Fighter Boys: Saving Britain 1940. Patrick Bishop
one’s troops,’ he wrote, ‘all movements are likely to be seen and reported. Therefore the first step in war will be to get rid of hostile aircraft.’1
This was how combat in the air was to develop in the four years of the Great War. The essential role of aeroplanes was to lift the roof off the battlefield, allowing commanders to peer into the enemy’s territory, detecting his movements and trying to divine his intentions. At the same time, spotters hovering perilously over the front lines helped to direct the artillery barrages that occupied much of the effort of both sides.
The rival pilots, from the outset, tried to kill each other. One of the first recorded encounters took place on 25 August 1914. Lieutenant C. E. C. Rabagliati of the Royal Flying Corps was cruising with an observer on a reconnaissance mission over northern France when they came across a lone German aeroplane. Rabagliati’s aircraft was unarmed, but he had with him a .303 service rifle. The German carried a Mauser pistol, fitted with a wooden shoulder stock. The two machines approached each other and circled, coming within feet of colliding. Rabagliati fired a hundred rounds without success. Then, he reported afterwards, ‘to my intense joy, I saw the German pilot fall forward on his joystick and the machine tipped up and went down’.2
Such encounters were to be repeated thousands of times in the following years. Technological advances, accelerated by the demands of warfare, meant that the aircraft became faster, more nimble and more sturdy, and the weapons they carried more deadly. But the purpose of aerial fighting remained the same. No bomber heavy enough to make a significant difference on the battlefield or in the rear had emerged by the end of the war. The main function of military flying remained observing the enemy, and trying to prevent the enemy from observing you.
These activities grew to be increasingly important as the war progressed. The RFC went to France with sixty-two aircraft. In April 1918 it became, together with the Navy’s air arm, a service in its own right, the Royal Air Force. It finished the war with 1,799 aeroplanes. This transformation was presided over by a particularly forceful and energetic commander, Hugh Trenchard. There were others who played a crucial part in the creation of a separate air force, but Trenchard’s passion made him stand out. He became known as ‘The Father of the RAF’, a label he claimed to detest. The designation had some truth in it, though. He loved the air force with the fierce love of a father; a Victorian father who would not flinch from sending his boy to his death if duty demanded it.
Trenchard combined nineteenth-century mores with a twentieth-century appreciation of the new. He was born on 3 February 1873 in the West Country, and had a difficult childhood. His sister died of diphtheria, his solicitor father was bankrupted and he failed several attempts to enter military schools before scraping a commission as a second-lieutenant in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and being posted to India. He spent the first decade of the new century in southern and western Africa. In October 1900 he was shot in the chest while trying to capture Boers and was expected to die. Trenchard, who ‘hated sick people’, pulled through, recovering in characteristic fashion by hurtling down the Cresta run at St Moritz.
He was tall, bony, with mournful eyes that seemed to search for faults and slights. His personality was similarly angular: quarrelsome, morose and dissatisfied, ill at ease in the genial atmosphere of mess and gymkhana club. By 1912 it was clear that his career was going nowhere. He was approaching forty, unmarried and not much loved. His salvation came in a letter from one of his few friends, Captain Eustace Loraine, who was learning to fly at the RFC aviation school on Salisbury Plain. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re missing,’ Loraine wrote excitedly. ‘Come and see men crawling like ants.’3
Trenchard was not a natural pilot. His tall, long-legged frame looked ridiculous crammed into the narrow seats of the primitive Blériots and Farmans that were used to give instruction to trainees. What fascinated him was not flying itself, but its potential. He sensed he had finally made his rendezvous with destiny and joined the RFC. Three years later, in August 1915, he became its commander.
Trenchard tried to make the RFC indispensable, straining to satisfy every demand made on it by the army no matter how unreasonable, or how limited his resources. The aim was to obtain and maintain control of the air over the trenches. The balance of power shifted constantly as the technological and tactical advantage swung back and forth between the sides. The level of fighting was kept high. The RFC’s main business was reconnaissance. Trenchard decided early on that the best way of defending the spotter aircraft and ensuring a steady flow of intelligence to the army was to go on the offensive, reaching over the lines into enemy air space. This was, at best, a logical response to the three-dimensional nature of aerial warfare in which there were no fixed lines to defend and to wait for the enemy to attack was to cede a moral advantage. At times, though, it could seem like an echo of the numb thinking of the terrestrial generals, who, literally stuck in the mud, threw more and more troops into futile attacks because they could think of nothing better to do.
Trenchard did not hesitate to sacrifice men to fulfil the RFC’s obligations to the army and maintain the momentum of aggression. The losses among pilots during the great offensives of 1916 and 1917 came close, in proportionate terms, to matching those on the ground. During the Battle of the Somme pilots were in the air for five or six hours a day. The gaps were often filled by novices coming straight from flying school. Cecil Lewis, eighteen years old, was asked by a senior officer when he arrived at No. 1 Aircraft Depot at St Omer how many hours’ flying experience he had.
‘Fourteen hours.’
‘Fourteen! It’s absolutely disgraceful to send pilots overseas with so little flying. You don’t stand a chance…Another fifty hours and you might be quite decent; but fourteen! My God, it’s murder.’4
The aeroplanes which carried the war to the Germans became known as fighters. The machines were constantly being refined and improved. These efforts produced steady rather than startling increases in performance. The Bristol Scout, in service in 1915, had a top speed of 86.5 m.p.h. at 10,000 feet, to which level it could climb in twenty-one minutes. The Sopwith Camel, one of the most ubiquitous types in the closing stages of the war, could in ten minutes reach 10,000 feet, where it could travel at 112 m.p.h. Aircraft armaments similarly became heavier and more accurate as interrupter devices were refined to allow bullets to pass through the arc of the propeller.
Fighter pilots came to exemplify the character and spirit of the new air force, even though their role was essentially secondary. They were a godsend to propagandists charged with conjuring romance out of the horror of mechanized warfare. They operated in the clean medium of the air, detached from the vileness of the trenches. The nature of their work made it inevitable that they would be linked to an older, nobler fighting tradition. Some aviators believed this themselves, at least at the beginning. ‘To be alone,’ wrote Cecil Lewis, fresh from flying school, ‘to have your life in your own hands, to use your own skill, single-handed against the enemy. It was like the lists in the Middle Ages, the only sphere in modern warfare where a man saw his adversary and faced him in mortal combat, the only sphere where there was still chivalry and honour.’5
What was true was that to be a successful fighter pilot required different qualities from those that made a good infantry officer. In the air you were on your own. The business was entirely new. There was no one to teach it, no textbooks to refer to. To survive, the pilot had to make his own decisions and develop his own tactics. The new air service attracted men who were independent-minded, adventurous, often unusual, sometimes to the point of eccentricity. Among the first to emerge on the British side was Albert Ball, in whom the values of the playing field jostled unhappily with the neurosis of the battlefield. Ball was brought up in a middle-class home in Nottingham where his father hauled himself up the class ladder, starting his working life as a plumber and ending up mayor of the city. He was educated at a local fee-paying school, founded to promote Anglican principles and a sense of patriotic duty. There were cold baths, perpetual exercise and an emphasis on technology.
Like tens of thousands