Winston Churchill’s aviation interests began at the age of thirty-three in 1908 when he read reports of the flight tests carried out by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s airships in Germany. These tests caused ever-increasing alarm in Britain: neither ships nor armies had threatened her in living memory, but the airship might.
David Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer) was so disturbed by these reports that he proposed the formation of a coalition government to deal with such an unprecedented danger. Although nothing more useful than cries of alarm followed, Zeppelins – all imaginary – were regularly reported to be flying over British coasts in years when Europe was more or less at peace.
Shortly after the German alarm sounded in 1908 came another alarm from France, a traditional enemy though currently a suspicious friend. In July 1909 Louis Blériot flew across the Channel from Calais to Dover in barely half an hour. Churchill was among those who realised that practical flying machines (Zeppelins and aeroplanes) would soon affect the age-old conduct of war on land and at sea. He was then president of the Board of Trade and announced that the development of an aviation industry would be filled with immense consequences for everyone at home and abroad. The War Office did not share his excitement glumly referring, in July 1910, to the ‘unwelcome progress’ of aerial navigation, an opinion with which the Admiralty ‘concurred generally’. Nevertheless, as soon as Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911, his fertile mind and vivid imagination turned to recruiting pilots and ground crews and he sought instruction in the art of flying himself.
‘To describe Churchill as taking a close interest in his work,’ wrote Peter Rowland, ‘would probably be the understatement of all time. He flung himself into it.’ He would hold that appointment for three years and seven months: ‘The most memorable of my life’, he wrote, long after he had earned enduring fame as Prime Minister during the Second World War.
In the winter of 1912-1913 a wave of Zeppelin mania swept across Britain. Citizens saw them everywhere and in February 1913 Churchill assured the Committee of Imperial Defence that Germany’s huge airships had actually flown over parts of eastern England. Could the War Office and/or the Admiralty build their own airships or would it be better to develop aeroplanes capable of challenging these monsters? The War Office merely fretted, but the Admiralty – goaded by Churchill – began to set up a chain of coastal aerodromes, primarily for working with ships at sea.
John Seely, Under-Secretary of State at the War Office, discussed the formation of an air corps with David Henderson, its designated head, in 1912. ‘What is the best method to pursue,’ he asked Henderson, ‘in order to do in a week what is generally done in a year?’ The army and the navy had at that time about nineteen qualified pilots between them, whereas France had about 263, ‘so we are what you might call behind.’ As for Germany, she would have 180 aeroplanes in the west on the outbreak of war in August 1914.
Early hopes for a unified air service gradually evaporated with the Admiralty determined to keep command of one and the War Office just as anxious to control the other. Air-minded navy officers were keen to develop fighting and bombing aeroplanes, whereas air-minded army officers thought more of developing stable platforms in the sky to observe enemy movements and direct artillery fire. Churchill had at first been greatly impressed by the potential threat of airships if war broke out, but was gradually won over by the much greater potential of the aeroplane.
Demands in newspapers and in Parliament for the government to foster aviation with more enthusiasm had obliged Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, in November 1911, to invite Henderson (Director of Military Training) and an army staff captain, Frederick Sykes, to look into the matter. Both of them had qualified as pilots during that year and in April 1912 Asquith accepted their recommendation that a Royal Flying Corps, comprising an Army Wing and a Naval Wing – with a Central Flying School to serve both – should be created. Sykes commanded the Army Wing from 1912 to 1914 and Henderson was appointed Director of Military Aeronautics in September 1913. They are the first two in a long line of distinguished airmen who might fairly be called Churchill’s.
The aeroplane, they supposed, would be most useful in spotting for artillery and carrying out (or preventing) reconnaissance; eventually it might engage in aerial combat with enemy aircraft. They ordered a biplane designed by Geoffrey de Havilland that was stable enough to permit useful observation by airmen, who were later able to take thousands of valuable photographs. This machine – the BE 2 and improved versions – was built in a new Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough in Hampshire.
