Pilots and observers have consistently maintained the ever-changing fortunes of the day and in the war zone our dead have been always beyond the enemy’s lines or far out at sea. Our far-flung squadrons have flown over home waters and foreign seas, the Western and Italian battle line, Rhineland, the Mountains of Macedonia, Gallipoli, Palestine, the Plains of Arabia, Sinai and Darfur…
King George V to all RAF squadrons after the Armistice
‘Our far-flung squadrons… battle-line…’ Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ was evidently echoing in the unconscious of whoever drafted the King’s message. The poet’s anxious prayer to the ‘Lord of our far-flung battle-line’ embodied the worry that without His blessing Britain’s global empire represented vainglorious overstretch. ‘Far-called, our navies melt away…’ It was inevitable that the war in Europe should have had tentacles reaching overseas into the Balkans, Middle East and Africa since the major combatants – Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy – all had empires or spheres of interest and influence far beyond the main European fronts. As usually happens in wars, well before the end men in suits were cooking up post-bellum deals, scheming how various frontiers might be redrawn and what colour the new maps should be. Among the more notorious of these deals was the secret Sykes–Picot agreement in which one Briton and one Frenchman decided how the entire Middle East should be carved up. The fallout from those arbitrary lines drawn across a map in crayon on a May day in 1916 has now persisted for a century and may yet become literal.
The political geography of the Middle East was considerably determined by the twin fading dynasties of Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Persia. The protracted struggle for the Ottoman Empire’s former possessions had already been a background factor of the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1914 Turkey sided with Germany and the Central Powers, which left the Entente – chiefly Britain, France and Russia – with regional wars on its hands, Britain fighting the Turco-German forces from the Balkans to Sinai and Palestine and on through Mesopotamia. It was above all vital for Britain to maintain its lifeline with the Empire via the sea route that included the Suez Canal and Aden, an important coaling station. But in view of the Royal Navy’s gradual switch from coal to oil at this time (the new Queen Elizabeth-class battleships were oil burners), it was equally vital to secure the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s oilfields in Mesopotamia, and especially its huge refinery at Abadan in what is now Iran. In order to drive the Turks out of Palestine and elsewhere, Britain entered into an alliance with Sherif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca, who was leading an Arab nationalist movement that also wanted the Turks out of the Middle East. The British army officer under General Allenby’s command working with Sherif Hussein to free the Hejaz (the western coast of Arabia) was T. E. Lawrence, who gave this assessment of the Arabs’ campaign:
Of religious fanaticism there was little trace. The Sherif refused in round terms to give a religious twist to his rebellion. His fighting creed was nationality. The tribes knew that the Turks were Moslems who thought that the Germans were probably true friends of Islam. They knew that the British were Christians, and that the British were their allies. In the circumstances, their religion would not have been of much help to them, and they had put it aside. ‘Christian fights Christian, so why should not Mohammedan do the same? What we want is a Government which speaks our own language of Arabic and will let us live in peace. Also, we hate those Turks.’202
The armies involved in the Middle East conflict were naturally accompanied by air support which, especially in desert landscapes with little cover, was useful for observing troop movements and bombing supply lines. As far as maintaining an air presence went, the British had an advantage over the Germans for purely logistical reasons. The merchant fleet, escorted by the Royal Navy, could reliably supply Britain’s protectorate, Egypt, via Alexandria and Port Said, whereas the Germans had to bring their aircraft, spares and equipment overland from Germany on the long and difficult haul down through the Balkans and Turkey.
Some RFC and RNAS squadrons were even further-flung than King George’s message-drafter knew, for they were also present in a minor way in East Africa and India. In India a few squadrons were based almost exclusively on the North-West Frontier in what today is Pakistan, dealing with the ‘troublesome tribesmen’ in Waziristan who were part of Britain’s continuing imperial headache, albeit one that was independent of the Great War. In Africa, though, the Kaiser’s colonial presence was fought with varying success in both German South-West Africa (Namibia) and German East Africa (today’s Tanzania).
Probably the most famous air action in the latter was the destruction of the German light cruiser Königsberg in 1915 after it had hidden some ten miles inland in the complex delta of the Rufiji river, temporarily immobilised by engine failure. The Königsberg had long been a menace to British shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Admiralty viewed her elimination as a priority. Royal Navy warships arrived off the Rufiji delta but failed to find the German vessel because its crew had camouflaged the ship with foliage cut from the surrounding forest. It was a clear case for aerial reconnaissance. A local pilot was hired, together with his privately owned Curtiss F. seaplane, but this did not survive many missions. Two G.III Caudrons and two Henri Farman F.27s were sent down from Dar-es-Salaam (the F.27 was essentially a ‘Rumpty’ with a bigger engine and without its ‘horns’: the curved skids on the undercarriage) but nor were these up to the task. The Navy then deployed two RNAS Sopwith ‘Folders’: Type 807 biplanes with folding wings for shipboard storage. However, their Gnome Monosoupape (single valve) rotary engines proved too weak in the hot climate even as their airframes came unglued in the tropical damp. Three of Short’s ‘Folders’ were then deployed that, while also suffering in the heat and unable to climb above 600 feet, did manage some useful photo-reconnaissance work and finally pinpointed the Königsberg’s position. Two shallow-draught monitors were sent whose guns fatally crippled the German ship, thereby removing a major threat to Allied traffic in the Indian Ocean.
