Cavalry of the Clouds Page 5

  After the Race to the Sea ended, British troops occupied a 30–mile (48km) front northwards from Béthune in France into Belgium. There the final sector comprised a salient around the Belgian medieval city of Ypres, which bulged into German-held territory. On 19 October, the first of three major battles in three years began there. It would last for a month.

  The RFC’s fortunes were mixed during the First Battle of Ypres. No 6 Sqn, hastily trained and sent to the Front, mistook extended patches of tar on a road for troops on the march, the shadows of gravestones for bivouacs. And, despite the Union Flag on its wing, a No 4 Squadron machine was shot down by British infantry. This prompted use of a prominent roundel, based on the French symbol but with blue and red colours interchanged. A more positive note was struck on 21 October when, this time with official blessing, Strange and Penn-Gaskell took up an Avro 504 armed with a Lewis machine-gun and strafed a troop train, although the story was not quite that straightforward. Lt R.O. Abercrombie initially flew in the observer’s seat and claimed that the gun, rigged up by Penn-Gaskell to fire over the pilot’s head, jammed in action. A furious Penn-Gaskell blamed him, persuaded Strange to go up again, and could find nothing wrong with the weapon. Having failed to locate an enemy machine to attack, he let fly at the train. The Lewis gun was lighter than a Vickers, but weight remained a problem and most crews were still armed with only revolvers, rifles or shotguns. Nevertheless, Penn-Gaskell’s achievement held promise for the future.

  Of attempts to hit enemy targets with grenades, darts (flechettes) or canisters filled with petrol, Maurice Baring was less optimistic. Referring to an attempt to strike a German airfield in October 1914, he whimsically wrote: ‘Theoretically it was a beautiful shot, practically it hit a turnip.’ More efficient bombs and better sighting mechanisms were clearly needed.

  Apart from such evidence of operational shortcomings, by the end of October 1914, it had become clear that a swift conclusion to the war was no longer possible. Eighteen-year-old Freddie West, son of a British officer killed in the Boer War and a French countess, travelled overland from his Italian home to volunteer in the land of his birth. Questioned later about his motives, he replied: ‘Patriotism is a very fine word, but meant nothing to me. I was young and like so many others seeking adventure.’

  Those who cut short university studies, left school or abandoned steady jobs and lucrative professions to serve King and Country would have disputed West’s cynicism, while identifying with his passion for excitement. Norwegian Tryggve Gran, member of Capt Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated 1912 polar expedition and himself a volunteer, described the nascent RFC as ‘a corps of adventurous young men’. Poet, playwright and wartime staff officer Maurice Baring believed they went to war ‘gaily as to a dance’, which Sholto Douglas thought struck ‘just the right note of the mood in which many of us went off to war’. If so, after three months in battle, the light-hearted dreams of many airmen had already faded.

  3

  Build-up: The First Winter

  ‘The weather has been atrocious’

  In November 1914, wintry weather began to ravage the two lines of trenches now facing one another from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The German airman, Oswald Boelcke, deplored this ‘sort of fortress war’. Combined with unfavourable meteorological conditions, which prevented operational flying for days on end, it created ‘horrible inactivity and boredom’. His application for transfer to a more active sector was greeted with an assurance that ‘this tedious trench warfare was going on along the whole western front’.

  The RFC in the field and the RNAS at Dunkirk took the opportunity to consolidate and build up strength for the major land offensive expected in Spring 1915. They did so in an atmosphere of revulsion against alleged German atrocities. The Daily Mirror informed its readers that ‘the arch-bully Wilhelm is making Europe run with blood to satisfy his overweening ambition and is torturing women and children for a pastime’, illustrating the article with photos of human suffering in Belgium and highlighting a woman and her children begging outside their burnt-out house. A New York Times correspondent reported from the ruins of Louvain that ‘we could read it [suffering] in the fears of women and children being led to concentration camps and of citizens on their way to be shot’.

