Among the spectators were members of the Air Board, watching from the balconies of the Hotel Cecil [their headquarters], who were probably less excited than humiliated by this latest demonstration of German daring and British aerial impotence. The Times published a breathless report on the raid the next day. ‘As a spectacle, the raid was the most thrilling that London has seen since the air attacks began. Every phase could be followed from points many miles away without the aid of glasses, and hundreds of thousands of people watched the approach of the squadron, the dropping of the bombs, the shelling of the German aeroplanes and the eventual retreat.’196
The Gothas dropped their bombs right across London causing many casualties. There were the familiar scenes of children with their legs blown off, lumps of hair and gristle plastered to brick walls, the screams of a disembowelled drayhorse that was messily put down with a fireman’s axe. One of 63 Squadron’s pilots, Lieutenant W.G. Salmon, was shot in the air, attempted an emergency landing at Joyce Green airfield near Dartford, but died in the crash. Several arrests were made among sightseers who rushed forward and looted his body and the wreckage of his aircraft for souvenirs. In the poorer districts of London itself the looting and rioting increased as news of the casualties spread. One of the witnesses was Sylvia, the Suffragist daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst. She described how the air was
filled by the babble of voices and the noise of knocking and splintering wood. Men were lowering a piano through the window… A woman and her children raced off with an easy chair, rushing it along on its castors before them. ‘I shall sit, and sit, and sit on this chair all day,’ the mother yelled. ‘I never had an armchair to sit in before.’ ‘Bread! Bread! Bread!’ The shrieks rang out. Women and children rushed by, their arms and aprons laden with loaves. Looting continued with impunity for days… men unknown in the district, with hatchets on their shoulders, marched through Bethnal Green, Green Street and Roman Road to the very end. Wherever a shop had a German name over it, they stopped and hacked down the shutters and broke the glass. Then crowds of children rushed in and looted. When darkness fell and the police made no sign, men and women joined in the sack. Only when adjoining English shops began to be looted did the police stir themselves to intervene.197
Lloyd George later toured the bombed areas and his report to the War Cabinet led to two more squadrons being withdrawn from France against the wishes of Trenchard and Haig, whose Flanders offensive was now put back to 31st July. 46 Squadron, which flew Sopwith Pups, returned in a hurry to England to be based at Sutton’s Farm in Essex.
Once again, German intelligence must have been well informed because five days later, on 22nd July, the so-called ‘England Squadron’ of Gotha bombers ignored London and instead attacked Harwich and Felixstowe at breakfast time, scoring a direct hit on an army barracks that killed eleven men. This time Home Defence got more than 120 aircraft into the air though only one managed to fire a shot. A single Gotha out of twenty-one was shot down, but that was by two Dunkirk-based Brisfits as it crossed the Belgian coast afterwards, homeward bound. The real damage done to the RFC and RNAS fighters must have been to morale as a result of being peppered by their own anti-aircraft batteries. These had merrily shelled nine British aircraft over the Thames Estuary that morning, damaging several, and they were still firing away at 9.45 a.m., by which time the twenty remaining Gothas were even then landing back at their bases on the outskirts of Ghent. Being ‘archied’ by their own guns must have been enraging for the British defenders, who had survived the madhouse of Flanders only to find the war not one whit saner in their own homeland. Only four months earlier Field Marshal Viscount Sir John French, whom Haig had replaced as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force and reassigned as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, issued a bizarre edict. All anti-aircraft batteries except those along the coast were forbidden to fire. ‘No aeroplanes or seaplanes, even if recognized as hostile, will be fired at either by day or night.’198 That way the batteries’ personnel could be sent off to France where they were more urgently needed. This order was only rescinded in early June. Presumably the bemused returning gunners then decided to play it safe and fire at absolutely any aircraft they spotted.
