Post by Dave Homewood on Mar 2, 2023 18:13:52 GMT 12
The following article appeared in the Supplement of the New Zealand Herald dated the 13th of May 1939, and it generated a number of letters to the editor which I will add subsequently.
"WAR-BIRDS" PAST AND PRESENT
Our Empires Powerful Aerial Army of To-day Possesses an Efficiency Surpassed Nowhere
THE DEBT WE OWE TO PIONEER FIGHTERS IN GREAT WAR
By GUY RAMSEY (World Copyright Reserved)
BRITAIN'S aerial army to-day numbers 100,000, the pick of the Empire's manhood and a fighting force of an efficiency surpassed nowhere. Before this present year is out, there will be added 75,000 men to the Royal Air Force, its reserves and auxiliaries, and including civil training schools, and university air squadrons, Britain may have before Christmas 250,000 officers and men in all ranks of the Royal Air Force and its ancillary services.
And what of the machines, the fighters, bombers, reconnaissance craft, land and sea types, single-seaters and troop-carriers, that go to make up a modern air force? Sir Kingsley Wood, Secretary of State for Air, in introducing to the House of Commons the largest Air Estimates on record, made a quiet boast which remains unchallenged.
"Best In The World"
"In the types of aircraft now being issued to the bomber and fighter forces, we possess what we believe to be the best in the world," he said. Sir Kingsley cited specially two famous types, the Hawker "Hurricane" and the Supermarine "Spitfire," which, he said, "are capable of shooting down any type of bomber." And in addition to the bombers now going into service, the Minister remarked: We have even better and faster types, with a larger range, shortly coming forward.
While he avoided quoting figures which it is not thought in the nation's interest to disclose, Sir Kingsley lifted a little higher the veil which hides the facts about Britain's tremendous effort in aircraft production. He said that the country was spending £250,000 a day on aircraft production alone, a staggering figure which would rise still further. The increase in monthly output of 150 per cent over that of May last year, scheduled to take place in July this year, had already been reached. The 400 per cent increase on the same basis, promised for achievement by May, 1940, would probably be attained by the end of this year.
Production Speeded Up
The military aircraft industry's labour force has been increased by 400 percent in the last six months. Eleven factories under the "shadow" system are in production. Delivery of aeroplanes from Canada, where substantial contracts for long-range bombers have been placed, will begin in 1940. The mission which recently visited Australia and New Zealand had as its main object the smoothing of the way for arrangements for aircraft supply for the benefit or Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
That is the picture in 1939.
When the British Expeditionary Force marched away to its immortal battles in the summer of 1914, there were in Britain fewer than 150 flying machines capable of standing active service and fewer than 250 pilots capable of flying them.
France was, proportionately to her infinitely larger army, no better off; and even Germany, the most formidable military machine ever to be unleashed on a hapless world (to quote the papers of the day), even Germany had so few aeroplanes and realised their possibilities so little that the High Command did not even know the British were at the front until Von Kluck s Uhlans rode one day into the British outposts!
The British aerial force was divided into two sections: The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The Royal Flying Corps (do you remember the uniform: a high-necked tunic with a curving front, the palest possible cord breeches and a tiny forage cap perched on the side of the head!) had been founded early in 1912, the Royal Naval Air Service a few months later.
Most of the pilots and their observers were children; boys in their late teens and their early twenties. They were, at a stroke, required to face without training service in which seasoned veterans might well have broken.
It was easy either to romanticise or to belittle these young pilots. Novelists have had a shot at both. They have been pictured as insufferably gay and gallant, ludicrously given to flamboyant gestures of fantastic chivalry; they have also been pilloried as a drunken lot of dissipated rakes who found in courage and patriotism the last refuges of scoundrels.
"Appalling Job"
They were neither. They were a body of exceedingly brave young men who hid their courage behind a shield of flippancy. They had an appalling job to do and did it with magnificence.
This is not to say that the Germans and the French did not do equally well. But they had not so much to do. They had better machines; they had a (proportionately speaking) much longer tradition. Their high command was at least glad to use them, whereas the British authorities thoroughly resented having "to tack a lot of blasted birds" on to the fighting forces of the realm.
It is a certain and accepted fact that, by the end of the war the Anglo-French air arm had established so definite a supremacy that barely a German aeroplane dared cross the lines. But the most successful airman of all time in a military sense was Freiherr von Richthofen. He flew a scarlet Albatross machine which gave him the sobriquet of "The Red Knight." He was the central figure of a crack squadron of these aeroplanes, which came to be known in the defensive derision of the Royal Flying Corps as the "Richthofen Circus."
