However, with the introduction of the Brock incendiary round – invented by a naval reserve officer who belonged to the firework manufacturing family – flying in a Zeppelin became an extremely hazardous activity. A single shot could turn an airship into a gigantic torch, and the balance of advantage tilted sharply and irrevocably in the defenders’ favour. The first demonstration of the Zeppelins’ new vulnerability came on the night of 2–3 September. It took place in front of an appreciative audience: the Londoners who for the previous fifteen months had cowered in the shadow of these silent and sinister monsters. At 2.30 that morning Muriel Dayrell-Browning, a thirty-seven-year-old linguist whose skills in Matabele, Zulu and German were being put to use in the War Office, was awoken at her house in central London by ‘a terrific explosion and was at the window in one bound when another deafening one shook the house’. Muriel, whose daughter Vivienne would go on to marry the novelist Graham Greene, looked out to see sailing above ‘a cigar of bright silver in the full glare of about 20 magnificent searchlights . . . the night was absolutely still with a few splendid stars. It was a magnificent sight and the whole of London was looking on, holding its breath.’2
As the ghostly shape slid overhead, Lieutenant William ‘Billy’ Leefe Robinson of 39 Squadron was approaching in his BE2 C, having taken off from Sutton’s Farm on anti-Zeppelin patrol just after 11 p.m. He was twenty-one, the son of a coffee planter, who had served as an observer in scout planes on the Western Front before becoming a pilot. Earlier that year he had intercepted an airship, but it had got away and in his eagerness to succeed he now pushed his luck to the limit. He had already sighted – then lost – the target once and was running low on fuel when he encountered it again, picked out in the searchlights. He swooped down, braving the anti-aircraft shells bursting all around and the accurate fire of the airship’s gunners, climbed up underneath and, as he wrote in his combat report, ‘distributed one drum’ of Brock and explosive Pomeroy bullets along its belly.
‘It seemed to have no effect,’ he remembered. ‘I therefore moved to one side and gave it another drum distributed along its side.’ Again his bullets seemed wasted. He swung round for a rear attack and from 500 feet blasted the rear. ‘I had hardly finished the drum before I saw the part fired at glow,’ he wrote. ‘In a few seconds the whole rear part was blazing.’ He ‘quickly got out of the way of the falling, blazing airship and being very excited fired off a few red Very lights and dropped a parachute flare.’
Leefe Robinson seems to have felt a sort of ecstasy at his achievement. Writing to his parents seven weeks later he was still high on the memory. ‘When the thing actually burst into flames of course it was a glorious sight – wonderful! It literally lit up the sky all around and me as well, of course . . . I hardly know how I felt. As I watched the huge mass gradually turn on end and . . . slowly sink, one glowing, blazing mass, I gradually realized what I had done and grew wild with excitement.’ As he admitted to his ‘darling old mother’, he was ‘not what is popularly known as a religious person’, but he found himself thanking ‘from the bottom of my heart that supreme power that rules and guides our destinies’.3
Muriel Dayrell-Browning watched the end from her bedroom window. ‘From the direction of Barnet a brilliant red light appeared . . . we saw it was the Zep diving head-first. That was a sight . . . the glare lit up all of London and was rose red. Those deaths must have been the most dramatic in the world’s history. They fell – a cone of blazing wreckage – thousands of feet, watched by eight million of their enemies. It was magnificent, the most thrilling scene imaginable.’
