Jumping clear, he threw off his flying kit and ran towards the two roads he had noticed. On the way, he met some farm workers: ‘Where’s the nearest telephone exchange?’ ‘Hull’, came the reply, ‘giving me such a shock of surprise that I nearly collapsed’. He was, to put it mildly, a trifle off course. Gran made his way back to North Weald that afternoon. ‘I have seldom had such a heartfelt welcome,’ he noted, which made him reflect that ‘perhaps the tension and pressure had been worse for the ground staff than for the pilot.’
Without suffering Gran’s tribulations, Maj A.R. Kingsford emphasised the frustration and discomfort of being on routine anti-airship duty. Serving with a detachement of No 33 Sqn at Brattleby (later renamed Scampton), Lincolnshire, ‘our job was night patrols hunting for Zeppelins. My patrol was Spurn Head [a spit of land east of Grimsby] to south of Lincoln for 3hrs duration and we literally froze.’ In his opinion, this exercise was absolutely pointless, as the ceiling of the FE2b was 12,000ft, whereas Zeppelins cruised at 18,000ft. Small wonder, he concluded, that he did not even glimpse an enemy airship throughout his time at Brattleby.
In France, as the new year dawned, Allied hopes turned towards the annual dreams of a decisive Spring breakthrough. In the east, Russia was to launch offensives against Germany and Austria-Hungary; the Italians would renew their campaign on the Isonzo river; the French (led by the confident, charismatic Gen Robert Nivelle) seize the dominant Chemin des Dames ridge; while the British advanced in the Arras region. In the British sector, the RFC would once more play a critical role, but it also had to support activity in other parts of the line, like the Ypres salient. Arras would be an important but not exclusive commitment. Hopes were raised of a more telling long-range bombing campaign with entry into service in November 1916 of the Handley Page (HP) O/100, product of a call from the RNAS the previous year for a ‘bloody paralyser’ of a bomber. With a crew of three, this formidable machine was powered by two 250hp Rolls-Royce Eagle engines, had a maximum bomb load of 2,000lbs, provision for Lewis guns in the front cockpit, rear cockpit and for downward and rearward firing through an opening in the fuselage.
On 7 January 1917, the RFC received a further morale boost with the award of another VC. Flying a FE2d at 9,000ft, Sgt Thomas Mottershead of No 20 Sqn remained at the controls of his burning machine, while his observer attempted to quell the flames. The citation for Mottershead’s decoration explained:
This very gallant soldier succeeded in bringing his aeroplane back to our lines, and though he made a successful landing, the machine collapsed on touching the ground, pinning him beneath wreckage from which he was subsequently rescued. Though suffering extreme torture from burns, Sgt Mottershead showed the most conspicuous presence of mind in the careful selection of a landing place, and his wonderful endurance and fortitude undoubtedly saved the life of his observer.
The citation ended sadly in noting that ‘he has since succumbed to his injuries’, leaving a widow, Lilian.
A week after Mottershead’s act of bravery, on 14 January an ominous appointment occurred in the German ranks. Manfred von Richthofen, awarded the Prussian Pour le Mérite two days earlier for his sixteenth kill, assumed command of Jagdstaffel 11 and painted his Albatros D.III red – a colour destined to strike fear into many an Allied pilot. The British aerial successes of the Somme were about to be painfully reversed at Arras; the new Halberstadt and Albatros machines prove as devastating as the Fokker of yesteryear.
8
Months of Setback, March–July 1917
‘Quelle guerre!’
Political upheaval in Russia arising from widespread dissatisfaction with the war, and which saw the Tsar replaced by a Provisional Government in March 1917, had worrying implications. The promised Russian offensive evaporated, and the collapse of the entire Eastern Front now seemed likely, making additional land and air forces available to the Germans in the west.
More immediately for the British air arms, the relative weakness of the pusher fighters compared with the new enemy single-seat machines and Jasta organisation caused mounting concern. During March 1917, 120 RFC machines were shot down, and Ewart Garland personally testified to the carnage. He returned from leave on 23 March to find that he had been posted to No 10 Sqn, which was still flying BE pushers. ‘Casualties were so high we hardly had time to get to know one another. I was soon to know what it was like to be attacked by enemy fighters of far superior speed and ability.’
