The War in the Air; Vol. 1 / The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force

by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

In 1899 the South African War began. Four balloon sections took an active part in the campaign. The first section, commanded by Captain H. B. Jones, operated with the troops under Lord Methuen, and proved its value at the battle of Magersfontein. The second section, commanded by Major G. M. Heath, was with Sir George White throughout the siege of Ladysmith. An improvised section, commanded by Captain G. E. Phillips, was raised at Cape Town, and joined Sir Redvers Buller's force at Frere Camp, for the relief of Ladysmith. The regular third section, commanded by Lieutenant R. D. B. Blakeney, embarked for South Africa early in 1900, and joined the Tenth Division at Kimberley. It is not easy to make a just estimate of the value of the balloons in this war. Some commanding officers were prejudiced against them, and the difficulties and miscarriages which are inevitable in the use of a new instrument did nothing to remove the prejudice. The steel tubes in which the hydrogen was compressed were cumbrous and heavy to transport. The artillery were not trained to make the fullest use of the balloons; the system of signalling by flags was very imperfect; and the signallers in the air often failed to attract the attention of those with the guns. For all that, the balloons proved their value. The Ladysmith balloon did good service in directing fire during the battle of Lombard's Kop, and, more generally, in reporting on the Boer positions. Later on in the siege it was impossible to get gas, and the balloons fell out of use. At Magersfontein it was by observation from the air that the howitzer batteries got the range of the enemy's ponies concealed in a gully, and accounted for more than two hundred of them. On the 26th of February 1900 an officer in a balloon reported on General Cronje's main position at Paardeberg, and the report was of value in directing the attack on the position.

These operations put a heavy strain on the factory. Its normal output of one balloon a month was increased during the war to two balloons a month, and new buildings at a cost of more than four thousand pounds were proposed in 1900, and approved by the Aldershot Command. Even during the South African War there were other calls on the factory. In the summer of 1900 a balloon section, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel J. R. Macdonald, was embarked for China; in the following year the factory supplied two balloons and stores for the Antarctic Expedition of Captain Scott. These demands interfered with experimental activities, which when the war was ended, and especially when the new factory was built in 1905, were renewed with great zest. As early as January 1902 Colonel Templer, having visited Paris to report on the doings of M. Santos Dumont, recommended that experiments with dirigible balloons should be carried out at once, but received from the War Office the reply that the estimates for the year, which, apart from these experiments, amounted to £12,000, must be cut down to half that sum. Nevertheless from time to time grants were obtained for the construction of elongated balloons, for a complete wireless telegraphy equipment, and, in 1903, for a dirigible balloon. The factory was a small place, but it was full of energy. In 1904 experiments were carried out with man-lifting kites, with photography from the air, with signalling devices, with mechanical apparatus for hauling down the balloons, and finally with petrol motors. It must always stand to the credit of those who were in charge of the factory that when the new era came, revolutionizing all the conditions, and when, not many years later, the Great War made its sudden and enormous demands, they rose to the occasion. Up to May 1906 Colonel Templer was superintendent of the balloon factory. He was succeeded by Colonel J. E. Capper, who held the position till October 1909. During these early years the balloon factory and balloon school, though nominally separate, were under the same control. The chief point of difference was that the factory employed some civilians, whereas the school was wholly in the hands of the military. Mr. Haldane decided to separate them, and in 1909 appointed Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman superintendent of the balloon factory, while Colonel Capper, who was succeeded within a year by Major Sir Alexander Bannerman, Bart., took over the command of the balloon school. Colonel Capper was a firm believer in the future of the aeroplane, and a true prophet. In a lecture on military ballooning, delivered at the Royal United Service Institution in 1906, just before he was appointed superintendent of the balloon factory, he concluded with a forecast. 'There is another and far more important phase of aerial locomotion,' he said, 'which in the near future may probably have to be reckoned with.... In a few years we may expect to see men moving swiftly through the air on simple surfaces, just as a gliding bird moves.... Such machines will move very rapidly, probably never less than twenty and up to a hundred miles per hour; nothing but the heaviest storms will stop them. They will be small and difficult to hit, and very difficult to damage, and their range of operations will be very large.' Colonel Capper acted on this belief, and during his time at the factory did what he could with meagre funds to encourage aviation. The policy which, in the spring of 1908, he recommended to the War Office was to buy any practicable machines that offered themselves in the market, and at the same time not to relax effort at the factory. The attempts of Lieutenant Dunne and Mr. Cody to construct an efficient aeroplane seemed hopeful, and the factory took them under its wing. Lieutenant Dunne worked at Blair Atholl from 1907 onward, and Mr. Cody, in the winter of 1907-8, began to construct his machine at Farnborough. In the autumn of 1908 the Hon. C. S. Rolls offered to bring to Farnborough a biplane of the Farman-Delagrange type, and to experiment with it on behalf of the Government, in return for the necessary shed accommodation. The acceptance of this proposal had been authorized when an accident to Mr. Cody, caused by want of space, discredited the fitness of the factory ground for aeroplane work, and the arrangement with Mr. Rolls was deferred. He renewed his proposal in the spring of 1909, this time with the offer of a Wright machine, and he had established himself at Farnborough, when his death, at the Bournemouth meeting of 1910, cut short a career of brilliant promise, for Mr. Rolls was not only one of the best of practical aviators, but was alert in all that concerned the science of his craft. At the factory the experiments of Mr. Cody and Lieutenant Dunne were supported and continued, but progress was slow and uncertain, and when, early in 1909, the two machines between them had involved an expense of something like £2,500, further experiments with them were abandoned for a time. Their performance did not seem to warrant a large national outlay, and the bulk of Colonel Capper's work was devoted to what seemed the more promising task of supplying airships for the army. The earliest of these had been designed by Colonel Templer, and two envelopes of gold-beater's skin were ready by 1904, but the cost of making them had been so great that further progress on the ship was arrested until 1907. In September of that year the first British army airship, the Nulli Secundus, sausage-shaped, about a hundred and twenty feet long and less than thirty feet in diameter, took the air and passed successfully through its trials. It was driven by an Antoinette engine of from forty to fifty horse-power, and attained a speed of about sixteen miles an hour.

