Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  However, it did sometimes happen that the number of combatants was big enough for the fight to become a mêlée, with a great risk of collision. It was a terrifying business for any pilot who was comparatively inexperienced. Everything took place at bewildering speed, with brightly coloured machines flashing past at every angle at closing speeds of 200 mph or more, and in the concentration of the moment all notion of where he was in relation to the earth beneath or to his companions was completely lost. There was the staccato sound of machine guns above the roar of his own engine, the intimate smell of other men’s exhaust fumes and castor oil as well as the cordite smoke from his own guns. And then abruptly something quite extraordinary. He would complete a turn and find himself utterly alone. The guns were silent, the sky empty of aircraft, whether enemy or friendly. He would look wildly around but see nothing other than dissipating tendrils of black smoke standing in a corner of the sky to mark someone’s fall. Scanning the ground he might finally spot a couple of machines low down, heading somewhere but already too far away for him to tell whose they were. Disorientated, he might follow them in the manner of a small dog tagging on at the end of a parade just so as not to be left behind. Years later, W. E. Johns wrote about a neophyte’s bewilderment in combat:

  The first dog fight I was ever in, it seemed to me that one minute we – that is, my formation – were sailing along all merry and bright, and the next minute the air was full of machines, darting all over the place. I didn’t see where they came from or where they went. I didn’t see where my formation went, either. By the time I had grasped the fact that the fight had started and I was looking to see who was perforating my plane, the show was all over. Two machines lay smoking on the ground and everybody else had disappeared. While I was considering what the dickens I should do I suddenly discovered that I was flying back in formation again! The fellows had come back to pick me up and formed up around me. I didn’t even see where they came from.56

  As the war went on and aircraft grew more capable, many DOPs effectively changed into bombing sorties against enemy infrastructure and finally into retaliation raids against cities. Again, these missions seemed to have a purpose – or at least they had targets – and airmen were more easily resigned to them.

  As mentioned in the previous chapter, another suicidal pursuit was that of balloon strafing. Observation balloons were obvious targets, and the men who went up in their creaking baskets for hours on end with high-powered binoculars and a field telephone offered examples of some of the least-rated heroism of the entire war. Quite apart from the cold and the motion sickness often brought on by windy conditions, it must have been most unreassuring to dangle beneath an enormous tethered bag of hydrogen, the most prominent thing in the sky for miles around and famously a challenge to any passing enemy airman who fancied immortality. True, observers on both sides had a parachute that was carried in a canister outside the basket, which was more than the pilots had. True also that this worked more often than it failed, even though it sometimes happened that an observer might make it safely back to earth just in time for the blazing remains of his balloon to fall on top of him. Balloons could be hauled down if an attack were spotted in time, although the speed of their descent depended on the alertness of the ground crew and the power of the winch. Balloons’ real defences lay in their usually being surrounded by ack-ack guns and machine gunners who between them could send up a lethal barrage towards any aircraft that fancied its chances. German balloons were also reputed to be defended by powerful flamethrowers, but how those were to be deployed against a rapidly moving aircraft was not clear.

  Great personal acclaim accrued to those who downed a balloon, and in a pilot’s tally it counted as a victory equal to shooting down an enemy aircraft. It was generally agreed that ‘balloon-busting’ was a mug’s game, a pastime reserved for those who were radically tired of life. The greatest balloon-buster of all was the Belgian Willy Coppens. Flying his favourite French aircraft, an Hanriot HD.1, Coppens accounted for thirty-four balloons in a scant five months between May and October 1918. On more than one occasion he actually landed on top of a balloon to hide from ground fire, a brilliant dodge as well as evidence of superb airmanship. He undoubtedly had what people thought of as a charmed life because although his war career was ended by an incendiary bullet that led to the amputation of one leg, Coppens lived to be ninety-four, dying in 1986.

  He had several miraculous escapes when balloon-busting, not least in surviving booby-traps. These were decoy balloons, worn-out sacrificial envelopes complete with a dummy observer leaning pensively on the rim of the basket that also contained a huge charge of high explosive fired electrically from the ground when the attacking aircraft was close enough. Each time Coppens somehow contrived to emerge unscathed in his sturdy Hanriot, rocking wildly in the blast and fumes.

