CHAPTER 11

The Royal Flying Corps; (Royal Air Force).

As a reminder of the time scale in which we are dealing, the brothers Wright made their first successful flight of a manned, powered aircraft at Kittiwake, Maine, U.S.A. in December 1903. Colonel ‘Bill’ Cody (originally Cowdery) launched his first successful flight of an aircraft on behalf of the British Army at Farnborough in Hampshire in 1908. In 1914, ten years plus a few months after the first flight and only six years after Cody’s first aircraft had taken to the air; forty-eight planes set out in August 1914 with the BEF to make their contribution to the army’s commitment to support the French against the German offensive. To fly one of these early machines was in itself an act of great courage, confidence or lunacy; reliable they were not, either mechanically or aeronautically, but fly they did and to war they went. The combined strength of aircraft of all types in service with the British and French Armies was 273, the Germans had 246

The task allocated, in August 1914, to these early airmen, was reconnaissance to act in a role which traditionally had been undertaken by the cavalry. So that is what they did, scout for enemy activity and did their best using none to accurate maps to find and identify the movement of enemy troops. Then, because in the first hectic days the fog of war was causing uncertainty, the role of the airmen was extended to include finding and reporting on the position of British and French troops whose position was not known to commanders and headquarters. To the surprise of nobody the opposing forces each took a dim view of this first version of a ‘spy in the sky’ but certainly at the beginning had no realistic way to deal with the incursions. It was left, despite pre war experiments, to the air crew to improvise a solution. This they did by firing rifles and revolvers at each other. Thus was the second role of flying, aerial combat was initiated. There is no record of any damage to men or machines by these early encounters. Considering all the variables of this ‘miss and miss’ technique we should not be surprised26.

The development of adequate guns for defensive and offensive aerial warfare was a serious technical challenge to the inexperienced builders of aircraft and the armaments industry. The forward firing automatic machine gun was the obvious candidate for use in the air, but where to mount said gun? There was no electric firing mechanism, the gun had to be operated using a firing trigger or button. To put guns immediately in front of the pilot meant the bullets had to be synchronised with the revolutions of the propeller or disaster would ensue. The provision of a practical interrupter gear proved to be a serious technical challenge. A gun capable of firing through the boss of the propeller was the dream of the airborne cavalry; it was not to be realised for the Allied air forces. It would also have been only one gun and as the war in the air progressed it became clear to all sides that to cripple another plane by aerial gun fire required a lot of ammunition. The easy solution would have been to use several guns as was eventually arranged on fighters for the 1939 episode. Then we find more problems, snag number eight or is it nine? Using the guns available required the manual replacement of spent ammunition feeds, belts or drums. Now how was that to be achieved? If the aircraft were a single seat fighter, the pilot in addition to keeping his ’plane in the air had to take time out to unclip and replace the drum or belt then rearm the firing mechanism and return to find the enemy. This task would have been bad enough in favorable conditions but at several thousand feet above ground, travelling at some speed in the consequent slip stream with gloved, frozen fingers in a temperature degrees colder than at ground level the challenge presented was monumental. If the ‘plane was a two man job with an observer/gunner added, then at least the pilot could bend his mind to flying the machine whilst the second crewman dealt with the air warfare and armaments aspects of their excursion. To the credit of all the aircrew this was what they undertook and brought confusion to the enemies of the King.

The RFC attracted the adventurer to their ranks and very often such personalities have ideas that escape the attention of more conformist minds. As the value of aerial reconnaissance quickly became established, someone, somewhere, said, just as Toad would have done; “I say you chaps why don’t we take a camera with us and take some pictures of the troops on the ground? Then there would be no more bally argument about what we have seen and where.” Photo-reconnaissance was up and running. Now here the British were on the back foot again in technical terms. The nation with the most advanced camera and in particular lens industry was Germany. Carl Zeiss of Jena was the leading supplier of optical lenses when August 1914’s events broke upon the world. Murphy appearing from the sidelines again! British industry using firms such as Ross of London had to up their game dramatically.