On the 5th of October the ship flew from Farnborough to London, circled round St. Paul's Cathedral, manœuvred over the grounds at Buckingham Palace, and, on her return journey, as she could make no headway against the wind, descended in the centre of the cycle-track at the Crystal Palace, having been in the air for three and a half hours. Five days later, to avoid damage by a squall, the ship was deflated, packed up, and returned to Farnborough by road. Colonel Capper, influenced doubtless by the success of the Lebaudy airship in France, decided to rebuild Nulli Secundus as a semi-rigid, but funds were short, and work could not be commenced on her until the following year. In the reconstruction every possible portion of the original ship was ingeniously utilized. The reconstructed ship was taken out for her first trial in the air on the 24th of July 1908. During this flight of four miles, lasting eighteen minutes, she suffered various mishaps. After two more short flights she was deflated at the end of August, and the career of the Nulli Secundus was ended. Another smaller and fish-shaped airship, nicknamed the Baby, was put in hand during the autumn of 1908, but was not completed until the following spring. To enable her to carry a more powerful engine the Baby was enlarged by cutting the envelope in half and introducing a wide belt of gold-beater's skin in the middle. Rechristened the Beta, she was ready for flight at the end of May, and on the 3rd of June 1910 made a successful night-flight from Farnborough to London and back, covering a distance of about seventy miles in just over four hours.

