Callender witnessed several air raids while at Dover. Soon after he arrived two enemy aeroplanes appeared at noon one Sunday and dropped bombs on a brewery. Neither the suddenness nor the extent of the attack particularly concerned Callender and his fellows: ‘We were anxious to know if our beer supplies would be interrupted.’ Days later, around midnight a Zeppelin came over, causing the guns of Dover Castle to open up: ‘It was a lovely sight and quite new to us. About every other shell was a tracer, so as to allow the gunners to see where the shells were travelling.’ But the German airship moved out of range and slowly disappeared inland. ‘Guns mounted on aeroplanes at this time were a very medieval affair’, Callender reflected, pilots ‘quite thrilled’ when he devised a ‘mounting with swivel attachment’. He observed that successfully crossing to France by air still rated as ‘an achievement’. One day, six machines left Dover for St Omer, but only two arrived, the rest ditching in the Channel. All eight airmen from the floating machines were saved by patrolling vessels, though one testy Scotsman ‘played hell’ because the Royal Navy fished him out of the water with a boat hook.
At the Front, during June Max Immelmann had moved to Douai with Flying Section 62 in response to the Allied Spring offensive. He explained to his mother that he shared a small villa with Boelcke and Lt von Teubern, finding Boelcke a ‘quiet fellow with sensible views’. Boelcke revealed that he deplored the lack of ambition among contemporary fighter pilots, who went ‘for pleasant excursions round our lines and never got a shot at the enemy’. Boelcke was more ambitious, savouring ‘the joy of having a good clout’ at Allied machines beyond the line: ‘One must not wait till they come across, but seek them out and hunt them down.’
Boelcke painted a picture of relaxed confidence in Douai, despite Allied ground attacks merely 20km (12.4 mls) away. Shops and hotels were open, ‘civilians [were] going for walks, the boys returning from swimming and the girls from tennis’, he wrote to his parents. Like Immelmann, Boelcke received parcels from behind the lines, in his case from an unusual source. While stationed at Trier (Trèves) in August 1914, he had been billeted with Frau Kunz and her two young daughters, who treated him as part of the family. When Boelcke admitted to being short of reading material, Frau Kunz sent him ‘a whole bookshop’.
Immelmann’s correspondence from Douai revealed that his main work involved photographic reconnaissance. He was confident that the British and French would not break through on the ground and saw ‘no harm in Italy coming in’ against Germany as this would open up new battle areas preventing the Allies from reinforcing the Western Front. On 3 June 1915, Immelmann thanked his mother for a long letter and revealed that he had run into trouble for the first time. The previous day, ordered with Teubern as his observer to photograph enemy positions, he had evaded an enemy machine to cross the line near Lens. But another harassed him in the target area, which led to a ‘wonderful game’ of manoeuvring without either aeroplane opening fire. After completing their task, Immelmann and Teubern flew back unmolested.
They were not so lucky on 3 June. As Teubern was busy taking shots of a British position, Immelmann saw a Farman biplane approaching 300m (almost 1,000ft) higher. The machine came closer and closer until it was directly above Immelmann, whose view was blocked by the wings of his own biplane. Then he heard ‘the familiar “tack, tack, tack, tack”’ of machine-gun fire, and small holes began to appear in his right wing. Immelmann had to cope with his attacker, while Teubern continued to photograph. Immelmann wrote that ‘it is a dreadful feeling to wait without being able to open fire until perhaps you are hit’. Teubern completed his work, but on landing Immelmann discovered that they had been extremely fortunate: ‘The lower part of the cowling, which cover the engine looks like a strainer’; damage, he claimed, caused by ‘dum-dum’ soft-nosed expanding bullets. This detailed account of a narrow escape, like many relayed by Allied airmen, could scarcely have cheered his mother. For completing this operation, Immelmann was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, and he soon moved from reconnaissance aeroplanes to fighters.
