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 any future war there can be no doubt that torpedo aircraft will prove to be a weapon of enormous power. As Lieutenant Hyde-Thomson remarks in a paper which he prepared in 1915, they will be a menace to the largest battleship afloat. They have double the speed of a destroyer, and a large measure of that suddenness of attack which is the virtue of a submarine and the dread of its victims. The technical difficulties connected with the release and aiming of the torpedo have been met and conquered, so that these craft, though they played no considerable part in the war, were brought by the pressure of war, which quickens all things, to the stage of practical efficiency.

Some minor causes of the delay in the development of torpedo aircraft may perhaps be found. Those who pinned their faith to the Dreadnought as the mainstay of naval power were not likely to be eager to improve a weapon which, more than any other, seemed likely to make the Dreadnought belie its name. Moreover, the burden of a torpedo was never very popular with pilots. A torpedo can be used only against its preordained target; it gives no protection to the aircraft that carries it, and its great weight makes the machine slower in manœuvre and more vulnerable. This objection was well stated by a German pilot who was taken prisoner in June 1917. The Germans, in the early part of that year, formed at Zeebrugge a flight of torpedo seaplanes, which had this advantage over our torpedo aircraft, that suitable targets were not lacking. These seaplanes sank three of our merchant ships in the vicinity of Margate and the Downs. Two of the seaplanes were shot down on the morning of the 11th of June 1917 by the armed yacht Diana. In the report of the examination of the German pilots it is told that both the prisoners seemed to deprecate this mode of flying, and to glory chiefly in their own single-seaters, which were smaller, swifter, and without encumbrance. 'Once you are given a two-seater,' said one of them, 'the authorities start loading you up with cameras, machine-guns, bombs, and wireless, and now, to crown all, they actually hang a torpedo on your machine!'

The new types of naval aircraft which were invented or developed during the course of the war have now been briefly described. When a critical account shall hereafter be rendered of the doings of the years 1914 to 1918, regarded as an incident in the ever-lengthening history of human warfare upon earth, these new departures in the use of naval aircraft will probably be recognized as the chief contribution to sea-power made by the late war. Their importance is enormous, but their place in the actual history of the earlier years of the war is comparatively small. The weapons of the Royal Naval Air Service, so far as purely naval uses were concerned, were in a rudimentary state at the outbreak of war. A fighting service, suddenly engaged in a great war, must use the weapons it has; it cannot spend more than a margin of its time and thought on problematic improvements. The Naval Air Service, when the war began, had good machines and good pilots. The army had endeavoured, before the war, to establish, on behalf of the nation, a centralized control of aeronautical manufacture, and the benefits of that policy, when the war came, have already been described. The navy, following its traditional plan, and working on freer lines, had done all it could to encourage private effort, and so had greatly stimulated aeronautical invention and progress. There was nothing inconsistent in the two policies; they were stronger together than either could have been alone. When the great effort was called for, the only thing that could be done at once was to multiply the best existing types of machine, and to attempt, with the means available, to perform such tasks as might present themselves.

Before the war the principal firms employed by the Admiralty in the manufacture of flying machines were: for seaplanes, Messrs. Short Brothers at Eastchurch, Messrs. Sopwith at Kingston-on-Thames, and Messrs. J. Samuel White & Co. at Cowes, who had produced the Wight seaplane; for aeroplanes, Messrs. Short and Messrs. Sopwith as before, the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company at Bristol, and Messrs. A. V. Roe & Co. at Manchester. Orders as large as they could handle were placed with all these firms on the outbreak of war. Further, a very large order for B.E. 2c machines was placed with various firms, who were to construct them by the aid of Government plans and specifications; and Messrs. Vickers received orders for their gun-carrying two-seater pusher aeroplane known as the Vickers fighter.

The navy naturally paid more attention than the army to fighting in the air. They were committed to the defence of the coast and the beating off of hostile air-raids. In France, where the guns were going all day, the first need was for reconnaissance machines; the navy, who were farther from the enemy, had set their hearts on machines that should do more than observe—machines that could fly far and hit hard. They diligently fostered the efforts of the leading motor-car companies, especially the Sunbeam and Rolls-Royce, and so were instrumental in the production of very efficient engines of high horse-power. In the second year of the war the Admiralty proposed a competition among aeroplane-makers for a large bombing machine and a fast fighting aeroplane. In the result the Short machine for bombing, fitted with a 250 horse-power Rolls-Royce engine, was produced. Later on, the single-seater Sopwith Pup and the two-seater Sopwith 1-1/2 Strutter set the fashion in fighting machines, and did good work with the army at the battles of the Somme. The fact is that in the early part of the war the best of the existing types of aeroplane were more useful, as things stood, to the army than to the navy, and when this was recognized a great part of the work of the Royal Naval Air Service took the form of help given to the British army.

When in August 1915 Mr. Maurice Baring was sent to Rome on business connected with aircraft, he records how he had speech with General Morris, who was in charge of Italian aviation. 'What I am going to say to you', said General Morris, 'will be absolutely unintelligible and unthinkable to you as Englishmen, but I regret to say that here, in Italy, it is a fact that there exists a certain want of harmony—a certain occasional, shall I say, friction?—between the military and naval branches of our flying service.' Mr. Baring was amused by this speech, but he kept a grave countenance, and murmured, 'Impossible'.

