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  Aces High

  The War in the Air over the Western Front 1914–18

  Alan Clark

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: The Opening Shots

  Background 1914–15

  1 Airmen

  The life of the pilots in the first year of the war

  Part Two: The Weapons are Forged

  Background 1915–16

  2 Machines

  The evolution of aircraft

  3 Tactics

  The development of flying skills

  4 Death

  Horrors of aerial warfare

  Part Three: The Killing Time

  Background 1917

  5 Aces

  The qualities that made the greatest airmen

  6 Circuses

  The period of German supremacy

  7 Squadrons

  The Allies’ recovery

  8 Braves

  The Escadrille Americaine

  9 Storks

  The French Escadrilles

  Part Four: The End of the Battles

  Background 1918

  10 Vapour Trails

  The last months of the war

  Appendices

  1 Comparative weights and performance of leading combat aircraft of the First World War

  2 Comparative chart showing when leading combat aircraft were in operation during the First World War

  Prologue

  Picture if you can what it meant for the first time when all the world of aviation was young and fresh and untried, when to rise at all was a glorious adventure, and to find oneself flying swiftly in the air, the realization of a life-long dream.

  Comtesse de Landlot

  Everybody who was anybody, the young, the dashing, the adventurous, wanted to learn to fly. But who would teach them? Each individual (and they were not many) who knew something about flying, had his own theories about tuition. Some were sound, others criminally dangerous.

  The most popular technique – the ‘French School’ – was like learning to swim, starting at the shallow end. First the would-be pilots would sit in their aircraft running up the engine and looking around the cockpit in eager bewilderment at the controls while the instructor or some expert well-wisher leaned over their shoulder, blown by the wind, shouting out facts and ‘hints’ above the roar of the engine. Then the instructor would step down and the pupil would be on his own. He would open the throttle and make the aircraft ‘taxi’ about on the grass trying (but with little effect for there was no proper airflow over their surfaces) to get some reaction from the controls. At a nod from his instructor, he would increase the throttle opening and the tail would lift, the aeroplane would travel at a considerable speed and perhaps for brief seconds with the more adventurous the wheels would leave the turf, although in theory it was intended that this should be saved for the following day.

  An American pupil at the French school gives a vivid account of his experience:

  When a student was first learning to crow-hop up and down a field, he’d take off, rise about ten or twenty feet and then bring the ship down almost flat, hardly peaking at all, by blipping the motor on and off. About four or five feet off the ground, the amateur eagle just let her drop ker-wham.

  The sound was the general effect of an earthquake in a hardware store, but the miracle was that the ship seemed to suffer no particular ill effects. A tire here or a couple of wires there would go, or perhaps a shock-absorber cord, but nothing happened to render the ship unfit for further use.

  Gradually the pupil would progress. The aeroplane would be in the air for longer and longer periods at a time and slowly, by trial and error, the pilot would discover how the controls responded. Mechanical waywardness and the frailty of the airframe itself compounded his problems and gradually as he gained altitude, moving into and above the clouds, strange, hidden mysteries emerged.

  The importance of wind and air current revealed themselves. Air pockets, caused by sudden fluctuations in atmospheric temperatures, seized the aeroplane and carried it without warning and despite anything that the pilot could do through the engine or ailerons. In the depths of the Salisbury Plain training area a narrow, wooded cleft, some nine miles from Upavon aerodrome, came to be known as the valley of death. Between 1909 and 1913 seven aircraft crashed there, seized on fine summer evenings by its peculiar spiralling air currents and dashed to pieces in the trees. You can visit the place today, unaltered since that time and curiously redolent of its victims’ aura.

