A month later came another major boost to morale, with the award of the VC to a third pilot. Twenty-four-year-old Capt Lanoe Hawker had transferred to the RFC from the Royal Engineers in October 1914, and already gained the DSO for his daring at Gontrode Zeppelin base on 25 April. During the evening of 25 July, patrolling alone over the Ypres salient he attacked three German machines in a single-seat Bristol Scout C, according to Cecil Lewis, another pilot and author of Sagittarius Rising, ‘so small that even an average man had to be eased in with a shoehorn’. Hawker’s machine had a Lewis gun mounted on the left side of the cockpit, set at an angle to fire downwards beneath the lower wing of his biplane. Thus any attack had to be launched from the starboard rear of an opponent, making Hawker vulnerable to a gunner positioned behind his pilot. Although raked and damaged, the first German machine escaped, but the engine of the second was disabled and the pilot forced to land. Over Hooge, at 10,000ft Hawker spotted a third machine, an Albatros directing artillery fire. Skilfully manoeuvring, with the sun behind him Hawker achieved complete surprise. The enemy machine crashed in flames behind the Allied lines killing its crew of two. A bonus in the wreckage was a marked map showing a German gun position hitherto undetected. Hawker’s VC citation read: ‘The personal bravery shown by this officer was of the very highest order, as the enemy’s aircraft were armed with machine guns, and all carried a passenger as well as the pilot.’ Sadly, like so many other airmen, Hawker would not survive the war.
Within a week the RFC was celebrating yet another triumph. Twenty-six-year-old Capt John Liddell, an Oxford First Class honours graduate in Zoology and member of the British Astronomical Association, had qualified as a pilot at Brooklands pre-war but went with The Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders to France in August 1914. Mentioned in Despatches and awarded the Military Cross (MC) before being invalided home, he recovered to become attached to the RFC in May 1915, and on 31 July gain a VC. On patrol in the Ostend-Ghent area, his machine was severely damaged in aerial combat and his right thigh bone broken. The aeroplane fell 3,000ft before the wounded pilot regained consciousness and control though still under fire. After half and hour he managed to land the aeroplane back at his station, ‘not-withstanding his collapsed state’. The citation stated that
… the difficulties experienced by this officer in saving his machine and the life of his observer cannot be readily expressed, as the control wheel and throttle control were smashed, and also one of the under-carriage struts. It would seem incredible that he could have accomplished his task.
Although Liddell appeared likely to recover in hospital, his condition deteriorated. After his leg was amputated, blood poisoning took hold and he died on 31 August 1915, the Feast of St Aidan – Liddell’s second Christian name. Liddell’s Commanding Officer in The Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders wrote: ‘We were very proud of our VC and he will always be affectionately remembered, not only for the honour he has gained for us, but also for his great abilities and delightful disposition.’
Col H.M. Trenchard assumed command of the RFC in France on 19 August in place of Maj Gen Sir David Henderson, who returned to London as overall head of the Corps. He now controlled 12 squadrons and 161 aeroplanes, which he aimed to deploy aggressively. Trenchard quickly realised, however, that the RFC had too many aeroplanes inferior to German machines, such as the Fokker monoplane in which Immelmann gained an Iron Cross 1st Class on 1 August for shooting down a British two-seater. Increasing the operational number of machines was not enough; quality was crucial and specialisation of roles advisable. The day before Trenchard took post, Lt Sholto Douglas joined No 8 Sqn at Marieux, a ‘busy airfield’ with canvas hangars in a row in front of the wooden huts in the trees of forest which stood along two sides of it, and indirectly supported Trenchard’s conclusion. He noted that the BE2c pusher was superior to earlier models but still took an hour to climb to 6,000ft. As a pilot, he felt distinctly uncomfortable ‘to have a Lewis gun yammering away only a few inches above my head’ when his observer in the front cockpit fired backwards.
In his quest for more positive action, Trenchard was also faced with a sobering set of statistics. An analysis of longer range, ‘strategical’ bombing beyond the battlefield between 1 March and 20 June 1915 showed that only three attacks out of the 141 carried out could be deemed successful. He also came to realise that not all those on the ground appreciated his efforts, when rebuked by an artillery officer: ‘Don’t you see … that I’m far too busy to have time to play with your toys in the air.’
