Marked for Death (35 page)

In fact, as early as February 1913 there had been reports of strange airships seen over Britain’s east coast and on the 28th the
Whitby Gazette
ran a headline that read:

WANTED: AN AIR MINISTER

ENGLAND AT GERMANY’S MERCY

This laid out the respective positions of both future combatants eighteen months before the war began. Nobody could reasonably claim Britain hadn’t been warned. The idea of the country being at anybody’s mercy was shocking enough to emphasise how unprepared and inadequate its defences actually were: a common theme in public debate ever since Erskine Childers’s enormously popular ‘invasion’ thriller
The Riddle of the Sands
was published in 1903. Winston Churchill later claimed that this single novel had led directly to the Admiralty’s building three major naval bases in north-eastern Britain (Scapa Flow, Invergordon and Rosyth). But with the coming of airships and aircraft the Grand Fleet was suddenly no longer enough to protect the British Isles, just as the journalist Harold Wyatt had predicted when Blériot first flew the Channel in 1909. Winston Churchill, ever the politician, had tried to allay fears in a speech on 17th March 1914 in which he predicted that ‘Any hostile aircraft, airships or aeroplanes which reached our coast during the coming year would be promptly attacked in superior force by a swarm of very formidable hornets.’
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At the very least this absurd piece of bombast implied ignorance: Zeppelins could not only fly far higher than any aircraft Britain had in 1914, they could also carry out raids at night.

However, it was one thing for the German military to embrace the idea of total war and quite another for ‘Kaiser Bill’ (Wilhelm II) to agree to all that this implied. As Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson he realised that bombing London would not only escalate hostilities to a new, unheard-of level, it would also risk killing his own cousins in Buckingham Palace. To pacify his
generals he reluctantly agreed to bombing raids outside London. That first Zeppelin raid on King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth ‘was greeted with wild acclaim in Germany, where “
Gott strafe England
” was already a national rallying cry, daubed on walls, fences and lamp-posts and recited by German schoolchildren in their daily morning assemblies’.
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As always, once the principle of bombing had been established it became easy to continue, and Zeppelin raids were soon extended to London and continued for the next two years until airships at last became too vulnerable to fighter aircraft and the defences Britain could belatedly muster. They were superseded by big twin-engined Gotha bombers, whose first raid took place in May 1917.

The psychological effect on Britons of being bombed in their own country, and especially in their capital city, was immense. They were quite used to the idea of sending troops and warships overseas to outposts of the Empire in order to bring uppity natives into line; they were absolutely unprepared for this sort of treatment to be meted out to themselves on home ground. Worse still, for a long time they were powerless to stop it. In the first place every available RFC aircraft and anti-aircraft gun was needed in France; and in the second combat flying was in its adolescence at best while
night
combat flying was not even in its infancy. This sense of national impotence was probably an important contributory factor to the VC awarded to Flight-Sublieutenant Reginald Warneford, a young RNAS pilot stationed in Belgium. On 7th June 1915, flying his Morane-Saulnier Type L monoplane, he chased Zeppelin LZ.37 over Ostend and dropped bombs on it until it blew up. The explosion flipped his own aircraft upside down and stopped the engine. Warneford managed to land in German-held territory, work feverishly on the engine, fix a fuel leak with his cigarette holder, restart and take off again before he could be captured. Almost immediately King George V awarded him the Victoria Cross and he was acclaimed in Britain as a national hero. A mere ten days later Warneford was killed while flying an American journalist
over Versailles in a new Farman F.27, a pusher biplane, apparently because of mid-air structural failure. Both men were thrown out and fell to their deaths.