  And then in still air there was another phenomenon. The most frightening of all, and one which for the first two years of the war only a few brave men had mastered, was to exercise a permanent constraint on the airman’s inclination to ‘stunt’ his plane. When a pilot went to make a turn and banked the aircraft over, it would lose speed very rapidly. As the airflow over the wing surfaces diminished – or indeed vanished altogether – the controls became lighter and the aircraft’s response diminished, speed fell off very rapidly and a stall followed. Then the whole feeling of flight changed. The noise died away, the sound of wind in struts and rigging remained, but took on a new and sinister quality. Over the side of his cockpit the pilot could see the fields, lanes, copses and streams, all the happy panorama of the earth going round, and round, and round. Opening the throttle, making the engine scream, pushing the stick this way or that, was to no avail. Some pilots, very few, discovered in their panic and quite accidentally the correct technique, and lived. But even they found it hard to remember exactly what they had done. The ‘spin’, when the aeroplane was no longer technically aerodynamic but was simply a large girating kite of metal, wood and canvas, doomed to hit the earth with the force of gravity because it was heavier than air, the element in which it had so insolently tried to move, was the most dreaded plight that could befall an airman.

  As there was no cure it was necessary simply to eschew the thought. For three thousand years the only manner in which humans had been able to move independently and at a greater speed than their own legs would carry them, was on horseback. The railway engine (‘the iron horse’) had given them a kind of confined mobility, and then had come the motor-car, giving them independence also. But to the motor-car at every stage of its development analogies and comparisons with chivalry and the horse had been applied. If anything, the aeroplane with its strange and variable personality, its response to the ‘rider’s’ hands, its temperament, seemed more analogous to the horse than its earthbound predecessor, although both depended upon the internal combustion engine. No cavalryman would allow his horse to lie down and roll while he was in the saddle; a touch of the whip (pushing the nose down) would cure an incipient stall. Equally it was a sign of the grossest incompetence – which might have fatal results – if the ‘horse’ should take the bit between its teeth and gallop, heedless of its rider, in a long and steepening dive. Steady disciplined flight was the ideal. ‘Stunting’ was regarded as dangerous and unnecessary.

  Nobody was quite clear about the real purpose of flight – certainly it was not speedy travel, for an express railway train, or even a good Rolls-Royce tourer, was considerably faster. When the military men devoted their minds to it (which was seldom’ they thought only in terms of ‘observation’ – for which requirement, of course, any deviation from straight and level flight was to be deplored.

  Yet it is in the nature of man to press into the unknown. The very fact that certain manœuvres were forbidden or fatal lured pilots into attempting them. The first man to fly inverted and survive was a (possibly intoxicated) Russian nobleman, Count Chalakoff. Word spread of his feat among the aero clubs that had mushroomed throughout Europe, and keen and extravagant competition followed among those who wished to claim the same achievement.

  Flying e
xhibitions became the smartest thing. Many of the wealthy sportsmen who had spent the previous three or four years avidly following the great inter-city automobile races and trying their thunderous Benz and Napier cars down the dusty and deserted Routes Nationales of France, now turned avidly to this new medium. Weekly, it seemed, new feats and experiments were reported. Every step forward was a ‘record’, a target for those who followed to aim at.

  In Britain the link with automobile racing was emphasized by the proximity of the Royal Aero Club (who granted would-be aviators their certificates of proficiency) to the great banked track at Brooklands. The young bloods who fought their 11 litre Benz and Peugeot motors down the railway straight and across the Byfleet Banking, would gather at the Blue Anchor pub and exchange stories with this strange, new, yet enviable breed – the aviators.

  Somewhat reluctantly the army establishment began to lay plans for a flying component, which came into existence as the Royal Flying Corps on 13 April 1912, absorbing the previous Air Battalion. Significantly it was accorded only the status of a corps (comprising a Military Wing, a Naval Wing and a Central Flying School), thus ensuring that those charged both with its administration and tactical deployment would be kept in a properly subordinate position and rank. Indeed, it is likely that the army was prompted by its natural rivalry with the Admiralty, who at the instigation of Winston Churchill and others had been quick off the mark in establishing the Naval Air Service, which had been placed under the autonomy of the Admiralty on 23 June 1914 and competed for funds from the Treasury. Until the outbreak of war candidates for the Royal Flying Corps had first to qualify for the Royal Aero Club pilot certificate by taking a civilian course at their own expense (no easy task on a subaltern’s pay and leave schedule). Senior regimental officers discouraged their favourites from applying for a transfer and there was an unspoken implication that those who tried for the RFC were unconventional – a serious offence in the military code – or, still worse, ‘unsatisfactory’.

