Marked for Death (14 page)

‘By this time we were near the trenches and as we approached – still of course with the sun behind our backs – I saw an enemy scout machine diving into our trenches and firing at the troops. It was easy to take him in our stride for home, and diving steeply I met him nose-on as he turned to make another dive. I nearly hit this machine, for we were approaching each other at something like 300 miles per hour. After firing I saw a burst of steam come from his radiator and he took a steep dive towards the River Scarpe. At the time I thought I had set him on fire and he was going to try to come down in the water to extinguish the flames (this fight took place at under 1,000 feet), but I was attributing thoughts to a dead man, for he bit the earth in No Man’s Land, sending up a great cloud of dust, since he fell with the velocity of a shell. This was one of the few occasions when I was sufficiently near to the ground to feel sick at the sight of a vertical plunge to earth of what was, but a few seconds previously, a breathing fellow-man mounted on wings of silk, but now unrecognizable amidst the twisted mass; death dealt to him while he was dealing death.

And so we flew home, landed and made our report. Four, possibly five of the enemy had been brought down before breakfast. We ourselves were untouched save for a few small holes in our wings from the anti-aircraft fire and, by virtue of
living on the surface, by turning away our faces and refusing to acknowledge death, by casting off that thin veneer of civilization with the excuse that we were, after all, hired assassins in the cause of patriotism, we were able to sit down and enjoy a good breakfast. How marvellously can the human mind adapt itself, how easily persuade itself that its course is right, from a nation to the individual; so that all experience, all knowledge, even religious beliefs can be laid on one side until the lust to kill is satisfied, leaving a charred and blackened earth and the sweet sickly smell of blood.’
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This is part of an undated account by an RNAS flight commander of a dawn patrol that took place over Flanders, somewhere between Arras and Douai, probably in late 1917 or early 1918. It is merely one of hundreds of such descriptions of First World War combat left by aircrew of all nations. The sentiments, too, were clichés even at the time. It was a very blunt sensibility that failed to appreciate the thinness of civilisation’s veneer and did not at some point think itself no better than a hired assassin.

As we know, this was emphatically not how the air war began. For the first few months the respective armies were mostly content for their aircraft to ‘see over the hill’, to use their own jargon. But it was not long before it became obvious that with the infantry largely bogged down this would primarily be an artillery war, and the need became urgent for artillerymen to have an eye in the sky to tell them what to aim at and whether they were hitting it. At the same time it was obviously necessary to attack the enemy’s observation balloons, just as in time it became imperative to carry out patrols, take photographs, spot for the artillery gunners, prevent hostile aircraft from doing the same, shoot up troops in their trenches, drop bombs, and finally do much of this work by night as well as by day. In short, to adopt the modern military cant, it was a good example of generalised ‘mission creep’. Airmen and aircraft laboured to keep up with
the armies’ expanding demands, while the armies themselves struggled to deal with what they saw as aviation’s shortcomings. Behind this lay a real difficulty that aggravated both parties’ problems: that of communication. The situation would have been utterly transformed had there been a reliable way of talking to each other during operations. This one great lack must indirectly have cost hundreds of thousands of infantry lives, as well as those of many hundreds of airmen.

The trouble was that radio, or wireless as it was then known, was almost as much in its infancy as were aircraft. The great Italian pioneer Guglielmo Marconi had sent the first Morse transmission across the English Channel in 1899, almost exactly ten years before Blériot became the first man to fly it. The first dots and dashes faintly crossed the Atlantic only in late 1902 – a year to the month before the Wright brothers first left the ground in their ‘Flyer’ – but such transmissions were unreliable and weather-dependent in that a kite needed to be launched first in order to pull a couple of hundred feet of aerial wire into the sky. Not only was Marconi’s spark transmitter crude, he knew little about wavelengths and nothing about how radically the range of a transmission could be affected by whether it was sent by night or day. But knowledge grew and by 1912 wireless was installed on most oceangoing liners; and in the sinking of the
Titanic
that year the technology proved serviceable enough to summon RMS
Carpathia
belatedly to the scene.