The autumn assault in the Artois and Champagne regions launched by British and French divisions on 25 September would further test the RFC. In Champagne, the French briefly held Vimy Ridge but after promising early progress, failed to achieve the anticipated break-through. Further north at Loos, 10 miles (16km) from Arras, the British suffered the same fate. Swift initial advances raised unreasonable hopes. A junior officer later recalled that ‘most of us who reached the crest of Hill 70 and survived were firmly convinced that we had broken through that Sunday, 25 September 1915’. The suburbs of Lens seemed open ahead, ‘but alas neither ammunition nor reinforcements were immediately available, and the great opportunity passed’. As another participant wrote: ‘How heavily we had suffered could be gauged by the bleeding mass of men that lay in the shelter of the roadside’. When the attack finally came to a halt on 16 October, the British had suffered 50,380 casualties (including some 15,800 dead or missing).
After Loos and other less publicised clashes in 1915, Field Marshal Sir John French paid tribute to the RFC’s ‘plucky work in co-operation with the artillery, in photography and the bomb attacks on the enemy railways … [which] were of great value in interrupting his communications’. Between 23 and 28 September, 82 100lb and 163 20lb HE plus 26 incendiary bombs were dropped. Railway tracks were reported to have been hit in fifteen different places, five trains damaged and installations such as signal boxes destroyed. On 26 September, separate attacks on Valenciennes from 5,000–6,000ft struck locomotive sheds with spectacular results, an ammunition train. French’s praise was followed by promotion of the RFC’s commander, Trenchard, to brigadier-general.
Away from the front, on another continent, Canadian-born Douglas Joy discovered that transfer to the RFC could still be tricky. Commissioned into a cavalry regiment seventeen days after the outbreak of war, on 2 February 1915 he applied to join the Canadian Aviation Corps. At his interview, it emerged that he had never even seen an aeroplane but was keen to fly and had a sound theoretical grasp of aeronautics. So, because RFC entrants must be certified aviators, he was sent to the Curtiss Flying School on 10 May. The School charged for a course of instruction, which with all other training costs, including living expenses, must be met by the fledgling pilot. He would receive a gratuity of £75 on qualification but only if accepted into the air arm. Joy took the gamble.
Half the course was on Curtiss F-type flying boats from Toronto harbour; the rest in the Curtiss JN-3 tractor aeroplane from Long Beach airfield, west of Toronto. On 20 July 1915, Joy received British Empire Aviation Certificate No. 1525 after performing two figure of eight manoeuvres round a pair of markers 500m (1,650ft) apart, then landing with the engine off close to a prescribed marker, and a third test requiring him to cut his engine, glide and land successfully after a straightforward flight. Joy’s final tests, which varied from those applied elsewhere, showed that there was no universal agreement about assessing a pilot’s ability. When he qualified, Joy had flown a total of eleven hours.
On 16 August, after travelling to England, Joy was gazetted probationary 2/Lt in the RFC backdated to 22 July and sent to Shoreham-on-Sea for military training. To his dismay, he discovered that the promised £75 would not be forthcoming until he had gained his wings in England. He was soon fuming in a letter to his mother that his treatment was ‘most insulting’, the ‘incompetent’ instructor ‘telling me that I allowed the machine to flop all over the place’, which made Joy ‘very angry’.
I
n a letter on 26 August, he confessed to being ‘fed up’. Addicted to flying, he had been forced to undertake a course of lectures ‘to which nobody dreams of paying much attention and if you do attempt to pay any attention you find that the lecturers are sort of hopeless and inefficient’. In an early test, he gained twenty-six marks out of a possible eighty, which placed him near the top of the group. Evidently, Joy was unimpressed with his fellow pupils and their instructors. He did not think any better of the aeroplanes: ‘Frankly I was fearfully funky about flying shortly after I came here. The machines are like bird cages, so many wires, with a bunch of squib firecrackers inside them’ and inferior to the Curtiss biplanes which he had flown in Canada. A Henri Farman biplane, in particular, he deemed ‘a cow’ to fly.
