Marked for Death

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The plea that the German atrocities in this war were perpetrated against orders, were against the wishes of the Kaiser, the General Staff and the German people, and that they have been magnified by the Allies, is a ‘terminological inexactitude’. For fifty years the gospel of Frightfulness has been preached in Germany; and the Germans, prone to violence, prone to hatred, rude in their language, coarse in their manners, have been apt pupils. So far from its being alien to the feeling of Germany or the tradition of the German Army, Frightfulness is part of the German code of war and is looked upon by soldiers and civilians alike as a useful and proper part of tactics and – business.193

  Blatchford naturally had his counterparts in Germany. One of the Hamburger Nachrichten’s journalists wrote that ‘England’s shamelessness is not only abominable; it drives the blood to our heads and makes us desire and demand a hard punishment for this frivolous and huckstering people. Therefore we cannot rain bombs enough on England, nor can enough of her ships be destroyed.’194 Protecting those ships was a priority for both the Royal Navy and its air service.

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  Throughout the war the RNAS (rather than the RFC) was charged with the air defence of Britain’s coasts and in particular the Channel and the North Sea. It entered the war with six airships and 93 aircraft. Many of these aircraft were seaplanes deployed on constant patrol for German U-boats; but as we know, RNAS squadrons were also land-based in France and Belgium where they shared duties with the RFC. ‘Seaplanes’ in this context generally meant floatplanes: aircraft that take off and land on water using fixed floats or pontoons rather than flying boats whose fuselage is also a hull for landing directly on the water. Since most early aircraft were single-engined they were best suited to become floatplanes because they rode high enough on the water on their pontoons for the propeller and engine to be clear of spray (which was not always true of flying boats floating on their hulls). On the other hand the floats added weight and aerodynamic drag that still further reduced their already limited agility in the air. All aircraft design represents compromise, and the Kaiserliche Marine made it still harder for its own airmen following an order in March 1912 that all German naval aircraft had henceforth to be amphibians, with the added weight and drag of wheels.

  The major problem for all seaplanes was that of navigation, which in those days was hard enough for aircraft flying over dry land. Over a featureless ocean out of sight of land or in restricted visibility it could be nightmarish, and scores of naval aircraft on both sides simply disappeared without trace. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bravery of a pilot and observer setting off alone on maritime patrol looking for enemy ships, aircraft and submarines over grey wastes of sea in flimsy wooden machines with open cockpits, a single engine, limited fuel, often no wireless and an unreliable compass; and all this in maritime areas where winds could change in a moment and sea mists gather out of nowhere. They flew day after day, all year round, often never seeing any shipping at all. It was possible for airmen to see not one single enemy vessel in 400 hours’ risky flying; and yet the job had to be done. If forced down by engine failure and lucky enough to make a decent landing on the sea they would probably be unable to take off again even if they managed to clear a blocked fuel pipe, for it would surely have been well-nigh impossible as well as dangerous to swing the propeller to restart the engine when standing on a narrow, heaving float. If they were carrying a wicker basket of homing pigeons they could send off a message giving their position as well as they were able, fully aware that they might be condemned to drift for days without water or food until they chanced to be spotted by a passing vessel of whatever nationality. That was if they were lucky. If they made a bad landing on a rough sea and wrecked the aircraft they would more likely cling to a float until cold or fatigue overcame them.

  If a patrolling seaplane did spot an enemy ship or surfaced submarine, it would have to resist engaging because the priority was to report the vessel’s course and position. It was some time before seaplanes on North Sea patrol were equipped with wireless, able like their dry-land equivalents spotting for the artillery in France to tap out messages on a Morse key. The RNAS had developed the Sterling Spark transmitter, also widely used by the RFC, but it only became at all common in 1917. It was even longer before aircraft carried a receiver as well as a transmitter, enabling the sender to know whether his message had even got through successfully. All in all, the demands on a naval seaplane observer were prodigious. He had to navigate for hours on end across a featureless expanse solely by means of a chart, a compass, and dead reckoning, at any time expected to be able to give an accurate ‘fix’ of his position. (German pilots coined their own somewhat scornful word for being lost, verfranzt, which derived from their generic name for observers, Franz.) He had to understand his wireless set thoroughly as well as be fluent in Morse code. He needed to be a practised machine-gunner and also able to aim and drop any small under-wing bombs the aircraft was carrying. And finally, if forced down he would need to be a good practical seaman to increase his chances of survival.

  In the first two years of the war most British and German naval patrol aircraft were sent out singly and without wireless. If they failed to return by dark they were generally given up for lost. Once wireless sets were installed they might at least get off a distress call. However, even assuming a vessel was near enough to receive the call and search for them, rescue was by no means guaranteed, especially at night. The observer’s compartment carried a signal pistol and flare cartridges, but these were in limited supply. Besides, anyone who has travelled by boat on a moonless night will know the extreme difficulty of judging the distance of any light. Spotting an object as small as a Short or Rumpler floatplane bobbing on the sea in daylight would be hard enough, but infinitely harder at night and well-nigh impossible in rough or foggy conditions.