After his death the British, with (fortunately) an unusual lack of generosity to an enemy, sought to belittle his victories. They said he "only 'shot sitting birds,' only challenged when he had superior machines or numbers, only took easy victories."
Famous British Ace
But, whatever his shortcomings (and I subscribe to none of them) the incontrovertible fact remains that Freiherr von Richthofen accounted for no fewer than 80 enemy aeroplanes before, at last, a Canadian pilot sent him crashing to the ground. The man who succeeded him (less, effectively) in the command was a slim young Junker, by name Hermann Goering.
Hard on Richthofen's heels came the British ace, Mannock. He was scarcely the type of Ouida hero from which the Royal Flying Corps was reputed to be recruited. He was the son of a noncommissioned officer. He had weak eyes. He was always nervous, so the story went. But Mannock, before he was killed at Arras, won three separate M.C.s., and three separate D.S.O.s. And the German who brought him to earth avenged, by that lucky, skilful shot, 73 German aeroplanes.
Only just behind Mannock came "Bill" Bishop, with 72 enemy machines to his credit. He was the hero of no fewer than 170 air battles. Long years after, when Bishop had not flown since the peace, he said, as he took over the controls of an aeroplane again: "I was afraid I had forgotten how to fly, but one does not forget. It is not the air that is the enemy, you know; it is the earth."
It was no more than sober truth to call William Bishop an "airman."
Swooping Tactics
There was Ball, too, with 43 victories, who modelled his tactics on those of a hawk'. He always got in close, swooping downward on the enemy. He was the first man to be officially recognised as a British "Ace." On the ground he had only one interest—playing the violin. But in the air, all the music he heard was the singing of the wind between the wires of his aeroplane, the percussion of his own and the enemy's machine-guns, the ground-bass of the engine roar.
There are epics enough to be written of those early war-fliers. Alan Bott (chairman to-day of the Book Club), for example, whose machine was set on fire by an anti-aircraft shell; who crawled along the fuselage to put it out: and whose pilot, finding himself challenged by two enemy machines, drove at them full-tilt, firing all the time, and finally felt the engine fail under his hand. Bott and his pilot glided to earth behind their own lines nearly a mile away amid a hurricano of bullets.
Ball, who defined the average German pilot in the following typical jargon—"The Hun is a good chap with very little guts, doing his job as well as he can'—came to earth one day with his controls shot away. He effected his landing by using his tailfin only; the genius of airmanship.
For France the hero of the war in the air for all time was Guynenier, a Provencal with a face like the young Shelley, and a congenital weakness that had marked him "unfit" to join the army. He brought down 53 enemy aeroplanes before be was killed or, as the legend told, he "flew so high he flew out of sight into heaven."
It was the naked necessity of war that created aeronautical technique, tactics, strategy; new turns, new evolutions, new methods of flying. Was it better to hover a mile or so above and swoop down on the enemy? Or to lurk below him and suddenly fire upward? If you were under fire, was it safer to climb, to drop, or to run? All of our air-fighters to-day profit by the experience of these men who gained their knowledge in a hard school.
Science of Aerobatics
lmmelmann, the great German, was, perhaps, the pilot who contributed most to the rapidly advancing science of aerobatics. It was a British officer who discovered that the steep-banking turn, when the machine's wings are almost at right angles to the earth, was fatal when the sun was shining; it was more effective to turn more slowly and take a shallower sweep to avoid the flash of sun on silver wings which might reveal one to the foe.
The fights—you have seen them on the pictures —were impossible to follow from the ground; the aeroplanes would turn and twist in the air like live things almost as if the pilot endowed the senseless canvas and metal with his own personality.
You have seen a crack tennis player perhaps, and noted how his racquet appears like a hand —as flexible, as subject to automatic control? That is how a star pilot's machine appeared as it swooped and dived and soared to attack and defence in falling leaf and nose-dive, tail-spin and Immelmann turn.
Sometimes, even, a machine would surrender in mid-air and under the eye of the conqueror, circle slowly to earth behind the enemy lines. There were other types of aerial warfare than plain duels between aeroplane and aeroplane; there were duels between airship and aeroplane: _ aeroplanes like a swarm of bees seeking to sting a tarantula to death.
Zeppelin Raids
Over the lines in France, over the open towns of Britain, the long, slender Zeppelins would ride; silver cigars, serene above the clouds suddenly loosing puffs of fatality. At the first warning they had been sighted, up would go the defenders, speeding and streaking through the sky, scanning the empty blue (or indigo — for airships usually came over by night) for the sinister silver shape. They glimpsed it only to lose it again behind a cloud; saw it suddenly in a searchlight, only to lose it for a second time as the pilot was blinded by the brilliance.
