There are no British survivors of the Great War. On 25 July 2009, a turning point in the history of this conflict, the last soldier, Harry Patch, died and the First World War moved permanently into the past. Patch outlived Royal Air Force veteran Henry Allingham by just a week, but it is the experiences of soldiers in 1914–1918 that have been the historiographic focus. Nearly 700,000 men served in the navy and airforce in this conflict (almost as many as the total British casualties), but their contribution has never been explored. Their knowledge of conflict, encapsulated in the diaries, letters and memoirs of pilots and sailors, reveals the diversity of the war experienced between 1914 and 1918. Unlike war in the trenches, it is ‘jolly nice to land at 10:30 am and feel you are pretty much done for the day’, pilot Charles D. Smart noted in his diary in February 1917. ‘Fritz evidently doesn’t like working before breakfast,’ he continued, ‘and I am inclined to agree with him ... a good solid foundation of bacon & eggs makes a good base to work from.’1 Meanwhile, Douglas King-Harman on patrol onboard HMS Swift for the Royal Navy expressed far less enthusiasm for his role. In a letter to his grandfather in 1917, he wrote of the ‘heartbreaking work patrolling night after night ... {only} to miss the enemy when he does come ... . It has always been their {sic} torpedoes which hit & ours which missed, and that couldn’t go on for ever.’2 The Royal Navy expected to dominate the war and force victory, so the frustration of King-Harman typified the response of sailors who had expected to fight. The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) began the conflict with no significant role, yet the regular patrols over German lines and daily contact with the enemy, recorded by Smart, saw the air force earn a permanent position as Britain’s third service. Still, it has been the soldier who has dominated the academic and cultural study of warfare. Yet the oldest and youngest services made a significant contribution to eventual victory and both were permanently altered by the events of 1914–1918.
The Great War retains an emotional hold over modern Britain. From the annual remembrance ceremonies to honour the fallen, through the frequently-quoted poetry of Owen and Sassoon, to representations in popular culture, this conflict continues to fascinate. Whether this is Laurence Binyon’s promise to always remember, or regret that it happened at all, the experience of soldiers in the trenches had a significant impact on British life, and crucially, its approach to later conflict.3 Whilst impressing these events onto the national memory, however, hundreds of thousands of men have been left behind. It is estimated that three quarters of a million British servicemen died in the First World War, and there have been almost one hundred years of remembrance, yet in 1918 there were almost as many men serving as pilots and sailors, and they have simply been forgotten.
Without the presence of the Royal Navy and Royal Flying Corps, this would have been a very different conflict. The naval blockade and domination of the North Sea in particular prevented enemy attacks on the British coastline and contributed to the eventual diminution of Germany’s resources. The intelligence-gathering of pilots on the Western Front and their aggressive role in Home Defence and long-range bombardment of German industrial centres was vital to British strategy and morale. Superficially these are two very different services; the navy – old, hierarchical, centralist and in some ways tired – took a defensive role, but was expected to win the war with a decisive battle. Its men were extensively trained to expect glory and to spend their careers as naval personnel. The Royal Flying Corps was young and at the cutting edge of technological development. Its structure, nominally based on the army’s, was more relaxed, and men engaged in personnel warfare after a relatively brief training period. In 1914, few expected the Corps to achieve anything, or to become much more than an auxiliary service.
Yet both services were motivated by duty, and both were challenged by the new technologies of twentieth-century warfare. They also shared, like soldiers, an experience of war that limited actual fighting to contained periods, and spent much of their time waiting, which makes them an interesting comparison. Both services had to grapple with prolonged demands for new technology to match German advancement, and faced the challenge of developing effective systems when machinery alone was insufficient to end the war. The extent to which the oldest and newest services were able to do this is an interesting question, and one which this book examines. Was the navy, with its established methods, ingrained service culture and fearsome reputation, better able to meet the demands of combat, or was the fledgling Royal Flying Corps, in its first conflict, with no proven structure or experience, more able to adapt as the war progressed? Both services periodically struggled, failed and succeeded, and by returning them to the story of the First World War, it is possible to understand, in all circumstances, why servicemen continued to fight.
The Royal Flying Corps was established in 1912 and existed for six years until it was refashioned into the Royal Air Force (RAF). It was Britain’s first military air service. Prior to this, enthusiasm for aerial development was confined to wealthy enthusiasts giving acrobatic displays to the public. Government investment meant expansion and when war was declared in 1914, the nucleus of an air force went to France with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), whilst civilian instructors were requisitioned to train new pilot recruits. From this handful of aeroplanes and men, the Royal Flying Corps grew into a permanent third service. By 1918, the RFC’s intelligence-gathering role had expanded to include aerial combat, short and long-range bombardment, home defence, agent dropping and artillery support. Each of these developments was encouraged by the pilots of the RFC, and established the basis of aerial power in the twentieth century. Their pioneering effect is, therefore, worth examining.
The existence of the Royal Flying Corps owes much to the arms race of the early twentieth century, and Britain’s belief that it lagged behind other nations in its support for aviation. At the International Conference on Aerial Navigation in 1910 it was noted with concern that Britain was trailing behind other countries in the production of aircraft and a group was formed to investigate the potential for military aviation. In 1912, the Subcommittee of Imperial Defence on Aerial Navigation was reportedly ‘impressed with the evidence which has been placed before them regarding the backward state of Aerial Navigation in this country, when contrasted with the progress made by other great naval and military powers.’4 A second, and perhaps more important, concern was the disputed ownership of airspace, indicating a breach with Germany that would be of importance during the war. The Subcommittee on Imperial Defence noted that the British government’s view was that ‘sovereignty over the soil extends to the air above it, while the theory advanced by the German delegates ... was that the air is free to all.’5 In consequence, the formation of the Royal Flying Corps was quickly advanced and plans for its establishment agreed.