  It is worth briefly mentioning the seaplane that travelled furthest in the First World War. This was a two-seater Friedrichshafen FF.33 that accompanied the German ship SMS Wolf and was predictably nicknamed Wölfchen or cub. The Wolf was a classic ‘Q’ ship. It was slow, with a fake funnel, and looked every inch an innocent merchantman. In fact it was quite heavily armed with guns and four torpedo tubes and also carried 460 mines. Wolf sailed from Kiel on 30th November 1916, returning on 24th February 1918. In just under fifteen months Wolf and the Wölfchen visited the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the South Seas. The seaplane would fly ahead and scout for likely victims, then drop a message in English threatening that the ship would be bombed unless it kept wireless silence and steamed to meet the Wolf. From choice such victims would be other merchant vessels carrying valuable cargoes that were then offloaded into the Wolf’s capacious holds. By then the British naval blockade of German ports was resulting in acute shortages of vital supplies such as rubber, brass, copper, zinc, molybdenum and even cocoa, and after a long intrepid voyage the Wolf’s victims enabled it to return to Kiel with considerable stocks of such things. It also had on board 467 prisoners of war, having sunk 37 ships around the world totalling 110,000 tons and mined harbours from Colombo to Australia. In that time the faithful Wölfchen had been dismantled and rebuilt several times, meanwhile demonstrating how valuable a seaplane could be when tactically deployed in war. It was an astonishing voyage – in fact, the longest by any warship in the First World War – and earned the Blue Max for its skipper, Commander Nerger.

  As the Wölfchen so brilliantly demonstrated, the seaplanes of both sides could to some extent track shipping as well as monitoring troop and other movements in ports, but they were ill-equipped to give much useful notice of attacks by air. Naval stations on Britain’s east coast did indeed keep a sharp watch and, if they spotted German airships or bombers heading towards the British coast, RNAS aircraft would be sent up to investigate. However, by the time enemy aircraft had reached the coast it was generally too late to do much about a raid on London – even if hastily scrambled scouts could have found them in time. Incredibly, d
espite two years of Zeppelin raids and mounting public outcry, as late as the summer of 1917 there was still no comprehensive plan for the systematic defence of the capital and the warning and protection of its citizens. Neither was there any guaranteed co-operation between the RNAS and the RFC, thanks to inter-service disdain.

  Stuart Wortley gives a plausible description of what he found when he was posted back from France to Home Defence duties in July 1917. At that time the only competent aircraft available for the defence of London were several squadrons of the Bristol F.2A, the Bristol Fighter or ‘Brisfit’. This was an excellent combat machine, structurally strong and manoeuvrable, but dogged by engine problems. These were almost entirely the result of the chaos in planning and procurement that resulted from the War Office and the Admiralty each going its own way. The designated engine for the Brisfit was the Rolls-Royce Falcon III, but this was in very short supply because Rolls-Royce had failed to keep up with demand. Bristol was forced to resort to a lower-powered Hispano-Suiza engine, which crucially took the edge off the Brisfit’s performance while desperate efforts were made to uprate the French-built motor. Meanwhile the War Office had on a whim ordered 3,000 units of Sunbeam’s new Arab engine, despite the company warning them that not only was the design untested but the novel casting techniques required for its aluminium parts were equally untried. This ill-conceived order tied up the production capacity of two large factories at a critical juncture and, just as the company had feared, the castings proved too weak. Nevertheless a stubborn attempt was made to fit Brisfits with Arabs, which were a complete failure. Bristol’s final despairing choice of Siddeley’s Puma engine proved no better. Most Brisfits wound up with the Hispano-Suiza once it had had the bugs removed and the horsepower increased. The aircraft deployed for Home Defence in 1917 were those stationed around the capital in ‘advanced training’ squadrons, but by no means all were reliably powered. Advanced or not, these were still training squadrons rather than dedicated units of machines in peak condition manned by experienced pilots; but even the increasingly pressured Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was having a hard time prising such men away from the RFC in France to serve at home.

  Wortley’s own unit was No. 35 Training Squadron based at Northolt. This had six Brisfits whose condition, since they were used and abused by trainees, was not always good and it was rare for more than two to be airworthy at the same time. No doubt this was also true for the other Home Defence stations. On one morning of high winds the klaxon sounded and Wortley and his pilot were scrambled to patrol for two hours between Greenwich and Chingford at 17,000 feet. In the excitement Wortley had forgotten to put on his heavy flying jacket and all he had on over his ordinary clothes was a mackintosh. He steadily froze as they flew up and down London’s north-east flank for ninety minutes without seeing a single other aircraft, friend or foe. Then, just as they were turning for home to thaw out, Wortley spotted a formation of Gothas over Harwich heading for the capital. It must have been a bad moment. There they were, a lone Bristol Fighter facing an oncoming cloud of the big twin-engined German bombers. The temptation must have been great simply to pretend they had seen nothing and turn for home.