Towards the end of June 1915, Oswald Boelcke enthused about the arrival of new wireless apparatus with which to direct ‘our artillery fire instead of the coloured lights formerly used’. He was even more excited about the advent of a 150hp two-seater machine in which he scored his first victory on 6 July, though to his parents he condemned the dramatic manner in which the press had written up a straightforward encounter. Shortly after his initial success, Boelcke forsook the two-seater for a single-seat Fokker E.III with which he stalked Allied artillery spotters silhouetted by the evening sun.
On the Allied side of the line on 26 May 1915, precisely five months after beginning life in the RFC, Sholto Douglas, not content with an observer’s role, commenced pilot training in France. He took to the air in a 80hp Caudron, which he considered ‘somewhat weird and primitive … [with] the gliding angle of a brick’. Nevertheless, in little over a week he gained Royal Aero Club certificate No. 1301. Reporting to Shoreham-on-Sea, Sussex, for military aviation training, he mastered the ‘antediluvian … large, clumsy’ Shorthorn before moving to Hounslow and then the CFS for his final test. At Upavon, he duly acquired his pilot’s wings, ‘one of the proudest moments I have known in my life’.
Harold Harrington Balfour, like Douglas, forsook the front line for the air. Gazetted 2/Lt in the Special Reserve of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps on his seventeenth birthday, 1 November 1914, he had watched airmen aloft as a youth while recovering from bronchitis in France, and revived his fascination during regimental manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, admiring ‘the god-like RFC pilots’. Now thoroughly hooked, he borrowed money from his father for flying lessons at Hendon on elderly Grahame White box-kites from whose precarious structure a pilot peered through his legs into space. Two even more dubious Beatty-Wright machines with twin propellers run on bicycle chains from a small Gnome engine were also available. For these ‘there were no instruments of any kind and the only engine control was for an electriclight switch with a piece of piping fixed to it as a lever’.
Despite these tribulations, on 5 July 1915 Balfour secured Royal Aero Club Certificate No 1399. He could therefore fly, but without specialist training could not join the RFC. He returned to his regiment and still under eighteen years of age, went with it to France. Life in squelching trenches poorly protected with parapets of canvas sandbags and the distressing sight of unrecovered bodies lying in No Man’s Land, prompted him to respond to a call for volunteers to join the RFC. With his basic flying qualification, he resisted attempts to make him an observer and returned to England for instruction as a potential RFC pilot. Unfortunately, almost at once he succumbed to diphtheria. After recovery, he spent the rest of 1915 in depots like Farnborough drilling recruits.
Unlike Sholto Douglas, Harold Balfour or Ranald Reid, Robin Rowell had not served at the front, when he transferred from the Royal Engineers to the RFC in June 1915, admitting that during his military service ‘all the time I had a longing for the RFC’. Suspecting that his commanding officer would refuse to forward his application as he had done with other officers, Rowell resorted to subterfuge. He wrote to Col Sefton Brancker at the War Office and was asked to call on him. Rowell applied for a day off on the grounds that his 21st birthday was imminent and armed with a letter of introduction from a family friend, after travelling to London on the night train he spent the whole of the following day in the War Office. Brancker seemed only interested in his height and weight (5ft 9ins and 9 stone stripped) and whether he could ski. Satisfied, he told Rowell to apply via his commanding officer, who dare not veto this application.
On 22 June, Rowell reported to Farnborough for pilot training. There he met an old friend, Gordon Richardson, ‘at this new game for eleven days’ and seemingly ‘a veteran and expert’ as he knew the parts of an aeroplane. Richardson further impressed by showing him a training machine in a hangar. ‘So much sailcloth, wire and sticks’, Rowell thought and asked how the pilot stopped
it. ‘You can’t stop it; you can only switch off the engine and let it stop itself’ came the unpromising reply. No brakes were fitted to aeroplanes at this time, only a tail skid to slow momentum on landing.