The Aerial Navigation Act established the Royal Flying Corps on 1 April 1912 under the combined aegis of the War Office and the Admiralty. It comprised a military and naval wing whose duty was to support the work of the parent services. The military wing began to prepare air bases from which the service could grow. The establishment of Farnborough in 1913, as noted in the Aldershot Annual Report for 1913, included the construction of barracks for 300 men, a sergeants’ mess, 32 married quarters, sheds for 28 aeroplanes and a wagon shed for 16 motor vehicles. Meanwhile, it was noted that a flying track at Eelmoor Marsh was in preparation, whilst further improvements were being made at Laffan’s Plain.6 It was recommended that officers were paid 10 shillings a day for flying in addition to their Corps pay. Thus, a Second Lieutenant would earn 14s. 6d. per day from the Corps plus 10s flight pay, a total of £447. 2s per year. The Squadron Commander would earn 25s. per day plus 10s. flight pay, giving him £638. 15s per year.7 There were lengthy discussions as to whether service in the air was of itself sufficiently brave to warrant the issue of a Distinguished Service Order (DSO), even in peacetime. Yet another committee was established to consider ‘what form the rewards should take and the conditions qualifying for a reward’.8 However, the navy objected to both the awarding of the DSO in peacetime and the creation of a new award for the air service.
From the beginning, cooperation between the military and naval wings was, therefore, difficult and the two worked almost independently. They trained their men at separate bases (Farnborough for the military wing and Eastchurch for the naval wing), and pursued their own methods of technological development. The navy, at that time more open to new equipment, employed civilian manufacturers to effectively develop the seaplane. By 1914, separation of the two wings was stark, and shortly before the outbreak of war the Admiralty claimed ownership of all naval flying, forming the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS).
Meanwhile, the military wing became the sole user of the name Royal Flying Corps, and it is with them that this book is primarily concerned.9 At the outbreak of war, the RFC could muster four squadrons, totalling 109 officers and 66 aeroplanes. Their hierarchical structure mirrored the army, increasing from Second Lieutenant as the lowest commissioned rank to Field Marshal at the top.10 Pilots were all officer class, and largely recruited from more privileged families who could afford the initial £75 cost of a Royal Aero Club Certificate, which was a precondition for entry into the military air service. The type of men applying can be seen in the Subcommittee’s report on aerial navigation from 1912, establishing the RFC. It suggested that
members of the Flying Corps who own aeroplanes, should be encouraged to bring these to the Central Flying School, when they undergo their training there ... . Owners should be indemnified in the event of a serious accident to their machines, when so employed, or repairs should be effected at the cost of the state. They should, in addition, receive hire for their machines on a scale to be laid down.11
The number of recruits in England who could afford a £75 certificate and owned their own plane was relatively small, but men were still eager to join this new group, especially once war was declared.
Men joined the Flying Corps often for the excitement of being in the air and the possibility of a quicker transfer to France. James McCudden joined the Royal Engineers in April 1913 and applied for a transfer to the RFC. ‘I felt that I was going to a calling which I thought would suit my rather erratic temperament,’ he recalled.12 Many men transferred from the army, and were proud to have experienced trench life, as William Fry recalled in his memoir. ‘It has always been a source of pride to me,’ he exclaimed, ‘to have served and fought as a private solider with the old pre-1914 Regular Army ... . It was an education and a delight to a youth of seventeen to serve in the trenches and in action with these men, real soldiers.’ Yet, in the winter of 1914, Fry decided to leave the mud and transfer to the RFC where he had ‘noticed the glamour attached to wearing pilots’ or observers’ wings ... . A notice appeared in unit orders that officer volunteers were wanted for the RFC so I put in my name.’13 Similarly, William Bishop, a Canadian, was so eager to get to the fighting before it was all over that he took a friend’s advice and applied for the Flying Corps, having been ‘assured ... it would be easy to arrange a transfer ... . {If} I wanted to get to the front quickly I would have to go as an observer’. Bishop later trained to become a pilot and remembered his time as an observer being tame in comparison to his more exciting time as a fighter pilot later in the war.14
This eagerness to be at war, preferably in the Flying Corps, was shared amongst colonial volunteers. In fact, as R. H. Kiernan recorded, at demobilization it was found that many Americans had posed as Canadians in order to enter the RFC. Consequently, ‘in many of the fighter squadrons, each of which consisted of twenty-five pilots, an average of four were Americans’, Kiernan explained. They posed as Canadians ‘because they judged that by joining our air service that was already in being they would reach the War more quickly.’15 Likewise, Australian F. C. Penny, when visiting an exhibition of farm equipment with his father in 1914, was attracted by the sight of an aeroplane in the centre of the arena:
Under strict supervision people were permitted to walk around to view this wonderful contraption consisting of wood, wires, fabric and engine which they said would fly! ... It was a Bleriot, and carried the first official airmail from Melbourne to Sydney in 1914 ... . After a few months I felt the urge to enlist for service overseas.
Penny enlisted in the army in June 1916 but soon became a pilot and travelled to England for training on Salisbury Plain.
Once enlisted, men were sent to training establishments and issued their kit. A 1915 Training Manual recorded that the kit should include a ‘leather coat with overall trousers lined with wool. If these are not available, a good substitute is a British-warm coat, with a waterproof or oil skin worn over it.’ Men should also have a leather cap with ear flaps which should be worn with a couple of balaclavas over the top to protect from the cold, with a flying helmet on the top. Men also needed flying goggles to protect their eyes and a muffler to cover their neck and chest. Boots and gloves were essential and should be loose fitting to allow extra socks and gloves to be worn underneath, as ‘woollen gloves worn alone do not keep out the wind ... . Vaseline is useful for the hands and feet as a protection against cold.’16 As technology developed and planes began to reach greater heights, protecting men against the elements became an increasing concern. Since men were required to supply their own kit, greater precautions were taken by pilots to protect themselves from cold.