Both the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service were eager to serve their country. Their rivalry was creditable to them. When they were called on to co-operate, their relations were friendly and helpful. But the pressing need for more and more aeroplanes on the western front dominated the situation. The Admiralty were many times asked by the military authorities to hand over to the Royal Flying Corps large numbers of machines and engines which were on order for the Royal Naval Air Service. To the best of their ability they fulfilled these requests, but the zealous members of a patriotic service would be more or less than human if they felt no regret on being deprived of the control of their own material.

When the Royal Flying Corps was formed, in the spring of 1912, it was intended that either wing should be available to help the other. But before the war broke out the two had almost ceased to co-operate. The methods and subjects of instruction were distinct. The discipline and training of the one wing were wholly military, of the other wholly naval; and this severance had been officially recognized, just before the war, by the transformation of the Naval Wing into the Royal Naval Air Service. In truth, while reconnaissance continued to be, what it was at the beginning of the war, almost the sole duty of aircraft, effective co-operation between the two services was difficult or impossible. Most of the naval air pilots knew little of the business of military reconnaissance; nor could the military observer be expected to recognize and identify enemy shipping.

The demand for squadrons to assist the land campaign seemed likely to be greater than the supply, and on the 24th of August 1914 the Government had approved the formation of two Royal Naval Air Service squadrons, to be trained for military duties. The Admiralty took action at once, and these two squadrons were formed, one at Fort Grange, the other at Eastchurch, during the early days of October. They were only a few days old when news came that the army chiefs did not approve of the plan. Writing on the 17th of October 1914 Sir John French said that the efficiency of the Flying Corps for military purposes was principally due to its organization and training. 'It is therefore', he added, 'most desirable that any reinforcements should be organized, trained, and equipped in exactly the same manner as the squadrons now in the field. Owing to the complete divergence between methods and equipment of the naval and military air services, I do not consider that units of the Royal Naval Air Service would be suitable as reinforcements to this force.' Lieutenant-Colonel Brancker, in a minute on this letter, dated the 22nd of October, suggested that the army should undertake all aerial work with the expeditionary force abroad and with the mobile forces at home, while the navy should undertake the aerial work for all fixed defences at home. A few weeks later the Army Council, replying to the offer of the Admiralty, suggested that the best way for the Admiralty to help would be by handing over to the War Office the aeroplanes which were being provided to the order of the Admiralty, so that the additional military squadron might be the earlier completed. Lastly, on the 2nd of December, Lieutenant-Colonel Brancker addressed an urgent appeal to the Air Department of the Admiralty. The squadrons with the British forces in the field, he said, were very seriously short of aeroplanes. There was also a shortage of flying officers, especially for the training of pilots at home. He suggested that the entire output of the Avro factory, and all the Vickers fighters, should be placed at the disposal of the War Office; that four Maurice Farmans under construction in Paris for the Admiralty should be delivered direct to the headquarters of the Royal Flying Corps in France; and that any number up to twenty good pilots, and the same number of wireless operators, should be lent by the Admiralty to the War Office. The Admiralty replied at once that they were willing to hand over to the Army Council twelve Vickers fighters and six Maurice Farman machines, and that they were preparing a squadron of eight Avro machines and four Sopwith scouts under Squadron Commander Longmore, to proceed overseas about the middle of January, and to work under the orders of the officer commanding the Military Wing. On the 1st of January 1915 the War Office, after consulting Sir David Henderson, refused this offer of a naval squadron. 'It has been decided', wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Brancker, 'to send no further new aeroplane squadrons to join the Expeditionary Force until the winter is over; the bad weather renders aerial reconnaissance difficult, and we find that owing to the impossibility of protecting the machine from deterioration it will be better to keep our new units at home until conditions improve.' In the event about a hundred machines, and as many more American Curtiss machines, built and building, were turned over by the Admiralty to the War Office during the first year of the war, but no further suggestion for the use of naval squadrons on the western front was made until March 1916; and it was not until October of that year that the first complete naval squadron got to work as a self-contained unit under military command.

Service men will understand better than civilians the difficulties of a mixed service. Each of the great services has always been willing to help the other so long as it is allowed to preserve its own traditions intact. Their quarrels are lovers' quarrels, springing from a jealous maintenance of separate individualities. Moreover, the war, during its early course, was regarded by most civilians and most service men as likely to be a short war. The attention of soldiers late in 1914 was concentrated on the decision that was expected in the following spring. Lord Kitchener's famous prediction of a three years' war was regarded as a wise insurance against foolish over-confidence, but was not believed. The officers responsible for the Flying Corps in France were concerned chiefly for the maintenance of that admirable little force in full efficiency. They suffered continually from a shortage of aeroplanes, and although their casualties had been far lighter than any one had anticipated, they had every reason to fear a shortage of flying officers. Their first demand was not for new squadrons, but for a reserve of pilots and machines, to keep the existing squadrons in working trim. It was only by degrees that the portentous dimensions of the war began to be perceived—a war which, just before it ended, was employing ninety-nine squadrons of British aeroplanes on the western front alone.