At the end of the first day, two British divisions had been wiped out as the Germans advanced 12 miles (9.6km). No 52 Sqn discovered that enemy machines were sweeping ahead of the infantry at low level and lost its first aeroplane just after dawn but rallied to identify the positions of German units coming up. The British artillery was too disrupted to respond effectively. With air superiority, the Germans attacked Allied airfields, which were also hit by long-range artillery. During the afternoon of 27 May, No 52 Sqn were driven out of Fismes to Cramaille and endured two more rapid moves before settling at Tecon south of Reims on 29 May. For two days it was non-operational and did not re-join the battle until 30 May. By then, German forces had penetrated 40 miles (64km) and were on the banks of the Marne river with Paris in their sights.
Throughout the Spring in which the three German offensives took place, the bomber force at Ochey (renamed VIII Brigade) had continued to attack Germany. The first raid of Lt Stuart Keep, a DH4 pilot with No 55 Sqn, was scheduled on 16 March against Mannheim until ‘unsuitable weather’ switched the target to the closer Zweibrücken. Keep wrote:
The start of a raid is an impressive sight. The twelve machines, six in each formation, set out in battle flying order on the aerodrome, the props revolving easily with engine throttles right back; the streamers of the leader and deputy leader fluttering from the struts, heavy ominous looking bombs slung under the wings, machine-guns pointing upwards; pilots and observers tense and waiting for the signal to start and last but not least Rodger the Squadron’s dog running excitedly around. Then the scene changes, the low note of the engines becomes a full throttle roar and the leading machine followed by the rest of the formation move forward rapidly, gaining speed, leave the earth behind and soon become specks in the blue.
Keep had ‘plenty to do’ keeping formation and avoiding a collision. The DH4s climbed for an hour to cross the line at 13,000ft. ‘Below we could see the shell-pocked earth and the wriggling lines of trenches and here and there the smoke of a bursting shell.’ He was soon reminded that enemy batteries ‘were by no means unmindful of your existence. What had previously been clear air now became filled with puffs of black and white smoke preceded by a little flash of flame.’ The sensation of an ‘Archie’ barrage he found weird. ‘The little round black puffs of smoke apparently appear from nowhere with nothing to herald their approach,’ as no shell burst could be heard above the engine noise. But they were soon through and heading for the Vosges mountains before crossing the Rhine and on to the target. Everything was now going smoothly, ‘when with a cold thrill I saw a red light soar into the air from the leader’s machine’; this meant ‘enemy aeroplanes approaching, close in and prepare to fight.’
Black specks to port ‘speedily resolved themselves into hostile aeroplanes … and a few seconds later spurts of flame appeared from the leading machine’. Stuart Keep heard the ‘never to be forgotten crackle’ of machine-guns and saw ‘blue smoke from the tracer bullets’. He was soon embroiled in an aerial fight as a German machine came up behind him with Keep’s observer ‘blazing away’ with his Lewis gun. ‘To put it mildly, I was frightened and quickly decided that I must be something worse than an ordinary fool to have voluntarily given up my safe testing job at St Omer to come into this.’ (After ferrying replacement machines to France from England, Keep had been posted to St Omer as a test pilot. His fellow pilots there included ‘a wild good-hearted Irishman’, a Canadian ‘with a dry sense of humour’ and a former Oxford don.)
One bomber with a damaged petrol tank turned back, but the Germans failed to stop the others. Over the target, the leader fired white lights, the signal to attack. Shortly afterwards bombs began to fall ‘and with great joy [I] released my own with a vigorous tug of the release gear. The worthy citizens of Zweibrücken vigorously plastered us with Archie shells but without much effect’, as they ‘wheeled for home. I experienced great satisfaction in seeing flames in various parts of the town where our bombs dropped,’ Keep observed. He landed after 2 hours 40 minutes, in time for lunch, ‘feeling very satisfied with the morning’s work’.
