‘We found ourselves in the fire control or observation post of the battery, and naturally in a very advanced position. The idea is that the battery fires from a concealed spot such as behind a ridge and an observer, often two miles away, directs their fire by telephone or otherwise, all fire being what they call indirect, ie you can’t see what you are firing at. Of course the observer has to be able to see everything, and so we naturally did well, and watched the French shells exploding over a German battery about 4 miles away.’261
Yet British gunners had great difficulty in finding suitable observation points. The Chemin des Dames, being the highest point in the area, completely masked the position of German batteries beyond it. Direct observation on these gun positions was impossible except by cooperation with the RFC observers, of which more in the following chapter. Where batteries were successfully brought into action on the north side of the valley observers made use of a variety of locations from which to report on the accuracy of their battery’s shooting. Likely buildings were soon targeted by the German gunners as were haystacks and trenches. Movement to and from observation points was kept to a minimum and absolute immobility of movement was strictly enforced when German aircraft were overhead.
The frequent references to spies directing German shell fire which appear time and time again in personal accounts and war diaries did have some truth in them, although the ‘spy fever’ which often seemed to seize the battlefield was frequently generated by inaccurate and false suspicions. Aylmer Haldane recounted an occasion when a dynamo in a local cottage was reported as being used to transmit wireless signals to the enemy, a search revealing nothing but a weaving machine and a startled occupant. On another occasion a ‘heliograph’ was observed by troops flashing signals which appeared to be directing the shell fire of German batteries and convinced them that this was the work of a spy. It turned out to be a discarded sardine tin caught in the branches of a bush!
However, there were several documented cases of German artillery observers actually being discovered in British lines with telephone lines connecting them to German batteries. Gunner Myatt of 109/Battery wrote of an officer and two men being discovered in a wood with a telephone directing German fire onto British batteries. There was no doubt in Myatt’s mind that, ‘they were pretty brave men’. Another example quoted in the Official History described a German with a week’s supply of food being discovered inside a haystack and another disguised as a farmer in a house between the lines. The I Corps Diary made reference to the use by the Germans of motor cars for reconnaissance with the, ‘occupants dressed as French or English officers who drive boldly through our lines at great pace’. There is only one, ‘safe rule in dealing with Germans’, remarks the diarist, and that was to, ‘treat them as capable of any treacherous trick’.
On 23 September four siege batteries armed with the old pattern 6-inch 30 cwt (breech loading) howitzers arrived on the Aisne. These guns, when fired from their travelling carriages as heavy howitzers, had a range of 5,200 yards but mounted on a siege platform, the range increased dramatically to 7,000 yards. Ancient they may have been – they had seen service in South Africa at the turn of the century – but they were the only siege artillery pieces available for use in September 1914. The batteries were brought into position just in time to play their part in what may have been one of the very first organised artillery fire plans used in the Great War.262 On 18 September Haig entrusted Brigadier General Henry Horne – his Corps Artillery Adviser – with the organization of artillery fire and liaison with the RFC. Horne still lacked the legal authority as a commander of artillery and had to bow to the chain of command by passing suggestions to the relevant CRAs, but it was a beginning. The I Corps Special Artillery Group – which acted under the direct command of Haig himself – made even further inroads into centralizing divisional artillery. On 25 September, for example, the combined fire power of the 1st and 2nd Divisions was brought to bear on the Germans in the Chivy valley. Placed under the orders of Haig, guns from XV and XVII Brigade, a battery of VIII Brigade howitzers, 3/Siege Battery and a section of 35/Heavy Battery, brought the attacking German infantry divisions to a standstill as fire was swung across the corps frontage, an action we know was very successful. This was a great improvement but Major John Mowbray, brigade major of the 2nd Divisional Artillery, still expressed his frustration at the continuing lack of effective communication:
‘It is quite clear that divisional artillery require much more effective communication arrangements than we have. There should be a signal company or a section of a signal company allocated for this purpose and able to provide at least four stations with several miles of wire. The CRA would then be able to communicate directly with his brigades and fire could be rapidly controlled. Present arrangement of communications through infantry brigades is most unsatisfactory, many delays, often entirely nullifying the value of messages.’263
We can only ponder as to whether Mowbray himself speculated on what might have been if a concentration of fire power been used on the I Corps front during their attack of 14 September.