James McCudden missed the disasters that month, having returned to England as an instructor at Joyce Green, near Dartford in Kent. His pupils included Lt Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock, a future VC winner, and his own brother Anthony. All four McCudden brothers were now in the RFC, the youngest (Maurice) having become an apprentice. James was not unduly impressed with Anthony in the air: ‘Very keen, but inclined to be over-confident’, he reported. Less officially, McCudden smuggled a blonde West End dancer onto his machine for a joy ride, subsequently painting ‘Teddie’ on the aeroplane’s fuselage in tribute to Miss Teddie O’Neill. The showgirl indirectly caused a moment of acute embarrassment for him, as he explained to his sister Kitty on 10 April: ‘Miss E’ had just phoned ‘to see if I received her letter posted three weeks ago’. He told her it had not arrived and she therefore thought that Kitty had not forwarded it or it had been lost. ‘Just play up to that’, McCudden asked, ‘so she will not have the satisfaction of thinking I got it’. Apparently, Miss E wanted ‘to make up’ and tell ‘her version’ of an incident, but McCudden had swiftly made his excuses and rung off. He admitted to Kitty that when he first heard a woman’s voice on the phone, he thought it was Miss O’Neill and said: ‘Is that you Teddie?’ Miss E must have heard this, so ‘don’t let it out’ that he knew a girl in the West End show Lorne, ‘otherwise she will get a programme and see Teddie O’Neill’s name’. Signing off ‘in great haste’, he pleaded with his sister: ‘Don’t tell anyone about Miss O’Neill will you.’
While McCudden – soon to be promoted to captain – was instructing at Joyce Green, test flying for Vickers at their nearby works and indulging in extra-curricular flirtations, promising technical developments were enhancing the RFC’s operational capability. In May 1916, a Romanian inventor, George Constantinesco, began work on an idea for ‘a gear designed to fire a machine-gun by means of impulses through a column of liquid contained under pressure in a pipe’. In other words a variation of the mechanically-operated interrupter gear, which activated a machine-gun when the propeller blades were out of the line of fire. This synchronised system prevented the gun from firing when a propeller blade was in the way. The new arrangement was demonstrated on a BE2c in August 1916 and once teething problems had been smoothed out, reached France in DH4s of No 55 Sqn on 6 March 1917. Two days later Bristol Fighters of No 48 Sqn and a month after them, on 8 April, SE5s of No 56 Sqn arrived at the front similarly equipped. Before the close of 1917, 6,000 synchronised gears would be fitted to a range of machines, a further 20,000 before the Armistice.
This was a timely development in Spring 1917, when enemy formations like Jasta 11 under Manfred von Richthofen were harassing British squadrons. Richthofen nearly came to grief near Douai on 9 March, when his Albatros was damaged by an FE8 of No 40 Sqn, causing him to echo the dread of British airmen. He immediately lost height and switched off his engine, fearing that if the fuel tank were ruptured petrol would wash around his cockpit. In such a situation, he wrote, ‘the danger of fire is indeed great … One drop of fuel and the whole machine will burn.’
The next day, his brother Lothar joined Jasta 11, where the younger Richthofen commented on the superstitions of airmen. Manfred always wore the same old leather jacket in the air, another pilot Kurt Wolff a nightcap and Lothar himself donned leather gloves given to him by his brother. Violations of such rituals could, apparently, prove fatal. Oswald Boelcke never had his photo taken before take-off until the day he was killed, and Kurt Wintgens of Jasta 11 perished on the only occasion he left behind his riding crop.
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br /> Boelke’s death had not affected the ability of Jasta 2 (renamed Jasta Boelcke in his honour) to wreak havoc. On 27 November 1916, a newcomer Werner Voss claimed his first victim, bringing down a BE2c on the Allied side of the line. As the crew fled, Voss landed, scrambled aboard the wreck, unloaded the machine-gun and took it back to prove his triumph. Voss had begun the War in a cavalry regiment and in 1915, aged eighteen, volunteered for the Air Service. After a spell as an observer, during which he found artillery spotting unadventurous, Voss underwent pilot training which preceded his appointment to Jasta 2. After his first success in November 1916, he rapidly increased his score, between 1 February and 24 March 1917 registering nineteen victories, and shortly afterwards, his prowess would gain him command of his own squadron. The successes of Voss and Richthofen showed that loss of prominent airmen such as Immelmann and Boelcke had not operationally affected the Germans.