That morning, like hundreds of others, she made the trip to Cuffley in Hertfordshire where the airship – it was a wooden-framed Schutte-Lanz, not a Zeppelin – had hit the ground. By now her sentiments were more measured. ‘The wreck covers only thirty feet of ground and the dead are under a tarpaulin,’ she wrote. ‘I hope they will be buried with full military honours. They are brave men. RIP!’4
A fifteen-year-old schoolboy, Patrick Blundstone, was staying with family friends only a few hundred yards from the site, having apparently been sent out of London to escape the raids. He saw the bodies before they were hidden from view. ‘I would rather not describe the condition of the crew,’ he wrote in a letter to ‘Dear Daddy’ in London. ‘They were roasted, there is absolutely no other word for it. They were brown like the outside of roast beef.’ He collected ‘some relics, some wire and wood framework’.5Before souvenir hunters could strip the wreckage bare, the War Office carted it off and donated it to the Red Cross, who had the wires by which engines and gondolas were suspended beneath the envelope cut into inch-long lengths and sold at a shilling apiece with a certificate of authenticity ‘to help the wounded at the Front’.
Leefe Robinson’s victory generated a flood of relief and he became an instant hero. Within four days he was awarded the VC, pinned on him by King George V at Windsor in front of a large crowd. A fund was started for him which raised a colossal £3,500. He was obliged to have postcards bearing his photograph, smiling shyly as he emerges from a tent to respond to constant requests for autographs. Commemorative table napkins declared that ‘his greatest reward’ was ‘the heartfelt thanks of every woman and child in England’. Billy Leefe Robinson stands as the prototype for the barely formed young paladins who, twenty-four years later, would stand between British civilians and German bombers. Like them, he performed his feats in full sight of those he was seeking to protect. Half of London seems to have watched Airship SL11 sinking earthwards in a ball of fire, taking its commander Wilhelm Schramm and fifteen crew members to their deaths. Thus was formed a direct link between combatant and civilian that was to define the way the public regarded airmen in the years ahead. Even though their domain was the air, they were far more visible and accessible than the soldiers across the Channel or on the high seas, their daring, their prowess and their sacrifice on show for all to see.
Leefe Robinson was promoted and sent off to France eight months later as a flight commander with 48 Squadron. On his first patrol he ran into the Jasta 11 of Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron himself, and four of the six aircraft in his flight were shot down, including his own. Leefe Robinson survived, but spent the rest of the war in prison, including spells of solitary confinement as punishment for repeated escape attempts. He returned to England only to die in the great Spanish ’flu pandemic in December 1918.
His victory marked the end of the Zeppelins’ employment as a bomber. Henceforth they were easy meat for the night-fighters. In the next month, three more were shot down. During the winter of 1916 there were no further attacks, but in the spring of 1917 a new menace appeared in the shape of twin-engined Gotha GIV bombers. With these the Germans had the means to pursue their initial ambition to mount a serious aerial assault on the British homeland. Gothas were not the first long-range heavy bombers – the Russian engineer Igor Sikorsky had already designed a four-engine aircraft, which had been used effectively on the Eastern Front. They were, though, superior to anything so far developed in Britain. They got their name from the town in Thuringia, where the Gothaer Waggonfabrik, a rolling-stock manufacturer before the war, developed them. They had a wingspan of nearly eighty feet, were pushed along at about 80 or 90 mph by twin 260 hp Mercedes engines and carried ordnance weighing up to 1,100 pounds. The payload was smaller than an airship’s, but whereas Zeppelins scattered their bombs haphazardly, the Gothas were able to achieve some degree of concentration. The results were apparent on their first raid, on the early evening of 25 May 1917, when twenty-one bombers crossed the Channel from Ostend and made for London. They found the capital covered in low cloud, so they headed back, bombarding the army camp at Shorncliffe in Kent and neighbouring Folkstone on the way, killing ninety-five people, the largest death toll yet.
On 13 June, a hot hazy day, the Gothas returned to London. This time the conditions were ideal and fourteen aircraft bombed the City and East End of London. Another record was set, with 162 d
ead and 432 injured, some of them as they stood in the street, gawping at the machines overhead. The raid produced one of the emblematic events of the civilians’ war. One bomb landed on a primary school in Upper North Street, Poplar, an area of densely packed terraced houses. There had been some warning of the raid, but not enough to evacuate the children. The teachers tried to keep the pupils calm by getting them to sing, but soon their voices were drowned out by the sound of anti-aircraft guns and bombs. Eighteen children were killed, almost all of them infants between four and six years old, the sons and daughters of dock-workers.
