by Max Hastings
The following year France’s Gen. Joseph Manoury, who would command Sixth Army at the Marne, took to the air during manoeuvres, and was profoundly impressed by seeing for himself what flight must do to war. After the German army’s 1912 exercises, Falkenhayn reflected upon a range of technological innovations of which aircraft were among the foremost: ‘When these inventions of the devil work, then what they achieve is more than amazing; when they do not work, then they achieve less than nothing.’ The Kaiser formally accorded Germany’s air corps parity with his other services in March 1914, when he ordered the Protestant Church to include fliers in its regular prayer for the armed forces.
The British were slow starters: in 1909 the War Office temporarily closed down army flying experiments, claiming that their cost of £2,500 – this at a time when the Germans had already spent £400,000 and the French little less – was unaffordable. But in 1912 the Royal Flying Corps was formed, and at the following year’s manoeuvres Lt. Gen. Sir James Grierson told King George: ‘I think, sir, that these aeroplanes are going to spoil war. When they come over I can only tell my men to cover their heads with hay and make a noise like a mushroom!’ Grierson was nonetheless an imaginative early convert to the new technology, exploiting air reconnaissance to win an exercise. Senior officers of every army realised that power to view the earth from the sky, reaching far behind enemy lines, changed the rules, rendering concentrations vulnerable to bombardment and every manoeuvre susceptible to enemy counterstroke. In past wars, before a battle commanders liked to position themselves on hilltops with a view. Now, such exposure could be fatal: German staff regulations emphasised the importance of avoiding locating headquarters near landmarks.
But air reconnaissance had its limitations, of which the most obvious was the weather: low cloud and serious rain grounded planes. Even if pilots became airborne and observed troop movements, they had much to learn about interpreting the significance of what they saw. Moreover, they could not be assured that generals would display the imagination to heed their reports – French at Mons and Kluck at the Marne were only two obvious examples of commanders who failed to draw appropriate conclusions from air intelligence received. Finally, aircraft were chronically scarce, especially on the Eastern Front. The Germans started with 254 trained pilots and 246 aircraft, half Taubes and the rest Albatroses and Aviatiks, but only a modest proportion were serviceable at any one time. The same was true of France’s Aviation Militaire, which had two hundred machines and five hundred trained pilots, soon reinforced by civilian volunteers. The aircraft – mostly Caudrons and Morane-Saulniers – were organised in escadrilles – squadrons – of either six two-seaters or four single-seaters. The French air corps’ erratic commanding officer first mobilised his fliers on his own initiative at the beginning of July – a month before war – then decided that any conflict would be brief, and in August closed down flying schools and sent all instructors to the front. More rational policies were adopted after a new general was appointed.
The British went to war with 197 pilots and 113 serviceable operational aircraft, mostly Farmans and BE2a biplanes. Churchill had also created a separate Royal Naval Air Service. The army initially deluded itself that replacement pilots could be found by inviting gentleman fliers to secure their own Aero Club certificates of competence, themselves paying the necessary £75, before enlisting for service. ‘Members of the RFC who own their own aeroplanes should be encouraged to bring them to the Central Flying School when they undergo their training there,’ said a War Office instruction. In the autumn of 1914, however, an RFC flight-training programme was hastily introduced, which before the war’s end had killed more pilots than enemy action. The first Flying Corps battlefield casualty was Sgt-Maj. Jillings, hit in the leg by a rifle bullet while flying over Belgium on 22 August.
Meanwhile, the Austrians owned just forty-eight planes and the Belgians twelve. The Russians had an impressive paper strength of two hundred aircraft of sixteen types, and displayed notable design flair. But such was their organisational incompetence that serviceability was chronically low. The French, alone among the belligerents, had gained previous practical experience of using aircraft for military purposes, during their 1913 colonial campaign in Morocco. French biplanes flew at speeds of between 50 and 70 mph, and required between thirty and sixty minutes to reach an altitude of 6,000 feet, depending on conditions; Blériot and Taube monoplanes were somewhat faster and nimbler.
