Marked for Death (13 page)

From early 1916 the RFC at last began to reorganise its squadrons according to dedicated roles so that each flew the same type of aircraft. Hitherto, any squadron might field a motley assortment of types and vintages to which sorties were assigned somewhat at whim. But the coming of Fokker’s single-seat fighter made this amateurish approach impossible to sustain. In February 1916 24 Squadron, under Major Lanoe Hawker VC, flew to France as the first RFC single-seat fighter squadron. They were equipped with the de Havilland D.H.2. This was still a ‘pusher’ type of aircraft in which the pilot had both to fly and aim his gun: a type of design that synchronisation gear had made old-fashioned at a stroke even though the D.H.2 was probably the best of all the pushers in terms of performance and toughness. Like many another true fighter it at first proved difficult to fly for pilots used to the almost bovine stability of the old Avros and the government’s aircraft from the Farnborough establishment. It had a tendency to spin, and following one occasion when a spinning D.H.2 caught fire it was dubbed ‘the Spinning Incinerator’. As we know, in those days spinning was hardly understood and less confident pilots tended to be almost superstitious about it. However, among those who mastered it the D.H.2 gradually lost its fearsome nickname. It also helped that it was fully aerobatic, which naturally appealed to the better pilots who, once in France, began systematically to deal with the Fokker Scourge. By late May Sir Henry Rawlinson, General Officer Commanding the Fourth Army, could report that ‘the de Havilland machine has unquestionably proved itself superior to the Fokker in speed, manoeuvre, climbing and general fighting efficiency’.

Nevertheless, pushers were not as efficient as were front-engined aircraft and the British had yet to make the breakthrough
of coming up with a suitable way of allowing a machine gun to fire safely through the propeller arc and installing it in a fighting aircraft. From the first, German pilots flying the Fokker
Eindecker
had been forbidden to venture over the British lines for fear the secret of their synchroniser might be revealed. At last, on 8th April 1916 one was downed on the British side of the lines and Anthony Fokker’s mechanism could be taken apart and examined in detail. But although a British equivalent had lagged behind both the Germans and the French, the engineers had not been idle and six weeks later the first RFC machines equipped with synchronising gear, the new Sopwith 1½-Strutters of 70 Squadron, arrived in France. The gear was made by Vickers and the aircraft mounted a single Vickers machine gun on the cowling in front of the pilot. In the long run this particular gear proved less significant than the type of gun. Because of the way its action worked the ubiquitous Lewis gun was impossible to synchronise, and from now on the Vickers took its place as a forward-firing machine gun.

Meanwhile the Royal Navy, individual as ever, favoured a synchroniser called the Scarff-Dibovski. ‘Scarff’ referred to Warrant Officer F. W. Scarff of the RNAS who had already invented the ‘Scarff ring’ mount for the gun of the observer/gunner in the rear cockpit of two-seaters. As the name suggests this was circular, and by means of bungee suspension to cancel the weight of the gun it enabled the gunner to swivel the weapon quickly through 360 degrees. As with most other advantageous developments it was swiftly copied by other air forces and the Scarff ring and its derivatives went on being used in aircraft long after the First World War.

Like the Vickers, the Scarff-Dibovski synchroniser was not a great success and the British tried other types including one made by the Sopwith company, the Sopwith-Kauper gear. But like the Fokker system, all these variants were purely mechanical. The synchronising gear the British finally adopted, and which was to remain in service until the Second World War, was
the so-called Constantinesco [
sic
] or ‘CC’ gear. It was the invention of a Romanian scientist with a fertile mind, George Constantinescu, who had settled in London in 1912. It employed his theory of sonics, which used hydrosonic impulses transmitted through oil-filled tubes to synchronise the gun with the propeller. The theory behind the system remained an official secret until after the war even though it used the same basic principle as that of hydraulic brakes in a car (which the American Fred Duesenberg had pioneered for his racers in 1914).

