Chapter 8
War at Sea, War in the Air
In This Chapter
Hunting German raiders and U-boats
Watching fleets clash at Jutland
Flying with Zeppelins
Meeting the world’s first war pilots
The First World War was the first war in history to be fought both in the air and under the sea. It saw one of the biggest naval battles in history, the first widespread use of submarines and the first use of airpower at sea. Air technology in particular was transformed by the war, and in this chapter you meet the first men to become famous for their exploits in fighter aircraft – and see how these campaigns in the air and out at sea contributed to the final outcome of the war.
Sea Power = Great Power: Ruling the Waves
Back in 1890 the American Admiral AT Mahan wrote a book called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, which considered Britain’s long war with Napoleonic France, when the French had controlled all of mainland Europe but Britain had controlled all the seas around it. Mahan concluded that mastery of the sea was the key to a nation’s economic and political prowess, and that a naval power like Britain would always be able to defeat any country, however powerful, that had only military power on land. Many people agreed with him.
Ever since the days of Admiral Lord Nelson and his famous 1805 victory over the French at Trafalgar in the Napoleonic wars, the British had controlled the world’s oceans and prided themselves on their naval power. In the years leading up to the First World War, Britain was the dominant sea power and, under the dynamic First Sea Lord Sir John ‘Jacky’ Fisher, the British had been ditching their old wooden battleships and adopting the very latest in ironclad technology to further strengthen their position. They even maintained a two-power standard: they’d keep their fleet larger than the next two largest fleets in the world combined. No other country, it seemed, could possibly challenge Britain’s command of the sea. Until the Germans began expanding their navy, that is.
Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm wanted a large fleet, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz proposed to give him one. Von Tirpitz was influenced by Mahan’s book, which became required reading in the German high command. He argued that Mahan had shown that a Great Power had to have a powerful navy, and he got the German parliament – the Reichstag – to agree to a huge spending programme to expand the German fleet. It wasn’t long before the British began to wonder exactly why the Germans were building so many ships and whom they expected to be fighting. The answer wasn’t too difficult to work out: Britain.
Tirpitz knew he had no chance of building a fleet bigger or more powerful than Britain’s, but he reckoned he could build one that could do the British fleet serious damage, enough to force the British to give up their two-power standard and threaten their control of the seas.
Updating and Innovating: Dreadnoughts and Destroyers
In Nelson’s day ships had been built of wood and they carried cannon to blast holes in each other. By 1914, however, ship design had completely changed. Ships were now made of steel and they carried huge gun turrets that swung around to target an enemy who might be many miles away. Small vessels could damage, even sink, much bigger ships with the latest in sea warfare technology, the torpedo – an explosive, fast-moving missile that travels underwater. Before long, navies were developing new types of ships to meet the challenge of new hardware:
- Destroyers were fast, lightly armoured ships whose main task was to deal with torpedo boats. They could fire torpedoes themselves and they were also useful as fast scouts. When U-boats started to attack British shipping, destroyers were armed with depth charges to attack them.
- Cruisers came in different versions: light cruisers or the more heavily armoured battlecruisers. Cruisers were faster than battleships but more lightly armoured. They were useful as escorts for convoys to protect them from surface raiders, and cruisers could take on other cruisers, but they were much less useful in battle against battleships.
- Dreadnoughts were the state-of-the-art game-changers. The first, HMS Dreadnought, was launched by Britain’s Royal Navy in 1906 – a full battleship that was more heavily armoured and yet faster than any other warship afloat. All navies had to scrap all their existing battleships, go back to the drawing board and start building dreadnoughts.
The history books say – rightly – that Dreadnought made all other ships obsolete overnight, but the bad news for Britain was that this included the rest of Britain’s own vast navy, so the country needed to start building more dreadnoughts – and fast, because the Germans were building them too. From 1906 to 1913 the two countries thrust vast sums of money into a desperate race trying to out-build each other, until the Germans decided it was costing too much and that they’d never win: they had 17 dreadnoughts but the British had 29. The naval race didn’t lead directly to war, but it did lead the British to see the Germans as a dangerous enemy, set on undermining them.
Raiders and Blockaders
The key to winning a war is food. No one can fight without sufficient food, so if you control your enemy’s food supply, in effect you control your enemy.
As soon as war broke out in 1914, each side planned to use its fleet to starve the other into submission. The British used their fleet to blockade Germany’s ports and stop any seaborne imports getting through, though the Germans could still get imports through neutral Holland. Britain, on the other hand, as an island was entirely dependent on shipping to feed its population.