  As the British air forces sought to enhance their operational capacity, strenuous efforts were made to develop an effective British aero engine and reduce reliance on French manufacturers. Not without cost. On 5 November, as the aeroplane designer and pilot Geoffrey de Havilland came in to land late in the afternoon at Farnborough, he saw 2/Lt Edward Busk, who was testing an RAF-designed eight-cylinder engine, crash in a fireball. De Havilland believed that the severity of the accident was increased by the shortcomings in fuel procedures: with no petrol gauges fitted, pilots pumped petrol from the reserve to the main tank until it overflowed. De Havilland himself touched down that day with petrol lapping around his feet. Poignantly, in Busk’s belongings were press cuttings about aeroplane fires.

  Wireless communication remained frustrating. A 75lb set was bulky for aeroplane use and the ground stations to which this was linked were unwieldy, difficult to dismantle and transport in an emergency. The wireless flight attached to No 4 Sqn had done sterling work in the opening weeks of the war, on 8 December 1914 evolving into No 9 Sqn under Maj Herbert Musgrave, pre-war commander of the Salisbury Plain experimental outfit. The new unit’s task was to test and supply wireless equipment to other squadrons and to train men in the use of the radio; a monumental undertaking given that initially Musgrave had only two radio operators to carry out the training and a small group of instrument repairers working under a canvas shelter in a gravel pit. Power to this modest workshop frequently failed and a visiting officer described the entire enterprise as ‘primitive’. At least the need for a dedicated training and repair centre 30 miles (48km) behind the lines had been formally recognised.

  In Britain, more training facilities were created to cope with rapid expansion of the RFC at Trenchard’s instigation, Brooklands being one. By the close of 1914, three reserve squadrons were supplying men and machines to front-line squadrons. On Salisbury Plain, Netheravon was transformed into a flying training centre from which suitable graduates progressed to the CFS at Upavon. Its ‘straggling collection of brick-built quarters and sheds’ between Tidworth and Tilshead did not impress Algernon Insall and his older brother Gilbert, who discovered that ‘Huns’ (trainees like themselves thought liable to kill their instructors) were banished to the extremity of the mess situated in a former cavalry barracks.

  The Insall brothers reached Netheravon after an adventurous journey. With France already at war, on 4 August 1914 the family left their Paris home to catch a ferry for England and discover mid-Channel the following day, via a chalked message on a blackboard, that Britain had joined the conflict. Algernon and Gilbert enlisted in the 18th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, and during training in Surrey, they responded to an appeal for RFC pilots, making imaginative use of ten-minute trips in the air in France and familiarity with Louis Blériot’s activities near Paris in their applications. To their delight they were duly chosen ‘to join a small band of what most people regarded as pioneers’ at Brooklands for flying instruction.

  Despite the urgent quest for more men, entry to the RFC was not easy, as the Norwegian former Antarctic explorer Tryggve Gran discovered. An accomplished pilot, nevertheless Gran had his application to join the RFC rejected on 28 July 1914, Britain not then being at war and Gran a foreigner. Returning to England four months later as an officer in the Norwegian Flying Corps he enlisted the help of Capt Edward Evans, Capt Scott’s second in command for his polar expedition of 1912, to secure access to RFC stations. Here he built up knowledge and personal contacts, which would prove beneficial when he renewed his application two years later.

  Establishment of No 9 Sqn, the wireless unit, at RFC HQ near St Omer was part of a major reorganisation in the field, to ensure closer and more effective
co-operation with army formations. Two wings were created: the First (Nos 2 and 3 squadrons) under Lt Col H.M. Trenchard – posted from the depot at Farnborough – to support the Indian Corps and IV Army Corps; the Second (Nos 5 and 6 squadrons) under Lt Col C.J. Burke supporting II and III Army Corps. This system evolved from an unofficial one adopted during the First Battle of Ypres, when squadrons supporting individual corps remained with them rather than return to HQ RFC after operations.

  Capt Harold Wyllie, a Boer War veteran seconded from his infantry regiment to the RFC, joined No 4 Sqn as an observer on 1 November 1914. The overland trip to St Omer in France, he wrote:

  … was very much like any other journey of the kind with the exception that every now and then one saw a smashed gun being sent down country for transhipment to England, a bloody bandage dropped from a hospital train, and troops moving in trucks; and there was a truckload of wounded horses but that is another story as Kipling says.

