Marked for Death (15 page)

As from late spring 1916, the RFC’s contact patrol aircraft had broad black bands painted on the underside of their wings and flew blue streamers from their struts in the hopes that
trigger-happy British troops would not machine-gun them from their trenches, as had frequently happened. The pilots were also issued klaxon horns, and if they needed to draw the troops’ attention they would fly low and slow over them repeatedly sounding the letter A in Morse code (short–long) on their klaxons like the harsh cries of some giant prehistoric bird. Hearing this, the infantry were expected to lay out a panel of white cloth on the ground with black letters in a prearranged code displayed on it. (‘NN’, for example, meant ‘Short of ammunition’). This was communication, First World War-style. Needless to say, it was exceedingly unreliable, especially if the troops were under fire. No sane man wanted to leave the shelter of a trench or cover in order to lay out large pieces of cloth, and particularly not if there were enemy aircraft around since it simply drew attention to his position.

From the airmen’s point of view, too, flying contact patrols was immensely frustrating because they could often see trouble on the way for the men on the ground and had to resort to dropping hastily scrawled messages in bags with streamers attached, provided they still had some left (in dire need the observer’s cigarette case might have to be sacrificed). In reverse, a signaller was expected to communicate from the ground in Morse by means of a black-and-white venetian blind affair with strings that uncovered one or other colour, a method that was laborious to the point of impossible, especially under fire, and extremely hard for airmen passing overhead at seventy miles per hour to follow.

After the armies’ initial scepticism about aviation’s usefulness, by 1916 their reliance on it and their expectations of what aircraft could do were often downright unrealistic. A notorious instance of this became apparent in the first days of the costly Somme offensive in July. It was fundamental to the British Army’s plan that observation aircraft should not only reveal the size and position of the German forces behind their front lines, but also direct the artillery barrage so it could blast aside the barbed wire
that lay in massive entanglements in front of the advancing British troops. At the same time aircraft were also required to attack troops in the trenches as well as to bomb railways and supply lines behind the German front. Some of this was gallantly achieved. Yet no matter how good the RFC’s and RNAS’s cameras were, they could not show what was happening underground in the German dugouts and elsewhere: how, safely hidden from aerial scrutiny, the well-disciplined German forces went on with their target practice and machine-gun drills in underground shooting ranges. Nor were photography or observation even possible if ground mist or clouds of gas obscured the view, as was often the case. In several places the artillery completely failed to clear the barbed wire or annihilate the Germans inside their fortifications as directed, and much of the reason for this was an absence of reliable communication between the aircraft and the artillery batteries as well as a lack of visibility. The wretched infantry advanced believing the barbed wire was gone, only to be brought up short by it and shot to ribbons.

The Germans had exactly the same problems during the protracted battle of Verdun. The usual forms of ground communication (runners, field telephones, even messenger dogs) having failed, aircraft were sent up. But even from 1,000 feet there was nothing to be seen. ‘The muddy uniforms of our troops were hardly distinguishable from their background of shell holes,’ as one pilot remarked later.
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In fact, in those days long before GPS aircrew would have found it impossible to give a map reference for almost anything they saw, the destruction below them being so complete. Since whole French villages had literally vanished, the pre-war maps were useless and the German infantry frequently became lost, there being absolutely no landmark left on which to take a bearing.

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Other forms of patrols that RFC pilots carried out included line offensive patrols (LOPs) and distant offensive patrols (DOPs).
The line offensive patrol required cruising up and down the enemy lines in a fighter to protect the vulnerable ‘art. obs.’ aircraft from attack as they circled around. This inevitably drew ground fire, and out of self-defence LOPs could degenerate into pure and simple trench-strafing.