Cutting off the enemy’s food supply didn’t mean positioning your ships or submarines just outside his ports: you could operate just as effectively at a distance. The British blockaded Germany by positioning ships far out in the North Sea, to intercept merchant ships heading for Germany. In return, German raiders attacked British merchant ships all over the world, even in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
Sink the Emden!
Before they sent U-boats into action in significant numbers, the Germans used surface raiders – small, fast naval vessels designed to sink merchant vessels – to attack Allied merchant ships and troopships. German raiders did a lot of damage and were difficult to catch, though if they were cornered by an Allied warship they were too small and lightly armoured to defend themselves very effectively.
The most successful surface raider was the Emden, which operated in the Indian Ocean under its captain, the daring Karl von Müller. Müller constructed a dummy fourth funnel to make his ship look from a distance like a British ship, so he could get in close before his victim realised the danger. The Emden sank some 16 British merchant ships, a French destroyer and a Russian cruiser at anchor in the harbour at Penang; it even bombarded the port of Madras in British India and set alight its oil tanks.
At one point 60 ships, British, Russian, Japanese and French, were all out looking for the Emden. Eventually, in November 1914, the Emden was cornered by the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney at Direction Island in the Cocos Islands and battered into surrender (see Figure 8-1). Even then some of her crew managed to escape from the island in a stolen schooner and make it back to Germany.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 22743)
Figure 8-1: The Emden, damaged by HMAS Sydney.
Coronel and the Falklands
The Emden had been part of a German squadron under Admiral von Spee that was causing serious damage to Allied shipping in the Pacific. By October 1914, the rest of von Spee’s squadron was operating off the west coast of South America with five powerful cruisers, including two light cruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.
The British were determined to catch von Spee, but their nearest force, based in the Falkland Islands under Admiral Cradock, had only one modern cruiser, HMS Glasgow: Cradock’s other three ships were old and slow. Cradock had been told to wait for reinforcements, but he was too impatient. He took his force around Cape Horn and challenged the Germans at Coronel, off the coast of Chile, on 1 November 1914. It was a disaster. The Germans sank two of Cradock’s old ships, his flagship HMS Good Hope and HMS Marlborough, and forced the others to withdraw. Admiral Cradock went down with his ship.
The British were aghast at the news of the disaster at Coronel, and sent a powerful fleet, including two large battlecruisers, to find von Spee’s fleet and destroy it. In fact von Spee found the British first. Von Spee was heading to raid the British base on the Falkland Islands, thinking they were undefended, when he spotted the British ships in the harbour. They were in the middle of taking on coal and would have been defenceless if the Germans had attacked, but von Spee didn’t know that. He headed back out to sea and the British gave chase. The Germans’ gunnery was more accurate, but the British ships were bigger and faster. Only one of von Spee’s ships escaped; the others were all sunk. It was Admiral von Spee’s turn to go down with his ship.
U-boats and Q-ships
Before the war started everyone expected the war at sea to be dominated by huge battleships, but the key type of ship turned out to be the submarine. Although rudimentary submarines had already been around for a long time, it was only in the 20th century that countries started using them on a wide scale. All navies in the First World War had them, but the Germans used submarines (or U-boats – from Unterseeboot, the German for ‘submarine’ – as they called them) in a particular way: to blockade the British Isles and try to force Britain out of the war.
Things aren’t always what they seem
People often think of submarines as being the kings of the sea, able to sink anything on the water and impossible to detect. Submarines have some distinct advantages over surface vessels – they can move about virtually unseen and unheard, and stealthily creep up on their unsuspecting enemy before attacking them with torpedoes (see Figure 8-2). Certainly, submarines proved their worth during the war. Navies around the world built more and more of them as the war progressed in an attempt to gain the upper hand in the war beneath the waves.
© Imperial War Museums (a detail of Q 20343)
Figure 8-2: A German U-boat on the surface torpedoes a merchant vessel.
One particularly sad tale illustrates only too well the devastating impact U-boats could have on the enemy. In 1914 the British admiralty gave the job of patrolling the Dutch coast to the elderly Cressy class of cruisers, the oldest ships in the Royal Navy. They were so vulnerable to attack that they were given their own escort of destroyers and were nicknamed the ‘live bait’. By September 1914 the navy had decided to withdraw the ships, but a German U-boat managed to catch three of them, HMS Cressy, HMS Aboukir and HMS Hogue, in the open without their destroyers, and it sank all three, killing 1,400 men. It was a terrible demonstration of what U-boats could do and a signal to the British that the U-boat was an enemy to be reckoned with.