At first, the unfamiliarity of aircraft caused innocents on the ground merely to marvel when they appeared in the sky. In Belgium, Britain’s Sister Mayne thought Taubes looked like ‘beautiful little birds’. But soon soldiers and civilians alike understood that flying machines posed a direct threat to their welfare, and contrived their destruction when they could. Late on the afternoon of 6 August, the citizens of Freiburg were shocked by the spectacle of two French aircraft flying above their city, having sailed serenely over the Kaiser’s frontier and his armies. Some affronted citizens fired sporting guns skywards, as did those soldiers on guard duty who had been issued with ammunition. Frankfurt’s militia likewise opened a brisk fusillade at clouds in which, so they were told, French aircraft were hiding.
Austrian Dr Richard Stenitzer, besieged in Przemyśl, took exception to the intrusions of airborne Russians: ‘It is a strange unpleasant feeling if an aeroplane appears above oneself high in the skies. You get the impression it tracks you personally although it is not able to distinguish individuals because of its height of 2,000 metres.’ Though planes of different nationalities were soon marked with distinguishing symbols – a German cross, a tricolour cockade and suchlike – these were usually invisible from the ground. French soldier François Mayer wrote: ‘when any aircraft passes overhead, we bury our heads like ostriches’. On 27 October at Ypres, every rifleman in the Black Watch emptied his magazine at an overhead aircraft, then cheered wildly when it burst into flames and tumbled to earth; better-informed witnesses found this ‘a dreadful sight, as we … realized it was British’. Austrian Lt. Constantin Schneider described the sensation created by the appearance of the first aircraft over his division in Galicia: there was a barrage of musketry which officers had difficulty in suppressing, even when they saw that it was one of their own. Three Austrian planes were brought down by friendly fire in the first days of the campaign.
The public became fascinated by the new art of aerial warfare. Herbert Asquith, displaying the wonder of a Victorian, referred to the revolutionary machines as hyphenated ‘aero-planes’. Pilots, initially armed only with revolvers or rifles, became national heroes: their voyages into the sky empowered them to rise above the squalor of the battlefield figuratively as well as literally. They appeared to resurrect the glories of personal endeavour in a repugnant new era of industrialised slaughter. Twenty-seven-year-old Pyotr Nesterov, a famous Russian pioneer aviator and the first man to loop the loop, was at the controls of a Morane-Saulnier monoplane over Poland on 25 August when he encountered an Austrian Albatros BII biplane, flown by pilot Fritz Malina and observer Baron Friedrich von Rosenthal. Having emptied his revolver at them without effect, Nesterov resorted to ramming, which brought down the enemy plane. Unfortunately his own Morane was severely damaged in the collision, and followed the German machine down; next day Nesterov died of his injuries. His funeral, in Kiev cathedral, became a major public occasion: the coffin was adorned with his leather helmet and the catafalque was almost submerged in flowers, some brought from the field in which his plane had come down. Nesterov’s conduct reflected the suicidally undisciplined ethos of the Russian air service, which had by far the worst accident rate of any combatant, because of its insistence on sending almost untrained pilots into the air.
Maurice Baring, an RFC staff officer, waxed lyrical at the beauties of autumn at a French airfield among young British fliers, despite the incongruities of the ground headquarters in which he served: ‘I remember the clicking of the typewriters in our little improvised office, and a soldier singing
“Abide With Me” at the top of his voice in the kitchen. And the beauty of the Henry Farmans sailing through the clear evening, “the evening hush broken by homing wings”, and the moonlight rising over the stubble of the aerodrome, and a few camp fires glowing in the mist amid the noise of the men singing songs of home.’
A significant consequence of the war’s early campaigns was to cause every nation’s commanders to recognise the importance and potential of their air arms. Joffre, impressed by the contribution of aerial reconnaissance to his victory on the Marne, demanded an expansion of the Aviation Militaire to sixty-five squadrons. By October French orders had been placed for 2,300 aircraft and 3,400 engines, and other nations were thinking equally ambitiously. Kitchener was told of a plan to give the RFC thirty squadrons, and growled laconically, ‘Make it sixty!’ All the air forces had too many different types of aircraft, which created severe difficulties for training, maintenance and spares. The French were the first to categorise their squadrons explicitly into fighter, bomber and reconnaissance types. As early as September, the RFC began to experiment with taking primitive radio sets into the air, to signal to the artillery.