Unfortunately the sheer speed of development and the hectic pressures of wartime manufacture did not allow for much in the way of re-equipping existing aircraft with better weapons and weapon systems as they became available. Thus Arthur Gould Lee, in a letter to his wife from France dated 29th June 1917, could still write:

Scott left us because he’d shot away half his propeller. The Sopwith-Kauper interrupter gear with which the [Sopwith] Pup is fitted is complicated mechanically and sometimes goes wrong, and then the bullets go through the prop. It’s this gear which slows down the rate of fire of the Vickers. In the air when you press the trigger, instead of getting the fast rattle of a ground gun you have a frustrating pop! pop! pop! pop! The Huns have a much more efficient gear, for the Spandau fires very fast. In fact, when you hear the twin Spandaus of the Albatros opening up on your tail they sound like some vast canvas being ripped by a giant. And your answer is pop! pop! pop!
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Even the Constantinesco gear was not infallible, being highly dependent on correct maintenance, as were all the synchronisation systems. The ease with which guns jammed, invariably at a critical moment (otherwise why would a pilot be firing?), was a permanent source of complaint in all the air forces in the First World War. One of the commonest reasons was a swollen or split
cartridge. Cockpits were usually equipped with a small pouch containing a hammer with which the wretched pilot could bash away at the gun’s cocking handle until the cartridge was cleared. This usually happened when under attack, the pilot cursing and hammering at his gun even while trying to dodge about and avoid collision. It was noticeable that many of the pilots who became ‘aces’, or others who realised that being an accurate shot was every bit as important as being able to fly well, would spend time before sorties hand-loading their own machine gun belts and checking each round rather than going off to the mess and leaving the job to some ack-emma (air mechanic, in the Army’s phonetic alphabet). They would then taxi their machine over to the testing butts (the ‘gun pit’) on the edge of the airfield and zero the guns afresh, according to the range they preferred for attacking. Any gun they found unsatisfactory they would take to the Armaments Officer’s hut and swap for something better. On such attention to detail their lives depended. As the ace Mick Mannock succinctly advised anyone posted to 74 Squadron: ‘Sight your own guns. The armourer doesn’t have to do the fighting.’ He was unequivocal about the importance of constant shooting practice, of going up in a spare half hour to try to hit a petrol tin in a nearby field at various distances and speeds. ‘Good flying never killed a Hun yet,’ he would say. ‘And when you shoot, don’t aim for the plane – aim for the pilot.’
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In fact many of the most successful pilots like Mannock and McCudden spent a good deal of time tinkering with their aircraft’s engines and guns, trying out various modifications of their own invention for improving performance. Each gun – like each aircraft and each engine – had a log or record sheet of its own on which the armourer noted its history: whether and when it had jammed, the total number of rounds it had fired, plus any mechanical defects such as barrel wear. Mannock is reported to have increased his Vickers’ rate of fire by the judicious addition of a washer somewhere in its mechanism. But none of these critical tweakings and tunings was proof against a substandard
load in a single cartridge, or a primer cap whose mercury fulminate failed to ignite the charge.

Often behind such things lay the labour problems in Britain’s munitions factories. There, the predominantly women workers would be working long shifts doing repetitive and heavy tasks with potentially dangerous explosives. As time went on they became increasingly unionised and despite emergency legislation mounted ever more frequent go-slows and walkouts. Endemic alcoholism and drug-taking hardly helped the situation, and under the intense pressure to maintain and increase production quality checks could be variable or skimped altogether. Since working conditions – and especially lighting – were often poor and there was increasing panic over German air raids and the toxicity of the chemicals the munitions workers were using, it is hardly surprising that some of the millions of cartridges they churned out varied in quality.