Despite this evidence of the U-boats’ advantages of stealth and surprise, waging war by submarine had some significant drawbacks:
- At the start of the war, submarines didn’t carry radios (though this changed when the war got underway).
- Travelling underwater was very slow, so submarines had to spend most of their time travelling on the surface.
- Even on the surface, submarines were quite slow and most ships could easily outrun them.
- Submerging took anything up to three minutes, so a submarine caught on the surface was very vulnerable.
- Submarines had no guns with which to defend themselves. A submarine caught on the surface could be sunk by even quite small ships.
- A submarine didn’t stand a chance if a ship decided to ram it – as many did.
- Ships could avoid torpedoes relatively easily by zigzagging.
- Submarines could be torpedoed by enemy submarines or by torpedo-firing ships, such as destroyers.
With these weaknesses, submarines in the First World War were actually very vulnerable.
Please observe the rules when sinking enemy ships
Many people thought it was distinctly unethical for a submarine to sink a ship, especially an unarmed merchant or passenger ship, with no regard for the safety of the people on board. After all, surface raiders such as the Emden would pick up survivors from the ships they sank and look after their wounded. So international law imposed a set of rules, known as Prize Rules, telling submarine captains how they should operate in wartime:
- Submarines must surface before stopping merchant ships. They might creep up underwater, but they had to show themselves before doing any harm.
- Submarines should warn the captains of merchant ships that they must stop and allow their ships to be searched. Only ships that refused to stop should be fired upon.
- Ships’ crews should be given time to evacuate the ship and take to the lifeboats with any necessary supplies. Ideally, the submarine should call other ships to pick up the crew.
- The submarine is allowed to sink the ship only after all the crew have left it.
Following these rules further weakened the effectiveness of submarines, taking time, making them vulnerable to attack from Q-ships (see the later ‘The Allies strike back’ section) and rather denying the submarines the element of surprise. However, most people viewed submarine attacks in much the same way that they viewed gas attacks on land: as a dishonourable form of warfare that should be used only if absolutely necessary. So the rules stuck – for a while, at least.
Yes, but what about the neutrals?
At first the German U-boats operated according to Prize Rules. Result: the British were able to fight against the blockade and defend themselves, and could sometimes sink the U-boats. Because of this, Admiral Tirpitz, the head of the German navy, wanted to tear up the Prize Rules and declare unrestricted U-boat warfare, or Handelskrieg (war on trade), sinking ships on sight without coming to the surface and leaving the survivors to their fate. However, the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, opposed this idea. He realised that U-boats were bound to sink neutral ships as well as enemy ones, and doing that could seriously damage Germany’s international relations. He reckoned it could even cause the neutral United States to come into the war against Germany. The decision on the U-boat war would have to rest with the Kaiser.
Kaiser Wilhelm longed to end Britain’s dominance of the sea, but with Germany’s battle fleet bottled up in port (see ‘High Noon on the High Seas: The Battle of Jutland’, later in the chapter, to find out why), he couldn’t see any alternative to using U-boats. He gave his approval to Tirpitz’s plan, and in 1915 Germany announced it was declaring unrestricted U-boat warfare within a defined area around the British Isles called an exclusion zone. Any ship entering this exclusion zone around the British Isles was now in danger of being torpedoed. Even neutral vessels. Even passenger liners.
The Lusitania
The most significant victim of the new German policy of unrestricted U-boat warfare was the huge British passenger liner the Lusitania, which sailed from New York in May 1915 with a large number of passengers, including many Americans, heading for Southampton. The German embassy in Washington issued a warning that the ship was heading into the exclusion zone and could be sunk, but most people took no notice. As one overconfident American told the press, ‘The Germans dare not sink this ship!’
But on 7 May, off the southern coast of Ireland, it was spotted by Captain Schwieger of U-boat U-20. He fired a single torpedo, the ship rolled over and sank within 18 minutes, and over 1,000 people drowned, including 128 Americans. The Lusitania was unlucky: it was zigzagging to avoid submarines, and it had run into U-20 quite by chance. Captain Schwieger doesn’t even seem to have realised which ship he was attacking.
The Germans claimed the Lusitania was a legitimate military target and that it was carrying military supplies. We now know this was true: like most British ships crossing the Atlantic, the Lusitania was secretly carrying 4,200 cases of ammunition to help alleviate the desperate shortages the British were experiencing on the Western Front. Quite possibly the ship was carrying other forms of munitions too, which could account for a second explosion that eyewitnesses of the sinking reported.
