The Secret Life of Fighter Command

by Sinclair McKay

  Real air-power innovation was coming from the Italians; in 1911, when declaring hostilities against the Ottoman Empire, they deployed a handful of aeroplanes (with a grand total of thirty-one qualified pilots) to carry out operations in north Africa. In November of that year came the first ever instance of aerial bombing. Pilot Lieutenant Gavotti dropped grenades from his cockpit upon the settlements of Taigura and Ain Zura. It was not too long before the explosives were being refined elsewhere; and it was the Bulgarians, also in an extended skirmish with the Ottomans, who bombed the town of Adrianople. The editor of The Aeroplane magazine was the first to declare in a headline: ‘Destroyed By Fire Bombing’.

  Despite all this, back in Britain, Colonel J.E. Edmonds pooh-poohed aerial warfare as a ‘German bogey’ and claimed that in Africa, Italian bombs had fallen so slowly that ‘Arabs’ and ‘Turks’ had ample time simply to step out of their way. But the Italians – the more cosmopolitan of whom were at that time in the grip of the Futurist Movement, with its emphasis on the thrilling nihilism of the new technology – saw it differently. As Michael Paris wrote: ‘The success of the air detachment resulted in a wave of patriotic air-mindedness and the north African pilots became national heroes, creating an image of the dashing aviator and the mystique of the air service which was not dispelled until the poor performance of the Italian Air Force in the Second World War.’2

  In 1912, Major Frederick Sykes was out in Italy, closely observing and reporting back on the evolution of flying tactics. Sykes was to become a key figure in the months and years to follow. He also helped design the emblem that has lasted to this day: the brevet, or pilot’s wings, which is awarded to fully trained pilots. The original badge involved a representation of the wings of a swift, picked out in white silk, a crown on the top. It was given royal approval in February 1913. You still occasionally hear the expression ‘earned his wings’.

  In 1912, one man who signed up for flying lessons at Brooklands in Hampshire was the young Winston Churchill. He was fearless about it; but that is not the same thing as having a talent for it. Churchill grew so addicted to the adrenaline thrust that came with leaving the ground at speed that at one point, he was going up ten times a day. In 1913, his instructor, Captain Gilbert Wildman Lushington, was killed in a separate plane accident; this and the disappearance of yet another pilot over the Channel so unnerved Mrs Churchill – Clementine – that her husband was persuaded to drop the lessons, at least temporarily.

  At around the same time, an experienced, rather stolid military man also signed up for lessons at Brooklands. Hugh Dowding’s desire to fly was nothing to do with ambition or passion; it was, according to his biographer Basil Collier, a ‘desire to gain knowledge likely to be useful to him as a soldier’.3 Dowding longed to return to India, where he had been a lieutenant with the Mountain Artillery in Rawalpindi, relishing the exercises and adventures that he had found in remote jungles and on mountains. But the gaining of his wings was to change the course of his life permanently.

  The outbreak of the First World War brought a wider variety of unanticipated mortal danger for freshly trained aviators, from the precision of anti-aircraft guns to the phenomenon of planes ‘icing up’ high in the winter skies. Moreover, in the early stages of the conflict, aerial combat regularly lacked a specific focus or aim, while pilots were required to fly in highly unsuitable wet, misty or rainy conditions. In all the noise made by enthusiastic newspapers, the proximity of death was consistently glossed over. There was a point in the First World War when the average life expectancy of a newly qualified pilot was barely weeks once the man had earned his wings. This was an era before flyers were equipped with parachutes. If a propeller stuck, or if the enemy’s bullets had hit home and the plane went into a stomach-quivering drop, the only hope was that a steep dive would produce enough wind resistance on the propeller to start it revolving again. If not, then either the body was crushed beyond recognition, or was sometimes bisected by impact, or the pilot endured the horror of being burnt alive. Yet there was still a romanticism about flying that was completely absent from the despair in the trenches below.