War Office reliance on the Farnborough factory, which attempted to monopolise airframe design and production, but failed to encourage engine development, caused outrage in the newspapers. The Admiralty, especially when Churchill took charge, refused to succumb to its pressure. Murray Sueter was Director of the Air Department from 1911 to 1915 and helped to create a Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) out of the Naval Wing. Sueter encouraged the development of aircraft capable of carrying torpedoes and set up an Anti-Aircraft Corps for London. He had in mind aircraft for coastal and fleet reconnaissance, submarine and mine detection, defence against air raids and offence against enemy bases. He chose to rely on private industry for the Naval Wing’s aircraft and found in Churchill a strong supporter. Sueter was clearly one airman who was important when Churchill’s mind turned to aviation matters.
Terms of service for naval airmen, wrote Churchill, in December 1911, ‘must be devised to make aviation for war purposes the most honourable, as it is the most dangerous, profession a young Englishman can adopt’. Young men, he ruled, must be in effective – and aggressive – command, learning all they can about bomb dropping and the use of machine guns. The army, by contrast, thought its airmen should think mainly of observation and the avoidance of combat.
Churchill had required the Royal Navy to concentrate on acquiring aeroplanes, not airships, in 1911 and in the following year oversaw the launching of its first seaplanes. He then changed his mind about airships, on observing the progress made by Germans with their Zeppelins. In December 1912 he admitted in Parliament that Germany, ‘has won a great preeminence’ in airships and expressed ‘anxiety’ about the threat they posed to dockyards, machine shops and ships in British harbours: all of them ‘absolutely defenceless’. He also foresaw that generals and admirals would compete to control naval aircraft.
When presenting his estimates of naval expenditure to the House of Commons in March 1912, Churchill had said that he wished to see ‘a thoroughly good and effective development’ of naval air power ‘and money will not stand in the way of the necessary steps’. He thought the products of the Royal Aircraft Factory inadequate and looked to private companies for a source of more efficient machines. The Naval Wing became a successful weapon and played an important part in stimulating Britain’s aircraft industry into building efficient aircraft for the army as well as the navy.
In the event of war, Churchill doubted whether the War Office could provide sufficient aircraft for both home defence and to assist ground forces in France. By ‘various shifts and devices’, he later wrote, he began to arrange for more aircraft to protect harbours, oil tanks and other ‘vulnerable points’. He called for an air service separate from both the Admiralty and the War Office, but the time was not ripe for such a radical idea.
Aeroplanes could not yet be flown at night, Churchill learned in 1913. Consequently, Zeppelins had a great advantage. Also, they flew so steadily that they could easily defend themselves with accurate gunfire and might well be protected, as some alleged experts supposed, from return fire by a noninflammable outer layer. The time had come, he argued, ‘when we must develop long-range airships of the largest type’. In July 1913 he ordered the construction of two rigid and four non-rigid airships and had ‘good hopes’ of ‘building a vessel which in every respect will be equal to the latest on the Continent’. But his earlier opposition to the airship had left the navy too far behind to catch up and he was obliged to make a deal with the War Office to obtain use of the army’s airships.
With regard to defence against German airships, Churchill thought ground gunners, aided by searchlights, would force them to fly higher, even if they were unable to hit them. That should at least make accurate bombing more difficult. Extinguishing ground lights would be a great help and so too would aeroplanes, if and when pilots learned to fly in darkness. But defence was only part of the answer: Zeppelins ‘must be kept away altogether and that will only be done by attacking them’, he said, in their bases as well as en route to and from their targets. This emphasis on offence (always a prime consideration for Churchill in peace or war) persuaded him that the aeroplane was superior to the airship, which was merely ‘an enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas’. It was not, he rightly believed, invulnerable to bullets and could surely be destroyed by aeroplanes attacking from above and dropping a string of bombs ‘like a whiplash across the gas bag’.
Churchill firmly supported the development of seaplanes, working from coastal bases, to protect ships at sea. As early as October 1913, he had recommended that the Royal Navy needed armed aircraft able to carry out long-range reconnaissance (operating from ships at sea as well as bases ashore) and also to protect ports and coastal shipping. When seaplanes are devised that can carry torpedoes, he thought, they ‘may prove capable of playing a decisive part in operations against capital ships’. In Flight’s opinion, the government was reluctant to spend sufficiently on aviation. ‘We frankly do not envy the task of the First Lord’, wrote the editor, Stanley Spooner, in October 1913. Churchill was obliged to fit in with both his professional advisers and with the Treasury which, ‘to put it mildly’, is never anxious to support new ventures. But Spooner was convinced that Britain must match ‘the iron-hard determination’ of Germany to develop air power.