None of the Germans’ claims affected the enormous public anger, on both sides of the Atlantic, that followed the sinking. American public opinion was outraged. Americans were particularly indignant that so many of their fellow countrymen had been drowned. Posters were produced there that showed women and children drowned by the U-boat, and in Britain the press presented the sinking as another example of uncivilised German behaviour, a reminder of why the Allies were fighting and why they had to defeat Germany.
After the Lusitania was torpedoed, Allied propaganda picked up on a strange medal that had appeared in Germany, apparently celebrating the sinking (see Figures 6 and 7 in the insert section). On one side it showed the ship going down and on the other it showed people buying tickets for the liner from a figure of death. ‘Aha!’ shouted Allied posters. ‘This shows how inhuman the Germans are!’ The medal certainly existed, but it wasn’t issued by the German government. It was produced privately as a cynical comment both on the sinking and on the attitude of Cunard, the shipping company that owned the Lusitania and had insisted on its sailing, despite the danger. Sometimes satire backfires: the medal was a gift to Allied propaganda.
The German government was so deeply alarmed by the impact of the Lusitania sinking that it called off the unrestricted U-boat campaign. Tirpitz was furious, but Bethmann Hollweg overruled him: from now on, German submarines would switch to the Mediterranean, where they could attack ships supplying the Allied troops at Gallipoli.
U-boats will win the war!
It didn’t take the Germans long to change their minds and go back to using U-boats around the British Isles. With no one breaking through on land, the U-boat campaign seemed the only way the Germans might cause one of their western enemies to collapse. In fact, they seemed to be Germany’s best chance of winning the war. But the Germans still couldn’t entirely ignore international public opinion:
- Spring 1916: Germans declare unrestricted U-boat warfare once again. Huge international protests: public opinion in the United States is particularly outraged. Germans cancel unrestricted U-boat warfare. Fed up with all these changes of policy, Tirpitz resigns as head of the German navy.
- February 1917: Desperate to bring the war to an end, the Germans re-declare unrestricted U-boat warfare. Two months later, angry at having lost so many of its ships and seamen, the United States declares war on Germany. Many South American countries do the same.
Throughout the war and particularly during these intermittent periods of unrestricted warfare, the U-boat was a serious threat to the Allies, and especially to Britain. But the Allies were learning how to fight back against the U-boats.
The Allies strike back
At first, with U-boats operating on the surface and observing Prize Rules, the Allies had a chance to sink them. From the start of the war, the British used special decoy vessels, codenamed Q-ships – armed naval vessels disguised as merchant ships – to trick and sink German U-boats. When U-boats were operating according to Prize Rules, a U-boat would warn a merchant ship to stop and submit to a search. The U-boat would approach, and some of the ship’s crew might even start getting into lifeboats. Then, when the U-boat was well within range, the Q-ship crew would suddenly reveal their guns and open fire on it. The Germans protested that Q-ships were unfair; the Allies retorted that they weren’t as unfair as sinking unarmed merchant ships.
But as U-boat tactics changed, so did the Allies counter-tactics:
- Laying mines: Well-positioned mines could catch U-boats where the Allies expected them to gather.
- Attacking surfaced U-boats: U-boats on the surface were very vulnerable either to gunfire or, failing that, to being rammed.
- Setting the Dover Barrage: A line of underwater netting and mines, the Dover Barrage was designed to keep U-boats away from the English Channel, where they could interfere with the vital troop transport boats. The barrage needed to be repositioned and strengthened at times, but it generally did a good job and forced the U-boats to pass through the North Sea, where Royal Navy destroyers could hunt them.
- Employing Allied submarines: The Allies sometimes used their own submarines to attack German ones. The Deutschland Class U-boats the Germans deployed at the end of the war made particularly good targets because they were so big.
- Dropping depth charges: Towards the end of the war, the Allied navies developed explosives that they could drop off ships and time to explode at the depth of a U-boat.
- Attacking by air: The British used long-range airships to attack U-boats travelling on the surface. They also began using aircraft launched from the decks of ships. This use of air power against ships was a sign of the way naval warfare was changing.
The British did have some success with these new counter-tactics, but without doubt the U-boats definitely hit the British very hard, and their blockade of the British Isles in particular came closer than any of the land campaigns to causing Britain to consider pulling out of the war. U-boats sank over 5,000 Allied ships, including 104 warships, most of them British. The U-boat campaign caused serious problems of food supply in Britain. On the other hand, in some ways the campaign was self-defeating for the Germans: it was very costly in terms of U-boat losses and in propaganda terms it was a disaster, especially because it was the key issue that brought the United States into the war.
