Marked for Death (10 page)

This is obviously not to deny that hundreds of WWI pilots often found a new type wonderful and exhilarating to fly, usually because it was so much better than the machine they were used to and which had increasingly been feeling like a deathtrap when confronting the enemy. On the British side Sopwith’s Pup, Triplane and Camel, as well as the Royal Aircraft Factory’s S.E.5a, were a revelation to those who first flew them in combat; and at
the time, as also today, each aircraft had its dedicated supporters. W. E. Johns’s punning title for an early collection of his stories,
The Camels Are Coming
, shows that fighter still had a certain legendary quality to it fourteen years after the war’s end, even though its active service life lasted a scant eighteen months after its introduction in the summer of 1917.

The stumpy little Camel was neither beautiful nor easy to fly. In fact it was notoriously tricky, ‘a fierce little beast’, as one airman described it, although those who mastered it found it a highly effective fighting machine. All the same, by late 1917 many German pilots reckoned their new Pfalz D.III was easily the Camel’s equal and in less than a year the Fokker D.VII was plainly the better fighter. One aviation historian, the late Peter Grosz (son of the German Expressionist painter Georg Grosz and an acknowledged expert on German aircraft), described the Camel baldly as ‘probably the most over-rated and accident-prone fighter in the Allied inventory’, going on to add that ‘surprisingly, only the D.H.5 was superior to the Pfalz in speed, climb rate and manoeuvrability’.
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‘Accident-prone’ the Camel certainly was, which must partly explain why it so easily heads the list of British types lost. Many an experienced British pilot dreaded having to convert to it:

They were by far the most difficult of service machines to handle. Many pilots killed themselves by crashing in a right-hand spin when they were learning to fly them. A Camel hated an inexperienced hand, and flopped into a frantic spin at the least opportunity. They were unlike ordinary aeroplanes, being quite unstable, immoderately tail-heavy, so light on the controls that the slightest jerk or inaccuracy would hurl them all over the sky, difficult to land, deadly to crash: a list of vices to emasculate the stoutest courage, and the first flight on a Camel was always a terrible ordeal. They were bringing out a two-seater training Camel for dual work, in the hope of reducing that thirty percent of crashes on first solo flights.
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Nevertheless, once in the air the Camel had an agility all its own, partly down to the lightness of its construction and the weight of engine, guns, tanks and pilot all being concentrated in the nose. The gyroscopic effect of the engine was very marked, as might be expected with a mass of 350 lb whirling around at 1,250 rpm. Seen from the pilot’s little wicker seat the propeller rotated clockwise. This meant that if he climbed or turned to the right the nose would drop sharply, and if he dived or turned to the left the nose would rise. It also meant that lightning-fast right-handed turns were easily performed. Left-handed turns were another matter, however, and pilots found they could often turn 90 degrees left quicker by making a right turn of 270 degrees. This is not an ideal characteristic in any aircraft, but the most skilled pilots eventually found ways of instinctively going with rather than against the engine’s gyroscopic pull. The Camel is credited with being the top-scoring fighter of any side in the war, with 1,294 victories.
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On the other hand it killed 350 trainee pilots, or more than one non-combat death for every four enemy aircraft downed (but not necessarily with a fatality): a high price to pay.
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Like the contemporary French SPAD S.XIII, it stalled readily and spun viciously. Because of its tail-heaviness it could never for a moment be flown ‘hands-off’ and was therefore a very tiring aircraft to fly. Its combat success rate unquestionably makes the Camel one of the best fighters – and by that sole yardstick
the
best – of WWI. Yet that still does not make it a great aircraft because it so obviously could be improved, as was demonstrated by Sopwith’s next aircraft, the Snipe, which came late in the war and was willy-nilly adopted as the RAF’s first postwar standard fighter because there was nothing else available at the price. The Snipe was derived from the Camel and was equally manoeuvrable (hence its name), but it was much easier to control while affording the pilot far better all-round visibility. It was also slightly faster, being fitted with Bentley’s powerful BR.2 rotary engine.