The lone carrier beneath the envelope was filled with shooting, bomb-dropping men, just as brave, just as chivalrous, just as compelled to obey hideous orders as themselves. But death did not threaten the pilots only from the dirigible; it came hailing upward at them from their own anti-aircraft guns, or raining downward at them from shrapnel shells that burst above them.
Even if — as was the case more than once — a Zeppelin came crashing to the earth, a swooping funeral pyre, burning to cinders and shards of twisted meta and tortured flesh, men and ship alike the pilot whose triumphant bullet has set the lifting gas afire was in danger of being struck by a flying spark or sucked down into the vortex with victim.
Leafe Robinson it was who brought down the first Zeppelin on British soil; it fell, a blaze of hideous glory, at Cuffley, in Middlesex. Two million people, roused by the raid, cheered so loudly from the ground that Robinson thousands of feet up, heard it in his aeroplane. Once the airship dropped it was not only the heat that kept the throng at a distance, but the seeming sound of machine-guns—cases of cartridges fired by the heat.
Dangers Derided
Robinson flew again, in France, but was forced down behind the enemy lines and was imprisoned. He died —of his wounds and privation—on the last day of 1918.
Leafe Robinson got the V.C., So did Warneford, who brought down a Zeppelin in Belgium. He received the decoration by telegram from King George V. He was killed—ironically enough, on casual flight—within a week.
Those were the men who, under the pioneers, created the science, of aviation. In self-defence they treated it as a game, belittling its dangers, affecting to talk of it as a sport, chattering like people in a Wodehouse book. But beneath the banter and the derision were two things; a genuine chivalry, in which the brotherhood of arms extended almost into the brotherhood of man; and a grim realisation of just what the war in the air meant.
The young pilot, doubtful jest on his lips, drink in his hand at the aerodrome, became transformed, almost transfigured, once he was in the air.
And behind the lines the engineers and designers were working as feverishly as the pilots in the azure field; Fokker and Roe, Sopwith and de Havilland, were conning fallen enemy aeroplanes for new ideas, new developments, to incorporate into the next machine they would build.
When the "War Birds'- folded their wings in 1918, those who survived never in their wildest that in 20 years' time be spending a-quarter of a million pounds a day on aircraft production.
"WAR-BIRDS" PAST AND PRESENT
Our Empires Powerful Aerial Army of To-day Possesses an Efficiency Surpassed Nowhere
THE DEBT WE OWE TO PIONEER FIGHTERS IN GREAT WAR
By GUY RAMSEY (World Copyright Reserved)
BRITAIN'S aerial army to-day numbers 100,000, the pick of the Empire's manhood and a fighting force of an efficiency surpassed nowhere. Before this present year is out, there will be added 75,000 men to the Royal Air Force, its reserves and auxiliaries, and including civil training schools, and university air squadrons, Britain may have before Christmas 250,000 officers and men in all ranks of the Royal Air Force and its ancillary services.
And what of the machines, the fighters, bombers, reconnaissance craft, land and sea types, single-seaters and troop-carriers, that go to make up a modern air force? Sir Kingsley Wood, Secretary of State for Air, in introducing to the House of Commons the largest Air Estimates on record, made a quiet boast which remains unchallenged.
"Best In The World"
"In the types of aircraft now being issued to the bomber and fighter forces, we possess what we believe to be the best in the world," he said. Sir Kingsley cited specially two famous types, the Hawker "Hurricane" and the Supermarine "Spitfire," which, he said, "are capable of shooting down any type of bomber." And in addition to the bombers now going into service, the Minister remarked: We have even better and faster types, with a larger range, shortly coming forward.
While he avoided quoting figures which it is not thought in the nation's interest to disclose, Sir Kingsley lifted a little higher the veil which hides the facts about Britain's tremendous effort in aircraft production. He said that the country was spending £250,000 a day on aircraft production alone, a staggering figure which would rise still further. The increase in monthly output of 150 per cent over that of May last year, scheduled to take place in July this year, had already been reached. The 400 per cent increase on the same basis, promised for achievement by May, 1940, would probably be attained by the end of this year.
Production Speeded Up
The military aircraft industry's labour force has been increased by 400 percent in the last six months. Eleven factories under the "shadow" system are in production. Delivery of aeroplanes from Canada, where substantial contracts for long-range bombers have been placed, will begin in 1940. The mission which recently visited Australia and New Zealand had as its main object the smoothing of the way for arrangements for aircraft supply for the benefit or Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
That is the picture in 1939.