A cost–benefit analysis would probably say that the Germans had to take a gamble: the U-boat campaign was their best chance of winning the war. But they paid a very heavy price by bringing the United States into the conflict. They gambled – but they lost.
High Noon on the High Seas: The Battle of Jutland
When war broke out, the men of the German and British fleets could hardly wait to have a big battle that would settle once and for all which of them ruled the seas. As it turned out, though, they had to wait nearly two years for the chance to come to blows. During those two years, the Germans sent out U-boats and surface raiders to sink British merchant ships (see ‘Raiders and Blockaders’, earlier in this chapter) but they kept their battle fleet, the High Seas Fleet, in harbour.
The German High Seas Fleet stayed at home for so long for a good reason: the British Grand Fleet under Admiral Sir John Jellicoe was based at Rosyth in Scotland and Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, patrolling the North Sea and waiting like a cat outside a mouse hole for the moment when the Germans would venture out. Jellicoe had to keep Britain’s Grand Fleet together, blockade Germany’s ports and keep the German High Seas Fleet bottled up in harbour, well away from the waters around Britain.
Jellicoe’s responsibility was such that Winston Churchill, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, called Jellicoe ‘the one man who could lose the war in an afternoon’. If Jellicoe made a misjudgement and lost control of the sea, Germany would be able to sail at will around Britain’s coasts and cut Britain off from all its sources of food. He took his responsibilities very seriously and knew it was more important to keep the Grand Fleet together than to go looking for big battles with the Germans. That made him appear a bit cautious and hesitant to the public, who much preferred their admirals more aggressive, such as Admiral Sir David Beatty.
Those two years weren’t without their fair share of naval action close to home, though:
- Battle of Heligoland Bight, August 1914: A British force of destroyers and submarines under Commodores Tyrwhitt and Keyes ambushed German ships patrolling the North Sea coast. Jellicoe sent reinforcements but Tyrwhitt didn’t get the message, so the British fired at them, thinking they were Germans. Eventually, the British sank four German ships and damaged many others, and the Kaiser ordered his fleet to stay safely in harbour, but the British had some serious lessons about communications and co-ordination to learn as well.
- Battle of the Dogger Bank, January 1915: The British intercepted a German raiding squadron. Although the British sank the German cruiser Blücher and badly damaged the German flagship, the Germans were able to badly damage the British flagship, HMS Lion, in return. With the British Admiral unable to get clear orders to his ships, most of the German squadron escaped back to port.
These two engagements, however serious, were precursors to what many people still felt was coming: the big naval showdown between Britain and Germany.
Admiral Scheer’s plan
In 1916 a new commander took charge of the German High Seas Fleet, Admiral Reinhard Scheer. Scheer didn’t believe in sitting around in harbour: he wanted to attack. He decided to set a trap for the British.
Scheer’s thinking went like this:
- The British Grand Fleet is far too big and powerful for the German High Seas Fleet. But if the Germans could defeat part of the British fleet, they could weaken the whole Royal Navy. Scheer’s target was the British battlecruisers based at Rosyth under Beatty.
- Send a squadron of German battlecruisers out into the North Sea to tempt Beatty to come out in pursuit. Beatty enjoyed a good battle: he would come (and he did).
- While Beatty is engaged with the German battlecruisers, the whole German High Seas Fleet will suddenly appear, surround Beatty’s ships and blow them out of the water. Then the Germans could nip back into port before the main British Grand Fleet appeared.
It was a good plan and it nearly worked. Beatty took the bait and set sail with his battlecruisers to attack the Germans. However, Sir John Jellicoe had also heard of the German movements and he decided to order the Grand Fleet into action straight away, steaming southwards from Orkney into the North Sea. Instead of staying in harbour, as Scheer had expected it would, Jellicoe’s fleet was at sea and not very far behind Beatty. And the Germans didn’t know.
The battlecruisers’ battle
Beatty caught up with the German battlecruisers near Jutland, off the coast of Denmark (see Figures 8 and 9 in the insert section). He had moved so quickly that they weren’t yet ready for him. Beatty gave orders to attack and the great Battle of Jutland began. And immediately began going wrong.
Beatty’s men were so keen to get to grips with the Germans that they forgot to take basic safety measures, such as closing hatches and bulkheads. As a result two of his battlecruisers, HMS Queen Mary and HMS Indefatigable, blew up when German shells penetrated through to their ammunition stores. Beatty was aghast. ‘There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today,’ he exclaimed.