However, the Königsberg’s menace did not end there because most of its crew went to join an extraordinary guerrilla force led by a true genius in the art of bush warfare. This was General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck who was the officer in charge of all military forces in German East Africa. Between 1914 and 1918, living off the land and with a mere 14,000 men – German and local African – he managed to tie down and harry 300,000 Allied troops, remaining uncaptured at the time of the Armistice. It is pleasant to record that ‘The Lion of Africa’ survived until 1964. He was the only German commander ever to invade British imperial territory in the First World War, and his four years of improvised bush tactics mark him as probably the greatest-ever exponent of this form of warfare.
It was against Lettow-Vorbeck and in support of General Smuts that 26 Squadron flew reconnaissance missions in their B.E.2cs and ‘Rumptys’ (by that time the sort of antiquated aircraft most easily spared from the Western Front). But theirs was a tiny contingent and the task proved hopeless since little could be observed in thick bush from the air. Apart from that the African climate proved too much for fragile wooden aircraft designed for northern Europe, susceptible to wood-boring pests and warping as well as to weakened adhesives. No airman is much comforted by the thought of termites in his airframe and still less by the possibility that at any moment it might come unglued in the air. Thirty years later in the Second World War this same problem had to be addressed when the wood-framed de Havilland Mosquito was deployed in the Far East. By then new formaldehyde-based adhesives had been devised that seemed mostly to work; occasional airframe failures were attributed to sloppy assembly in de Havilland’s factories at Hatfield and Leavesden.
King George’s reference to Darfur in his message was significant for the way in which it related to the wider picture of the British campaign in the Middle East. Since the turn of the century the Sudanese sultanate of Darfur (the land of the Fur people) had effectively been independent under its ruler, Ali Dinar. From its geographical position of sharing frontiers with Italian-administered Libya and the French-administered district of Chad (then part of French West Africa), Dinar felt himself drawn into the wider conflict, being already estranged from Sudan’s British administration ever since Kitchener had ordered the mass killing of wounded Mahdists after the Battle of Omdurman in 1899. Instinctively, the Sultan sided with Libya’s politico-religious Senussi tribe, who were waging their own anticolonial war against the Italian occupation. He believed Turkish and German propaganda that promised the creation of an Islamic state in North Africa after the war was over and the Italians, the French and the British had all been driven out.
Ali Dinar’s rebelliousness led to British intervention in 1916, motivated half by needing to keep the peace in Sudan and half by macro-political considerations. Four B.E.2cs flew observation and reconnaissance missions over remote Darfur territory as well as dropping propaganda leaflets on the town of Al Fashir, Dinar’s stronghold. After fierce ground battles between the British Army and Dinar’s men Lieutenant John Slessor in his B.E.2c bombed the Fur troops retreating to Al Fashir, during which he was hit in the thigh by a bullet. Shortly afterwards all four aircraft and Lieutenant Slessor himself were withdrawn to Egypt for repair and the Darfur campaign ended with Ali Dinar’s death in November 1916. Many years later John Slessor was to become Air Marshal Sir John and finally a hawkish Cold War Chief of the Air Staff in the early 1950s.
It is shaming to see how quickly Europeans betrayed their promises to the Middle-Eastern allies they had so assiduously cultivated during the First World War. The Libyans’ faith in Turco-German visions of an Islamic state in North Africa was shattered when the Italians not only stayed on after 1918 but began importing Sicilians en masse to displace local Arabs and turn the country’s sole fertile coastal strip into ‘the garden of Italy’. The Arabs’ faith in British promises of a pan-Arab state from Aleppo to Aden was likewise destroyed once it was clear the Sykes–Picot agreement had secretly broken the promises even before they were made. The hopes of young nationalistic Egyptians were similarly dashed when the British stayed on in their protectorate after the war with a military occupation of the Canal Zone that included a considerable RAF presence. And the Ottomans’ faith in the Germans likewise came to naught. To this day the malign ghost of these and other betrayals haunts Middle East peace talks as an unbidden but ever-present delegate.
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On the other side of the Mediterranean fighting had become general ever since the abortive British and French Gallipoli campaign that began in April 1915 at the western end of the Dardanelles – the narrow strait separating Europe from Asia. It was across this bottleneck that German lines of supply to the Middle East had to run. They came south-eastwards through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, through Bulgaria (which had finally sided with the Central Powers in September 1915) and thence through Turkey. Both the British and the French badly underestimated the fighting abilities of the Turkish troops defending the Dardanelles. This was curious, considering that before the war the Turkish army had been reorganised by the Germans, their navy by the British, and their air force by the French. It is hard to see how these military advisers could have overlooked the Turkish forces’ combined competence on their own terrain. Nevertheless they did; and after a campaign that cost the French and the British and their Anzac divisions dear, the Entente armies withdrew to Egypt and Salonika in January 1916 to lick their wounds.