Very quickly, considering the starting point, the Allies were producing good photo images of enemy positions and the location of ‘lines of communication’, forward supply dumps, gun positions and much else besides. Commanders were now in a position to see a record of positions beyond the front line and look at areas of which the enemy would rather the opposition knew nothing. There is only one way to prevent this happening, the spy in the sky has to be destroyed, shot down. As the technique of aerial photography developed the task of flying the planes to precise patterns and coordinates became the order of the day. Straight level, flying whilst the camera records the image below might be the needed for the job in hand, for the pilot the inherent dangers were increased dramatically. The German airmen could have a pop at these new sitting ducks and did. The Red Baron (Richthofen) had a field day.

That brings us back to the dilemmas posed by aerial combat in this new form of warfare. Clearly the force that had the best machines in sufficient numbers ought to prevail. The Germans deployed for three of the four years of the war better ’planes. The British quickly began producing sufficient of their less effective machines to outnumber the Germans; stalemate, perhaps? In July 1916 there were twenty-seven RFC squadrons with 421 aircraft. Their commander was a man of steel who understood the ‘Military Imperative’ that winning is all! The formations and ’planes were deployed and flown very aggressively, to their human and technical limits and beyond, gaining air parity and sometimes air superiority.

The third major task undertaken by the RFC was artillery spotting. In an earlier section the difficulties of controlling indirect fire were described. The pilots of the RFC were in a unique position and for the first time in warfare it was possible to see the effect of the indirect fire of shot and shell, whether the target was receiving its intended punishment. The problem was that whilst the airmen could see the result there was no means to tell the gunners on the ground what they should do to improve the accuracy of the shooting. Improvisation was the order of the day systems of visual signals were devised to correct the target registration of the gunners until it became possible to install a rudimentary radio transmitter in the spotting planes. Then messages could be sent using Morse code to ground stations who would relay the corrections to the artillery and the gunfire would hit the target. Whereupon the enemy would up and off to another location and the whole procedure began again. This tactic was a continual problem, if the target was mobile the enemy quickly recognised the corrections being made to the gun fire and because this was a professional army, jumped about a bit and lived to fight another day.

As war in the air developed the opportunity to use aircraft to interfere with the activities of troops on the ground, independently of such resources as artillery, came into the reckoning. Such an idea was fine, but there were two problems: weapons and delivery. The idea of a ‘bomb’ launched at the enemy from the ground by a mortar was not new, but from an aircraft, that, as we now say, was ‘a whole new ball game’. Off to the drawing board and fused aerial bombs were devised. Wonderful, we have aircraft, bombs and targets, all we now have to do is drop the missiles onto the targets and we can all go home for tea; not so. The need for accuracy creeps into the equation. The bombs we are considering at this point in the development of aerial warfare were not the Barnes Wallis five ton ‘Tallboys’, these were fifty pounders (twenty-four kg) just about enough to give the local rodents a headache. The accurate delivery of air born bombs was then and continues to be a problem. A parallel idea was to use aircraft armed with machine guns to attack enemy ground forces, the ’plane as an adjunct to operations on the ground had staked its claim for inclusion in the considerations of the generals. Later larger planes with twin engines were developed, capable of flying to distant targets and bombing strategic locations, not just the poor bloody infantry in the front line.

The casualties suffered by the RFC are disguised from general appreciation by the imbalance of aircrew to ground staff in a squadron establishment. A squadron of a dozen planes with four extra aircrews would have a ratio of aircrew, pilots and observers, to ground staff of approximately one to fifteen. Although there were casualties on the ground the aircrew bore the brunt. At critical times some units lost the equivalent of the entire aircrew establishment in one month. Thirty-two killed and injured is a loss rate of 1200% (384) per annum for the combatant element of the unit. The comparison with infantry battalions now becomes more obvious. The PBI could take casualties of 380 in one day, but that was the exception. More common were the losses experienced by the 1st Bn. King’s Royal Rifle Corps who lost twenty-eight dead during January 1915 which included thirteen days of front line trench service. Using this figure to calculate an annual loss, which is a pretty dubious procedure but makes a point, the battalion’s annual casualty total would be 335, approx 50% of the combatant strength. The drain on aircrew resources caused great anxiety and proved to be a dilemma not just in this conflict but also in Act II that opened in 1939.

