July 18, 2025 • 47 mins
For the start of our War in the Air Month, we begin with a look at the real story of the 'Twenty Minuters', the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force in the First World War. We look at its history from formation in 1912, its role in the opening months of the conflict, and how the war on the Western Front changed military aviation forever.
A good overview of the Air War from the Imperial War Museum: What impact did the First World War have on aircraft and aerial warfare?
Photographs of some of the aircraft mentioned in the podcast can be found here: Old Front Line website.
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Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:02):
The battles along the Western Front in the First
World War are impossible tounderstand without reference to
the war in the air, the battleabove those trench lines of
France and Flanders.
What was the history of theRoyal Flying Corps and the Royal
Air Force in World War I?
(00:26):
In episode four of the classiccomedy series Blackadder Goes
Forth, Captain Blackadderdecides to join the Royal Flying
Corps, which he has heard iscalled the 20 Minuters.
Thinking this relates to theaverage amount of work they do
each day compared to what he, asan infantry soldier in the
trenches, does, this sounds likea cushy number.
(00:47):
but he quickly discovers insteadfrom Lord Flashard that the
phrase relates to theirprojected life expectancy, much
to his and Lieutenant George'shorror.
Now, Blackadder isn't adocumentary, of course.
It's comedy.
But being good observationalcomedy, and for many, a segue to
(01:07):
an interest in the Great War, ithighlighted an aspect of the
conflict which is easy toforget.
The War Above the Battlefield.
John Giles, who was the founderof the Western Front
Association, always said, whenwe look at the history of the
Great War, we look at whathappened on the battlefield,
often what happened beneath thebattlefield with those
(01:30):
tunnelling operations that wereso widespread, but it's just as
important to look up above thebattlefield.
And that's what we're going todo in this upcoming series.
So with this episode, we beginthis special series, War in the
Air Month, beginning here withan overview of the Royal Flying
(01:52):
Corps and the RAF in the GreatWar, and hopefully learn the
true story of the 20 Minuters.
Now there's a lot we won't havespace to cover in just one
episode as an overview of this,from the other theatres of war
where the flying services wereoperating through to the
balloonatics there was a balloonsection of the Royal Flying
(02:15):
Corps which operated as the eyesof the gunners above the
battlefield to look from basketssuspended beneath balloons to
observe what was happeningacross that static landscape of
the Western Front to the role ofwomen in the RFC and the RAF in
the latter period of the war andmany aspects of the specialist
(02:37):
work that the air services didwe haven't got room for all of
that and that's true with somany subjects of the Great War
there's always something for usto return to and while in some
of the upcoming episodes thework of the Royal Naval Air
Service the RNAS will bementioned because they flew side
by side with the Royal FlyingCorps so often and of course
(02:59):
became part of the RAFthemselves in 1918 those naval
flyers are really a separatesubject subject that again
perhaps we will return to.
But what I hope in this specialseries of episodes which will
include interviews with twosubject experts and a special
(03:19):
Q&A and if you've got any RFC,RAF questions that you've always
wanted answered get those in andI'm going to pick the best four
for a special RFC RAF Q&Aepisode and then we'll end with
an overview of what we can findof the flying services on that
landscape of the First World Waron the Western Front today and
(03:42):
hopefully all of this will giveus a wider understanding of this
aspect, this layer of Great Warhistory.
So where to begin?
The best place to start is withthe approach to the Great War
(04:03):
and the formalisation of aerialservices as aviation technology
changed in that Edwardianperiod.
The Royal Flying Corps wasformed under a Royal Warrant in
April of 1912, replacing earlieraerial units like the Air
Battalion of the Royal Engineersand the Royal Engineers' use of
(04:25):
balloons.
They were the kind of pioneers,really, of British military
aviation.
But it was clear that aviationwas changing, developing, and
there had to be a specialistbranch to deal with this and to
see how it fitted into the wideraspect of warfare at that time.
The Royal Flying Corps was partof the Army, so not an air force
(04:49):
at this stage, and was managedand funded by the War Office.
The Admiralty had their own airservice, which was for use by
the Royal Navy.
That's the Royal Naval AirService.
And what it meant from theperspective of the RFC is that
officers and men who served init were soldiers, not airmen.
(05:10):
They might have seen themselvesas airmen, but technically on
paper they were soldiers of thearmy governed by the war office.
And they had army ranks becauseair force ranks would not exist
until after the Great War.
The whole establishment ofBritish Air Services was in
response to the development ofmanned flight following the
(05:32):
Wright brothers' first mannedflight in a heavier-than-air
powered aircraft in 1903 andthen Bleriot's first flight
across the English Channel in1909.
This kind of technology, whichto the generation then would
have felt kind of space-agetechnology in so many different
ways, was bringing new aspectsto civilian life and with it of
(05:54):
course potentially new aspectsto the way warfare would be
conducted and Italy became thefirst nation in the world to use
aircraft when they flew planesin Libya and in the
Italian-Turkish conflict of 1911to 1912 when planes were used to
(06:15):
bomb targets not alwayssuccessfully but it was a
turning point in the way thataircraft had now become weapons
of War.
Aircraft were also later used inthe Balkan Wars just before the
Great War and many nations inthat period were essentially
playing a kind of catch-up toensure that they had some kind
(06:37):
of air forces and that includedBritain.
So as such, the Royal FlyingCorps developed during this
period.
It recruited pilots andtechnical personnel who had the
required skill to maintain theaircraft.
And that ground crew, thatessential ground crew that would
keep planes in the air, alwaysreally formed the bulk of those
(07:01):
who served in the Royal FlyingCorps and then, latterly, the
RAF.
Because while piloting was theglamorous side of the Royal
Flying Corps, no pilot couldtake an aircraft into the sky
unless the ground crew hadworked on it fueled it
maintained it armed it and allthe other things that will be
required as the war went on Acentral flying school, the CFS,
(07:24):
was established at Uphaven onSalisbury Plain, and that opened
in June 1912, a couple of monthsafter the Royal Flying Corps was
formed, and it was set up totrain all pilots who had
obtained licences to flyaircraft.
You had to get a civilianlicence to get permission to fly
an aircraft, and those men wenton to have their formal training
(07:48):
at Uphaven.
By August 1914, the Royal FlyingCorps had 63 aircraft, around
150 pilots and over 1,000personnel.
So already you can see that theground crew massively outweigh
those who were going to get inaircraft and fly up over any
potential battlefield.
The aircraft that the RFC hadwere all monoplanes or biplanes,
(08:12):
none were armed, and most wereB-2 aircraft, which were
biplanes with a pilot andobserver and could fly to
something like 10,000 feet.
The vast majority of theaircraft in the first squadrons
of the Royal Flying Corps werethese BE-2s, but they also had
other models of planes, like theFrench Farman, for example.
(08:33):
And each aircraft had its owncharacteristics, and training on
them could often be complex anddifficult.
and dangerous.
There were many accidents.
There were no flight simulators.
The men had to get in theaircraft and take off, and often
taking off was the easier bit.
It was the landing bit that wasquite difficult.
And that whole issue of trainingpilots in this way without
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proper simulators meant thatthroughout the conflict that
would come, many, many pilotsand observers were killed and
injured during that trainingperiod before they'd even got to
a battlefield.
At this stage in the approach towar, as the outbreak of war
came, aircraft were perhaps seenas a novelty by the commanders
(09:18):
in the forming BritishExpeditionary Force, and their
true value, I think, was yet tobe realised by most soldiers and
civilians alike.
But the war, of course.
would change all of that.
Following the outbreak of war inAugust 1914, the BEF, the
British Expeditionary Force, wasmobilised and the first three
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squadrons of the Royal FlyingCorps, which would be part of
its order of battle, began toprepare to cross to France.
And the first pilot to take offfrom Britain and land in France
was the 23-year-old LieutenantHubert Dunstaville Harvey Kelly.
Born in Tameth, Devon, the sonof an Indian Army Colonel and
from an Anglo-Irish familyHarvey Kelly was commissioned in
(10:02):
the Royal Irish Regiment in 1910and was one of those who
volunteered to transfer andtrain as a pilot in the RFC in
1913.
As part of No.