Soldiers, increasingly conscious of their own predicament as prisoners of an unlovely ground environment, readily succumbed to enthusiasm for the exploits of their comrades in the sky. Everything to do with aircraft seemed worthy of awe: on 17 September Belgian Charles Stein’s entire battalion was given the afternoon off, in the manner of a successful school football team, for shooting down a German plane of which the crew were made prisoners. Capt. Robert Harker of the BEF wrote with unashamed wonder in November: ‘I have had some talks with men and officers in the Flying Corps here and it is most interesting. One of them told me that he had been fired on for half an hour at a time and felt like a driven pheasant – he says that [guns aimed at] aeroplanes can shoot up very high and accurately. He says one minute you may be watching a great battle and within an hour be having a good meal in some peaceful place right away as aeroplanes can move about so quickly.’
Caroll Dana Winslow, an American who trained as a pilot at the French flight school at Pau, identified three categories of airman: gentlemen; pre-war aviators and mechanics with specialist qualifications; and civilian chauffeurs and mechanics, admitted to the aristocracy of the air because they were thought to have relevant expertise. Almost all the best pilots were aged between twenty and thirty; those younger were dangerously immature, while older men proved too cautious, their reflexes slowing. Every nation found itself struggling hastily to train riggers, fitters and mechanics to service and repair machines constructed of canvas, wire and plywood. Many French ground crews were recruited from Indochina – these were known as ‘les Annamites’.
All fliers were volunteers, and a growing number of army officers offered their services: some to escape from the trenches; others because as cavalrymen they now had little fighting to do; others again because wounds had incapacitated them for ground duties. All soon learned that flying was no less perilous than soldiering: far more airmen perished in accidents than from enemy action. Twelve-year-old Elfriede Kuhr witnessed two crashes a day at her local training airfield at Schneidemühl, and wrote fatalistically in her diary about the pilots: ‘When they make their first solo flight they are often nervous, and then an accident happens.’
Fliers had a one-in-four chance of surviving a crash, and none were equipped with parachutes. Everything had to be learned by experience: the perils posed at low altitude by telegraph wires and the cables of captive observation balloons; the case for unbuckling seat straps before a crash, because the risk of breaking one’s neck on being thrown clear seemed less than that of being crushed by the engine in a wreck; the menace of clouds, which could hide hostile machines. Gas-filled airships were soon restricted to night operations in the immediate battle zone, because of their vulnerability to both sides’ ground fire – French troops repeatedly shot down their own dirigibles. Airships proved useful in the dark, because neither side had yet accepted the necessity to black out military installations behind the front.
One November morning in Hamburg, little Ingeborg Treplin announced, ‘When I grow up I’ll march far away to war!’ Her mother asked, ‘Well, what would you do there?’ ‘Shoot sailors and Zeppelins.’ Frau Treplin was ‘a little bit shocked’, and pleaded in favour of sparing Zeppelins. ‘Yes, not our Zeppelins’ – the child had seen one over Hamburg a few days earlier – ‘but if it comes from France then it will drop bombs on my head.’ Her mother exclaimed, ‘What such a small child picks up!’ Her husband answered that letter by saying: ‘the war should not last long enough for our daughters to grow up … to shoot Zeppelins. The reason we are now over here is to finish this conflict in such a way that none of our daughters have to experience war again!’
Unfortunately for Dr Treplin’s hopes, energetic efforts were already under way to advance the primitive art of aerial bombardment, which made possible assaults on targets in an enemy’s country far beyond any battlefield. There had been several pre-war experiments – France’s Michelin Aero Club held a bombing competition. Rudolf Martin, an early German evangelist for bombardment from the air, argued in 1908 that Zeppelins and aircraft could destroy Britain’s island security, and ‘soften it up’ for an invasion: eighty Zeppelins, he pointed out, could be built for the same cost as a single dreadnought. Germany’s industrial capacity made it possible to build 100,000 aircraft, each of which could carry two infantrymen to England by night in no more than half an hour. Martin believed that a great German air fleet could become a decisive strategic deterrent to his nation’s enemies. Like many prophets, he correctly grasped the importance of the new technology, but underrated – by more than a generation – the time-lag before it would attain maturity, along with the destructive power to fulfil his battlefield expectations.