When the RFC went to war in August 1914 nobody actually knew how to use or command the resources put at the disposal of the army. From the very beginning the new born air arm had to improvise, invent and innovate to achieve recognition. This was one of those circumstances where it was literally true that you ‘made things up as you went along’. This was true also of the French and German air components. In circumstances such as this the quality of command is often the key to results. Britain by some happenstance in August 1915 had available for appointment Colonel (later Major General) Hugh Trenchard to command the growing aerial resources. (“Cometh the hour, cometh the man” apologies to Sir Walter Scott for the popular misquotation.) General Trenchard had joined the British Army in 1893, transferred to the RFC in 1913 at the age of forty and prior to mobilisation in August 1914 was Assistant Commandant of the Central Flying School. As war loomed and the army deployed in France he took command of 1 Wing of the RFC. Events moved on, the first field commander of the RFC returned to Britain to resume the appointment of Director of Military Aeronautics in August 1915; Trenchard was appointed to the vacancy in the rank of brigadier general. Here was a thinking man in command, one who had the intellect, vision, military experience and power of leadership to forge a new weapon of war. There are not many of whom that can be said. Hannibal and his elephants was Trenchard’s predecessor for that wreath of laurels.

The new commander had qualified as a pilot, he had a keen personal and professional interest in flying and he was a trained soldier who could read the military situation on the ground and apply the increasing resources of the RFC to the achievement of winning the war. Despite the increasing importance of air power he was not comfortable with the cult of ‘air aces’. The likes of such airmen as Bishop, Ball and McCudden were appreciated for their success against their German equivalents and appropriately recognised with awards. More importantly their success was used to bolster morale, the Germans are not invulnerable was the point made. Such success was also good for recruitment and that was vital. Trenchard was a pragmatist and knew that to fulfil his dictum ‘no empty chairs at breakfast’ there must be a continual replacement of the daily casualty losses.

The achievements of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) were recognised by the combination of the two organisations on 1st April 1918 to form the Royal Air Force (RAF). The RFC/RAF was not responsible for winning the war: that decision had to be achieved on the ground. But without the contribution of the newly established aerial cavalry the war on the ground could have been lost. A second and, at the time, unappreciated outcome of the success of the RFC/RAF was that the foundations had been well and truly laid for the air defence of Britain when the curtain went up in 1939 on Act II of this awful brawl.

The Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Naval Air Service and the successor Royal Air Force, fought the war with determination and imagination and deserve the recognition given for their achievements. The Royal Air Force was off to a flying start concluding their war of only seven months with the courage and skills learned by the pioneers and founders of their success.

Dedication

F. E. B.Jones.

This chapter of my summary of the Great War is dedicated to Colonel F E. B.Jones, late RFC/RAF and Royal Signals. ‘Feeby’ was commissioned as a pilot in the RFC, and flew with both the RFC and the RAF after its formation on 1st April 1918. Leaving the service after the war he returned to the family business in Birmingham. He maintained a military connection by joining the Territorial Army 48th (SM) Signal Regiment. In 1939 he went to France with the Regiment when it was sent with 48th Division of the BEE, he returned to Britain during the evacuation through Dunkirk. In 1941 he was released from army service to rejoin the family business and manage the reorganisation of essential production for the war effort, following serious damage to the factory premises by German bombing. He retained his commitment to the Territorial Army and both commanded and later was appointed Honorary Colonel of 48th Signal Regiment (subsequently renumbered 35th (V) Signal Regiment).

A gentleman and soldier held in much affection by those who had the privilege of his friendship.