2 Squadron in 1914, he flew hisBE-2A from Scotland to Kent via
Yorkshire, and then on the 13thof August did a nearly two-hour
(10:22):
flight to AMIA, just beating hiscommanding officer, Major
Charles Burke, and sending hisaircraft down on a grass
airfield at AMIA, the first RFCplane to land on French soil.
And for Harvey Kelly, this wasthe beginning of a long war in
the air, which would sadly endin tragedy with his death at
Arras in 1917 while flying withthe famous number 56 squadron.
(10:47):
The role of the Royal FlyingCorps in this early phase of the
conflict was simple really.
It was reconnaissance.
It was to fly up above thebattlefield, spot enemy troop
movements and then report back.
The front was fluid.
This was a war of movement.
And so it wasn't clear where theenemy might be, what direction
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he was coming.
And it was clear that aircrafthad aptitude here to be able to
be used to find this kind ofinformation out.
And it was in thisreconnaissance role in the lead
up to the first clash of Britishtroops at the Battle of Mons in
August 1914 that the firstcasualties in the air were
(11:31):
suffered.
The first aircrew to becomefatal casualties in the Great
War were Lieutenant VincentWaterfall and Lieutenant Charles
George Goodwin Bailey.
They were both of No.
5 Squadron Royal Flying Corpswho were flying an Avro 504 when
they were shot down by groundfire on 22nd August 1914, the
(11:51):
day before the Battle of Mons.
Waterfall was from Grimsby buthad moved to Burgess Hill in
Sussex and was educated atBrighton College.
He'd been commissioned initiallyin the East Yorkshire Regiment
and then qualified as a pilot in1913.
Bailey was a South African whowas a great nephew of Gordon of
Khartoum and he was commissionedinto the Royal Engineers and
(12:14):
transferred to the Royal FlyingCorps as an observer.
And these two lads, the firstair crew to become fatal
casualties over the battlefieldare buried side by side today at
Tornay communal cemetery inBelgium.
At Mons, aircraft were used andwere able to warn of the
approach of German forces.
(12:35):
But how did this kind of workoperate without radios?
Because there were no radio setsin these aircraft.
The kind of radio sets thatexisted in 1914 were massive and
were not portable in any kind ofway.
And they only transmitted Morse,not voice.
These aircraft didn't have them.
anyway so how did they do itwell they would fly over an area
(12:57):
spot the movement of troops markthat onto a map and some of
these men had message pads thatwere strapped to their knee and
this was a wooden device with acompass on it and paper on two
rollers they could make notes ordraw a map write a message and
they had message pods in theaircraft cockpit as well so they
(13:17):
could make a map write out amessage give the indication of
troop movements or locations putthat in a message message pod
and then fly to where they knewthere was some kind of British
headquarters and then drop thatonto the headquarters and they
would pick it up.
Now this is fairly primitive asyou can imagine and there was a
(13:38):
lot of movement of troops andwhile headquarters might be at
one location on one day it mightnot be there in the next so this
is far from perfect and this wasan aspect of ground air and air
to ground cooperation that wouldhave to be developed as the war
went along, until there were, bythe end of the conflict, radio
(13:58):
sets that could be put into thecockpits of aircraft, but again,
to only transmit morse andreceive morse, not voice.
The Germans were, of course,using aircraft in exactly the
same kind of way, and also ourFrench allies.
They were rapidly on all partsof the battlefield, becoming the
eyes of the army above thatbattlefield, but at this stage
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could not really clash in theskies themselves as they were
not equipped with weapons of anykind.
Having said that, pilots andaircrew began to take weapons up
with them to tackle theincreasing number of aircraft
they encountered in the skies,even in 1914.
From pistols to carbines, I'veread about shotguns, and even
(14:43):
bricks, where pilots took abrick up, flew over an enemy
aircraft and tried to chuck thebrick out the side to put a hole
in the wingspan or knock thepilot out.
I mean, these are all veryprimitive methods that were used
in this early phase of the fightbut the real change in the use
of aircraft came with a changein warfare on the western front
(15:06):
Everybody, as we often say onthis podcast, everybody had gone
to war prepared for war in 1914,but not the kind of war that the
Great War would rapidly turninto, this vast static war where
there were hundreds of miles oftrenches across Belgium and
France.
(15:27):
But the static war suddenly gavea new dimension to the use of
aircraft because they could nowbe used not just as a spot for
the army, spot for the guns spotfor whoever required that kind
of information even with thoselimited communications and
observe they could also takephotographs cameras could be
(15:48):
taken up with the aircraft andthe cameras could be used to
capture intelligence informationabout those battlefield
positions when the war wasmobile that wasn't really
practical and one photographtaken in the morning could
easily be out of date bylunchtime but on a static front
where both sides were digging inand building these vast trench
(16:12):
networks the air photographscould really chart the
development of that and then beused by headquarters to decide
how they could be attacked orovercome and then later by
artillery to accurately bombardthem and harass the enemy in
building those positions and airphotos led to maps they were
(16:33):
used in the whole development ofmapping on the battlefield which
was fairly primitive when thewar began but the ability to
send up aircraft to take airphotos to allow military
cartographers to work accuratelyon maps and produce trench maps
became a massive game changerand was a really important part
(16:53):
of the whole development of theuse of aircraft by the military
in the first world war it wasn'tjust the royal flying corps
doing this the germans and thefrench air forces they were
doing exactly the same so atthis stage it's still a
reconnaissance role the aircraftare going up to spot what's
happening take these airphotographs relay intelligence
(17:14):
back to headquarters allow mapsto be created but there's no air
combat.
Tactical bombing however didbecome a thing during this
period where BE-2Cs were adaptedto carry fairly modest bombs and
positions could be targeted onand off the battlefield so they
(17:35):
could fly over a trench systemand drop a bomb or fly a bit
further behind enemy lines to anammunition dump or bridges and
try and bomb those and in manycases bombs were not dropped
from the aircraft wings or fromunderneath the aircraft they
were dropped out of the side ofthe aircraft so they were kept
in the cockpit and then heavedover the side and let go so you
(17:57):
can see already this isn'tparticularly accurate and it was
It wasn't just bombs that theydropped as well.
There were things calledflechettes, which were kind of
aerial darts, and there's allkinds of different types of
these, and you see them beingdiscussed quite frequently in
newspapers and magazines of thatearly war period.
(18:20):
And while flechettes were notbanned under the rules of
warfare, they were fairlycontroversial.
The use of them wascontroversial because you could
drop a whole bag of these aerialdarts out of the side of an
aircraft and they would cascadedown into a trench below and you
can imagine a steel aerial dartwith a very fine point to it
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coming down at a rapid rate ofknots straight onto the head of
a soldier standing in thattrench before helmets became a
thing and even with helmets Idon't think they would withstand
a flechette I won't describe thekind of gory outcome of that but
it wasn't good so flechettesalthough they were used I don't
think they were used as often asthe press were kind of
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indicating because a wholeconstant stream of them would
have to be produced and I thinkthey had more of a shock effect
than actual military value andalso at the same time to counter
the use of zeppelins thesemassive dirigibles that the
Germans were using to fly acrossand bomb positions behind the
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battlefield even fly across toBritain resulting in the first
blitz where civilians became asmuch a part of a front line, a
new front line, as thoseactually on the battlefield on
the Western Front.
So to counter the use of thesezeppelins, the Royal Flying
Corps began to fly longermissions across northern France
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and Belgium to try and take outtheir points of departure.
But long-range bombing was stillrelatively new for fixed-wing
aircraft and not very accurate,something that would develop
over the period of the FirstWorld War resulting in much
bigger bombers nothing on thescale of World War II but
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bombers of that period thatcould fly well into enemy
territory and bomb key targets.
But with the increase in airtraffic over the battlefield
essentially being used by bothsides to spy on each other, the
necessity to snuff out thoseeyes over the trenches became
more and more pressing.
Anti-aircraft artillery wasincreasingly used by both sides
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to bombard the sky with shellswhich would either rip apart the
aircraft with shrapnel or killthe pilots and observers.