Meanwhile the Zeppelins attacking Britain came at night – huge, stealthy and terrifying. 1916 saw the introduction of the ‘R’ types that were over 200 yards long. Silent newsreels could not record the menacing drone of their six immense Maybach engines, nor how they might fall quiet as they drifted almost unopposed above London as though picking out something choice at which to take careful aim. By now there were searchlights and anti-aircraft guns that put up a fine show of activity, although mostly with few results. The spectators milled excitedly in the streets, staring upwards. The airships’ ability to hit a specific target with their bombs was practically nil, but in a way this made it worse for those below as it turned the raids into a kind of sinister lottery by high explosive. Silver blades slashed the dark sky, criss-crossing feverishly as though in a hectic fencing match. None drew blood, however; and generally the sparkling blooms of shells sent up by the gunners in Hyde Park, for all the visible effect they had, might have been a benign firework display. The blow to British self-esteem is not recorded on film, but it soon had immense political impact.

To be sure, the numbers of casualties caused by the German raids on London and elsewhere in the First World War were not remotely comparable with those in the Second. The entire year’s campaign by German bombers between May 1917 and May 1918 killed 836 Britons up and down the country and injured 1,965: figures that for much of the war would have represented light casualties for a single day on the Western Front. (In World War II the Luftwaffe’s raids on Coventry alone were to kill 1,236.) But the panic the bombing inspired was quite out of proportion to the number and size of the bombs dropped and the damage they caused. A spirit of ‘Britain Can Take It’ or ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was often notably absent. Small wonder, since not only were the British public completely unprepared but they
could all too plainly see that ‘the authorities’ were as well. For a long time there were no organised and co-ordinated civil defence measures: no air raid warning sirens, no official bomb shelters. Policemen wearing sandwich boards with messages in red capitals reading POLICE NOTICE: TAKE COVER or, alternatively, ALL CLEAR would pedal through East End streets on their regulation bicycles, ringing their bells.

The difficulties involved in setting up adequate defences against aerial bombing raids in 1915 should not be underestimated. Even giving the public an early enough warning was problematic. Telephones were still comparatively rare and every call had to be hand-connected by operators pushing plugs into switchboards at the few exchanges. The most reliable form of quick communication was probably by telegraph. (There were of course no household radio sets.) Observers stationed on the North Foreland or the Essex coast might – if they were extremely lucky – succeed in raising someone at a local airfield or in London by telephone or by ‘sending a wire’ if they heard what they thought were a Zeppelin’s engines overhead; but what then? In those days aircraft climbed with painful slowness. Zeppelins could easily out-climb any of them and go as high as 15,000 feet, way beyond any defender’s capability. It might take a single-seater scout half an hour to reach a mere 8,000 feet even before it began looking for the intruder. True, the airships had a top speed of only about 60 mph; but within two years the big Gotha bombers that succeeded them could reach 21,000 feet and a speed of 87 mph, a difficult challenge for any interceptor even in 1917, especially at night and without oxygen.

Meanwhile the British government, worried as they already were by the war’s dismally slow progress in France, became increasingly concerned about unrest at home. The anger caused by food shortages and bad working conditions, especially in the armaments factories, was increased by the panic induced by air raids. Particularly in London’s East End, where the docks were an obvious target and there were no proper air raid shelters, this
led to spectacular public funeral parades for the victims and also to strikes and rioting in the face of which the police were sometimes helpless. In fact, air raid casualties were often split along class lines since to the west and south of Holborn, and particularly in the West End, the numerous underground stations at least afforded a network of deep shelters. This inequity was exploited by union and strike leaders to reinforce their message that the whole conflict was a capitalist war, deliberately waged to enrich international bankers and arms manufacturers: one in which the British working class were mere cannon fodder in France and bomb fodder at home. The largely right-wing press countered with denunciations of official incompetence over civil defence and appeals to Britons’ innate bulldog patriotism. Propagandists like Horatio Bottomley, the crooked proprietor of the jingoistic newspaper
John Bull
, foamed with virulence against the Germans. Similarly, the otherwise socialist journalist Robert Blatchford fulminated at book length about the enemy’s ‘Cult of Frightfulness’:

The plea that the German atrocities in this war were perpetrated against orders, were against the wishes of the Kaiser, the General Staff and the German people, and that they have been magnified by the Allies, is a ‘terminological inexactitude’. For fifty years the gospel of Frightfulness has been preached in Germany; and the Germans, prone to violence, prone to hatred, rude in their language, coarse in their manners, have been apt pupils. So far from its being alien to the feeling of Germany or the tradition of the German Army, Frightfulness is part of the German code of war and is looked upon by soldiers and civilians alike as a useful and proper part of tactics and – business.
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Blatchford naturally had his counterparts in Germany. One of the
Hamburger Nachrichten
’s journalists wrote that ‘England’s shamelessness is not only abominable; it drives the blood to our
heads and makes us desire and demand a hard punishment for this frivolous and huckstering people. Therefore we cannot rain bombs enough on England, nor can enough of her ships be destroyed.’
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Protecting those ships was a priority for both the Royal Navy and its air service.

