Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Half a dozen of us were sitting having tea in the orchard behind the sheds when a machine was heard. Soon it came in to land, passing overhead. We looked up at it casually. It was Hoppy, out with another pilot (for my machine was dud) returning from patrol. Suddenly the camp table on which the tea was set flew up into the air, described a pretty parabola above the grass, and landed ten yards farther down the slope – a debris of broken china and spilt jam. We all jumped up, very annoyed.

  ‘That silly little bastard, coming down without winding in his aerial!’ – for the meteoric flight of the tea table was caused by the lead weight attached to the end of the aerial catching it as it swept past at sixty miles an hour. The peace of the orchard was gone, tea entirely ruined. ‘Besides which,’ added the Major, ‘the damn thing only missed my head by six inches.’48

  The technological and supply difficulties meant that air-to-ground wireless communications only gradually took hold in the various air forces. For some time yet ordinary observations of potential targets had to be marked on a squared map which was then dropped in a message bag for the gunners to make a decision. A harder and even more valuable role for airmen was in ‘art. obs.’ or spotting for the artillery: observing where their shells were landing and giving instructions on how to correct their aim. This marked the armies’ shift in attitude from viewing aircraft as an extension of the cavalry to being an extension of artillery. Although by May 1915 many RFC airfields in France had a wireless hut and a call sign, only a few individual aircraft carried Morse transmitters and those were in constant demand by the gunners. Despite this, even by the war’s end airborne wireless was still neither widespread nor reliable, many pilots preferring to do without it altogether in exchange for having less weight and drag. The alternative was signalling between observer and battery using Very flares or flash lamps in a prearranged code. Such methods were obviously crude and fallible but often there was no alternative.

  An added difficulty in mid-1915 was the so-called ‘Shell Crisis’. The military on all sides had miscalculated, largely through thinking the war would be brief, and supplies of big shells ran short. In Britain this was also down to industry’s chronic inability to produce steel of high enough quality to make reliable shell casings. This had to be imported hastily from the United States and the inevitable delays and U-boat depredations of merchant shipping caused a scandal that threatened the government. For a while British gunners in France were rationed to four rounds per gun a day:49 not enough even to give the spotters overhead a couple of ranging shots, while a brief barrage could exhaust that gun’s ration. Once supplies of munitions increased, though, artillery observation became a major daily task for the RFC and the RNAS. A few aircrews seemed to like it, but for most it was simultaneously boring and horribly dangerous. It involved stoogeing around in the sky in an antiquated and largely defenceless machine (usually a B.E.2c) over the same spot for anything up to half an hour or even longer, by which time every ‘archie’ battery within range was well zeroed in and putting up its own barrage. Despite this the pilot had to circle round and round in a hail of shrapnel while his observer watched for the smoke-puffs of shells landing below and laboriously tapped out the codes for ‘Over’, ‘Short’, ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and – in the event of a bull’s eye – ‘OK’.

  It is small wonder that the RFC’s continuing reliance on the pre-war B.E.2c should have earned that aircraft the heartfelt contempt of so many airmen. Today it has its admirers; but none of them ever had to fly sorties in it against far more advanced machines armed with twin synchronised machine guns. It was a disgrace that it went on being flown for so long and in such numbers, and the men knew it. As late as June 1917 Arthur Gould Lee heard a mess performance of a parody of Psalm 23 known as The Pilot’s Psalm:

  The B.E.2c is my bus; therefore shall I want.

  He maketh me to come down in green pastures.

  He leadeth me where I wish not to go.

  He maketh me to be sick; he leadeth me astray on all cross-country flights.

  Yea, though I fly o’er No-Man’s-Land where mine enemies would compass me about, I fear much evil, for thou art with me; thy joystick and thy prop discomfort me.

  Thou prepareth a crash for me in the presence of mine enemies; thy R.A.F.1* anointeth my hair with oil, thy tank leaketh badly.

  Surely to goodness thou shalt not follow me all the days of my life, else I shall dwell in the House of Colney Hatch2* for ever.50

  A further danger was the real possibility of being hit by the shells fired by the very battery the aircraft was directing. ‘At two thousand feet we were in the path of the gun trajectories, and as the shells passed above or below us the wind eddies made by their motion flung the machine up and down as if in a gale. Each bump meant that a passing shell had missed the machine by four or five feet.’51 There are even accounts of observers or pilots actually glimpsing a big artillery shell as it howled past. Some aircrew were less lucky. Cecil Lewis wrote of his friend and observer Pip, who carried on art. obs. duties with another pilot while Lewis was away on leave:

  One morning, on the dawn patrol, they, flying low in the arc of our own gunfire, intercepted a passing shell. The machine and both the boys were blown to bits.52

  But the real objection of most aircrew to spotting was the sense of being helpless prey for any enemy aircraft that happened by. The chief problem was that it was impossible to take any sort of evasive action with 120 feet or more of weighted copper wire trailing beneath the aircraft. Very often the observer would not have enough time to wind it all in before the attack and he had to leap to his gun instead. The chances were excellent of one’s own machine becoming entangled in the aerial, wrecking the propeller or fouling the controls and leaving the aircraft helpless. This went on being a difficulty throughout the war (Stuart Wortley refers to a pilot’s complaint about it as late as September 1918) and it was not until the war was well over that the technology had developed enough for RAF aircraft finally to acquire fixed aerials contained within the fuselage. It is equally clear that with the exception of some experimental installations, primarily in Home Defence, there was no regular use of wireless by British commanders on the ground to control a pilot in the air during the war.