By 1915, the role of the aircraft in war was becoming more firmly established and for the remainder of the conflict, the multiple roles of the RFC included reconnaissance, directing artillery fire, air fighting, aerial bombing to undermine enemy production and aggressive action against troops. The air force sought aerial superiority and the way to obtain it was ‘by moral effect of success in a series of such combats’, the 1915 training manual instructed, to which end ‘there must be no cessation of effort ... until not only the enemy is prevented from carrying out any reconnaissance, but their machines are driven from the element altogether and command of the air is complete.’17 By 1918, the Royal Flying Corps combined each of these methods of fighting to overwhelm the enemy and claim the aerial ascendancy on the Western Front. It was a difficult task, often frustrated by technology and the vigorous defence of German pilots. Yet the RFC, which in 1914 was regarded as an auxiliary service, earned its independence by becoming the Royal Air Force. How men maintained their belief in this outcome, and thereby managed to achieve it, is a subject of this book.
The Royal Navy, by contrast, had existed for centuries, but was unexpectedly undermined by its role in the First World War. Its potent combination of history and power created high expectations of victory in the Great War. However, no major sea battle ensued and the navy was relegated to a supportive role. This affected long-standing public enthusiasm, even though the blockade of German ports had significantly aided the Allied victory. This was not the role that sailors had hoped to play, and their own memoirs speak of disappointment and regret. The cost of the First World War to the Royal Navy was significant and left it unsure of its future role.
In 1914, the Royal Navy had little to prove. It was the most advanced technological service in the world with an established reputation as the preserver of the British Empire. Founded in the sixteenth century by Henry VIII, it was tested most notably by the coming of the Spanish Armada in 1588 during Elizabeth I’s reign, and later at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, under Nelson’s command. Consequently, the navy was at the forefront of England’s defence plans. Its role in the creation and sustenance of the Empire was firmly established during the Interregnum when the beginnings of British rule abroad were emerging. From this point British colonial plans grew rapidly, bringing not only power and wealth to the home nation, but encouraging trade links that affected Britain’s economic and cultural future.
Running parallel to this was a role in scientific exploration in all corners of the world. Beginning with the Elizabethan explorers, through the discovery of Australia and extending to the Arctic adventurers of the twentieth century, the Royal Navy had long been associated with the development of Britain’s understanding of, and role in, the international context. In many ways, by 1914 the navy was the ultimate symbol of Britain. It represented the power and might of its forces, the intellectualism and scientific understanding of the Enlightenment, and the cultural transmission of the Protestant ethic to the world. Above all the Royal Navy embodied success, in the memories of its greatest battles and most celebrated heroes. In the first decade of the twentieth century, its purpose was to seek battle, to emulate these expectations, and to win the First World War.
Men joined the Royal Navy for all these reasons. Unlike the other services, sailors enlisted for a career, intending that they would move through the ranks during their working life. More than this, however, it offered a way of life, a code of gentlemanly values which men wanted to live by, established through the various customs and traditions. The value of discipline, encoded in the hierarchical system and the often brutal punishments were also used to maintain this sense of order. The strict regulations and belief in hierarchy gave its men a behavioural guide for all situations, creating a structured and ordered system.
The experience of the navy in the First World War is arguably one of the most complicated of the services. On the one hand, Britain dominated the High Seas Fleet, was rarely engaged in battle and maintained its control of shipping and supplies throughout the conflict. As several historians have recently shown, Jan Rueger and Niall Ferguson amongst them, the technological position of the Royal Navy and its public estimation were practically unassailable at the start of the war.18 Yet the experience of sailors in this conflict suggests that they were far less satisfied with its outcome. For men trained to expect conflict and hopeful of a climactic victory, the quiet nature of the war at sea led to some disappointment. There were three notable encounters with the enemy, at Heliogoland Blight in 1914, at Dogger Bank in 1915 and at Jutland in 1916. None proved to be the war-ending engagement the navy had expected.
The encounter at Heligoland Blight on 28 August 1914 was considered an early victory for the Royal Navy. Although the fleets remained in their ports, both sent patrols to survey the area around Heligoland in the first months of the war. Britain ambushed one such patrol and both lost four ships. However, over 700 German sailors were killed, over 500 were injured and more than 300 were captured. By contrast, the Royal Navy lost just 35 men, with 40 wounded. As a consequence of this action, the High Seas Fleet was ordered to remain in port and not to engage with the superior fleet. For the remainder of the war, it was increasingly difficult for Britain to lure its enemy into an open sea fight.
Following their new conservative policy, the German navy limited the number of ships it sent out on patrol. The Battle of Dogger Bank was little more than a skirmish fought on the 24 January 1915 when the Royal Navy intercepted a party of German raiders, after receiving advanced intelligence. Britain gave chase, successfully sinking a German ship, but sustained damage to its own flagship which took months to repair. Although this was considered a victory for the Royal Navy, the German fleet escaped and the war continued. The encounter revealed a number of signalling problems between British ships that allowed their counterparts to evade capture and return to their ports. Some of these issues would be repeated at Jutland the following year where the opportunity to end the war was again squandered.
The Battle of Jutland was the most famous, and only significant, naval encounter of the Great War. Fought on 31 May–1 June 1916, Jutland was the only engagement involving full-scale battleships. Germany’s purpose was to engage a portion of the British fleet and break the blockade. The Royal Navy lost 14 ships and the High Seas Fleet lost 11 on the first day. Overnight the British forces manoeuvred to come between the enemy and their ports so the battle could be concluded the next day, but, as with Dogger Bank, the German ships escaped and the stalemate at sea continued. Both sides claimed a victory, but the Royal Navy lost twice as many men and its only opportunity to destroy the opposing fleet. After Jutland, Germany remained in its ports avoiding engagement, and switched its attention to unrestricted submarine warfare to covertly undermine the British stranglehold.