*

Throughout the war the RNAS (rather than the RFC) was charged with the air defence of Britain’s coasts and in particular the Channel and the North Sea. It entered the war with six airships and 93 aircraft. Many of these aircraft were seaplanes deployed on constant patrol for German U-boats; but as we know, RNAS squadrons were also land-based in France and Belgium where they shared duties with the RFC. ‘Seaplanes’ in this context generally meant floatplanes: aircraft that take off and land on water using fixed floats or pontoons rather than flying boats whose fuselage is also a hull for landing directly on the water. Since most early aircraft were single-engined they were best suited to become floatplanes because they rode high enough on the water on their pontoons for the propeller and engine to be clear of spray (which was not always true of flying boats floating on their hulls). On the other hand the floats added weight and aerodynamic drag that still further reduced their already limited agility in the air. All aircraft design represents compromise, and the Kaiserliche Marine made it still harder for its own airmen following an order in March 1912 that all German naval aircraft had henceforth to be amphibians, with the added weight and drag of wheels.

The major problem for all seaplanes was that of navigation, which in those days was hard enough for aircraft flying over dry land. Over a featureless ocean out of sight of land or in restricted visibility it could be nightmarish, and scores of naval aircraft on both sides simply disappeared without trace. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bravery of a pilot and observer setting off alone on maritime patrol looking for enemy ships, aircraft and
submarines over grey wastes of sea in flimsy wooden machines with open cockpits, a single engine, limited fuel, often no wireless and an unreliable compass; and all this in maritime areas where winds could change in a moment and sea mists gather out of nowhere. They flew day after day, all year round, often never seeing any shipping at all. It was possible for airmen to see not one single enemy vessel in 400 hours’ risky flying; and yet the job had to be done. If forced down by engine failure and lucky enough to make a decent landing on the sea they would probably be unable to take off again even if they managed to clear a blocked fuel pipe, for it would surely have been well-nigh impossible as well as dangerous to swing the propeller to restart the engine when standing on a narrow, heaving float. If they were carrying a wicker basket of homing pigeons they could send off a message giving their position as well as they were able, fully aware that they might be condemned to drift for days without water or food until they chanced to be spotted by a passing vessel of whatever nationality. That was if they were lucky. If they made a bad landing on a rough sea and wrecked the aircraft they would more likely cling to a float until cold or fatigue overcame them.

If a patrolling seaplane did spot an enemy ship or surfaced submarine, it would have to resist engaging because the priority was to report the vessel’s course and position. It was some time before seaplanes on North Sea patrol were equipped with wireless, able like their dry-land equivalents spotting for the artillery in France to tap out messages on a Morse key. The RNAS had developed the Sterling Spark transmitter, also widely used by the RFC, but it only became at all common in 1917. It was even longer before aircraft carried a receiver as well as a transmitter, enabling the sender to know whether his message had even got through successfully. All in all, the demands on a naval seaplane observer were prodigious. He had to navigate for hours on end across a featureless expanse solely by means of a chart, a compass, and dead reckoning, at any time expected to be able to give an
accurate ‘fix’ of his position. (German pilots coined their own somewhat scornful word for being lost,
verfranzt
, which derived from their generic name for observers, Franz.) He had to understand his wireless set thoroughly as well as be fluent in Morse code. He needed to be a practised machine-gunner and also able to aim and drop any small under-wing bombs the aircraft was carrying. And finally, if forced down he would need to be a good practical seaman to increase his chances of survival.