And on the British side of thebattlefield, the Royal Garrison
Artillery formed anti-aircraftunits equipped with 13-pounder
guns which could fire shells upto 19,000 feet for example.
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But the real key to counteringenemy aircraft with combat in
the air was taking weapons upand that became more and more
commonplace with pilots andaircrew frustrated at seeing so
many enemy aircraft and notbeing able to do something about
it.
And Lieutenant John FrederickLascelles of the Rifle Brigade
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attached to the Royal FlyingCorps became the first man to
shoot down an enemy aircraftwith a rifle in mid-air.
Lascelles was born in Sussex in1895.
He was educated at WinchesterCollege, commissioned in the
Rifle Brigade in the summer of1914 and then transferred to the
Royal Flying Corps as anobserver and flew in a BE-2C
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with No.
4 Squadron based at Santa Maria.
The incident of him shootingdown an enemy aircraft happened
on 17 July 1915 when he took 24shots at a German aircrew
shooting the pilot in the headand forcing the aircraft to
crash for which he was awardedthe military cross.
Lascelles was shot down himselfover the Somme and killed in
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July of 1915 and is buried atthe communal cemetery at Beauval
which has quite a lot of aircrewin it.
His short war lasted just a fewmonths and he was only 19.
Eventually machine guns wereadded to aircraft.
That was the next obvious step.
But these had problems.
If you just mount a machine gunon the forward part of the
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aircraft in front of the pilot,you've got a propeller there
that moves the aircraft forward.
And if you open fire with yourmachine gun, you're going to
scythe that propeller off, andthe aircraft is going to crash.
If you have a rearward firingmachine gun, perhaps where the
observer is, he could getcarried away, and in following
an aircraft across the sky, hecould scythe off the back of the
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tailplane of the aircraft.
So there were problems in usingautomatic weapons on aircraft in
that way, but it was clear thatthey would really be, again, the
game changer that would enableaircraft to successfully shoot
down other aircraft in the skyBut as aircraft types changed
the Royal Flying Corps investeda lot in planes like the Vickers
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FB-5 Gunbus which had theobserver in a forward cockpit
with a machine gun so they couldfire straight out the front of
the aircraft and fire from leftto right, up and down and not
interfere with the actualaircraft itself or do potential
damage to it, focus that machinegun fire and try to shoot down
the enemy.
(23:27):
And other twin winged aircraftcould also have of a machine
gun, usually a Lewis gun,mounted on the upper wing of the
aircraft so it could fire overthe propeller at targets beyond
and not do any damage to theaircraft itself.
But this had all kinds ofproblems in changing the
magazine of the Lewis gun, forexample, and also accurately
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firing the weapon.
These things were sighted up ina fairly basic way.
And again, that use of weapons,using them so they could fire
accurately was all part ofaircraft development these were
perhaps easy solutions to acomplex problem but the enemy
the germans were looking formore complex outcomes and as
(24:13):
they gradually got the upperhand in aircraft technology and
development with the fokker e1for example becoming the first
aircraft with a synchronizedmachine gun mounted in it that
gave them an edge an upper handin those skies above the
battlefield because asynchronized machine gun could
be fit to the forward part ofthe aircraft and it worked in
(24:34):
cooperation with the turn of thepropeller so that the bullets
passed either side of thepropeller blades and not did
damage to the propeller itself.
But the Royal Flying Corpseventually got there themselves
with synchronised machine gunsand they brought in the Sopwith
1.5 strutter for example thathad a synchronised machine gun
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in 1915-16 and over the nextyear or so the use and
development of these weaponscontinued creating the first
proper fighter planes.
And if we kind of look at that1916 period, so about halfway
through the Great War, from aGerman and a British
perspective, those two airforces clashing in the skies
(25:16):
above the Western Front, theGermans were using the Fokker E3
that had a Spandau machine gunon it.
This was that first properlysuccessful synchronised fighter
plane, the synchronised machinegun.
The British had the aircraft DH2that had a Lewis gun on it, it
was a pusher design initially totry and counter the Fokker
(25:37):
threat in the skies above Franceand Flanders they also brought
in that Sopwith 1.5 strutterthat had one pair of fixed
forward firing machine guns thatwere synchronised with the
propeller and also a machine gunin the observers cockpit as well
and the FE2B with one or twoLewis guns was a two seater
(25:59):
fighter reconnaissance aircraftthat was a bit outdated by that
stage, but this was the kind ofcommon aircraft used in that
mid-period of the war.
And bigger, faster, betteraircraft would be developed as
the conflict moved forward.
And with this development offighter planes and the idea of
(26:19):
fighter pilots, a new phase ofaerial warfare came in.
This was the time of the Aces,or the so-called Knights of the
Air.
With the ability to now fightbattles in the air, with fighter
(26:41):
aircraft sent up to specificallytarget aircraft being used for
reconnaissance or aerialphotography and shoot them down,
and aircraft then beingdispatched to bring down those
fighter aircraft to protect thespotter planes, the whole war in
the air changed completely atthis stage of the conflict.
And this became a period of theKnights of the Air, as the press
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reports often called them.
Men, pilots, jousting just likeknights of old, in the skies
above the Western Front.
There was this idea that therewas some kind of chivalry
amongst the air crews who flew.
that it was a cleaner, perhapsmore civilised form of warfare
in what was rapidly becoming atotal war with gas and
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flamethrowers, chemical warfareand mass artillery bombardments.
It was believed that pilotsrespected each other, signalled
to each other in the air duringand after combat, saluted each
other even and dropped messagesof condolence when an enemy
pilot was killed.
And while some of this of coursedid happen, it was in some ways
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a clever foil on the home frontto the brutality of aerial
warfare, where men could dropfrom thousands of feet on fire
and die horribly, and wherepilots could pursue an enemy
until he was riddled withbullets or smashed to pieces on
the ground.
Was there really any honour inan industrialised war, a total
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war, that the Great War was by1916?
With this concept of knights onboth sides came the development
of the concept of aces, airaces, some of the most skilful
and in many ways deadliestpilots flying over the
battlefield.
In Britain, this was arguablyled initially by Albert Bull, a
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teenage pilot from Nottinghamwho'd achieved 44 victories and
was decorated numerous timesuntil he was shot down in May
1917, crashing behind the Germanlines and being awarded a
posthumous Victoria Cross.
He was a typical lone wolfpilot, preferring to fight alone
in those duels over thebattlefields and being intensely
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religious with strong Christianbeliefs, it began to bother him.
in the way that he could inflictsuch heavy losses in the air on
his German counterparts and thestrain I think generally on
pilots during this period ofduels above the battlefield
pilots fighting pilots and thenseeing the terrible outcome when
(29:15):
an aircraft was shot down two ofthe veterans that I interviewed
in the 1980s and 90s had beenpilots one in the RFC and one in
the RAF and they'd both seenfriends shot down in flames over
the battlefields one of themcarried a pistol in his cockpit
to shoot himself if his aircraftever caught fire and the other
one carried a cyanide capsule incase the same thing happened to
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him.
And then later, this mantle ofair race that was championed by
Albert Ball was also picked upby Canadian Billy Bishop, who
had a staggering 72 victoriesand was also awarded the
Victoria Cross.
And then James McCudden with 57victories and Mick Mannock with
at least 61.
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The latter two collected justabout every medal going, many
with bars and both of them theVictoria Cross, which was a
common trait with these aces,how much they were deceptive.
and then were given really highprofiles in the press to set
this kind of example for othermen to perhaps follow into the
Royal Flying Corps and also toshow I guess from a propaganda
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point of view how well Britainwas doing in that air war over
the battlefield.
The other trait that really wascommonplace amongst them all
with just a few exceptions wasnot surviving the war.
The idea as we mentioned at theThat wasn't ever really true.
Life expectancy was short andpilots like Mannock and McCudden
(30:44):
did have quite long wars in manyrespects but so many of them did
not survive the Great War.
Billy Bishop being one of themore unusual ones to survive in
that list of great pilots in theFirst World War.
