Wings (10 page)

With the invention of aeroplanes a new anxiety entered the lives of European civilians. As the prospect of war grew, fear began to erode their initial enthusiasm for aviation.
It seemed increasingly likely that far from benefiting mankind, freeing humans from the shackles of gravity, shrinking distances and drawing the world more closely together, powered flight carried
almost limitless potential for destruction. Never before had attackers struck from the air. Popular literature played up the nightmare of bombers reaching across seas to shower death on
non-combatants, who, in Britain, had been largely insulated from the violence of outsiders for hundreds of years.

Politicians and soldiers shared the alarm. An attempt was made at the 1907 Hague Disarmament Conference to prohibit the use of bombing aircraft. It failed. But when Britain went to war no
practical system of aerial defence was in place. The absence was due to a conflict – of interests and perceptions – that would affect the development of British military
aviation for the next three decades. The rapid conquest of the sky created a new dimension in which wars could be fought, one that stretched over the traditional battlegrounds of land
and sea. This reality forced a reassessment of the historical responsibilities of the army and navy. Earth and water created a natural division of duties. The air overlapped everything, creating
endless possibilities for confusion and duplication. Soldiers and sailors anyway viewed the advent of aviation through the lens of their own particular needs, which, often, were not easily
reconciled. The traditional rivalry between the services ensured there would be no smooth solution to the resulting problems.

In August 1914 the army had conceded that it would not be able to both defend Britain and support the army in France and it had grudgingly allowed the navy to take over responsibility for
domestic air space. The difficulties of protecting a huge target like London were overwhelming and Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, accepted from the start that ground and air defences
should concentrate on protecting vital military and war-industrial targets. He favoured a ‘forward’ strategy, attacking enemy aircraft as close to their point of departure as possible
from bases on the French and Belgian coast. It was for that reason that the RNAS had set up a string of seaplane bases in east coast ports, facing Germany. Secondary interception forces based in
London and its approaches would deal with the aircraft that got through. At the same time, civil-defence precautions were imposed. In central London street lamps were partially
extinguished, illuminated shop lights banned and householders were forced to draw their shades after dark. Dummy lights were strung across the big parks to deny German aviators a
landmark. The cautious began filling buckets with sand and water. Bolder spirits were amused at first, but soon everyone was doing it.

Airships were the only German aircraft capable of reaching Britain. They became known by the generic name ‘Zeppelins’. They were about 150 yards long, held aloft by gigantic
hydrogen-filled gasbags sewn from cows’ intestines. About 200,000 were needed for each craft. By the beginning of 1915 the German army and navy had fourteen of them. The raids began in
December 1914, not on London but over Dover and Sheerness, and did little damage or harm.

The first attack on the capital came as midnight approached on 31 May 1915. A Zeppelin arrived over Stoke Newington in north-east London and dropped an assortment of grenades and incendiaries on
the terraced houses below. The resulting fires and explosions killed seven people and injured thirty-five. Among the dead was a three-year-old girl, Elsie Leggat, who lived in Cowper Road. Her
little body was found curled up under her bed where she had vainly sought protection from the German bombs. Her eleven-year-old sister May died later of her injuries.

Looked at coolly, the results were less awful than both officialdom and the public had imagined. The bombs were scattered haphazardly and hit nothing of strategic importance. The anonymous
New York Herald Tribune
correspondent felt it
‘fell short badly on the spectacular side’. The raid had ‘caused excitement in a certain section of
London, but the inhabitants of the rest of its 609 square miles came home from theatres and picture shows undisturbed, to learn nothing of the . . . raid until they opened their morning
papers.’

Public reaction, however, was out of all proportion to the scale of the event. Starved of real information until the Government issued an official bulletin at 5 p.m. the following day, rumour
ran riot. The
Herald Tribune
reported that ‘as the story of the raid passed from man to man on the streets, in public houses and on street cars it grew amazingly. Several hundred had
been killed, churches destroyed, a theatre audience massacred and hundreds of fires started.’

It was this aspect of the raid, rather than the fact that bombs had dropped within a few miles of the Bank of England and Buckingham Palace, that most alarmed the authorities. To Londoners and
city dwellers throughout Britain the attack seemed to be the beginning of the fulfilment of prophesies that had been uttered even before aeroplanes had been invented. The smashed-up houses and the
dead girls were the tragic proof that henceforth civilians stood on a new front line. On 6 June Hull was hit. Twenty-four people were killed and forty injured and many homes destroyed. The
following day there was some good news when, over Belgium, Lieutenant Reginald Warneford of 1 Squadron, RNAS, shot down a Zeppelin which crashed in flames onto a convent.

In British skies, however, the ‘Zepps’ seemed to operate with near-impunity. Anti-aircraft fire forced them higher rather
than bringing them down. Even with the
help of searchlights the paltry fighter forces deployed around London had no luck finding their targets. ‘You had about as much chance of spotting a black cat in the Albert Hall in the
dark,’ said one RNAS pilot, Flight Lieutenant Graham Donald.
¹
After a while only token efforts were made to intercept the attacks. Two raids on
consecutive nights in September 1915 killed forty. The death tolls were tiny compared with what was to come in the Blitz. The anticipation, though, was unnerving, and the sense of violation
deepened anxiety, which, in turn, stoked a hatred of the Germans. The Kaiser had asked his airmen to spare civilian areas and – in deference to his British relations – royal palaces,
but this pious hope was soon forgotten. Everyone knew that precise targeting was impossible and the men in the airships had no idea where their bombs would fall.