Nonetheless, in mitigation it has to be said that GHQ’s Operational Orders for the 14 September directed the BEF to ‘pursue’ a retreating German Army, not to attack entrenched positions. Had the orders from Sir John French been less ambiguous in content the tactics employed on that crucial first day may perhaps have been different. In any case the heavier 6-inch guns were not on the Aisne on 14 September and these would undoubtedly have been a vital component in any such attack.
By their very nature the siege batteries demanded a forward observation station from where the battery’s fire could be controlled. 2/Siege Battery under the command of Major G S MacKenzie, was in place by 5.00pm on 24 September amongst the trees to the right of the modern day D967 just southwest of La Tuilerie Farm. The forward observation post was on the high ground of Mont de Charmont, some 200 yards in front of the battery and manned from dawn to dusk. The guns were capable of firing a 100lb HE shell as well as a similar round containing shrapnel, but old stocks of obsolescent ammunition were dangerous and prone to premature detonation as was demonstrated on 25 September when such an explosion killed 22-year-old Gunner Thomas Lacey. Another similar accidental explosion occurred in 1/Siege Battery on the same day, this time killing Gunners Smith and Fuller,264 while a third premature on 1 October wounded the battery commander, Major C N Ewart, and six men.265 John Mowbray commented in his diary that the shells were too old and not really safe enough to be used, but added, ‘Ewart neglected to order all ranks to take cover while firing’. Major E L Hardcastle arrived to take over command of Ewart’s battery on 9 October.
As obsolete as the guns were they were at least able to begin to answer the questions posed by the powerful German guns and also began working closely with the infantry. On 2 October 2/Siege Battery fired four high explosive rounds into the Ostel valley after the Irish Guards reported a German band playing at about 4.30am. John Mowbray was delighted with the results:
‘Siege HQ had a telephone message last night from the Irish Guards that the enemy had a band playing and concert in progress in front of them. Without leaving the table he [the CRA] telephoned the battery who fired three rounds from the Guards directions. Message then received, band stopped. Concert ended. Assembly dispersed. Good night!.’266
A few days later on 6 October the Coldstream Guards directed fire from 1/Siege Battery onto a German trench just in front of their positions. The battery observation post was right up amongst the Guards’ forward trenches. Major Bernard Gordon Lennox and the Grenadiers were on the receiving end of the German retaliation at Chavonne:
‘Singularly quiet day up to 3.00pm. From then for about 1½ hours the Dutchmen subjected us to a terrific bombardment in the village: shrapnel and high explosive. It was quite like old times at Soupir and we couldn’t make out what had woke the beggars up, they simply plastered the village and some came so close that we got orders to be ready to move out of the
village at once. This luckily was not necessary and the entertainment closed with net result of three transport horses killed and a lot of tiles and roofs not looking their best. Strolled up to the Coldstream Guards’ billets at about 6.30 and saw Tony who told me the reason of their peevishness. The Dutchmen have apparently a big trench about 500 yards in front of the Coldstream with a lot of men in it. The Coldstream got a RA officer to look at it. He telephones down to the big howitzers and they planted their very first shot right into the middle of the trench. Tony tells me he never heard such a squealing and squawking and howling and moaning which went on for the best part of an hour. Our howitzers went pumping on and the result was the Dutchmen became very peevish and let us have it for all they were worth.’267
Gordon-Lennox’s rather blasé attitude to the shelling at Chavonne was also a feature of George Jeffrey’s diary. On another occasion he describes Prince Arthur of Connaught – the colonel of the regiment – paying them a visit: ‘He sat for some time and had tea. The 6-inch battery was firing, and every time a shell went off he jumped nearly out of his skin, so fear he didn’t enjoy his visit’.
On 7 October 2/Siege Battery turned its guns on the German strongpoint at Fort Condé this time using the RFC to guide its shooting. Their first round fell within the confines of the fort and over the next few days from their position on the southern bank of the river near the Château Bois Morin, north of Chassemy, the battery fired over 100 rounds at targets on the Chivy spur registering several direct hits.