  Apart from the bristling defences, the main problem with shooting down balloons was the need to get in close despite the fact that they offered a very large target. Given hydrogen’s notorious habit of exploding, it was ironic that it should so often have proved remarkably hard to set on fire. Ordinary tracer rounds seldom did the job, which was why Allied balloon-busters would load up with incendiary bullets – as already mentioned, the only permissible use of Buckingham ammunition. Even this did not always work and the pilot was obliged to fall back on Le Prieur rockets. He usually carried eight of these, four on each side of his aircraft attached in racks to the outer struts between his wings. Fired electrically, the rockets had barbed heads for tearing a hole in the balloon’s fabric before the main incendiary charge exploded inside. They worked, but they were seriously inaccurate and needed to be fired at close range to guarantee a hit.

  Another kind of flying that hand-picked pilots were sometimes asked to do was dangerous for rather different reasons. This was dropping or picking up agents in enemy territory, a mission usually but not always carried out at night. It required exceptional knowledge of the local country, which tended to mean a pilot who had been in the area for some time, plus the airmanship to find a particular field, land safely in it, turn around and take off again. Obviously it demanded good nerves as well as skill, for even though an RFC pilot might be uniformed, dropping an agent was sometimes considered the same as being a spy since it facilitated espionage, and he stood a good chance of being shot if caught. In addition to the spy – often a nondescript Frenchman wearing peasant clothes – he would probably carry a basket of homing pigeons strapped to one wing: the spy’s best chance of getting a message back. These were useful birds and RNAS seaplanes frequently carried pigeons in case the aircraft was forced down on the water. On such ancient methods was the new machine age obliged to rely, and it was astonishing when they worked, the pigeons stoically flying through appalling weather and sometimes through much worse:

  Today one of them performed an act of gallantry worthy of Napoleon’s famous drummer-boy. The bird in question struggled into the pigeon loft, and having delivered its message fell dead upon the floor. It had been shot in the chest and one of its legs had been blown away, undoubtedly while crossing the trenches, for the enemy are always on the look-out for westward-flying pigeons. The men buried it with pomp and circumstance…57

  Certainly picking up an agent at a prearranged time and place was, as one pilot put it, ‘a very ticklish business’. Obviously there was no knowing whether the spy had been caught and compromised, in which case there might be quite a reception committee waiting for whoever kept the rendezvous. There was also a good chance the field had been ‘trapped’, with wires stretched invisibly across it to snag the wheels of any aircraft attempting to land. There are accounts of agents being fetched out of fields from under the noses of search parties, with the aircraft doing a rolling turn-around at the end of its landing run and the sprinting agent not even having time to climb aboard but simply flinging himself onto one wing and hanging on for dear life as the aircraft took straight off again. If lucky he might cling on with frozen hands for as long
as it took to get back across the lines – provided he wasn’t hit by gunfire as they crossed or didn’t fall off if the pilot had to make a sudden swerve.

  In fact, there are numerous accounts of men surviving flights outside a cockpit (and engineers/gunners in the massive German Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI bombers were expected as a matter of course to climb an external iron ladder in flight to reach their guns in the upper wing). It was not uncommon for observers to leave their cockpit in the air – naturally, without a parachute or safety harness – and clamber around outside in the tearing slipstream in order to try and fix something. There are celebrated instances of observers hugging a strut on the outer section of a wing in order to balance a crippled aircraft as it flew, and even an instance of one managing to land his burning aircraft with its dead pilot by standing on the wing next to the cockpit with a hand on the joystick in the machine’s blazing interior. In 1916, following a bombing raid on a British airfield on the island of Tenedos off the Turkish coast near the Dardanelles, a German pilot suddenly discovered that his throttle had jammed shut:

  With astonishing coolness and agility the observer climbed down onto the wing and found that the control rod to the throttle had worked loose and that the spring on the throttle had automatically shut it. He therefore held it open and was obliged to remain standing on the wing throughout the whole of the homeward flight, which lasted nearly an hour.58

  Obviously, this sort of thing was only possible in a biplane. Probably one of the very last instances of such heroics occurred in the absurdly gallant but doomed attack in February 1942 by six Fleet Air Arm Fairey Swordfish aircraft of 825 Squadron on the German battle-cruisers trying to slip through the Channel to their home port in the so-called Channel Dash. The leading Swordfish attempting to torpedo the Scharnhorst was a wood-and-fabric biplane designed in 1933. It was pitted against defending Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs and inevitably it was hit. ‘Tracer tore through the junction of tail plane and fuselage, setting the fabric afire. The rear gunner, Clinton, calmly climbed out of his cockpit, sat astride the fuselage and beat at the flames with his hands. He put the fire out and clambered back.’59

  *

  Bombing became ever more common on all sides during the First World War as aircraft were designed to carry increasingly significant loads. A technique for aiming had to be developed from scratch, and a great deal of practice was called for. With practice of the kind described by one pilot it was amazing that anyone survived, even though the bombs were inert:

  After a week’s constant practice most of us became fairly proficient in the art of bomb-dropping. Sometimes one or other of us would be deputed to stand out on the aerodrome and ‘mark’ for another observer who was doing his tests. This was a rather trying job. We used to call it ‘death-dodging.’ You would take your scoring-card with its bull’s eye and concentric circles marked upon it, and proceed to a spot as near to, or as far from, the target as your temperament dictated. Some fellows would stand in the geometric centre of the ring and allege that they felt safer there; others would hang about near the edge of the field, and with the fall of each bomb would dash forward, measure roughly its distance from the bull’s eye, then retreat once more to the comparative safety of the hedge.60

  Very British, the whole thing (‘a rather trying job’) in its lethal and primitive way. Was it really not possible to devise a method of scoring for bombing practice that didn’t threaten to turn a valuable trained pilot into a potential target on the ground?

  This particular airman had been trained as a night bomber. In the last two years of the war air activity continued through the night. As in the case of the German bombers over London, night flying conferred obvious advantages until defending pilots also learned the technique. In France this skill was developed principally because the various armies soon learned the benefit of moving troops and supplies at night. Accordingly, these movements were targeted by the opposing artillery, which in turn demanded ‘art. obs.’ aircraft to carry out their normal daytime tasks as best they could by night. They, and night bombers like the old F.E.2s still doing service, also carried parachute flares that for a short while could bathe the ground below in the unearthly white light of burning magnesium. Apart from that, anti-aircraft and artillery guns below were unable to suppress the muzzle-flashes that reliably betrayed their position, just as their ‘blazes’ showed up in daylight on grass and in snow.

  Flying at night required very different techniques, and some pilots never adapted to it. It was exceedingly daunting, regardless of how courageous you were. The Canadian future ace Billy Bishop described being assigned to fly a B.E.12 as a night fighter with 37 (Home Defence) Squadron, based in Essex. It was December 1916 and he was a newly-qualified pilot. In common with everyone else at the time he had no radio, no parachute, and precious little training:

  Night flying… in small aircraft was a fearsome business… We took off between two rows of flares and soared into the night sky, praying to goodness we would be able to find our aerodromes when the time came to return. Our knowledge of navigation was completely elementary. We had a lecture or two… and a rudimentary knowledge of the stars in their courses, but… whenever we flew by night, it was strictly by the seat of the pants. I would pick myself a few shadowy landmarks and try to orient myself by them. There was no… voice contact with the ground… and no control tower telling [us] what to do and when to do it. Consequently, it was always an awesome business to get back to the starting point and… to land.61

  Some pilots, no matter how courageous, never did adapt to night flying, often for physiological reasons. Men with perfect daytime vision discovered that their eyes failed to adjust to low levels of light – ‘night blindness’ – which ruled them out. This was also age-related: yet another reason why airmen in this first air war were generally reckoned to be over the hill at twenty-six. Some men found they became hopelessly disorientated in the dark and lost all sense of direction and even balance. They, too, were scratched from night-flying rosters, assuming they had survived training long enough for their names to be put down in the first place.

  Surprisingly, pilots unaffected by such conditions often adjusted very well and even found it easier to navigate at night than they had imagined – provided the weather was reasonably clear and they didn’t need to make an emergency landing. Certain things became particularly visible from the air (as Anthony Fokker had already noticed before the war when flying over towns by day: a costermonger’s barrow heaped with oranges in a market square stood out like a beacon, for instance, which is why a particular shade of orange-yellow is still used today for visibility at airfields). At night, and even without a moon, the stars shed an unexpected amount of light. Rivers showed up well (the German navigators heading for London needed only to pick up the mouth of the Thames and follow its sheen like a flarepath). Roads were distinguishable even in the days when by no means all roads were asphalted, especially in the country. They appeared a slightly different colour to the surrounding fields. The high polish of railway lines was also prominent, as were the signals. Railways were prime navigation aids in aviation’s early days when lost pilots only needed to pick up and follow a line because sooner or later it would reach a town (in Britain this mode of navigation soon became known as ‘Bradshawing’, after the well-known railway timetable). At night the steam engines pulling the trains sent up billows of sparks from their chimneys, while each time a stoker opened the furnace door to throw on more coal the glow lit up the smoke overhead and was visible for miles in the darkened landscape.

  Systems were developed on both sides for marking landing grounds at night. The RFC used flares laid out in an inverted ‘L’ shape. The pilot could land anywhere within the space the arms enclosed, depending on the direction of the wind, while the shorter arm marked the safe limit of his run. Additionally, a series of beacons could be lit in response to a Morse message – which was fine in an aircraft carrying wireless and an observer, but not available to a solo ‘scout’ or
fighter pilot. As Billy Bishop found, the first scout pilots sent up in desperation over the Thames Estuary as part of Britain’s Home Defence against German night raiders were at all sorts of disadvantage besides the likelihood of becoming lost. Perhaps the most crucial difficulty was that their instrument panels were unlit. They were therefore without any way of knowing their air speed or attitude to the horizon. It suddenly became extremely easy to edge into a stall without knowing it, and only the wind on one cheek told them if they were side-slipping. Worse still, they could not read the fuel gauge or (if they had one) the rev. counter; and worst of all they had no idea of the oil pressure, which was critical for rotary engines. A further unexpected problem was the exhaust pipe. This glowed cherry red and sent back bright rags of blue flame. Depending on how it was sited it could seriously interfere with a pilot’s night vision as well as being a useful giveaway for an attacker searching for a target.

  Whereas night tactical missions such as bombing and observation were feasible, if difficult and dangerous, the interception of enemy aircraft at night proved virtually impossible. If aircraft could seem to disappear with the greatest of ease in daylight – there one moment, an empty sky the next – trying to find a lightless and probably black-painted aircraft at night was generally reckoned a mug’s game, although naturally squadrons of mugs were sent up to try, if only to defend their commanding officers against censure for having made no effort. Searchlights could occasionally make it easier to shoot down a bomber that had become caught in a beam, but they could also destroy night vision and leave a scout pilot temporarily blind.

  *

  By 1918 aircraft had long since become maids-of-all-work. In June 1918 the Independent Air Force was formed under the command of ‘Boom’ Trenchard with the remit of bombing German targets deep inside the Rhineland. The raids, carried out by day and night, quickly led to several Jastas of German fighters being sent down to the Nancy area from which squadrons like W. E. Johns’s No. 55 were flying their shows. In some ways this represented the climax of aerial combat in the war, in the sense that at last the aircraft on both sides were more evenly matched in terms of capability. By this time no pilot any longer thought in terms of gallantry or considered for a moment that he was a knight of the air. His was ‘a simple, vicious struggle for existence. There were endless days of struggling out of bed before daylight, almost too tired to gulp down the cup of tea brought in by a persistent batman with his eternal “Early morning show, sir. Fine morning, sir.” Pilots would make their way, half-dazed, half-dressed and unshaven to the sheds; flying in all weathers; flying at all hours; flying when they were ill but would not say so because the squadron had lost men on the previous day and was short-handed; flying with their souls sick at seeing their friends go down in flames…’62 From being so recently an adventure, flying had become a nightmare: