By the spring of 1915 the Western European battlefront had more or less stabilised into a line stretching unbroken from the Channel to Switzerland. The British troops were largely deployed northwards of Amiens on the Somme, the line to the south being defended by the French. Since the British sector was mainly open farmland interspersed with woods and villages, airfields were quite easily established and vacated. Aircraft of that period needed no concrete runways so there were none to lay. Even a grass airstrip was inappropriate because it was directional. The whole point of an airfield or aerodrome was that aircraft could land and take off in any direction according to the wind. Nor were there any permanent metal hangars to erect. The French Bessonneau wood-framed canvas hangars (always known as ‘the sheds’) were portable and adequate for much of the time although vulnerable to fire and gales and offering little protection in winter.
Sometimes the conditions under which our mechanics had to work were deplorable. Imagine nine inches of snow on the ground, with icy wind blowing through many holes in the canvas walls, the feel of cold spanners and frozen oil, the making of delicate adjustments with hands numbed to the bone…119
A typical RFC or RNAS squadron required an array of professional specialists. Riggers and fitters, mechanics, armourers, blacksmiths, carpenters, drivers, clerks and cooks: they all needed places to work, eat and sleep. Typically, the squadron’s administration offices, medical bay, armourer’s hut, officers’ mess, cookhouse and accommodation were draughty wooden sheds, but sometimes the men and even the officers were housed in tents in a temporary measure that could drag on for months of mud and damp. Not until August 1916 did the first Nissen huts begin to appear, the utility buildings designed by a Royal Engineer that were essentially a tunnel of corrugated iron with a semicircular brick wall at either end and made habitable by efficient Canadian stoves. Sometimes personnel were farmed out in ‘digs’ in the local village. Failing that, it was a lucky unit that was billeted somewhere with brick buildings, let alone in a requisitioned château with extensive grounds (as did occasionally happen). All that was needed then was to stick up a pole with a wind sock on it – jocularly known in the RFC as the ‘effel’ from the initials of ‘French letter’ – and they were in business.
It was from such lumpy fields, often dangerously ringed with trees, that aircraft on both sides took to the skies to do their armies’ bidding. Perhaps because the RFC’s commander Hugh Trenchard was himself a pilot and had so early been convinced that aircraft had a potential far beyond that of simple observation, he formulated his strategy of using the RFC to wage an aggressive war from the first. (Maybe after all he had read Douhet.) One consequence of this soon became apparent. Because of the prevailing westerlies it was easier for the British and the French to fly into German territory than it was for German airmen to cross the Allied front – itself an indication of how weak the early aircraft were, even in the autumn of 1917:
The Wing ordered a patrol this morning: at which I protested that the wind was too high, and that if we got mixed up in a fight over the lines we ran an excellent chance of losing the lot. GHQ insisted, so I took the patrol myself. I climbed to 15,000 feet dead into the eye of the wind (blowing from the west, of course). The air speed indicator showed a steady 90 m.p.h., and I remained perfectly stationary over the hangars! Turned east and reached Arras in five minutes. Turned back at once and took 2½ hours to get home! Rang up the Wing to tell them all about it. They replied that they had since received a message from GHQ cancelling my patrol…120
Because of the prevailing winds Allied pilots, once over the lines, felt particularly vulnerable to damage, engine failure or simply running out of fuel. Being forced down on the wrong side would at best lead to internment for the duration and at worst to being attacked and even killed by angry civilians in retaliation for injuries the airman (or anybody else) had previously inflicted. Many RFC and RNAS pilots and observers flew with a pistol but also with a small pack containing a razor, a toothbrush, some money and, in the pre-Sidcot suit days (see page 212) of thigh-length sheepskin ‘fugs’, a pair of ordinary shoes. This practice was often frowned on by commanding officers (by Robert Smith-Barry, for example) because to the faithless military mind it looked as though airmen might be making preparations to fake a forced landing behind the lines in order to be safely interned for the remainder of the war.
Where Trenchard’s policy was one of taking the fight to the enemy, German pilots were more constrained. This was certainly true in 1915 with the introduction of Fokker’s new E.I monoplanes. As already noted, the fear was that they might be shot down on the wrong side of the lines and the secret of their synchronised machine guns be discovered. Thereafter this turned into something of a habit and in general German aircraft ventured over the lines comparatively rarely except for the odd raid and to attack observation balloons. Later in the war they would also night-bomb the occasional airfield. (The big bombers that blitzed London were based safely in German-occupied Belgium.) German pilots understood only too well how the prevailing wind usually made it harder for Allied aircraft to get back home. So did their anti-aircraft gunners, who often craftily conserved their ammunition and disdained to fire at RFC machines crossing their lines when setting out on a sortie, preferring to wait for the machines’ return when they would be low on fuel and labouring against the wind. In general, German pilots were freer to choose when to attack, safe in the knowledge that if they were forced down it would usually be in friendly territory.
Obviously Trenchard knew this too, but as the war went on it did not deter him from sending his aircraft on varied missions ever deeper into hostile territory. His pilots mostly spent these lengthy shows in a state of high anxiety, their senses attuned more than ever to their engine’s note, alert for the faintest sign of trouble that might leave them stranded forty miles on the wrong side of the lines with a dud magneto. Since this strategy of carrying the war to the enemy involved greater risk, it naturally resulted in much higher casualties than if the RFC had just been deployed defensively. From time to time it was denounced in the House of Commons and by newspapers as a ‘murderous’ policy, but for all his genuine sympathy for his fellow pilots Trenchard knew what he was doing. Besides, he had the backing of Army generals who probably felt that if his nasty smelly machines had presumed to usurp the role of the cavalry then they ought also to emulate those gallant, pulse-quickening horseback recces deep into enemy territory that had gained so much useful information in previous wars. The strategy was vindicated by the fact that ever since, air power has primarily been used aggressively rather than defensively. It is the nature of the beast and Trenchard was among the first fully to understand and act on it.