As Arthur Gould Lee was to remark, ‘every fighter pilot heartily abominated trench-strafing, not only because of poor results for much jeopardy, but because blind chance played too big a part.’
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In fact, it was as near as an RFC airman came to understanding what the PBI or ‘poor bloody infantry’ felt like. Suddenly, his individual skill as a pilot counted for nothing and his fate was completely arbitrary, settled by randomly flying pieces of lead or steel. The trench-strafer’s job was perpetually over the edge of suicidal since it involved flying low along an enemy trench and shooting up men who were well protected in the narrow, zig-zagging slit and who were meanwhile shooting back at close range with all the rifles, machine guns and anything else they possessed. No pilot ever felt other than mother-naked, perched as he was on a wicker seat with only a flying suit and some doped fabric between his cringing skin and the hail of supersonic metal hurled up at him personally from a mere eighty feet below. All in all, it was an efficient way of getting killed without having achieved anything commensurately useful. As Arthur Lee Gould put it:

Low-flying attacks were, with few exceptions, a wasteful employment of highly trained pilots and expensive aeroplanes. A 30 percent rate of casualties meant a new squadron every fourth day and one rendered useless for normal air fighting duties. This situation developed in 46 Squadron when after a week’s losses, all but a handful of our pilots were straight out from England.
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One obvious way of improving the airman’s chances was to provide him with some protective armour. The engine and
cockpits of a few B.E.2cs were given 445 lb of steel plate, but the effect on the performance of an already sluggish and outdated machine can be imagined. It was really only once aero-engines had become powerful enough towards the end of the war that armour plating became practicable. Once Camels entered service in 1917 they were extensively used for ground attacks and a prototype armoured Sopwith Trench Fighter (T.F.1) version was built. However, the project was shelved in favour of the Sopwith T.F.2 Salamander, conceived from the first for a trench fighting role. It carried 650 lb of armour to protect the pilot and the fuel tanks, and after field trials in France production was begun in the summer of 1918 despite the ridicule voiced by diehards like Biggles (
see
Chapter 9, p.246–7). However, as so often with new British aircraft, production was too slow and only a handful of Salamanders were delivered before the Armistice. The sole successful armoured aircraft of the war was the German Junkers J.I, a remarkable piece of design since the engine, tanks and pilot were protected by a one-piece ‘bathtub’ of steel that also doubled as the fuselage itself, monocoque-style. It was introduced in the late summer of 1917 and was well liked by its German crews since it offered them immunity from just about anything short of armour-piercing cannon shells. RFC pilots, meanwhile, had to content themselves with sitting on cast-iron stove lids, just as in World War II bomb-aimers lying prone in the nose of their aircraft used car hub caps, and in Vietnam low-flying helicopter pilots sat on their flak jackets rather than wearing them.

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Distant offensive patrols were a distilled expression of Trenchard’s aggressive policy of carrying the fight to the enemy.
3*
Several flights of aircraft would carry out a sweep well behind the German lines, and many pilots could see little point in that,
either. Had the sortie had a particular objective such as a photo recce or a bombing raid, nobody would have raised a murmur. But to fly off deep into enemy territory either looking for trouble or just hoping to represent a demoralising presence seemed mere risk-taking for no useful purpose. DOPs were particularly unpopular because something as trivial as engine trouble could lead to an airman having to glide down and crash-land deep inside German territory, with almost inevitable capture and internment for the duration. On many of these patrols not a single enemy machine was seen, so it was not as though being downed was always the result of combat. It might merely mean a careless mechanic had failed to tighten a nut sufficiently and the last oil had drained out of the engine twenty miles on the wrong side of the line. In such circumstances a harsh stretch in a prison camp for an unknowable number of years seemed a cruelly unearned punishment, as well as a waste of a trained airman and his aircraft.

DOPs in the last two years of the war could easily lead to combat if they ran into a Jasta (German fighter squadron) patrol. A real set-piece battle could take place if they had the misfortune to encounter a flying circus like that of Richthofen himself, with massed fighters waiting ‘upstairs’ for just such victims. Certainly in the early stages of an encounter like this the lack of communication between aircraft made it almost impossible for the leader to employ a particular tactic once the fight had started. Formation flying without wireless required extreme alertness on the part of the wingman to what his leader was doing. It was all a matter of a pilot rocking his wings, firing off a prearranged colour of Very light with his flare pistol or simply waving his arms in the slipstream and pointing. The way a battle would commence was almost entirely determined by which side had the height advantage and could decide when and how to attack. Once the higher aircraft dived, the lower formations quickly split up to avoid becoming sitting targets, and without the cohesive force of a leader being able to communicate his
tactics it quickly became a free-for-all. It seldom degenerated into a mass dogfight like the whirling knots of midges so beloved by film-makers and soon to be expected by cinema audiences. A pilot would pick out a potential victim and concentrate on him, make an attacking run and then pull out to see its effect.

