Sundry references have already been made to Hugh Trenchard’s strategy of using his air forces aggressively, with the implication that compared to the RFC flying daily over the German lines, the Luftstreitkräfte flew much more rarely over the British lines in France. However, it would be a big mistake to conclude from this that the German Air Force was reluctant to take its own fight to the enemy (and remembering that for much of the war it was fighting on several fronts simultaneously). In fact, German air strategy was every bit as forward-looking as Trenchard’s and in many respects a good deal more so because it formed part of the concept of total war. The German Army had been reared on Vom Kriege (On War), the classic treatise by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. This makes clear that it is futile going to war other than with an absolute determination to win. Anything else is an irresponsible sacrifice of lives and matériel. A real war – as distinct from a campaign or a local skirmish – presupposes the involvement of the combatants’ entire nations, civilians as well as military, for reasons of psychological as well as of material back-up. In this view an army in the field needs robust supply chains and hence the full support of the electorate and politicians back home.
It was in this spirit that from the turn of the century Germany had built up a highly competent U-boat fleet that was to prove most effective in blockading the merchant shipping that brought Britain its vital supplies, resulting in periodic shortages of raw materials and food throughout the war. It was fortunate that in 1901 the Royal Navy had founded a submarine service of its own that was to have a far-sighted champion in Admiral John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, at a time when it really needed one. In general, the Admiralty’s attitude towards this new weapon was analogous to that of the British Army’s towards aircraft a decade later. As the then-Third Sea Lord, Rear-Admiral Arthur Wilson VC, memorably put it, ‘The submarine is an underhand form of warfare, unfair, and a damned un-English weapon.’ It is not known what he thought a truly ‘English’ weapon might be: possibly a cricket bat. However, it is clear that the ‘Christian gentleman’ ideal of Dr Thomas Arnold’s public school system was not an adequate weapon for tackling bounders who had been brought up on Clausewitz. Luckily, despite the attitudes of many gold-braided old sea dogs who had served their apprenticeships in the days of sail, the Admiralty’s younger and more progressive element realised the new technology of submarines was not going to disappear merely because it was un-English. Consequently the Royal Navy’s submarines were steadily developed in the shadow of its grander and far more visible fleet of destroyers and dreadnoughts – symbols of Britain’s global maritime hegemony. The Royal Navy’s submariners were to cover themselves in glory throughout the First World War, especially while maintaining their own economic blockade of Germany; but so were the German submariners as they steadily disrupted British shipping.
Once the war had started the clash of the Clausewitzian idea of total war versus some very idiosyncratic British ideas of morality could be seen in action. Yet from the first the German General Staff’s position had never been a secret. In 1902 it had published a handbook for its officers, Kriegsbrauche im Landkriege (The Waging of Land War) in which it stated ‘The conduct of war allows any belligerent state to employ any means to bring about the war aim,’ and went on to make it clear that this might quite properly entail attacking civilian targets. On 16th December 1914 six German warships suddenly appeared off the coast of northeast England and shelled Scarborough and Hartlepool. They killed 147 outright, with many badly injured, besides causing much damage. Such an attack without warning on mainly civilian targets produced general outrage in Britain as well as anger directed at the Royal Navy’s failure to prevent it. British citizens struggled to accept that total war meant exactly that. They might indeed have found this abhorrent; yet before long it became anybody’s guess who was holding the moral high ground.
In 1915 a tactic known as The Tethered Goat was introduced, whereby a British submarine would remain submerged beneath a trawler fleet, connected to one of the vessels by a covert telephone link. Trawlers were a favoured target of U-boats, if only as a means of obtaining fresh food whilst on patrol, and they would surface rather than waste a precious torpedo on such insignificant vessels and instead sink them with explosives or their deck guns. Once an enemy was spotted, the British submarine was informed and it would attempt to sink the surfaced U-boat. This worked on several occasions, but was obviously not a long-term strategy since the Germans soon got wise to this arguably underhand and morally dubious tactic.190
Even as the Royal Navy were staking out their tethered goats they were also deploying the first of the ‘Q’ ships: vessels disguised to look like innocent merchantmen that tempted a German submarine to surface in order to investigate its cargo and see if it was worth stealing. As soon as the U-boat appeared, hinged panels would drop open in the ‘Q’ ship’s side to reveal heavy guns that opened fire on the submarine. The Royal Navy, like the Kaiserliche Marine, understood from the first that there were to be no holds barred in their sea war. The British were much too aware of their islands’ dependency on overseas supplies to give any quarter. This ‘Q’ ship ruse was soon used by both sides, as it would be again in the Second World War.
Initially, at least, the first air war did not offer quite the same opportunities for ruse and trickery, and tactics were more open. Aerial bombing was one such measure. A fortnight after the shelling of the northeast ports, German aircraft dropped the first small bombs on British soil, hitting Dover and Sheerness, although with little damage. Three weeks later came the first raid by an airship that bombed Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn on 19th January 1915. Predictably, this caused further outrage in a Britain taken by surprise and there came the first squalls in what was to develop into a four-year deluge of press rhetoric about German ‘frightfulness’ invoking the bucolic peace of British towns and villages and, of course, the sanctity of unarmed civilians and especially of women and children. This was promptly matched in the German press by accusations of British ‘Schrecklichkeit’. Yet you didn’t need to be Clausewitz to know that in war people have always used whatever weapon confers superiority. Only ever in duels of honour in Hyde Park or Heidelberg were two combatants solemnly handed identical weapons with which to fight while their seconds monitored fair play. Once Giulio Gavotti had dropped his little bombs over Libya in 1911 it was inevitable that sooner or later the same technique would be used again. Given that at the outbreak of war Germany was the unchallenged world leader in airship technology, it was obvious the Zeppelin would become a weapon in wartime if only because in 1915 no German aircraft yet had the range to fly as far as London with a bomb load and return to Belgium. The rhetoric of ‘frightfulness’ was something of a smokescreen to cover the British public’s impotent fury that as yet there seemed to be no reliable means of countering the Zeppelin raids. There was also fear that H. G. Wells’s dire predictions in his 1898 proto-SF novel The War of the Worlds might actually be coming true. There was something primordial in the dread of attack from the sky.
In fact, as early as February 1913 there had been reports of strange airships seen over Britain’s east coast and on the 28th the Whitby Gazette ran a headline that read:
WANTED: AN AIR MINISTER
ENGLAND AT GERMANY’S MERCY
This laid out the respective positions of both future combatants eighteen months before the war began. Nobody could reasonably claim Britain hadn’t been warned. The idea of the country being at anybody’s mercy was shocking enough to emphasise how unprepared and inadequate its defences actually were: a common theme in public debate ever since Erskine Childers’s enormously popular ‘invasion’ thriller The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903. Winston Churchill later claimed that this single novel had led directly to the Admiralty’s building three major naval bases in north-eastern Britain (Scapa Flow, Invergordon and Rosyth). But with the coming of airships and aircraft the Grand Fleet was suddenly no longer enough to protect the British Isles, just as the journalist Harold Wyatt had predicted when Blériot first flew the Channel in 1909. Winston Churchill, ever the politician, had tried to allay fears in a speech on 17th March 1914 in which he predicted that ‘Any hostile aircraft, airships or aeroplanes which reached our coast during the coming year would be promptly attacked in superior force by a swarm of very formidable hornets.’191 At the very least this absurd piece of bombast implied ignorance: Zeppelins could not only fly far higher than any aircraft Britain had in 1914, they could also carry out raids at night.
However, it was one thing for the German military to embrace the idea of total war and quite another for ‘Kaiser Bill’ (Wilhelm II) to agree to all that this implied. As Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson he realised that bombing London would not only escalate hostilities to a new, unheard-of level, it would also risk killing his own cousins in Buckingham Palace. To pacify his generals he reluctantly agreed to bombing raids outside London. That first Zeppelin raid on King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth ‘was greeted with wild acclaim in Germany, where “Gott strafe England” was already a national rallying cry, daubed on walls, fences and lamp-posts and recited by German schoolchildren in their daily morning assemblies’.192 As always, once the principle of bombing had been established it became easy to continue, and Zeppelin raids were soon extended to London and continued for the next two years until airships at last became too vulnerable to fighter aircraft and the defences Britain could belatedly muster. They were superseded by big twin-engined Gotha bombers, whose first raid took place in May 1917.
The psychological effect on Britons of being bombed in their own country, and especially in their capital city, was immense. They were quite used to the idea of sending troops and warships overseas to outposts of the Empire in order to bring uppity natives into line; they were absolutely unprepared for this sort of treatment to be meted out to themselves on home ground. Worse still, for a long time they were powerless to stop it. In the first place every available RFC aircraft and anti-aircraft gun was needed in France; and in the second combat flying was in its adolescence at best while night combat flying was not even in its infancy. This sense of national impotence was probably an important contributory factor to the VC awarded to Flight-Sublieutenant Reginald Warneford, a young RNAS pilot stationed in Belgium. On 7th June 1915, flying his Morane-Saulnier Type L monoplane, he chased Zeppelin LZ.37 over Ostend and dropped bombs on it until it blew up. The explosion flipped his own aircraft upside down and stopped the engine. Warneford managed to land in German-held territory, work feverishly on the engine, fix a fuel leak with his cigarette holder, restart and take off again before he could be captured. Almost immediately King George V awarded him the Victoria Cross and he was acclaimed in Britain as a national hero. A mere ten days later Warneford was killed while flying an American journalist over Versailles in a new Farman F.27, a pusher biplane, apparently because of mid-air structural failure. Both men were thrown out and fell to their deaths.
Meanwhile the Zeppelins attacking Britain came at night – huge, stealthy and terrifying. 1916 saw the introduction of the ‘R’ types that were over 200 yards long. Silent newsreels could not record the menacing drone of their six immense Maybach engines, nor how they might fall quiet as they drifted almost unopposed above London as though picking out something choice at which to take careful aim. By now there were searchlights and anti-aircraft guns that put up a fine show of activity, although mostly with few results. The spectators milled excitedly in the streets, staring upwards. The airships’ ability to hit a specific target with their bombs was practically nil, but in a way this made it worse for those below as it turned the raids into a kind of sinister lottery by high explosive. Silver blades slashed the dark sky, criss-crossing feverishly as though in a hectic fencing match. None drew blood, however; and generally the sparkling blooms of shells sent up by the gunners in Hyde Park, for all the visible effect they had, might have been a benign firework display. The blow to British self-esteem is not recorded on film, but it soon had immense political impact.
To be sure, the numbers of casualties caused by the German raids on London and elsewhere in the First World War were not remotely comparable with those in the Second. The entire year’s campaign by German bombers between May 1917 and May 1918 killed 836 Britons up and down the country and injured 1,965: figures that for much of the war would have represented light casualties for a single day on the Western Front. (In World War II the Luftwaffe’s raids on Coventry alone were to kill 1,236.) But the panic the bombing inspired was quite out of proportion to the number and size of the bombs dropped and the damage they caused. A spirit of ‘Britain Can Take It’ or ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ was often notably absent. Small wonder, since not only were the British public completely unprepared but they could all too plainly see that ‘the authorities’ were as well. For a long time there were no organised and co-ordinated civil defence measures: no air raid warning sirens, no official bomb shelters. Policemen wearing sandwich boards with messages in red capitals reading POLICE NOTICE: TAKE COVER or, alternatively, ALL CLEAR would pedal through East End streets on their regulation bicycles, ringing their bells.