On the German side stories oftheir aces also dominated the
popular press of both nations,both on the British and the
(31:07):
German side with Manfred vonRichthofen and his 80 confirmed
victories and legendary statusflying that red Fokker triplane
through to pilots like MaxImmelmann the Eagle of Lille who
may have had fewer victoriesthan Richthofen but developed
for example the Immelmann Turnan aviation manoeuvre still in
(31:28):
use today both of them died inthe Great War along with many
other German aces but noteveryone was an ace So who were
the pilots and aircrew of theRoyal Flying Corps in the Great
War?
In the early phase of the war,aircrew came from a middle and
upper class kind of background.
(31:48):
And that was true of allofficers of the British Army at
that time because the RFC, youremember, was part of the Army.
And to get a commission in theArmy, when you applied, you were
asked what school you'dattended.
And there was a list of approvedschools.
Now, if you'd gone to Eton orWinchester or Harrow, schools
like that, then that's the kindof school that they were looking
(32:11):
for.
State schools were not on thatlist so it meant that the kind
of men that became pilots inthat early phase of the history
of the Royal Flying Corpsparticularly in that period from
its formation in 1912 through tothe outbreak of war in 1914 came
from a fairly narrow backgroundbut as the war went on and
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changed this also changed thisbackground of the pilots changed
with many working class menfinding a route to flight and
flying men like McManacher wementioned before a working class
lad who'd been a telephoneengineer on the outbreak of war
he worked his way through tobecoming a pilot and with the
change in the army acts in 1917allowing men from any background
(32:56):
any schooling to be commissionedthat brought in a lot of pilots
as well there was also a changein the way that pilots did not
have to be officers to actuallyfly aircraft as well so
non-commissioned officers NCOscould fly aircraft and that
allowed men from humblebackgrounds to fly including
Britain's first black pilotWilliam Robinson Clarke who was
(33:19):
from the West Indies.
He paid to come to Britain toserve initially as ground crew
in the Royal Flying Corps butbecause of his technical
knowledge and ability that gothim into the pilot seat and
enabled him to fly and he flewaircraft with Royal Flying Corps
over Ypres in 1917 until hecrashed and injured himself and
he couldn't fly again.
(33:40):
I've told a bit of his story inan episode that we did on black
soldiers in the British Army inan earlier podcast you can go
back and find out more about himthere but aside from black
pilots from the West Indiesthere were also Indian pilots
like Indra Lal Roy DFC who wasan ace with 10 victories until
he was killed in 1918 andeventually men from every corner
(34:03):
of Britain and the BritishEmpire would become pilots or
observers in the Royal FlyingCorps and the RAF in that latter
phase of the First World War.
But we have to ask, I guess,considering this period of the
Knights of the Air, was itreally truly representative of
the Royal Flying Corps andeventually the RAF?
(34:24):
Not everyone was an ace.
Not everyone managed to shootdown a large number of German
aircraft.
For some pilots and observers,their role was to act in that
reconnaissance role, to takephotographs, and that became
increasingly, as the war wenton, more and more important, and
the use of air photographsbecame so commonplace that
(34:45):
gunner officers on the ground,for example, could commission a
flight from the Royal FlyingCorps to go out and photograph a
trench system or a series ofbunkers bring those air photos
back get them developed, deliverthem to the gunners who would
then work on their fire planbased around those air
photographs, carry out theirfire plan, drop shells onto the
(35:07):
targets, and then commissionanother flight of RFC planes to
go over and photograph it to seewhat damage had been done.
So while there were theseknights jousting in the skies,
from Mick Manor to McCudden toAlbert Ball to Billy Bishop and
so many others, they were thekind of high-profile pilots.
(35:28):
There were many others who justdid their bit.
often their war in the air wasshort not necessarily because
they were shot down and killedbut because they crashed on
landing injured themselves whileflying or because of the
psychological pressures offlying could end up being
transferred out of a squadronwith severe psychological issues
(35:50):
so while in that kind of midperiod of the war the aces the
knights of the air dominated thestory the history of the royal
flying corps that was onlyreally part of the story.
And as the war progressed to itsfinal phase, things would change
again.
Beyond that period of theKnights of the Air, as modern
(36:11):
warfare on the ground changed,the role of the air forces
changed with it.
Aerial photography remaineddominant, a dominant, dominant
part of their task over thebattlefield.
Not just fighting enemyaircraft, not just bombing
targets, but taking air photosbecause it was so important and
that battlefield intelligencewas so important.
(36:35):
Air combat of course continued,but the focus on aces lessened
as the war went on.
Perhaps the old idea of it beingchivalrous began to fade when
they looked at the casualtyrates of units of the Royal
Flying Corps, for example.
And that was especially trueduring bloody April in 1917, the
(36:59):
nearest in reality that theRoyal Flying Corps got to this
concept from Blackadder of 20Minuters.
That was a period when GermanGerman aviation had really got
the advantage on the RoyalFlying Corps, the upper hand,
and German pilots were able toinflict really a disaster on
British and Commonwealthaircrew.
In April 1917, the RFC lost 245aircraft of all types and over
(37:23):
200 aircrew were killed, woundedor taken prisoner.
The average life expectancy of anew Royal Flying Corps pilot
during this month, April 1917,was just less than three weeks,
sometimes as little as five to11 days when they were on the
front line.
And it's worth mentioning, Ithink here, that amongst those
(37:45):
casualty rates were men who wereprisoners of war that were
captured when their aircraftcrashed.
We tend to think with aircraftlosses that when an aircraft
came down, the men were killedor badly injured, perhaps
terribly burnt, but many wereable to survive an aircraft
landing, crash landing, behindthe battlefield, behind the
(38:05):
German front lines, but ended upas prisoners of war.
And a lot of these pilots wentoff to PO camps and as officers
had a very different experienceto the men as an ordinary
soldier another rank if you werecaptured you could be used by
the Germans for all kind oflabor tasks working in salt
mines and coal mines andfactories and any kind of dirty
(38:28):
work that the Germans requiredPOWs were used for that officers
were treated differently by theGermans were often kept in
separate camps or separate partsof a camp and it was considered
an officer's duty as a prisonerof war was to try and escape and
there were many escape storiesthat came out of the great war
(38:49):
some of them penned by men whohad flown above the trenches as
part of the rfc or raf comingback to the battlefield in 1917
this is a period when you lookat infantry war diaries you see
a lot more mention of ground toair and air to ground
cooperation where battalions onthe ground lay out coloured
(39:12):
markers to indicate that theyhad advanced so far into an
enemy position and that the 7thBuffs were here or the 11th
Sussex were there and that theaircraft could then see this and
relay that information back toheadquarters and also the Royal
Flying Corps began to spot farmore commonly for the gunners by
(39:36):
flying over the battlefieldlooking for enemy artillery
concentrations and then relayingthat information back to the
gunners so they could fire ontothose and as we mentioned while
at the beginning of the war itwasn't possible to put radio
sets into the cockpits ofaircraft by the latter stage of
the conflict that was possibleand they could communicate
(40:00):
better with the men on theground as well largely with
artillery units I don't thinkthere were too many if any
occasions in which aircraftcommunicated with infantry on
the ground portable radio setsjust didn't really exist in
terms of an infantry element by1918 it was decided to combine
(40:22):
the air forces into oneorganization and i think this
reflects the changing nature ofthe use of aircraft the
importance of aircraft and themove away from this idea of just
aces and knights of the air intothe air force becoming part of a
wider modern armed force So onthe 1st of April 1918 the Royal
(40:44):
Flying Corps and the Royal NavalAir Service were combined to
become the Royal Air Force and anew organisation which still
exists today, the RAF, wasformed.
It was still run as a militaryand army style unit so again
this was before the period ofAir Force ranks and its
(41:06):
principal purpose was now towork as one of those air forces
elements on the battlefield.
I've often described it like anorchestra of bringing all these
parts together.
Infantry with tanks, withmortars and artillery, and also
aircraft in the sky as well.
(41:26):
And on the Western Front, bombersquadrons now flew side by side
with fighters.
The RAF developed in 1918 theability to drop supplies to men
on the ground, for example.