  After the battles of the Marne and the Aisne, where the airmen had proved their worth but their ‘wastage’ rate had increased alarmingly, the army undertook to train volunteers to fly ab initio. But still the second question in the interview could fail the candidate. The first (to which there could only be one answer) was: ‘Why do you want a transfer?’ The second was: ‘Can you ride?’

  Military instruction was if anything less comprehensible than in the old civilian schools. The chosen mount was the Maurice Farman biplane with a Renault engine known as a ‘Shorthorn’. The Shorthorn had certain basic design defects. But knowledge of aerodynamics was still in its infancy and the instructors were too busy or too ignorant to analyse or report on those defects. By trial and error it had been found that some manœuvres induced disaster but it was assumed that the fault lay in the manœuvre rather than in the aeroplane – which had the unfortunate result that a large number of pilots were ‘passed out’ with an inbred resistance to attempting certain kinds of aerobatics regardless of what their subsequent aircraft might be. The Shorthorn at least had the advantage of dual-controls, but verbal instruction in the air was impossible. The pupil allowed his hands and feet to rest gently on joystick and rudder bars and ‘feel’ the impulses of his instructor’s movement. Some of the latter were intelligent and sympathetic; but as more and more instructors crashed to their death following a pupil’s blunder, others of their number came quickly to resent over-confidence or ‘ham-handedness’ and would nurture their pupils to the solo stage by the simple expedient of seldom relaxing their own grip upon the controls.

  One recruit gave a vivid description of his first flight:

  The nacelle was half-way up the interplane struts. A shallow side panel hinged down to simplify the gymnastic feat of entering it. When seated I lifted the panel and secured it with ordinary door bolts. I was in the nose, well ahead of the wings. The instructor sat behind, perched between the upper and lower wings’ front edges.

  Wooden bearers, running aft from the nacelle’s structure, supported part of the engine between the wings and part behind them where the pusher propeller could revolve. A mechanic stood within the booms and wires behind the propeller. It was his unenviable task to help to start the engine from his encaged position.

  Before doing anything he first assured himself by question and answer that the pilot’s ignition was switched off and the gasoline turned on. Then he primed the engine from the carburetter. He did this by manually rotating the two-blade wood propeller as if he were himself a starter motor. It was hard work. When he thought he had done enough he paused and called to the pilot: ‘Contact, sir.’

  After the pilot had responded by switching on his ignition and then announcing ‘Contact’, the mechanic hopefully and lustily heaved the propeller a quarter-turn round, while the pilot twirled a hand starter magneto to boost the spark at the plugs. Usually the Renault rattled into life after one or two heaves and the mechanic could emerge from his cage.

  This air-cooled V8’s pistons had ample clearances. One could always hear them slapping against the cylinder walls, loudest when the engine was cold. With no device to compensate for cylinder expansion and contraction, its valves and tappets chattered incessantly. Its propeller revolved on an extension of the camshaft at half engine-speed and the reduction gear was noisy.

  The fuel tank, between the rear seat and the engine, was in a nasty place should a crash occur. The hot engine could break away from its mounting, rupture the gasoline tank, ignite its contents, and the burning mass might fall on the aircrew. Fortunately for their peace of mind, few, if any, pilots or pupils thought about the several features of the Shorthorn that lowered its safety level below par. Enough that they were flying! For what more should they ask?

  As for the distinction between military and civilian flying, this – if its existence was admitted at all – was ignored. Even the great German General Staff, a body less hostile to new ideas than its English and French counterparts, had reported in September of 1914 that: ‘Experience has shown that a real combat in the air such as journalists and romancers have described, should be considered a myth. The duty of the aviator is to see, not to fight.’