*
For all the political rhetoric in Westminster about the ‘Fokker Scourge’ of late 1915, the skies above the battlefields of Belgium and France were often remarkably empty of aircraft for the first two years of the war. Until the first Battle of the Somme in the late summer of 1916 it was perfectly possible for a two-seater observation machine to go up for three hours over certain sectors of the front without ever seeing another aircraft, whether hostile or friendly. Obviously, most would tend to congregate in the neighbourhood of features of immediate military interest on the ground; but the vastness of the area that could usefully be overflown at heights of up to 10,000 feet further diluted the small number of aircraft in the sky at any one time.
As we know, Roland Garros’s victory on 1st April 1915 in his Morane was the first ever by an aircraft using a fixed machine-gun firing through the propeller, and the autumn and winter of that year saw the worst of the Germans’ answer: the Fokker monoplanes’ supremacy against which the British and French had no real defence for some months. The truth is, however, that the Entente’s casualty figures were by no means as enormous as the impassioned rhetoric in the debates back home suggested, and vanishingly tiny when compared to the slaughter taking place on the ground. In the sixteen months between August 1914 and December 1915 153 British aircrew are listed as being killed – a figure that includes training fatalities.121 By the end of 1915 there were some 107 Fokker and Pfalz monoplanes operating on the whole of the Western Front, and the Germans’ official published list of their victories showed a grand total of twenty-eight.122 Even had these victims all been two-seaters and their crews killed or captured, the loss of fifty-six men over five months would scarcely have constituted a ‘scourge’ at a time when the infantry might easily lose 4,000 men in a single day. The real loss to the Army was that the downing of its few observation machines effectively blinded the commanders on the ground. The rhetoric reflected an impotent anger that the RFC was not yet equipped to meet the German aircraft on an equal footing. It was crafted for public consumption and to shame the government into leaning harder on the Royal Aircraft Factory and others to come up with an appropriate answer. A new generation of French and British aircraft did indeed begin to appear in early 1916 but the German monoplanes did not disappear completely until that summer, by which time the tables were turned and they themselves had become obsolete fodder. However, their real significance in the twelve months from mid-1915 to mid-1916 was to mark the moment when the idea as well as the science of modern aerial combat was invented and certain pilots became ‘aces’: celebrities whose names are famous to this day.
The comparative lack of aircraft in the skies of that early period of the war is part of the reason why the total scores of the early French and German aces were so much smaller than those of their later counterparts. At the time, too, air-to-air fighting was simpler in terms of the evolutions pilots could perform, and the majority of combat was not in the form of ‘dogfights’ but simple diving attacks on unwary victims. As previously indicated, Fokker’s ‘E’ series of monoplanes (and the Pfalz lookalikes) were not in themselves such distinguished aircraft; they were merely superior to most of the Entente aircraft they met at the time, and that largely on account of their forward-firing machine guns. Many of the machines they shot down were antiques such as Farman ‘Longhorns’ and Caudron G.3s, wire and canvas birdcages dawdling along at fifty or sixty miles an hour, or the more advanced but still defenceless B.E.2cs.
One of the skills of air-to-air combat the German pilots were acquiring was knowing how to take advantage of the wind and the sun’s position. For their part the RFC pilots were keenly aware of the disadvantages of nature under which they flew. The Canadian ace Billy Bishop later spoke for them all when he described the drawbacks of an early show, typically on a morning when, having gone to bed past midnight, pilots were woken at 4 a.m. by an orderly.
After a cup of hot tea and a biscuit, four of us left the ground shortly after five. The sun in the early mornings, shining in such direct rays from the east, makes it practically impossible to see in that direction, so that these dawn adventures were not much of a pleasure. It meant that danger from surprise attack was very great, for the Huns coming from the east with the sun at their back could see us when we couldn’t see them. In any case one doesn’t feel one’s best at dawn, especially when one has had only four hours’ sleep. This was the case on this bright May morning, and to make matters worse there was quite a ground mist. The sun, reflecting off this, made seeing in any direction very difficult.123
‘Beware the Hun in the sun’ was the warning repeated to every RFC airman who came to France. Bishop must have taken the adage to heart and learned how to use it to his own advantage since he was to become the war’s third- highest-scoring ace after Manfred von Richthofen and France’s René Fonck, which made him the top-scoring RFC, Canadian and British Empire pilot. Strangely, the flying aces remain almost the sole aspect of the first air war of which most people today have even the faintest knowledge, much of that being incorrect.
The system was largely invented by the French press, which first awarded the appellation of ‘As’ to Adolphe Pégoud. As mentioned in Chapter 5, Pégoud had achieved great fame in France and Europe in 1913 when he was acclaimed as the first to loop the loop, although in fact the Russian Pyotr Nesterov had done it a few days earlier in a Nieuport IV. That same year Pégoud became the first pilot (rather than passenger) to make a successful parachute jump, abandoning his single-seat aircraft, an old Blériot, to find its own way back to earth. Once the war had begun his combat career was brief. On 5th February 1915 he shot down two German aircraft and forced a third to land in French territory. In those early days this was dramatic stuff and thereafter the French press blazoned his every move. On 18th July when he had shot down his sixth German victim he was awarded ‘ace’ status. On 31st August he was himself downed in combat, shot through the heart. All France mourned.