Among the survivors was the 22-year-old W. E. Johns, who had taken part in the Gallipoli fiasco as Private Johns of the Norfolk Yeomanry. He was well aware how lucky he was to have survived since he had left half his regiment behind in mass graves. Many had been killed in action but the great majority had died of dysentery, malaria or simply of exposure in the lethal late autumn blizzards. Once in Alexandria Johns was deployed for the next six months to various outposts of the Suez Canal defences, often in remote desert locations that he could not have guessed would prove extremely useful to him in twenty years’ time as the setting for several of his Biggles stories. In September 1916 he was transferred from the Norfolk Yeomanry to the Machine Gun Corps, sent back to England on a brief leave and promptly dispatched once again by troopship, this time to Salonika.
This Greek seaport, more properly Thessaloniki, was some fifty very rough miles due south of Lake Doiran on the border between Macedonia and Bulgaria. In late 1915 the French general Maurice Sarrail had led a joint French and British force in an attempt to go to the aid of Serbia using the rail link that ran past this lake, but he left it too late. Bulgaria had just thrown in its lot with the Central Powers and its troops cut the railway line that Sarrail and his men were relying on and he had to turn round and withdraw south to Salonika. The port promptly became the main base for Entente troops in the so-called Macedonian theatre. In true Balkan style Greece’s political position was equivocal since the country was split between royalists who, like King Constantine, favoured the Germans, and those who sided with the revolutionary Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who favoured the Entente. It was not until June 1917 that Constantine abdicated after a coup supported by General Sarrail, to be succeeded by his son Alexander who endorsed the Prime Minister, and Greece as a whole (now often referred to as ‘Venizelan’ Greece) finally came down firmly on the side of the Entente powers.
That was in the future, however. Greece was still on the edge of civil war when in mid-1916 General Sarrail tried again to advance beyond the Macedonian frontier, meeting the German Eleventh Army from the west and the Bulgarians from the east. In support of this effort the RFC’s 17 Squadron was sent to Salonika in July. It came fresh from flying in Sinai, the Western Desert and Arabia and for a short while was the only RFC unit in Macedonia. The squadron comprised twelve B.E.2cs and three Bristol Scouts (both pre-war designs) plus two D.H.2s, the resilient little single-seat fighter that was even then helping to end the ‘Fokker Scourge’ over Flanders and France. Soon 47 Squadron was also sent to swell the RFC’s presence on the Macedonian front.
By the time Johns arrived at the front with the Machine Gun Corps in October 1916 the British trenches ran through formidable country from Lake Doiran (‘that fever-ridden sewer’ as he later called it) south-westwards along the Macedonian border. It was the tactical stalemate of that terrible winter that confirmed Johns’s views about politicians and the military, as well as of war in general. He wrote later of the ‘lies and lies, and still more lies that made it impossible for men to stay at home without appearing contemptible cravens’:
I helped to shovel eighteen hundred of them into pits (without the blankets for which their next-of-kin were probably charged) including sixty-seven of my own machine gun squadron of seventy-five, in front of Horseshoe Hill in Greek Macedonia. We were sent to take the hill without big guns. Oh yes, they sent guns out to us, but when they got to Salonika there wasn’t any tackle big enough to lift them out of the ships. At least, that’s what we were told. Later, when we took the hill and the guns afterwards appeared, there wasn’t any tackle powerful enough to haul them up the hill. So back we came again.203
By early 1917 there was an increasing German presence in the air over the Macedonian front, and in February they humiliatingly bombed the headquarters of the British XII Corps in Salonika, the Yanesh Hotel. An eyewitness lamented that the Entente’s air defences were no match for the German machines and that all they could do was get into the air to avoid being bombed on the ground. It would have taken them twenty minutes to climb to meet the Germans, by which time the attackers would be landing back at their base at Drama. This can’t have been good for morale, particularly with such a wide variety of potential witnesses of the raid, Salonika having become the port where all the Entente’s troops and supplies for their Balkan armies were landed. At any one time the town was a polyglot jumble of British, French, Italian, Russian, Serbian, Venizelist-Greek, Indian, Algerian, Annamese and Senegalese troops.
During this year Lance-Corporal Johns, like so many thousands of others, finally went down with malaria and was hospitalised in Salonika. During his long recuperation he decided he had had his fill of the infantry. He applied for a transfer to the RFC, obtained his discharge from the Machine Gun Corps and in September 1917 was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the RFC and sent home to be taught to fly. ‘I was learning something about war,’ he wrote later. ‘It seemed to me that there was no point in dying standing up in squalor if one could do so sitting down in clean air.’204 It was an impeccably Bigglesian sentiment.