The difficulties involved in setting up adequate defences against aerial bombing raids in 1915 should not be underestimated. Even giving the public an early enough warning was problematic. Telephones were still comparatively rare and every call had to be hand-connected by operators pushing plugs into switchboards at the few exchanges. The most reliable form of quick communication was probably by telegraph. (There were of course no household radio sets.) Observers stationed on the North Foreland or the Essex coast might – if they were extremely lucky – succeed in raising someone at a local airfield or in London by telephone or by ‘sending a wire’ if they heard what they thought were a Zeppelin’s engines overhead; but what then? In those days aircraft climbed with painful slowness. Zeppelins could easily out-climb any of them and go as high as 15,000 feet, way beyond any defender’s capability. It might take a single-seater scout half an hour to reach a mere 8,000 feet even before it began looking for the intruder. True, the airships had a top speed of only about 60 mph; but within two years the big Gotha bombers that succeeded them could reach 21,000 feet and a speed of 87 mph, a difficult challenge for any interceptor even in 1917, especially at night and without oxygen.
Meanwhile the British government, worried as they already were by the war’s dismally slow progress in France, became increasingly concerned about unrest at home. The anger caused by food shortages and bad working conditions, especially in the armaments factories, was increased by the panic induced by air raids. Particularly in London’s East End, where the docks were an obvious target and there were no proper air raid shelters, this led to spectacular public funeral parades for the victims and also to strikes and rioting in the face of which the police were sometimes helpless. In fact, air raid casualties were often split along class lines since to the west and south of Holborn, and particularly in the West End, the numerous underground stations at least afforded a network of deep shelters. This inequity was exploited by union and strike leaders to reinforce their message that the whole conflict was a capitalist war, deliberately waged to enrich international bankers and arms manufacturers: one in which the British working class were mere cannon fodder in France and bomb fodder at home. The largely right-wing press countered with denunciations of official incompetence over civil defence and appeals to Britons’ innate bulldog patriotism. Propagandists like Horatio Bottomley, the crooked proprietor of the jingoistic newspaper John Bull, foamed with virulence against the Germans. Similarly, the otherwise socialist journalist Robert Blatchford fulminated at book length about the enemy’s ‘Cult of Frightfulness’:
The plea that the German atrocities in this war were perpetrated against orders, were against the wishes of the Kaiser, the General Staff and the German people, and that they have been magnified by the Allies, is a ‘terminological inexactitude’. For fifty years the gospel of Frightfulness has been preached in Germany; and the Germans, prone to violence, prone to hatred, rude in their language, coarse in their manners, have been apt pupils. So far from its being alien to the feeling of Germany or the tradition of the German Army, Frightfulness is part of the German code of war and is looked upon by soldiers and civilians alike as a useful and proper part of tactics and – business.193
Blatchford naturally had his counterparts in Germany. One of the Hamburger Nachrichten’s journalists wrote that ‘England’s shamelessness is not only abominable; it drives the blood to our heads and makes us desire and demand a hard punishment for this frivolous and huckstering people. Therefore we cannot rain bombs enough on England, nor can enough of her ships be destroyed.’194 Protecting those ships was a priority for both the Royal Navy and its air service.
*
Throughout the war the RNAS (rather than the RFC) was charged with the air defence of Britain’s coasts and in particular the Channel and the North Sea. It entered the war with six airships and 93 aircraft. Many of these aircraft were seaplanes deployed on constant patrol for German U-boats; but as we know, RNAS squadrons were also land-based in France and Belgium where they shared duties with the RFC. ‘Seaplanes’ in this context generally meant floatplanes: aircraft that take off and land on water using fixed floats or pontoons rather than flying boats whose fuselage is also a hull for landing directly on the water. Since most early aircraft were single-engined they were best suited to become floatplanes because they rode high enough on the water on their pontoons for the propeller and engine to be clear of spray (which was not always true of flying boats floating on their hulls). On the other hand the floats added weight and aerodynamic drag that still further reduced their already limited agility in the air. All aircraft design represents compromise, and the Kaiserliche Marine made it still harder for its own airmen following an order in March 1912 that all German naval aircraft had henceforth to be amphibians, with the added weight and drag of wheels.
The major problem for all seaplanes was that of navigation, which in those days was hard enough for aircraft flying over dry land. Over a featureless ocean out of sight of land or in restricted visibility it could be nightmarish, and scores of naval aircraft on both sides simply disappeared without trace. It would be difficult to exaggerate the bravery of a pilot and observer setting off alone on maritime patrol looking for enemy ships, aircraft and submarines over grey wastes of sea in flimsy wooden machines with open cockpits, a single engine, limited fuel, often no wireless and an unreliable compass; and all this in maritime areas where winds could change in a moment and sea mists gather out of nowhere. They flew day after day, all year round, often never seeing any shipping at all. It was possible for airmen to see not one single enemy vessel in 400 hours’ risky flying; and yet the job had to be done. If forced down by engine failure and lucky enough to make a decent landing on the sea they would probably be unable to take off again even if they managed to clear a blocked fuel pipe, for it would surely have been well-nigh impossible as well as dangerous to swing the propeller to restart the engine when standing on a narrow, heaving float. If they were carrying a wicker basket of homing pigeons they could send off a message giving their position as well as they were able, fully aware that they might be condemned to drift for days without water or food until they chanced to be spotted by a passing vessel of whatever nationality. That was if they were lucky. If they made a bad landing on a rough sea and wrecked the aircraft they would more likely cling to a float until cold or fatigue overcame them.