  Some of the work – especially that involving attacks – had an element of the experimental about it but was nonetheless vital: for instance, pre-emptive bombing strikes on Zeppelin sheds in northern Germany, which were cheered on by Churchill.

  The man appointed in 1915 to take command of the Royal Flying Corps – Hugh Trenchard – shared Churchill’s passionate belief that an air force should go on the attack with bombing raids. Trenchard had little faith in the idea that aircraft could be used protectively. ‘The aeroplane,’ he said, ‘is not a defence against the aeroplane.’ A glowering and often spectacularly maladroit figure socially, who came from a bankrupt and impoverished family at a time when one needed money to rise to the higher levels of military life, Trenchard nonetheless quickly won loyalty among his associates. In fact, he had had the most unquantifiable military career. As a young man in serving in South Africa, he acquired a nickname: the Camel. This was because, like a camel, he did not drink and neither did he ever seem to speak. Such social graces seemed beyond him.

  But Trenchard was very good at sports such as polo – notably besting Winston Churchill on one occasion – and this won him a retinue of admirers. He was also, according to his biographer, ‘impatient of all orders but his own’ (something of a recurring leitmotif in many airmen). Several years later, he was in charge. But he and his pilots were feeling their way in the dark.

  A huge test for the Royal Flying Corps–and a foreshadowing of the crucial defensive actions of the Battle of Britain – came in 1915 when the Germans started launching their dirigibles across the North Sea to bomb the British mainland; when the attacks began, it initially seemed as if there was no way to stop them. On 19 January 1915, there was a raid on the blameless seaside town of Great Yarmouth, and bombs were dropped near Sandringham (the royal family had reportedly been moved to London) and the town of Sheringham. Obviously the deaths and injuries that resulted were inflicted upon civilians. The outrage stoked by this and similar raids was vast.

  Count Zeppelin himself, interviewed by an American newspaper in February 1915, was the image of insouciance. ‘War in the air is bound to become a vital factor in the strife between nations,’ he said. When asked about the killing of civilians, he responded: ‘No one regrets that more than I do.’ Those Zeppelin crews subsequently returned to kill many more women and children, regretfully or not.

  But eventually a defensive system was established combining very powerful new searchlights, set to cross beams and hold the Zeppelin in their light ‘like scissors’; anti-aircraft guns; and, most importantly, fighter pilots sent up to counter the Zeppelins in the air. They faced a range of difficulties. The first was altitude: in mechanical terms, their aircraft could easily reach 10,000 feet – but in a plane with an open cockpit, on an autumn or winter evening, the temperature would be bitingly low. Although the fur-lined leather jacket was already in place, as were the gloves, the standard clothing of the pilot that we associate with Fighter Command and the Second World War was still evolving in 1915. Goggles were widely disliked at first because they restricted the all-important field of vision. But all pilots eventually acceded to them – with no windscreen to speak of, to fly at speeds of 128 to 160 kilometres per hour (80 to 100 miles per hour) without them was tricky.

  The silk scarves that later became such an important leitmotif were introduced as the best means – and material – for wiping dirt and oil from the goggles in mid-flight. Meanwhile, oxygen equipment was primitive or non-existent. For many of us, the idea of being 15,000 feet above the ground – that is, over ten times the height of The Shard tower in London – in an apparently fragile and open construction of wood and metal would be intolerable. The men’s courage was certainly understood and celebrated, though; a twenty-year-old pilot called James McCudden became nationally famous, his missions over the battlefields of France celebrated especially in t
he pages of the Daily Mail. This ace also flew defensive missions over London (and bitterly, his death in 1918 was caused not by his return to the Front or enemy fire, but by an engine fault).

  And the prototype Fighter Command, fighting a prototype London Blitz, did have some startling success. Late one night in the autumn of 1916, Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson, stationed at Hornchurch, was ordered to go in pursuit of an airship that was menacing northeast London. Fighting enemy bullets, black fog and the danger of immolation, he brought the monster down in a blinding ball of orange.