Another equally lunatic measure was that restricting wireless communications with the defending aircraft. Sir David Henderson, the Director-General of Military Aeronautics, had been constantly urging that wireless receivers should be installed in Home Defence aircraft so they could be directed from the ground. By 1917 scout aircraft were generally powerful enough for the small additional weight to be easily manageable, and it seemed like one of those ideas that could only be sensible. Nevertheless it was promptly scuppered by the Admiralty, who protested that the transmissions might interfere with the Fleet’s own communications. Eventually two-way wireless equipment was installed in four aircraft whose pilots could communicate with operations centres in the Hotel Cecil and Wormwood Scrubs. The rest of the Home Defence squadrons had to rely on AA batteries laying out broad strips of white cloth on the ground in the form of arrows pointing towards any enemy aircraft they spotted. Thus was Great Britain prepared to defend itself and its citizens.
In desperation the War Cabinet at last appointed the energetic old Boer leader, Lieutenant-General Jan Christiaan Smuts, as Home Defence supremo, a task he undertook with considerable efficiency. Fresh from his campaigns in Africa and untainted by the old inter-service prejudices that were bedevilling so much of the air war effort, he at once ordered RFC and RNAS squadrons to work together under a unified command. Secondly, he called for a protective ring of anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights around London, three new squadrons of fighters plus a reserve force on permanent detachment, and a new air raid warning system for the capital. This called for a command centre in County Hall able to contact any of eighty fire stations all over London so they could sound warning of an impending raid. Such long overdue measures were just as well, since the end of September 1917 marked the introduction of Germany’s R.VI Zeppelin-Staaken bombers. These were the biggest aircraft of the war: four-engined giants with a wingspan of 138 feet. To see one of those droning over London must have fulfilled anybody’s worst fears that H. G. Wells’s nightmarish visions in The War in the Air were about to come true.
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By now it was clearer to everyone what Clausewitzian ideas of total war entailed. Both sides were sustaining civilian casualties. Both sides were experiencing periodic shortages of food and fuel, although without a large empire on which to rely Germany – now embattled on several fronts – was undoubtedly suffering more. Its war machine was beginning to feel the pinch with ever-acuter shortages of vital materials like rubber and copper. In fact, the time was not far off when German coins would become worth more for the metal they were made of than their monetary value.
Maybe after all Clausewitz had simply produced a highly sophisticated version of the age-old adage that anything is fair in love and war. Even so, this maxim could still backfire badly, as it did on the Germans over the sinking of the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania and the executions of two British citizens, the nurse Edith Cavell and the merchant seaman Captain Charles Fryatt. It may be that Clausewitz or the German high command did not pay enough attention to some of the negative effects of total war that might sometimes hand a propaganda and morale advantage to an enemy. In May 1915 the Lusitania was torpedoed off Ireland by a U-boat while in-bound to Liverpool from New York, killing 1,198, many of them Americans. Although the Kriegsmarine had previously declared the waters around the British Isles as a war zone, and the German Embassy in New York had published a warning in New York newspapers urging passengers not to travel on the ship, the sinking was a disaster for Germany as well as for the victims because it materially increased the chances of bringing the United States into the war – as it proved two years later. There is a conspiracy theory that the British deliberately used the Lusitania as a ‘tethered goat’ in order to lure America into the war. The Germans claimed the ship was a le
gitimate naval target because it was carrying munitions. This was vehemently denied at the time as a typical German lie, although divers have recently found upwards of four million rounds of .303 rifle and machine-gun ammunition in the wreck. However the various truths intersect, and once the mourning and bluster had subsided, the overall result was a major propaganda coup for the Allies.
As for Edith Cavell, there is no question that she was guilty as charged, having abused her presumed neutrality as a nurse to help over 200 Allied soldiers escape from Germany; but shooting her was likewise a dreadful mistake. It was a gift to propagandists and proof of German ‘frightfulness’. And if Captain Fryatt’s name is today much less familiar than that of Edith Cavell, at the time his execution caused equal outrage although his case was even more equivocal, morally speaking. He was not a naval man but simply the civilian captain of a merchant vessel. From early 1915 he had run the gauntlet of U-boat attacks in the English Channel, finally attempting to ram U-33 which had surfaced to torpedo him. He might not have been in uniform but he was acting in compliance with an order from Winston Churchill, by then First Lord of the Admiralty. This included a clause further stating that any German crews captured by a merchantman could legitimately be shot if that was more convenient than taking them prisoner, and another declaring that any white flag of surrender was to be ignored.