All of this had a notable effect on the enthusiasm of British sailors. Naval warfare in this conflict primarily consisted of watching and waiting for the enemy to emerge. The few battles that occurred were frustratingly indecisive and British failures affected the morale of its men, exposing them to the new dangers of submarines and mines. The history of the navy is interesting because although it retained a position of great strength throughout the war and was virtually invincible, the writings of sailors reveal anger, disappointment and regret at a victory which they did not feel part of. This book examines that paradox to understand the experience of the war at sea from the perspective of the men who fought it.
Since the Armistice, books about the First World War have been prolific, revealing an obsession with this particular conflict that endures almost 100 years after it began. From veterans keen to add their voices to the public recollection in the 1920s, to the twenty-first century historian trying to understand Britain’s place in the world, this conflict has retained an emotional resonance in the national memory. Histories of the Great War have been frequently produced since the Armistice as a means to record, and somehow to understand, the events of 1914–1918. In the ensuing years, these works were created to reassure a war-weary nation that victory had been attained and the conflict had been worth enduring. However, another war in the 1940s showed that the unsatisfactory outcomes of the First World War culminated in a second, and in many ways far more devastating, conflict. In the wake of the Second World War, therefore, the precedent set by the first conflict was reconsidered, whilst simultaneous developments in historiographical methods led to the flowering of individual history, made possible by a wider interest in social reforms (such as the NHS) and a more established role for women and ethnic minorities in society. By the 1960s, with the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War, the individual was becoming firmly embedded in the cultural history of this conflict. This section considers some of the key texts in each decade to show that although the nature of historical study has evolved, works about pilots and sailors have not progressed in the same way.
Soldiers have always been the primary focus for historians. From Martin Middlebrook’s examination of men on the Somme to Richard Holmes’s Tommy, soldier experiences have dominated the historiography of this conflict. Partly, this relates to the conditions endured by men in the trenches and how this was presented in the disillusioned memoirs and poetry published in the 1920s. As soldiers were demobilized, they brought home the truth of war, and it was less easy for the public to believe in the jingoistic sentiments of 1914. The evidence was before them in the death toll, the disabled veterans, the unemployment figures and the economic crisis. But the historians’ focus on the army is based on the incorrect assumption that the airforce and the navy played a negligible role in the conflict.
Accounts of the Royal Flying Corps fall broadly into two categories – veteran accounts and enthusiast histories, the latter being concerned with aeroplanes and engine specifications rather than pilots. Few historians have recorded or understood the war record of this service and the cultural existence of the airman in France and Belgium. Why men chose to serve their country in the airforce rather than the infantry has been overlooked. Even during the great flowering of First World War history in the 1960s, when oral history first became a driving force in understanding the war experience, the role of the Flying Corps (and indeed the Royal Navy) was largely forgotten in favour of the misery of the trenches. Those historians who did acknowledge the presence of the Flying Corps produced tactical guides to encounters and skirmishes between rival pilots, rather than analyses of the men involved, their culture, background and motivation. Fundamentally, the history of the RFC has always been part of the technical history of flying and mainly used as a preface to the Battle of Britain in the Second World War. It has never been considered as a distinct and vital part of Britain’s total Great War effort.
The men of the Royal Navy have also been excluded from the story of the Great War. They too faced the challenges of technology, political machinations and the influx of civilians into every area of their institution. The historiographical reasons for the disregard of the navy are complex. The writing of naval history has been quite different to the army and airforce, reflecting the nature of naval life as a lifestyle rather than a job for its servicemen. Boys were recruited from the age of 12, and stayed until retirement, imbibing hundreds of years of prestigious history along the way, a strict moral and behavioural code for all occasions, and a deep public respect for the premier guardians of Britain’s shores. During the First World War, each service was popularly regarded in quite different ways: the Army dominated coverage as it contained the highest number of men and thereby focused the emotional investment of millions of mothers; the Royal Flying Corps had romance, and the Navy inspired respect and admiration. These perceptions endure until the present day and have affected written histories. Twentieth-century writing on the Royal Navy has maintained an essential continuity with centuries of naval traditions and history writing, viewing the Great War as just one of many conflicts in which it had participated since its inception. Crucially this does not suggest aberrance, or disconnection with the past, which some works on the Army and RFC in the Great War have stressed.
The nature of historical study has evolved throughout the twentieth century, moving from a strategic focus on battles and generals, to understanding the human emotions and motivations of the ordinary soldier in combat. Briefly charting how the Great War has been interpreted and re-imagined by historians will make it be possible to see why pilots and sailors have been largely omitted from these accounts, and how techniques now commonplace in writing about soldiers should be applied to other services to fully understand Britain’s contribution to this conflict. Proud of pilot achievements, the first histories of the air war appeared in the early 1920s including the voluminous The Great War in the Air (1920) by Edgar Middleton of the Royal Naval Air Service. His four volumes provide a detailed chronological insight into all aspects of the war, written with the romantic tone that has long been associated with early notions of aerial warfare. ‘Behind the mask,’ Middleton gushed, ‘burnt incessantly the all-absorbing flame of pulsating Youth. The joie de vivre was ever uppermost. How they enjoyed this poor mortal existence, those gallant boys and youth!’19 The purpose of this work, and the others of this decade, was to record and pay homage to the courage and honour of the men who served, but without dissecting the modes and methods employed by men on active service. Walter Raleigh and H. A. Jones’s seven-volume The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by The Royal Air Force, written between 1922 and 1937, stands alongside Middleton’s work as a thorough tactical history, placing far greater emphasis on the technical advances made by both the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps in detecting the enemy and establishing combat systems. In fact, one of the peculiarities of pilot accounts was recognition of their place in the history of flying, rather than personal reminiscences, so Middleton, Raleigh and Jones, like other veteran pilots, wrote to reinforce the permanence of the RAF, by no means assured in the 1920s, and guarantee the First World War pilot a place in the story of aviation.