The propaganda effect of Pégoud’s example was not lost on the Germans. It had great patriotic significance while also trading on the romantic aura that flying already held for most people. His death came just before the autumn battles of Loos and Artois, and amid the general slaughter it was clear the French Army was taking many more casualties than the Germans. Flying aces like Pégoud acquired an additional sheen of glamour because they were named individuals, and as such the very antithesis of the anonymous carnage of the battlefields. Something gallant and heroic could be retained in the idea of aerial knights jousting in encounters high above the mud and smoke. Although the ace system itself was no more than the glorified equivalent of the notches on a gunfighter’s gun, it partook of the same mystique of the lone champion. The German press was quick to follow suit by publicising the exploits of Fliegerasse like Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann flying Fokker’s new monoplane. The newspapers soon developed the pilots’ friendly rivalry into a competition, with one man now ahead in the scoring and then the other, with the readership of all Germany following it as though the two were Olympic sportsmen representing their country rather than ‘hired assassins’.
However, it must be emphasised that it is often misleading to compare different pilots’ valour and skill solely by reference to ‘league tables’ of their scores. At the outset it seems to have been unofficially agreed that a minimum of five victories was required before a pilot could officially become an ace. This minimum crept upwards over the remaining three years and four months of the war, partly because by the end there were many more aircraft in the sky compared to 1915 and total scores tended to be higher. Secondly, in the beginning both German and British ‘victories’ would often include aircraft that were merely forced down rather than destroyed, and sometimes even those that were merely driven away from an observation task. In the RFC this practice of crediting so-called ‘OOC’ (Out Of Control) claims was only stopped on 19th May 1918.124 But thirdly and most crucially, records did not always tally. A pilot might have believed he had shot down an aircraft and watched it fall, but the only way of being certain was to follow it down and see it crash. Yet this was often impossible because he was being harried by another machine. So back at his airfield he might report a victory with a reasonably clear conscience, and efforts would be made on the ground to confirm the crash. If none could be found it might be because the aircraft had fallen in no-man’s-land in the middle of an artillery barrage, in which case nobody might have noticed, or it could mean that the enemy pilot had merely faked being mortally hit in order to escape. Furthermore, as the war progressed and the front line was hurriedly redrawn here and there, many airfields had to be abandoned at short notice and squadron records were very easily lost in the general panic and turmoil. Even after the war was long over and military historians from opposing sides could examine each other’s operations books, certain ‘victories’ were exposed as enigmatic, unlikely, or almost certainly imaginary – for airmen everywhere could hardly help being drawn into the competitive nature of their trade, occasionally making claims for themselves or their squadron that were wishful thinking or even downright false. All that being said, the offices of the Kofl and then the Kogenluft1* soon insisted on rigorous standards for German pilots reporting victories, and claims were frequently disallowed. But in the heat of battle, and with rivalries between individual pilots and squadrons being keen, factual accuracy must often have been a fairly flexible concept.
With the immense newspaper publicity given to Germany’s most successful combat aces of that early period, Immelmann and Boelcke, it was clear that medals would have to follow. Prussia’s highest award for valour, the Orden Pour le Mérite (which from the colour of its enamel was popularly known as the Blue Max) was very roughly the equivalent of Britain’s Victoria Cross; but unlike the VC it had to be worked towards via a strict precedence of other medals such as all three classes of the Iron Cross. By November 1915 only three Blue Maxes had been awarded to the German military, two to navy men and one to a soldier. In that month Boelcke and Immelmann were given the next highest award. Two months later in January 1916 both pilots had scored eight victories each and became the first two airmen to be awarded the Blue Max. It is interesting to compare this with the case of Manfred von Richthofen, who was to receive his own Blue Max exactly a year later but had needed twice as many victories to get it. By May 1918 his protégé Erich Löwenhardt needed twenty-four, and at the end of 1918 the last-ever recipient of a Blue Max, Carl Degelow, had thirty to his credit. This apparent inflation reflected less an effort to prevent depreciation in the medal’s value than recognition that with many more pilots in the sky the opportunities for victory had become more plentiful, if not necessarily easier. In any case a Blue Max man became a publicly lionised hero, and even the military often granted him a remarkable degree of autonomy in how he chose to fight.
From its inception the German ace system also offered a valuable practical advantage to its pilots. As they became national celebrities they were eagerly sought after by representatives of the aircraft industry, who listened attentively to what they wanted from an aircraft.
