In the late hours of Sunday, 1 October 1916, one of the present authors was aroused from his youthful slumbers, inserted into a dressing-gown, and brought downstairs for greater safety. The Zepps were over again, and a six year old could happily look forward to the pleasures of cherry cake and a glass of milk in the middle of the night.
On this occasion there was soon greater excitement. To the banging of the north London guns was added the news, brought in by a neighbour, that the searchlights were ‘holding’ one of the raiders. A rush into the street followed. The night was starlit between the clouds, and away to the north a Zeppelin was indeed clearly visible, trapped in a cone of light. Suddenly there was a burst of flame, which swiftly spread along the entire length of the huge machine. ‘Blazing from end to end like an enormous cigar,’1 the Zeppelin canted over and sank nose-down towards the earth. Sounds of cheering came over the air. Then a final flash, sudden darkness and an afterglow in the sky.
The next day a visitor to the wreckage, luckier than the thousands who crammed the trains to Potters Bar but were denied a close view, observed two large heaps of twisted metal widely separated in a field, a pile of charred corpses, and indentations in the ground made by one of the crew who had presumably jumped to avoid incineration: ‘a round hole for the head, then a deep impression of the trunk, then the widely separated legs – a most uncanny sight’.2
The destruction of L31 by the bullets of Second Lieutenant W. J. Tempest flying a BE2C was the fourth combat-loss to be inflicted on the German airship services within a month. After a year and a half in which the Zeppelins had made thirty-seven raids without a single loss over British soil, they had suddenly become prey to the defences. The shooting down of two more on 27 November 1916, and the dwindling of further Zeppelin effort into a mere dozen raids during the rest of the war, only confirmed that the first assault on Britain from the skies had been decisively defeated.
‘When did the Battle of Britain really begin? A not unreasonable answer is that the Battle of Britain began when the Wright brothers flew.’ So wrote the American historian Alfred Gollin, who went on to show that of all the governments to express an interest in the Wright brothers’ achievement, Britain’s was the first.3
History is indeed a continuum, and there is a chain of progression between the innocent half-minute hops in the sandhills of North Carolina in 1903 and the deadly encounters at 350 mph 18,000 feet above the chequered counties of southern England thirty-seven years later. Of the many links in this chain, few are more important than the experiences of 1914–18, a glance at which will show how victory in 1940 stemmed at least in part from developments more than twenty years earlier.
The threat to Britain from an enemy in the skies was appreciated from the earliest days of flying. The story is well known of how the newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe was angered to read in his Daily Mail only a brief factual report of Alberto Santos Dumont’s pioneer aeroplane flight in Europe in 1906 – a mere 722 feet. The news, Northcliffe told the offending editor, was ‘not that Santos Dumont flies 722 feet, but that England is no longer an island. It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes.’4 The lesson became clearer still when Louis Blériot flew the Channel in 1909 and the German Army and Navy began to interest themselves in the dirigible balloons or airships invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
The British response to this new danger was to create the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), with naval and military wings, in 1912. This, however, raised as many questions of responsibility for air defence as it solved – questions of the utmost importance, since intelligently allocated and clearly recognised spheres of authority and lines of command are a prime requisite for military success. The historic roles in the defence of the United Kingdom were reasonably clear: it was the duty of the Royal Navy to prevent invaders approaching Britain, and the duty of the Army to throw them back, or out, if they got there. Now, by extension, it was the duty of the Army to deal with enemy aircraft which crossed British coasts. But air attack was likely at first to fall on ports and naval bases, so the Navy was soon busy providing aircraft and air stations for their defence. With the Army concentrating purely on reconnaissance tasks for aircraft, and the Navy, under the energetic and adventurous Mr Churchill at the Admiralty, much more aware of wider possibilities like attacking Zeppelins in their sheds, the two wings of the RFC rapidly grew apart and finally separated. Meanwhile, at the outbreak of war in 1914, the Army sent almost its entire strength in operational aircraft – four squadrons of the RFC – over to France to reconnoitre for the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). This produced the situation aptly described by Churchill: ‘The War Office … claimed that they alone should be charged with the responsibility for home defence. When asked how they proposed to discharge this duty they admitted sorrowfully that they had not got the machines, and could not get the money. They adhered, however, to the principle.’5
In the face of the facts of the situation, principle had to go out of the window. In September 1914 the Admiralty was formally charged with the air defence of the United Kingdom, the role of the Army being to co-operate with guns and any aircraft awaiting despatch overseas. But as the Army soon had more men and guns available than the Navy, it was quickly given the task of defending most of the strategic points outside London. No military aircraft were set aside to protect any particular place, but when available they were to co-operate with the naval aircraft. Under arrangements of this sort it was not surprising that, despite many advances in the provision of aircraft, airfields, high-angled guns, searchlights and other elements of defence, including training for night flying, the defences succeeded in damaging only one of the thirty-seven Zeppelins and none of the four German aeroplanes which crossed the British coasts during 1915.6
With more resources available, in February 1916 the Army resumed responsibility for air defence over Great Britain – though not in advance of its shores. The next few months, with Field Marshal Lord French as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, saw much progress. Height-finders were introduced for the guns; the gun and searchlight defences of London and other centres were thickened up; and five RFC squadrons – increased to eleven by the end of the year – were allocated specifically to Home Defence. In an ‘Ever-Ready’ zone aircraft stood by and flew regular night patrols. A ‘barrage-line’ of air stations and searchlights was developed inland parallel with the east coast. For air-raid warning, dependent on reports from thousands of observer posts and not yet generally communicated to the public, the military took over from the chief constables and operated a much more effective system with control areas based on the main telephone centres. At the sharp end of things, incendiary and explosive bullets began to replace the previously ineffective machine-gun ammunition and the attempts to bomb Zeppelins from above. After a preliminary success in April 1916, the result was seen six months later in the virtual ending of the ‘Zeppelin menace’.