The attempted ramming took place in March 1915 but it was not until June 1916 that Fryatt and his vessel were finally captured by German destroyers and escorted to Bruges. He was court-martialled as a guerrilla fighter for trying to sink U-33 and tried in the Town Hall in July, sentenced to death (a sentence personally confirmed by the Kaiser) and shot on the 27th. Then-Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s statement to the House of Commons four days later unequivocally called this ‘murder’, describing it as an ‘atrocious crime against the laws of nations and the usages of war’, which conveniently ignored the fact that under Churchill’s draconian rules of engagement the wretched Fryatt could have been arrested back in Britain had he not tried to ram the U-boat. Given that he was also permitted to shoot any prisoners he took and ignore any white flag – that most immemorial of all ‘usages of war’ – his role could reasonably be described as very far from that of an ordinary merchant skipper. Great international condemnation followed his death, including an impassioned article in The New York Times. However, so insistent were the Germans that the sentence was justified that they reviewed it after the war was over and reconfirmed its legitimacy in 1919. Poor Charles Fryatt could never have guessed his own death’s propaganda value to the Allies, nor that a century later London’s commuters would still be passing his memorial tablet daily in Liverpool Street Station.
After the Zeppelin and Gotha raids there was never any serious doubt that the British would eventually carry out retaliatory raids on German cities with a clear conscience. However, Trenchard’s plan had always been to achieve air superiority before bombing industrial targets and Germany’s infrastructure. Superiority in terms of sheer numbers of Allied fighters was not achieved until the spring of 1918, at which point the Independent Air Force was formed under Trenchard’s command. Designed expressly for the purpose of bombing German targets from eastern France by night and day, the IAF eventually comprised British, French, Italian and US units. Many of Handley Page’s big twin-engined O/400 bombers were deployed, but the majority of the RFC’s bombers were much smaller single-engined aircraft such as D.H.4s.
Long-range raids were carried out on cities like Mainz, Stuttgart, Coblenz, Mannheim, Trier and Metz, as well as on targets such as railways and factories. (It was on one such sortie that W. E. Johns and his observer were shot down.) The Entente’s air forces might theoretically have been in the ascendancy but it was still an extremely hazardous enterprise for the aircrews, with round trips of up to 200 miles and ‘archie’ defences and German fighters still highly active and competent. Post-raid aerial photos showed many of the targets badly damaged; less visible was the inevitable toll of limbless children and disembowelled horses. Nor did the photos reveal the tally of roast or smashed airmen, nor those captured to spend long months in ever-worsening conditions in prison camps as Germany’s food shortages grew more acute.