Beatty lures the Germans
While the battlecruisers were slogging it out, Admiral Scheer was closing in on Beatty with his dreadnoughts. But when Beatty saw the German battleships approaching he didn’t stay put: he ordered his ships to disengage and head north. He knew the Germans would pursue him. What the Germans didn’t know was that Beatty was drawing them right into the path of Jellicoe, who was closing in rapidly with the entire British Grand Fleet. The Germans had originally set a trap for Beatty; now Beatty was setting a trap for them.
Crossing the T and turning away
Jellicoe sent some of his battlecruisers ahead to help Beatty, so when they arrived on the scene the Germans still thought they were only up against a force of battlecruisers. But at about 6.30 in the evening the smoke cleared to reveal to Scheer’s men their very worst nightmare: the entire British Grand Fleet lay across their path in a very long line, like the crosspiece of a capital T. All the British ships could fire at the Germans, but very few German ships could fire back.
Scheer needed to get out of there fast. He sent in his battlecruisers to keep the British occupied while he withdrew his battleships, but Jellicoe followed him and shortly afterwards the British crossed Scheer’s ‘T’ once again. With only a short length of daylight left, each side fired torpedoes and the Germans headed for home. Jellicoe turned his fleet away for a while to avoid the torpedoes, and by the time he was able to turn it back in the right direction, the Germans had got away. They made it to port and they stayed there. For the rest of the war.
Who won the Battle of Jutland?
The arguments about who won at Jutland still go on. The Germans undoubtedly won the battlecruiser battle: they did far more damage to Beatty’s squadron than he was able to do to them. The Germans certainly claimed they’d won and the British public was deeply disappointed that Jellicoe hadn’t won a Trafalgar-style victory. But sea battles aren’t really about sinking ships: they’re about commanding the ocean. The Germans had recognised that they simply couldn’t break Britain’s command of the seas. Scheer realised that he’d been very lucky to get so many of his ships back in one piece, and he didn’t intend to risk them like that a second time. As for Jellicoe, many people thought he’d let the Germans get away too easily at Jutland, and although he became First Sea Lord, he never held another command at sea.
How much did Jutland matter?
Whoever controlled the sea would win the war: the matter was as simple as that. The Allies needed to move troops across the English Channel and around the Mediterranean (and, eventually, across the Atlantic) and for that they had to control the seas. Both sides depended heavily on imports of munitions and of food: without these even the strongest military power can’t carry on a war. German raiders and U-boats came close to starving Britain out, but the Allies worked out effective counter-measures in time to stop that happening. The Germans, on the other hand, never worked out a way of breaking the British blockade of their ports.
Jutland – the big showdown between the British and German navies – may not have been the crushing victory the British public hoped for, but it mattered because it left the British in command of the North Sea and the British blockade of Germany still in place. It was no coincidence that the winter that followed Jutland brought some of the hardest food shortages of the war. The war ended in 1918 (and Chapter 16 tells you exactly how) because Germany suddenly collapsed, and the British blockade – and Jutland – played an important part in making that happen.
Controlling the Skies
Humans have long dreamed of flying, but it was not until 1783 that the Montgolfier brothers were the first to leave the ground under their own power – in balloons. Since then, armies had used balloons in war for observation and, in 1871 Parisians used them to get messages out of the city during the Prussian siege. But balloons had major disadvantages: they were easily visible to an enemy, who just had to follow a balloon and capture its occupants when it came to earth, and balloons were almost completely at the mercy of the elements. One balloon carrying a message out of besieged Paris in 1871 carried its bewildered crew all the way to Norway! In the First World War, both sides used balloons for observation, and the crews were even given parachutes so they could jump to safety if the enemy started firing at them.
However, in wartime people were starting to see that having control of the skies was as critical to success as having control of the seas. To have control, you needed to be able to attack your enemy from the air, and to attack your enemy from the air you needed powered flight. Balloons just weren’t enough.
Powered flight saw some of the most dramatic technological advances made during the war. The Wright brothers had made their famous pioneering flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, and the first flight over the English Channel took place in 1909. Less than ten years later airships were conducting the first ever airborne bombing raids and fighter planes were staging dogfights in the skies above the trenches on the Western Front and carrying out long-range bombing missions against the British Isles. Aircraft hadn’t yet reached the stage where they could decide the outcome of wars on their own, but the First World War took air power a long way down that road.