When the British Expeditionary Force marched away to its immortal battles in the summer of 1914, there were in Britain fewer than 150 flying machines capable of standing active service and fewer than 250 pilots capable of flying them.
France was, proportionately to her infinitely larger army, no better off; and even Germany, the most formidable military machine ever to be unleashed on a hapless world (to quote the papers of the day), even Germany had so few aeroplanes and realised their possibilities so little that the High Command did not even know the British were at the front until Von Kluck s Uhlans rode one day into the British outposts!
The British aerial force was divided into two sections: The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The Royal Flying Corps (do you remember the uniform: a high-necked tunic with a curving front, the palest possible cord breeches and a tiny forage cap perched on the side of the head!) had been founded early in 1912, the Royal Naval Air Service a few months later.
Most of the pilots and their observers were children; boys in their late teens and their early twenties. They were, at a stroke, required to face without training service in which seasoned veterans might well have broken.
It was easy either to romanticise or to belittle these young pilots. Novelists have had a shot at both. They have been pictured as insufferably gay and gallant, ludicrously given to flamboyant gestures of fantastic chivalry; they have also been pilloried as a drunken lot of dissipated rakes who found in courage and patriotism the last refuges of scoundrels.
"Appalling Job"
They were neither. They were a body of exceedingly brave young men who hid their courage behind a shield of flippancy. They had an appalling job to do and did it with magnificence.
This is not to say that the Germans and the French did not do equally well. But they had not so much to do. They had better machines; they had a (proportionately speaking) much longer tradition. Their high command was at least glad to use them, whereas the British authorities thoroughly resented having "to tack a lot of blasted birds" on to the fighting forces of the realm.
It is a certain and accepted fact that, by the end of the war the Anglo-French air arm had established so definite a supremacy that barely a German aeroplane dared cross the lines. But the most successful airman of all time in a military sense was Freiherr von Richthofen. He flew a scarlet Albatross machine which gave him the sobriquet of "The Red Knight." He was the central figure of a crack squadron of these aeroplanes, which came to be known in the defensive derision of the Royal Flying Corps as the "Richthofen Circus."
After his death the British, with (fortunately) an unusual lack of generosity to an enemy, sought to belittle his victories. They said he "only 'shot sitting birds,' only challenged when he had superior machines or numbers, only took easy victories."
Famous British Ace
But, whatever his shortcomings (and I subscribe to none of them) the incontrovertible fact remains that Freiherr von Richthofen accounted for no fewer than 80 enemy aeroplanes before, at last, a Canadian pilot sent him crashing to the ground. The man who succeeded him (less, effectively) in the command was a slim young Junker, by name Hermann Goering.
Hard on Richthofen's heels came the British ace, Mannock. He was scarcely the type of Ouida hero from which the Royal Flying Corps was reputed to be recruited. He was the son of a noncommissioned officer. He had weak eyes. He was always nervous, so the story went. But Mannock, before he was killed at Arras, won three separate M.C.s., and three separate D.S.O.s. And the German who brought him to earth avenged, by that lucky, skilful shot, 73 German aeroplanes.
Only just behind Mannock came "Bill" Bishop, with 72 enemy machines to his credit. He was the hero of no fewer than 170 air battles. Long years after, when Bishop had not flown since the peace, he said, as he took over the controls of an aeroplane again: "I was afraid I had forgotten how to fly, but one does not forget. It is not the air that is the enemy, you know; it is the earth."
It was no more than sober truth to call William Bishop an "airman."
Swooping Tactics
There was Ball, too, with 43 victories, who modelled his tactics on those of a hawk'. He always got in close, swooping downward on the enemy. He was the first man to be officially recognised as a British "Ace." On the ground he had only one interest—playing the violin. But in the air, all the music he heard was the singing of the wind between the wires of his aeroplane, the percussion of his own and the enemy's machine-guns, the ground-bass of the engine roar.
There are epics enough to be written of those early war-fliers. Alan Bott (chairman to-day of the Book Club), for example, whose machine was set on fire by an anti-aircraft shell; who crawled along the fuselage to put it out: and whose pilot, finding himself challenged by two enemy machines, drove at them full-tilt, firing all the time, and finally felt the engine fail under his hand. Bott and his pilot glided to earth behind their own lines nearly a mile away amid a hurricano of bullets.
Ball, who defined the average German pilot in the following typical jargon—"The Hun is a good chap with very little guts, doing his job as well as he can'—came to earth one day with his controls shot away. He effected his landing by using his tailfin only; the genius of airmanship.