  This lack of easy communication was particularly noticeable in contact patrols. These were designed to keep the generals in the rear constantly informed about where their infantry were, especially during a rapid advance. Apart from the tactical reasons, this was vital to avoid the gunners shelling their own troops. Down on the ground Royal Engineers signallers laid skeins of field telephone cables like spiders’ webs across a dawn meadow, most immediately lost in the mud. Being static, they were largely useless in quick advances or retreats, and entirely so if a platoon became cut off or surrounded. The RFC was therefore instructed to maintain contact with the troops from the air and report back their position to the brigades’ or divisions’ headquarters. They also had to report on the enemy’s position, how well it was defended, and whether or not he had reserves to bring up.

  As from late spring 1916, the RFC’s contact patrol aircraft had broad black bands painted on the underside of their wings and flew blue streamers from their struts in the hopes that trigger-happy British troops would not machine-gun them from their trenches, as had frequently happened. The pilots were also issued klaxon horns, and if they needed to draw the troops’ attention they would fly low and slow over them repeatedly sounding the letter A in Morse code (short–long) on their klaxons like the harsh cries of some giant prehistoric bird. Hearing this, the infantry were expected to lay out a panel of white cloth on the ground with black letters in a prearranged code displayed on it. (‘NN’, for example, meant ‘Short of ammunition’). This was communication, First World War-style. Needless to say, it was exceedingly unreliable, especially if the troops were under fire. No sane man wanted to leave the shelter of a trench or cover in order to lay out large pieces of cloth, and particularly not if there were enemy aircraft around si
nce it simply drew attention to his position.

  From the airmen’s point of view, too, flying contact patrols was immensely frustrating because they could often see trouble on the way for the men on the ground and had to resort to dropping hastily scrawled messages in bags with streamers attached, provided they still had some left (in dire need the observer’s cigarette case might have to be sacrificed). In reverse, a signaller was expected to communicate from the ground in Morse by means of a black-and-white venetian blind affair with strings that uncovered one or other colour, a method that was laborious to the point of impossible, especially under fire, and extremely hard for airmen passing overhead at seventy miles per hour to follow.

  After the armies’ initial scepticism about aviation’s usefulness, by 1916 their reliance on it and their expectations of what aircraft could do were often downright unrealistic. A notorious instance of this became apparent in the first days of the costly Somme offensive in July. It was fundamental to the British Army’s plan that observation aircraft should not only reveal the size and position of the German forces behind their front lines, but also direct the artillery barrage so it could blast aside the barbed wire that lay in massive entanglements in front of the advancing British troops. At the same time aircraft were also required to attack troops in the trenches as well as to bomb railways and supply lines behind the German front. Some of this was gallantly achieved. Yet no matter how good the RFC’s and RNAS’s cameras were, they could not show what was happening underground in the German dugouts and elsewhere: how, safely hidden from aerial scrutiny, the well-disciplined German forces went on with their target practice and machine-gun drills in underground shooting ranges. Nor were photography or observation even possible if ground mist or clouds of gas obscured the view, as was often the case. In several places the artillery completely failed to clear the barbed wire or annihilate the Germans inside their fortifications as directed, and much of the reason for this was an absence of reliable communication between the aircraft and the artillery batteries as well as a lack of visibility. The wretched infantry advanced believing the barbed wire was gone, only to be brought up short by it and shot to ribbons.

  The Germans had exactly the same problems during the protracted battle of Verdun. The usual forms of ground communication (runners, field telephones, even messenger dogs) having failed, aircraft were sent up. But even from 1,000 feet there was nothing to be seen. ‘The muddy uniforms of our troops were hardly distinguishable from their background of shell holes,’ as one pilot remarked later.53 In fact, in those days long before GPS aircrew would have found it impossible to give a map reference for almost anything they saw, the destruction below them being so complete. Since whole French villages had literally vanished, the pre-war maps were useless and the German infantry frequently became lost, there being absolutely no landmark left on which to take a bearing.

  *

  Other forms of patrols that RFC pilots carried out included line offensive patrols (LOPs) and distant offensive patrols (DOPs). The line offensive patrol required cruising up and down the enemy lines in a fighter to protect the vulnerable ‘art. obs.’ aircraft from attack as they circled around. This inevitably drew ground fire, and out of self-defence LOPs could degenerate into pure and simple trench-strafing.