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The importance of Salonika and the Macedonian front to the Entente meant that such air activity as there was became increasingly well organised. The Germans’ Fliegerabteilung (Air Force Detachment) 30 was attached to the Bulgarian and Turkish armies, with an important base outside the Greek town of Drama, some forty miles north-east of a British airfield on the island of Thasos, itself along the coast to the east of Salonika. At that time Drama was not yet part of Venizelan Greece and the German machines regularly made reconnaissance flights from it over Salonika. However, the British had set up a chain of wireless-equipped observation posts along the front and any enemy aircraft crossing the line were reported to Salonika and Thasos, from where scouts were scrambled to meet the Germans.
Although aircraft on both sides were regularly shot down, there must have been something about the terrain and general conditions that reawakened a spirit of comradeship among the opposing airmen. The countryside which they daily overflew in their small biplanes was extremely daunting, and they knew that if they suffered engine failure or were shot down and injured rather than killed their chances of rescue were slender indeed among the thickly wooded mountains, ravines and coastal marshes, none of which offered a road or landing place for miles. At least in France with its open fields there was the chance of either rescue or capture, unless one fell in no-man’s-land and the aircraft became an artillery target. The weather, too, was unpredictable in this area between the Aegean and the mountainous interior. Storms blew up within minutes, accompanied by violent winds and down-draughts such as the one mentioned in Chapter 9 that caused a German observer, unnoticed by his pilot, to be flung out of his cockpit over these same mountains. At any rate both sides regularly dropped message bags with streamers on each other’s airfields with notification of an aircrew’s fate, and even with invitations. On one occasion a British pilot dropped a note that read:
As we have met so often in the air and peppered one another, we should also be very pleased to make the personal acquaintance of the German airmen of Drama. We therefore make the following proposition. Give us your word of honour that you will not take us prisoners, and we will land a motor boat on the eastern shore of Lake Takhino to meet you.205
‘Unfortunately,’ the German pilot who recounted this added,
we had bad experiences with that sort of fraternisation not long before on the Russian front, and so an order was issued forbidding us to go in for anything of that kind – and I’m still heartily sorry about it for I should have been ever so pleased to shake hands with those Tommies.
Their refusal was understandable given the reference to the Russian front, long since a byword among German airmen for duplicity and barbarities of every kind. Not only was there a short film doing the rounds of captured men being crucified, but wounded aircrew were frequently butchered, then stripped and robbed of everything including all documents, so identification of the naked and dismembered corpses was often impossible.206
In Macedonia, on the other hand, opposing airmen often did their best to preserve the niceties. When Lieutenant Leslie-Moore from the RNAS squadron at Thasos was shot down he was brought to Drama and welcomed in the Staffel’s mess, as was normal. After a celebratory dinner his captors shamefacedly apologised for only being able to offer him tea since coffee had become virtually unobtainable. Leslie-Moore said this was no problem if he might be allowed to pencil a note to his commanding officer that the Germans could drop over Thasos. This read:
Dear Major,
I have just dined with the German Flying Corps. They have been very kind to me. I am going up to Philippopolis [Plovdiv] tomorrow. The Germans have asked me to ask you to throw them over some coffee on Drama which they want in [the] mess here. Good luck to all, A. Leslie-Moore.207
It was a shame that when a British pilot obliged, the German diarist noted regretfully that ‘they could not catch the streamer he dropped because a strong wind carried it away into the mountains. But we were gratefully convinced that it contained the coffee we desired. I can only hope that it did not agree with the dishonourable finder,’ a remark that probably reflected a degree of disenchantment with the locals, whether Greek, Turkish or Bulgarian. The Germans generally found their allies amiable enough, but language and cultural barriers often proved insurmountable and there was a complete lack of the rigorous Prussian army-style honesty and efficiency they were used to.
But as W. E. Johns had discovered in both Gallipoli and Macedonia, the real problem everybody faced in the Balkans was not bullets so much as microbes. Typhus felled thousands, malaria tens of thousands. One British Army officer later wrote: ‘When we went to Macedonia, we knew it was a fever country. But no-one was able to realise the full extent of the deadliness of – for example – the Struma plain. Our people sank under the malaria like grass-blades under a scythe. One infantry battalion dwindled from its strength of 1,000 to one officer and nineteen men.’208
An incident tangential to the Macedonian front but still worth mentioning on account of its fame was the attempt by a German airship in the autumn of 1917 to take medical stores and other badly needed supplies from Bulgaria to East Africa (where the RFC’s 26 Squadron’s B.E.2cs and Farmans were flying patrols against General von Lettow-Vorbeck’s guerrillas). It was a feat that merely confirmed Germany’s supremacy in airship technology. The heavily laden Zeppelin L.59 took off from Yambol in Bulgaria, crossed the Mediterranean, flew obliquely across Egypt and down through Sudan to the confluence of the Blue and White Niles south of Khartoum. It was little more than halfway to its destination when it was recalled by wireless on account of a false rumour that the German garrison in East Africa had been evacuated and abandoned. Captain Bockholt simply turned the L.59 around in mid-air and headed back to Yambol, where in due course he landed uneventfully, having been in the air for ninety-six hours and flown 4,200 miles. It was an epic flight.