Even so, Churchill confidently asserted in November 1913: ‘The British seaplane, although still in an empirical stage, like everything else in this sphere of warlike operation, has reached a point of progress in advance of anything done elsewhere.’ This was thanks to Commander Charles Samson ‘and his band of brilliant pioneers’. Samson became one of those fighting men who always delighted Churchill for their skill, courage and above all their aggressive temperament.
Churchill lost what he called his ‘ethereal virginity’ in 1912 when he made his first flight and during the following year began a determined attempt to qualify as a pilot. All pilots, actual and hopeful, were delighted to learn that the First Lord of the Admiralty himself, a person so eminent and almost as old as Methuselah (he was then thirty-eight) should attempt to master so dangerous a skill. ‘We are in the Stephenson age of flying’, he told one of his instructors. ‘Now our machines are frail. One day they will be robust, and of value to our country.’ He had lessons at Upavon in Wiltshire, but Colonel Hugh Trenchard (commanding the flying school there) was unimpressed by his ‘wallowing about the sky’ and decided that he was ‘altogether too impatient for a good pupil’. However his opinion would weigh more if Trenchard had ever shown any skill as a pilot himself.
In October 1913 Churchill told his wife Clementine about ‘a very jolly day in the air’ over Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and places nearby: ‘A delightful trip on which I was conducted by the redoubtable Samson.’ Quite apart from the thrill of flying, which no-one of any earlier generation had enjoyed, Churchill relished excitement, novelty, and the thrill of being above the clouds. Unlike almost all his fellow-politicians, he rarely missed an opportunity to fly during the next forty years. ‘It has been as good as one of those old days in the South African war,’ he happily reminisced to Clementine, ‘and I have lived entirely in the moment, with no care for all those tiresome party politics and searching newspapers, and awkward by-elections, and sulky Orangemen, and obnoxious Cecils and smug little Runcimans.’
Churchill became the first cabinet minister to ‘control’ (with a qualified pilot beside him) an aeroplane in flight. This was in a Short biplane, with Gilbert Wildman-Lushington. The Pall Mall Gazette was impressed, but other newspapers were critical of the risks he took and envious of the publicity he attracted so easily and enjoyed so obviously. That approval was not undermined, in the newspaper’s opinion, when Lushington was killed shortly after his flights with Churchill. It was ‘simply one of those fortuitous circumstances,’ the Gazette wrote, somewhat callously, ‘which have a habit of happening.’
Lushington had written to his fiancé on 30 November, just two days before his fatal accident. ‘I started Winston off on his instruction about 12.15 and he got so bitten with it I could hardly get him out of the machine, in fact except for about forty-five minutes for lunch we were in the machine till about 3.30. He showed great promise and is coming down again for further instruction and practice.’ Lushington had made a good impression and was invited to dine aboard the Admiralty yacht Enchantress that night, seated at the right hand of the First Lord. ‘He was absolutely full out and talked hard about what he was going to do.’ Had the young pilot lived he would undoubtedly have been given every opportunity to make his name.
Churchill kept on flying during 1914, both as passenger and pilot, until he was persuaded, especially by his wife, to give up – which he did, most reluctantly. ‘This is a wrench,’ he told her on 6 June, ‘because I was on the verge of taking my pilot’s certificate. It only needed a couple of calm mornings; and I am confident of my ability to achieve it very respectably.’ This was a misplaced confidence, because he had already had ample flights to qualify if he had been skilful enough. He admitted that ‘the numerous fatalities of this year’ justified her anxiety.
‘Anyhow, I can feel I know a good deal about this fascinating new art. I can manage a machine with ease in the air, even with high winds, and only a little more practice in landings would have enabled me to go up with reasonable safety alone. I have been up nearly 140 times, with many pilots, and all kinds of machines, so I know the difficulties and the joys of the air well enough to appreciate them and to understand all the questions of policy which will arise in the near future.’
