Marked for Death (5 page)

It is all good emotive stuff; but as usual the truth was very much more complicated. For one thing, Pemberton Billing’s accusation about Farnborough existing at the expense of the private aero companies was specious. At the very least he could be accused of sour grapes, given that he himself had until recently run just such a company, scarcely a single one of whose aircraft designs had yet managed to fly, still less had gone into production. Secondly, his diatribes conveniently ignored the fact that companies in the private sector were not only doing their own original design work but were also building Farnborough’s machines by the hundred, and being well paid by the government for doing so. And thirdly PB, with firm loyalties to his late service the Royal Navy, was only too happy to see the rival War Office get any blame that was going.

There was also a good deal that PB could have told the House that he did not, such as that British losses in the air at the time were not so very different from those of the French, who were always cracked up to be so much more advanced in aviation. He also failed to mention that it was not so much the wrong aircraft as the lack of a British version of synchroniser gear that was giving the Germans such a huge advantage, and anyway that was for the professional armaments companies like Vickers to produce and not Farnborough. He might also have pointed out
that a high proportion of the British casualties during the six months of the ‘Fokker Scourge’ had little to do with German air supremacy and a great deal with the RFC’s inadequate training for its pilots and poor maintenance by its ground crews which led to unnecessary accidents.
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Furthermore, although the RNAS was getting all its aircraft from private companies there was no reason to suppose it was getting superior machines. As of March 1916, the month of PB’s maiden speech, the first truly effective fighters from stables such as Sopwith and Bristol were not yet in service. It was not until May that the first Sopwith 1½ Strutters with synchronised machine guns were at last delivered to 70 Squadron in France. In fact, the ‘Fokker Scourge’ was effectively combatted on the British Front by the Farnborough-trained Geoffrey de Havilland’s Airco D.H.2 and the Royal Aircraft Factory’s F.E.8 and F.E.2b fighters: all three having been developed under O’Gorman’s administration. However, the aircraft that probably did most to end the Fokker’s supremacy in the early months of 1916 was France’s Nieuport ‘Bébé’ even though it was still only armed with a Hotchkiss machine gun mounted on the upper wing. From the very first this beautiful little aircraft comprehensively outflew the Fokker and did much to redress the balance of the air war temporarily in the Allies’ favour.

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It cannot be denied that a good deal of Pemberton Billing’s fiery indictments were justified. The way in which aircraft were commissioned, designed and built for the British war effort was indeed inefficient, the delays often grotesque. In 1915 thirty-four different companies produced 1,680 aircraft.
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This might sound like a lot but wastage was extremely high. Actual combat aside, training and ordinary accidents (which in those early days of aviation were very frequent) accounted for at least half the
casualties. What happened to the F.E.2b is revealing enough of how the industry lacked a sense of real urgency. This aircraft was a development of Geoffrey de Havilland’s early design. Its first version, the F.E.2a, had been planned as early as August 1913 as a fighter: itself an indication that O’Gorman’s Farnborough was capable of forward thinking since at that time hardly a military aircraft anywhere was being built for any role other than observation. It will be remembered that this was a ‘pusher’ type with the gunner/observer sitting at the front of the nacelle with an outstanding field of forward fire. In due course, with modified wings and a more powerful Beardmore engine, it became the F.E.2b. The future memoirist Louis Strange flew the first of four examples to France in May 1915, just before the start of the ‘Fokker Scourge’. Having already survived at least one pre-war flying accident, Strange was destined to continue a charmed and distinguished career as a pilot throughout the First World War. He was to survive active service in World War Two as well, finally leaving the RAF as a Wing Commander in 1945.

The F.E.2b Strange ferried to France was soon acclaimed as an able fighter and was badly needed at the front. Yet it took a scandalously long time for the type to be built and delivered in any quantity. For all that production was contracted out to several aircraft companies, a mere thirty-two machines had been delivered to the RFC by the end of that year – by which time the Fokkers had been doing their worst for some six months. Evidently Pemberton Billing and Charles Grey had been wrong in their repeated assertions that the private companies were so much more efficient than Farnborough.