Now, there was no World War Iequipment of a Dakota aircraft
or anything like that but forexample in the Battle of Le
Hamel in July 1918 on the Sommethe RAF flew in close support of
(41:50):
the Australian troops on theground who advanced over quite
some distance from the outskirtsof Corby up onto the high ground
around Le Hamel and one of theproblems in advances on the
ground was that the men couldn'tcarry as much ammunition as they
required they would run out ofammo having captured a position
very quickly and needed aresupply so aircraft took
(42:15):
special crates with small armsammunition in it that could be
thrown over the side of theaircraft crash and break up but
the packaging would absorb thedamage caused by the impact when
it hit the ground and it meantthey could fly up and drop ammo
onto some of the objectives sowhen the diggers got there they
had small arms ammunition fortheir rifles and their Lewis
(42:36):
guns to continue with theirbattle and that was a really big
game changer.
It wasn't without risk becausequite a few RAF pilots were shot
down flying so low over theGerman positions that they were
vulnerable to ground fire butthat use of aircraft as a method
of resupply again was anotherelement that changed air warfare
(43:00):
forever and in some of those1918 battles there was a role
that the RAF could perform thatwas far less glamorous but still
very important and that was tosend whole squadrons up into the
air to fly over the battlefieldwith droning engine noise to
drown out the noise of tanks onthe ground approaching the
(43:25):
battlefield and this was putinto good effect at amiens for
example in august 1918 so Themen who fought those battles in
the air had gone from thisperiod of being unarmed
observers through to knightsjousting in the skies, through
to being the means by which theycould drown out the noise of new
(43:45):
battlefield weapons and allowthem to approach that
battlefield and defeat theenemy.
A lot less glamorous, but wasquite literally the direction of
travel of military aviation inthe 20th century.
When the war ended...
while the life expectancy of menin the Royal Flying Corps and
the Royal Air Force had been alot more than 20 minutes.
(44:07):
Nevertheless, the casualties hadbeen immense, with thousands of
pilots and observers killed andwounded and taken prisoner just
on the Western Front alone, andof them, almost a thousand with
no known grave.
That separate section of theArras Memorial, the Flying
Services Memorial, which liststhe pilots of the Royal Flying
(44:30):
Corps of the Royal Naval AirService and then latterly the
RAF and also men from otherCommonwealth nations who were
killed, shot down over thebattlefield and have no known
grave.
It makes us reflect I think whenwe see that memorial on the
realities of air warfare in theGreat War.
(44:50):
Those very early designs ofquite fragile aircraft with
humans inside and when they camedown at a rapid rate of knots
often on fire perhaps it's notsurprising that so many pilots
do not have a known grave.
And that memorial really...
Chronicles the history of theRFC and the RAF in the Great War
(45:13):
from Major Lano Hawker who wasthe first pilot to get a
Victoria Cross for shooting downan enemy aircraft over Ypres in
1915 through to Mick Mannock,that great fighter pilot, that
great ace who was killed withthe RAF in the summer of 1918
and we'll return to his storylater on in this series of Air
(45:36):
War Podcasts.
The development of aircraft andtheir use in the Great War was
all part of the changing natureof warfare seen by both sides in
that conflict.
But the war in the air is soeasy to ignore.
It's easy to concentrate on thetrenches and the tanks and the
(45:56):
bunkers and the barbed wire andthe gas and everything else.
But it's impossible tounderstand all of that without
knowledge of what was happeningabove it.
And just as the planes flown bythose masters of the air in the
Great War once cast long shadowsacross the smashed landscapes
(46:18):
and crenellated trench lines ofnorthern France and Flanders
more than a century ago, todaytheir exploits and achievements
as pioneers of a new way ofwarfare continue to cast shadows
across that landscape.
of the Old Front Line.
(46:55):
Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
find lots of podcast extras andphotographs and links to books
that are mentioned in thepodcast.
And if you feel like supportingus, you can go to our Patreon
page, patreon.com slasholdfrontline or support us on
Buy Me A Coffee atbuymeacoffee.com slash
(47:16):
oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsite.
Thanks for listening and we'llsee you again soon.
The battles along the Western Front in the First
World War are impossible tounderstand without reference to
the war in the air, the battleabove those trench lines of
France and Flanders.
What was the history of theRoyal Flying Corps and the Royal
Air Force in World War I?
(00:26):
In episode four of the classiccomedy series Blackadder Goes
Forth, Captain Blackadderdecides to join the Royal Flying
Corps, which he has heard iscalled the 20 Minuters.
Thinking this relates to theaverage amount of work they do
each day compared to what he, asan infantry soldier in the
trenches, does, this sounds likea cushy number.
(00:47):
but he quickly discovers insteadfrom Lord Flashard that the
phrase relates to theirprojected life expectancy, much
to his and Lieutenant George'shorror.
Now, Blackadder isn't adocumentary, of course.
It's comedy.
But being good observationalcomedy, and for many, a segue to
(01:07):
an interest in the Great War, ithighlighted an aspect of the
conflict which is easy toforget.
The War Above the Battlefield.
John Giles, who was the founderof the Western Front
Association, always said, whenwe look at the history of the
Great War, we look at whathappened on the battlefield,
often what happened beneath thebattlefield with those
(01:30):
tunnelling operations that wereso widespread, but it's just as
important to look up above thebattlefield.
And that's what we're going todo in this upcoming series.
So with this episode, we beginthis special series, War in the
Air Month, beginning here withan overview of the Royal Flying
(01:52):
Corps and the RAF in the GreatWar, and hopefully learn the
true story of the 20 Minuters.
Now there's a lot we won't havespace to cover in just one
episode as an overview of this,from the other theatres of war
where the flying services wereoperating through to the
balloonatics there was a balloonsection of the Royal Flying
(02:15):
Corps which operated as the eyesof the gunners above the
battlefield to look from basketssuspended beneath balloons to
observe what was happeningacross that static landscape of
the Western Front to the role ofwomen in the RFC and the RAF in
the latter period of the war andmany aspects of the specialist
(02:37):
work that the air services didwe haven't got room for all of
that and that's true with somany subjects of the Great War
there's always something for usto return to and while in some
of the upcoming episodes thework of the Royal Naval Air
Service the RNAS will bementioned because they flew side
by side with the Royal FlyingCorps so often and of course
(02:59):
became part of the RAFthemselves in 1918 those naval
flyers are really a separatesubject subject that again
perhaps we will return to.
But what I hope in this specialseries of episodes which will
include interviews with twosubject experts and a special
(03:19):
Q&A and if you've got any RFC,RAF questions that you've always
wanted answered get those in andI'm going to pick the best four
for a special RFC RAF Q&Aepisode and then we'll end with
an overview of what we can findof the flying services on that
landscape of the First World Waron the Western Front today and
(03:42):
hopefully all of this will giveus a wider understanding of this
aspect, this layer of Great Warhistory.
So where to begin?
The best place to start is withthe approach to the Great War
(04:03):
and the formalisation of aerialservices as aviation technology
changed in that Edwardianperiod.
The Royal Flying Corps wasformed under a Royal Warrant in
April of 1912, replacing earlieraerial units like the Air
Battalion of the Royal Engineersand the Royal Engineers' use of
(04:25):
balloons.
They were the kind of pioneers,really, of British military
aviation.
But it was clear that aviationwas changing, developing, and
there had to be a specialistbranch to deal with this and to
see how it fitted into the wideraspect of warfare at that time.
The Royal Flying Corps was partof the Army, so not an air force
(04:49):
at this stage, and was managedand funded by the War Office.
The Admiralty had their own airservice, which was for use by
the Royal Navy.
That's the Royal Naval AirService.
And what it meant from theperspective of the RFC is that
officers and men who served init were soldiers, not airmen.
(05:10):
They might have seen themselvesas airmen, but technically on
paper they were soldiers of thearmy governed by the war office.
And they had army ranks becauseair force ranks would not exist
until after the Great War.
The whole establishment ofBritish Air Services was in
response to the development ofmanned flight following the
(05:32):
Wright brothers' first mannedflight in a heavier-than-air
powered aircraft in 1903 andthen Bleriot's first flight
across the English Channel in1909.