Aside from that, though, a common reason for guns stopping in the air was extreme cold, particularly at high altitude. The various kinds of grease and oil, so vital to the proper functioning of these high-speed mechanisms, thickened and sometimes froze solid. The RFC’s Chief Armament Officer, Major J. L. T. Pearce, devised an electric heater to keep a gun warm and Mannock enthusiastically adopted it. Low temperature oils and lubricants were also introduced but they didn’t work at the subzero temperatures of patrols at very high altitude (from 1917 up to 20,000 feet). Then, a pilot’s only recourse was to fire half a dozen single shots every so often to keep the breech warm in case of a sudden attack. It was wasteful of ammunition but better than being caught defenceless.

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The First World War saw the rapid development of existing types of bullet such as armour-piercing (AP), tracer, incendiary and explosive, most of which occasioned moral outrage and accusations of ‘frightfulness’ at one time or another. It should
be pointed out that all of them had been produced before the war by this or that country. Only one type of bullet had already been outlawed by the Hague Convention in 1899. This was the notorious creation of the British Military Arsenal at Dum-Dum, Calcutta, a few years earlier. The dum-dum was not an explosive but an expanding bullet. The problem with sharp-nosed jacketed bullets designed for maximum range is that they tend to go straight through a target and carry on beyond. It was obviously better to devise a round that gave up all its energy on impact to cause maximum damage. The British military achieved this by cutting a slit in the nose of the bullet so it would mushroom on hitting anything. It was this type that was outlawed, as well as other soft-nosed bullets designed to expand, such as hollow points. As the First World War progressed, so new propellants were adopted and the velocities of bullets greatly increased. Particularly if they tumbled after a ricochet they could cause gross injuries that field doctors wrongly but excusably assumed could only have been caused by ‘exploding’ bullets.

True exploding bullets were not really practicable simply because they were too small to contain a significant explosive charge. But tracers (‘sparklers’) were devised that left a smoke trail and glowed in the dark to tell the gunner where his shots were going. However, not only did they quickly become erratic as their charge burned, often misleading the gunner as to whether the rest of his shots were on target, but their corrosion and residues fouled gun barrels and jammed mechanisms. Pilots usually had their own private preferences for the best combinations of bullet types in their machine gun belts, selecting from a mixture of ordinary rounds, tracer, armour-piercing and incendiary.

Incendiary rounds were originally devised for use against hostile airships (Zeppelins, for instance) or observation balloons. A frequent and unloved mission – usually rated by airmen on all sides as semi-suicidal – was to shoot down enemy balloons
that were directing artillery fire. These were always heavily protected by nests of machine guns and anti-aircraft guns as well as by aircraft waiting high overhead. It was wrongly believed that incendiary ammunition would easily set fire to the hydrogen in the balloon and several different British types of bullet were invented, among them the Pomeroy, the RTS, the Brock and – best-known of all – the Buckingham. They all contained phosphorus in one form or another, were sensitive to heat and could be quite hazardous to the user in a highly flammable aircraft. The Buckingham incendiary round achieved notoriety because it was soft-nosed and at the beginning was officially made available for use only against Zeppelins flying over Britain. Nevertheless it became widely employed in France against balloons, although with trepidation as it was said that any pilot who was downed over the German lines with Buckingham ammunition would be shot out of hand. Station commanders sometimes gave a pilot an official letter in English and German stating that his Buckingham rounds were for use exclusively in sorties against gas-filled balloons.

As usual in war, complaints by one side of ‘inhuman’ weapons used by the other were purely hypocritical. As early as 1914 the French pioneered the use of tear gas in artillery shells. This seemed to constitute a carte blanche for the use of chemical agents by all sides and it was only a matter of months before both the Germans and the British adopted the mass release of chlorine, and later mustard gas, phosgene and worse on the battlefield. That all these contravened the 1899 Hague Declaration as well as the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare knocked none of the combatants off their self-claimed moral high ground. Compared to the horror of young men trapped in trenches being burned alive with flamethrowers (a German invention), the Buckingham bullet now looks almost humane.

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How these basic component parts – the assorted weaponry and the aircraft themselves – were brought together and deployed for an ever-widening variety of hazardous military purposes is the subject of the next chapter.