An opportunity soon arose for Rowell to make his first flight in the early evening when the wind had died down sufficiently for ‘novices’ to go up. His instructor told him to ‘jump into’ a Maurice Farman Longhorn. On learning that Rowell had never flown before, he opted to take him ‘down the Straights’, which entailed flying along a line between the RAF airstrip and Laffan’s Plain and back (3-mile/5km return flight).
Once the mechanics had started the engine and the chocks were removed from under the wheels, ‘off we went, bumping down the aerodrome as we gathered speed, touching the ground more lightly and less frequently as we went, until eventually we were off the ground … It was a strange feeling, and I hung on to the two struts at each side as hard as I could.’ As the Longhorn passed over trees, ‘the old engine began spitting fire behind me’ and Rowell began to wonder how the machine could turn to go back, when ‘suddenly the machine heeled over to 45 degs.’ Rowell thought it was going completely over and clung on even more tightly. Looking over the left-hand side of the aeroplane he could see the ground and the canal, which caused him frantically to lean to the right. The machine righted itself and was again facing the RAF. After he landed, Richardson asked how he had liked the experience. ‘“Great fun”, I said, with a sense of guilt’, recalled Rowell more shaken than he cared to admit and worried about being able to execute such elementary turns himself.
When not flying, Rowell studied the theory of flight, how aeroplanes were rigged, the maintenance and care of engines. Pilots had to learn the Morse code and how to fire a Lewis gun, which was ‘just beginning to be used in the air’. There were, Rowell discovered, two ways of instructing a pupil in the art of flying. Each ‘novice’ could be put into a machine whose wings had been clipped so that he could only fly 10–15ft at a time; in effect, a series of hops.
You can easily picture a school of thirty would-be birdmen charging ten at a time round the aerodrome knocking off their wheels, colliding, and standing on their noses. It may be right to crawl before you can walk in learning many things, but not so much so in flying.
Farnborough favoured a less perilous form of instruction and the one more generally adopted in other training establishments. By mid-1915, most of its machines had dual controls.
For the first two or three flights you would be told to watch the movement of the levers in front of you; you would then be told to take hold of them and follow them with your hands; and after half-a-dozen trips you would be allowed to control the machine in a mild way, once you were up off the ground.
The instructor would show the pupil how to land, adding breezily that ‘putting the machine on the ground is as easy as falling off a log. At your first attempt, you would probably make a beautiful landing’, only to hear the instructor’s discouraging voice: ‘Yes, but the ground is twenty feet off’, as he took over and glided in to land.
The training flights were normally short and one day, when Rowell had a total of two and a half hours in the air, his instructor declared it was time for his first solo. ‘What an awful moment!’ Rowell wrote.
This indubitably is the worst flight a pilot ever makes. He is never competent to fly a machine alone; but by some extraordinary guarding of providence he will make a successful flight, and then the ice is broken and he makes good headway afterwards.
For his initiation, Rowell climbed into ‘the old Maurice Farman’. ‘Go ahead, then’ were the only words of encouragement. Once aloft, Rowell used the forward outrigger as his guide, his eyes fixed on it ‘intently, keeping it in line and level with the horizon’. Rowell was concerned that he might be climbing too steeply, but lacked the courage to take his eyes off the outrigger to glance at the airspeed indicator. But he realised that this was ‘imperative … and so keeping my head perfectly still, I swivelled my eyes on to the instrument board, only to get another fright’. He was flying at over 40mph, ‘a speed at which Longhorns are not supposed to lift, much less have any grip of the air with their controlling surfaces’. Instantly, Rowell pushed the controls forward ‘and as luck was with me they answered; up went the tail, and in a second or two I was charging down hill with the engine full throttle, nearly jumping out of the frame … So I went on, alternately stalling and diving as I went round’.