Meanwhile, naval historiography reflected the need to assess the effects of the conflict, praise achievement and deflect the negative attacks of some of its veterans. Henry Newbolt’s text A Naval History of the War 1914–1918 (c. 1920s), therefore, identified the primary subject matter of naval histories for the next 60 years. Naval duties, he wrote, ‘were practical and particular ones ... . The British fleet fulfilled its traditional work ... on a scale never known before.’20 The men who devoted themselves to these duties and their reasons for doing so never really mattered. According to Newbolt, the navy was one homogenous body, driven by honour and proud of its illustrious history. The sailors who fought the war were just constituent parts of the whole, and not even the social changes in British society after the Second World War would alter that historical perspective.
It was really from the 1960s that there was significant interest in the First World War as an historical event, and as methods began to change, a new perspective on the individual in history began to emerge. Previously unconsidered aspects of the past came to the fore whilst simultaneous advances in technology produced the tape recorder and established oral history, the recording of interviews (i.e. original testimony) from those who had witnessed events, archived like documents for future use. Most importantly, as a consequence of the government’s 50-year rule, a flood of official records became available to the Great War historian for the first time. Benefiting from this, the Royal Flying Corps was one such ‘unconsidered aspect’ that came under discussion. The Royal Flying Corps: A History by Geoffrey Norris (1965) was one of the first books to make use of ‘the generous help of the men who served in the Royal Flying Corps’. He acknowledged that their ‘willingness to talk or to write ... or to loan documents’ was invaluable.21 Norris accentuated the role of individuals who had shaped the development of the RFC, and showed that squadrons had frequently been responsible for their own advancement; for example, he wrote that ‘again it was left to the individuals of the RFC to show what could be done. ... No 3 squadron ... {as} no government funds were available ... bought their own cameras.’22 Home Defence was also examined; Douglas Robinson looked at the division of control between the RFC and RNAS in his book The Zeppelin in Combat: A History of the German Naval Airship Division 1912–1918 (1962), which stressed German unpreparedness for war and the false belief that England would not fight. Thus the success of the Zeppelin and the fear it engendered was primarily psychological.23
The secondary naval works of the 1960s focused entirely on policy, strategy and leadership, reinforcing the continuity of naval life and traditions, in contrast to the direction in which other histories moved in this decade. Sidestepping the personal dimension, Geoffrey Bennett looked at technical elements of warfare in his Naval Battles of the First World War (1968). It was ‘a drama to be played in three acts’, he explained, ‘the first between cruisers overseas, the second in Home waters between the opposing battle fleets, the third ... under the sea’. This book, like its counterparts, dealt with the highest level of decision-making, weighed the advantages and disadvantages of protagonists’ strategies to conclude that both navies wished ‘to avoid an engagement’. To achieve this, the defeat of the U-boat was fundamental to British success.24 What it was like to participate in battles and use these strategies was overlooked by Bennett’s volume, which preferred a top-down view of the fighting process – a perspective shared by Correlli Barnett in The Swordbearers (1963). In the early twentieth century, Barnett mocked, ‘the navy was no longer a deadly functional instrument of policy: it was an exclusive yacht club. Yet by August 1914, in ten years, it had been ... transformed once more into a fighting service’, and this was largely thanks to the direction of Admirals Jellicoe and Fisher. Barnett’s concentration on those in the Admiralty (for all their faults) is typical.25 Despite the opportunities of the 1960s, historians continued to favour a traditional history for a traditional Navy.
The 1970s was perhaps the most highly politicized decade in historical study and this was particularly true for writings on the First World War. For many historians, the conflict had been a watershed for radical change in the nation when the Edwardian past had become illusory, and radically different to the uncertain and fundamentally altered post-war world. This decade saw strong political feeling with class disputes, trade unionism and economic complexities dominating contemporary thought, and this shaped the historians’ perspective on the past. ‘History from below’ was at the crux of scholarship in the 1970s, utilizing the oral history interviews from the previous decade and examining questions of motivation and endurance. Fussell believed that a radical break with literary tradition had occurred and soldier-writers created a ‘victim’ character to reflect their time at war. Similarly, historian John Keegan wrote of the blind faith of soldiers in their hierarchy, which removed any notion that men had determined their own war experience.
