto Santos-Dumont flew, or some said hopped, a little over 200 yards in his own aircraft. And France was to be the centre of European aviation for some years to come. Gifted engineers like Gabriel Voisin and Henri Farman began to build and fly several new designs of aircraft. Indeed, John Moore-Brabazon was flying a French Voisin-Farman aircraft when he first took to the air on the Isle of Sheppey. He had lived in France and made several flights there beforehand, watched by crowds who cheered him on. He described these early flights as like ‘sitting on a jelly in a strong draught’.2
Moore-Brabazon, better known simply as Brabazon or ‘Brab’, was typical of the pioneers who characterised the first chapter in the history of flight. His family were members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and he had attended Harrow, one of the top public schools. But while there he fell head over heels in love with the motor car. Like many of his age group with a mechanical bent, he became obsessed by the new engineering triumph and gave a lecture to his school scientific society on the workings of the internal combustion engine. His father, who had served in the Indian army for thirty years, thought his son should be getting a fine classical education and like many of his generation, as Brabazon put it, ‘did not “hold” with motor-cars’.3 Family pressure persuaded Brabazon to apply to Cambridge to study for an Applied Sciences degree. Bizarrely, he had to spend a term at a crammer to improve his Greek, which he had neglected at school, to get through his matriculation exams even to study sciences. But he only spent a year at Cambridge before dropping out.
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p; While there, he met another young man from a similar social background who shared his obsession with motor cars: Charles Rolls was about to form a company to design and build automobiles. The two young men used to race cars together and won several speed trials in the Gordon Bennett races (named after the proprietor of the New York Herald) in Ireland in July 1903. After dropping out of Cambridge, Brabazon stayed in close touch with Rolls but moved to Paris, where he served a form of apprenticeship in the workshop of the Darracq Motor Company. Here he did a bit of everything, from assembling engines to fitting tyres on to new vehicles.
Before long, the young Englishman had an opportunity to try his hand once again at motor racing, and very good at it he turned out to be. The thrill of driving at speed seems to have captivated him, and soon Brabazon was winning motor races – and with them decent sums of prize money. He raced in Britain, in Ireland and on the continent for several different companies including Austin, Mors and Minerva. It was in one of the Minerva cars that he made an international name for himself by winning the celebrated Circuit des Ardennes in 1907. His car reached the then incredible speed of 70 mph.
Brabazon, like many of the bright young things of his era, enjoyed another enthusiasm. Having started in France in the 1780s, by the early twentieth century ballooning had become established as a form of reconnaissance for the military. However, it was now also a fashionable recreational sport for the wealthy elite; to fill a balloon with the required 45,000 cubic feet of gas cost five pounds (equivalent to about £500 today). While at Cambridge, Brabazon discovered the joy of sailing silently and majestically over the countryside suspended in a basket below a large spherical balloon. He loved the peace and quiet of ballooning, and in a way that perfectly summed up his class he used to say that ‘to go up in a balloon is the only way to go into the air like a gentleman’.4
It was perhaps inevitable in 1906–7, when interest began to grow in the new science of aviation, that Brabazon and his chums like Charles Rolls would take up this latest fad. It offered the opportunity to combine a fascination for solving mechanical problems with the thrill of speed and the excitement of flight. After Brabazon’s victory at the Circuit des Ardennes, several motor manufacturers approached him with requests to drive for them. But instead Brabazon spent more time mixing with the young men who were beginning to pioneer the new sport of flying.
One group Brabazon got to know well was the three Short brothers, Horace, Eustace and Oswald. They came from a family of north country mining engineers. The eldest, Horace, had designed an early form of amplifier in the late 1890s. The brothers initially set up a business in Hove, near Brighton, to construct balloons. After a few years they each put up £200 capital to form a company to design and build aircraft and moved to a larger site, erecting a set of hangars on an area of marshland at Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey. When Brabazon returned from France he based himself there.
Most of the early pioneers emerged from the tradition of mechanical engineering whose champions had been part of the revolution in transport over the previous decades. The Wright brothers were bicycle manufacturers, while in France many of the pioneers were technicians who enjoyed trying to make machines work successfully. In Britain the first generation of aviation pioneers quickly established themselves, building their own aircraft or adapting the designs of others. Broadly speaking, they fell into two types. First there were the gentlemen pioneers, of whom Brabazon is a perfect example; another was his friend, the son of a peer who was correctly known as The Honourable Charles Stewart Rolls.
Rolls had been to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was one of the first people in Britain to acquire a motor car when in October 1896 he imported a Peugeot from France. He attracted an immense amount of attention when he drove it up from London to Cambridge, a journey that took eleven and a half hours. Rolls was tall, thin and looked every inch the aristocrat, but unusually for his class he had an instinctive understanding of things mechanical. Flamboyant, wealthy and still in his twenties, he cut a dashing figure on the early motor racing circuit and later was one of the first to join the RAC, which he helped to run for some years. He was a great publicist for the motor car.