Away from the Front, Spring 1917 saw Kathleen MacKenzie once more on the offensive in England. Her diary entry for 25 March recorded that in response to a phone call from John, then training at Brooklands, ‘that he needed me to go and see General Brancker’, she had done so ‘last Tuesday’. Tantalisingly, Mrs MacKenzie entered no more details. On 24 May, a proud mother noted that her son had gained his wings, but added a concerned footnote: ‘Fearing he might be sent to France, I planned to go to London tomorrow to see Col Warner to get him sent as an instructor to Canada or the States.’ That morning, apparently in response to a communication from her, she received a letter from Lt Col W.W. Warner (in the Directorate of Military Aeronautics) stating that Brancker ‘quite realises this is a special case and that as soon as he had graduated in flying [which had now happened], his name shall be put down for duty in Canada’. Perhaps unfairly, the impression conveyed by this decision is that the Deputy Director-General of Military Aeronautics would prefer not to face such a formidable lady for a third time. On 28 June 1917, John Mackenzie would sail for Canada, never having come within earshot of the guns.
April 1917 proved a traumatic month at the front. In late 1916, a German bulge westwards in the Péronne/Roye area looked vulnerable to a pincer movement. Plans were therefore drawn up for the British to advance south-east from Arras in the north, French troops north-west towards Guise in the south. Once the Germans were committed to these flank attacks, Gen Robert Nivelle would launch the decisive French thrust towards St Quentin in the centre. Unfortunately, poor security alerted the Germans to the scheme and they pre-empted it by withdrawing from the salient 20 miles (32km) east to a 60-mile (96km) long line of fortified positions, the Siegfried Stellung, known more generally as the Hindenburg Line.
On 4 April, a five-day artillery bombardment by 2,800 guns, orchestrated by RFC spotters, preceded a successful assault by Canadian forces on the dominant Vimy Ridge. During this period and throughout the ensuing battle the RFC carried out reconnaissance, escort and photographic duties, fighter operations, bombing of the enemy front line and rear areas: the entire range of activity now expected of it, and the cost was horrendous. Between 4 and 8 April, 75 aeroplanes were lost (105 men killed, wounded or missing), and a further 56 machines wrecked in crashes.
Ewart Garland was detached from No 10 Sqn to carry out photographic flights over Vimy. ‘I got badly shot up by Hun fighters taking photos of the Ridge urgently needed by the Canadian Command just before their attack was launched,’ he recalled. His letter to his parents about this ‘narrow escape’ was revealing. With no escort, he was taking photos at 6,000ft when two German scouts ‘twice as fast as us … came at me’. He and his observer had ‘a sporting chance’ until the observer’s gun jammed. ‘Well I flew for our lives – My God what an experience. This wonderful Hun machine just flying all over us and firing all the time while I tried to dodge in our clumsy bus.’ Until, ‘at last’, five fighters came and drove it off. Just in time ‘because I couldn’t of [sic] dodged him any more.’ Garland’s aeroplane suffered ‘50–60 holes, but I had my photos’. Reflecting on this experience of 2 April, he wrote: ‘Later in the war I met the General [Sir Julian Byng] in London at his house in Belgravia and he mentioned how vital the photos were.’
On 5 and 6 April, Garland was again over Vimy Ridge, on the second of these days watching two other BEs shot down before the comparatively slow FE escorts could come to their rescue. As soon as Garland saw three Albatros machines making towards him, he ‘scuttled back over our side’ and landed safely with ‘the necessary photos’. He related his experience to his parents that same day: ‘It was an awful sight to see the machines shot down in a mass of flames before your eyes.’ Garland and his fellow flyers were ‘continually harassed’ by an enemy with ‘far superior machines’, and he went on to show how the strain was beginning to tell. So far away, his parents must have been desperately worried.
