Marked for Death (34 page)

Even so, none of this is to deny Arthur Gould Lee’s implied point that the powers-that-be could have issued parachutes to RFC aircrew well over a year earlier had they really wanted to. It is here that we come up against that imponderable mixture of official indifference and bureaucratic languor, leaving us unable to decide where the ultimate responsibility lies. It is a perennial question. In the Second World War the eminent British-born Princeton mathematician Freeman Dyson was assigned to the RAF’s Operational Research Section where he made a disturbing discovery. About half the crews of American bombers shot down in daylight raids were escaping from their aircraft to become PoWs. From the older British night bombers, the Halifax and the Stirling, about 25 per cent escaped. From the RAF’s newest bomber, the Lancaster, a mere 15 per cent of the crews survived. Dyson established that this was because its escape hatch was not only badly sited but too small for men wearing parachutes to squeeze through easily. An informant on a bomber squadron told him that the true fraction of survivors among shot-down crews was kept secret from the airmen even more strictly than were the true odds against their completing an operational tour. ‘If the boys had found out how small was the fraction who succeeded in baling out after being hit, some of them might have been tempted to jump too soon.’
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This was an exact reprise of the WWI ‘official’ argument against parachutes.

There ensued a
two-year
attempt to get Bomber Command first to acknowledge the problem and then to notify Avro to modify the Lancaster’s escape hatch. Avro took months simply to design a larger hatch and build a prototype, and the war ended before it could be installed. It had clearly never been considered a priority. The ‘entrenched inertia of the military establishment’ had been matched by that of the aircraft’s manufacturers. Dyson hazards that the inadequacy of the Lancaster’s hatch ‘probably cost the lives of several thousand boys’. The military’s instinct, then as earlier, was that the priority in war is killing the enemy and not saving the lives of one’s own combatants.

*

In finally addressing the question of why no parachutes were issued to British aircrew in the first air war, perhaps the most important thing of all is to remember that it is simply no longer possible to understand exactly how people thought a century ago. On 11th November 1914, towards the end of the First Battle of Ypres, the Prussian Guard launched a concerted attack on the British 1st Guards Brigade. In the ensuing Battle of Nonnebosschen the Germans were defeated, but at terrible cost to both sides. Out of eighty British officers and 4,500 men who went into battle, five officers and 478 other ranks were left standing at the end. Afterwards, when the C-in-C asked a surviving brigadier how his men had done, he reportedly replied: ‘We had an uncommonly good shoot,’
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as though he had spent a pleasant day on a grouse moor.

This is not a code we can hope to crack merely by invoking stiff upper lips or British understatement. We are as much at a loss to grasp it fully as the brigadier would have been to understand our present conventions of health and safety, let alone modern free-for-all sexual mores. As the opening of L. P. Hartley’s novel
The Go-Between
has it: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ This crux has to be appreciated when trying to make any sense of the First World War and is too often left out of the equation. Apparent inconsistencies of attitude about such things as parachutes and seatbelts now seem baffling, contradictory or simply downright perverse but were obviously quite differently weighted at the time. Indeed, no sooner had an agreement been signed in 1919 for the first commercial flights to start between London and Paris than Frederick Handley Page ‘civilianised’ one of his big O/400 bombers as a passenger aircraft by turning it into a simulacrum of a suburban parlour. There were curtains for the windows, flowers in vases on the window sills and a drawing-room clock up on a bracket near the ceiling. For the fourteen passengers there were two rows of cane
chairs with floral cushions, but not a seatbelt anywhere. Presumably to be hurled about the cabin in an ‘air pocket’ was all part of the thrill of flying, and if anyone were hurt it wouldn’t occur to them to sue.