Germany started aerial bombing trials in 1910, though two years later a report described results as ‘very bad’, even from a height as low as three hundred feet. In 1914 a secret bomber squadron was created, under the cover-name of Brieftaubenabteilung Ostende – the ‘Ostend carrier-pigeon unit’. This was disbanded because it proved unable to hit anything, but the experience of war dramatically accelerated the development of both aircraft and bombing techniques. On 18 September, an RFC officer named Maj. Musgrove conducted the first British experiment on dropping a bomb from his aircraft. ‘It exploded,’ noted an observer laconically, ‘but not exactly where nor how it was expected to.’ Three weeks later a German plane dropped the inaugural bomb to land on an RFC field – without effect. In December the Russians formed a squadron of Ilya Muromets, the world’s first four-engined bombers, which regularly if ineffectually attacked German and Austrian positions.
By the winter of 1914, all the belligerents save the British had staged at least modest raids on each other’s accessible cities; the battlefield use of aircraft to spot targets for artillery was also being urgently explored. During the ensuing four years, radio-controlled aerial direction of gunnery would become one of the most important tactical innovations of the conflict. The Germans helped their enemies to celebrate Christmas Eve by mounting the first air attack on British soil – a biplane dropped a small bomb on Dover. This did no harm, but the auguries were plain: a new kind of campaign against civilian populations had become possible, and no moral scruples would impede its prosecution as soon as means permitted. Next day – Christmas – the Royal Naval Air Service launched a seaplane raid against reported new Zeppelin sheds near Cuxhaven. The raid was wholly abortive, and three aircraft had to be abandoned at sea on their return to the fleet. But Erskine Childers, who flew as an observer in one machine, wrote exultantly: ‘We are fortunate to have witnessed this remarkable event which is but a foretaste of a complete revolution in warfare.’ In 1914–18, what airmen could see beneath them of the enemy’s movements proved much more important than the destruction they could inflict. But little more than a decade after man’s first powered flight, the blitz era was a
lready at hand.
15
Ypres: ‘Something that was Completely Hopeless’
In Belgium in mid-October, even as King Albert’s soldiers were falling back from Antwerp, further west allied and German forces surged and milled in open country, hampered by chronic uncertainty about each other’s movements. Joffre had been uneasy about accepting Sir John French’s demand to move his contingent to the allied left flank: if a new strategic crisis erupted, proximity to the sea might encourage the British to scuttle home, as their C-in-C had been eager to do in August. But there was little chance they would achieve any big advance on the Aisne, whereas in the north-east their strong cavalry could make itself useful. It would be much easier to supply the BEF from England through the Channel ports. Thus, Joffre acceded to the shift of front. Britain’s continental army spent the second week of October in transit towards Flanders. The infantry travelled by train, while the cavalry enjoyed a leisurely week-long ride through Picardy in balmy autumn weather, halting in hospitable French villages. Those who survived the year afterwards recalled this as a last brush with relative comfort and happiness before the shades closed in upon them.
On the 13th, the Germans marched into Lille, singing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ accompanied by their regimental bands, and bewildered to find trams clattering along the streets beside their columns. Joffre afterwards nursed a grievance about losing the great industrial city: he claimed that if the railway system had not been committed to shifting the British to suit their own convenience, French reinforcements might have reached and held Lille. This is implausible, however, and the BEF arrived in the north just in time to play a critical role, though its C-in-C had no inkling about the nature of this. Experiencing one of his spasms of optimism, Sir John persuaded himself that the Germans were weak in north-west Belgium. He thought that the three corps he now mustered might make a rapid advance, capturing Bruges then pushing for Ghent.