  As Arthur Gould Lee was to remark, ‘every fighter pilot heartily abominated trench-strafing, not only because of poor results for much jeopardy, but because blind chance played too big a part.’54 In fact, it was as near as an RFC airman came to understanding what the PBI or ‘poor bloody infantry’ felt like. Suddenly, his individual skill as a pilot counted for nothing and his fate was completely arbitrary, settled by randomly flying pieces of lead or steel. The trench-strafer’s job was perpetually over the edge of suicidal since it involved flying low along an enemy trench and shooting up men who were well protected in the narrow, zig-zagging slit and who were meanwhile shooting back at close range with all the rifles, machine guns and anything else they possessed. No pilot ever felt other than mother-naked, perched as he was on a wicker seat with only a flying suit and some doped fabric between his cringing skin and the hail of supersonic metal hurled up at him personally from a mere eighty feet below. All in all, it was an efficient way of getting killed without having achieved anything commensurately useful. As Arthur Lee Gould put it:

  Low-flying attacks were, with few exceptions, a wasteful employment of highly trained pilots and expensive aeroplanes. A 30 percent rate of casualties meant a new squadron every fourth day and one rendered useless for normal air fighting duties. This situation developed in 46 Squadron when after a week’s losses, all but a handful of our pilots were straight out from England.55

  One obvious way of improving the airman’s chances was to provide him with some protective armour. The engine and cockpits of a few B.E.2cs were given 445 lb of steel plate, but the effect on the performance of an already sluggish and outdated machine can be imagined. It was really only once aero-engines had become powerful enough towards the end of the war that armour plating became practicable. Once Camels entered service in 1917 they were extensively used for ground attacks and a prototype armoured Sopwith Trench Fighter (T.F.1) version was built. However, the project was shelved in favour of the Sopwith T.F.2 Salamander, conceived from the first for a trench fighting role. It carried 650 lb of armour to protect the pilot and the fuel tanks, and after field trials in France production was begun in the summer of 1918 despite the ridicule voiced by diehards like Biggles (see Chapter 9, p.246–7). However, as so often with new British aircraft, production was too slow and only a handful of Salamanders were delivered before the Armistice. The sole successful armoured aircraft of the war was the German Junkers J.I, a remarkable piece of design since the engine, tanks and pilot were protected by a one-piece ‘bathtub’ of steel that also doubled as the fuselage itself, monocoque-style. It was introduced in the late summer of 1917 and was well liked by its German crews since it offered them immunity from just about anything short of armour-piercing cannon shells. RFC pilots, meanwhile, had to content themselves with sitting on cast-iron stove lids, just as in World War II bomb-aimers lying prone in the nose of their aircraft used car hub caps, and in Vietnam low-flying helicopter pilots sat on their flak jackets rather than wearing them.

  *

  Distant offensive patrols were a distilled expression of Trenchard’s aggressive policy of carrying the fight to the enemy.3* Several flights of aircraft would carry out a sweep well behind the German lines, and many pilots could see little point in that, either. Had the sortie had a particular objective such as a photo recce or a bombing raid, nobody would have raised a murmur. But to fly off deep into enemy territory either looking for trouble or just hoping to represent a demoralising presence seemed mere risk-taking for no useful purpose. DOPs were particularly unpopular because something as trivial as engine trouble could lead to an airman having to glide down and crash-land deep inside German territory, with almost inevitable capture and internment for the duration. On many of these patrols not a single enemy machine was seen, so it was not as though being downed was always the result of combat. It might merely mean a careless mechanic had failed to tighten a nut sufficiently and the last oil had drained out of the engine twenty miles on the wrong side of the line. In such circumstances a harsh stretch in a prison camp for an unknowable number of years seemed a cruelly unearned punishment, as well as a waste of a trained airman and his aircraft.

  DOPs in the last two years of the war could easily lead to combat if they ran into a Jasta (German fighter squadron) patrol. A real set-piece battle could take place if they had the misfortune to encounter a flying circus like that of Richthofen himself, with massed fighters waiting ‘upstairs’ for just such victims. Certainly in the early stages of an encounter like this the lack of communication between aircraft made it almost impossible for the leader to employ a particular tactic once the fight had started. Formation flying without wireless required extreme alertness on the part of the wingma
n to what his leader was doing. It was all a matter of a pilot rocking his wings, firing off a prearranged colour of Very light with his flare pistol or simply waving his arms in the slipstream and pointing. The way a battle would commence was almost entirely determined by which side had the height advantage and could decide when and how to attack. Once the higher aircraft dived, the lower formations quickly split up to avoid becoming sitting targets, and without the cohesive force of a leader being able to communicate his tactics it quickly became a free-for-all. It seldom degenerated into a mass dogfight like the whirling knots of midges so beloved by film-makers and soon to be expected by cinema audiences. A pilot would pick out a potential victim and concentrate on him, make an attacking run and then pull out to see its effect.