This kind of technology, whichto the generation then would
have felt kind of space-agetechnology in so many different
ways, was bringing new aspectsto civilian life and with it of
(05:54):
course potentially new aspectsto the way warfare would be
conducted and Italy became thefirst nation in the world to use
aircraft when they flew planesin Libya and in the
Italian-Turkish conflict of 1911to 1912 when planes were used to
(06:15):
bomb targets not alwayssuccessfully but it was a
turning point in the way thataircraft had now become weapons
of War.
Aircraft were also later used inthe Balkan Wars just before the
Great War and many nations inthat period were essentially
playing a kind of catch-up toensure that they had some kind
(06:37):
of air forces and that includedBritain.
So as such, the Royal FlyingCorps developed during this
period.
It recruited pilots andtechnical personnel who had the
required skill to maintain theaircraft.
And that ground crew, thatessential ground crew that would
keep planes in the air, alwaysreally formed the bulk of those
(07:01):
who served in the Royal FlyingCorps and then, latterly, the
RAF.
Because while piloting was theglamorous side of the Royal
Flying Corps, no pilot couldtake an aircraft into the sky
unless the ground crew hadworked on it fueled it
maintained it armed it and allthe other things that will be
required as the war went on Acentral flying school, the CFS,
(07:24):
was established at Uphaven onSalisbury Plain, and that opened
in June 1912, a couple of monthsafter the Royal Flying Corps was
formed, and it was set up totrain all pilots who had
obtained licences to flyaircraft.
You had to get a civilianlicence to get permission to fly
an aircraft, and those men wenton to have their formal training
(07:48):
at Uphaven.
By August 1914, the Royal FlyingCorps had 63 aircraft, around
150 pilots and over 1,000personnel.
So already you can see that theground crew massively outweigh
those who were going to get inaircraft and fly up over any
potential battlefield.
The aircraft that the RFC hadwere all monoplanes or biplanes,
(08:12):
none were armed, and most wereB-2 aircraft, which were
biplanes with a pilot andobserver and could fly to
something like 10,000 feet.
The vast majority of theaircraft in the first squadrons
of the Royal Flying Corps werethese BE-2s, but they also had
other models of planes, like theFrench Farman, for example.
(08:33):
And each aircraft had its owncharacteristics, and training on
them could often be complex anddifficult.
and dangerous.
There were many accidents.
There were no flight simulators.
The men had to get in theaircraft and take off, and often
taking off was the easier bit.
It was the landing bit that wasquite difficult.
And that whole issue of trainingpilots in this way without
(08:56):
proper simulators meant thatthroughout the conflict that
would come, many, many pilotsand observers were killed and
injured during that trainingperiod before they'd even got to
a battlefield.
At this stage in the approach towar, as the outbreak of war
came, aircraft were perhaps seenas a novelty by the commanders
(09:18):
in the forming BritishExpeditionary Force, and their
true value, I think, was yet tobe realised by most soldiers and
civilians alike.
But the war, of course.
would change all of that.
Following the outbreak of war inAugust 1914, the BEF, the
British Expeditionary Force, wasmobilised and the first three
(09:39):
squadrons of the Royal FlyingCorps, which would be part of
its order of battle, began toprepare to cross to France.
And the first pilot to take offfrom Britain and land in France
was the 23-year-old LieutenantHubert Dunstaville Harvey Kelly.
Born in Tameth, Devon, the sonof an Indian Army Colonel and
from an Anglo-Irish familyHarvey Kelly was commissioned in
(10:02):
the Royal Irish Regiment in 1910and was one of those who
volunteered to transfer andtrain as a pilot in the RFC in
1913.
As part of No.
2 Squadron in 1914, he flew hisBE-2A from Scotland to Kent via
Yorkshire, and then on the 13thof August did a nearly two-hour
(10:22):
flight to AMIA, just beating hiscommanding officer, Major
Charles Burke, and sending hisaircraft down on a grass
airfield at AMIA, the first RFCplane to land on French soil.
And for Harvey Kelly, this wasthe beginning of a long war in
the air, which would sadly endin tragedy with his death at
Arras in 1917 while flying withthe famous number 56 squadron.
(10:47):
The role of the Royal FlyingCorps in this early phase of the
conflict was simple really.
It was reconnaissance.
It was to fly up above thebattlefield, spot enemy troop
movements and then report back.
The front was fluid.
This was a war of movement.
And so it wasn't clear where theenemy might be, what direction
(11:11):
he was coming.
And it was clear that aircrafthad aptitude here to be able to
be used to find this kind ofinformation out.
And it was in thisreconnaissance role in the lead
up to the first clash of Britishtroops at the Battle of Mons in
August 1914 that the firstcasualties in the air were
(11:31):
suffered.
The first aircrew to becomefatal casualties in the Great
War were Lieutenant VincentWaterfall and Lieutenant Charles
George Goodwin Bailey.
They were both of No.
5 Squadron Royal Flying Corpswho were flying an Avro 504 when
they were shot down by groundfire on 22nd August 1914, the
(11:51):
day before the Battle of Mons.
Waterfall was from Grimsby buthad moved to Burgess Hill in
Sussex and was educated atBrighton College.
He'd been commissioned initiallyin the East Yorkshire Regiment
and then qualified as a pilot in1913.
Bailey was a South African whowas a great nephew of Gordon of
Khartoum and he was commissionedinto the Royal Engineers and
(12:14):
transferred to the Royal FlyingCorps as an observer.
And these two lads, the firstair crew to become fatal
casualties over the battlefieldare buried side by side today at
Tornay communal cemetery inBelgium.
At Mons, aircraft were used andwere able to warn of the
approach of German forces.
(12:35):
But how did this kind of workoperate without radios?
Because there were no radio setsin these aircraft.
The kind of radio sets thatexisted in 1914 were massive and
were not portable in any kind ofway.
And they only transmitted Morse,not voice.
These aircraft didn't have them.
anyway so how did they do itwell they would fly over an area
(12:57):
spot the movement of troops markthat onto a map and some of
these men had message pads thatwere strapped to their knee and
this was a wooden device with acompass on it and paper on two
rollers they could make notes ordraw a map write a message and
they had message pods in theaircraft cockpit as well so they
(13:17):
could make a map write out amessage give the indication of
troop movements or locations putthat in a message message pod
and then fly to where they knewthere was some kind of British
headquarters and then drop thatonto the headquarters and they
would pick it up.
Now this is fairly primitive asyou can imagine and there was a
(13:38):
lot of movement of troops andwhile headquarters might be at
one location on one day it mightnot be there in the next so this
is far from perfect and this wasan aspect of ground air and air
to ground cooperation that wouldhave to be developed as the war
went along, until there were, bythe end of the conflict, radio
(13:58):
sets that could be put into thecockpits of aircraft, but again,
to only transmit morse andreceive morse, not voice.
The Germans were, of course,using aircraft in exactly the
same kind of way, and also ourFrench allies.
They were rapidly on all partsof the battlefield, becoming the
eyes of the army above thatbattlefield, but at this stage
(14:20):
could not really clash in theskies themselves as they were
not equipped with weapons of anykind.
Having said that, pilots andaircrew began to take weapons up
with them to tackle theincreasing number of aircraft
they encountered in the skies,even in 1914.
From pistols to carbines, I'veread about shotguns, and even
(14:43):
bricks, where pilots took abrick up, flew over an enemy
aircraft and tried to chuck thebrick out the side to put a hole
in the wingspan or knock thepilot out.
I mean, these are all veryprimitive methods that were used
in this early phase of the fightbut the real change in the use
of aircraft came with a changein warfare on the western front
(15:06):
Everybody, as we often say onthis podcast, everybody had gone
to war prepared for war in 1914,but not the kind of war that the
Great War would rapidly turninto, this vast static war where
there were hundreds of miles oftrenches across Belgium and
France.