Stuart Keep flew on several bombing raids during March and named his DH4 ‘Buff Orpington’ after the fowl, which was a good egg layer, and the machine ‘certainly laid some very healthy eggs’. On 29 March, he undertook his first photo operation to an industrial complex inside Germany. ‘The trick,’ Keep explained, ‘was to fly at 22,000ft’ to avoid danger. There it was undoubtedly cold despite ‘our electrically heated clothing and towards the end of the trip owing to failure of my oxygen apparatus my heart gave trouble’. Nevertheless, the DH4 landed safely and Keep suffered no permanent ill effects.
Shortly after this episode, Keep described a moment of light relief. The presentation of the Croix de Guerre to some squadron members was ‘duly carried out with appropriate ceremony’ by a French general. He kissed the recipients on both cheeks ‘to their disgust and the huge delight of everybody else. As the worthy general was about 5ft nothing and Capt Collett one of the victims stood 6ft or more, the kissing was worth seeing.’
In May 1918, Keep went on leave.
Only those who have been on the line can appreciate what this means. One marked one’s life by the times of leave … Never had I been more glad of leave than this time. The strain of the big raids was telling and I wanted a rest for body and mind and had ten perfect days in England.
When he returned, the Squadron had moved to Azelot. While on leave, Keep (a former pupil of King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and graduate of Birmingham University) was awarded the MC for displaying ‘great skill and determination’ while raiding enemy towns. By Keep’s own admission, though, the repeated, long-distance operations were taking their toll of airmen.
As more squadrons reinforced VIII Brigade and hopes of a decisive bombing campaign against Germany rose, a change of emphasis became apparent. No longer were purely industrial reasons advanced. On 7 March the War Cabinet declared that ‘in the interest of the world’s peace in the future, it was not desirable that the civil population among the belligerent nations be immune from the worst suffering of war.’ Eighteen days later, Sir Henry Norman, ‘additional member’ of the Air Council, responded to the Secretary of State’s request for his ‘impression upon the general question of long-range bombing of German towns, the air situation and prospects’. Referring to ‘the destruction of the national moral [sic] and means of production by the bombing of his [the enemy’s] towns’, Norman recommended that six major towns be repeatedly attacked. They should be ‘reduced to virtual collective ruins’, so that the rest of Germany would ‘approach a state of panic’, their military strategy ‘largely paralysed’. The reliability of this assessment may be gauged from Norman’s judgement of the fragility of ‘the German civilian moral [sic] … I speak from personal knowledge, dating from my school days.’
Notwithstanding the conduct of the bombing campaign, support to ground forces remained crucial. The Germans had been rebuffed at Amiens and around Ypres, but they retained significant gains in these sectors. Furthermore, following their third offensive on the Aisne, enemy troops were on the Marne for the second time in the war poised to assault Paris.
12
Forward March, June–August 1918
‘Flaming onions and archie’
Enemy air activity at the beginning of June suggested an impending foray along the Oise river, north-east of the main confrontation on the Marne. The British had fourteen squadrons with the Fourth Army in a position to intervene and, responding to a French request, between 5 and 8 June heavily-escorted formations of day bombers attacked the communication centre of Roye and nearby ammunition dumps. German ground forces launched their expected assault at 3.20am Sunday 9 June and in two days advanced 6 miles (9.6km) until halted by a French counter-attack. During this brief battle, the RAF carried out mainly low-level attacks against troop targets, dropping sixteen tons of bombs and firing 120,000 rounds of ammunition.
As they did so, Maj Gen J.M.
Salmond commanding the RAF in the field, drew conclusions from the German assault on 21 March. He was particularly concerned at the shortcomings of air intelligence. Salmond reminded commanders of the ‘vital necessity that his [the enemy’s] approach march must be discovered’. Reconnaissance should be carried out on all likely routes twice a night and the slightest movement noted. The same areas had to be covered immediately before dawn, which meant pilots risking low flying in poor light. Nevertheless, ‘responsibility that the British Army is not surprised is on the Royal Air Force.’