Joy remained far from the action in which Max Immelmann was closely involved, though like him still thoughtful of his family. On 11 October, Immelmann apologised for not getting home for his mother’s birthday, but hoped that the next year would fulfil her wish ‘to see peace in the world again’. On 28 October he noted his fifth victory two days previously, for which Duke Ernst Henrich of Saxony telephoned his congratulations and an engraved silver goblet was fashioned. Practically, he sent money to his mother to subscribe to the War Loan appeal; something which Oswald Boelcke also did frequently. Since news of Immelmann’s successes had been publicised, his mail had markedly increased though he could not see that he had achieved ‘anything particular’. He was wary of unscrupulous people getting hold of his correspondence and warned his mother that she would earn his ‘eternal’ displeasure ‘if anything of mine is published’.
Immelmann acknowledged his debt to Boelcke, who devoted considerable time to studying Allied tactics. Faced with formations of fighters protecting observation machines, he looked to German aeroplanes operating in pairs. In this mini-formation, he often flew with Immelmann who nevertheless was not averse to raising doubts about Boelcke’s victory claims. Immelmann only counted machines which ‘crash or land’ on the German side of the line, whereas Boelcke included any seen to come down in Allied territory. If Immelmann applied this criterion, his total in October 1915 would be seven. This seems to have been a passing irritation and the two pilots continued their friendship and practical co-operation until Boelcke was posted further south.
In mid-September, Boelcke moved to Metz, where he carried out escort duties with one of the bombing units controlled directly by the Army High Command. His victory tally continued to rise, but to his parents he deplored exaggerated press accounts of his achievements and like Immelmann, implored them not to make photos available to newspapers or magazines. Nevertheless, he continued to send them detailed descriptions of his exploits, explaining that this would prevent them from imagining combat worse than it actually was. ‘My fast, nimble Fokker makes a fight in the air hardly more dangerous than a motor trip.’ There was no need for them to worry.
In Britain, there was much to worry about, with a sharp reminder that the homeland remained vulnerable to enemy attack. During the late afternoon of 13 October, six Zeppelins were detected approaching London and aeroplanes on stand-by brought to immediate readiness. Lt John Slessor was on duty at Sutton’s Farm, Essex, and ordered to patrol in his BE2c at 10,000ft. He caught sight of an airship over London, but was himself spotted. As Slessor manoeuvred to attack from above, the Zeppelin released ballast, opened up its engines and climbed out of range. Frustrated, Slessor picked up the Thames and patrolled in the Chingford-Tilbury area until his fuel ran low. As he prepared to land in the dark, fog partly obscured the flare path. An attempt by a searchlight crew to aid illumination only made visibility worse and Slessor severely damaged his machine on landing. He walked away unscathed. The inescapable reality was that of the defending aeroplanes to go up, his was the only one even to spot a Zeppelin. Both of John Cotesworth Slessor’s legs had been affected by polio in childhood and an army medical board had ruled him ‘totally unfit for any form of military service’. However, a family friend secured his direct entry to the RFC in which he was commissioned on his eighteenth birthday, four months before his Zeppelin quest.
The year 1915 had not been a good one for the British ground forces, in which the costly major offensives had been peaks in a pattern of continuous probes, attacks and counter-attacks along the whole front. By 9 December, in Flanders and France 404,459 casualties had been incurred for precious little territorial gain. Tryggve Gran wrote that ‘the casualty lists showed that the air war too was taking a sacrificial toll’, singling out for criticism the expensive practice of making ‘quite unprotected’ machines bomb at low level. Gran’s claim of ‘a sacrificial toll’ at first glance looks absurd. Up to 9 December the RFC had incurred 174 casualties (dead, wounded and missing), in reality a high proportion of available manpower on the Western Front in 1915.
Like the Army, the RFC was painfully coming to terms with a new type of warfare. With the onset of the second winter of the war, it was poised for another period of consolidation, reorganisation and renewed hope.
