Fighter Heroes of WWI. Joshua Levine

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      Every Sunday, we used to take people up for trips. From Hendon, round Hyde Park and back. I don’t suppose the trip lasted more than ten minutes and we used to charge a guinea. One particular Sunday, Handley-Page was there himself and I saw him talking to the actress Gladys Cooper. We hadn’t had a customer for a while, and the pilot, a man named Whitehead, said to me, ‘I wonder if Miss Gladys Cooper wants a trip? Go and ask! And if she doesn’t want a flip, ask Mr. Page if he’d like one. I don’t think he’s ever been in the air before!’ So I went over and just stood aside Mr. Page while he was talking to Gladys Cooper. ‘What do you want, Charlie?’ he asked. I said, ‘Mr. Whitehead is sitting up there and he’s getting fed up. Is anybody coming up?’ He said, ‘No!’ So I said, ‘Well, he says he’d like to take you up as he doesn’t think you’ve been in the air before!’ He looked at Miss Gladys Cooper and he took me aside and whispered in my ear, ‘You go back and tell Whitehead – I build them. I don’t bloody well fly them!’

      For a number of years, the military authorities in Britain had financed the development of airships while leaving aircraft production to private enterprise. However shortsighted this may now seem, the fact was that early aircraft could not reach high altitudes, they could not carry great weights and they could not fly at night or in high winds. Airships could do all of these things. They were also considered rather more genteel than aeroplanes. Robert Pigot recalls an agreeable morning spent aboard an airship, while serving with the Royal Flying Corps in 1913:

      I was living about fourteen miles from Farnborough, where I was stationed, and one morning, I thought I’d go home for breakfast so I flew my airship over and circled round my house until the butler came out. He fetched the gardener. The two of them pulled me down and tied the airship to a tree at one end and a garden roller at the other. And I went in and had breakfast.

      Over time, as aircraft became sturdier and more reliable, the military authorities began to take them more seriously. A 1911 report of the Committee of Imperial Defence declared that aeroplanes could ‘keep army commanders in the field as fully informed as possible of the movements of the enemy’. The idea of entrusting the role of military reconnaissance to a fleet of flying birdcages was unsettling to the armed forces. It was particularly unsettling to the cavalry, whose job reconnaissance had always been, and who still dominated the War Office. There was not yet any official expectation that aircraft could contribute to military operations, drop bombs, or engage in air-to-air combat, but there was now the prospect of a role.

      The new thinking was reinforced in April 1911, with the establishment of the Army Aircraft Factory (later renamed the Royal Aircraft Factory) at Farnborough. Under its Superintendent, Mervyn O’Gorman, the Factory assembled a team of designers, who were immediately hampered by the limitations placed on the Factory by its charter, which stated that it could not manufacture new types of aircraft, merely produce conversions from existing aircraft. Geoffrey de Havilland joined the Factory as a designer. He describes how it was possible to circumvent the Factory’s restrictive charter:

      We weren’t supposed to design new aeroplanes but we could reconstruct them from a landing wheel or a few old bolts from a crashed machine. In this way, during my time at Farnborough, we designed and built several new aeroplanes. When I’d been at Farnborough for about a year, we designed the BE1. We did it by taking a small part of a broken-down French Voisin and reconstructing it into something totally different. The BE1 was quite a successful aeroplane but it was unstable – meaning that you had to control it all the time. I was not very interested in stability until Edward Busk, who had studied the theory of stability, joined the Factory. He took the BE1 and applied his knowledge to modifying it in order to get stability. He moved the lower plane back about three feet, which was equivalent to moving the centre of gravity forward, he fitted a bigger span tailplane, he fitted a fin in front of the rudder and we ended up with a really stable aeroplane. It was quite astonishing to be able to get into this machine, after the unstable machines of the early days, and fly around with hands and feet off indefinitely. That machine eventually became the BE2c and it was really the start of practical, stable aeroplanes.

      The Factory produced a series of aircraft, each classified by type. The first type, designated BE (Blériot Experimental) was a ‘tractor’ biplane, with the propeller at the front of the aircraft. This is the type described by de Havilland. The second type, designated FE (Farman Experimental), was a ‘pusher’ biplane, with the propeller behind the fuselage. A third type, with the elevators at the front, was named SE (Santos-Dumont Experimental). The final type produced by the Factory was the RE (Reconnaissance Experimental). Different versions of these types constituted the Factory’s output throughout the Great War.

      As the Army Aircraft Factory came into being, a body of men was needed to fly the new machines. On 1 April 1911, the Air Battalion, Royal Engineers was created. Consisting initially of 14 officers and 150 other ranks, it was decided that officers could join the battalion from any arm or branch of the army but that the other ranks must come from within the Royal Engineers. Pilots would not be trained ab initio, however. Prior to joining, they would have to learn to fly at their own expense, before being reimbursed on acceptance by the Air Battalion.

      While the British High Command could not see beyond the possibilities of aerial reconnaissance, Germany was proposing a far more aggressive function for its airborne fleet. The Germans considered the Zeppelin airships superior to any weapon possessed by any other nation. General von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, announced to his War Ministry that ‘its speediest development is required to enable us at the beginning of a war to strike a first and telling blow, whose practical and moral effect could be quite extraordinary’.

      On 13 April 1912, the Air Battalion was superseded by a larger organization: the Royal Flying Corps. This was intended to join together, under a single umbrella, the army aviators of the Air Battalion with a group of naval aviators who had been running their own flying school at Eastchurch, on the Isle of Sheppey. The Royal Flying Corps comprised a military wing, a naval wing and a Central Flying School at Upavon, on Salisbury Plain.

      Doubts were expressed about the location of the Central Flying School. The area around Upavon was prone to dangerous air currents, which had brought down many aircraft over the previous few years, causing the area to become known as ‘The Valley of Death’. Another issue was the status of The Royal Flying Corps. As a corps, its leaders would be subordinate to those in the established services, guaranteeing it little say in its own destiny. Nevertheless, it appeared that unity had been imposed on the world of British military aviation.

      That unity did not last very long. The Admiralty was not keen to hand control of its flying matters over to an army corps. It therefore rejected the idea of a ‘naval wing’ and announced the formation of the Royal Naval Air Service, under the command of Murray Sueter. This unilateral decision went entirely unchallenged, leaving the Royal Flying Corps to represent the army alone – although, officially, the Royal Naval Air Service did not come into being until July 1914. Philip Joubert de la Ferté, an early member of the Royal Flying Corps, who was to fly one of the first two ‘shows’ of the war in August 1914, remembers the divide between army and navy:

      The Admiralty never really accepted the recommendations of the Committee of Imperial Defence. They didn’t want to be organized by the War Office in any way. They paid lip service to the royal warrant for a period of years, but they went along in their own way. When the Royal Flying Corps was formed, Brigadier General David Henderson took the military and naval wings under his charge. He was an authority on reconnaissance – he’d written a book on reconnaissance. He was a soldier, not an airman. Looking at an aeroplane, he could only imagine flying over an enemy force at low speed so that you could literally count the men on the ground. He believed that there should be no aeroplane with an engine more powerful than it should have a speed of more than 100 miles per hour in the air. The Admiralty, on the other hand, was looking into the problem of fighting and offensive operations in the air. It was fully alive to all the possibilities and it wanted bigger and faster aeroplanes СКАЧАТЬ