If a patrolling seaplane did spot an enemy ship or surfaced submarine, it would have to resist engaging because the priority was to report the vessel’s course and position. It was some time before seaplanes on North Sea patrol were equipped with wireless, able like their dry-land equivalents spotting for the artillery in France to tap out messages on a Morse key. The RNAS had developed the Sterling Spark transmitter, also widely used by the RFC, but it only became at all common in 1917. It was even longer before aircraft carried a receiver as well as a transmitter, enabling the sender to know whether his message had even got through successfully. All in all, the demands on a naval seaplane observer were prodigious. He had to navigate for hours on end across a featureless expanse solely by means of a chart, a compass, and dead reckoning, at any time expected to be able to give an accurate ‘fix’ of his position. (German pilots coined their own somewhat scornful word for being lost, verfranzt, which derived from their generic name for observers, Franz.) He had to understand his wireless set thoroughly as well as be fluent in Morse code. He needed to be a practised machine-gunner and also able to aim and drop any small under-wing bombs the aircraft was carrying. And finally, if forced down he would need to be a good practical seaman to increase his chances of survival.
In the first two years of the war most British and German naval patrol aircraft were sent out singly and without wireless. If they failed to return by dark they were generally given up for lost. Once wireless sets were installed they might at least get off a distress call. However, even assuming a vessel was near enough to receive the call and search for them, rescue was by no means guaranteed, especially at night. The observer’s compartment carried a signal pistol and flare cartridges, but these were in limited supply. Besides, anyone who has travelled by boat on a moonless night will know the extreme difficulty of judging the distance of any light. Spotting an object as small as a Short or Rumpler floatplane bobbing on the sea in daylight would be hard enough, but infinitely harder at night and well-nigh impossible in rough or foggy conditions.
It is worth briefly mentioning the seaplane that travelled furthest in the First World War. This was a two-seater Friedrichshafen FF.33 that accompanied the German ship SMS Wolf and was predictably nicknamed Wölfchen or cub. The Wolf was a classic ‘Q’ ship. It was slow, with a fake funnel, and looked every inch an innocent merchantman. In fact it was quite heavily armed with guns and four torpedo tubes and also carried 460 mines. Wolf sailed from Kiel on 30th November 1916, returning on 24th February 1918. In just under fifteen months Wolf and the Wölfchen visited the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the South Seas. The seaplane would fly ahead and scout for likely victims, then drop a message in English threatening that the ship would be bombed unless it kept wireless silence and steamed to meet the Wolf. From choice such victims would be other merchant vessels carrying valuable cargoes that were then offloaded into the Wolf’s capacious holds. By then the British naval blockade of German ports was resulting in acute shortages of vital supplies such as rubber, brass, copper, zinc, molybdenum and even cocoa, and after a long intrepid voyage the Wolf’s victims enabled it to return to Kiel with considerable stocks of such things. It also had on board 467 prisoners of war, having sunk 37 ships around the world totalling 110,000 tons and mined harbours from Colombo to Australia. In that time the faithful Wölfchen had been dismantled and rebuilt several times, meanwhile demonstrating how valuable a seaplane could be when tactically deployed in war. It was an astonishing voyage – in fact, the longest by any warship in the First World War – and earned the Blue Max for its skipper, Commander Nerger.
As the Wölfchen so brilliantly demonstrated, the seaplanes of both sides could to some extent track shipping as well as monitoring troop and other movements in ports, but they were ill-equipped to give much useful notice of attacks by air. Naval stations on Britain’s east coast did indeed keep a sharp watch and, if they spotted German airships or bombers heading towards the British coast, RNAS aircraft would be sent up to investigate. However, by the time enemy aircraft had reached the coast it was generally too late to do much about a raid on London – even if hastily scrambled scouts could have found them in time. Incredibly, despite two years of Zeppelin raids and mounting public outcry, as late as the summer of 1917 there was still no comprehensive plan for the systematic defence of the capital and the warning and protection of its citizens. Neither was there any guaranteed co-operation between the RNAS and the RFC, thanks to inter-service disdain.
Stuart Wortley gives a plausible description of what he found when he was posted back from France to Home Defence duties in July 1917. At that time the only competent aircraft available for the defence of London were several squadrons of the Bristol F.2A, the Bristol Fighter or ‘Brisfit’. This was an excellent combat machine, structurally strong and manoeuvrable, but dogged by engine problems. These were almost entirely the result of the chaos in planning and procurement that resulted from the War Office and the Admiralty each going its own way. The designated engine for the Brisfit was the Rolls-Royce Falcon III, but this was in very short supply because Rolls-Royce had failed to keep up with demand. Bristol was forced to resort to a lower-powered Hispano-Suiza engine, which crucially took the edge off the Brisfit’s performance while desperate efforts were made to uprate the French-built motor. Meanwhile the War Office had on a whim ordered 3,000 units of Sunbeam’s new Arab engine, despite the company warning them that not only was the design untested but the novel casting techniques required for its aluminium parts were equally untried. This ill-conceived order tied up the production capacity of two large factories at a critical juncture and, just as the company had feared, the castings proved too weak. Nevertheless a stubborn attempt was made to fit Brisfits with Arabs, which were a complete failure. Bristol’s final despairing choice of Siddeley’s Puma engine proved no better. Most Brisfits wound up with the Hispano-Suiza once it had had the bugs removed and the horsepower increased. The aircraft deployed for Home Defence in 1917 were those stationed around the capital in ‘advanced training’ squadrons, but by no means all were reliably powered. Advanced or not, these were still training squadrons rather than dedicated units of machines in peak condition manned by experienced pilots; but even the increasingly pressured Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was having a hard time prising such men away from the RFC in France to serve at home.
