Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  *

  For all the political rhetoric in Westminster about the ‘Fokker Scourge’ of late 1915, the skies above the battlefields of Belgium and France were often remarkably empty of aircraft for the first two years of the war. Until the first Battle of the Somme in the late summer of 1916 it was perfectly possible for a two-seater observation machine to go up for three hours over certain sectors of the front without ever seeing another aircraft, whether hostile or friendly. Obviously, most would tend to congregate in the neighbourhood of features of immediate military interest on the ground; but the vastness of the area that could usefully be overflown at heights of up to 10,000 feet further diluted the small number of aircraft in the sky at any one time.

  As we know, Roland Garros’s victory on 1st April 1915 in his Morane was the first ever by an aircraft using a fixed machine-gun firing through the propeller, and the autumn and winter of that year saw the worst of the Germans’ answer: the Fokker monoplanes’ supremacy against which the British and French had no real defence for some months. The truth is, however, that the Entente’s casualty figures were by no means as enormous as the impassioned rhetoric in the debates back home suggested, and vanishingly tiny when compared to the slaughter taking place on the ground. In the sixteen months between August 1914 and December 1915 153 British aircrew are listed as being killed – a figure that includes training fatalities.121 By the end of 1915 there were some 107 Fokker and Pfalz monoplanes operating on the whole of the Western Front, and the Germans’ official published list of their victories showed a grand total of twenty-eight.122 Even had these victims all been two-seaters and their crews killed or captured, the loss of fifty-six men over five months would scarcely have constituted a ‘scourge’ at a time when the infantry might easily lose 4,000 men in a single day. The real loss to the Army was that the downing of its few observation machines effectively blinded the commanders on the ground. The rhetoric reflected an impotent anger that the RFC was not yet equipped to meet the German aircraft on an equal footing. It was crafted for public consumption and to shame the government into leaning harder on the Royal Aircraft Factory and others to come up with an appropriate answer. A new generation of French and British aircraft did indeed begin to appear in early 1916 but the German monoplanes did not disappear completely until that summer, by which time the tables were turned and they themselves had become obsolete fodder. However, their real significance in the twelve months from mid-1915 to mid-1916 was to mark the moment when the idea as well as the science of modern aerial combat was invented and certain pilots became ‘aces’: celebrities whose names are famous to this day.

  The comparative lack of aircraft in the skies of that early period of the war is part of the reason why the total scores of the early French and German aces were so much smaller than those of their later counterparts. At the time, too, air-to-air fighting was simpler in terms of the evolutions pilots could perform, and the majority of combat was not in the form of ‘dogfights’ but simple diving attacks on unwary victims. As previously indicated, Fokker’s ‘E’ series of monoplanes (and the Pfalz lookalikes) were not in themselves such distinguished aircraft; they were merely superior to most of the Entente aircraft they met at the time, and that largely on account of their forward-firing machine guns. Many of the machines they shot down were antiques such as Farman ‘Longhorns’ and Caudron G.3s, wire and canvas birdcages dawdling along at fifty or sixty miles an hour, or the more advanced but still defenceless B.E.2cs.

  One of the skills of air-to-air combat the German pilots were acquiring was knowing how to take advantage of the wind and the sun’s position. For their part the RFC pilots were keenly aware of the disadvantages of nature under which they flew. The Canadian ace Billy Bishop later spoke for them all when he described the drawbacks of an early show, typically on a morning when, having gone to bed past midnight, pilots were woken at 4 a.m. by an orderly.