German aircraft and engine manufacturers were in sharp competition. To a great extent the orders they received depended upon what the pilots themselves thought of their engines and their machines. Each manufacturer rented rooms in Berlin’s best hotels, and a pilot on leave could bask in luxury at the expense of those who made the aircraft they flew. There was no word in German for ‘lobbyist’ then, but the industrialists of 1915 anticipated the manufacturers and pressure groups of today by providing everything in the way of alcoholic and feminine charms for the customer. And the pilot was the customer.125
The value of such a system in ensuring feedback between pilot and the industry, especially when aviation was developing so fast, can hardly be exaggerated. It can also hardly be imagined in a stolidly British context in 1915. The idea of the Royal Aircraft Factory renting suites in the Ritz or the Savoy and liberally stocking them with champagne and floozies for the benefit of RFC pilots on leave is comic in its implausibility. And yet a Flight Lieutenant Mackenzie, who was killed early in 1917 while flying with the RNAS, could write with some ruefulness:
If a designer while designing, building and testing a machine had the constant advice of a thoroughly experienced war pilot, a much more efficient and satisfactory machine could be turned out. This would also avoid endless work in the flights, under the difficult conditions of active service, and would avoid such simple mistakes as not putting the trigger on the joystick. The experience of this pilot must not be more than one month old. This would also give a good opportunity of resting a pilot after a strenuous time.126
However, this idea of pilots’ feedback was evidently too commonsensical for the British to adopt, just as their initial attitude towards the ace system was that it was all a lot of foreign flapdoodle, failing to see how it might actually have advantageous practical and even political effects. As far as the RFC was concerned the Expeditionary Force’s airmen were simply soldiers doing their duty as required by God and the King, and heroism was only to be expected. That was what medals like the Military Cross were for. Any suggestion of a cult of individualism tended to be frowned on as basically unBritish and immodest, unless perhaps a VC was awarded. ‘A bit of a star turn,’ senior officers might allow of a particular pilot, as though he were playing the lead in a panto or music hall show. In the summer of 1917 the anonymous author of an article in Flying entitled ‘The Flying Corps Spirit’ explained this policy as embodying a quintessentially British virtue:
The Royal Flying Corps is coldly impersonal in its official reports. It is in this aspect splendidly unique. It alone among the belligerents steadily refuses the limelight of publicity so far as its personnel is concerned. In its bulletins aeroplanes, not men, are mentioned. The names of its flying officers and observers are recorded only in the Roll of Honour or in the list of awards. ‘Baron von Richthofen,’ says the German bulletin, ‘yesterday secured his sixtieth victim.’ Doubtless the Germans have some good reason for booming their Richthofens at the expense of their [lesser] comrades. It is their considered policy, and it has its advantages as well as its drawbacks. On the whole, our policy is peculiarly British, and it is based upon British traditions. It springs partly from the regimental spirit, partly from the public-school spirit, and partly from the sporting spirit which is found in the British wherever they are…127
Such cultural differences aside, Trenchard initially thought it unfair to laud one man for his bravery while every day equal bravery was being shown by the pilots and observers of humbler types of aircraft, especially two-seaters doing artillery spotting and the like. Nor was it clear who might claim the victory in such a case: the pilot or the observer with the machine gun who actually did the shooting. It was equally problematic when two or more British machines joined forces to down an enemy aircraft. At first each pilot was credited with a kill, but later on a more scrupulous system of awarding fractions was adopted, so an individual score like 12½ became the norm.
The award of the third wartime VC to an RFC airman, Captain Lanoe Hawker, for shooting down three enemy aircraft on a single day in July 1915, was the exception that proved the British rule. By the end of the year Hawker had seven victories, which put him almost on a par with the German aces, and the newspapers back home were already acclaiming him as an ace. To his further credit Hawker had managed this feat against opponents armed with machine guns while flying a Bristol Scout on which he had fixed a mounting for his single-shot cavalry carbine to fire obliquely past the propeller. Hawker was already an outstanding rifle shot and became expert with this idiosyncratic arrangement that a few other pilots copied but never mastered as he did. When after a tremendous twenty-minute aerial battle in November 1916 he became Manfred von Richthofen’s eleventh victim, his passing was mourned throughout Britain and particularly by the RFC, for whom by then he had become the grand old archetype of a fighter pilot. He was twenty-five.
Immelmann and Boelcke were also killed that same year – Immelmann in June and Boelcke in October. Both were mourned nationally and the RFC dropped notes of regret and respect for such worthy opponents. Of the two, Boelcke was perhaps the more whole-heartedly lamented. By all accounts he was an outstandingly decent man who, whenever he could, landed next to his victims to shake them by the hand, invite them back to his Staffel’s Kasino (mess) for lunch, ensure their swift transfer to hospital or salute their cadavers. More than that, he was a superb tactician who did much to bring about the organising of the German Jagdstaffeln or Jastas – the hunting squadrons that later formed the ‘flying circuses’ that would serve aces like Richthofen so well. The immense prestige Boelcke had won for himself in Germany – not to mention the Blue Max – enabled him to exert considerable influence on the military authorities, who were happy to defer to him in the field in which he was so clearly expert.
Boelcke lived to see the end of the Fliegertruppen’s monoplane supremacy at the hands of the now better-organised fighter squadrons of the RFC and the Aéronautique Militaire. These were principally flying the D.H.2 and the Nieuport ‘Bébé’, although rather earlier in 1916 the RNAS had already begun making inroads into the German monoplanes with the new Sopwith Scout, usually known as the ‘Pup’. Had the RFC been given the vastly superior Pups at the same time as the Navy, the Fokkers would have been finished months earlier; but of course the Sopwith company was contracted to the Admiralty and not to the Army, a good example of the absurd inefficiency of the British system.