On 28 November 1916, only a few hours after the destruction of two Zeppelins, some bombs fell on London in broad daylight from an unseen German aeroplane. It was the first episode of its kind, but a portent. The Zeppelins, for all their advantages in range, ceiling and bomb-load, had proved highly vulnerable to the defences and still more so to the weather. Aeroplanes were a different story.
For the next six months enemy air activity was slight and two of the Home Defence squadrons were sent over to France. Then, with the better weather, the Germans struck in force. On the afternoon of 25 May 1917 twenty-three Gothas, sturdy twin-engined bombers from what came to be unofficially known as the Englandgeschwader, set off from their bases in Belgium to attack London. Thwarted by cloud, most of them dropped bombs on Folkestone instead, killing ninety-five people. On 13 June– ‘the Wednesday’ of Londoners’ later memories – fourteen Gothas in clearer weather then penetrated to the heart of the capital. Flying high in formation like a flock of white birds, and watched in fascination by thousands of people below who at first mistook them for ‘friendlies’, they calmly unloaded their bombs on Liverpool Street Station and the neighbouring areas, killing 162 persons. Until heading home they met no challenge from the ninety-odd British fighters ordered into the air. Three weeks later the pattern was repeated when eighty-three fighters failed to intercept, or even see, Gothas bombing Harwich. Then on 7 July – ‘the Saturday’ – came the second big daylight raid on London. Again the Gothas rode the skies, undisturbed by ineffective gunfire. But this time, after dropping their bombs on the City, they paid a price – two shot or forced down on the flight back, three more wrecked in landing.7
This second daylight raid on London had profound effects. The public outcry against the weakness of the defences led to the setting up of a Prime Minister’s Committee on Air Organisation and Home Defence against Air-Raids. It consisted only of Lloyd George and General Smuts, with the latter doing all the work. Criticising ‘the dispersal of Command’ in the Home Defence Force under Lord French as between the RFC, the artillery and the Observation Corps, Smuts recommended on 19 July that all such forces should be placed under the control of an airman, responsible to French but ‘charged with the duty of working out all plans for the London Air Defence’.8
The institution of the London Air Defence Area, covering in fact south-east England, swiftly followed. To command it, a brilliant combination of airman and artillery officer was brought back from France in the person of Brigadier-General E. B. Ashmore. With naval fighters on the coast, a gun-belt planned to extend twenty-five miles round London, an RFC fighter patrol zone between the gun-belt and the capital, and finally gun defences within the capital itself, the whole defensive system became coherent. More and better British fighters, too, became available, as Sopwith Pups, Camels and Bristol fighters gradually replaced the slow, old BEs, and as daring pilots demonstrated that such inherently unstable aircraft could be successfully flown and landed at night. To direct the pilots towards the enemy in the air – there was as yet no radio telephony – a system of white arrow pointers was devised. ‘The great principle of air defence’, in Ashmore’s later words, was becoming recognised: ‘that although aeroplanes are the first means of defence, they are ineffective unless supported by a control system on the ground’.9 All told, the defenders could soon look forward to giving the raiders a hotter time.