In the third week of June, several of the squadrons that had supported the French near Noyon on the Oise were moved north to the La Bassée-Ypres area preparatory to an air assault on the German lines of communication by five day and three night squadrons. Railway junctions and large depots, wayside stations and sections of track between stations were specifically identified for attack. Between 24 June and 2 July, the day squadrons dropped nineteen tons on allotted targets and ten tons on alternatives when primary targets could not be reached; night squadrons forty-two tons and five tons respectively. However, a study of aerial photos on 1 July confirmed the pilots’ views that attacking railway lines was not productive, railway junctions a better option. Wet weather over the following week restricted bombing designed to hamper the enemy’s troop concentrations prior to a renewed British advance. Furthermore, an outbreak of influenza provided a sharp reminder that availability of aircrew did not solely depend upon losses in battle or accidents. No 46 Sqn had thirteen pilots (half its strength) in hospital with the bacterium between 18 and 21 June.
Back home, Douglas Joy, now the proud father of baby Jean Kathleen, indirectly revealed the strains that war service could put on a marriage, even though the husband was not at the Front. Having survived two spells in France and been promoted major on his return to England, command of No 93 Reserve Sqn had prevented Joy from spending Christmas 1917 with his family. In June 1918, to Nesta’s evident dismay, he was posted to command No. 105 Sqn in Omagh, Ireland. Her reaction led Joy to address a testy letter to ‘My bad-tempered wife … You should have censored your own letter and yet my sincere wish is that you and I should be living together again.’
Across the Channel, it soon became clear that the Germans were preparing a major effort on the Marne. Therefore, on 14 July, despite the rain nine British squadrons flew there to reinforce the French. At midnight that day, a massive enemy bombardment commenced and as dawn broke on 15 July Ludendorff launched his attack, which had been thrown back by the evening of 17 July with the help of American troops, and Paris had been saved once more. During the Second Battle of the Marne, British aeroplanes attacked battlefield targets at low level, especially footbridges over the river. German single-seat fighters shot down eleven British machines; four others were wrecked on landing.
Lt Anthony Kilburn, eight months after commencing his RNAS flying training at Eastchurch and now serving with a Handley Page squadron at Ochey, was not involved in this action. On 26 June, his first planned operation as pilot of his own machine against Metz was aborted due to bad weather. Despite poor visibility, two raids on that target were subsequently completed before Kilburn was briefed for an operation on Mannheim, which did not have a successful outcome. During take-off, his machine struck Ochey church spire and crashed with a full bomb load, fortunately without exploding or anybody being injured. Kilburn explained that ‘an extra person came on board at the very last moment, as I was preparing to take off. No compensation was made for this extra weight by the removal of two 112lb bombs with the result that the machine would not rise.’
‘A very misty night’ was a complicating factor during a six-and-a-half-hour round trip to Stuttgart on 30 July. At the target, ‘two fires’ were started despite ‘a great deal of Archie and a good many searchlights’. On the way back though, the crew lost its way, ran out of fuel and came down in hilly country 4 miles (6km) from the Swiss border. Kilburn noted that the ‘machine crashed and ran into river. Caught fire, but put out by back gunlayer’. Kilburn and the observer were ‘pinned in water under the machine for one and a half hours. Not badly hurt.’ Perhaps not, but one HP O/100 had been written off without enemy intervention.
That was certainly not the case on 24 July, when flying a contact patrol Pithey and Rhodes of No 12 Sqn also had a narrow escape from injury. Rhodes accounted for one of the four attacking Fokker D.VIIs, but a bullet pierced the RE8’s petrol tank. As fuel streamed out, the likelihood of reaching safety seemed remote until Rhodes climbed out of his cockpit onto the lower wing of the biplane. He stuffed one of his gloves into the hole and clung precariously to the wing until Pithey managed to put the machine down at their base. An incandescent squadron commander greeted Rhodes, his ill-temper fanned by a report from an anti-aircraft battery that one of his airmen had been seen doing aerobatic stunts. Maj T.Q. Back calmed down when Rhodes showed him the gaping hole in the tank. ‘Ho! Ho!’, he said, ‘forget it.’ Rhodes admitted, though, that aircrew were not above ‘skylarking’ on other occasions. A petrol can was often placed on top of a garage and the proceeds of a sweepstake given to the first aircraft to knock the target off that perch with its wheels. In off-duty hours Rhodes, who during his infantry days had sung duets with the future celebrity Stanley Holloway, joined the No 12 Sqn concert party, whose shows provided much-needed relaxation from the stress of battle.