To remind us of how hard it is for people to grasp the attitudes of even two or three decades ago, let alone a century, in 2012 Andrew O’Hagan interviewed the veteran broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell about the BBC’s former internal culture that underwrote the sexual abuses of celebrities like the late Jimmy Savile. She wisely observed: ‘You can’t recreate the mood of an era. You just can’t get into the culture of what it was like, transfer our sensibilities backwards from today. It would be like asking Victorian factory owners to explain why they sent children up chimneys… What we now find unacceptable was just accepted then by many people.’
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The same will of course be true in a hundred years’ time, when people look back at this era, at a loss to understand our antediluvian codes of taboo and licence.

It should be added that certain prevailing attitudes in 1914–18 were determined by urgent priority. In Britain the overwhelming preoccupation of the government, the War Office and the public generally was with the way the land war was going, and its unprecedented slaughter of hundreds of thousands of men for no apparent gain or purpose. By comparison the air war’s casualty figures were insignificant, and therefore irrelevant. What gave the air forces everywhere a claim to public attention beyond that of their military uses was the still-novel status of flying and of aircraft in general. A mysterious aura of futurism and romance undoubtedly attached to men who flew. The idea of pilots as knights of the air was very appealing. But just as they fought as individuals, so did they die. Entire streets of industrial towns were not left grieving by an airman’s death as they often were by a wholesale massacre of infantry. In Britain the RFC, with its vociferous advocates in the House of Commons and the press, undoubtedly attracted an amount of public attention quite out
of proportion to the size of its fighting force. In the khaki fastness of the War Office, however, the generals made bleak logistical calculations. In their brisk daily triage the lives of those few hundred airmen who might have been saved by parachutes had no weight.

1*
Sopwith Salamander.
See
Chapter 4, p.106.

Sundry references have already been made to Hugh Trenchard’s strategy of using his air forces aggressively, with the implication that compared to the RFC flying daily over the German lines, the Luftstreitkräfte flew much more rarely over the British lines in France. However, it would be a big mistake to conclude from this that the German Air Force was reluctant to take its own fight to the enemy (and remembering that for much of the war it was fighting on several fronts simultaneously). In fact, German air strategy was every bit as forward-looking as Trenchard’s and in many respects a good deal more so because it formed part of the concept of
total war
. The German Army had been reared on
Vom Kriege
(
On War
), the classic treatise by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. This makes clear that it is futile going to war other than with an absolute determination to win. Anything else is an irresponsible sacrifice of lives and
matériel
. A real war – as distinct from a campaign or a local skirmish – presupposes the involvement of the combatants’ entire nations, civilians as well as military, for reasons of psychological as well as of material back-up. In this view an army in the field needs robust supply chains and hence the full support of the electorate and politicians back home.

It was in this spirit that from the turn of the century Germany had built up a highly competent U-boat fleet that was to prove most effective in blockading the merchant shipping that brought Britain its vital supplies, resulting in periodic shortages of raw materials and food throughout the war. It was fortunate that in
1901 the Royal Navy had founded a submarine service of its own that was to have a far-sighted champion in Admiral John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, at a time when it really needed one. In general, the Admiralty’s attitude towards this new weapon was analogous to that of the British Army’s towards aircraft a decade later. As the then-Third Sea Lord, Rear-Admiral Arthur Wilson VC, memorably put it, ‘The submarine is an underhand form of warfare, unfair, and a damned un-English weapon.’ It is not known what he thought a truly ‘English’ weapon might be: possibly a cricket bat. However, it is clear that the ‘Christian gentleman’ ideal of Dr Thomas Arnold’s public school system was not an adequate weapon for tackling bounders who had been brought up on Clausewitz. Luckily, despite the attitudes of many gold-braided old sea dogs who had served their apprenticeships in the days of sail, the Admiralty’s younger and more progressive element realised the new technology of submarines was not going to disappear merely because it was un-English. Consequently the Royal Navy’s submarines were steadily developed in the shadow of its grander and far more visible fleet of destroyers and dreadnoughts – symbols of Britain’s global maritime hegemony. The Royal Navy’s submariners were to cover themselves in glory throughout the First World War, especially while maintaining their own economic blockade of Germany; but so were the German submariners as they steadily disrupted British shipping.