Another gun brought back into service on the Aisne was the antiaircraft gun. Another relic of the South African War it was largely ineffective. 11/Pom-Pom Section arrived on 22 September and Brigadier General Haldane had one of their guns, which he thought to be ‘a considerable novelty’, attached to 10 Brigade under the command of a Captain Hudson, ‘whose refreshing optimism as to the number of “birds” he brought down or wounded was a source of much amusement to myself and staff’. There is no record of any German aircraft being brought down by one of these guns. Accompanying the unit was Sergeant Major Victor Laws from 3 Squadron RFC. Laws’ task was to identify friend from foe in an effort to ensure the pom-pom guns did not shoot down any British aircraft, something which even Laws himself considered unlikely, although he admits that, ‘[we] may have killed quite a few troops in the front line where the percussion capped shells fell after firing’. John Mowbray was not impressed either:
‘Converted Pom-Poms sent out for anti-aircraft work, which arrived a day or two ago, already clearly useless. It is slow, the shells do not readily burst and the tracers only work up to 2–3,000 feet. As the planes generally reconnoitre at 5–6,000 feet this is of little use. Perhaps it does keep the hostile planes a little higher.’268
The I Corps War Diary shared Mowbray’s opinion, declaring the Pom-Poms, ‘have been quite useless’.
On 27 September a memorandum on British and German tactics employed on the Aisne was circulated by GHQ, which set the tone for future fighting on the Western Front. Unsurprisingly the future control of artillery was high on the agenda. The section on defence opened with a statement which heralded the birth of the new form of warfare, ‘before this war it was thought that artillery bombardment unaccompanied by an infantry attack was ineffective’. The memorandum went on to underline the need for artillery to occupy fully covered and concealed positions using observation stations to direct fire. The Germans had already made good use of observation balloons on the Chemin des Dames for artillery spotting observation and the memorandum conceded that the enemy appeared to be superior to us both in ingenuity and science:
We must learn from their methods particularly in terms of aircraft observation … Their co-operation between the artillery and aeroplane also appears thorough, aeroplanes indicate the direction of targets by throwing out lights or smoke balls which are easily distinguishable at a distance, then they return to the batteries for which they are observing and shortly afterwards (presumably when the aeroplane had had time to give further data) fire is opened with great accuracy.’269
In what would become a feature of the next four years of fighting, the memorandum drew attention to the German artillery’s habit of systematically searching for targets using map lines, giving the example of German fire on crossroads and supply routes where, ‘searching fire is frequently kept up at night’. Arthur Osburn was on the receiving end at Paissy when the German gunners began one of their ‘searching bombardments’:
‘Then came the Coal Boxes rumbling roar, as if a thousand clumsy housemaids had fallen down a thousand flights of stairs with loaded coalscuttles, the ground quivering, the rocky escarpments of the Aisne echoing and re-echoing for miles. These Coal Boxes and Black Marias would come over in salvos of twos and threes; then methodically the German gunners would search for us, ranging from end to end of each valley in huge diagonals, creeping ever nearer towards the brown mass of tightly packed men and horses which cowered away from them under the shelter of the hill; searching until whole valleys were pock-marked with smoking craters ten feet wide.’270
The shelling which Osburn described so graphically was typically fired from batteries concealed in wooded areas. The memorandum hardly needed to point out that German gunners were well concealed and, ‘quick in picking up targets and in opening effective fire’ – the British troops on the ground already knew that!
The lessons were unquestionably being learned but the material cost of answering the Germans’ apparently inexhaustible supply of shells was having repercussions at home. On 17 September Sir John French in a communiqué to the War Office indicated that shell stocks were becoming critically low. The BEF had only 270 rounds for each of its howitzers and 180 rounds for each field gun; the reply from the War Office to the effect that shell shortages were not just the preserve of the BEF was not what Sir John wanted to hear. The guns in Edward Bulfin’s 2 Brigade alone were firing an average of twenty rounds per day per gun and daily quotas were inevitably exceeded. A further 300 rounds per gun were shipped across the channel by early October but the shell shortage would raise its head again in late October when the BEF was fighting for survival at Ypres.