With Soissons retaken on 6 August and the Allied line straightened, Gen Pétain called a halt to the French counter-attack. Two days later, Haig mounted a strong assault on the Germans around Amiens. Again profiting from effective preliminary aerial photography, the initial bombardment at 4.20am caught the enemy by surprise. Soon afterwards, covered by mist along a 14-mile (22km) front, the British Fourth Army left its trenches, supported by the artillery, which fired a creeping barrage in front of the advance, 530 tanks and a strong RAF presence. On that first day, the British went forward an unprecedented 8 miles (12km), causing an estimated 27,000 enemy casualties and capturing some 400 guns. It was, Ludendorff declared, ‘the black day of the German Army’.
On 8 August Salmond had 88 squadrons and two flights totalling 1,696 machines on the Western Front. Of these, 810 were committed to the Amiens attack. Not until 9am did the mist clear sufficiently for squadrons to take off, then the low-flying machines found ample targets. At 10.30am two Camel pilots dropped 25lb bombs on three trains near Harbonnières village. Two escaped but the third was surrounded by British cavalry, its passengers returning from leave captured. Other low-flying aeroplanes bombed an 11-inch railway gun busily firing on Amiens. When the 5th Australian Division reached the cannon, they found the entire gun crew either killed or wounded.
One pilot flying a SE5 machine of No 24 Sqn was reputed to have scattered 300 infantry with bombs and machine-gun fire. Another spotted eight armoured cars held up by an enemy anti-tank gun, attacked and silenced the weapon allowing the armoured cars to proceed. Later in the morning, the same pilot had his petrol tank damaged by small arms fire causing him to land for running repairs. Grey uniforms speedily approaching alerted him to a geographical error. Discharging his revolver at the hostile pack, he rapidly switched to the gravity tank and had just enough petrol to get to an advanced party of British cavalry, which promptly charged the would-be captors. In the afternoon, attacks were made on three major bridges over the Somme and wider afield, escorted bomber operations hit other crossing points. To cope with the aerial onslaught, the Germans summoned reinforcements from the adjacent Seventeenth Army, including the Richthofen wing (JG 1) now commanded by Capt Hermann Göring.
The RAF did not escape lightly on 8 August. From ninety-seven aeroplanes shot down or written off, seventy belonged to squadrons engaged in low-level attacks, a 23 per cent loss rate. That day, fifty-seven men were missing, besides four known to have been killed and nineteen wounded. This prompted the headquarters of the RAF’s IX Brigade at St André-aux-Bois to issue a variation of orders for the morrow. Noting that enemy scouts had
‘molested our bombers by diving on them from the clouds and preventing them from carrying out their missions effectively’ wing commanders were required to ‘detail scouts for close protection of bombers to ensure the latter are not interfered with by enemy aircraft, while trying to destroy bridges’. This would be ‘the sole duty of these scouts’, who would not themselves carry bombs.
Something went wrong with this arrangement at first light on 9 August. Between 5am and 5.15am, DH9s of Nos 27 and 49 squadrons took off to attack three bridges from 500ft, but failed to rendezvous with their escorts. Harassed by the enemy, the bombers dropped half their loads on other targets and scant, if any, damage was done to the primary objectives. Incredibly, none of the DH9s were lost. One No 49 Sqn report referred to between ten and fifteen enemy machines attacking from the south-east as the formation approached its target, another ten to fifteen joining them from the east as the British turned for home, so that ‘a running fight ensued’. This DH9 crew, pilot Lt J.A. Keating and observer 2/Lt E.A. Simpson, had a torrid time:
We were persistently attacked by a large number of enemy aircraft; observer fired a good burst into the first enemy aircraft which was only 50ft from our tail, and it turned over on its back and burst into flames: this was over Marchelepot.
Cavalry of the Clouds Page 25