Nothing ever daunted Churchill’s self-confidence for long.
As John Morrow wrote, Churchill ‘became the darling of the aviation press’ and in January 1914, The Aeroplane magazine described him as ‘the fairy godfather’ of naval aviation. As was typical of Churchill in all his offices, he paid great attention to detail. In December 1913, for example, he had told Sueter to ensure that the seaplanes currently being designed should have comfortable seats for the pilots: at present, manufacturers were not paying sufficient attention to this need. Also, designs must ensure that both engines and wireless sets should be easy to fit and replace. In another December message to Sueter, Churchill gave specific instructions about the equipment of a new Sopwith machine to be used for special reconnaissance. It must have a well-sheltered cockpit for two pilots seated side by side with complete dual control, a full instrument panel and be ready for service by February next.
Churchill took the closest interest in everything to do with the infant service by firing off a constant stream of minutes dealing with landing places, navigation, promotions, terms of service, working conditions aboard aircraft and airships, design and construction, methods of spotting submarines, rates of pay, details of uniforms, leisure activities and, not least, anything said or done by the Admiralty or the War Office suggesting that airmen were inferior to sailors or soldiers. At the same time, he was adamant that ‘young gentlemen’ wishing to join the Naval Wing were not to become a ‘mere mixture of pilot and mechanic’. They must also receive a proper military training.
Sadly, during 1914 divergent approaches to aviation between the Admiralty and the War Office led to a split, with the navy setting up its own training school at Eastchurch. By July 1915 the Admiralty in ‘a unilateral declaration of independence’ had officially turned its wing into a separate service. This despite the fact that Churchill, while First Lord, and Lord Haldane (chairman of the Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence) had spoken strongly in favour of a united air service. ‘Tremendous strides have been made’, wrote Spooner in March 1914 during the past year, especially in naval aviation. As Churchill pointed out, ‘the creation of an entirely new branch of armaments is not a thing that can be done in a day ... sheds, plants, appliances and land, as well as the actual instruments of aviation’ take time to emerge. But Spooner remained convinced that the work should already have begun: ‘As soon, indeed, as the recognition was first born that aviation was destined to play an important, possibly a vital, part in the warfare of the immediate future.’
At that time, March 1914, the RNAS had about 100 aeroplanes of which sixty were seaplanes; there were 125 officers and 500 men in the service and by the end of the year those numbers were expected to reach 180 officers and nearly 1,500 men. Five seaplane bases had been established and two more were under construction. Spooner again:
‘This new service is thoroughly naval in spirit and character, but at the same time it contains, and must contain, a large element of civilians, both officers and mechanics... The seaplane has a great future before it. We cannot doubt that it will play an effective part in military and naval arrangements. We are without doubt in numbers, quality and experience far in front of any other country in our seaplane work.’
On 20 March 1914 Churchill circulated to his Cabinet colleagues a paper on a ‘Proposed Aircraft Expedition to Somaliland’ in response to a massacre carried out by a local ruler, the so-called ‘Mad Mullah’. The Mullah’s wealth, wrote Churchill, is in camels and livestock, so ‘very considerable damage could be inflicted on him, apart from actual offensive operations, by stampeding his stock and keeping them from the wells. Stephen Roskill thought this the first appearance of a proposal to use aircraft ‘in a counter-insurgency role in colonial territories – later termed “air control”’. As it happened, retribution did not follow for the Mullah until 1920, but from then on rebels against imperial authority in many places east of Suez would feel the impact of air control.
Meanwhile, in May and June 1914, Churchill proposed that Sueter be appointed Inspecting Captain of the Naval Wing as well as Director of the Air Department in the Admiralty. His two principal assistants should be Francis Scarlett, commanding the seaplane ship and managing the central office, and Samson, commanding the Eastchurch Naval Flying School and the war squadron there. Samson should not, ruled Churchill, give up his flying duties, ‘for which his qualifications are pre-eminent’. Oliver Schwann (who would, in April 1917, change his name to a more English-sounding Swann) should stay at the Admiralty, ‘where his technical knowledge and administrative abilities are at present indispensable’.