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The Italian Front also offered airmen the challenge of forbidding terrain, and this at first without adequate maps. The Austrian maps of the Julian Alps, in particular, proved useless for military purposes, being too small-scale. In late September 1917 the German General Staff urgently needed to relieve the pressure on the Austro-Hungarian troops in Trieste, but couldn’t advance its own divisions without reliable large-scale maps. German squadrons were called in to make a complete photographic survey of the region on both sides of the lines. This involved flying fifty miles each way over impassable mountains, itself a nerve-racking enterprise with the prospect of surviving a crash-landing small and of being rescued smaller still.
After the catastrophic Italian defeat at Caporetto in November 1917, the RFC rushed three Camel squadrons and two squadrons of R.E.8s to the Italian front. Air activity over the front became constant but by now, as in Macedonia, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians found themselves badly outnumbered, especially as the Italian fighter forces were becoming seasoned and effective. Even so, Austro-Hungarian aircraft still managed to bomb Padua, Treviso, Mestre and Venice in December, causing the usual terror and destruction. In fact the air war over the north of Italy had from the first been predominantly one of bombing. It will be recalled from Chapter 3 that the Italian military visionary Giulio Douhet had elaborated his ideas of air warfare well before the war, and he continued his warnings via the press. On 12th December 1914 he wrote in a Turin newspaper:
To be safe from enemy infantry it is sufficient merely to be behind the battlefront; but from an enemy who dominates the air there is no safety except for moles. Everything that is to the rear and keeps an army alive lies exposed and threatened: supply convoys, trains, railway stations, powder magazines, workshops, arsenals, everything.209
Today this might seem like stating the obvious, but in 1914 the military on all sides needed to be reminded of their vulnerability to air attack. Immediately after Italy’s May 1915 declaration of war on Austria-Hungary, until so recently its prewar ally, Austro-Hungarian airmen vengefully bombed Venice and Ancona, following up with a further raid on Venice in October. The Italians retaliated by bombing Austrian railways and aerodromes with their impressive tri-motored Caproni heavy day-bombers. Douhet had inspired Gianni Caproni to design this big machine and then ordered by him to go into production with it, an order Douhet had no authority to give and for which he was imprisoned. He was later pardoned thanks to the intervention of the poet, patriot and national hero Gabriele d’Annunzio, who had long been a friend and champion of Caproni’s. Whatever else might be said about d’Annunzio’s egomania, affectations and philanderings, there was no doubting his outstanding physical courage. Despite having lost an eye and been rendered nearly blind in an air crash in 1916 he was not only given the command of a squadron of Caproni’s bombers but flew with them on raids, such as one in August 1917 when, at the age of fifty-four, he led a fleet of thirty-six aircraft to bomb Pola in the south of the Istrian peninsula. So far all the Italian Army’s smaller scout and observation aircraft had been imported from France; but by the end of the war Italy had developed a lively and efficient aviation industry of its own that Mussolini went on to foster with great enthusiasm. In Italy, at least, aviation and Fascism had begun to be close bedfellows, as Mussolini’s biographer Guido Mattioli would observe.
For their part the Austro-Hungarians kept up their own bombing campaign, which in its way was as impressive as the Italians’ effort since they were mostly flying single-engined aircraft on long sorties. Even though by the end of the war Austro-Hungarian air raids on northern Italy – including several on Venice and at least one on Milan – had killed upwards of 400 civilians, and Italian air raids had probably killed a similar number of Austro-Hungarians (the exact number is not known), the most decisive effects of the air war in that European theatre probably came from what the combatants learned for future use in terms of organising an aero industry and the military deployment of aircraft generally.
This was certainly true where recognising the potential of fighter aircraft was concerned. The top Italian ace, Francesco Baracca, fell in flames in June 1918 with a total of thirty-four victories. An inspirational figure, he flew French machines exclusively, mainly Nieuports and SPADs, painted with his personal emblem of a prancing horse: the cavallino rampante. Many years after his death, when Baracca was an enshrined national hero, his mother presented a copy of this emblem to Enzo Ferrari who adopted it as his company logo and on whose cars it can be seen to this day.