I lost my home to an airship trooper
Airships were developed in 1900 by Count von Zeppelin, after whom they became known, for carrying mail and passengers, but they were quickly taken up by the German army. Unlike a balloon, an airship has an engine to drive it to specific points, which meant that the army could use Zeppelins for reconnaissance at sea and to drop bombs to help with ground attacks in Belgium and in Poland, which they did from 1914. However, Zeppelins were vulnerable to the weather and many of them crashed.
Airborne attacks
After the Germans had conquered Belgium, they set up Zeppelin bases there from which they could conduct air raids against Britain. The Kaiser took some convincing before he authorised these raids, because he was fond of England, but in January 1915 he finally authorised the attacks. In return, the British launched raids on the Zeppelin bases at Cuxhaven and Friedrichshafen using aircraft launched from ships (these were the world’s first naval air raids), but they couldn’t prevent the Zeppelins from setting off (see Figure 10 in the insert section).
Zeppelins conducted several raids on the Allies:
- 19 January 1915: First Zeppelin raid on Britain, at Yarmouth on the Norfolk coast.
- 21 March 1915: First Zeppelin raid on Paris.
- 31 May 1915: First Zeppelin raid on London.
- 8–9 September 1915: Major Zeppelin raid on London.
Zeppelin raids caused considerable panic in London and angry crowds started attacking foreign-owned shops and homes, even when the owners weren’t German. By comparison with the Second World War, Zeppelin raids were tiny: a serious raid on London killed 22 people, whereas the Blitz of 1940–1 killed nearly 20,000 people there and left a quarter of a million homeless. But at the time, in a world that had never known bombing from the air, the damage wrought by these huge monsters in the sky was terrifying. The big Zeppelin attack of 8–9 September alone destroyed half a million pounds’ worth of property.
Zapping the Zeppelins
Zeppelins flew too high for British aircraft to reach them and ordinary machine gun bullets couldn’t bring them down in any case. Gradually, however, the British developed effective anti-Zeppelin measures:
- ‘Archie’: The British nickname for anti-aircraft gunnery. Archie didn’t often hit a Zeppelin but could force it to change course.
- Incendiary bullets: These bullets set light to the hydrogen in a Zeppelin’s gas bag. On 2 September 1916 a British fighter plane armed with incendiary bullets shot down a Zeppelin over north London.
- Blackout: Lights were dimmed or switched off to make it harder for Zeppelins to spot their targets.
- Searchlights: These lights would pinpoint Zeppelins to help anti-aircraft guns fire at them.
The incendiary bullet ended the Zeppelin raids: too many airships were being shot down and the Germans halted the campaign. Now they would concentrate on their aircraft.
Airplane!
Information is vital to military commanders, and at the start of the war the best use for aircraft seemed to be to get accurate information about enemy troop movements. Such information could sometimes prove crucial. For example, an air reconnaissance report caused the Germans to pull back from the Marne in 1914 and led to the decision on both sides to dig in. As the war went on, though, and technology progressed, aircraft began to be used for other purposes, too.
Spies in the sky
The earliest aircraft only had room for one pilot, who had to fly the plane, note what he saw on the ground and fly back to base to report it. Soon, however, factories started producing two-seater planes: one pilot could concentrate on flying while the other took photographs of the enemy position with a specially adapted camera designed for aerial photography (see Figure 11 in the insert section). Reports from aerial reconnaissance like this could have devastating effects on the ground: if a pilot reported a big build-up of troops behind the enemy lines, which usually meant a large attack was coming, the artillery could start shelling where the troops were gathering and cause enormous casualties. Seeing an enemy plane overhead was therefore very bad news for the men in the trenches. The only way to combat these aerial snoopers was to shoot them down, but how?
Flying bullets
In the early days of the war, enemy reconnaissance pilots would occasionally take shots at each other with pistols or rifles, or else they just waved and carried on with their business. But as the military value of aerial reconnaissance became clearer, so the military value of shooting down enemy planes became clearer too. Pilots would have to stop waving and get serious about killing each other.
The most obvious weapon to use in the air was a machine gun, but the problem was where to place it. If it went at the front, where the pilot could aim and fire it, it would shoot away the plane’s propeller. It could go on the upper wing, but that meant a pilot would have to stand up in the cockpit to fire it, which wasn’t a very safe thing to do. To start with, therefore, most planes carried a machine gun at the back, which was operated by the co-pilot. However, whereas a machine gun could be very useful for defending a plane against an attack from behind, it wasn’t much good for attacking other aircraft. If military aircraft were to be any good at attacking enemy planes, they had to be able to fire their machine guns from the front.