  Of the total of thirty-seven aeroplanes that went to France as the advance guard of the Royal Flying Corps nine days after the declaration of the war, none carried armament as part of its specification. The pilot’s first task was to keep the aeroplane in the air at all; second, to observe and report back what he had seen. The aeroplane was a ‘flying horse’ and treated by most of the officers on the Staff with some contempt for the very reason that it was unarmed and also because it could not be properly drilled or ‘dressed’. There was also a certain resentment among the more orthodox and conservative (always the majority) to this noisy, dirty machine which frightened the real horses when it came too close and which was already showing the power of attracting a somewhat ‘undesirable’ type of officer as pilot. Certainly the new breed, the ‘aviators’, had much in their make-up to irritate the conventional military mind. Young, full of zest, questioning, with a less than reverent attitude to pomp and discipline, they shared one common characteristic (which is often regarded with suspicion by the military hierarchy, who prefer discipline) – an unquestioned physical courage.

  For the first few months of the war the rival aviators would greet each other, on the rare occasions when they met, with a wave of the hand or perhaps some little piece of display to illustrate their prowess, a flick of the wings or a difficult half-roll. The bond which they shared – of being heavier than air and yet moving freely in it by virtue of their own skills – was stronger than the hostility which they were expected to display as soldiers of nations at war. But then, even if the hostility was to remain dormant for a few more weeks or months, a kind of sporting rivalry began to gather momentum. And as is the case where sport and national prestige run in harness, it became increasingly embittered. On 25 August, three aeroplanes of No. 2 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps sighted a single
German in a Taube observing the French lines of battle. Lieutenant H.D.Harvey-Kelly, the flight leader, dived on the enemy and closed right up on his tail. The German pilot, alarmed by the sudden proximity of this English madman with his threshing propeller four feet from the Taube, dived to get away from him. Harvey-Kelly remained glued to the adversary’s rudder. The other two pilots of the flight caught on and joined in the game, one flying on either side of the hapless German. Unable to comprehend what was going on, the unfortunate German pilot put his Taube down in the nearest field. Harvey-Kelly and his brother officers immediately landed themselves, to see the German running headlong to the shelter of a near-by wood. The unarmed Englishmen followed him in and prowled about in the undergrowth for a few minutes without success, then returned to the field where they put a match to the Taube and took off, having recorded the first aerial victory of the war.

  How innocent and playful this episode seems when one looks back on it across the headstones of all those graves that were to follow! A rising crescendo for the next four years of all those pilots who were to die with blasphemy on their lips; that were burned, smashed, mutilated, or driven to insanity in a combat that was to become increasingly ruthless and degraded with every month that passed.

  Part One

  The Opening Shots

  Background 1914–15

  When the First World War started in August 1914, each of the major powers involved possessed an air force of sorts. Without exception, each was to be shown that the precepts on which she had built up a force of aeroplanes had been not so much wrong as misguided. The most powerful air force was that of Germany, followed by France, with Great Britain’s meagre force a considerable way down the list. Each of these three powers, who were to contest the mastery of the air over the Western Front for the rest of the war, considered that the role of the aeroplane was that of reconnaissance, and in a way this was true. Although the world’s first heavier-than-air, powered and controlled aeroplane had flown more than ten years previously, and the science of flight had advanced rapidly, the aeroplane was still very much in its infancy. The loads that aeroplanes could carry were still very small, and the carriage of anything more than the crew was a severe impediment to the performance of the machine. To this extent, then, senior army officers, who in all cases controlled the air forces, were correct in stating reconnaissance as the aeroplane’s role. But in the long term they were incorrect – they had failed to take into account the rapid rate of growth in the science of flying. Soon aircraft would be capable of longer and faster flight with increased loads, and weapons, offensive or defensive, could be installed. Certainly the most valuable purpose fulfilled by aircraft in the First World War was tactical and strategic reconnaissance; but each side should have realized that the other side would start arming its machines as soon as it could for the very purpose of denying its opponents the chance to spy out troop dispositions, defences and the like, from the air. From this, it should have been deduced that each machine would require some form of defensive armament, and that an arms race in the air would begin. And from spying out an enemy’s dispositions it is only a small step to the first attempts to do something about them from the same machine as that from which they were spied; the air would witness the arrival of bombers.