The output of the factory was small, almost insignificant, compared with the efforts being made by foreign nations. Colonel Capper preferred not to attempt the construction of rigid airships till more was known of them. The Zeppelins were the only reputed success, and no Zeppelin, at that time, had succeeded in making a forced landing without damage to the ship. But the output of the factory is no true measure of the progress made. The officers in charge worked with an eye to the future. Early in 1906 a proposal was put forward by Brevet Colonel J. D. Fullerton, Royal Engineers, and was warmly supported by Colonel Templer, for the appointment of a committee consisting of military officers, aeronauts, mechanical engineers, and naval representatives, to investigate the whole question of aeronautics. A modified form of this proposal was put forward three years later, in 1909, by Mr. Haldane, then Secretary of State for War. He invited Lord Rayleigh and Dr. Richard Glazebrook, the chairman and the director of the National Physical Laboratory, to confer with him, and asked them to prepare for his consideration a scheme which should secure the co-operation of the laboratory with the services, thus providing scientific inquiry with opportunities for full-scale experiment. A scheme was drafted; it was discussed and approved at a conference held in the room of the First Lord of the Admiralty, and was submitted to the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, who took action on it, and appointed 'The Advisory Committee for 'Aeronautics', under the presidency of Lord Rayleigh. Seven of its ten members were Fellows of the Royal Society. The chairman was Dr. Glazebrook. The Army was represented by Major-General Sir Charles Hadden, the Navy by Captain R. H. S. Bacon, the Meteorological Office by Dr. W. N. Shaw. The other members were Mr. Horace Darwin, Sir George Greenhill, Mr. F. W. Lanchester, Mr. H. R. A. Mallock, and Professor J. E. Petavel. To these, soon after, were added Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman, when he took over the charge of the balloon factory, and Captain Murray F. Sueter, R.N., who deserves not a little credit for his early and persistent efforts to foster aeronautics in the navy. The great value of this committee was that it brought together the various bodies concerned with aeronautics, and combined their efforts. In particular, it gave to the new science the highly skilled services of the National Physical Laboratory, which organized at Teddington a new department, with elaborate plant, for the investigation of aeronautical questions. From this time onward the National Physical Laboratory worked in the closest co-operation with the balloon factory. Mathematical and physical investigations were continuously carried on at the laboratory, and improvements suggested by these researches were put to the practical test at the factory. Questions of air resistance, of the stresses and strains on materials, of the best shape for the wing of an aeroplane and the best fabric for the envelope of an airship—these and scores of other problems were systematically and patiently attacked. There were no theatrically quick results, but the work done laid a firm and broad base for all subsequent success. Hasty popular criticism is apt to measure the value of scientific advice by the tale of things done, and to overlook the credit that belongs to it for things prevented. The science of aeronautics in the year 1909 was in a very difficult and uncertain stage of its early development; any mistakes in laying the foundations of a national air force would not only have involved the nation in much useless expense, but would have imperilled the whole structure. Delay and caution are seldom popular, but they are often wise. Those who are stung by the accusation of sloth are likely to do something foolish in a hurry. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of our aeronautical development than its comparative freedom from costly mistakes. This freedom was attained by a happy conjunction of theory and practice, of the laboratory and the factory. The speculative conclusions of the merely theoretical man had to undergo the test of action in the rain and the wind. The notions and fancies of the merely practical man were subjected to the criticism of those who could tell him why he was wrong. The rapid growth in power and efficiency of the British air force owed much to the labours of those who befriended it before it was born, and who, when it was confronted with the organized science of all the German universities, endowed it with the means of rising to a position of vantage.

The same sort of credit belongs to the conduct of the balloon factory under Mr. Mervyn O'Gorman, who had charge of it during that very crucial period from the autumn of 1909 to the summer of 1916. When he took over the factory he found at Farnborough one small machine shop, one shed for making balloons, and one airship shed. The workers were about a hundred in number, fifty men and fifty women. Seven years later, when Lieutenant-Colonel O'Gorman was appointed to the Air Board as consulting engineer to the Director-General of Military Aeronautics, the hundred had swollen to four thousand six hundred, and the buildings situated on the forest land of Farnborough had increased and multiplied out of all recognition. This development was made necessary by the war, but it would have been impossible but for the foresight which directed the operations of the period before the war. The factory, working in close co-operation with the Advisory Committee and the National Physical Laboratory, very early became the chief centre for experimental aviation with full-sized machines. Systematic and rapid advance was hardly to be hoped for from unaided private initiative. Many private makers of machines were zealous and public-spirited, but there was no considerable private demand for aeroplanes, and a firm of manufacturers cannot carry on at a loss. Poor though it was in resources, and very meagrely supported by Government grants, the factory was what the country had to depend on; and it rose to its opportunities.

Aviation, in its early stages, was cramped and harassed by engine failure. The improvement of the light engine, in design and construction, was the most pressing of needs; but no sufficiently rapid improvement could be hoped for except by the encouragement of private enterprise. For some years the factory refrained from producing any official engine design, and the superintendent attempted to encourage the efforts of private firms. In order to specify the conditions which makers must observe, and to apply proper tests to the engines supplied, it was thought desirable to build an engine laboratory. Accordingly an engine test plant was devised and installed. It was set in a wind-tunnel, where by steeply tilting the engine both sideways and lengthways, in varying currents of air, the actual flying conditions could be imitated, and the performance of the engine measured. This plant for the testing of engines might have been used with valuable results, but for one hindrance—the makers of engines were unwilling to send them to the factory to be tested, and the plant remained idle. There was a misunderstanding, which after a time became acute, between the factory and the private makers of aircraft. The factory, zealous for the public interest, believed that it could best serve their interest by encouraging, supervising, and co-ordinating the efforts of the makers. The makers, jealous of supervision and control, did not accept that view. A wise judgement will be slow to blame either. The officials of the factory were strong in the knowledge that their work was disinterested and aimed only at the public good. The makers, remembering that progress in aviation had come chiefly by way of private enterprise, feared the paralysing effect of official control, and the habitual tendency of officials, especially of competent officials, to extend their ambitions and their powers. The makers, in short, dreaded a Government monopoly. A difference of this kind, even when it is gently and considerately handled, always furnishes a happy hunting-ground for the political agitator and the grievance-monger. The thing came to a head during the war, when the success of the Fokkers, which reached its height during the early months of 1916, made the public uneasy. The Fokkers late in 1915 had been fitted with guns which fired through the airscrew. This was the secret of their success, which was short-lived, but was made the occasion, in Parliament and elsewhere, for a long array of charges against the administration and command of the Royal Flying Corps. A parliamentary committee, under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice Bailhache, was appointed to investigate these charges. Their report vindicated the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Aircraft Factory, and expressed admiration for the work done by both under the stress and strain of war. The charges, it should be added, were not supported by the private makers, or 'the trade', as they are called; none of them made any complaint, and some of them went out of their way to record their gratitude for the help they had received from the factory.