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However, the theatre of war outside France and Belgium that had the gravest long-term consequences was that of Palestine and Mesopotamia. It is easy enough to see now why the Turco-German attempt to gain the Suez Canal, hold Palestine and Baghdad and retain the Turkish grip on Mesopotamia was doomed. Their lines of supply from the north were far too long, too shaky and critically affected by adverse weather in the winter months, with terrible roads and the incomplete rail link easily washed out or undermined. The steam trains hauling the goods could also not rely on supplies of coal, wood or even water along this increasingly desert route. It was some 900 miles by rail and road from Constantinople [Istanbul] down through Palestine to Beersheba, their base for the Canal campaign. Added to that, in the northeast Russian troops began crossing the Ottoman border from around the Caspian, marching south to harass the Turks holding Baghdad. Yet in the early months of 1916, following the humiliating rout of the Entente forces in Gallipoli and the Dardanelles, it is understandable that the Germans and Turks fancied their chances of success.
The Germans began their Suez campaign in early 1915 and soon acquired an aerial presence with fourteen two-seater Rumpler C.1s, ‘tropicalised’ for desert use as best they could be with enlarged radiators. They were facing the British Canal defence forces, some of whom (like W. E. Johns) had been withdrawn there after the retreat from Gallipoli, and others who were fresh reinforcements. Compared to the Germans, reliant on their creaking rail-and-road link, the British were well supplied. They were already laying a railway with a twelve-inch cast-iron water pipe running beside it from Ismailia across Sinai up towards Palestine, and had reached Bir Qatia. Meanwhile, Colonel Kress von Kressenstein had moved his men and two observation aircraft to El Arish, only about ninety miles from the Canal, and carried out a brilliant lightning raid on Bir Qatia, taking prisoner twenty officers and 1,200 men. The Turks had been counting on the Libyan Senussi to divide the British effort by attacking Egypt from the west at the same time, but the attack never took place and Bir Qatia was as near as the Turco-German forces ever came to menacing the Suez Canal directly. From now on, their story turned into one of steady northward retreat. Nevertheless, one of their Rumplers did achieve an astonishing morale-boosting coup by flying the 600-mile round trip from El Arish to Cairo, where the crew bombed the railway station and took various aerial photos, including one of the Pyramids at Giza.
Despite the setback at Bir Qatia, the British went on building the railway across Sinai at the rate of over 700 yards a day and reached El Arish just before Christmas 1916. They were soon in Khan Yunes and threatening Gaza, at which point the German forces must have realised they would do well if they could hold on to Palestine. They regularly sent observation machines back over the long haul to Suez, taking photographs of the British supply chain and doing what they could to harry the troops. By now the military on both sides were learning the techniques of desert survival, including camel riding, and were well aware of the logistical problems involved in desert warfare, the primary one being, of course, water. Any deployment had to be planned with reference to known wells. Aircraft presented problems of their own, including the need for large supplies of petrol and oil as well as spare parts. The airframes were drying out, the wood warping and cracking, while the sand in the air abraded propellers, stripped the dope from the wings’ leading edges and blasted windscreens opaque. Both sides managed to maintain a very high level of intelligence using spies and double agents often landed by air and robed à la Lawrence of Arabia, sneaking hither and yon through the desert on various clandestine escapades. This was to become the setting for one of W. E. Johns’s most exciting early novels, Biggles Flies East (1935), which has Biggles based first in Al Qantarah in the Canal Zone but flying for a German Staffel as a double agent. The narrative is full of the details of a desert campaign that Johns would have gleaned first-hand during his seven months in Egypt in 1916, spiced up with facts about flying in such unforgiving country that he briefly experienced in 1924 when he was in the RAF and spent time in both Iraq and Waziristan on India’s North-West Frontier.
Meanwhile, 700 miles to the northeast in Iraq, one of the most humiliating defeats in British military history was imminent as Major-General Charles Townshend’s contingent of largely Indian troops was bottled up in the town of Kut al Amara by the Turkish Army’s XVIII Corps. Kut was a hundred miles south of Ottoman-held Baghdad, and the defenders had been trapped there since December 1915. In the following four months various attempts to relieve them had failed in a series of battles the British Army had lost. In April 1916 30 Squadron RFC carried out daily drops of food and ammunition over Kut, possibly the earliest example of supply by air. At the time 30 Squadron contained an Australian ‘half-flight’ that had been recalled from India to help in Mesopotamia, but it is hard to see what on earth the wretched airmen could have been expected to do with the aircraft they were given. They had two ancient Maurice Farman ‘Rumptys’ and an even more veteran Maurice Farman ‘Longhorn’: the hideous pusher-engined contraption with enormous upward-curving wooden skids in front of its wheels to which a forward elevator was attached. What anybody was hoping such ludicrous museum pieces might achieve in a Middle Eastern battle zone is beyond conjecture. They not only had an absolute top speed of 50 mph in an area where desert winds frequently blew a good deal faster, but the machines’ antique wing design lost most of its lift in the hot air, to the extent that above certain temperatures neither type could even take off, let alone fly missions.