Wortley’s own unit was No. 35 Training Squadron based at Northolt. This had six Brisfits whose condition, since they were used and abused by trainees, was not always good and it was rare for more than two to be airworthy at the same time. No doubt this was also true for the other Home Defence stations. On one morning of high winds the klaxon sounded and Wortley and his pilot were scrambled to patrol for two hours between Greenwich and Chingford at 17,000 feet. In the excitement Wortley had forgotten to put on his heavy flying jacket and all he had on over his ordinary clothes was a mackintosh. He steadily froze as they flew up and down London’s north-east flank for ninety minutes without seeing a single other aircraft, friend or foe. Then, just as they were turning for home to thaw out, Wortley spotted a formation of Gothas over Harwich heading for the capital. It must have been a bad moment. There they were, a lone Bristol Fighter facing an oncoming cloud of the big twin-engined German bombers. The temptation must have been great simply to pretend they had seen nothing and turn for home.
The bombers droned on, unmoved by the white puffs of anti-aircraft shells bursting harmlessly well above and below them. Wortley noticed that a couple of the Gothas were straggling slightly behind the rest and his pilot Douglas Hill decided to attack them. There was nothing they could do about the rest. Hill made the combat-approved manoeuvre of diving behind and pulling up under the tail of one of them in its blind spot before opening fire. After half a dozen rounds his gun jammed. Meanwhile Wortley, who was not wearing a safety belt, had trained his own gun on the Gotha’s companion off to the right and likewise opened fire, only to have his gun jam as well after a few shots.
I was about to try to clear the stoppage when a violent lurch jerked me off my feet. For a fraction of a second I was suspended in mid-air, and it was only by desperately clutching at the gun-mounting that I was able to save myself from falling overboard and to haul myself back into my seat. Douglas Hill had dived steeply away in order to try to clear his gun. But it was the Constantinesco gear that was at fault. It had not been properly replenished with oil, so there was not enough pressure in the tube to fire the trigger. In a training squadron it is nobody’s job in particular to attend to these details. Consequently they remain neglected…195
They abandoned the fight and landed at Eastchurch, which turned out to be just as well because a sergeant-rigger there found the main spar of their lower left-hand wing had been shot nearly through. Had they taken off again the wing would almost certainly have collapsed, killing them both. What neither of them had known but had just learned the hard way was that Gothas were armed with a gun to defend their ‘blind spot’, shooting down and backwards from a port underneath the fuselage.
The incident that had probably led to Wortley’s squadron’s recall from France was the daylight raid a month earlier when on 13th June a fleet of Gotha bombers had bombed Bermondsey and Poplar. A single 50 kg bomb hit Upper North Street School in the East India Dock Road, killing eighteen children and severely injuring another thirty. Between them that day the Gothas spent a total of an hour and a half over south-east England, killing 162 and injuring 432. Brisfits from 35 and 39 Training Squadrons harried them, but with little effect. Before the children’s funeral at All Saints, Poplar on 20th June a long procession of horse-drawn hearses each carrying a little coffin and heaped with flowers was watched by massed crowds on the pavements. The occasion became a focus for public anger and led to an onslaught from the press demanding proper warnings of air raids and calling for reprisals on German towns and cities. Noel Pemberton Billing MP, whose book Air War: How to Wage It had been published the previous year and laid out a virtual blueprint for home defence against air attacks, gave a speech in the House of Commons. It was a characteristic PB harangue that began along ‘What did I tell you?’ lines and went on with such vehemence directed against the government for their laxity and bungling that he was eventually expelled from the chamber.
Hurried War Cabinet meetings decided that squadrons of fighters must be recalled from France and reprisal raids undertaken. When these conclusions were presented to Trenchard and Haig in France Trenchard refused to sacrifice any of his aircraft merely to defend London. His squadrons were for offensive use only. He was also against reprisal raids, saying that ‘reprisals on open towns are repugnant to British ideas’, while admitting ‘we may be forced to adopt them’. He then showed that he, too, understood the implications of Clausewitz by adding ‘It would be worse than useless to do so, however, unless we are determined that, once adopted, they will be carried through to the end.’ General Haig was similarly against retaliatory raids because he could see it all escalating out of hand. This of course is the nature of all-out war but he, like most Britons, was still reluctant to face the implications. Above all, Trenchard and Haig were against reassigning any aircraft to defend Britain at this moment because they were planning a major ground offensive for July and needed every last machine in France. After furious Cabinet sessions their hand was eventually forced to the extent that, with extreme reluctance, they released 56 Squadron (Cecil Lewis’s) to be posted to Bekesbourne in Kent, with 66 Squadron to go to Calais to patrol the Channel approaches, but only on condition that both squadrons were back in France in time for the July offensive.