Nevertheless, the uncertainty of its relations with the trade caused the factory, in its early days, to undertake a great diversity of business. The designing of aircraft was plainly a matter of the first importance, and for this designing it was necessary to collect a trained staff. The difficulty here was that there were no professional designers; the aeronautical world was a strange ferment of inventors, amateurs, enthusiasts, heretics of all sorts, wedded to their own notions, and mutually hostile. The factory decided to employ only those designers who had had a solid course of training in engineering shops. By degrees engineers trained in shipyards and officers skilled in motor-car design were added to the staff of the drawing office until, by 1916, it had increased from some half-dozen to two hundred and seventy-five.

When the war came this drawing office proved its value. An immense number of aeroplanes was required, and many firms had to be employed to make them. Some of these firms were well staffed, others not so well. The factory made elaborate detailed dimensioned drawings, marked with every permitted kind and degree of variation—as many as four hundred drawings to a single aeroplane. With the help of these drawings all kinds of firms—organ-builders, makers of furniture, or pianos, or gramophones, or motor-cars—could be turned on to aeroplane manufacture. In the course of two years half a million drawings were issued to various firms; and those firms to whom the whole business of engineering was strange were successfully initiated in one of its most delicate and difficult branches. Here, too, the outcry was raised, in the newspapers and in Parliament, that the factory was attempting to make a Government monopoly of aircraft design and air-engine design. The accusation was disproved; it would probably never have been made but for the admirable efficiency of the factory in rising to meet a national crisis. National defence, it is agreed, cannot safely be left wholly to private enterprise, even in England. The factory carried out an immense number of experiments in connexion with aeroplanes and airships. The quest for stability, longitudinal and lateral, in aeroplanes was the chief preoccupation of these early years. Powerful engines are useless in a ship which cannot be trusted to keep afloat. It was this quest, as much as anything, which drew the factory into designing aeroplanes. The various types of aeroplane designed at the factory bear names which consist of a pair of initial letters, with a number affixed. The letters indicate the type of the machine; the number indicates its place in the series of continually improving variants of the same type. Three of these types were gradually being evolved at the factory in the course of the year 1911. The earliest to attain to practical success was the B.E. type of machine. Every pilot who had his training in the early days of the war was familiar with this machine, though not every pilot knew that the initials are a monument to Louis Blériot, who first flew the Channel. His achievement gave a great vogue to his monoplane, which was imitated by many designers; and when the factory produced a biplane fitted, like all monoplanes, with a tractor airscrew, in front of the machine, the biplane was called the Blériot Experimental. The F.E. type is the Farman Experimental, a pusher biplane, which for a long time held its own by virtue of two advantages. The observer, being seated in the very prow of the machine, could fire a gun forward without being obstructed by the airscrew. This advantage disappeared after 1915, when, by the invention of synchronizing gears, which timed the bullets to pass between the revolving blades of the screw, tractor machines were enabled to fire directly ahead. But another advantage persisted. In night-flying, when the eyes are strained to pick up dim shapes in the dark, a clear field of vision is all-important, and the F.E. type of machine continued to be used in night raids throughout the war. The third type was the S.E., or Scouting Experimental. The fifth variant of this type, the S.E. 5, gained an enormous reputation in the war as a fighting machine, and indeed was preferred by some pilots to the best scout machines of private makers.