On the other hand PB was right that General Henderson’s Department of Military Aeronautics was doing a poor job of overseeing the industry and ensuring that the RFC’s aircraft were built and delivered on time. Because aviation generally had remained low on the Army’s list of priorities for so long, the supply of new aircraft – and particularly of engines – was slow and disorganised. In the first year of the war the RFC was almost
completely reliant on French engines to power its aircraft, and even in 1916 roughly a quarter of the air force was still French-powered. The companies shuffled their feet and muttered about strikes at engineering works up and down the country, especially in Glasgow where Beardmore engines were produced. The national deficiency in machine-tools had delayed essential supplies and what could they have done? Such inefficiencies merely added to the scandal in 1915 known as the ‘Shell Crisis’. This had caused a Cabinet split over the continued shortage of shells for the artillery in France, a shortage partly caused by industrial action. Yet the Munitions of War Act and the Defence of the Realm Act (‘DORA’) had given the army and police draconian powers to remove male strikers and send them straight off to the trenches. True, many factory workers were women, especially in munitions, but that was part of the problem because the government had had to promise male workers that once the war was over they would get their old jobs back again – which in turn made it clear to the women that they had no job security. Yet even with these bitter undercurrents, it still seemed inconceivable that in a time of national emergency things were so badly organised that the RFC should have to wait seven months to get a derisory thirty-two F.E.2bs that were, after all, of very basic wood-and-canvas construction.

Production of the otherwise excellent Bristol Fighter (the ‘Brisfit’) was also to be seriously delayed because Rolls-Royce failed to turn out its Falcon III engine in sufficient quantity and Bristol was obliged to substitute a less powerful Hispano-Suiza engine, built under licence, that considerably reduced the aircraft’s performance. Many of the engines were also seriously defective mechanically. And the Sopwith company’s failure to ensure its designs were built on time turned out to be at least partly down to poor standards in its Kingston drawing office as well as to sloppy supervision of its subcontractors. Such things led to a state of affairs (sadly familiar even a century later) when bought-in parts were found not to fit. The Royal Aircraft Factory,
by contrast, did at least make painstakingly accurate drawings and keep a keen supervisory eye on its suppliers. It made sure that wings from one factory would exactly fit a fuselage built at another, and they almost invariably did.

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The more the industry expanded, the more its work was farmed out to concerns both large and small throughout Britain, just as it would be in the Second World War. The actual construction of all these aircraft was often severely affected by shortages of materials, as well as by the sheer logistics of organising adequate supplies to factories up and down the land. The job of building the wooden frames of the fuselage and wings went most naturally to the motor industry’s coachbuilders, to furniture makers and even to piano factories. The wood used was principally Sitka spruce and Douglas fir, although since these were imported from the USA and Canada supplies were affected as German U-boats took an increasing toll of shipping. Not only that, but as production grew and great swathes of forest were felled in Oregon and Washington states, the increased haste led to imperfectly kilned or seasoned wood being used, with subsequent warping. Other woods were resorted to, including white pine. The different woods with their varying characteristics and strengths could produce marked differences in durability and handling between aircraft of the same type, and it was often difficult for aircraft manufacturers to ensure uniformity.

Some of the textile industry’s capacity was diverted to making fabric to cover the frames. This was chiefly cotton- or linen-based as well as canvas, and shortages occurred because of the regular Army’s rival demands – to say nothing of the Navy’s. (By 1918 30,009
miles
of flannelette had been produced as pull-throughs for cleaning rifles: enough to girdle the Earth with another 6,000 miles to spare.) There also seemed no limit to the amount of canvas needed for the millions of tents and awnings and haversacks, as well as enough webbing to reach to the moon –
quite apart from the acres of canvas required for the RFC’s Bessonneau hangars.