  After a cup of hot tea and a biscuit, four of us left the ground shortly after five. The sun in the early mornings, shining in such direct rays from the east, makes it practically impossible to see in that direction, so that these dawn adventures were not much of a pleasure. It meant that danger from surprise attack was very great, for the Huns coming from the east with the sun at their back could see us when we couldn’t see them. In any case one doesn’t feel one’s best at dawn, especially when one has had only four hours’ sleep. This was the case on this bright May morning, and to make matters worse there was quite a ground mist. The sun, reflecting off this, made seeing in any direction very difficult.123

  ‘Beware the Hun in the sun’ was the warning repeated to every RFC airman who came to France. Bishop must have taken the adage to heart and learned how to use it to his own advantage since he was to become the war’s third- highest-scoring ace after Manfred von Richthofen and France’s René Fonck, which made him the top-scoring RFC, Canadian and British Empire pilot. Strangely, the flying aces remain almost the sole aspect of the first air war of which most people today have even the faintest knowledge, much of that being incorrect.

  The system was largely invented by the French press, which first awarded the appellation of ‘As’ to Adolphe Pégoud. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Pégoud had achieved great fame in France and Europe in 1913 when he was acclaimed as the first to loop the loop, although in fact the Russian Pyotr Nesterov had done it a few days earlier in a Nieuport IV. That same year Pégoud became the first pilot (rather than passenger) to make a successful parachute jump, abandoning his single-seat aircraft, an old Blériot, to find its own way back to earth. Once the war had begun his combat career was brief. On 5th February 1915 he shot down two German aircraft and forced a third to land in French territory. In those early days this was dramatic stuff and thereafter the French press blazoned his every move. On 18th July when he had shot down his sixth German victim he was awarded ‘ace’ status. On 31st August he was himself downed in combat, shot through the heart. All France mourned.

  The propaganda effect of Pégoud’s example was not lost on the Germans. It had great patriotic significance while also trading on the romantic aura that flying already held for most people. His death came just before the autumn battles of Loos and Artois, and amid the general slaughter it was clear the French Army was taking many more casualties than the Germans. Flying aces like Pégoud acquired an additional sheen of glamour because they were named individuals, and as such the very antithesis of the anonymous carnage of the battlefields. Something gallant and heroic could be retained in the idea of aerial knights jousting in encounters high above the mud and smoke. Although the ace system itself was no more than the glorified equivalent of the notches on a gunfighter’s gun, it partook of the same mystique of the lone champion. The German press was quick to follow suit by publicising the exploits of Fliegerasse like Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann flying Fokker’s new monoplane. The newspapers soon developed the pilots’ friendly rivalry into a competition, with one man now ahead in the scoring and then the other, with the readership of all Germany following it as though the two were Olympic sportsmen representing their country rather than ‘hired assassins’.

  However, it must be emphasised that it is often misleading to compare different pilots’ valour and skill solely by reference to ‘league tables’ of their scores. At the outset it seems to have been unofficially agreed that a minimum of five victories was required before a pilot could officially become an ace. This minimum crept upwards over the remaining three years and four months of the war, partly because by the end there were many more aircraft in the sky compared to 1915 and total scores tended to be higher. Secondly, in the beginning both German and British ‘victories’ would often include aircraft that were merely forced down rather than destroyed, and sometimes even those that were merely driven away from an observation task. In the RFC this practice of crediting so-called ‘OOC’ (Out Of Control) claims was only stopped on 19th May 1918.124 But thirdly and most crucially, records did not always tally. A pilot might have believed he h
ad shot down an aircraft and watched it fall, but the only way of being certain was to follow it down and see it crash. Yet this was often impossible because he was being harried by another machine. So back at his airfield he might report a victory with a reasonably clear conscience, and efforts would be made on the ground to confirm the crash. If none could be found it might be because the aircraft had fallen in no-man’s-land in the middle of an artillery barrage, in which case nobody might have noticed, or it could mean that the enemy pilot had merely faked being mortally hit in order to escape. Furthermore, as the war progressed and the front line was hurriedly redrawn here and there, many airfields had to be abandoned at short notice and squadron records were very easily lost in the general panic and turmoil. Even after the war was long over and military historians from opposing sides could examine each other’s operations books, certain ‘victories’ were exposed as enigmatic, unlikely, or almost certainly imaginary – for airmen everywhere could hardly help being drawn into the competitive nature of their trade, occasionally making claims for themselves or their squadron that were wishful thinking or even downright false. All that being said, the offices of the Kofl and then the Kogenluft1* soon insisted on rigorous standards for German pilots reporting victories, and claims were frequently disallowed. But in the heat of battle, and with rivalries between individual pilots and squadrons being keen, factual accuracy must often have been a fairly flexible concept.