Meet the Fokkers
Tackling the problem of how to fire machine guns from the front exercised brains on both sides of the war. The first man to come up with a solution was the French pilot Roland Garros, who fixed metal plates to his propeller to deflect the bullets. That idea certainly allowed Garros to fire at the enemy; unfortunately it also made it difficult to aim, because the propeller could deflect the bullets in any direction. Nevertheless, his was the only idea about how a plane could shoot forwards. However, in April 1915 Garros ran out of fuel and had to land behind enemy lines. The Germans inspected his plane and discovered the metal plates on the propellers. They were impressed but reckoned they could improve on the design.
A Dutch aircraft designer called Anthony Fokker, who was living and working in Germany and whose factory was run by the German government, worked out a mechanism that synchronised the propeller and the gun, so the bullets always passed between the propeller blades. With this advantage, the Germans turned the tables on the Allies and dominated the skies.
For most of 1915 the Germans in their Fokker aircraft completely dominated the skies above the Western Front. In contrast, Allied pilots could measure their life expectancy in mere weeks. They often arrived at the Front with minimal training, and for much of the war Allied pilots had to make do with planes that were decidedly inferior to the Germans’. The Allies simply had no response to what they called the ‘Fokker scourge’.
Aircraft were now performing two quite distinct roles. Some were still carrying out vital reconnaissance work, spotting enemy troop movements and ‘artillery spotting’ and reporting on the effectiveness of artillery bombardment. Others were specifically designed to be fast and manoeuvrable, to seek out reconnaissance planes and shoot them down. These planes become known as fighters. If one side could dominate the skies above the front so that its reconnaissance planes could operate unhindered, it would give a huge advantage to its military commanders. From 1915, reconnaissance planes were equipped with radio sets (albeit rather cumbersome ones), so they could report their observations directly without having to wait till they landed. It was vital, therefore, for fighter pilots to shoot down as many enemy reconnaissance planes as possible. The pilots who proved best at doing this became national heroes (see the nearby ‘Aces high’ sidebar).
Fighting the Fokkers
At the start of the war the air forces on both sides operated as part of their national army or navy. The British Royal Flying Corps (RFC), for example, was the army unit, concentrating on reconnaissance, and a separate Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) supported the navy and provided home defence. While the RFC was desperately trying to survive the Fokker scourge, the RNAS was undertaking attack missions against German targets: it ran airship missions from bases in Britain to attack German U-boats and it commissioned the Handley-Page bomber, one of the most successful bombing aircraft of the war, to bomb the Zeppelin bases in German-occupied Belgium.
In 1915, General Hugh Trenchard took over the RFC. He wanted to take a much more aggressive policy towards the Germans: pilots weren’t allowed parachutes, for example, in case knowing they had them made pilots give up too easily in a fight. During the period of the ‘Fokker scourge’, Trenchard repeatedly called for better aircraft to fight back against the Germans and in 1917 he finally got one: the Sopwith Camel.
The Sopwith Camel was the most successful Allied fighter plane of the war: it shot down nearly 1,300 German planes and could also shoot down Zeppelins. To Trenchard’s delight it could also be used to attack enemy troops on the ground. The Sopwith Camel finally put an end to the Fokker’s dominance and allowed the Allies to turn the tide of the war in the air.
Bombs away
The Sopwith Camel didn’t completely turn the war the Allies’ way. In 1917 the Germans started using long-range ‘Gotha’ bombing aircraft to attack targets in Britain. Like the Zeppelin raids, these attacks probably shocked the British more than they disrupted Britain’s war industry, but the reaction was furious. The press said Britain had been humiliated, and the Prime Minister called for huge bombing raids on German towns in retaliation, even though the British didn’t have the means to launch these – and he knew it.
Gothas could fly higher and farther than the British fighters, which made shooting them down difficult. In one bombing raid, in July 1917, one Gotha was shot down, but 57 people on the ground were killed. The fighters would keep trying to get at the bombers, but the only sure defence against the Gotha was either to capture its bases – or to win the war.
Air power at sea
One of the most significant – and dangerous – technical advances made during the war was the aircraft carrier. The British experimented with launching planes from battleships, but they really needed ships specially designed to carry planes, so they converted two vessels, HMS Ark Royal and HMS Furious, into flat-topped aircraft carriers. Other navies soon followed suit.
Aircraft carriers gave the British a big advantage: their sea-based planes could attack targets both far inland or out to sea. The war of technology was racing ahead.