Garland confessed:
It is wearing me out. They expect too much from me. They give me photos and photos and photos every day to take, not once but twice a day. It’s like being sentenced to death, because of the type of machine we have as compared to the Hun. I have got very thin but am quite fit although I have no muscular strength at all.
To overcome this, it was necessary to develop ‘what we call “guts” … By rights it is time I was sent home to England, but the Colonel will keep me until the push is over and working high pressure all the time.’ An element of special bitterness then surfaced: ‘You see the better work you do the more you get – until the end. So long as the colonels and people get a DSO then nothing matters.’ Garland concluded, ‘Yours fed up but with much love’, adding a postscript: ‘Excuse bad writing. I’m shaky to-day.’ A sharp contrast to the ebullient newcomer to the Front of the previous year.
‘Quelle guerre!’ he wrote on learning the very next day, 7 April, that he was to return to No 10 Sqn so close to the ‘big show’. He arrived that afternoon in time to lead his flight against Provin aerodrome on which he dropped two 112lb bombs (each with 40lbs of explosivess). Garland heard on 8 April that two RFC machines had been shot down by the Allied barrage near Vimy Ridge and after completing practice formation flying with his flight, went up to have a look at the scene. ‘It was no exaggeration to say the sky was thick with shells … little black spots.’
Harold Taylor was equally unimpressed with the ‘obsolete’ FE2bs, which No 25 Sqn were still operating. He had an added cause for concern, being in the ‘unhappy position’ of knowing that from 1 April he could be granted leave ‘any day’, which made life tense. ‘Would I survive to have this leave or would I be wounded, taken prisoner, or be killed before the happy day arrived?’ Early in April he met Lt E. Bell, who had been in the choir with him at St John’s Church, Wimbledon, where Bell’s father was vicar. The meeting was ‘a wonderful surprise’. Bell was a pilot, though Taylor never flew as his observer. Shortly after their encounter, on 8 April, while on photo reconnaissance under ‘very heavy fire’, Taylor saw Bell go down on the other side of the line but make ‘a fairly decent landing’.
Taylor did last until 20 April, when the ‘wonderful day’ came for him to travel via Boulogne to Victoria station and ten days leave. He took the opportunity to visit Canon Bell, but he had already heard that his son was a prisoner. Taylor received a ‘marvellous reception’ from his parents, brother and sister. Qualms, though, soon arose:
I had been home two days and then I began to doubt whether this leave was really so wonderful. In a few days I would have to return to France … I knew all the terrible dangers ahead of me. Still, whenever with my folks, I kept happy and I was rewarded by the look of joy in all their faces … especially my mother.
The war was hardly mentioned in the house, ‘and I think they realised that maybe I would be happier if the war was not discussed.’
When time to return to the Squadron came, Taylor bade farewell to his parents, but his sister went with him to Victoria Station. He found it difficult to restrain his tears. ‘They were very emotional moments. Unless I was exceptionally lucky t
his would be the last time that I would see them as I was fully aware of what could be my fate.’
Although Vimy Ridge had fallen on Easter Monday, 9 April, high hopes for wider success were soon dashed. Further south, British troops did initially advance over three miles, but the Germans deployed strong reserves and soon more fierce fighting took place on the ground and in the air. On 9 April, the RFC had 365 serviceable machines (in twenty-two RFC and three RNAS squadrons) at its disposal in the Arras area. Exclusive of machines held in the army aircraft parks, the total strength at the front totalled 903 machines.
Casualties scarcely slackened, though, once the main battle commenced. Of particular concern was the patent inferiority of the DH2, Nieuport fighters and newly-arrived FE2d. One DH2 report read: ‘The hostile scouts with their superior speed and good handling were able throughout the fight to prevent the pilot from getting a single shot at one of them.’ A formation of German two-seaters accounted for all five FE2d machines on an offensive patrol. Both the Nieuports and to some extent the new Bristol fighters, proved vulnerable, though greater experience of the pilots and a change of tactics (with pilots no longer primarily manoeuvring for their observers to open fire) would overcome this problem in time. In retrospect ‘Bloody April’ 1917 would be the worst single month of the war for the RFC. On the Western Front as a whole, 316 machines were lost.
Cavalry of the Clouds Page 16