Since the new category and role of the dedicated single-seat fighter was by now firmly established, the German Army let Boelcke undertake far-reaching reorganisation of the Fliegertruppen’s fighters. The first of the new ‘hunting squadrons’ was Jasta 2, and in September 1916 it began taking delivery of the Albatros D.1 fighter. Although not outstandingly manoeuvrable, the Albatros was faster and had better firepower than anything the Allies were flying, and even the lighter Pups had to rely on their agility and eventually on sheer altitude to defeat it. In its subsequent marques the Albatros became the main German fighter for the rest of the war. Boelcke was also responsible for instituting the systematic tuition of combat flying. He would accompany formations of new Jasta pilots and assess the performance of each. Using his own hard-won principles, he was probably the first to realise that where combat was concerned, being able to fly and even to perform aerobatics was not enough. Combat was a separate art; and thanks to him the German air force was the first to institutionalise it as something needing to be properly taught.
On 8th October 1916 the German Army’s Fliegertruppen officially became the Luftstreitkräfte: the first of all the air forces to acquire a degree of administrative independence from the army. Much of the credit for this change was down to Boelcke and the highly effective Jasta system he had planned. Twenty days later, in a grievous blow to the German Air Force, he was dead. Boelcke was killed in combat, not by being shot down but in collision with a colleague when both were attacking the same enemy aircraft. He had nineteen official victories but also many others that he hadn’t claimed in his scrupulously honest and modest fashion and with which he was later to be credited. Of all the German aces Oswald Boelcke was probably the one whom his admiring RFC opponents would most have wanted to shake by the hand and stand a drink. They felt he was one of them, more a fellow airman than a Hun.
His legacy was considerable. By early 1917 the Albatri (the RFC’s own whimsical plural of Albatros) D.IIIs of the now thirty-seven Jastas that Boelcke had projected had once more restored German air superiority and precipitated the ‘Bloody April’ that even today is still regarded as one of the most disastrous periods in British military aviation history. In that single month 316 pilots and observers out of 912 aircrew in 50 squadrons were killed or captured,128,129 and German aircraft shot down Allied machines in a ratio of five to one. The life expectancy of a newly arrived RFC pilot was eleven days.2* Oswald Boelcke also left behind his Dicta: basic rules for combat flying that became the bible of all German pilots, much as Mick Mannock’s Rules did in the RFC. Finally, he had acted as tutor and mentor to the young Manfred von Richthofen, who was about to make history of his own.
Boelcke’s code of correct behaviour had much to do with his personal sense of honour. To an extent this same code permeated all the combatants’ air forces although the pressures of war could render it capricious. On 1st July 1916 Lieutenant W. O. Tudor-Hart and Capt. G. W. Webb were shot down in their F.E. Webb was killed outright but Tudor-Hart managed to crash-land the aircraft and survive, later writing home from internment describing the incident and adding that the German pilots had acted ‘like sportsmen and gentlemen’.130 This probably meant he was grateful they had not machine-gunned him on the ground, a practice that by then was not unknown on both sides, usually camouflaged as an attempt to destroy the aircraft. The young Blue Max holder Werner Voss was several times accused of deliberately shooting up his crashed victims on the ground.
By Bloody April in 1917 the original glamour of flying aces as stainless knights of the air was definitely tarnished. The steady proliferation of aircraft combined with the various armies’ increasing demands on their airmen was taking its toll. The gallantry of pilots like Boelcke gave way to a colder and more businesslike ethos of racking up scores by whatever means. This was probably inevitable by this stage in the war, when mass slaughter on the ground was commonplace and a spirit of cynicism and even nihilism was replacing the naïve patriotism of 1914. To many a combatant it must have felt as though everyone in uniform was an automaton on a treadmill of obligatory killing that might eventually lead to the ending of the war, although how the one might bring about the other seemed beyond conjecture. From Bloody April onwards not much quarter was given in air operations and inter-squadron rivalries over combat scores did little to improve things. Even so, a comradeship among fliers did still exist patchily, and there were shining examples of gallantry on all sides right through to the war’s end.
Manfred von Richthofen probably supplied precious few of these. Although no doubt honourable enough in private life, he was too dedicated a professional fighter in a late period of the war to waste time on gestures. He was never a born pilot but he was a superb tactician and an excellent shot (this last ability being shown time and time again as more valuable than any capacity for brilliant aerobatics). In January 1917, when he was awarded the Blue Max for his eighteen victories, he took charge of Jasta 11 and thereafter laid the foundations of his reputation as the only pilot of the First World War famous enough for his name to appear in cartoon strips a century later. Until 21st April 1918 Richthofen went on steadily increasing his score and his fame. It is interesting that instructors at the German Fighter Pilot Training School would tell their students: ‘Aim for the aeroplane, not the man. When you put the aeroplane out of action, you will take care of the man.’131 This was the exact opposite of Richthofen’s own advice: ‘Aim for the man and don’t miss. If you’re fighting a two-seater, get the observer first; until you have silenced the gun, don’t bother about the pilot.’132 This sounds as sensible as it is ruthless and was probably the policy adopted by most pilots of all sides including Mick Mannock, although he always said ‘Aim for the pilot.’ Still, many spoke privately of the instinctive reluctance they had to overcome in order to deliberately fire a stream of machine gun and tracer rounds into the back of a fellow aviator from thirty yards away. At that range you could actually see the tracers’ grey smoke trails converging on his sheepskin jacket, watch his body jerk and the nose of his aircraft pitch upwards as he convulsively clutched the stick. Sometimes if you were close enough your goggles might be misted by his blood or brains. The one thing all the aces agreed on was that it was absolutely essential to get really close to your target. As Carl Degelow was to put it, this really separated the men from the boys in aerial combat. The closer you flew to your target, the more nerve it required but the more certain you were of scoring. Nothing so betrayed the nervous airman or the beginner as did opening fire from 300 yards; at that point an experienced combat pilot rejoiced, knowing he had a potential ‘kill’ awaiting him.