Works on soldiers have much to contribute to the understanding of pilot and sailor experience. Many of the techniques now prevalent in the study of the army can be applied to the other services to offer a complete picture of Britain’s role in the Great War. Martin Middlebrook was among the first historians to use oral history interviews recorded during the 1960s to emphasize the centrality of 1916 to the veteran’s views on the war. His book The First Day on the Somme (1971) used interviews to demonstrate that disillusionment with the war came after the Armistice.26 The histories of the 1970s were united by the notion that 1914–1918 had been a radical watershed in the lives of the individuals in question and in the progress of the country. The use of oral history and memoir by 1970s historians argued that war had dislocated the ideal Edwardian past from a confused and broken present. At the centre of this was the soldier-victim, conscripted, oppressed and continually affected by his experiences on the Western Front. The most notable book on the Flying Corps, Aces High: The War in the Air Over the Western Front 1914–1918 by Alan Clarke (1973), argued that political manoeuvring kept good soldiers out of the RFC, because it was considered inferior to the Army:
{Until} the outbreak of war candidates for the Royal Flying Corps had first to qualify for the Royal Aero Club 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 ... and there was an unspoken implication that those who tried for the RFC were unconventional ... or still worse, ‘unsatisfactory’.27
Consequently, the RFC was perceived as the preserve of the rich and ill-disciplined, upper-class boys without sufficient courage for army life. This upper-class lifestyle, according to Clarke, firmly divided them from the honest working-man soldier. Yet Clarke simultaneously declared these playboy-airmen were victims of an unappreciative High Command who had left them under-staffed with inadequate equipment and increasing stress. Even ‘by the time Bloody April of 1917 came round’, Clarke insisted, ‘the very high casualties ... had left few crews with proper combat experience. The army’s insistence on continuous “offensive” patrols and the total obsolescence of their equipment were causing squadron casualties of approximately thirty per cent per week.’28
Although the 1970s were characterised by the politicization of history, this was, predictably, not the case in naval history. Edwyn Gray produced two notable texts – A Damned Un-English Weapon (1971) and The Killing Time (1972) – both concerned with submarine warfare. Primarily obsessed with tactics and the effect of the submarine on overall strategy, Gray revealed minimal details of onboard life, except that ‘there was little time for boredom and sea sickness was one of the greatest problems’.29 The navy’s attitude was always to focus on their professional role, and this was reiterated by Gray’s later book, a narrative history of U-boats and comparison of British-German strategy. ‘There can be little doubt,’ Gray asserted, ‘that the effectiveness of the British blockade had a strong bearing on the decision to employ the U-boat ... . {T}he submarine was the only available weapon of retaliation.’30 Naval history continued to look at plans and tactics in the 1970s, and, even though it recognized new aspects such as submarines and medical vessels, the focus was always strategic and statistical. However, in their own small way, these works began to look outside the Admiralty and away from traditional battleships – which in naval history was revolutionary enough.
With more than 60 years’ distance from the conflict, and veteran numbers dwindling in the 1980s, historians began to use these sources to challenge the idea of soldiers as passive victims of unremitting conflict. Tony Ashworth’s Trench Warfare 1914–1918 argued that serving in different areas of the front affected experience in different ways. Consequently, ‘no “single”, “typical” or “truly common” war experienced existed.’31 This work was vital to studies of the soldier because it showed the variance between the types of warfare they engaged in. Ashworth’s book began to dispel the notion that soldiers were kept in a permanent state of entrenched misery, suggesting that there was far more variation in the experience of conflict than the poetry suggested. Ashworth’s explanation of ‘quiet’ and ‘active’ sectors is extremely relevant to naval and airforce studies where men faced similar challenges.
The 1980s also saw greater attention paid to the home front and in particular the suffering of parents and families. Trevor Wilson in his 1986 text The Myriad Faces of War argued that ‘soldiers were not alone in their victimhood’, yet their writing had dominated the memory of war.32 In fact, Britain suffered from many of the exigencies of total war, and the freedom of its citizens underwent numerous restrictions including limitations to the amount of popular entertainment and even food. Wilson helped to broaden the cultural perspective on the First World War, encouraging it to be seen as a conflict that had a resounding effect on all the people of Britain. This book expands Wilson’s examination of the home front to look at the servicemen stationed there and the very different ways in which this affected their experience of war. Pilots and sailors were resident in Britain throughout the war and were tasked with its protection, giving them a very different perspective on the conflict from those stationed more remotely in France.
Of all aspects of aerial combat, it is the problems of home defence that have most interested historians largely because of its ramifications for the Second World War. The Air Defence of Britain 1914–1918 (1984) by Christopher Cole and E. F. Cheeseman argued that protecting the home front lacked the glamour of ‘chivalrous combat high above the squalor of the trenches’.33 Their narrative history catalogued the squabbles between the RFC and RNAS, neither of which wished to be responsible for Home Defence because it diverted valuable resources from what they considered their real work. The stress on politics and the inevitable need to reorganize resources was directly related to 1980s centralist political thought, as individual men had little control over the direction of the war and decisions made.
Richard Hough focused on sailors’ experience in The Great War at Sea 1914–1918 (1983). The Royal Navy, he argued, never experienced something like the Boer War to knock its complacency, thus Britain lagged behind Germany in training and professionalism. Hough argued that the failure of the navy to successfully wage war was due to a range of reasons from ‘unsuitable material, to lack of imaginative leadership, from inadequate preparations to a deep-seated and abiding national arrogance’. This meant, Hough argued, that many months were wasted in the early stages whilst the Royal Navy prepared itself for a conflict that had pre-empted it.34 ‘The Navy,’ Hough quipped, ‘continued to be regarded as a career for the less intellectually endowed and young men who liked the “clubbable” closed world and looked forward to steady rather than swift advancement.’ This was in contrast to the view of RFC boys as wealthy, unruly, thrill-seekers without the courage to face the slog of the trenches.35 Hough’s book is refreshingly scornful of grandiose naval histories. His book has helped to emphasize the incredible advances that made the navy an efficient, dominant force by 1918.
From the 1990s, the historiography of the Great War returned to the trenches to reconsider the process of warfare and its consequences for manliness. George Mosse was among the first to examine the effects of the conflict on contemporary views of masculinity. In The Image of Man (1996), Mosse asserted that volunteers ‘considered the war as a test of their manhood’, and many were excited by the opportunity.36 Joanna Bourke’s Dismembering the Male (1996) and An Intimate History of Killing (1999) agreed with Mosse’s reassertion of the soldier as an active participant in conflict rather than a faceless victim of mechanised war.37 Understanding how men were encouraged to kill, through the ideals of masculinity, and what effect this had on their motivation helped place the veteran back at the centre of the war experience.