With the fading of the Zeppelin threat, vigilance against air raids had slipped and aircraft were switched back to France, where they were wanted for the big pushes of 1917. The need to arm merchant ships against attacks by German commerce raiders meant they got priority in artillery production. Even so, ninety-odd fighters took off to intercept the Gothas over Britain, but they were too late and too dispersed to punish them. If they did manage to catch up, they were forced away by the bombers’ three Parabellum machine guns.
In the aftermath of the raid, the calls for civilian protection resumed. Against the opposition of the military, squadrons were shifted from the Western Front, weakening the balance of airpower over the trenches as both sides prepared for their summer offensives. Pressure also mounted once again for reprisals, which would also divert resources away from a struggle which, in the view of Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces, would be ‘the most severe we have yet had’.
It was essential, though, for the air raids over Britain to be halted or at least for the perpetrators to be punished if civilian morale and support for the war were to be maintained. The problem was that there were not enough aircraft to meet the demands of soldiers, sailors, politicians and civilians. The development of an efficient system of producing them had been held back by the haphazard development of airframes and engines, as well as the competing ambitions of the army and the navy. This began to be rectified when two forceful industrialists were given the job of boosting production. First Lord Cowdray, then Sir William Weir, promised dramatic increases in airframes and engines, but these came too late to stop another Gotha raid on 7 July, again on the East End, which killed another 54 and injured 190. A surge of public outrage generated yet another burst of bureaucratic energy. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, instructed Jan Christian Smuts to examine the whole question of the organization of the war in the air. Smuts, who fifteen years before had commanded a Boer army fighting the British in South Africa, set to work producing a report which was to shape Britain’s air forces for the rest of the century. In the meantime, improved anti-aircraft defences, barrage balloons and searchlights and faster and better organized fighter units gradually reduced the threat from the air. On 19 May 1918 seven out of an attacking force of nineteen bombers were shot down and, with mounting pressures on other fronts, the air raids petered out.
In three years the Zeppelins and Gothas had launched 103 attacks on Britain, killing 1,414 civilians and wounding 3,866. This was a fraction of the death toll among soldiers on the Western Front, and fewer than the 1,480 who would be killed in a single night in London in the worst attack of the Blitz (1940–41). It was the air raids of Zeppelins and Gothas, however, rather than any other experience of the First World War, that would change the nature of Britain’s air forces when it went to war with Germany again.
Chapter 5
Death, Drink, Luck
Despite the great expansion of the Allied and German air forces from 1916, the struggle in the skies retained a human scale. Aeroplanes were small and flimsy and the numbers involved in the fighting were small. It was possible for the participants to make some sense of it – unlike the nightmarish clash of steel and high explosive shaking the ground below them.
The combatants fought at close quarters. At the end of an aerial duel the protagonists might be only a few yards apart. Writing to his parents shortly after his arrival in France in February 1916, Albert Ball described an encounter with an Albatros, one of the sleek and powerful machines that were now consistently out-performing their enemies: ‘The interesting point about it was that we could see the Huns’ faces and they could see ours, we were so near.’1
Aviators could identify an opponent by his flying style. Later the German aces advertised themselves by painting their aircraft gaudy colours: blood-red for Manfred von Richtofen, a disciple of Oswald Boelcke, who had witnessed Boelcke’s banal death in a mid-air collision with a friendly aircraft, and inherited his crown as Germany’s top ace. Another flamboyant flier, Lieutenant Friedrich Kempf, had his name painted in giant letters on the top wing of his Fokker triplane, and the words Kennscht mi’noch? (Remember Me?) on the middle one.
German and Allied propagandists portrayed the war in the air as a chivalrous affair. It was an easier task than trying to prettify the swarming carnage on the ground. The public swallowed the line and, to some extent, the aviators themselves went along with it.