(15:27):
But the static war suddenly gavea new dimension to the use of
aircraft because they could nowbe used not just as a spot for
the army, spot for the guns spotfor whoever required that kind
of information even with thoselimited communications and
observe they could also takephotographs cameras could be
(15:48):
taken up with the aircraft andthe cameras could be used to
capture intelligence informationabout those battlefield
positions when the war wasmobile that wasn't really
practical and one photographtaken in the morning could
easily be out of date bylunchtime but on a static front
where both sides were digging inand building these vast trench
(16:12):
networks the air photographscould really chart the
development of that and then beused by headquarters to decide
how they could be attacked orovercome and then later by
artillery to accurately bombardthem and harass the enemy in
building those positions and airphotos led to maps they were
(16:33):
used in the whole development ofmapping on the battlefield which
was fairly primitive when thewar began but the ability to
send up aircraft to take airphotos to allow military
cartographers to work accuratelyon maps and produce trench maps
became a massive game changerand was a really important part
(16:53):
of the whole development of theuse of aircraft by the military
in the first world war it wasn'tjust the royal flying corps
doing this the germans and thefrench air forces they were
doing exactly the same so atthis stage it's still a
reconnaissance role the aircraftare going up to spot what's
happening take these airphotographs relay intelligence
(17:14):
back to headquarters allow mapsto be created but there's no air
combat.
Tactical bombing however didbecome a thing during this
period where BE-2Cs were adaptedto carry fairly modest bombs and
positions could be targeted onand off the battlefield so they
(17:35):
could fly over a trench systemand drop a bomb or fly a bit
further behind enemy lines to anammunition dump or bridges and
try and bomb those and in manycases bombs were not dropped
from the aircraft wings or fromunderneath the aircraft they
were dropped out of the side ofthe aircraft so they were kept
in the cockpit and then heavedover the side and let go so you
(17:57):
can see already this isn'tparticularly accurate and it was
It wasn't just bombs that theydropped as well.
There were things calledflechettes, which were kind of
aerial darts, and there's allkinds of different types of
these, and you see them beingdiscussed quite frequently in
newspapers and magazines of thatearly war period.
(18:20):
And while flechettes were notbanned under the rules of
warfare, they were fairlycontroversial.
The use of them wascontroversial because you could
drop a whole bag of these aerialdarts out of the side of an
aircraft and they would cascadedown into a trench below and you
can imagine a steel aerial dartwith a very fine point to it
(18:41):
coming down at a rapid rate ofknots straight onto the head of
a soldier standing in thattrench before helmets became a
thing and even with helmets Idon't think they would withstand
a flechette I won't describe thekind of gory outcome of that but
it wasn't good so flechettesalthough they were used I don't
think they were used as often asthe press were kind of
(19:04):
indicating because a wholeconstant stream of them would
have to be produced and I thinkthey had more of a shock effect
than actual military value andalso at the same time to counter
the use of zeppelins thesemassive dirigibles that the
Germans were using to fly acrossand bomb positions behind the
(19:26):
battlefield even fly across toBritain resulting in the first
blitz where civilians became asmuch a part of a front line, a
new front line, as thoseactually on the battlefield on
the Western Front.
So to counter the use of thesezeppelins, the Royal Flying
Corps began to fly longermissions across northern France
(19:48):
and Belgium to try and take outtheir points of departure.
But long-range bombing was stillrelatively new for fixed-wing
aircraft and not very accurate,something that would develop
over the period of the FirstWorld War resulting in much
bigger bombers nothing on thescale of World War II but
(20:08):
bombers of that period thatcould fly well into enemy
territory and bomb key targets.
But with the increase in airtraffic over the battlefield
essentially being used by bothsides to spy on each other, the
necessity to snuff out thoseeyes over the trenches became
more and more pressing.
Anti-aircraft artillery wasincreasingly used by both sides
(20:33):
to bombard the sky with shellswhich would either rip apart the
aircraft with shrapnel or killthe pilots and observers.
And on the British side of thebattlefield, the Royal Garrison
Artillery formed anti-aircraftunits equipped with 13-pounder
guns which could fire shells upto 19,000 feet for example.
(20:54):
But the real key to counteringenemy aircraft with combat in
the air was taking weapons upand that became more and more
commonplace with pilots andaircrew frustrated at seeing so
many enemy aircraft and notbeing able to do something about
it.
And Lieutenant John FrederickLascelles of the Rifle Brigade
(21:15):
attached to the Royal FlyingCorps became the first man to
shoot down an enemy aircraftwith a rifle in mid-air.
Lascelles was born in Sussex in1895.
He was educated at WinchesterCollege, commissioned in the
Rifle Brigade in the summer of1914 and then transferred to the
Royal Flying Corps as anobserver and flew in a BE-2C
(21:36):
with No.
4 Squadron based at Santa Maria.
The incident of him shootingdown an enemy aircraft happened
on 17 July 1915 when he took 24shots at a German aircrew
shooting the pilot in the headand forcing the aircraft to
crash for which he was awardedthe military cross.
Lascelles was shot down himselfover the Somme and killed in
(22:00):
July of 1915 and is buried atthe communal cemetery at Beauval
which has quite a lot of aircrewin it.
His short war lasted just a fewmonths and he was only 19.
Eventually machine guns wereadded to aircraft.
That was the next obvious step.
But these had problems.
If you just mount a machine gunon the forward part of the
(22:22):
aircraft in front of the pilot,you've got a propeller there
that moves the aircraft forward.
And if you open fire with yourmachine gun, you're going to
scythe that propeller off, andthe aircraft is going to crash.
If you have a rearward firingmachine gun, perhaps where the
observer is, he could getcarried away, and in following
an aircraft across the sky, hecould scythe off the back of the
(22:43):
tailplane of the aircraft.
So there were problems in usingautomatic weapons on aircraft in
that way, but it was clear thatthey would really be, again, the
game changer that would enableaircraft to successfully shoot
down other aircraft in the skyBut as aircraft types changed
the Royal Flying Corps investeda lot in planes like the Vickers
(23:07):
FB-5 Gunbus which had theobserver in a forward cockpit
with a machine gun so they couldfire straight out the front of
the aircraft and fire from leftto right, up and down and not
interfere with the actualaircraft itself or do potential
damage to it, focus that machinegun fire and try to shoot down
the enemy.
(23:27):
And other twin winged aircraftcould also have of a machine
gun, usually a Lewis gun,mounted on the upper wing of the
aircraft so it could fire overthe propeller at targets beyond
and not do any damage to theaircraft itself.
But this had all kinds ofproblems in changing the
magazine of the Lewis gun, forexample, and also accurately
(23:51):
firing the weapon.
These things were sighted up ina fairly basic way.
And again, that use of weapons,using them so they could fire
accurately was all part ofaircraft development these were
perhaps easy solutions to acomplex problem but the enemy
the germans were looking formore complex outcomes and as
(24:13):
they gradually got the upperhand in aircraft technology and
development with the fokker e1for example becoming the first
aircraft with a synchronizedmachine gun mounted in it that
gave them an edge an upper handin those skies above the
battlefield because asynchronized machine gun could
be fit to the forward part ofthe aircraft and it worked in
(24:34):
cooperation with the turn of thepropeller so that the bullets
passed either side of thepropeller blades and not did
damage to the propeller itself.
But the Royal Flying Corpseventually got there themselves
with synchronised machine gunsand they brought in the Sopwith
1.5 strutter for example thathad a synchronised machine gun
(24:54):
in 1915-16 and over the nextyear or so the use and
development of these weaponscontinued creating the first
proper fighter planes.
And if we kind of look at that1916 period, so about halfway
through the Great War, from aGerman and a British
perspective, those two airforces clashing in the skies
(25:16):
above the Western Front, theGermans were using the Fokker E3
that had a Spandau machine gunon it.
This was that first properlysuccessful synchronised fighter
plane, the synchronised machinegun.
The British had the aircraft DH2that had a Lewis gun on it, it
was a pusher design initially totry and counter the Fokker
(25:37):
threat in the skies above Franceand Flanders they also brought
in that Sopwith 1.5 strutterthat had one pair of fixed
forward firing machine guns thatwere synchronised with the
propeller and also a machine gunin the observers cockpit as well
and the FE2B with one or twoLewis guns was a two seater
(25:59):
fighter reconnaissance aircraftthat was a bit outdated by that
stage, but this was the kind ofcommon aircraft used in that
mid-period of the war.
And bigger, faster, betteraircraft would be developed as
the conflict moved forward.
And with this development offighter planes and the idea of
(26:19):
fighter pilots, a new phase ofaerial warfare came in.
This was the time of the Aces,or the so-called Knights of the
Air.