In the meantime London’s East Enders finally lost patience. This was mid-1917; they had effectively been left unprotected for well over two years. They took the law into their own hands and carried out reprisals of their own against people and shops with Germanic names, looting and smashing. There was spreading xenophobia to the extent that practically anyone with a foreign name or accent was unsafe and sometimes police and even soldiers refused to intervene as people were beaten up and their premises ransacked. At first light on 7th July 56 Squadron left Bekesbourne to fly back to France as promised. They had not fired a single shot at a German machine all the time they had been in England even though a flight of Gothas had carried out at least one major raid while they were stationed in Kent. Given how good German intelligence was by now, it seems likely it was no accident that another daylight Gotha raid was launched against London on the very morning 56 Squadron left. By now a London Warning Centre was in operation and a Royal Navy lightship sighted the incoming bombers and told the Admiralty, which then alerted the RNAS at Chatham. Their fighters joined with some eighty others scrambled from the advanced training squadrons in the London area. Anti-aircraft batteries also sent up a barrage of shells to meet the Gothas. It is a measure of how new aviation still was, and how exciting any aircraft seemed, that far from taking cover Londoners would come out of their houses to watch daylight raids despite the lethal hail of shrapnel from the ack-ack guns that killed and injured many on the ground. Small boys would scurry through the streets looking for the most sought-after trophies of all, the artillery shells’ brass nose-caps and copper driving bands. On this occasion some distinguished witnesses observed the twenty-five bombers as they flew across the capital, ‘packed together like a flight of rooks’:
Among the spectators were members of the Air Board, watching from the balconies of the Hotel Cecil [their headquarters], who were probably less excited than humiliated by this latest demonstration of German daring and British aerial impotence. The Times published a breathless report on the raid the next day. ‘As a spectacle, the raid was the most thrilling that London has seen since the air attacks began. Every phase could be followed from points many miles away without the aid of glasses, and hundreds of thousands of people watched the approach of the squadron, the dropping of the bombs, the shelling of the German aeroplanes and the eventual retreat.’196
The Gothas dropped their bombs right across London causing many casualties. There were the familiar scenes of children with their legs blown off, lumps of hair and gristle plastered to brick walls, the screams of a disembowelled drayhorse that was messily put down with a fireman’s axe. One of 63 Squadron’s pilots, Lieutenant W.G. Salmon, was shot in the air, attempted an emergency landing at Joyce Green airfield near Dartford, but died in the crash. Several arrests were made among sightseers who rushed forward and looted his body and the wreckage of his aircraft for souvenirs. In the poorer districts of London itself the looting and rioting increased as news of the casualties spread. One of the witnesses was Sylvia, the Suffragist daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst. She described how the air was
filled by the babble of voices and the noise of knocking and splintering wood. Men were lowering a piano through the window… A woman and her children raced off with an easy chair, rushing it along on its castors before them. ‘I shall sit, and sit, and sit on this chair all day,’ the mother yelled. ‘I never had an armchair to sit in before.’ ‘Bread! Bread! Bread!’ The shrieks rang out. Women and children rushed by, their arms and aprons laden with loaves. Looting continued with impunity for days… men unknown in the district, with hatchets on their shoulders, marched through Bethnal Green, Green Street and Roman Road to the very end. Wherever a shop had a German name over it, they stopped and hacked down the shutters and broke the glass. Then crowds of children rushed in and looted. When darkness fell and the police made no sign, men and women joined in the sack. Only when adjoining English shops began to be looted did the police stir themselves to intervene.197
Lloyd George later toured the bombed areas and his report to the War Cabinet led to two more squadrons being withdrawn from France against the wishes of Trenchard and Haig, whose Flanders offensive was now put back to 31st July. 46 Squadron, which flew Sopwith Pups, returned in a hurry to England to be based at Sutton’s Farm in Essex.
Once again, German intelligence must have been well informed because five days later, on 22nd July, the so-called ‘England Squadron’ of Gotha bombers ignored London and instead attacked Harwich and Felixstowe at breakfast time, scoring a direct hit on an army barracks that killed eleven men. This time Home Defence got more than 120 aircraft into the air though only one managed to fire a shot. A single Gotha out of twenty-one was shot down, but that was by two Dunkirk-based Brisfits as it crossed the Belgian coast afterwards, homeward bound. The real damage done to the RFC and RNAS fighters must have been to morale as a result of being peppered by their own anti-aircraft batteries. These had merrily shelled nine British aircraft over the Thames Estuary that morning, damaging several, and they were still firing away at 9.45 a.m., by which time the twenty remaining Gothas were even then landing back at their bases on the outskirts of Ghent. Being ‘archied’ by their own guns must have been enraging for the British defenders, who had survived the madhouse of Flanders only to find the war not one whit saner in their own homeland. Only four months earlier Field Marshal Viscount Sir John French, whom Haig had replaced as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force and reassigned as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, issued a bizarre edict. All anti-aircraft batteries except those along the coast were forbidden to fire. ‘No aeroplanes or seaplanes, even if recognized as hostile, will be fired at either by day or night.’198 That way the batteries’ personnel could be sent off to France where they were more urgently needed. This order was only rescinded in early June. Presumably the bemused returning gunners then decided to play it safe and fire at absolutely any aircraft they spotted.
Another equally lunatic measure was that restricting wireless communications with the defending aircraft. Sir David Henderson, the Director-General of Military Aeronautics, had been constantly urging that wireless receivers should be installed in Home Defence aircraft so they could be directed from the ground. By 1917 scout aircraft were generally powerful enough for the small additional weight to be easily manageable, and it seemed like one of those ideas that could only be sensible. Nevertheless it was promptly scuppered by the Admiralty, who protested that the transmissions might interfere with the Fleet’s own communications. Eventually two-way wireless equipment was installed in four aircraft whose pilots could communicate with operations centres in the Hotel Cecil and Wormwood Scrubs. The rest of the Home Defence squadrons had to rely on AA batteries laying out broad strips of white cloth on the ground in the form of arrows pointing towards any enemy aircraft they spotted. Thus was Great Britain prepared to defend itself and its citizens.