Once the war had started the clash of the Clausewitzian idea of total war versus some very idiosyncratic British ideas of morality could be seen in action. Yet from the first the German General Staff’s position had never been a secret. In 1902 it had published a handbook for its officers,
Kriegsbrauche im Landkriege
(
The Waging of Land War
) in which it stated ‘The conduct of war allows any belligerent state to employ any means to bring about the war aim,’ and went on to make it clear that this might quite properly entail attacking civilian targets. On 16th December 1914 six German warships suddenly appeared off the coast of
northeast England and shelled Scarborough and Hartlepool. They killed 147 outright, with many badly injured, besides causing much damage. Such an attack without warning on mainly civilian targets produced general outrage in Britain as well as anger directed at the Royal Navy’s failure to prevent it. British citizens struggled to accept that total war meant exactly that. They might indeed have found this abhorrent; yet before long it became anybody’s guess who was holding the moral high ground.

In 1915 a tactic known as The Tethered Goat was introduced, whereby a British submarine would remain submerged beneath a trawler fleet, connected to one of the vessels by a covert telephone link. Trawlers were a favoured target of U-boats, if only as a means of obtaining fresh food whilst on patrol, and they would surface rather than waste a precious torpedo on such insignificant vessels and instead sink them with explosives or their deck guns. Once an enemy was spotted, the British submarine was informed and it would attempt to sink the surfaced U-boat. This worked on several occasions, but was obviously not a long-term strategy since the Germans soon got wise to this arguably underhand and morally dubious tactic.
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Even as the Royal Navy were staking out their tethered goats they were also deploying the first of the ‘Q’ ships: vessels disguised to look like innocent merchantmen that tempted a German submarine to surface in order to investigate its cargo and see if it was worth stealing. As soon as the U-boat appeared, hinged panels would drop open in the ‘Q’ ship’s side to reveal heavy guns that opened fire on the submarine. The Royal Navy, like the Kaiserliche Marine, understood from the first that there were to be no holds barred in their sea war. The British were much too aware of their islands’ dependency on overseas supplies to give any quarter. This ‘Q’ ship ruse was
soon used by both sides, as it would be again in the Second World War.

Initially, at least, the first air war did not offer quite the same opportunities for ruse and trickery, and tactics were more open. Aerial bombing was one such measure. A fortnight after the shelling of the northeast ports, German aircraft dropped the first small bombs on British soil, hitting Dover and Sheerness, although with little damage. Three weeks later came the first raid by an airship that bombed Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn on 19th January 1915. Predictably, this caused further outrage in a Britain taken by surprise and there came the first squalls in what was to develop into a four-year deluge of press rhetoric about German ‘frightfulness’ invoking the bucolic peace of British towns and villages and, of course, the sanctity of unarmed civilians and especially of women and children. This was promptly matched in the German press by accusations of British ‘
Schrecklichkeit
’. Yet you didn’t need to be Clausewitz to know that in war people have always used whatever weapon confers superiority. Only ever in duels of honour in Hyde Park or Heidelberg were two combatants solemnly handed identical weapons with which to fight while their seconds monitored fair play. Once Giulio Gavotti had dropped his little bombs over Libya in 1911 it was inevitable that sooner or later the same technique would be used again. Given that at the outbreak of war Germany was the unchallenged world leader in airship technology, it was obvious the Zeppelin would become a weapon in wartime if only because in 1915 no German aircraft yet had the range to fly as far as London with a bomb load and return to Belgium. The rhetoric of ‘frightfulness’ was something of a smokescreen to cover the British public’s impotent fury that as yet there seemed to be no reliable means of countering the Zeppelin raids. There was also fear that H. G. Wells’s dire predictions in his 1898 proto-SF novel
The War of the Worlds
might actually be coming true. There was something primordial in the dread of attack from the sky.