By the time the last battery of British guns had left the Aisne, there had been a sea change in tactics and thinking; the artillery was fast becoming the dominant force on the battlefield and over the course of the next four years the RFA would grow from 45 to 173 field brigades whilst the heavy and siege artillery of the RGA would undergo a similar expansion from 32 heavy and 6 siege batteries to 117 heavy and 401 siege batteries. The gunners had come of age.
Chapter 13
Those Magnificent Men in
Their Flying Machines
About 50 shells burst all round us, the farthest from us being about 200 feet and some quite close. God knows how we were not hit. Funny noise those shells make when they burst, not a loud bang, sort of a ‘plop’ noise.
Lieutenant Kenlis Atkinson, 4 Squadron RFC – describing anti-aircraft fire
On 13 April 1912 the RFC was constituted by Royal Warrant, it consisted of a Military Wing and a Naval Wing, the Naval Wing becoming the Royal Naval Air Service on 1 July 1914. Nine days after the declaration of war on 4 August 1914 the vanguard – consisting of the aircraft of 2, 3 and 4 squadrons flew across the channel on 13 August to land at Amiens. The first to arrive at 8.20am was the 2 Squadron pilot Lieutenant Hubert Harvey-Kelly in his BE2a and by the evening of 15 August they had been joined by 5 Squadron and over fifty aircraft of all shapes and sizes were parked at the Amiens airstrip waiting to fly to the forward airbase at Maubeuge the next day.271
The four squadrons of the RFC were very much in evidence during first weeks of the Great War. They reported the German movements north of Mons, they observed the movements of German units before and after Le Cateau and detected von Kluck’s swing to the southeast which culminated in the Battle of the Marne. The eventual German retirement from the Marne towards the Aisne was confirmed by Captains Robert Boger and Robin Gre
y of 5 Squadron who watched the Germans cross the Marne. When one considers all this was carried out from the back of a collection of commercial lorries – some still sporting the company logos – and assorted other vehicles, and all reconnaissance flights were unaccompanied by other aircraft, the performance of the fledgling air service was impressive to say the least. But this Heath Robinson approach to war was soon to change.
Aerial co-operation with artillery was the subject of a communiqué from GHQ dated 13 September. It drew attention to an artillery action which had taken place in the Thiaucourt area on 8 September where, ‘about half the artillery of the 6th German Corps was destroyed by our field artillery’.272 The German batteries were discovered by aircraft of the French Aéronautique Militaire and it was based on their intelligence that an artillery fire plan was hastily put together – the effects of which were observed by French aircraft which continued to fly over the battlefield observing the ‘complete destruction’ of guns and limbers. GHQ made the point that, ‘this success shows the results which can be and must be obtained by co-operation of the artillery and aircraft during an action’. Haig’s reply on 14 September demonstrated his firm belief in the advantages of aerial observation:
‘The French system of employing aviators in action with artillery is a very sound one. I strongly agree that GHQ take the matter in hand at once and establish a similar system for the British Army area. An adequate number of machines should be permanently attached to each Corps and Corps commanders should be given a free hand to use the machines at their discretion.’273
Haig’s recommendations were fortunately taken seriously by GHQ and led eventually to the formation of corps squadrons – aircraft which were under the control of corps commanders. Corps aircraft were already in use by the Germans. In August 1914 the German Air Service had some 200 aircraft dedicated to short range reconnaissance and artillery control, considerably in advance of the BEF which was still desperately attempting to redress the balance when it arrived on the Aisne. However, as the lines of trenches along the Aisne valley became fixed, the RFC were soon mapping out the enemy positions and batteries along the German front line and in the rear areas, locating rail heads, aerodromes and supply dumps. There were also some early attempts to photograph enemy trenches as demonstrated on 15 September by Lieutenant George Pretyman, a pilot from 3 Squadron, who took five photographs of enemy positions with his own hand held camera and although of dubious quality, the images demonstrated that aerial photography was possible in a combat environment.274
BEF Campaign on the Aisne 1914 Page 23