Time to turn for home. ‘I put on a little left rudder and no bank – I was afraid to bank – and the machine turned gradually, slipping outwards as hard as it could go, making a terrific draught on the right side of my head.’ As he prepared to land, Rowell recalled that ‘the perspiration was now rolling off me and my knees were so weak that I could barely press the rudder controls’. He switched off the engine and started to glide, but suddenly panicked that he was too close to the ground, pulled up before starting another glide with the result that the Longhorn ‘bounded like a kangaroo’. But he did get down feeling pleased with himself: ‘What a joy it was all over’. He had been round Farnborough safely without wrecking the aeroplane. His elation lasted until his disgruntled instructor materialised. The landing was ‘disgusting’ and he wondered how Rowell ‘didn’t fold up the whole outfit … Keep your controls still until the last moment, instead of pulling them backwards and forwards as if you are drawing beer in a bar’, he roared.
Eventually, Robin Rowell could successfully ascend to 1,000ft, execute three figures of eight over a designated ground marker, and managed twice to land from 1,000ft without using his engine, to finish within 10 yards of another marker. He now had his Royal Aero Club certificate.
A week before Rowell began his RFC training at Farnborough, writing from France on 15 June to his sister Kitty, James McCudden asked whether she had ‘had a visit from the Zeps [sic] yet?’ Unknown to him, the growing Zeppelin threat to London had resulted in a swift increase in defensive arrangements, with six RFC machines being put on permanent alert, two each at Joyce Green, Hainault Farm and Sutton’s Farm to the east of the capital. In addition, a ring of 13-pdr anti-aircraft guns was established to protect the approach to the capital from the north-east. During a Zeppelin night raid on 31 May, the first bombs fell on London causing forty-two casualties and £18,596 of damage. An inquest on two of the people killed recorded a verdict of ‘murder by some agent of a hostile force’. Then, on 7 June, encouraging news came from across the Channel. In the early hours Flight Sub Lieutenant (FSL) J.S. Mills, an RNAS pilot stationed at Dunkirk, resisted fierce ground fire to release four 20lb Cooper bombs on the airship base at Evère from 5,000ft, which utterly destroyed LZ.38 in its hangar.
Another RNAS pilot from Dunkirk registered an even more spectacular triumph that day. In drifting fog close to Ostend, 22-year-old FSL Reginald Warneford glimpsed the silhouette of an airship moving inland from a training cruise over the North Sea. Closing with it near Bruges, Warneford’s Morane-Saulnier L monoplane came under vigorous machine-gun fire from LZ.37’s gondolas, as its commander dropped ballast to gain height. Although his machine climbed more slowly Warneford kept up the pursuit, and seized his chance when the German airship began to descend towards its base near Ghent. This allowed Warneford to get higher than his enemy. Released 550ft above the envelope, five of his 20lb bombs fell harmlessly through, the sixth ignited a gas bag. The violent explosion tore the airship apart but also threw the Morane upside down into an uncontrolled dive, which Warneford fought successfully to correct. ‘There were pieces of something burning in the air all the way down’, he recorded. As he levelled out, the blazing remains of the Zeppelin hit the ground. Discovering that his machine’s tanks were almost empty, Warneford landed in enemy territory and keeping a wary eye for hostile troops, refilled them from the spare petrol cans he carried. As he finished his task and took off, rifle fire sped him on his way, but he escaped unharmed, the first Briton to destroy a Zeppelin in the air.
Within 36 hours, he had a t
elegram from the King awarding him the VC, gazetted on 15 June. In Paris to receive the Knight’s Cross of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his feat, two days later Warneford was dead. Both he and his passenger, an American journalist Henry Needham, on a short flight above Buc aerodrome were not strapped in and fell from the open cockpits as their machine suffered mechanical failure coming in to land killing both men. The previous day Warneford had been given some roses in a restaurant with the comment that his mother would be proud of him. Inexplicably, many of the petals dropped off and Warneford said, ‘I feel I shall die before I return home.’ He was buried in Brompton Cemetery, and George V wrote to Warneford’s mother expressing not only condolences but regret that he would not have ‘the pride of personally conferring upon him the Victoria Cross, the greatest of all naval distinctions’.
Cavalry of the Clouds Page 8