A fourth factory machine, produced just before the war, and no less famous than the other three, was called the R.E., or Reconnaissance Experimental. It was the first almost completely stable machine. Stability is not of the first importance to a fighting scout, whose attention is concentrated on his own manœuvres, but where a machine is used for observation, and the pilot must needs pay heed to all that is visible on the earth beneath, stability is essential. A perfectly stable machine maintains an even keel in varying gusts of wind. If it is tilted, it rights itself. If it is nose-dived, the pilot has only to let go of the control, and after a descent of some hundreds of feet it comes out of the dive and resumes its horizontal flight. The perfecting of this type of machine was achieved at the factory, and was the work of many minds. On the mathematical side the theory of stability was investigated by Mr. F. W. Lanchester, an authority on the theory of flight, and by Professor G. H. Bryan, a great pioneer, who in 1911 produced his book on Stability in Aviation. He had long been interested in the subject; his work, which is recognized as epoch-making, laid a sound mathematical basis for the theory of flight, and directed the work of others along the lines of fruitful experiment. The theoretical conclusions of Professor Bryan were reduced to a practical form by Mr. Leonard Bairstow and the members of the staff of the National Physical Laboratory, who put the doctrine to the proof of experiment, at first with models, and then with full-scale machines. The dangerous work of trying conclusions with the air fell to the young men of the factory. A brilliant young Cambridge man, Mr. E. T. Busk, of King's College, who had been trained in the laboratory of Professor Bertram Hopkinson, joined the staff of the factory in the summer of 1912, having previously spent a month at the National Physical Laboratory, to acquaint himself with the work there. He understood the theoretical basis of aeroplane design, and he was a daring and skilful pilot. The R.E. machine was designed by the staff of the factory; Mr. Busk, in collaboration with Mr. Bairstow, worked at the problem of giving it stability. He cheerfully took all risks in trying the full-sized machines in the air. When the R.E. 1 had been theoretically warranted, by experiments with models, to right herself after a nose-dive, he tested the theory by flying the machine to a great height, turning her nose down and letting go the controls. As he expected, she righted. To test the machine he flew her in all weathers, hurling her against the wind storms. For the purposes of these practical tests he invented an instrument of his own called the Ripograph, which recorded on a single strip all the pilot's movements in warping and steering, as well as the speed, inclination, and roll of the machine. This machine, when the rudder was turned right or left, automatically banked itself; and when the engine was cut off, took the angle of gliding flight. It was a later variant of the same machine, an R.E. 8 belonging to the Australian Flying Corps, of which it is told that, when the pilot and observer had both been shot dead, in December 1917, the machine continued to fly in wide left-hand circles, and ultimately, when the fuel was exhausted and the engine stopped, fell near St.-Pol, some thirty miles from the scene of combat, without completely wrecking itself. When the war broke out Mr. Busk was more than ever needed at the factory. On the 5th of November 1914 he mounted in an experimental B.E. 2c machine to a height of about eight hundred feet. Exactly what happened will never be known; the petrol vapour must have been ignited by a spark; the machine burst into flames, and after drifting aimlessly for a time, fell on Laffan's Plain. The death of such men as Charles Rolls and Edward Busk was a part of the heavy price that had to be paid for victory; before victory was in sight. There was no other way; the work that they did could not be spared, and could never have been even attempted except by the quiet of absolute courage.

The business undertaken by the factory, apart from its main business of research and experiment, was almost bewildering in its diversity. From the first the officials of the factory insisted on maintaining a high standard of workmanship, which spells safety in the air. This question of workmanship became doubly important during the war, when, in order to improve the performance of machines, all avoidable weight had to be sacrificed, and the factor of safety, as it is called, reduced to the lowest permissible limit. The breaking of a spar or a wire, the failure of a bolt or a nut, may mean a fatal accident. Further, the factory did what it could to standardize the component parts of an aeroplane, so as to facilitate repair; and this, before the war came, had been largely achieved. It designed and fitted up the instruments necessary for the pilot's use, which record for him his speed through the air, the consumption of his fuel, the rate of revolutions of his airscrew, the height attained, and other essentials. The average pilot, it is well known, is supplied with more instruments than he uses, but it is true nevertheless that familiarity with the use of instruments has often staved off disasters. At first the factory had refrained from initiating engine designs, but when competition and trial had shown that there was no immediate prospect of obtaining a thoroughly satisfactory engine from English makers, it asked permission of the War Office, and in 1913 designed its own engine. Among its notable devices one or two may be mentioned. The mooring-mast for airships, to which they can be tethered in the open, was invented at the factory, and developed independently for naval work, by the Admiralty. The fair-shaped wires and struts, to decrease air resistance, were a great improvement. These parts of an aeroplane offer so considerable a resistance to its passage through the air, that when their transverse section, instead of being round, is streamlined, the speed of the machine is increased by several miles an hour. In short, during those early years the factory, which directly or indirectly had to supply most of the requirements of the balloon school, the Air Battalion, and the Royal Flying Corps, combined in itself all the functions of what later on were highly organized separate Government departments—inspection, stores, repairs, the testing of inventions, and the like.