  The bombers droned on, unmoved by the white puffs of anti-aircraft shells bursting harmlessly well above and below them. Wortley noticed that a couple of the Gothas were straggling slightly behind the rest and his pilot Douglas Hill decided to attack them. There was nothing they could do about the rest. Hill made the combat-approved manoeuvre of diving behind and pulling up under the tail of one of them in its blind spot before opening fire. After half a dozen rounds his gun jammed. Meanwhile Wortley, who was not wearing a safety belt, had trained his own gun on the Gotha’s companion off to the right and likewise opened fire, only to have his gun jam as well after a few shots.

  I was about to try to clear the stoppage when a violent lurch jerked me off my feet. For a fraction of a second I was suspended in mid-air, and it was only by desperately clutching at the gun-mounting that I was able to save myself from falling overboard and to haul myself back into my seat. Douglas Hill had dived steeply away in order to try to clear his gun. But it was the Constantinesco gear that was at fault. It had not been properly replenished with oil, so there was not enough pressure in the tube to fire the trigger. In a training squadron it is nobody’s job in particular to attend to these details. Consequently they remain neglected…195

  They abandoned the fight and landed at Eastchurch, which turned out to be just as well because a sergeant-rigger there found the main spar of their lower left-hand wing had been shot nearly through. Had they taken off again the wing would almost certainly have collapsed, killing them both. What neither of them had known but had just learned the hard way was that Gothas were armed with a gun to defend their ‘blind spot’, shooting down and backwards from a port underneath the fuselage.

  The incident that had probably led to Wortley’s squadron’s recall from France was the daylight raid a month earlier when on 13th June a fleet of Gotha bombers had bombed Bermondsey and Poplar. A single 50 kg bomb hit Upper North Street School in the East India Dock Road, killing eighteen children and severely injuring another thirty. Between them that day the Gothas spent a total of an hour and a half over south-east England, killing 162 and injuring 432. Brisfits from 35 and 39 Training Squadrons harried them, but with little effect. Before the children’s funeral at All Saints, Poplar on 20th June a long procession of horse-drawn hearses each carrying a little coffin and heaped with flowers was watched by massed crowds on the pavements. The occasion became a focus for public anger and led to an onslaught from the press demanding proper warnings of air raids and calling for reprisals on German towns and cities. Noel Pemberton Billing MP, whose book Air War: How to Wage It had been published the previous year and laid out a virtual blueprint for home defence against air attacks, gave a speech in the House of Commons. It was a characteristic PB harangue that began along ‘What did I tell you?’ lines and went on with such vehemence directed against the government for their laxity and bungling that he was eventually expelled from the chamber.

  Hurried War Cabinet meetings decided that squadrons of fighters must be recalled from France and reprisal raids undertaken. When these conclusions were presented to Trenchard and Haig in France Trenchard refused to sacrifice any of his aircraft merely to defend London. His squadrons were for offensive use only. He was also against reprisal raids, saying that ‘reprisals on open towns are repugnant to British ideas’, while admitting ‘we may be forced to adopt them’. He then showed that he, too, understood the implications of Clausewitz by adding ‘It would be worse than useless to do so, however, unless we are determined that, once adopted, they will be carried through to the end.’ General Haig was similarly against retaliatory raids because he could see it all escalating out of hand. This of course is the nature of all-out war but he, like most Britons, was still reluctant to face the implications. Above all, Trenchard and Haig were against reassigning any aircraft to defend Britain at this moment because they were planning a major ground offensive for July and needed every last machine in France. After furious Cabinet sessions their hand was eventually forced to the extent that, with extreme reluctance, they released 56 Squadron (Cecil Lewis’s) to be posted to Bekesbourne in Kent, with 66 Squadron to go to Calais to patrol the Channel approaches, but only on condition that both squadrons were back in France in time for the July offensive.

  In the meantime London’s East Enders finally lost patience. This was mid-1917; they had effectively been left unprotected for well over two years. They took the law into their own hands and carried out reprisals of their own against people and shops with Germanic names, looting and smashing. There was spreading xenophobia to the extent that practically anyone with a foreign name or accent was unsafe and sometimes police and even soldiers refused to intervene as people were beaten up and their premises ransacked. At first light on 7th July 56 Squadron left Bekesbourne to fly back to France as promised. They had not fired a singl
e shot at a German machine all the time they had been in England even though a flight of Gothas had carried out at least one major raid while they were stationed in Kent. Given how good German intelligence was by now, it seems likely it was no accident that another daylight Gotha raid was launched against London on the very morning 56 Squadron left. By now a London Warning Centre was in operation and a Royal Navy lightship sighted the incoming bombers and told the Admiralty, which then alerted the RNAS at Chatham. Their fighters joined with some eighty others scrambled from the advanced training squadrons in the London area. Anti-aircraft batteries also sent up a barrage of shells to meet the Gothas. It is a measure of how new aviation still was, and how exciting any aircraft seemed, that far from taking cover Londoners would come out of their houses to watch daylight raids despite the lethal hail of shrapnel from the ack-ack guns that killed and injured many on the ground. Small boys would scurry through the streets looking for the most sought-after trophies of all, the artillery shells’ brass nose-caps and copper driving bands. On this occasion some distinguished witnesses observed the twenty-five bombers as they flew across the capital, ‘packed together like a flight of rooks’: