Marked for Death (11 page)

Germany’s position in 1914 was also equivocal in that its army had long since committed itself to the development of airships, a field in which it held unchallenged world supremacy. Seen from the army’s point of view its Zeppelins and Parsevals could easily outperform any contemporary aircraft in terms of endurance, to say nothing of being able to carry a considerable bomb load. To many in the German high command there seemed little point in jumping on the bandwagon of an inferior technology
simply because it was newer. Besides, nobody was expecting the war to last beyond Christmas. The German Air Force thus began the war at a disadvantage, aware that such airmen and machines as it was able to field were not only still prone to all sorts of teething troubles but were undervalued to the point of contemptuous dismissal by much of the Army’s high command.

Well before either Germany or Britain, however, France had understood how useful aircraft could be in artillery spotting, bombing and aerial warfare in general, and had already envisaged arming them. As early as 1910 the brilliant aviation pioneer Gabriel Voisin had bolted an enormous 37 mm naval gun to an improvised mounting in the nacelle of one of his pusher-engined biplanes. It looked, and was, ridiculously unwieldy – a motorised kite with a cannon – and it caused some derision. However, enough influential military men took it seriously for Voisin to persevere with his experiments. In 1913 he gave a demonstration of a Hotchkiss 37 mm gun more flexibly mounted in one of his aircraft, shooting at a bedsheet laid out in a field from an altitude of 1,500 feet. Roughly 70 per cent of the shots were hits, a degree of accuracy that was not lost on the military observers that day, who must have gone home imagining the awful damage a number of similarly armed aircraft might inflict on massed cavalry or infantry. Anyone at the time would have been impressed that Voisin’s aircraft could not only fly with the weight of a substantial cannon and its explosive ammunition but that it could be flown steadily enough to score hits on a small ground target 500 yards away.

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By August 1914 the battle lines were drawn between the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and, later, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire) and the Triple Entente (of France, Britain, and France’s ally Russia). Although according to treaty Italy was pledged to side with Germany, it remained non-combatant until eventually joining the Entente, principally
against Austria-Hungary. Each one of these combatant nations had an air force of sorts, ranging from the best-prepared (France) to the most rudimentary (Turkey).

At first light on 13th August the ragbag assortment of fifty-six flying machines making up the four squadrons of Britain’s entire army air power flew in stages to Amiens. Most were already obsolete. Gallantly unprepared, they afforded an authentically British spectacle. ‘We patched up anything that could stagger off the ground,’ as Arthur Edwards remembered from his apprenticeship at Farnborough as a ‘Trade Lad’ learning how to use a lathe. ‘We sent off a total of about seventy aircraft, some of them hardly capable of flying. Twin-seaters were fitted with rifle-clips and a rifle, and single-seaters supplied with a revolver or a Very pistol.’
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Soon both sides were making observation flights over each other’s territory in two-man machines, the opposing pilots and observers waving cheerily at each other with the comradeship of men conscious of being members of an international winged elite. Indeed, a good few of them could well have known each other from private training and flying clubs scant weeks earlier. This ‘brotherhood of the air’ was, needless to say, not popular among their respective army generals and it was quickly made clear that since observing such things as troop deployments was of vital military significance, every effort should be made to prevent the enemy from carrying out their reconnaissance in the first place, and certainly from flying back with the information. Despite this, and despite the as yet unimagined horrors of the next fifty months, there is ample evidence that a lingering spirit of comradeship amongst airmen on all sides did survive the conflict. Certainly it was widely considered a matter of honour throughout the war to drop message bags and streamers – often at great personal hazard – over opposing airfields to give news of those who had been shot down. Both sides also held funerals with full military honours for their respected adversaries.