Whatever Richthofen’s tactics, they were extraordinarily successful. In that single month of April 1917 he claimed twenty-two victories in his Albatros D.III, once shooting down four Allied aircraft on a single day. His official score was now fifty-two. His preferred method was to attack out of the sun, and he generally did so with other members of his Jasta covering him. He seldom was the ‘lone hunter’ of combat myth; he couldn’t see the point in taking unnecessary risks. If he didn’t think the odds were good enough he wouldn’t engage. Instead, he became a well-organised and efficient killing machine, which was simply what he interpreted his job to be. As his total climbed, so did his reputation until the name of Richthofen was accorded national hero-worship, although it must have helped that his younger brother Lothar – a much more flamboyant pilot – had forty kills of his own.
Manfred von Richthofen’s ‘Red Baron’ nickname was given him by his squadron comrades and swiftly taken up by newspapers everywhere. It derived from his family title of ‘Freiherr’, which translates more or less as ‘baron’ in English and accounts for the ‘von’, and his habit – acquired as a squadron leader – of painting the various aircraft he flew red. Here was a curious contrast with the RFC, nearly all of whose aircraft were a uniform khaki colour, which was good camouflage when viewed from above but less good for quick identification in a fight. James McCudden asked for the underside of his Sopwith Pup to be sprayed light blue so it would be less easy to see from beneath when he was flying high. Later, some colour did begin creeping into the RFC’s aircraft, such as the ace Albert Ball’s red propeller boss, but these were exceptions. The British had long tended to view the Germans as rigid conformists (much as most Germans viewed the Prussians); yet it was the German Army and not the British that allowed its Staffeln and individual pilots to paint their aircraft according to whim. This was fighting machinery gaily decked out. There were black aircraft and white, yellow and green, orange and brown, speckled and striped. However, after Richthofen’s rise to fame there was only one all-red aircraft, although others in his Jasta might have parts of their machines painted red for identification in the air.
The ‘flying circus’ appellation derived from Richthofen’s leadership of Jagdgeschwader 1. The Jagdgeschwader were something like the RFC’s ‘wings’: groups of squadrons convened for a particular purpose. In this case they were groups of Jastas that were highly mobile and could be deployed up and down the front to trouble spots as required. With their gaudily painted aircraft and habit of travelling around, they quickly acquired the nickname of flying circuses. Inevitably, the one led by the Red Baron acquired the most notoriety among Allied squadrons, as well it might since Richthofen cherry-picked the best combat pilots from the Jastas for his own Jagdgeschwader 1: first-rate men like Ernst Udet and his young friend Werner Voss. He would also dump inferior pilots on other Jagdgeschwader, with the unsurprising result that no other flying circus was as successful as his.
Not that any of Richthofen’s men was invincible, not even Voss, whom some later reckoned to be the single finest pilot of the war. By 11th September 1917 and barely out of his teens Voss had forty-seven confirmed victories (and Richthofen sixty-one), but he was in severe need of a rest. On 23rd September, flying his new Fokker F.I Triplane (the prototype of the Dr.I), he became embroiled in what was to be one of the most celebrated dogfights of the war in which he found himself effectively alone facing no fewer than eight British aces flying S.E.5a’s. These were from 56 Squadron and included James McCudden and Arthur Rhys-Davids, all of whose aircraft Voss riddled with bullets in a ten-minute exhibition of virtuoso combat flying before he was at last shot through the chest and stomach. He probably died in the air, but in any case his Fokker smashed into the ground so violently it appeared to the watchers overhead that it ‘went into powder’.
His victors landed their shot-up machines one by one back at their station, shattered by the sheer tension of the encounter, one of them bursting into a fit of weeping and Rhys-Davids (who had fired the shots that killed Voss) still hyperventilating. At that point they none of them knew who their defeated foe was and wondered whether it could have been Richthofen himself. They all recognised him as a superlative airman and the most courageous opponent any of them had ever fought. That night they solemnly drank a standing toast to him in the mess. What was left of Voss’s body was retrieved by a British patrol the following day, identified, and buried in a shell crater that soon vanished beneath fresh artillery barrages. He was twenty years old.
Mention of Voss’s Fokker F.I (then so new that one of the British pilots misidentified it as a Nieuport) is a reminder that nowadays the commonest depiction of the Red Baron is of him flying an all-red Fokker Triplane. It is not clear why this association should have become so indelible. As already noted, this aircraft was not especially Germanic since it and all other triplane fighters had been directly influenced by the revolutionary Sopwith Triplane whose rate of climb and manoeuvrability had made it so lethal in the hands of its RNAS pilots when it was new in the first half of 1917. (Indeed, had it not been for the small numbers of this new fighter in the hands of Navy pilots, the RFC’s ‘Bloody April’ would have been still bloodier.) Secondly, Richthofen flew several different kinds of aircraft, only piloting his Triplane for a limited period when it accounted for a mere nineteen of his eighty victories. The type he most favoured was the Albatros D.III, although he would almost certainly have switched to the formidable new Fokker D.VII when it came into squadron service in May 1918. However, that aircraft arrived too late for the Red Baron, who was himself finally downed on 23rd April that year in circumstances that will probably be argued over for as long as air historians continue to enjoy an utterly pointless dispute that has already lasted nearly a century. In trying to shoot down a Sopwith Camel at very low level Richthofen was attacked by a second Camel and fatally wounded in the chest by a .303 bullet. He just managed to land his aircraft before dying in his seat. Thereafter argument has raged over whether the bullet was fired from the air or by troops on the ground. It hardly seems to matter now that everybody involved is long dead.