5
New Look: The Second Winter
‘Three cheers for old Lloyd George’
On 6 December 1915 at Chantilly, 25 miles (40km) north of Paris, British, French, Russian and Italian representatives (Italy having joined the Allies on 26 April 1915) met to finalise operations for the coming year. Agreement was reached to attack on three fronts: Britain and France in the west, Russia in the east, Italy from the south.
Thirteen days later, a significant change in command occurred, when Gen Sir Douglas Haig replaced Field Marshal Sir John French at the head of British troops on the Western Front. From the outset, Sir John had been generous in his appreciation of the RFC, but Haig and Trenchard had enjoyed a close working relationship ever since Trenchard took charge of the First Wing in Flanders when Haig led the British I Corps.
Preparation of the two British air forces for the new year were based on an analysis of events in 1915 and their own anticipated capability for 1916. The Lewis gun firing .303in bullets fed from a revolving drum had been generally adopted, although there was still a disturbing tendency for the mechanism to jam. In two-seater machines, whether pusher or tractor, the observer had freedom to manipulate and reload. However, in a single-seater, the pilot faced greater difficulty. He must stand up to fire and reload his machine-gun fixed on the upper wing, while still flying his aeroplane. In November 1915, the Director of Military Aeronautics at the War Office invited the Vickers Aircraft Company to examine this problem. A month later its chief designer, G.H. Challenger, came up with a modified system involving less frequent drum changes and a more flexible field of fire. Development of a bomb-sight at the CFS, which allowed pilots to gauge speed over the ground rather than the less accurate air speed, was another important advance in 1915.
Tactical innovations had also proved beneficial. Identification of targets simply by map references was refined into a system of squares on a map coupled with evolution of a clock code. A spot on a transparency had twelve radial lines (numbered 1 –12) emanating from it and eight concentric circles (each with a letter of the alphabet A–F, Y–Z) representing distances 10–500yds. An airborne observer would place the spot over a target on his map and signal the fall of shot to a battery using the same lay-out: A2, for example. The squared map and clock system would remain in use throughout the war. By November 1915, better daylight visual communication had evolved between ground and air, signal lamps and strips of cloth being supplemented by the use of coloured smoke flares.
Notwithstanding the competition for manufacturing sources between the RFC and RNAS, a solution to which had prompted Maj Gen Sir David Henderson’s return to the War Office, during 1915 vast strides were made to improve the design and provision of aeroplanes. To some extent, in the short run design would remain simpler than construction, with manufacturers still geared to limited production runs. Vickers, according to its official historian, at this time represented a good example of ‘this small and still amate
urish British aircraft industry’. At its Crayford works, five types of aeroplane were under construction. Four were variations of the RAF’s BE design, the fifth Vickers’ own ‘Gunbus’. Only the BE2c and Gunbus would exceed 100 machines. With relaxation of the RAF’s monopoly, during 1915 Vickers opened a new works with bigger production capacity at Weybridge, adjacent to the Brooklands racing track. By June, the BE2c was being turned out there, and in October 1915 a conference at the RAF further widened design opportunities for civilian companies. The following month, Henderson reiterated the need for such a development, when he complained that machines were ‘still in the stage of experiment and speculation’.
The fruits of the October 1915 manufacturing and design initiatives would be felt in the future. The present, especially on the home front, brought more acute problems. On 8 September 1915 a Zeppelin raid on London killed thirteen and wounded 87; on 13 October the casualties were 71 killed and 128 injured. Mounting attacks against the capital caused Lord Kitchener to reproach Henderson: ‘What are you doing about these airship raids?’ he demanded. The Secretary of State for War brushed aside Henderson’s protest that the RNAS exercised responsibility for home defence. ‘I do not care who has the responsibility’, Kitchener replied. ‘If there are any more Zeppelin raids and the Royal Flying Corps do not interfere with them, I shall hold you responsible.’ It may have been entirely coincidental that shortly after-wards the RFC determined to increase the night training of pilots for anti-Zeppelin patrols and ringed London with ten airfields ready to intercept hostile airships.
Cavalry of the Clouds Page 9