  Wyllie found the Squadron’s officers

  … billeted in a chateau standing in park-like grounds on the outskirts of the town which among other things boasts a canal, a beautiful ruined abbey, three big churches and on average better looking women than any I have seen in France up to date.

  Two days after arriving at St Omer, Wyllie revealed how combat affected behaviour. Attacked by a German Taube, Lt Cyril Murphy ‘gave him 24 rounds’ and he ‘shoved off’. ‘Murphy flew about for some time like a terrier with all his bristle up looking for trouble in the shape of more Germans but failed to find a scrap.’ Wyllie added: ‘He was quite pathetic about it in the Mess that night.’ Shortly afterwards a visiting officer hinted that No 4 Sqn was ‘having rather an easy time’, to which Murphy reacted: ‘Be God! It’s wiping me nose on the skin of me chest I am, I’m so thin from hard work.’

  No doubt with his Boer War experiences in mind, Wyllie observed that ‘everything is strange about this war. Motor transport, wireless and flying machines have altered things tremendously.’ He soon learnt that while enemy anti-aircraft guns had been called ‘Archibald’ or ‘Archie’, the British were known as ‘Adolphus’. When not flying, Wyllie sketched aeroplanes and other military scenes on the ground. He also went sight-seeing, recording that on 5 November he had visited two churches: ‘One magnificent but the majesty of the design utterly defeated by the taudry [sic] Renaissance altar screen and pictures of with which the building was filled’.

  The Squadron was soon on the move to Poperinghe, in the Ypres sector. Travelling by road, Wyllie recorded ‘a sickening sight. A horse had been killed by the roadside and someone had been cutting steaks from it without even the preliminary process of skinning … I don’t know why it turned my stomach up’, he mused.

  Once at the new airfield, two of the Squadron ‘were loafing around one of the French towns bored to death’, when they saw a sign ‘Femme Sage’. They assumed this meant ‘Fortune Teller’. ‘The old hag’, who answered their knock on the door, ‘shook her head, put her hands on her stomach to intimate size and said, “Non, ici pour les bébés”’ – to the amusement of a crowd curious about what business two British officers had with the local midwife.

  On 21 November, No 4 Sqn returned to St Omer and the next day Wyllie recorded that three German aeroplanes had been captured; two forced down by frozen carburettors, the other by fire from an airborne Avro. Soon afterwards, a series of gales struck the area. However, despite particularly strong gusts punctuated by heavy rain, King George V inspected the Squadron on 5 December and spoke to every officer. It was ‘a great honour to be asked to touch one’s hat to one’s King on service’, Wyllie wrote.

  In between further showers, gales and snowstorms, Wyllie did get some flying; not always with conspicuous success. While striving to gain height after take-off, the engine of a Blériot IX monoplane cut out and the pilot had to glide in to land in a field. His concerned observer noted that, in doing so, ‘he missed the top of some hop poles by a few feet’. A flight in a BE8 to test a signalling lamp and another in a Blériot to sketch enemy trenches proved more successful. On 31 December 1914, Wylllie went up in a BE2b on another sketching operation, ‘He [the pilot] soared the machine beautifully over Whytschaete in the strong wind that was blowing and I knelt on my seat facing aft and drew in all the trenches visible.’

  As No 4 Sqn operated from St Omer, towards the end of November 1914, No 3 Sqn settled at Gonneham, 15 miles (24km) south-west of Armentières, where James McCudden discovered that sugar beet had to be flattened by marching men to make the airfield usable. Now a corporal, he sometimes flew as an observer in reconnaissance machines armed with a rifle. Evidently temporarily despondent, to his 15-year-old sister Kathleen (Kitty) on 15 December he echoed the pessimism of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Tommy’: ‘England being against militarism, when the war finishes the soldier will be called no good just because he is a soldier, the same as before the war’.