‘To be alone,’ wrote Cecil Lewis, who had lied about his age to join the RFC in time to take part in the battle of the Somme, ‘to have your life in your own hands, to use your own skill, single-handed against the enemy. It was like the lists in the Middle Ages, the only sphere in modern warfare where a man saw his adversary and faced him in mortal combat.’
The airmen were grateful to be at one remove from the dirt and stink of the front lines, returning at the end of each day to an aerodrome where they could get a bed, a bath, a drink and decent food. They looked down on the men toiling in the churned and polluted earth below and blessed their luck. One day in July 1917 Captain Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock went to scavenge a souvenir from a two-seater he had shot down (a habit he shared with von Richtofen).
‘The journey to the trenches was rather nauseating,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Dead men’s legs sticking through the sides with putties and boots still on – bits of bones and skulls with the hair peeling off, and tons of equipment and clothing lying about. This sort of thing, together with the strong graveyard stench and the dead and mangled body of the pilot . . . combined to upset me for a few days.’2
The airmen were in a unique position to comprehend the futility of what was happening on the ground. From their vantage point they saw all too clearly how miniscule were the gains that resulted from all the enormous effort.
‘The war below us was a spectacle,’ wrote Cecil Lewis. ‘We aided and abetted it, admiring the tenacity of men who fought in verminous filth to take the next trench thirty yards away. But such objectives could not thrill us, who, raising our eyes, could see objective after objective receding, fifty, sixty, seventy miles beyond.’3
This perspective encouraged feelings of detachment. Many airmen on both sides clung to the idea that what they were engaged in was somehow ‘clean’ in comparison to the vileness of trench warfare. British pilots used public-school lingo to describe what they were doing. ‘Have just been up to test my new machine [one of the newly arrived Nieuports],’ Albert Ball wrote to his parents in May 1916. ‘Well, I have never had so much sport. I fooled about and banked it, having such a topping test ride.’ He finished: ‘Huns, look out!’
The exuberance in Ball’s early letters home is the last sparkle of schoolboy innocence. He was nineteen years old when he arrived in France in February 1916, but in photographs his taut, uncreased skin makes him look even younger. He stares straight at the camera, giving nothing away. The letters, however, reveal his inner confusion as the values of the playing field jostle uncomfortably with the neurosis of the battlefield.
Ball was the first British pilot to become famous. He was brought up in a middle-class home in Nottingham, where his father had become Lord Mayor after starting his working life as a plumber. He went to a local public school organized along Christian lines with plenty of cold baths and exercise. When the war broke out he hurried to join up and was posted to the infantry. Bored with waiting to be sent to France he took flying lessons with a view to jo
ining the RFC. He fell instantly in love with flying, despite the dangers. ‘It is rotten to see the smashes,’ he wrote in a letter. ‘Yesterday a ripping boy had a smash and when we got up to him he was nearly dead. He had a two-inch piece of wood right through his head and died this morning.’ He informed his parents – without apparent irony – that he ‘would be pleased to take you up any time you wish’.
Ball reached France in time for the big Somme offensive of the summer of 1916 and soon made his mark by his extraordinarily aggressive approach. By now airmen were developing new tactics. The more skilful pilots disliked the close escort duties that Trenchard had demanded, which restricted their tactical options and made life more dangerous both for the aircraft they were supposed to be protecting and themselves. They preferred to operate solo, going off on hunting missions to seek out the enemy before they arrived over no-man’s-land. It was a singularly British approach and RFC fliers spent more time to the east of the front lines than the Germans did over British territory.
Ball was the embodiment of this approach. He would set off alone, having first tuned his aeroplane to his liking. Odds meant nothing to him and he would fly straight into swarms of opponents, closing to almost point-blank range and opening up with his Lewis gun. If he failed to down his victim with the first drum of ammunition he would break off, change the magazine and try again. Frequently, on his return from combats, his machine was found to be riddled with bullet holes.
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