The Turkish besiegers were not much better supplied and were uncertain of being able to defend Baghdad at all costs. At this point Turkish Fokker E.III monoplanes arrived and began to bomb Kut. A German Staffel also arrived in Baghdad. One German pilot, Hans Schüz, shot down three RFC machines over Kut in short order and brought to an end the British supply drops. This, together with the Turks’ daily bombing of the town, led to a collapse of morale among Major-General Townshend’s mainly Indian troops. He finally surrendered the garrison and his men to the Turkish commander, having failed to negotiate an abject cash deal for their release using T. E. Lawrence as an intermediary. It was a resounding triumph for the Turco-German forces, and the Germans in Baghdad treated it as being on a par with their victory in the Dardanelles. However, the rejoicing was short-lived because it was here that the Germans’ own lines of supply began to break down badly. Aircraft and spares were not getting through on the long haul from Constantinople and, thrown back on its own resourcefulness, the Staffel in Baghdad was forced to become inventive.
After petrol, one of the biggest necessities for maintaining aircraft in the desert was a supply of propellers. At that time these were all made of wood that was laminated, glued and pressed before being accurately carved into the final complex shape. In the extreme desert heat the glue softened, the wood dried out and the laminations began to open up. The German airmen in Baghdad were reduced to making their own propellers from scratch even though they lacked the proper equipment. Improvisation was the order of the day, and they scoured the workshops of Baghdad for anything they could use. They even built an entire aircraft that they later claimed flew remarkably well. Some also taught themselves to distil petrol and to make bombs out of cast-iron pipes.
Their Turkish allies were now being threatened from the other direction by Russian forces advancing down through Persia. Soon the Staffel in Baghdad was reduced to a ratty handful of old aircraft plus a single new one that had managed to get through. It was a copy of a British R.E. type, and the RFC airmen stationed behind the British lines noted this with glee. One day they dropped a parcel of spare R.E. parts on the Staffel’s base with a note that read: ‘We congratulate the newly arrived bird upon its success. Herewith a few spare parts which, no doubt, will soon be required.’ This was only one of a series of jocular notes dropped by the airmen of both sides, echoing those in Macedonia that betokened mutual esteem and a joint recognition of the dangers and hardships that operations in such extreme landscapes offered. Hans Schüz, who ended the war with ten victories after flying an Albatros D.III in the retreat through Palestine, observed:
The limit was reached one day when the English airmen proposed that we should all land at some neutral spot to meet over a cup of tea and exchange newspapers and gramophone records. However, we were unable to see eye to eye with them in this conception of warfare. Those who know the English are aware that, in spite of events like this, they would always fight in the air with the greatest determination and keenness. No doubt our machine guns and bombs provided them with plentiful antidotes to boredom.210
It was a repeat of the RFC’s proposal for a get-together in Macedonia, the sort of gesture soldiers tend to make only when they suspect they have the upper hand. Thereafter the decline in conditions for their German opponents in Iraq accelerated. The Staffel’s few remaining aircraft managed to photograph evidence that the British Army was preparing for an attack on Baghdad in the shape of new encampments beside the Tigris and increased steamer traffic on the river. Unfortunately, the heat tended to melt the chemicals on the photographic plates, which were anyway in short supply, and the results of these flights were not always commensurate with the risks. Captain Schüz’s retrospective narrative began to show signs of sheer frustration:
One request for more aeroplanes and the necessaries of war followed on another; but it was a long way to Constantinople. In vain did the handful of Germans endeavour to accelerate the arrival of supplies. All such demands were rendered nugatory by that peculiarity of the Turkish temperament about which we have already complained. If it should be Allah’s will that we should be victorious, then victory shall be ours, even without new aeroplanes; but if Allah hath ordained otherwise, then nothing can help us. Kismet! All is fate!211
By the time the British finally attacked towards Baghdad in December 1916 the remaining German aircraft were barely airworthy. Their wings were warped, instruments were missing from the cockpits and the wheels no longer had tyres, the rubber having perished. The aircraft had to take off and land on wheels whose rims were bound with wired-on rags. (It would not be long before rubber was in such short supply back home in Germany that training aircraft were shod with wooden wheels.) Baghdad at last fell to the British and after a hectic retreat the Turkish army reassembled in Mosul only sixty or seventy miles from the Turkish border. Captain Schüz went back to Germany to demand fresh supplies in person and returned in April 1917 with nine new scouts:
In order to confound the English by the unexpected appearance of a new type, I covered the 300-odd miles from the railhead of the Baghdad line to the front in one day. But even this rapidity was of no use. On the same day an English machine appeared at a great height and dropped a tin of cigarettes with the following message: ‘The British airmen send their compliments to Captain S. and are pleased to welcome him back to Mesopotamia. We shall be happy to offer him a warm reception in the air. We enclose a tin of English cigarettes and will send him a Baghdad melon when they are in season. Au revoir. Our compliments to the other German airmen. The Royal Flying Corps.’ The English secret service had again done a brilliant piece of work.212
For the next sixteen months the Germans and the Turks were steadily pushed back as British and Indian troops moved northwards, having already taken Gaza and Beersheba on the way to Jerusalem. They were supported by RFC squadrons under their GOC Palestine, General Sefton Brancker, the man who in 1914 had flown a B.E.2c hands-off from Farnborough to Netheravon. (Brancker was to survive the war only to die in the crash of the R.101 airship in 1930. He was last heard from via a spirit medium in a séance, describing himself as ‘rather busy’.)