So, indeed, it proved. During August 1917 the combination of better defences and strong north-westerly winds made the task of the Gothas much more difficult. Their losses on 22 August – three out often which attacked – spelt the end of German daylight raiding. The second phase of Germany’s air assault on the British homeland had ended, like the first, in favour of the defenders.10
For the Englandgeschwader, however, there was still the unexploited cover of night. Navigation in the dark would be difficult for the Gothas – unlike the Zeppelins they carried no wireless for direction-finding fixes – but at least they could hardly have an easier target to find than London. After an experimental raid on Chatham which took the defences completely by surprise, eleven Gothas set out the following night – 4 September 1917 – to attack the capital. Only five got through, but the damage they inflicted caused the British to estimate their numbers at twenty-six.
Again there was a public outcry, to which Ashmore was swift to respond. Fighter patrols were reorganised within a broader zone free from guns but with more searchlights, work was begun on sound locators, guns were brought in from outlying areas, and barrage fire became more accurate as the raiders were more accurately plotted from square to square in the gun zone. It was found, too, that single-seat fighters – Camels – could be successfully flown at night. In addition, balloon nets or aprons – steel wires suspended from groups of three or four barrage balloons yoked together with steel cables – were installed at points along the northern and eastern approaches to the capital. Flown at up to 10,000 feet, they were intended to force the raiders to a height which was more predictable for the gunners, and from which bombaiming would be less accurate.”
The Gothas’ most sustained night assault came in late September 1917. Between 24 September and 1 October they attacked London on no fewer than six nights – ‘the week of the harvest moon’. They were joined by half-a-dozen Riesen (Giants), huge multi-engined aircraft nearly as big as a World War II B29 Superfortress. With a crew of eleven, a bomb-load of two tons and a range of nearly 600 miles, they carried every known refinement of the time from wireless, an intercom system and electrically heated clothing for the crew to a wide selection of instruments including an artificial horizon.
This series of raids caused little physical damage by World War II standards, but nevertheless had big effects. Each night, thousands of Londoners poured into the underground railway stations: as the song of the time had it:
When the moon shines bright
Ma red-faced Rube,
Put your little hand in mine
And hop it for the tube.
Others took to the western suburbs or the countryside. In the East End of London the psychological trauma was deep. Despite earlier experiences in the war civilians still did not expect to be bombed, and least of all in a proud island which had successfully resisted intrusion for centuries. On all sides arose the cry not only for further strengthening of the defences, but for retaliation.
The organisation to make this possible had already been proposed in the second part of Smuts’s report, completed on 17 August 1917. Smuts suggested that the Air Board, a co-ordinating body of great achievement in the fields of aircraft production and allocation, should be replaced by a fully fledged Air Ministry ‘to control and administer all matters in connection with aerial warfare of all kinds whatsoever’. At the disposal of this Air Ministry would be a unified air force, co-equal with the Army and the Royal Navy, to be formed from the amalgamation of the RFC and the Royal Naval Air Service. Only by freeing this service from the direction of the Admiralty and the War Office, in Smuts’s opinion, could the resources be found for air operations independent of the Navy and the Army. By these he meant the proper protection of Britain against air attack and the bombing of the enemy homeland. In prophetic words he wrote of ‘the day … when air operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and popular centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war’.12
Once it was known that the Giants were operational and had been in action, Smuts’s recommendations were accepted and swiftly implemented. The Air Ministry came into being in January 1918, and the two air services became the Royal Air Force (RAF) on 1 April 1918. No great change in air defence arrangements immediately followed, but the other half of Smuts’s ‘independent’ air operations, the bombing of Germany, received a great impetus. RFC units in eastern France, which began bombing Germany regularly in October 1917, grew from a wing into a brigade into the RAF’s Independent Force, which in turn was meant to be the nucleus of the projected Inter-Allied Independent Air Force. When the Armistice came, the RAF was planning to bomb Germany the following year with a force of forty squadrons based in France and eight in England – four-engined Handley Page V1500S, capable of reaching Berlin. The cries of ‘give it’ em back’ which greeted Churchill in London’s bombed East End in 1940 had already resounded with equal vehemence in 1917.
Meanwhile, there was the battle against the German night raiders. They did not come very often – two or three times a month during the autumn and winter of 1917–18, and then not at all between 17 March and a final big fling on 19 May 1918. But their losses were greater; and on the last raid of 19 May, when less than half of the attacking force of forty-two got through to London, the defenders had their best night ever – three Gothas to the guns, three to the fighters, another Gotha down in England from engine failure and three more crash-landed in Belgium.
And there, apart from one fatal Zeppelin approach to Norfolk in August, the raiding ceased. One cause was undoubtedly the increased effectiveness of the defences; but the Allied bombing of western Germany, and still more the enemy’s need to concentrate all his resources on the desperate struggle in France and Belgium, also contributed powerfully to the German change of policy.