For France the hero of the war in the air for all time was Guynenier, a Provencal with a face like the young Shelley, and a congenital weakness that had marked him "unfit" to join the army. He brought down 53 enemy aeroplanes before be was killed or, as the legend told, he "flew so high he flew out of sight into heaven."
It was the naked necessity of war that created aeronautical technique, tactics, strategy; new turns, new evolutions, new methods of flying. Was it better to hover a mile or so above and swoop down on the enemy? Or to lurk below him and suddenly fire upward? If you were under fire, was it safer to climb, to drop, or to run? All of our air-fighters to-day profit by the experience of these men who gained their knowledge in a hard school.
Science of Aerobatics
lmmelmann, the great German, was, perhaps, the pilot who contributed most to the rapidly advancing science of aerobatics. It was a British officer who discovered that the steep-banking turn, when the machine's wings are almost at right angles to the earth, was fatal when the sun was shining; it was more effective to turn more slowly and take a shallower sweep to avoid the flash of sun on silver wings which might reveal one to the foe.
The fights—you have seen them on the pictures —were impossible to follow from the ground; the aeroplanes would turn and twist in the air like live things almost as if the pilot endowed the senseless canvas and metal with his own personality.
You have seen a crack tennis player perhaps, and noted how his racquet appears like a hand —as flexible, as subject to automatic control? That is how a star pilot's machine appeared as it swooped and dived and soared to attack and defence in falling leaf and nose-dive, tail-spin and Immelmann turn.
Sometimes, even, a machine would surrender in mid-air and under the eye of the conqueror, circle slowly to earth behind the enemy lines. There were other types of aerial warfare than plain duels between aeroplane and aeroplane; there were duels between airship and aeroplane: _ aeroplanes like a swarm of bees seeking to sting a tarantula to death.
Zeppelin Raids
Over the lines in France, over the open towns of Britain, the long, slender Zeppelins would ride; silver cigars, serene above the clouds suddenly loosing puffs of fatality. At the first warning they had been sighted, up would go the defenders, speeding and streaking through the sky, scanning the empty blue (or indigo — for airships usually came over by night) for the sinister silver shape. They glimpsed it only to lose it again behind a cloud; saw it suddenly in a searchlight, only to lose it for a second time as the pilot was blinded by the brilliance.
The lone carrier beneath the envelope was filled with shooting, bomb-dropping men, just as brave, just as chivalrous, just as compelled to obey hideous orders as themselves. But death did not threaten the pilots only from the dirigible; it came hailing upward at them from their own anti-aircraft guns, or raining downward at them from shrapnel shells that burst above them.
Even if — as was the case more than once — a Zeppelin came crashing to the earth, a swooping funeral pyre, burning to cinders and shards of twisted meta and tortured flesh, men and ship alike the pilot whose triumphant bullet has set the lifting gas afire was in danger of being struck by a flying spark or sucked down into the vortex with victim.
Leafe Robinson it was who brought down the first Zeppelin on British soil; it fell, a blaze of hideous glory, at Cuffley, in Middlesex. Two million people, roused by the raid, cheered so loudly from the ground that Robinson thousands of feet up, heard it in his aeroplane. Once the airship dropped it was not only the heat that kept the throng at a distance, but the seeming sound of machine-guns—cases of cartridges fired by the heat.
Dangers Derided
Robinson flew again, in France, but was forced down behind the enemy lines and was imprisoned. He died —of his wounds and privation—on the last day of 1918.
Leafe Robinson got the V.C., So did Warneford, who brought down a Zeppelin in Belgium. He received the decoration by telegram from King George V. He was killed—ironically enough, on casual flight—within a week.
Those were the men who, under the pioneers, created the science, of aviation. In self-defence they treated it as a game, belittling its dangers, affecting to talk of it as a sport, chattering like people in a Wodehouse book. But beneath the banter and the derision were two things; a genuine chivalry, in which the brotherhood of arms extended almost into the brotherhood of man; and a grim realisation of just what the war in the air meant.
The young pilot, doubtful jest on his lips, drink in his hand at the aerodrome, became transformed, almost transfigured, once he was in the air.
And behind the lines the engineers and designers were working as feverishly as the pilots in the azure field; Fokker and Roe, Sopwith and de Havilland, were conning fallen enemy aeroplanes for new ideas, new developments, to incorporate into the next machine they would build.
When the "War Birds'- folded their wings in 1918, those who survived never in their wildest that in 20 years' time be spending a-quarter of a million pounds a day on aircraft production.