  But this letter from the ‘British Expeditionary Force Abroad’ revealed an affectionate relationship between brother and sister as well as nostalgia for home and a hint of loneliness. James thanked Kitty for her letter and parcel, handkerchiefs in particular being ‘very handy’. He expected that Sheerness ‘looks quite crowded with so many soldiers’ and seemed surprised that she had been ‘several times’ on board the warship HMS Bulwark. McCudden wondered what she thought of the naval victory over the Germans off the Falkland Islands, where Vice-Admiral Frederick Sturdee annihilated Maximilian Count von Spee’s fleet on 8 November 1914. Rather naively he was ‘looking forward … with keen anticipation’ to a promised flight into enemy territory ‘to drop some big bombs’. He had so far enjoyed ‘lots of flights’ without yet crossing the German lines. McCudden joked that ‘you must not get too fat, or you will make my motorbike collapse when I give you your next joyride’.

  James McCudden thought Kitty would wait ‘a long time’ for a Zeppelin raid, ‘for as soon as they build them, our naval airmen destroy them in their bomb-dropping “stunts”’. Frivolously he added, ‘please remember me to all enquiring maidens’, sent his best wishes for a ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’ and concluded with a plea for her to write soon ‘as all letters are very welcome’.

  A letter from Kitty’s elder brother, signed ‘William the Silent’, on 10 February 1915 further illustrated family closeness. He expressed surprise ‘at you riding on the back of motor-cycles … and one so young too’. William went on to scold his sister for cavorting with Servicemen in this way, then revealed that he had acquired a 16hp ‘Brown two-seater [car] with folding seats at the back for two … No doubt … dear Flapper … you are longing for the fine weather to come again so that you can get off with the boys along the [sea] front’. Like James, he welcomed letters from her and his mother and closed with ‘lots of love’.

  Approaching the close of 1914, in the far south of the Allied line there was a sharp demonstration of the wider potential of air power, beyond reconnaissance and artillery spotting. In October, four single-seat RNAS Avro 504 biplanes powered by an 80hp Gnome engine were crated, transported via ship from Southampton, then in sealed railway wagons from Le Havre to Belfort in eastern France, where they were concealed in a barn until the morning of 21 November. One machine broke its tail skid in attempting to take off shortly after 9.30am, but the other three (each carrying four 20lb Hales bombs) successfully began their 125-mile (201km) dog-leg route to the target, designed to avoid neutral Switzerland. Flying south of Mulhausen, 25 miles (40km) north-east of Belfort, then parallel to the Rhine over the Black Forest, they turned south-east at Shaffhausen. Avoiding the city of Constance, they crossed the spit of land between two inlets at the north-western of the lake. One of the pilots, Flight Lieutenant (Flt Lt) S.V. Sippe, explained that the three Avros, flying independently, skimmed the water at 10ft hugging the northern shore until 5 miles (8km) from the Zeppelin works, where they climbed to 1,200ft. At 11.55am, ‘when half a mile from [the] sheds [I] put machine into dive, and came down to 700ft … Dro
pped one bomb in enclosure to put gunners off aim, and, when in correct position, two into works and shed’, the fourth bomb failing to release. ‘During this time’, Sippe wrote, ‘very heavy fire, mitrailleuse [machine-gun] and rifle, was being kept up, and shells were being very rapidly fired’. Sippe and Flight Commander J.T. Babbington survived this onslaught to reach Belfort again after a two-hour return flight. The formation leader, Squadron Commander E.F. Briggs, was shot down in the target area and taken prisoner. One Zeppelin in a shed was damaged, the gas-works spectacularly exploded and other buildings were hit. In the context of the time, this constituted a daring, deep-penetration raid with ominous implications for enemy installations far beyond the front line.

  Much has been made of the ‘Christmas truce’ in the trenches, illustrated by the letter home of one soldier: ‘Just you think that whilst you were eating your turkey, I was out talking with the very men I had been trying to kill a few days before.’ Less has been written about aerial activity in France that day, though precisely what did take place is unclear. One account has the RFC dropping ‘a padded, brandy-steeped plum pudding’, the Germans responding with a suitably protected bottle of rum. Another contends that Louis Strange deposited a collection of footballs on Lille airfield. These stories, evidently in keeping with the spirit of goodwill, may well be apocryphal.