An American writer and columnist, Irvin S. Cobb, wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post in 1918 describing a visit he had made in the spring of that year to Night Bombing Squadron No. 100. This was now an IAF outfit flying F.E.2bs and based at Ochey, near Nancy: far enough south and east in France to be within reach of some important German targets. One day a biplane landed near him and out of it climbed two very young British aviators. When Cobb asked what they were doing, the following conversation ensued:
‘Well, you see, we were a bit thirsty – Bert and I – and we heard you had very good beer at the French Officers’ Club here. So we just ran over for half an hour or so to get a drop of drink and then toddle along back again. Not a bad idea, what?’ The speaker wore the twin crowns of a captain on the shoulder straps of his overcoat. His age I should have put at twenty-one and his complexion was that of a very new, very healthy cherub. ‘Anything happening at the Squadron since I was over that way?’ I enquired. ‘Quiet enough to be a bore – weather hasn’t suited for our sort these last few evenings,’ stated the taller boy. ‘We got fed up on doin’ nothing at all, so night before last a squad started across the border to give Fritzie a taste of life. But just after we started the Squadron Commander decided the weather was too thickish and he signed us back – all but the Young-un here, who claims he didn’t see the flare and kept on goin’ all by his little self.’ ‘It seemed a rotten shame, really it did, to waste the whole evenin’.’ This was the Young-un, he of the pink cheeks, speaking. ‘So I just jogged across the jolly old Rhine until I came to a town, and I dropped my pills there and came back. Nice quiet trip it was – lonely, rather, and not a bit excitin’.’199
If this suggests Bertie Wooster more than Biggles it is because of the upper-class Edwardian drawl that was already becoming the linguistic hallmark of the newly formed RAF. Out of hunting field jargon, public school cant and aviation slang was created a verbal tradition proper for a gentleman’s breezy relationship with sudden death. This was style: an affectation that was to persist, most famously in the Second World War when cries of ‘Tally ho!’ and languid talk of wizard prangs and pieces of cake became indelibly associated with the Battle of Britain and the boys of Fighter and Bomber Command. Under the pressure of attrition rates far greater than those suffered by airmen in the previous war, this argot then reached its zenith as the studied nonchalance of the dashingly doomed. By then, too, the awful lessons of the nation’s complete vulnerability to bombing raids in the earlier war had been learned, and a well-organised and effective early warning system was at last in place as a vital part of Britain’s home defence.
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Even so, an idea had taken hold that was to dominate strategic – and particularly air force – thinking for decades to come, above all in Britain and the United States. This was that bombing was the way forward, despite evidence from the First World War that for all the localised panic the air raids had at first caused, civilian morale overall had been very little injured by it – had maybe even been strengthened, especially once it could be seen that the air force was putting up a serious defence. Moreover, what appeared from aerial photographs to be grievous damage inflicted on an enemy’s factories and infrastructure often turned out to cause no very great reduction in industrial output.
Yet between the wars the idea that strategic bombing was the key to winning future conflict took hold strongly in various air forces. In 1932, in the wake of Japan’s indiscriminate bombing of Shanghai which killed thousands, the Geneva Disarmament Conference tried vainly to outlaw aerial attacks on vulnerable citizens, Clausewitz or no Clausewitz. Britain’s then-Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, said resignedly that the man in the street had to realise ‘there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed… the bomber
will always get through’.200 And so it was to prove. All the same, the ensuing world war provided no evidence that, with the sole exception of America’s use of nuclear bombs against Japan in 1945, strategic bombing, area bombing or ‘precision’ bombing was ever the critical factor in the war’s outcome. Even massive damage to Germany’s Ruhr industries by the RAF and the USAAF did less to disrupt Hitler’s war machine than did an increasing lack of raw materials from outside Germany. Neither did the setting on fire of entire cities bring about a mass uprising of citizens willing to sue for peace. Yet the idea of bombing’s supremacy persisted in the military mind, and after the Second World War it became enshrined as an eternal truth that has to some extent dominated strategic thinking ever since, above all in the United States. Aerial bombing by drones in the Middle East has yielded its daily ‘collateral damage’ of limbless children and disembowelled donkeys and nothing remotely approaching a victory has yet been achieved, and nor can it be. Quite the reverse. As the first air raids a hundred years ago demonstrated, attacks that leave dismembered children strewn among rubble are more likely to strengthen a people’s resolve than to weaken it.
Yet that first air war did establish one military principle that has endured unchallenged: that of the vital importance of air superiority in general. By the end of 1918, with sheer weight of numbers, the Entente had at last achieved aerial dominance over the battlefields of Europe. The critical advantage this conferred was noted by all sides and was to be confirmed many times in the Second World War as, indeed, ever since. As one senior RAF officer recently remarked, ‘The Gulf War of 1991 was a sharp reminder of what can happen to even a large and well-equipped army [i.e. Saddam Hussein’s retreating from Kuwait] when caught in open ground by an opponent enjoying total air supremacy.’201 That was decisive; whereas the shattering bombardment of ‘Shock and Awe’ in the second Gulf War of 2003 was not. Baghdad fell, but it brought the Coalition forces no overall victory in the war. Back in 1918 a few wise heads on all sides might have predicted that.
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