  With the immense newspaper publicity given to Germany’s most successful combat aces of that early period, Immelmann and Boelcke, it was clear that medals would have to follow. Prussia’s highest award for valour, the Orden Pour le Mérite (which from the colour of its enamel was popularly known as the Blue Max) was very roughly the equivalent of Britain’s Victoria Cross; but unlike the VC it had to be worked towards via a strict precedence of other medals such as all three classes of the Iron Cross. By November 1915 only three Blue Maxes had been awarded to the German military, two to navy men and one to a soldier. In that month Boelcke and Immelmann were given the next highest award. Two months later in January 1916 both pilots had scored eight victories each and became the first two airmen to be awarded the Blue Max. It is interesting to compare this with the case of Manfred von Richthofen, who was to receive his own Blue Max exactly a year later but had needed twice as many victories to get it. By May 1918 his protégé Erich Löwenhardt needed twenty-four, and at the end of 1918 the last-ever recipient of a Blue Max, Carl Degelow, had thirty to his credit. This apparent inflation reflected less an effort to prevent depreciation in the medal’s value than recognition that with many more pilots in the sky the opportunities for victory had become more plentiful, if not necessarily easier. In any case a Blue Max man became a publicly lionised hero, and even the military often granted him a remarkable degree of autonomy in how he chose to fight.

  From its inception the German ace system also offered a valuable practical advantage to its pilots. As they became national celebrities they were eagerly sought after by representatives of the aircraft industry, who listened attentively to what they wanted from an aircraft.

  German aircraft and engine manufacturers were in sharp competition. To a great extent the orders they received depended upon what the pilots themselves thought of their engines and their machines. Each manufacturer rented rooms in Berlin’s best hotels, and a pilot on leave could bask in luxury at the expense of those who made the aircraft they flew. There was no word in German for ‘lobbyist’ then, but the industrialists of 1915 anticipated the manufacturers and pressure groups of today by providing everything in the way of alcoholic and feminine charms for the customer. And the pilot was the customer.125

  The value of such a system in ensuring feedback between pilot and the industry, especially when aviation was developing so fast, can hardly be exaggerated. It can also hardly be imagined in a stolidly British context in 1915. The idea of the Royal Aircraft Factory renting suites in the Ritz or the Savoy and liberally stocking them with champagne and floozies for the benefit of RFC pilots on leave is comic in its implausibility. And yet a Flight Lieutenant Mackenzie, who was killed early in 1917 while flying with the RNAS, could write with some ruefulness:

  If a designer while designing, building and testing a machine had the constant advice of a thoroughly experienced war pilot, a much more efficient and satisfactory machine could be turned out. This would also avoid endless work in the flights, under the difficult conditions of active service, and would avoid such simple mistakes as not putting the trigger on the joystick. The experience of this pilot must not be more than one month old. This would also give a good opportunity of resting a pilot after a strenuous time.126

  However, this idea of pilots’ feedback was evidently too commonsensical for the British to adopt, just as their initial attitude towards the ace system was that it was all a lot of foreign flapdoodle, failing to see how it might actually have advantageous practical and even political effects. As far as the RFC was concerned the Expeditionary Force’s airmen were simply soldiers doing their duty as required by God and the King, and heroism was only to be expected. That was what medals like the Military Cross were for. Any suggestion of a cult of individualism tended to be frowned on as basically unBritish and immodest, unless perhaps a VC was awarded. ‘A bit of a star turn,’ senior officers might allow of a particular pilot, as though he were playing the lead in a panto or music hall show. In the summer of 1917 the anonymous author of an article in Flying entitled ‘The Flying Corps Spirit’ explained this policy as embodying a quintessentially British virtue:

  The Royal Flying Corps is coldly impersonal in its official reports. It is in this aspect splendidly unique. It alone among the belligerents steadily refuses the limelight of publicity so far as its personnel is concerned. In its bulletins aeroplanes, not men, are mentioned. The names of its flying officers and observers are recorded only in the Roll of Honour or in the list of awards. ‘Baron von Richthofen,’ says the German bulletin, ‘yesterday secured his sixtieth victim.’ Doubtless the Germans have some good reason for booming their Richthofens at the expense of their [lesser] comrades. It is their considered policy, and it has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. On the whole, our policy is peculiarly British, and it is based upon British traditions. It springs partly from the regimental spirit, partly from the public-school spirit, and partly from the sporting spirit which is found in the British wherever they are…127

  Such cultural differences aside, Trenchard initially thought it unfair to laud one man for his bravery while every day equal bravery was being shown by the pilots and observers of humbler types of aircraft, especially two-seaters doing artillery spotting and the like. Nor was it clear who might claim the victory in such a case: the pilot or the observer with the machine gun who actually did the shooting. It was equally problematic when two or more British machines joined forces to down an enemy aircraft. At first each pilot was credited with a kill, but later on a more scrupulous system of awarding fractions was adopted, so an individual score like 12½ became the norm.

  The award of the third wartime VC to an RFC airman, Captain Lanoe Hawker, for shooting down three enemy aircraft on a single day in July 1915, was the exception that proved the British rule. By the end of the year Hawker had seven victories, which put him almost on a par with the German aces, and the newspapers back home were already acclaiming him as an ace. To his further credit Hawker had managed this feat against opponents armed with machine guns while flying a Bristol Scout on which he had fixed a mounting for his single-shot cavalry carbine to fire obliquely past the propeller. Hawker was already an outstanding rifle shot and became expert with this idiosyncratic arrangement that a few other pilots copied but never mastered as he did. When after a tremendous twenty-minute aerial battle in November 1916 he became Manfred von Richthofen’s eleventh victim, his passing was mourned throughout Britain and particularly by the RFC, for whom by then he had become the grand old archetype of a fighter pilot. He was twenty-five.

&nb
sp; Immelmann and Boelcke were also killed that same year – Immelmann in June and Boelcke in October. Both were mourned nationally and the RFC dropped notes of regret and respect for such worthy opponents. Of the two, Boelcke was perhaps the more whole-heartedly lamented. By all accounts he was an outstandingly decent man who, whenever he could, landed next to his victims to shake them by the hand, invite them back to his Staffel’s Kasino (mess) for lunch, ensure their swift transfer to hospital or salute their cadavers. More than that, he was a superb tactician who did much to bring about the organising of the German Jagdstaffeln or Jastas – the hunting squadrons that later formed the ‘flying circuses’ that would serve aces like Richthofen so well. The immense prestige Boelcke had won for himself in Germany – not to mention the Blue Max – enabled him to exert considerable influence on the military authorities, who were happy to defer to him in the field in which he was so clearly expert.

  Boelcke lived to see the end of the Fliegertruppen’s monoplane supremacy at the hands of the now better-organised fighter squadrons of the RFC and the Aéronautique Militaire. These were principally flying the D.H.2 and the Nieuport ‘Bébé’, although rather earlier in 1916 the RNAS had already begun making inroads into the German monoplanes with the new Sopwith Scout, usually known as the ‘Pup’. Had the RFC been given the vastly superior Pups at the same time as the Navy, the Fokkers would have been finished months earlier; but of course the Sopwith company was contracted to the Admiralty and not to the Army, a good example of the absurd inefficiency of the British system.