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

by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

For the supply of machines during the earlier period of our preparation we were chiefly dependent on the French. They were ready, and we were not. Their magnificent aviation held the air while we prepared ourselves for our task. They had many factories in good working order, so that they were able to supply us with machines and spare parts in large numbers. During the last four months of 1914, from the end of August to the end of December, the Royal Flying Corps received twenty-four machines from home, fitted with French engines, and twenty-six from France. These last were chiefly Blériots and Henri Farmans. In October General Henderson posted Captain James Valentine of the Royal Flying Corps to Paris, to organize a department for the supply of machines, engines, spares and stores, and to report on the performances of all new machines. In December the Admiralty followed suit and posted Lieutenant Farnol Thurstan to Paris to fulfil similar duties on behalf of the Royal Naval Air Service. The French Government were courteous and willing, but a certain amount of bargaining was inevitable, for if we wanted their aircraft, they wanted our raw material, especially steel, and our Lewis guns. The arrangements were entrusted to a series of conferences, and subsequently to a joint commission. In spite of difficulties the supply went forward. It was not until 1916 that we began to be independent of the French factories. In the four months August to November 1915 the total value of the orders which were placed in France for aeroplanes, engines, spare parts, and other accessories, was not much short of twelve million francs. It was this help from our Allies that enabled us to make progress during the first year of the war. By the 31st of May 1915 five hundred and thirty aeroplanes had been taken into the service and about three hundred had been struck off as lost or worn out. On the same date orders for two thousand two hundred and sixty aeroplanes were in progress.

The story of the expansion of the Royal Flying Corps for military uses is simple and clear, as its main purpose was simple and clear. Its business was to furnish the army with eyes, to observe all enemy operations, and especially the operations of enemy artillery. Its later uses grew out of this, as the branches grow out of the stem of a tree. From the aerodromes which were ranged all along the British front in France our machines crossed the lines every day, to give help to the General Staff, to give help to the gunners and the infantry, to carry destruction to the enemy. The Flying Corps tried to keep pace with the growth of the army which needed its help. Its own growth was continuous; the problems which presented themselves to those who superintended that growth were problems of supply, adjustment, and efficiency. The need was certain; the only question was how the need might be best and quickest supplied. A good aeroplane, flown by a skilled pilot, could always find work of the first importance waiting for it on the western front.

The story of the development and expansion of the Royal Naval Air Service is a different kind of story. As the first business of the Royal Flying Corps was to help the army, so the first business of the Royal Naval Air Service was to help the navy. But this business of helping the navy was a much more difficult and complicated business than the other. To help the army from fixed aerodromes behind the line of battle was a dangerous and gallant affair, but it was not difficult. In the ease of its solution the military problem was child's play compared with the naval problem. How was the navy to be helped? As early as 1912 a policy for the employment of the Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps was laid before the Board of Admiralty by Captain Murray Sueter. In this statement the duties of naval aircraft were laid down; the two first to be mentioned were: '(1) Distance reconnaissance work with the fleet at sea. (2) Reconnaissance work off the enemy coast, working from detached cruisers or special aeroplane ships.' The policy is clear and sound; but a world of ingenuity and toil was involved in those two short phrases—'with the fleet at sea', and 'working from detached cruisers'. Aircraft must work from a base; when they had to work with the army on land all that was needed was to set up some huts in certain meadows in France. For aerial work with the fleet at sea the necessary preparations were much more expensive and elaborate. Sea-going vessels had to be constructed or adapted to carry seaplanes or aeroplanes and to serve as a floating and travelling aerodrome. The seaplane itself, in the early days of the war, was very far from perfect efficiency. It could not rise from a troubled sea, nor alight on it, without disaster. Accidents to seaplanes were so numerous, in these early days, that senior naval officers were prejudiced against the seaplane, and, for the most part, had no great faith in the value of the help that was offered by the Royal Naval Air Service.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet well knew the value to the fleet of aerial observation, but the means were not to hand. The airship experiment had broken down. Such airships as were available in the early part of the war had not the necessary power and range. To build a vessel which should be able to carry seaplanes or aeroplanes for work with the fleet was not a simple matter. Such a vessel would be an encumbrance unless it could keep station with the Grand Fleet or with the Battle Cruiser Squadron, that is, unless it could steam up to thirty knots for a period of many hours together. Further, a stationary ship at sea is exposed to attack by submarines, so that it was desirable, if not necessary, that the flying machines should be able to take the air and return to their base without stopping the ship. This consideration led, at a later period of the war, to the use by the navy of aeroplanes flown from specially constructed decks. But this was a matter of time and experiment. As early as December 1911 Commander Samson had succeeded in flying off the deck of H.M.S. Africa, and when the war broke out the Hermes, which had formerly served as headquarters for the Royal Naval Air Service, was fitted with a launching-deck for aeroplanes. The Hermes was sunk in the third month of the war; thereafter the Ark Royal, the Campania, the Vindex, the Manxman, the Furious, the Pegasus, and the Nairana were each of them successively fitted with a launching-deck. But launching proved easier than alighting. It may seem to be a simple thing for an aeroplane to overtake a ship that is being driven into the wind, and to alight quietly on its afterdeck. But immediately behind such a ship there is always a strong up-current of air. This up-current—the bump that the albatross sits on—is what makes the difficulty and danger of the attempt. An aeroplane which resists it by diving through it will almost certainly crash on the deck beyond. The business of landing an aeroplane on the ship from which it had been launched was not accomplished until the 2nd of August 1917, when Flight Commander E. H. Dunning succeeded, at Scapa Flow, in landing a Sopwith Pup on the forecastle deck of the Furious, while she was under way. Five days later, when he was repeating this performance, his machine rolled over into the sea, and he was drowned. His work was not lost; the Furious was fitted thereafter with a special landing-deck aft, and it was by naval aeroplanes flown from the deck of the Furious that one of the large Zeppelin sheds at Tondern was destroyed on the 19th of July 1918.

The next ships in the succession were the Vindictive, the Argus (which was the first ship to be fitted with a flush deck), the Eagle, and the new Hermes, which last two ships were unfinished at the time of the armistice.

In this matter of aerial work for the navy the whole period of the war was a period of experiment rather than achievement. The conditions of experiment were hard enough, when all the shipyards and factories of the country were working at full pressure in the effort to make good our heavy losses in merchant shipping. Yet experiment continued, and progress was made. Three new forms of aircraft deserve special mention. The kite balloon, the small improvised airship called the submarine scout, and last, though not least, the flying boat, were all invented or brought into use by the Naval Air Service during the course of the war.

For stationary aerial observation the means employed in England, before the war, were the captive spherical balloon and the man-lifting kite. Many successful experiments with the man-lifting kite, or groups of kites, had been carried out, especially by Major B. F. S. Baden-Powell, during the closing years of the nineteenth century. But both the balloon and the kite had serious faults. The kite cannot be efficiently operated in a wind of less than twenty miles an hour, and the spherical balloon cannot be operated in a wind of more than twenty miles an hour. The balloon except in the lightest of breezes, and the kite at all times, give a very unsteady platform for observation, so that field-glasses are difficult to use. The merits of both kite and balloon were combined and the faults of both were remedied in the kite balloon. The attachment of a kite to the upper hemisphere of an ordinary spherical balloon, on the cable side, to prevent the balloon from rotating in a wind, had been proposed by a private inventor as early as 1885, but nothing came of it. The kite balloon which was used in the war was invented in 1894 by Major von Parseval, the German airship designer, and Captain von Sigsfeld. This balloon is sausage shaped; the cable is attached to the forward portion; the rear end carries an air-rudder, and is weighted down by the car, or basket. Extending outwards at right angles on both sides of the rear portion of the balloon is a wind-sail which does the office of a kite and assists in preventing the rudder end of the balloon from being too much depressed by the weight of the car. The balloon is divided into two segments; the forward segment is filled with gas, the rear segment is kept full of air through a circular entrance attached, facing the wind, to the under surface of the balloon. But the steadying of the balloon is mainly achieved by the air-rudder, which is another inflated sausage, curved round the under side of the rear end of the balloon, and automatically filled with air through a valve at its forward end. The kite balloon is the ugliest thing that man has ever seen when he looks up at the sky, but it serves its purpose.

Before the war, kite balloons, often called 'Drachen' balloons, had been a German secret. The French and Belgians had obtained drawings of them, and at the outbreak of war had some few ready for use. Moreover, the French were at work on their 'Cacquot' balloon, an improvement on the 'Drachen' in that it made use of a new and more convenient stabilizing device. Where the 'Drachen' had used a long and clumsy string of parachute streamers attached to the tail, the 'Cacquot' achieved the same result by means of stabilizing fins attached to the balloon itself.

In October 1914 Wing Commander Maitland was sent to Belgium in command of a captive balloon detachment, to carry out aerial spotting for the guns of monitors working off the coast between Nieuport and Coxyde. His two balloons, which were spherical, proved to be useless in a strong wind. In January 1915 he made acquaintance with a 'Drachen' balloon which the Belgians were using in the neighbourhood of Alveringheim. He was allowed to inspect this balloon and to take measurements and photographs. In January and February he sent home reasoned reports to the Air Department of the Admiralty, urging that kite-balloon sections should be formed in the British air service. He also sent Flight Commander J. D. Mackworth to Chalais-Meudon, the French kite-balloon centre, and in the second and fuller of his reports he embodied the technical information which had been gathered from the French.

These reports were acted on at once. Wing Commander Maitland was recalled from Belgium, and a centre was established at Roehampton, to train kite-balloon sections for active service. In March 1915 two kite balloons, an old type of winch, and a length of cable were received from the French, who also lent competent instructors and a generous supply of accessories.