However, it was one thing to install a wireless room aboard a ship and quite another to reduce the equipment in size and weight so it would fit into an early aircraft. It was a real achievement in August 1910 when John McCurdy in the United States transmitted the first Morse message from an aircraft to the ground, a feat that was repeated a month later in Britain by the pilot-actor Robert Loraine, flying a 50 h.p. Bristol Box-kite above Salisbury Plain during the Army’s autumn manoeuvres. By the end of 1911 the British Army had designed a wireless transmitter suitable for its aircraft and in June 1914 the RFC Lieutenants B.
T. James and D. S. Lewis flew from Netheravon to Bournemouth with transmitters and receivers in their two B.E.2s. They flew ten miles apart and kept in touch with each other by Morse the whole way. This seemed auspicious.

Yet as the Army soon discovered, there was a big difference between experimentally installing wireless equipment in a couple of aircraft and gearing that up to widespread use, together with aircrew well enough trained in Morse code to be able to send and receive messages while flying. Airborne wireless telephony – the transmission of speech – was not achieved until 1915; and although by the end of that year a British transceiver capable of both telephony and Morse, the TWA Mk.1, was produced in small numbers, it was never more than experimental. For the duration the war, and for the overwhelming majority of aircraft on all sides, airborne wireless was by Morse. As has been amply indicated, weight in those early days of aviation was critical and wireless equipment was bulky. It also required an external power source: an accumulator fed by a generator bolted beneath a wing or on a strut and driven by a little wooden propeller. Apart from its extra weight the equipment caused significant drag. Although it only provided 6 volts with an output of 30-40 watts, the system was also potentially dangerous. The Morse key was wired directly into an induction coil that stepped up the voltage to produce a spark across a gap when the key was pressed (the origin of the later generic name for radio operators, ‘Sparks’). This was less than safe in a flammable aircraft with petrol vapour seeping into the cockpit, and the problem was only solved, presumably many fireballs later, by encasing the spark gap in a sealed box. An additional weight was the spool of copper aerial wire the observer needed to lower before he could transmit. This had its own drawbacks, and not only when the aircraft needed to take evasive action.

Half a dozen of us were sitting having tea in the orchard behind the sheds when a machine was heard. Soon it came
in to land, passing overhead. We looked up at it casually. It was Hoppy, out with another pilot (for my machine was dud) returning from patrol. Suddenly the camp table on which the tea was set flew up into the air, described a pretty parabola above the grass, and landed ten yards farther down the slope – a debris of broken china and spilt jam. We all jumped up, very annoyed.

‘That silly little bastard, coming down without winding in his aerial!’ – for the meteoric flight of the tea table was caused by the lead weight attached to the end of the aerial catching it as it swept past at sixty miles an hour. The peace of the orchard was gone, tea entirely ruined. ‘Besides which,’ added the Major, ‘the damn thing only missed my head by six inches.’
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The technological and supply difficulties meant that air-to-ground wireless communications only gradually took hold in the various air forces. For some time yet ordinary observations of potential targets had to be marked on a squared map which was then dropped in a message bag for the gunners to make a decision. A harder and even more valuable role for airmen was in ‘art. obs.’ or spotting for the artillery: observing where their shells were landing and giving instructions on how to correct their aim. This marked the armies’ shift in attitude from viewing aircraft as an extension of the cavalry to being an extension of artillery. Although by May 1915 many RFC airfields in France had a wireless hut and a call sign, only a few individual aircraft carried Morse transmitters and those were in constant demand by the gunners. Despite this, even by the war’s end airborne wireless was still neither widespread nor reliable, many pilots preferring to do without it altogether in exchange for having less weight and drag. The alternative was signalling between observer and battery using Very flares or flash lamps in a prearranged code. Such methods were obviously crude and fallible but often there was no alternative.