In desperation the War Cabinet at last appointed the energetic old Boer leader, Lieutenant-General Jan Christiaan Smuts, as Home Defence supremo, a task he undertook with considerable efficiency. Fresh from his campaigns in Africa and untainted by the old inter-service prejudices that were bedevilling so much of the air war effort, he at once ordered RFC and RNAS squadrons to work together under a unified command. Secondly, he called for a protective ring of anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights around London, three new squadrons of fighters plus a reserve force on permanent detachment, and a new air raid warning system for the capital. This called for a command centre in County Hall able to contact any of eighty fire stations all over London so they could sound warning of an impending raid. Such long overdue measures were just as well, since the end of September 1917 marked the introduction of Germany’s R.VI Zeppelin-Staaken bombers. These were the biggest aircraft of the war: four-engined giants with a wingspan of 138 feet. To see one of those droning over London must have fulfilled anybody’s worst fears that H. G. Wells’s nightmarish visions in The War in the Air were about to come true.
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By now it was clearer to everyone what Clausewitzian ideas of total war entailed. Both sides were sustaining civilian casualties. Both sides were experiencing periodic shortages of food and fuel, although without a large empire on which to rely Germany – now embattled on several fronts – was undoubtedly suffering more. Its war machine was beginning to feel the pinch with ever-acuter shortages of vital materials like rubber and copper. In fact, the time was not far off when German coins would become worth more for the metal they were made of than their monetary value.
Maybe after all Clausewitz had simply produced a highly sophisticated version of the age-old adage that anything is fair in love and war. Even so, this maxim could still backfire badly, as it did on the Germans over the sinking of the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania and the executions of two British citizens, the nurse Edith Cavell and the merchant seaman Captain Charles Fryatt. It may be that Clausewitz or the German high command did not pay enough attention to some of the negative effects of total war that might sometimes hand a propaganda and morale advantage to an enemy. In May 1915 the Lusitania was torpedoed off Ireland by a U-boat while in-bound to Liverpool from New York, killing 1,198, many of them Americans. Although the Kriegsmarine had previously declared the waters around the British Isles as a war zone, and the German Embassy in New York had published a warning in New York newspapers urging passengers not to travel on the ship, the sinking was a disaster for Germany as well as for the victims because it materially increased the chances of bringing the United States into the war – as it proved two years later. There is a conspiracy theory that the British deliberately used the Lusitania as a ‘tethered goat’ in order to lure America into the war. The Germans claimed the ship was a legitimate naval target because it was carrying munitions. This was vehemently denied at the time as a typical German lie, although divers have recently found upwards of four million rounds of .303 rifle and machine-gun ammunition in the wreck. However the various truths intersect, and once the mourning and bluster had subsided, the overall result was a major propaganda coup for the Allies.
As for Edith Cavell, there is no question that she was guilty as charged, having abused her presumed neutrality as a nurse to help over 200 Allied soldiers escape from Germany; but shooting her was likewise a dreadful mistake. It was a gift to propagandists and proof of German ‘frightfulness’. And if Captain Fryatt’s name is today much less familiar than that of Edith Cavell, at the time his execution caused equal outrage although his case was even more equivocal, morally speaking. He was not a naval man but simply the civilian captain of a merchant vessel. From early 1915 he had run the gauntlet of U-boat attacks in the English Channel, finally attempting to ram U-33 which had surfaced to torpedo him. He might not have been in uniform but he was acting in compliance with an order from Winston Churchill, by then First Lord of the Admiralty. This included a clause further stating that any German crews captured by a merchantman could legitimately be shot if that was more convenient than taking them prisoner, and another declaring that any white flag of surrender was to be ignored.
The attempted ramming took place in March 1915 but it was not until June 1916 that Fryatt and his vessel were finally captured by German destroyers and escorted to Bruges. He was court-martialled as a guerrilla fighter for trying to sink U-33 and tried in the Town Hall in July, sentenced to death (a sentence personally confirmed by the Kaiser) and shot on the 27th. Then-Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s statement to the House of Commons four days later unequivocally called this ‘murder’, describing it as an ‘atrocious crime against the laws of nations and the usages of war’, which conveniently ignored the fact that under Churchill’s draconian rules of engagement the wretched Fryatt could have been arrested back in Britain had he not tried to ram the U-boat. Given that he was also permitted to shoot any prisoners he took and ignore any white flag – that most immemorial of all ‘usages of war’ – his role could reasonably be described as very far from that of an ordinary merchant skipper. Great international condemnation followed his death, including an impassioned article in The New York Times. However, so insistent were the Germans that the sentence was justified that they reviewed it after the war was over and reconfirmed its legitimacy in 1919. Poor Charles Fryatt could never have guessed his own death’s propaganda value to the Allies, nor that a century later London’s commuters would still be passing his memorial tablet daily in Liverpool Street Station.
After the Zeppelin and Gotha raids there was never any serious doubt that the British would eventually carry out retaliatory raids on German cities with a clear conscience. However, Trenchard’s plan had always been to achieve air superiority before bombing industrial targets and Germany’s infrastructure. Superiority in terms of sheer numbers of Allied fighters was not achieved until the spring of 1918, at which point the Independent Air Force was formed under Trenchard’s command. Designed expressly for the purpose of bombing German targets from eastern France by night and day, the IAF eventually comprised British, French, Italian and US units. Many of Handley Page’s big twin-engined O/400 bombers were deployed, but the majority of the RFC’s bombers were much smaller single-engined aircraft such as D.H.4s.