The 1990s also saw a change in the public relationship with history as it became readily accessible through a variety of alternative sources. Popular culture opened history to widening audiences through books, films and the heritage environment. Museums and stately homes were transformed and the heritage industry began to affect academic study. J. G. Fuller channelled these new influences in his examination of trench popular culture. Troop Moral and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (1991) looked to trench newspapers as a commentary of intra-unit communication, especially ‘the jealousies and feelings otherwise perhaps too trivial to be generally recorded’.38 He moved from the individualistic ideas of the 1980s and began to look at the unit and mateship as motivators, and in particular the role of the individual in the wider group. Most importantly, Fuller directly challenged the idea of war as a radical divide in society, arguing that soldiers did not feel entirely dislocated from their pre-war selves. Samuel Hynes concurred with this assessment in A War Imagined (1990), in which he argued that literary styles were not disconnected by the conflict. ‘The past may have felt like a heap of broken images,’ he wrote, ‘but in fact much that had been established and secure in 1914 was still intact in post-war English society.’39 This examination of popular culture is relevant to the study of pilots and sailors because as the oldest and newest services, they both used established popular culture language to describe their exploits and affirm their role in the political landscape.
Historians in the 1990s and early twenty-first century also considered the role of the combatant in post-war society. From Adrian Gregory’s Silence of Memory to Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, the consequences of war and the unsuitability of the commemorative process came under examination. Gregory, like Hynes and Fuller, argued that existing modes of remembrance were used after the war but soldier-veterans often felt excluded from this national grief and its memorialization, which did not reflect their experience of war.40 Winter argued that commemoration was less concerned with understanding the war than reconciling the memory of conflict with its social, cultural and economic consequences.41
The writings on the Royal Flying Corps (and even the Royal Naval Air Service) have rarely produced more than two serious academic works per decade since the Armistice. The most scholarly book in the twenty-first century has been David Edgerton’s England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation. This reexamined the birth of aviation, arguing that Britain was enthusiastic about air power and its technological processes were strengthened by its existence.42 Although this is a key text in positioning the aeroplane in British history, it does not focus on the pilots who experienced, and in some cases influenced, the growth of First World War aviation.
In the twenty-first century, even the experience of sailors has begun to be considered more deeply. Jan Rueger’s monograph Great Naval Game (2008) and article ‘Nation, Empire and Navy: Identity Politics in the United Kingdom 1887 – 1914’ have addressed the cultural perception of the Navy in the years leading up to the First World War, and examined public engagement with the navy.43 Rueger’s book looks at the pageantry of fleet displays and the conscious attempts by the Royal Navy to embody the spirit of the British Empire in the early years of the twentieth century in order to appeal to the public. Although not about the First Word War, it has opened the door to greater analysis of the cultural history of the navy in this period. Rueger’s article from 2004 places the navy at the centre of nationalist sentiment in the 30 years preceding the Great War. He showed that ‘the Royal Navy was one of the most important agents of Britishness in the Victorian and Edwardian era.’44 This book contextualizes the sailor experience of the Great War, through the writing of the men who served, to understand the role they believed they performed in the preceding years.
The first decade of the twenty-first century has been a challenging one for historians. Contemporary wars raise questions about the purpose of conflict and its role in modern society. With popular culture exploring every aspect of modern warfare, the authenticity of experience now seems to rest with the combatant. For historical study this has meant an increasing number of anthologies collating the various experiences of war. In many ways the role of the soldier in society has come full circle since 1914. Originally a figure to be admired, in the aftermath of war and the ensuing decades the soldier has been both feared and pitied. In the light of modern conflict, when public support for war has dissipated, the soldier is again seen as a victim of war created by governments. Joshua Levine published On a Wing and a Prayer (2008), an anthology of pilot testimony from the First World War, to coincide with the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice and establishment of the RAF.45 Many similar books have been published to celebrate all three services and have returned combatants’ own words to the centre of historical study. Historiography has developed significantly since the 1920s, when first-hand experience gave way to narrative political strategy. However, Levine presents the accounts in vague chronological order, without any criticism of the sources. It is a useful collection, but not a history because it offers no analysis of airmen and the peculiar position they held in the Great War. Aside from charting the progress of flying and narrating the manoeuvres and encounters of each squadron, no one has explored why men chose to join the aerial services and what kept them there in spite of the difficulties of establishing air power. Questions remain over the effect of the long-unresolved ‘fuzzy’ area between the RFC and RNAS (the political ramifications of which left both suffering staff and equipment shortages) and above all the new modes of death, which could as easily come from technological failure and human error as from enemy action. The proliferation of memoirs in the mid-1920s, therefore, attempted to counter a romanticised vision of conflict as veterans attempted to claim ownership of the true war experience. The quest in writing about the Great War, for combatants and historians, has been to understand the conflict and attempt to find meaning in the experiences. Running parallel to this has been a cultural concern with the meaning of ‘Britishness’. The twentieth century has been seen as slowly eroding Britain’s position in the world, starting with the First World War, through the loss of empire, to the social welfare system of the past 60 years. All of which has cast the values and purpose of the country into question. The individual testimony of men, who have embodied British patriotism, is used as the only truth about war. The challenge for historians is to reassume their role in interpreting the past.
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This book expands the understanding of soldiers’ lives, crafted over 90 years of historiographic focus, to include pilots on the Western Front and home front, as well as sailors in the North Sea and English Channel, whose contribution has rarely featured. To fully understand Britain’s role in the Great War and the consequences for the development of Britain as an international power in the twentieth century, the role of the pilot and sailor is valuable. The effects of the First World War are still felt. Britain lost an empire but gained a political presence on a newly-created world stage. That position owes much to the growth of civilian air transport and improved international communications that were developed by the pilots and sailors of the Great War. The testimony of these men offers insight into the lived war experience and its later reconstruction in memory. The Western Front has dominated the academic exploration of soldiers in this conflict, so demonstrating that two other forms of warfare were happening simultaneously in this theatre of war is the first step towards widening the army-centric view of the Great War.