The twenty-five year-old German who was destined to become the most famous flying ace of all time – a status that will surely now never be eclipsed – was given a burial with full military honours by the Australians of 3 Squadron in whose sector he fell. Units from all over the newly formed RAF sent wreaths in homage to their most redoubtable foe, and messages of commiseration were dropped over the German lines. In Germany itself Richthofen’s death came as a savage blow: the inevitable outcome of elevating anyone to the point of myth where he is believed to enshrine a portion of a nation’s soul. Certainly the whole Luftstreitkräfte felt its morale shattered. Had the Red Baron not been immortal? Well yes, so he was in a historical sense; but as flesh and blood he had proved just as vulnerable as the merest novice to a small copper-jacketed bullet travelling at 2,400 feet per second.
As with so many other German aces, death had at least spared Richthofen from having to witness his nation’s total collapse of morale in the last weeks of the war and afterwards. Towards the end of 1918 the streets of cities like Hamburg became full of marauding gangs of communists inspired by the Russian Revolution, anarchists or just half-starved citizens desperately looking for food, fuel and warm clothing for the coming winter. As usual after a lost war, returning soldiers were no longer regarded as heroes. As Carl Degelow put it, ‘I realised that my officer’s epaulettes and Pour le Mérite [Blue Max] were not looked upon with favour by people wearing red armbands. A thick briefcase and an official-looking bearing was the preferred style of appearance.’133 Degelow was to survive until 1970. His fellow-ace, Hauptmann Rudolf Berthold, was not so lucky. He had ended the war with forty-four victories in the air, only to fall foul of a street gang of his own countrymen in Hamburg. One of the mob got behind him and strangled him to death with the ribbon of his Blue Max.
*
As Hugh Trenchard had maintained from the first, the ‘flying aces’ system would always entail a degree of injustice, not least by implying a monopoly of bravery and skill in the hands of a comparative few. Also, of course, the competitive sports mentality it fostered (which included the amassing of medals) led to endless disputes about the true scores of the ‘winners’, a few of which persist even to this day, fuelled as they sometimes are by ill-concealed nationalist motives. Probably the main figure here is that of the Canadian ace, Billy Bishop, whose total score of seventy-two has been much questioned in the last thirty years, one official historian of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Brereton Greenhous, saying that his true total might actually be twenty-seven.134 This allegation is founded on the fact that many of Bishop’s victory claims cannot be matched with German records, which are admittedly patchy and not always reliable. Despite many crucially missing documents, surviving British casualty records are generally more complete and accurate than their German counterparts. Above all, the famous engagement for which Bishop won the VC cannot be corroborated from the German side. This action took place at 4.30 in the morning of 2nd June 1917. His award citation, as it appeared in the London Gazette for 11th August, read as follows:
For most conspicuous bravery, determination and skill. Captain Bishop, who had been sent out to work independently, flew first of all to an enemy aerodrome; finding no machines about, he flew on to another aerodrome about 3 miles southeast, which was at least 12 miles the other side of the line. Seven machines, some with their engines running, were on the ground. He attacked these from about fifty feet and a mechanic, who was starting one of the engines, was seen to fall. One of the machines got off the ground, but at a height of 60 feet Captain Bishop fired 15 rounds into it at very close range, and it crashed to the ground. A second machine got off the ground, into which he fired 30 rounds at 150 yards’ range, and it fell into a tree. Two more machines then rose from the aerodrome. One of these he engaged at a height of 1,000 feet, emptying the rest of his drum of ammunition. This machine crashed 300 yards from the aerodrome, after which Captain Bishop emptied a whole drum of ammunition into the fourth hostile machine, and then flew back to his station. Four hostile scouts were about 1,000 feet above him for about a mile of his return journey, but they would not attack. His machine was very badly shot about by machine-gun fire from the ground.135
The problem here is that in theory, at least, it is an inviolable rule that a Victoria Cross is never awarded without the corroborative evidence of independent witnesses (except in the sole case of the Unknown Warrior), and it is sometimes claimed that Bishop’s remains the only VC ever to have been awarded entirely on the recipient’s testimony. It is true that his award citation is essentially identical to the report he himself gave on returning to his airfield. One investigator claims that ‘the evidence, from both British and German sources, shows that there were no aircraft losses in the Jastas of 2 or 6 Armée on 2nd June 1917, and indicates very clearly that the aerodrome attack never took place. There is not a shred of evidence to support Bishop’s claims.’136 By contrast the respected American scholar Peter Kilduff, in a definitive and exhaustive new investigation of each of Bishop’s 72 victories published in 2014,137 sees no reason to doubt that this early morning attack took place precisely as Bishop said it did. Furthermore, he believes that the rest of Bishop’s victories should stand – with exactly the same proviso that attaches to every other top-scoring pilot’s claims, viz. that they would inevitably have been subject to a young man’s occasional economy with the truth and wishful thinking, as well as to the pressures of national propaganda and the inter-unit rivalries of the day. No-one’s scores can ever now be proved with absolute certainty.