Some biplanes were undoubtedly a good deal more elegant than others, and aircraft with the longer stationary (especially
in-line) engines often looked more streamlined and better-proportioned. In this the German machines predominated because their designers were less wedded to rotary engines than were the French, the British, the Italians or the Russians. But the Royal Aircraft Factory’s S.E.5a with its stationary Hispano-Suiza or Wolseley Viper V-8 engine had the look of a serious modern fighter and was much respected by German pilots. Once initial problems with the supply and reliability of the engines had been overcome, the S.E.5a was looked on as the equal of the new Fokker D.VII, which ended the war with a fearsome reputation for all-round competence. After the Armistice the Allies, in punitive mood, impounded Germany’s entire fleet of Fokker D.VIIs as being too dangerous to be allowed to fall into others’ hands. This was really pure superstitiousness because by then the Fokker was already dated. Its top speed was only about 118 mph whereas Britain’s new Martinsyde F.4 ‘Buzzard’ was capable of a top speed at low level of 146 mph and was technically the fastest aircraft of the war. Unfortunately, it came too late to make the game-changing impression it otherwise might have done.

Long before then the war had determined the trajectory of aviation and of flying itself. A quirk of history ensured that what had started out as an entirely civilian enterprise had been comprehensively hijacked by the military. This is why considerations of a pilot’s pleasure – or even of his safety – did not figure on the list of specifications to which aircraft designers worked. This was also made clear in the matter of how to arm aeroplanes, where guns and bombs soon became the most significant part of many an aircraft’s payload, outweighing the aircrew both literally and metaphorically. The next chapter deals with this subject which, in the case of machine guns, was to afford a turning point in aerial warfare.

When the war ended in November 1918 the Germans were perfecting a flamethrower that could be deployed against troops from the air, and their increasingly threadbare and outnumbered air force was also taking delivery of the formidable twin-barrelled Gast machine gun capable of firing 1,800 rounds a minute. The French were adapting their four-engined ‘Henri Paul’ triplane bomber to take a massive 75 mm cannon (the calibre of a small artillery field piece) for trench strafing and general ground attack. And with the advent of the Handley Page V/1500 bomber the British had already begun dropping the 1,650 lb SN bomb they had developed, a munition whose weight and size would have made it inconceivable a mere four years earlier. Domination of the enemy’s airspace by sheer force of arms was now universally recognised as modern warfare’s
sine qua non
.

Back in August 1914 none of the high commands could possibly have imagined such hectic technological progress. In fact, at that time the question of whether to consider an aircraft itself as any sort of potential weapon revealed a good deal about the different armies’ reactions to the new technology and their varying ability to see its possibilities. Certain individuals had long since made up their minds, however. In 1912 a far-sighted Italian officer, Giulio Douhet, wrote a manual entitled
Rules for the Use of Aeroplanes in War
that advocated bombing from a high altitude. This was based on his own military experiences in Libya the previous year, when in November 1911 Italy had become the
first nation in history to use a heavier-than-air winged machine in war. Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti in his Blériot had hand-dropped four bombs of four pounds apiece on Ottoman troops in Libya, leaning out of his cockpit and letting them go one by one. In the same campaign Captain Carlo Piazza became the first man in a reconnaissance aircraft to take aerial photographs during an actual war. The Futurist and poet F. T. Marinetti was in Libya at the time and fancifully described a new being: the air hero. ‘Higher, more handsome than the sun Captain Piazza soared, his bold, sharp-edged face chiselled by the wind, his little moustache crazy with will.’
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However, dropping explosives on the heads of those below was one thing; the idea of using aircraft to fight duels in the sky quite another. In 1911 the French pilot Ferdinand Ferber gave an interview for an aviation journal in which it became clear that it had never occurred to the journalist that one aircraft might actually fight another in the air. Why not? asked Ferber. If such a combat could take place between a falcon and a raven, why might it not between two armed airmen?