Comparing the experience and motivation of the pilot and sailor in the Great War will aid the understanding of why men fought, and continued to fight, despite the conditions of combat. The two services were separated by age, the nature of conflict each was engaged in, and the attitude and the demands war made upon their men. They started and ended the war in quite different positions, and this makes them an interesting comparison. Their composition was also very different; the Flying Corps with new, recruited wartime volunteers, was at the cutting-edge of modern science, was in combat for clearly-defined periods of time, and enjoyed a relaxed structure. The navy, by contrast, was comprised largely of career-sailors, many of whom had been in service since the age of 12. They had a stringent hierarchy and discipline, were controlled from the top and endured long periods at sea with a relatively consistent level of danger. Seemingly quite opposite to one another, both services created the feelings of loyalty necessary for men to remain at their posts, and the enthusiasm for victory that sustained them.
Using the diaries, letters and memoirs of servicemen creates various problems for the historian. Each, in some sense, can be considered an ‘unreliable’ source because of its highly subjective nature and reliance on memory. However, they are the best and only sources that give insight into individual experiences of war and the ways in which men understood their role. Letters were often produced under difficult circumstances, were censored by senior officers, and assumed to report an idealized version of combat intended to bring comfort to the recipient. Historian Aribert Reimann complained that servicemen were often inexperienced with writing and adhered to a ‘widespread reluctance to tell family members about the horror of war’. All of which, he concluded, were ‘ample reasons not to read soldiers’ letters as an “authentic” documentation’ of experience’.46 However, soldiers’ letters in particular contained graphic descriptions of their experiences at the front and it was natural to suppose that men would look to their family for support. Letters were vital to the maintenance of motivation because they provided a link to each combatant’s pre-war self and constantly reminded him why he had volunteered to fight. Importantly, by writing letters to loved ones, combatants could also be sure they were being heard and would be more likely to be truthful. The flood of recollections in the inter-war period affirms that soldiers wanted the public to understand their experiences, providing motivation to write honestly to their relatives. Candid letters were sent from personnel of the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Navy, so their use here supports their value in motivating men to fight.
Diaries introduce similar problems of reliability and were officially banned in the First World War. The use of the personal diary was different from today; they were not used to unburden the emotions of the owner, but as a means to record events. They often dispassionately noted the key actions of the day but with little discussion of their meaning or more introspective considerations of their effects. Used in this way, diaries give the clearest indication of the combat experience, as lived day to day, and the tasks of the men involved. The perfunctory recording of events is exemplified by two entries in pilot A. J. Robinson’s diary from 1918. On 3 August he wrote: ‘Got fed up with keeping a diary so didn’t for a few days.’ A few days later he reconsidered and on 8 August wrote: ‘Two more dud days except that on the latter I developed toothache.’47 The brevity of these entries are revealing in themselves. The first suggests that pilots had other amusements that meant keeping a diary became a burden for Robinson, whilst the second indicates that as there had been no flying in recent days, nothing worth recording had occurred. These two short lines suggest the breadth of the war experience, in that when patrols were impossible, pilots had alternative duties or diversions that distracted Robinson from diary-keeping. The value of the diary to the historian is for the insight it offers into the daily lives of servicemen, and as much for the information men chose to record as to omit. The time for reflection would be after the war had been won, when the perfunctory entries in their diaries could be expanded. Diaries, however, became more problematic sources when published, as the original text was often embellished with later reflections. These diaries, like memoirs, pose questions of reliability in their sanitization or exaggeration of events. Like memoirs, however, the published diary also offers insight into the attitude of servicemen to their war experiences, and the ways they chose to remember the conflict.
The Great War was one event that many veterans felt shaped their lives in some indefinable way and the memoirs they wrote often reflected this perspective. Paul Fussell in his definitive 1975 text The Great War and Modern Memory described the memoir as a ‘kind of fiction, differing from the “first novel”... only by continuous implicit attestations of veracity or appeals to documented historical facts’.48 The memoir, Fussell suggests, is influenced not only by the writer’s knowledge of his survival but by the time of writing, both of which have altered his perspective on the war. Historian Ken Plummer expanded on the problem of memories, describing them as ‘simply our most habitually told stories ... . It is what we have said so often that we literally come to believe it is true (even when not).’49 Men repeatedly recreated the war in various forms, reliving and repeating their stories that with each telling would have become increasingly distorted. However, the memoir is testament to the lifelong obsession highlighted by Fussell, and although the war was not a radical break with the past in the cultural or political sense, within the lives of these men it was. It was an experience which many wished to relive and re-visit throughout their lives, searching for its meaning.
Most works on the airforce have been retrospective, taking the Battle of Britain or development of civilian air routes as a predetermined end point and fitting the 1914–1918 airman into these later developments. Yet the men of the Great War focused on the immediate moment, with no knowledge of the future, and it is this that makes their experience, as they wrote it, worth exploring. The development of the air force in the Great War was the direct result of pilot actions. Exploring how men responded to conflict and what drove them to improve and develop the weapons and tactics used to fight Germany is essential to understanding how the Royal Air Force came to exist. Most importantly, the events of the Great War were the basis for the development of military and civil aviation in the twentieth century, not by predestination, but because of the pilots of the Royal Flying Corps who made it possible.
Historical study has evolved significantly, and naval history must also now engage with the socio-cultural practices prevalent in other fields of Great War understanding. Whether Jutland was a success or a failure, the effectiveness of Sea Lords and of the Admiralty will continue to be debated, but what sailors felt they were doing, their motivations, intentions and reasons for endurance, are far more interesting questions vital to understanding Britain’s role in the Great War and the effect it was to have on the country in the subsequent years. To understand the nature of conflict entirely, and why the naval position as the perceived saviour of Britain was blemished by this conflict, is essential to understanding how the twentieth century developed. This book addresses the question of endurance as expressed by officer airmen and sailors during the conflict and what motivated them to remain in the conflict in spite of the deprivations they experienced. It is time to focus attention on the men who experienced the war and how they learnt to fight.