  His superiors knew that it would make for excellent newspaper copy. Here is how the normally grave Manchester Guardian described the young hero: ‘A glimpse of him revealed the sharp firm cut features of a very intrepid young man. He did not carry a superfluous ounce of flesh, and his features seemed hewn from granite.’ Moreover, when Robinson showed his face in public in the following days, he was mobbed by ecstatic crowds, and the police had to hurry him away in cars. The cult of Fighter Command’s pilots had its antecedent here.

  Indeed, the wider exploits of the Royal Flying Corps – taking on the likes of the diabolically skilled Baron von Richthofen, also known as the Red Baron – were eagerly taken up by the popular press. This is where the stories in boys’ papers and real life became quite deliberately entangled. It has been suggested that in an era when war had become hideously industrialised, reducing whole countries to poisoned wildernesses, the idea of fighting above, in the free air, pilot to pilot, had an irresistible purity. It almost seemed organic; a natural form of conflict, as opposed to the mechanical horrors taking place on earth. These early air battles were somehow not faceless; they could instead be dramatised in newspapers and boys’ journals with real passion, and indeed a sliver of compassion, on both sides.

  The element of kinetic poetry in this new world of flight was captured by a young German pilot a few years later, when he became one of the country’s leading film directors. F.W. Murnau, who had first served in the trenches, joined the Luftstreitkrafte, the German First World War air force, later in the war and the experience was clearly echoed in his later productions, both in the swooping fluidity of his camera-work and in specific set-pieces. In 1926’s Faust, there is a famous scene in which Mephistopheles takes the eponymous alchemist for a ride in the sky: they glide through foggy air, over vast mountain peaks, over dark forests, over twinkling waterfalls and rivers. During that first global conflict, the new young pilots must occasionally have forgotten that they were involved in war at all.

  Another striking film features stark monochrome documentary footage of young Luftstreitkrafte pilots. We see one young man coming in to land, removing goggles, then face-wrappings, then earplugs. He turns to the silent camera and smiles quizzically. This young German was a fighter ace responsible for at least twenty-two downed planes. In the footage, he is seen to be wearing a distinctive cross: the honour known as ‘The Blue Max’. The shrewd-looking young man was Hermann Goering. He had originally joined the army but had been persuaded by a friend to take up flying. The man who was to become Hitler’s deputy in the 1930s was quite at home within this pioneering new flying force; among the Luftsreitkrafte’s recruits were many German aristocrats, such as Walter von Bulow-Bothkamp. Goering himself, though nothing so exalted, was nonetheless the son of a career diplomat and acutely aware of the smarter circles. It is fascinating now to look into the eyes of this First World War hero, this fighter ace, and to imagine how he transformed over the ensuing years.

  Among the notable pilots on the British side, William Sholto Douglas – who was later to head Fighter Command – had himself flown in two-seater Sopwiths in France; it was here he gained experience of ground-strafing, shooting from the air at targets on the ground. Meanwhile, Hugh Dowding initially found himself posted to France with No. 6 Squadron. According to Collier, in the opening stages of the war, encounters between enemy pilots – even when firing upon each other with Mauser pistols – were random and even exploratory. On one occasion, Dowding wrote a letter to his sister that made him sound rather younger than thirty-two years of age: ‘I have had plenty of excitement since I have been out. 2 smashes without getting hurt. Peppered by “Archibald” [an anti-aircraft gun] without getting hit, 2 bullets through the plane one day and today a scrap with a German biplane … Nobody seems to get hurt; the nearest was one fellow who got a bullet flattened against his bullet-proof seat.’4

  In 1917, as the war below crushed so many hundreds of thousands of corpses into the mud, early cinemas showed With the Royal Flying Corps, a carefully timed propaganda epic; again, as with the pilots of Fighter Command in the Second World War, the dashing images helped cement the idea of a certain cheerful insouciance in the face of constant danger. There were the aces, whose exploits were to be pored over by schoolboys across the land: James McCudden, Mick Mannock, Albert Ball, and their elegant arch-nemesis, von Richthofen. At this time, the names of aircraft manufacturers began to take on a patina of the same glamour: de Havilland, Sopwith, Fairey, Short Brothers.