Within weeks aircrew had begun taking pot shots at each other with their service-issue pistols and rifles, plus various weird
weapons devised and pressed into service at the whim of the individual, such as (in one case) a black-powder blunderbuss loaded with nails. One German officer later recorded earnest top-level discussions about the etiquette of carrying a cavalry sword in the cockpit. He also remembered nailing a gramophone horn to the stock of his carbine so that, in the event of an aerial duel, he might better give an illusion of being armed with a terrifyingly large-calibre weapon.
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Other combatants were even more inventive. In early 1915 Lieutenant Alexander Kozakov of the Imperial Russian Army Air Service took off in his Morane-Saulnier Type G with a boat anchor attached to a length of rope. Tied to the anchor was a slab of gun cotton. His theory was that he could throw out the anchor while flying above an enemy aircraft, snare it, trigger the gun cotton and blow it to bits. He actually tried this in March with an Albatros he met near the River Vistula but the rope tangled in his own slipstream. Abandoning the idea, Kozakov gave up and rammed the German instead, who duly crashed. By sheer luck the future Russian ace managed to land his own crippled aircraft, but in terms of damage inflicted on an enemy it was something of a Pyrrhic victory.
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At that stage in the war, though, improvisation was the order of the day and at least one British airman saw quite clearly what was required. Louis Strange, who had survived the Hendon crash described in the previous chapter, arrived in France as a young lieutenant. He at once fitted a Lewis machine gun in the observer’s cockpit of his Farman ‘Shorthorn’. This occasioned much scoffing from the rest of his squadron, especially since the extra weight of the weapon and its ammunition limited his aircraft’s ceiling to 3,500 feet, but Strange was soon proved to have the right idea. After astonishing adventures he was to survive the war and eventually he met his German counterpart and sometime opponent, Bruno Loerzer (whom he mistakenly called ‘von Leuzer’ in his memoir). Loerzer recalled an absurd aerial duel he had had with a British machine back in the early months of warfare in 1914:

When the combatants had exhausted all their rifle and revolver ammunition they blazed away with their Very pistols, with which they made very poor shooting. After a while both pilots realized that the only chance of scoring a hit was to get close up, but when they laid their machines alongside, the humour of the situation struck von Leutzer forcibly, so that he roared with laughter at the sight of two observers solemnly loading up and taking deliberate aim, a green light answering a red one. Evidently the observers were also too tickled to shoot straight, for neither got anywhere near his mark.
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In fact, the first aircraft ever to shoot down another was probably the French Voisin that downed a German Aviatik on 5th October 1914. Thereafter there must have been fewer opportunities for opposing crews to be reduced to helpless laughter. With the murderous autumn battles of Mons and the Marne, followed by the winter conflict of Champagne, the war on the ground turned deadly serious and the war in the air had to match it. The pressure for technological improvement was urgent. It was developing into an artillery war, and anti-aircraft guns were driving aircraft ever higher.

At this early stage there was as yet little ‘specialisation’ in any of the air forces. There were no dedicated bombers as such, nor fighters – or ‘scouts’, as the British soon knew them – in service, even though the Royal Aircraft Factory’s F.E.2a of 1913 was intended as a fighting aircraft and the French had planned a bomber in the same year. Scarcely a single machine had yet been designed from scratch for a specific role other than general observation. (Once the war had begun the Imperial Russian Air Force’s gigantic and precocious four-engined ‘Ilya Muromets’, which the aviation genius Igor Sikorsky had designed and built in 1913, was redesignated as a bomber although originally it had been intended – and many times flown – as a luxury passenger aircraft seating sixteen. It even had a lavatory. Just how extraordinarily advanced
this record-breaking aircraft was compared with any other in 1914 can be judged by the fact that it continued in service until 1922.) If anything, most aircraft designers were still aiming for the characteristics best suited to reconnaissance: stability, easy handling, and duration in the air. Things like altitude, top speed and manoeuvrability were not yet reckoned of much importance. Pilots and observers were prepared to be sent aloft for any task they might be ordered to perform, from taking photographs to dropping bombs and
fléchettes
on enemy troops.

Fléchettes
or ‘aeroplane arrows’, which the French had already used in their pre-war Moroccan campaign, were simple steel darts a few inches long equipped with stabilising fins. All three principal combatants dropped their own designs. There is an early account that a Dr J. Volkmann gave to the Stuttgart Medical Society of two British aircraft at a height of around 4,000 feet dropping
fléchettes
on three German companies of bivouacked Uhlan cavalry. Volkmann reported that out of fifty or so
fléchettes
dropped, fifteen soldiers and several horses were hit, two men being killed outright while others were badly wounded, one pinned to the ground by a dart through his foot. Though lacking the lethality of explosive weapons they were definitely demoralising and half a century later would be used in American munitions in Vietnam to dreadful effect. At the time many RFC and RNAS airmen thought
fléchettes
‘unBritish’ and disliked dropping them on account of the dreadful wounds they could inflict. But squeamishness was another of the war’s early casualties.