In 1902, Rolls formed his own motor company in Fulham, dealing largely in French Panhard vehicles. But it was when, in 1906, he merged this concern with Frederick Henry Royce’s Manchester engineering parts supply company that one of the greatest brands in motoring and aviation was created. The resultant manufacturing company, based in Derby, was set up with capital of £60,000 and the first Rolls-Royce was a four-cylinder, 20 hp luxury vehicle named the Grey Ghost. Although by the time of the merger Rolls had become obsessed with aviation, the Rolls-Royce company devoted its early years to the manufacture of luxury motor vehicles. It was only during the war that it produced its first aircraft engines. The very name Rolls-Royce of course still stands as a by-word for excellence.
Thomas Sop with was another member of the wealthy classes who enjoyed pursuing his passions of yachting, motorcycling and motor racing and first came to aviation as a sport. Having bought a single-seat monoplane and taught himself to fly, in 1910 he established a British record by flying 107 miles in 3 hours 10 minutes. After this he opened a flying school at Brooklands. Among those who learned to fly at the school was Harry Hawker (whose company twenty-five years later built the Hurricane fighter). Sop with went on to design and build his own aircraft through the Sopwith Aviation Company, where his models soon acquired a reputation for combining manoeuvrability with stability; his name would become a household word in the course of the war for the famous series of fighters he produced.
Some of the other British aviation pioneers, however, were not sons of the gentry, and – like the Short brothers – they represented a different tradition that also fed into the early aviation business. Alliott Verdon Roe was born into a middle-class family in the suburbs of Manchester. His family moved to Clapham Common in south London and he attended St Paul’s School, but he was not happy there and left at fourteen to be apprenticed at a railway locomotive works outside Manchester. During his apprenticeship he developed an enthusiasm for cycling and a reputation as a fine bicycle mechanic. He then went to sea as an engineer for the British and South African Royal Mail Company, and while he was watching albatrosses glide in the wake of his ships he developed an all-consuming passion for flight.5 He left the merchant navy in 1902 and became a draughtsman in the new automobile industry, where he came up with an improved gear-changing mechanism. But Roe spent as much time as possible building gliders and furthering his interest in the possibilities of aviation. In January 1906 an engineering supplement of The Times published a letter from Roe in which he dismissed ballooning and said the future of aviation lay with ‘the aeroplane system’. He predicted that motor-driven machines would be flying over England by the following summer.6
But A.V. Roe, as he was known, had no wealthy friends to back him, and during the next couple of years he struggled to find funding to develop his ideas. In August 1907 he won a small amount of money from a competition flying aircraft models. Then, in the mews of a house in Wandsworth where an elder brother lived, he built his first aircraft. Its wooden frame was stiffened by wire bracing, and it had an upper wingspan of 36ft and a lower wingspan of 30ft. A local cycle shop mechanic helped with the welding work. There was no rudder, while the pilot’s place was at the very front, by the forward elevator. The big advance was that Roe designed the first all-purpose control column, effectively a prototype joystick/with which the pilot could adjust the elevator and hence affect the aircraft’s vertical movement.
Having built the aircraft, Roe had to find somewhere to try to fly it. He chose the motor racing centre at Brooklands near Weybridge in Surrey, as the club there was offering prize money of £2500 to anyone who could achieve a circular flight around their brand new track. A sum like this would set him up properly in business. Roe moved there in September 1907 and erected a shed on the infield to assemble his aircraft, but in part, no
doubt, because he did not share the gentlemanly background of most of the club’s members, he found the local track officials downright hostile to the presence of an aviator in their midst. For a long period he lived a hand-to-mouth existence, trying to get his craft to fly. However, despite facing a variety of difficulties and obstructions, he learned many lessons from every attempt to fly his aircraft. He started with a 9 hp twin-cylinder motorcycle engine, but in May 1908 he obtained a far more powerful 24 hp Antoinette engine from France, one of the best aero engines of its day. Roe later claimed that he managed to get airborne the following month in a modified and improved version of his aircraft, although at the time he made no announcement about what would have been a notable pioneering achievement. (In a dispute with Brabazon in the late 1920s a committee investigated his belated claims and decided not to accept them.7)
Despite the setbacks, A.V. Roe went on to be a prime mover in the founding of the British aircraft industry. His company Avro produced one of the finest planes in the early part of the war, the Avro 504. And in the Second World War it would be Avro that produced such legendary British aircraft as the Lancaster bomber.
Secret Warriors Page 5