There were even pressing health issues to take into account. Once the frames of the aircraft’s fuselage and flying surfaces were covered with fabric they were varnished with dope. This waterproofed and preserved them while at the same time the tautening effect added to the strength of the whole. A factory’s doping area needed to be kept warm at around 20°C because the fabric was very susceptible to damp and mildew. Six coats of dope were applied, each being allowed to dry thoroughly before the next. The dope itself was a syrupy, colourless liquid consisting of cellulose dissolved in acetone, benzene and tetrachloroethane, and had a pungent smell vaguely reminiscent of chloroform. It remained extremely flammable even when long dried on an aircraft in service, where it added materially to the fire hazard so feared by aircrew. In the warm atmosphere dope vapour had a dizzying effect on the workers involved. These were usually women and they frequently needed to stumble outside into fresh air to recover.

Far worse, the vapour slowly poisoned them. Once the war began and production increased, so did the number of aero industry workers reporting ill with nausea, back pain, headaches and jaundice. Several died, and fear and disquiet began to spread among the work force. Late in 1914, as the result of another death at a Hendon factory, Britain’s leading pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was called in. He was already known nationally for giving the forensic evidence that had sent Dr Crippen to the gallows two years earlier. He now set up a classic experiment with rats, exposing some of them to dope and others to just one of dope’s several constituents. After eight days he killed and examined the animals and found that the worst damage, especially to the liver and kidneys, occurred in the rats that had been exposed to tetrachloroethane. Back at the Hendon factory Spilsbury discovered that every one of the workers showed some symptoms of poisoning. He noted that dope fumes were heavier
than air and tended to sink, so the air extractor fans mounted high up in the wall were useless. He recommended building separate, properly ventilated sheds exclusively for the doping process, as well as instituting twice-weekly medical examinations for dope workers.

The real difficulty was that although it only constituted 12 per cent of the dope, tetrachloroethane seemed to be the one vital ingredient. Dope made without it resulted in a much less tight, flexible and durable coating. While chemists searched for a substitute, Bernard Spilsbury’s recommendations had a beneficial effect, if only for bringing the problem to wider recognition. No doubt factories took what precautions they could, but the urgency of the war’s requirements must have taken priority since the reports of illness and occasional death persisted. The phrase ‘toxic jaundice’ became common and was also used in connection with the exposure to TNT dust of ‘munitionettes’, the women workers in munitions factories who, because it turned their skin yellow, were also nicknamed ‘canaries’. ‘Even though women workers wore rubber gloves, mob caps, respirators and leggings and coated their faces with flour and starch to protect them, their skin still turned yellow and there were fifty-two deaths from “toxic jaundice” in 1916 alone.’
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In its 1st July issue of that year,
The Lancet
noted questions being asked in the House following the deaths of two women dope workers. The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, a Mr Brace, replied that ‘The Admiralty and the War Office are developing as fast as they can a non-poisonous dope. They are doing their best.’ A week later he assured the House that a non-poisonous dope would be available ‘within a very short time.’ On 12th August he was pleased to announce that non-toxic dope was now available and in wide use. Also, that notification of cases of toxic jaundice due to tetrachloroethane poisoning was now compulsory. As a footnote to this it would be interesting to know whether the Admiralty and the War Office had pooled their researches to discover a
non-toxic dope or if, as so often, they worked separately in an atmosphere of mutual disdain.

Pemberton Billing was certainly right that a situation where the Army and the Navy competed with one another for Treasury funds and aircraft was ridiculously counter-productive. A good example was the Sopwith Triplane. In June 1916 the company sent its new prototype fighter to France for evaluation. This was a revolutionary aircraft with its three pairs of wings, good pilot’s vision and manoeuvrability that rivalled that of their highly successful Pup. The design of the ‘Tripe’ was so influential it was quickly copied by no fewer than fourteen German and Austro-Hungarian manufacturers, and Richthofen’s red triple-decker Albatros would probably never have existed had it not been for Sopwith’s designers. However, it was the Navy that had a contract with Sopwiths and ordered it for RNAS squadrons, later cannily exchanging their old French SPADs with the Army for the RFC’s own order of ‘Tripes’. Thus it was that every one of the best new fighters wound up with the RNAS and the type never did see service with the RFC.