Long-range raids were carried out on cities like Mainz, Stuttgart, Coblenz, Mannheim, Trier and Metz, as well as on targets such as railways and factories. (It was on one such sortie that W. E. Johns and his observer were shot down.) The Entente’s air forces might theoretically have been in the ascendancy but it was still an extremely hazardous enterprise for the aircrews, with round trips of up to 200 miles and ‘archie’ defences and German fighters still highly active and competent. Post-raid aerial photos showed many of the targets badly damaged; less visible was the inevitable toll of limbless children and disembowelled horses. Nor did the photos reveal the tally of roast or smashed airmen, nor those captured to spend long months in ever-worsening conditions in prison camps as Germany’s food shortages grew more acute.
An American writer and columnist, Irvin S. Cobb, wrote an article for the Saturday Evening Post in 1918 describing a visit he had made in the spring of that year to Night Bombing Squadron No. 100. This was now an IAF outfit flying F.E.2bs and based at Ochey, near Nancy: far enough south and east in France to be within reach of some important German targets. One day a biplane landed near him and out of it climbed two very young British aviators. When Cobb asked what they were doing, the following conversation ensued:
‘Well, you see, we were a bit thirsty – Bert and I – and we heard you had very good beer at the French Officers’ Club here. So we just ran over for half an hour or so to get a drop of drink and then toddle along back again. Not a bad idea, what?’ The speaker wore the twin crowns of a captain on the shoulder straps of his overcoat. His age I should have put at twenty-one and his complexion was that of a very new, very healthy cherub. ‘Anything happening at the Squadron since I was over that way?’ I enquired. ‘Quiet enough to be a bore – weather hasn’t suited for our sort these last few evenings,’ stated the taller boy. ‘We got fed up on doin’ nothing at all, so night before last a squad started across the border to give Fritzie a taste of life. But just after we started the Squadron Commander decided the weather was too thickish and he signed us back – all but the Young-un here, who claims he didn’t see the flare and kept on goin’ all by his little self.’ ‘It seemed a rotten shame, really it did, to waste the whole evenin’.’ This was the Young-un, he of the pink cheeks, speaking. ‘So I just jogged across the jolly old Rhine until I came to a town, and I dropped my pills there and came back. Nice quiet trip it was – lonely, rather, and not a bit excitin’.’199
If this suggests Bertie Wooster more than Biggles it is because of the upper-class Edwardian drawl that was already becoming the linguistic hallmark of the newly formed RAF. Out of hunting field jargon, public school cant and aviation slang was created a verbal tradition proper for a gentleman’s breezy relationship with sudden death. This was style: an affectation that was to persist, most famously in the Second World War when cries of ‘Tally ho!’ and languid talk of wizard prangs and pieces of cake became indelibly associated with the Battle of Britain and the boys of Fighter and Bomber Command. Under the pressure of attrition rates far greater than those suffered by airmen in the previous war, this argot then reached its zenith as the studied nonchalance of the dashingly doomed. By then, too, the awful lessons of the nation’s complete vulnerability to bombing raids in the earlier war had been learned, and a well-organised and effective early warning system was at last in place as a vital part of Britain’s home defence.
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Even so, an idea had taken hold that was to dominate strategic – and particularly air force – thinking for decades to come, above all in Britain and the United States. This was that bombing was the way forward, despite evidence from the First World War that for all the localised panic the air raids had at first caused, civilian morale overall had been very little injured by it – had maybe even been strengthened, especially once it could be seen that the air force was putting up a serious defence. Moreover, what appeared from aerial photographs to be grievous damage inflicted on an enemy’s factories and infrastructure often turned out to cause no very great reduction in industrial output.
Yet between the wars the idea that strategic bombing was the key to winning future conflict took hold strongly in various air forces. In 1932, in the wake of Japan’s indiscriminate bombing of Shanghai which killed thousands, the Geneva Disarmament Conference tried vainly to outlaw aerial attacks on vulnerable citizens, Clausewitz or no Clausewitz. Britain’s then-Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, said resignedly that the man in the street had to realise ‘there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed… the bomber will always get through’.200 And so it was to prove. All the same, the ensuing world war provided no evidence that, with the sole exception of America’s use of nuclear bombs against Japan in 1945, strategic bombing, area bombing or ‘precision’ bombing was ever the critical factor in the war’s outcome. Even massive damage to Germany’s Ruhr industries by the RAF and the USAAF did less to disrupt Hitler’s war machine than did an increasing lack of raw materials from outside Germany. Neither did the setting on fire of entire cities bring about a mass uprising of citizens willing to sue for peace. Yet the idea of bombing’s supremacy persisted in the military mind, and after the Second World War it became enshrined as an eternal truth that has to some extent dominated strategic thinking ever since, above all in the United States. Aerial bombing by drones in the Middle East has yielded its daily ‘collateral damage’ of limbless children and disembowelled donkeys and nothing remotely approaching a victory has yet been achieved, and nor can it be. Quite the reverse. As the first air raids a hundred years ago demonstrated, attacks that leave dismembered children strewn among rubble are more likely to strengthen a people’s resolve than to weaken it.
Yet that first air war did establish one military principle that has endured unchallenged: that of the vital importance of air superiority in general. By the end of 1918, with sheer weight of numbers, the Entente had at last achieved aerial dominance over the battlefields of Europe. The critical advantage this conferred was noted by all sides and was to be confirmed many times in the Second World War as, indeed, ever since. As one senior RAF officer recently remarked, ‘The Gulf War of 1991 was a sharp reminder of what can happen to even a large and well-equipped army [i.e. Saddam Hussein’s retreating from Kuwait] when caught in open ground by an opponent enjoying total air supremacy.’201 That was decisive; whereas the shattering bombardment of ‘Shock and Awe’ in the second Gulf War of 2003 was not. Baghdad fell, but it brought the Coalition forces no overall victory in the war. Back in 1918 a few wise heads on all sides might have predicted that.