It seemed to those on the receiving end that the attacks had no purpose except to sow fear. ‘Zeppelins are intended as weapons of moral suasion,’ said the
Evening Standard and
Saint James Gazette
. The airship, it went on, ‘has been built with the idea of spreading panic over as wide an inhabitant area as possible. It has been devised as the terror of the air,
the very quintessence of frightfulness.’ The Germans’ motivations were mixed. They had always planned to launch operations on British soil against industrial targets of military
significance, but lacked an aeroplane with the range and power to carry them out. Frustration at the impasse in the ground war hastened the decision to use Zeppelins, which continued even after it
became clear they were incapable of causing significant
material damage. Instead, the effect on civilian morale was used to justify the attacks. It was an argument that –
despite its patent falseness – would be used by the British in the war to come.

Official propaganda tried to capitalize on the thirst for revenge. ‘It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb’ ran the message on one recruiting
poster, below an image of a looming Zeppelin. ‘Join the army at once and help stop an air raid.’

Going off to the trenches would not stop the attacks. What was needed was an effective air defence system at home. Public anger spurred official action. Early winter weather at the end of 1915
forced a suspension of Zeppelin activity. During the lull, the number of mobile anti-aircraft batteries, mounted on lorries and trailers and supplemented by searchlights, was expanded. Fixed
batteries were also in place at important points around the capital.

The Germans returned in the new year to more dangerous skies, yet they were still able to create havoc, killing seventy in raids on the industrial Midlands on the night of 31 January 1916. Calls
for action and revenge rose to a crescendo, led by the
Daily Mail
urging ‘Hit Back! Don’t Wait and See!’ The mood could not be ignored. This raw public sentiment pushed
both politicians and military planners down a strategic path that was to stretch into the next world war. Among those who responded to it was Winston Churchill, now out of government since his
sacking from the Admiralty following the Gallipoli debacle of 1915, and William Joynson-Hicks. The
latter was chairman of a new Parliamentary Air Committee, which pressed for
Britain to launch punitive air raids against Germany.

Demands for action added to the pressure for a reorganization of the air forces to overcome army and navy rivalries and rationalize equipment and organization. In February 1916 a committee was
set up under Lord Derby, the Secretary of State for War. It had no executive powers and was merely asked to report on how best to develop and supply aircraft to meet the needs of the RFC and the
RNAS. Within a few months Derby resigned, having concluded that the best way to improve matters was to amalgamate the two services – a bureaucratic challenge he judged to be too difficult for
wartime.

In May 1916 the problem was handed to Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India, who was put in charge of the first Air Board. He, too, took the view that a separate air service, controlled by an
air ministry, was the way forward. The idea was opposed by the older services – and with particular vehemence by the navy. The organizational wrangling would drag on for two more years under
successive committees until an agreement was ground out.

By now the RFC’s rapid expansion had put it in a position to reclaim its place as defender of the home airspace. On 10 February 1916, after much vacillation, the navy agreed to a reversion
to the original division of duties. It would be responsible for enemy aircraft approaching Britain. Once they crossed over land it was the army’s job to deal with them. The RFC set up ten
home-defence squadrons around the country.
No. 39 Squadron, based at Sutton’s Farm airfield, just south of Hornchurch in Essex, was charged with defending London.

It is hard to believe now that a target the size of a Zeppelin should prove so difficult to locate, stalk and shoot down. As was to be demonstrated in the next war, it is almost impossible to
find anything in a night sky with the naked eye when there is no moon shining. Even if an interception was achieved, airships were surprisingly nimble and not much slower than an aeroplane. In the
event of a pilot getting an airship under his guns, the results were liable to be disappointing. The .303 bullets of the Lewis guns pierced easily the steel skin of the Zeppelins and passed through
the gasbags, but failed to ignite the hydrogen, causing only minor leakages that were easily patched up.

However, with the introduction of the Brock incendiary round – invented by a naval reserve officer who belonged to the firework manufacturing family – flying in a Zeppelin became an
extremely hazardous activity. A single shot could turn an airship into a gigantic torch, and the balance of advantage tilted sharply and irrevocably in the defenders’ favour. The first
demonstration of the Zeppelins’ new vulnerability came on the night of 2–3 September. It took place in front of an appreciative audience: the Londoners who for the previous fifteen
months had cowered in the shadow of these silent and sinister monsters. At 2.30 that morning Muriel Dayrell-Browning, a thirty-seven-year-old linguist whose skills in Matabele, Zulu and German were
being put to use in the War Office, was awoken at her house in central London by ‘a terrific explosion
and was at the window in one bound when another deafening one shook
the house’. Muriel, whose daughter Vivienne would go on to marry the novelist Graham Greene, looked out to see sailing above ‘a cigar of bright silver in the full glare of about 20
magnificent searchlights . . . the night was absolutely still with a few splendid stars. It was a magnificent sight and the whole of London was looking on, holding its breath.’
²

As the ghostly shape slid overhead, Lieutenant William ‘Billy’ Leefe Robinson of 39 Squadron was approaching in his BE2 C, having taken off from Sutton’s Farm on anti-Zeppelin
patrol just after 11 p.m. He was twenty-one, the son of a coffee planter, who had served as an observer in scout planes on the Western Front before becoming a pilot. Earlier that year he had
intercepted an airship, but it had got away and in his eagerness to succeed he now pushed his luck to the limit. He had already sighted – then lost – the target once and was running low
on fuel when he encountered it again, picked out in the searchlights. He swooped down, braving the anti-aircraft shells bursting all around and the accurate fire of the airship’s gunners,
climbed up underneath and, as he wrote in his combat report, ‘distributed one drum’ of Brock and explosive Pomeroy bullets along its belly.