An added difficulty in mid-1915 was the so-called ‘Shell Crisis’. The military on all sides had miscalculated, largely through thinking the war would be brief, and supplies of big shells ran short. In Britain this was also down to industry’s chronic inability to produce steel of high enough quality to make reliable shell casings. This had to be imported hastily from the United States and the inevitable delays and U-boat depredations of merchant shipping caused a scandal that threatened the government. For a while British gunners in France were rationed to four rounds per gun a day:
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not enough even to give the spotters overhead a couple of ranging shots, while a brief barrage could exhaust that gun’s ration. Once supplies of munitions increased, though, artillery observation became a major daily task for the RFC and the RNAS. A few aircrews seemed to like it, but for most it was simultaneously boring and horribly dangerous. It involved stoogeing around in the sky in an antiquated and largely defenceless machine (usually a B.E.2c) over the same spot for anything up to half an hour or even longer, by which time every ‘archie’ battery within range was well zeroed in and putting up its own barrage. Despite this the pilot had to circle round and round in a hail of shrapnel while his observer watched for the smoke-puffs of shells landing below and laboriously tapped out the codes for ‘Over’, ‘Short’, ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and – in the event of a bull’s eye – ‘OK’.

It is small wonder that the RFC’s continuing reliance on the pre-war B.E.2c should have earned that aircraft the heartfelt contempt of so many airmen. Today it has its admirers; but none of them ever had to fly sorties in it against far more advanced machines armed with twin synchronised machine guns. It was a disgrace that it went on being flown for so long and in such numbers, and the men knew it. As late as June 1917 Arthur Gould Lee heard a mess performance of a parody of Psalm 23 known as
The Pilot’s Psalm
:

The B.E.2c is my bus; therefore shall I want.

He maketh me to come down in green pastures.

He leadeth me where I wish not to go.

He maketh me to be sick; he leadeth me astray on all cross-country flights.

Yea, though I fly o’er No-Man’s-Land where mine enemies would compass me about, I fear much evil, for
thou
art with me; thy joystick and thy prop discomfort me.

Thou prepareth a crash for me in the presence of mine enemies; thy R.A.F.
1*
anointeth my hair with oil, thy tank leaketh badly.

Surely to goodness thou shalt not follow me all the days of my life, else I shall dwell in the House of Colney Hatch
2*
for ever.
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A further danger was the real possibility of being hit by the shells fired by the very battery the aircraft was directing. ‘At two thousand feet we were in the path of the gun trajectories, and as the shells passed above or below us the wind eddies made by their motion flung the machine up and down as if in a gale. Each bump meant that a passing shell had missed the machine by four or five feet.’
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There are even accounts of observers or pilots actually glimpsing a big artillery shell as it howled past. Some aircrew were less lucky. Cecil Lewis wrote of his friend and observer Pip, who carried on art. obs. duties with another pilot while Lewis was away on leave:

One morning, on the dawn patrol, they, flying low in the arc of our own gunfire, intercepted a passing shell. The machine and both the boys were blown to bits.
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But the real objection of most aircrew to spotting was the sense of being helpless prey for any enemy aircraft that happened by. The chief problem was that it was impossible to take any sort of evasive action with 120 feet or more of weighted copper wire trailing beneath the aircraft. Very often the observer would not have enough time to wind it all in before the attack and he had to leap to his gun instead. The chances were excellent of one’s own machine becoming entangled in the aerial, wrecking the propeller or fouling the controls and leaving the aircraft helpless. This went on being a difficulty throughout the war (Stuart Wortley refers to a pilot’s complaint about it as late as September 1918) and it was not until the war was well over that the technology had developed enough for RAF aircraft finally to acquire fixed aerials contained within the fuselage. It is equally clear that with the exception of some experimental installations, primarily in Home Defence, there was no regular use of wireless by British commanders on the ground to control a pilot in the air during the war.

This lack of easy communication was particularly noticeable in contact patrols. These were designed to keep the generals in the rear constantly informed about where their infantry were, especially during a rapid advance. Apart from the tactical reasons, this was vital to avoid the gunners shelling their own troops. Down on the ground Royal Engineers signallers laid skeins of field telephone cables like spiders’ webs across a dawn meadow, most immediately lost in the mud. Being static, they were largely useless in quick advances or retreats, and entirely so if a platoon became cut off or surrounded. The RFC was therefore instructed to maintain contact with the troops from the air and report back their position to the brigades’ or divisions’ headquarters. They also had to report on the enemy’s position, how well it was defended, and whether or not he had reserves to bring up.