It had been clear from the first that it was nearly impossible for one aircraft to down another by means of pistols. No observer standing up in a lurching cockpit in a sixty mile-an-hour gale trying to hit another with a service revolver could hope to score, barring a one-in-a-million fluke. As Louis Strange had quickly realised, machine guns were absolutely essential for serious aerial combat. (He would have been amazed by the story dating from the Second World War claiming that the pilot and co-pilot
of an American L-4 light aircraft, Lieutenants Duane Francis and Bill Martin, opened fire on a German Fieseler Storch observation machine with their .45 service automatics, forcing it to land and its crew to surrender.)
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The problem with machine guns was chiefly one of weight: not merely that of the weapon itself but of the ammunition. Both the RFC and the RNAS opted for the American-designed Lewis gun as their standard weapon but left the question of how it should be mounted to individual taste. This was both logical and absurd: logical because the design and position of the mounting depended critically on the type of aircraft, and absurd because the lack of standardisation gave each man the responsibility for cobbling something together that might work. The Lewis gun weighed 28 lb, which was manageable. By far the easiest aircraft to arm were the ‘pusher’ types with the engine at the back like the British F.E.2d and the French Maurice Farman ‘Shorthorn’. As already noted, this design afforded the observer-gunner in front an unobstructed field of fire upwards, downwards and on both sides, although it was highly vulnerable to attack from the rear.

This set-up contrasted strongly with ‘tractor’ biplanes (like practically all the German types) with the engine and propeller in front. This arrangement soon proved hopeless if the observer remained in the forward cockpit, as convention at first seemed to demand in British two-seaters. Sandwiched between the upper and lower wings the gunner had no field of fire at all, hemmed in as he was by the birdcage structure with its delicate struts and the vulnerable propeller immediately in front of him. Close behind him was his pilot and, further to the rear, the aircraft’s fin and tailplanes. In fact, if one had set out expressly to design an aircraft for a machine gun that could never be safely fired, something like the British B.E.2c or the Avro 504 with their observer-gunner in the front seat would have been it. Yet this was no more than a reflection of the fact that the Royal Aircraft Factory had designed the B.E.2c before the war for the
express purpose of observation and photography rather than for fighting.

Here it is worth noting that in the German air force the observer was usually in the back seat. He was generically known as ‘Franz’ and was almost always an officer, while the pilot (‘Emil’) was his subordinate, no matter that with experience both men would form comradely bonds of mutual trust. By contrast it seemed logical to both the French and the British that the pilot should be in command of the aircraft, regardless of rank. German culture evidently saw things differently, perhaps by analogy with an officer in the back seat of a staff car giving directions to the driver/chauffeur, who was also expected to double as a mechanic in case of breakdown.

With remarkable swiftness the RFC’s new commander in France, Hugh Trenchard, appreciated that the attack must be taken to the enemy and that, used correctly, aircraft were nothing if not offensive weapons. For this they needed to be properly armed. The Lewis gun initially deployed by the RFC and the RNAS was air-cooled. Its .303 ammunition, which was identical to the standard round used in the infantry’s rifles as well as in its Vickers machine guns, came in flat drums that revolved on top of the weapon. When it didn’t jam the Lewis achieved a rate of fire of about 550 rounds per minute. The French had already settled on their 8 mm Hotchkiss, a reliable design that was also air-cooled and at first belt-fed until it too was converted to a drum feed with a rate of fire of about 450 rounds per minute. The Germans’ drum-fed 7.9 mm Parabellum MG 14 could fire up to 700 rounds a minute. In terms of airborne offensive weapons the three main air forces were thus fairly evenly matched at the outset. That is, until the next great step, which was devising a way to fire a machine gun through the aircraft’s propeller arc without reducing the propeller itself to matchwood: the Holy Grail of early air warfare.