The fact is that practically as soon as the Wrights’ ‘Flyer’ left the ground in 1903 there was speculation about the new technology’s military potential, something that has no doubt always been true of any new technology. Many who had foreseen the possibilities were not military men at all. In his writings and public speeches the libertine Italian poet and Futurist Gabriele d’Annunzio had been a noisy enthusiast for the glories of mechanised warfare since at least the turn of the century. He first went up in an aircraft in the summer of 1909 from an airfield in Rome where Wilbur Wright was teaching Italians how to fly. This aerial baptism turned d’Annunzio into an ardent devotee of flying and its military possibilities, and he was certainly not alone in this reaction. It was all of a piece with the fashion of the day for power and speed as already epitomised by the car and the train and celebrated earlier that same year by Marinetti’s
Futurist Manifesto
. H. G. Wells’s
The War in the Air
(1908) has already been alluded to for its novelistic vision of a London razed to the
ground by aerial attack. Ironically, Wells was writing his book even as the new Hague Convention was being promulgated. Article 25 stated: ‘The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.’ This particular Article was itself destined to become one of the war’s earliest casualties.

Wells was by no means alone in his anxieties. Many of his contemporaries were also rendered thoughtful by the military possibilities those spruce-and-fabric early aircraft offered. As soon as Blériot had made his epic flight across the Channel in July 1909 the British journalist Harold F. Wyatt wrote an article, ‘Wings of War’,
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in which he wondered how many of the crowds assembled on the cliffs of Dover to welcome the Frenchman realised they were ‘assisting at the first stage of the funeral of the sea power of England’. In this new air age, Englishmen would be ‘doomed helplessly to gaze into the skies while fleets which they are powerless to reach pass over their heads,’ a prediction destined to become true within six years when the first German bombs fell unopposed on London. This was to become a common theme in British journalism of the day, joining a strand of thinking in continental Europe whose misgivings about the malign potential of airships and aircraft was in marked contrast to attitudes in the United States where, thousands of miles away and unmenaced by warlike neighbours, Americans generally saw aviation more naively as a liberating technology that would spread Progress for mankind.

Few armies have ever been remarkable for their eagerness to embrace novelty, the British Army least of all. (One Chief of the Imperial General Staff wrote triumphantly in his retirement: ‘There have been many changes in the British Army during my term of office, and I have opposed them all.’
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) The formation of the Royal Flying Corps in 1912 was the Army’s reluctant acknowledgement that aircraft might conceivably be useful as ‘eyes in the sky’. They could act as a more mobile adjunct to observation balloons to watch for enemy troop movements and
take photographs of things like supply trains and ammunition dumps. With a bit of ingenuity they might even be able to tell artillery batteries where their shells were falling. But these envisaged roles were essentially passive and defensive. At the level of high commands there was little serious thought given to a more aggressive role for aircraft, such as fighting or bombing.

Such attitudes must have been intensely frustrating to those younger officers – German as well as British – who perceived the military possibilities beyond mere reconnaissance that the new aviation offered. They were abreast of developments that were already turning futuristic dreams into a primitive sort of reality. It is unlikely that any of them would have read Giulio Douhet, who remained largely unknown outside Italy for another twenty years; but they would have known about the Italian Army’s use of aircraft against the Ottoman Turks they had successfully evicted from Libya. They would also have known that French aircraft had similarly dropped bombs in their campaign against rebels in Morocco between 1912 and 1914, as had the Spanish Army in its campaign in the Moroccan Protectorate in 1913 (using four Austrian Lohner aircraft). In 1914 Italy was not yet at war in Europe and it would have been to France that young aviation-minded officers looked as leading the field in treating the aeroplane as a potential weapon, not least because the French had the most advanced aircraft. It should be added that at this stage Britain’s Royal Naval Air Service seems to have contained more progressively minded men among its high command than the RFC, a characteristic that in certain ways would persist.