  Meanwhile, one particular German advance became a byword in its own right: the Fokker. This new breed of plane had the lethal innovation of a machine gun that was precisely synchronised with the craft’s propeller, enabling a huge increase in both firepower and accuracy. The British answer was the DH2 – a plane which featured a forward-firing Lewis gun.

  The Royal Flying Corps did not only operate in the damp skies of northern Europe; squadrons were shipped out to Egypt too. From there, missions were carried out in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia. The aeroplane was changing the geography of Empire, and of the Earth. Royal Flying Corps pilots were making sorties over the fringes of Russia and taking their planes up above the northwest frontier of India. It was becoming obvious to many that control over a nation’s skies would be the key to any future conflict.

  In 1917 a hugely influential report from General J.C. Smuts gave the following assessment of how aeroplanes might change the world:

  As far as can at present be foreseen, there is absolutely no limit to the scale of its future independent war use. And the day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.5

  Smuts recommended that there should be a dedicated Air Ministry. Not too long afterwards, such a ministry was established, with Flying Corps enthusiast Lord Rothermere as its first Secretary of State. In April 1918, the separate wings of the Royal Flying Corps, naval and military, were gently detached. It became its own independent creature: the Royal Air Force.

  Many of the flying names that would go on to find illustrious resonance in the decades to come had gathered for the First World War; in December 1916, New Zealander Keith Park, having fought at the Somme, was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. Much of the knowledge and skill he acquired in matters such as formation flying was picked up on the hoof; the encounters with enemy aircraft were equally improvised affairs, a very long way from the meticulous planning that Park would later put in at Bentley Priory.

  The philosophy of what was to become Fighter Command was formed towards the end of the First World War, as the defensive strategy coalesced. By 1918, this was an air force that understood both about bombing and about parrying bombs. The capital’s protective system had been pulled together into a body called the London Air Defence Area. According to John Ferris, even in those early days of flight, there was remarkable sophistication:

  Within one minute, the headquarters at LADA could receive and process reports from thousands of observers, place them before commanders and despatch orders to the aircraft standing ready on the runway. These aircraft were in the air within two and a half to five minutes. By the end of the war, this system was on the technical verge of conducting ground-directed interception of enemy bombers at 20,000 feet [6,100 metres].6
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br />   In 1914, the Royal Flying Corps had gone into a conflict for the conduct of which it had very little to guide it. By the end of that war, it had grown into an institution with its own fresh-minted traditions and also – thanks to a large injection of money from Lord Cowdray – its own grand gentleman’s club, the RAF Club, in London. There were 188 combat squadrons, 22,647 aircraft and 291,170 officers and men. All these pilots and engineers might have thought that there was some stability in this mighty new fighting force. The inter-war years were to prove quite different.

  After the war, empires dissolved like dreams; the Ottoman caliphate, the Habsburg dynasty. Lines on maps lost all meaning, new lines seeded fresh hatreds. And for those nations that retained their colonies, the air was increasingly the means by which control was exercised as convulsive shocks coursed through Europe and out into the Middle East and north Africa. In Britain, Winston Churchill, now combined War and Air Minister, understood the opportunity and the danger; and he invited Hugh Trenchard to head the new service.

  But there was no guarantee that the RAF would be permitted to retain its independence. The conclusion of the war had brought with it the assumption – amid the slaughter of so many young fighting men – that there would be no further war like it for at least ten years. And on all sides, no one had any money left. The services had to contract. In March 1919, the RAF, barely formed, was slashed. Its 22,000 aircraft and 240,000 personnel were reduced to around 200 planes and 30,000 personnel.