Was this another clear-cut victory for the defences? The answer must be ‘no’, as it was to be again during the German ‘night blitz’ of 1940–41. The verdict would seem to be a draw, though the official historian of the RAF in World War I, H. A. Jones, was in no doubt that the raids—even the Zeppelin raids – had been effective for Germany in terms of allocation of military resources.13 In operating the Englandgeschwader the Germans lost sixty Gothas – twenty-four shot down, thirty-six in crashes – and inflicted what was in reality insignificant damage. The effect of the raids on production was demonstrable but in total small, and on civilian morale was partial and very temporary. But during the last six months of the war the mere threat of raids, after the raiding had actually ceased, caused Britain to retain at home some 200 fighters which would have been invaluable on the Western Front, to say nothing of over 450 guns and over 600 searchlights.14
Whatever the balance sheet of the raids, there can be no doubt that they forced the United Kingdom to develop, from nothing, an admirably coherent and well-organised system of air defence. During the final months of the war Ashmore, unhappy that out of every eighteen pilots sent up to intercept only one usually got so much as a sight of an intruder, concentrated on some obvious weaknesses. To improve early warning, a beginning was made with installing a few sound locators; and a big new telephone network, independent of the public service, was set up throughout the system of control. To lessen night-flying accidents, there was better training and better equipment in cockpits and on the ground. To communicate with the pilots in the air, the radio telephone was developed. For day fighters, this became standard equipment by May 1918; for night fighters, it was restricted to the patrol leaders.15 In the Home Office sphere of public warning, general by 1917, the firing of maroons by day (and later at all hours) replaced earlier methods such as police wearing ‘Take Cover’ placards and blowing their whistles as they bicycled through the streets. Bugles, usually sounded by Boy Scouts, proclaimed the ‘All Clear’.*
The British victory in 1940, then, was very far from an improvisation. It rested on, among other things, the solid foundations of a system which had been largely evolved from experience in an earlier conflict. Here is Cecil Lewis, author of that wonderful account of a young man’s flying, Sagittarius Rising, describing proceedings at Hainault Farm in 1917: ‘Each squadron had a telephone operator constantly on duty. When raid warnings came through, he pressed a Morse Key close to hand sounding three large klaxon horns set up on the roof of the men’s quarters and the officers’ mess. The men swarmed into their kit and warmed up their engines. If the raid warning was followed by the action signal, machines were off the ground within a minute.”7
And here is Major-General Ashmore in 1918: ‘A deep zone of country surrounding London, and extending to the sea on the south-east and east, was already covered with defence units under my command – gun-stations, searchlights, aerodromes, balloon aprons, emergency landing grounds, coastal and inland watching posts. Each of them was now treated as an observation station and was connected up by telephone to a sub-control. The sub-controls (there were twenty-five of them) were in their turn connected to the central control in the Horse Guards. This central control consisted essentially of a large squared map fixed on a table, round which sat ten operators (plotters) provided with headphones; each being connected to two or three of the sub-controls. During operations, all the lines were kept through direct: there was no ringing up throughout the system.
‘When aircraft flew over the country, their position was reported every half-minute or so to the sub-control, where the course was plotted with counters on a large-scale map. These positions were immediately read off by a “teller” in the sub-control to the plotter in the central control, where the course was again marked out with counters. An ingenious system of coloured counters, removed at intervals, prevented the map from becoming congested during a prolonged raid.
‘I sat overlooking the map from the raised gallery; in effect, I could follow the course of all aircraft flying over the country, as the counters crept across the map. The system worked very rapidly. From the time when an observer at one of the stations in the country saw a machine over him, to the time when the counter representing it appeared on my map, was not, as a rule, more than half a minute.
‘In front of me a row of switches enabled me to cut into the plotter’s line, and talk to any of my subordinate commanders at the sub-controls.
‘The central control, in addition to receiving information from outside, constantly passed it out to the sub-controls concerned: so that the commander, say, of an anti-aircraft brigade would know, from moment to moment, where and when hostile aircraft would approach his guns.
‘By my side, in the gallery, sat the air force commander … with direct command lines to his squadrons, and a special line to a long-range wireless transmitter at Biggin Hill. This transmitter was used for giving orders to leaders of defending formations in the air during day time, in accordance with the movements of the enemy as shown on the control map.
‘In order to leave me and my staff free for the defence work, a representative of Scotland Yard was present in the central control during operations, and was responsible for keeping the public and fire brigade informed of events….’18
As yet, of course, there was no radar to pick up swiftly flying raiders fifty miles out from shore; but in so many other essentials, how like 1940!
* Characteristically, the Home Office declined to accept responsibility for compensation if Scouts were killed on duty, since they were non-combatants.16