But there is another aspect. Unlike Richthofen, Bishop was one of the aces who acted as ‘lone wolves’. Such men of exalted reputation were often pretty much free to come and go as they chose, preferring to hunt alone, and this inevitably made corroborating their victories more difficult even at the time. The implication that anyone whose score is doubtful was probably a liar is an easy cynicism. Bishop and others like him typically flew far more sorties in a given period than the average airman – often twice as many - and there is every reason to suppose that this level of obsessive searching for quarry would have paid off in higher scores. At the very least the sheer courage in spending twice as much time in the air, thereby doubling the chances of disaster, is undeniable.
However, the lingering doubt about Bishop’s award of the VC for his 2nd June sortie remains awkward, and even Kilduff skirts the issue. The awarding of the most prestigious British medal in these anomalous circumstances must naturally prompt the question of whether there might not have been political motives at work here. First it must be said that the awarding of any medal has a political component since the recommendation has to be passed from the unit commander up through the chain of higher command until it is officially ratified, rejected or modified. Some sort of attempt at even-handedness has always to be made: it would be injudicious to allow one particular service, regiment or squadron to receive far more awards than any other. It was yet another of the drawbacks of the ‘ace’ system that once its laurelled heroes had entered a kind of national pantheon, they themselves acquired political significance willy-nilly. It so happens that in Canada by April 1917 popular backing for the war was evaporating. In that month the Canadian House of Commons passed a conscription act that was bitterly divisive. For one thing French Canadians in Québec were stolidly opposed to being forced to fight in yet another European war. Canada had already sacrificed large numbers of its bravest young men on a muddy altar thousands of miles away with no sign of an end in sight. And while British Canada continued to support the Canadian Corps, which had racked up brilliant victories as well as catastrophic casualties, many Canadians were privately opposed to conscription – above all farmers who stood to lose their young farm hands. Thus it is not at all beyond conjecture that a decision was taken at the most senior British level, and almost certainly with the agreement of the King himself, that the Empire’s highest award for bravery would be a very timely morale booster for Canada and make it that much more difficult for the Dominion to slacken its efforts.
The fact is that by 1917 (and regardless of disdainful leading articles in Flying about foreign practices) no military was above using its heroes to its own internal advantage, especially when it came to the various services competing to prise more money out of dwindling national treasuries. This writer has no desire to enter the lists in disputes about any of the aces’ scores. Even if it turned out that none had ever made more than thirty kills they would still be revealed as men of quite outstanding valour and skill, and Billy Bishop is no exception to this. It would just have been far better for his posthumous reputation had he been awarded the medal for cumulative bravery, like Albert Ball. God knows he’d earned it. It was a shame they chose that particular morning’s unwitnessed action for the citation. In any case the VC Bishop was awarded in 1917 turned him overnight into a national hero, to be fêted and celebrated for the rest of his life. Perhaps the most famous Canadian of his generation, he went on to become Air Marshal of the RCAF on the outbreak of the Second World War and died in 1956 at the age of sixty-two, a national hero to the last. Nevertheless, the scholarly wrangles continue to this day over the deeds of his younger self in the skies above France almost a hundred years ago, as they do over those of his peers on both sides.
There are 188 known First World War flying aces listed with twenty and more kills, which of course excludes virtually all the earliest aces like Pégoud with five and over, as well as one of the two greatest pioneers of aerial combat, Max Immelmann, with his fifteen victories – a good example of the inherent bias of a system that only counts gun-notches. Justice has since been done to Oswald Boelcke, who at the time of his death was credited with nineteen victories but has now been granted forty, scholarship having posthumously overcome his modesty. Even among the highest-scoring men some names are more familiar than others, perhaps a reflection of the attention paid to them by the newspapers of the day according to the relative attractiveness of their personalities. Thus the second-ranking ace of the war, René Fonck with seventy-five victories, is arguably less well known outside France than his more sympathetic compatriot Georges Guynemer with fifty-three. Similarly, while many Britons have heard of the RFC’s second, third and fifth highest scorers – respectively Mick Mannock, James McCudden and Albert Ball – fewer are familiar with George McElroy, in the UK’s fourth position with forty-seven victories. But why? Was it because he was Irish-born?
At all events the relative absurdity of the ace system rests in its never making quite clear what was being rewarded other than notches. True, there was always going to be an unusually high standard of airmanship, marksmanship and courage. But as any pilot of the day would have attested, an awful lot depended on sheer luck: on being in the right place at the right time, on a gun not jamming or an engine conking out, on the wind suddenly dropping or a chance hazard like a bird-strike on an opponent’s aircraft at a critical juncture. In addition, as Trenchard rightly thought, the ‘sports’ nature of competitive scoring heavily discounted the astounding daily bravery of men in two-seaters who had to loiter in the sky for hours on end as targets while observing for artillery or taking photographs of enemy positions; of those who ventured far over the lines to the limit of their fuel to drop a few small bombs on a factory or railway junction; or of those sent to fly low-level ‘trench-strafing’ missions in unarmoured machines of wood and canvas with every man on the ground focussing a withering barrage of lead and steel at them from close range. And not only this, but these men did it over and over again, day after day after day until their luck or nerve ran out. The more one reads the histories and accounts and memoirs, the more one realises that, admirable though the aces were, they were emphatically not the only flying heroes. What is more, in terms of the war’s outcome they were a complete irrelevance.
1* see Glossary on p.321 for an explanation of these terms.
2* ‘Between March and May 1,270 RFC aeroplanes were destroyed or failed to return; and during one five-day period in April 75 were shot down, of whose 105 occupants 86 were killed or missing’ (Arthur Gould Lee, No Parachute, p.21).