However, it did sometimes happen that the number of combatants was big enough for the fight to become a mêlée, with a great risk of collision. It was a terrifying business for any pilot who was comparatively inexperienced. Everything took place at bewildering speed, with brightly coloured machines flashing past at every angle at closing speeds of 200 mph or more, and in the concentration of the moment all notion of where he was in relation to the earth beneath or to his companions was completely lost. There was the staccato sound of machine guns above the roar of his own engine, the intimate smell of other men’s exhaust fumes and castor oil as well as the cordite smoke from his own guns. And then abruptly something quite extraordinary. He would complete a turn and find himself utterly alone. The guns were silent, the sky empty of aircraft, whether enemy or friendly. He would look wildly around but see nothing other than dissipating tendrils of black smoke standing in a corner of the sky to mark someone’s fall. Scanning the ground he might finally spot a couple of machines low down, heading somewhere but already too far away for him to tell whose they were. Disorientated, he might follow them in the manner of a small dog tagging on at the end of a parade just so as not to be left behind. Years later, W. E. Johns wrote about a neophyte’s bewilderment in combat:

The first dog fight I was ever in, it seemed to me that one minute we – that is, my formation – were sailing along all merry and bright, and the next minute the air was full of machines, darting all over the place. I didn’t see where they came from or where they went. I didn’t see where my formation went, either. By the time I had grasped the fact that the
fight had started and I was looking to see who was perforating my plane, the show was all over. Two machines lay smoking on the ground and everybody else had disappeared. While I was considering what the dickens I should do I suddenly discovered that I was flying back in formation again! The fellows had come back to pick me up and formed up around me. I didn’t even see where they came from.
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As the war went on and aircraft grew more capable, many DOPs effectively changed into bombing sorties against enemy infrastructure and finally into retaliation raids against cities. Again, these missions seemed to have a purpose – or at least they had targets – and airmen were more easily resigned to them.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, another suicidal pursuit was that of balloon strafing. Observation balloons were obvious targets, and the men who went up in their creaking baskets for hours on end with high-powered binoculars and a field telephone offered examples of some of the least-rated heroism of the entire war. Quite apart from the cold and the motion sickness often brought on by windy conditions, it must have been most unreassuring to dangle beneath an enormous tethered bag of hydrogen, the most prominent thing in the sky for miles around and famously a challenge to any passing enemy airman who fancied immortality. True, observers on both sides had a parachute that was carried in a canister outside the basket, which was more than the pilots had. True also that this worked more often than it failed, even though it sometimes happened that an observer might make it safely back to earth just in time for the blazing remains of his balloon to fall on top of him. Balloons could be hauled down if an attack were spotted in time, although the speed of their descent depended on the alertness of the ground crew and the power of the winch. Balloons’ real defences lay in their usually being surrounded by ack-ack guns and machine gunners who between them could send up a lethal barrage towards any aircraft that fancied its chances. German
balloons were also reputed to be defended by powerful flamethrowers, but how those were to be deployed against a rapidly moving aircraft was not clear.

Great personal acclaim accrued to those who downed a balloon, and in a pilot’s tally it counted as a victory equal to shooting down an enemy aircraft. It was generally agreed that ‘balloon-busting’ was a mug’s game, a pastime reserved for those who were radically tired of life. The greatest balloon-buster of all was the Belgian Willy Coppens. Flying his favourite French aircraft, an Hanriot HD.1, Coppens accounted for thirty-four balloons in a scant five months between May and October 1918. On more than one occasion he actually landed on top of a balloon to hide from ground fire, a brilliant dodge as well as evidence of superb airmanship. He undoubtedly had what people thought of as a charmed life because although his war career was ended by an incendiary bullet that led to the amputation of one leg, Coppens lived to be ninety-four, dying in 1986.