In December 1917 General Allenby secured Jerusalem after several battles. The following September he finally defeated the Ottoman army at the Battle of Megiddo and was free to march into Damascus. After making heroic efforts in the air, the remaining German Staffeln retreated to Aleppo and thence flew northwards in stages across Turkey to Samsun on the Black Sea. By then they knew the war was lost and their efforts in the blazing sands of the Middle East had been in vain. News was coming in from Germany of increasing unrest and mutiny there as, inspired by the Russian Revolution and utter disenchantment with the men who had led the country to ruin and defeat, Communists and anarchists fomented social unrest. It must have been a bitter moment for the airmen on the shores of the Black Sea, looking back on the hundreds of hours they had spent in the air, wobbling in the thermals above the endless camel-coloured landscapes of rock and sand and dried-up wadis beneath which they had left so many of their former comrades. Retrospectively, the desert must have seemed to them as Mount Everest does today: a locus of pointless travail. At the same time they were no doubt looking forward with a mixture of relief and apprehension to being back in a changed Germany they might scarcely even recognise as their homeland.
They certainly had no monopoly of bitterness. Prince Feisal, Lawrence and his victorious Sherifian forces were in Damascus when Allenby arrived and had already announced a provisional Arab government. Lawrence had to translate for the Prince as Allenby informed him that this might not be recognised. Seventeen months later, shortly after he had proclaimed the independent Kingdom of Syria, Feisal was abruptly told that this was null and void and Damascus was to be handed over to the French. Sykes–Picot had triumphed. By then Lawrence was back in Britain on leave, sick with forebodings of the betrayal he knew was in store for his Arab comrades.
*
That story had a curious sequel. In 1920, and with some difficulty after the wholesale demobilisations that followed the war, W. E. Johns had managed to get himself reinstated on the RAF’s active list. With the recently established rank of Flying Officer he was posted to the deskbound job of an Inspector of Recruiting in London. The new downsizing RAF was keen to reinvent itself with fresh volunteers, and F/O Johns was under strict instructions not to enlist former officers of the RFC, RNAS or RAF. He was based in offices in Covent Garden and was deeply affected by the pathetic sight of jobless ex-servicemen living rough in the city. One day a former pilot from 110 Squadron, who had been in Landshut POW camp in Germany with him, walked into the office, having survived a week of sleeping in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields with a single penny bun to eat each day. Forbidden to wangle him a job, Johns could only give the man some of his own cash and send him away. The anger and disgust he felt at the way neglect was being lavished on these men who had risked their lives for their country came out in a story he later wrote about an ex-RFC pilot who decided to live a postwar life of crime in order to give the proceeds to needy ex-servicemen. So much for Lloyd George’s ringing promise of ‘a land fit for heroes to live in’. Johns’s mistrust and contempt for politicians became yet more deeply ingrained.
One day in August 1922 a potential recruit walked in to whom Johns took an instant dislike. He was thin, pale-faced and somehow arrogant. He gave his name as Ross but failed to provide a birth certificate so Johns sent him away to get the necessary documents and meanwhile contacted Somerset House. This check confirmed that the man’s identity was false, so when Ross returned Johns quite rightly rejected him. He came back within an hour in the company of a messenger from the Air Ministry bearing an order for Ross’s enlistment. Reluctantly, Johns sent him upstairs for the obligatory medical inspection, but one look at the scars on Ross’s back was enough for the doctor to turn the man down on medical grounds. He was all too plainly not of the calibre needed for the rejuvenated RAF, since apart from anything else he was already thirty-four. This time the Air Ministry sent its own doctor to the Covent Garden depot to sign Ross’s medical form. Furious at this high-handed treatment, Johns complained to his own CO who simply told him that he had just rejected Lawrence of Arabia, so he might as well shut up if he wished to keep his job. There was nothing anybody could do. The Chief of Air Staff, Sir Hugh Trenchard himself, had facilitated the whole process of smuggling Lawrence into the RAF disguised as Aircraftsman Ross, and that was that.213
Johns never forgot this lesson in military realpolitik. Together with his wartime experiences it no doubt accounted for the deep scepticism of his later editorials in Popular Flying and elsewhere when commenting on official pronouncements by service chiefs and politicians. In some ways his belligerent advocacy for a properly prepared British air response to Germany’s rearmament in the 1930s had something in common with Noel Pemberton Billings’s denunciations and warnings in the House of Commons during the First World War. Though vastly different in character, both ex-pilots were unafraid of men in gold braid and had admirably clear vision and opinions when it came to understanding air power and its consequences.