With the ability to now fightbattles in the air, with fighter
(26:41):
aircraft sent up to specificallytarget aircraft being used for
reconnaissance or aerialphotography and shoot them down,
and aircraft then beingdispatched to bring down those
fighter aircraft to protect thespotter planes, the whole war in
the air changed completely atthis stage of the conflict.
And this became a period of theKnights of the Air, as the press
(27:04):
reports often called them.
Men, pilots, jousting just likeknights of old, in the skies
above the Western Front.
There was this idea that therewas some kind of chivalry
amongst the air crews who flew.
that it was a cleaner, perhapsmore civilised form of warfare
in what was rapidly becoming atotal war with gas and
(27:27):
flamethrowers, chemical warfareand mass artillery bombardments.
It was believed that pilotsrespected each other, signalled
to each other in the air duringand after combat, saluted each
other even and dropped messagesof condolence when an enemy
pilot was killed.
And while some of this of coursedid happen, it was in some ways
(27:49):
a clever foil on the home frontto the brutality of aerial
warfare, where men could dropfrom thousands of feet on fire
and die horribly, and wherepilots could pursue an enemy
until he was riddled withbullets or smashed to pieces on
the ground.
Was there really any honour inan industrialised war, a total
(28:10):
war, that the Great War was by1916?
With this concept of knights onboth sides came the development
of the concept of aces, airaces, some of the most skilful
and in many ways deadliestpilots flying over the
battlefield.
In Britain, this was arguablyled initially by Albert Bull, a
(28:32):
teenage pilot from Nottinghamwho'd achieved 44 victories and
was decorated numerous timesuntil he was shot down in May
1917, crashing behind the Germanlines and being awarded a
posthumous Victoria Cross.
He was a typical lone wolfpilot, preferring to fight alone
in those duels over thebattlefields and being intensely
(28:55):
religious with strong Christianbeliefs, it began to bother him.
in the way that he could inflictsuch heavy losses in the air on
his German counterparts and thestrain I think generally on
pilots during this period ofduels above the battlefield
pilots fighting pilots and thenseeing the terrible outcome when
(29:15):
an aircraft was shot down two ofthe veterans that I interviewed
in the 1980s and 90s had beenpilots one in the RFC and one in
the RAF and they'd both seenfriends shot down in flames over
the battlefields one of themcarried a pistol in his cockpit
to shoot himself if his aircraftever caught fire and the other
one carried a cyanide capsule incase the same thing happened to
(29:36):
him.
And then later, this mantle ofair race that was championed by
Albert Ball was also picked upby Canadian Billy Bishop, who
had a staggering 72 victoriesand was also awarded the
Victoria Cross.
And then James McCudden with 57victories and Mick Mannock with
at least 61.
(29:56):
The latter two collected justabout every medal going, many
with bars and both of them theVictoria Cross, which was a
common trait with these aces,how much they were deceptive.
and then were given really highprofiles in the press to set
this kind of example for othermen to perhaps follow into the
Royal Flying Corps and also toshow I guess from a propaganda
(30:20):
point of view how well Britainwas doing in that air war over
the battlefield.
The other trait that really wascommonplace amongst them all
with just a few exceptions wasnot surviving the war.
The idea as we mentioned at theThat wasn't ever really true.
Life expectancy was short andpilots like Mannock and McCudden
(30:44):
did have quite long wars in manyrespects but so many of them did
not survive the Great War.
Billy Bishop being one of themore unusual ones to survive in
that list of great pilots in theFirst World War.
On the German side stories oftheir aces also dominated the
popular press of both nations,both on the British and the
(31:07):
German side with Manfred vonRichthofen and his 80 confirmed
victories and legendary statusflying that red Fokker triplane
through to pilots like MaxImmelmann the Eagle of Lille who
may have had fewer victoriesthan Richthofen but developed
for example the Immelmann Turnan aviation manoeuvre still in
(31:28):
use today both of them died inthe Great War along with many
other German aces but noteveryone was an ace So who were
the pilots and aircrew of theRoyal Flying Corps in the Great
War?
In the early phase of the war,aircrew came from a middle and
upper class kind of background.
(31:48):
And that was true of allofficers of the British Army at
that time because the RFC, youremember, was part of the Army.
And to get a commission in theArmy, when you applied, you were
asked what school you'dattended.
And there was a list of approvedschools.
Now, if you'd gone to Eton orWinchester or Harrow, schools
like that, then that's the kindof school that they were looking
(32:11):
for.
State schools were not on thatlist so it meant that the kind
of men that became pilots inthat early phase of the history
of the Royal Flying Corpsparticularly in that period from
its formation in 1912 through tothe outbreak of war in 1914 came
from a fairly narrow backgroundbut as the war went on and
(32:32):
changed this also changed thisbackground of the pilots changed
with many working class menfinding a route to flight and
flying men like McManacher wementioned before a working class
lad who'd been a telephoneengineer on the outbreak of war
he worked his way through tobecoming a pilot and with the
change in the army acts in 1917allowing men from any background
(32:56):
any schooling to be commissionedthat brought in a lot of pilots
as well there was also a changein the way that pilots did not
have to be officers to actuallyfly aircraft as well so
non-commissioned officers NCOscould fly aircraft and that
allowed men from humblebackgrounds to fly including
Britain's first black pilotWilliam Robinson Clarke who was
(33:19):
from the West Indies.
He paid to come to Britain toserve initially as ground crew
in the Royal Flying Corps butbecause of his technical
knowledge and ability that gothim into the pilot seat and
enabled him to fly and he flewaircraft with Royal Flying Corps
over Ypres in 1917 until hecrashed and injured himself and
he couldn't fly again.
(33:40):
I've told a bit of his story inan episode that we did on black
soldiers in the British Army inan earlier podcast you can go
back and find out more about himthere but aside from black
pilots from the West Indiesthere were also Indian pilots
like Indra Lal Roy DFC who wasan ace with 10 victories until
he was killed in 1918 andeventually men from every corner
(34:03):
of Britain and the BritishEmpire would become pilots or
observers in the Royal FlyingCorps and the RAF in that latter
phase of the First World War.
But we have to ask, I guess,considering this period of the
Knights of the Air, was itreally truly representative of
the Royal Flying Corps andeventually the RAF?
(34:24):
Not everyone was an ace.
Not everyone managed to shootdown a large number of German
aircraft.
For some pilots and observers,their role was to act in that
reconnaissance role, to takephotographs, and that became
increasingly, as the war wenton, more and more important, and
the use of air photographsbecame so commonplace that
(34:45):
gunner officers on the ground,for example, could commission a
flight from the Royal FlyingCorps to go out and photograph a
trench system or a series ofbunkers bring those air photos
back get them developed, deliverthem to the gunners who would
then work on their fire planbased around those air
photographs, carry out theirfire plan, drop shells onto the
(35:07):
targets, and then commissionanother flight of RFC planes to
go over and photograph it to seewhat damage had been done.
So while there were theseknights jousting in the skies,
from Mick Manor to McCudden toAlbert Ball to Billy Bishop and
so many others, they were thekind of high-profile pilots.
(35:28):
There were many others who justdid their bit.
often their war in the air wasshort not necessarily because
they were shot down and killedbut because they crashed on
landing injured themselves whileflying or because of the
psychological pressures offlying could end up being
transferred out of a squadronwith severe psychological issues
(35:50):
so while in that kind of midperiod of the war the aces the
knights of the air dominated thestory the history of the royal
flying corps that was onlyreally part of the story.
And as the war progressed to itsfinal phase, things would change
again.
Beyond that period of theKnights of the Air, as modern
(36:11):
warfare on the ground changed,the role of the air forces
changed with it.
Aerial photography remaineddominant, a dominant, dominant
part of their task over thebattlefield.
Not just fighting enemyaircraft, not just bombing
targets, but taking air photosbecause it was so important and
that battlefield intelligencewas so important.
(36:35):
Air combat of course continued,but the focus on aces lessened
as the war went on.
Perhaps the old idea of it beingchivalrous began to fade when
they looked at the casualtyrates of units of the Royal
Flying Corps, for example.
And that was especially trueduring bloody April in 1917, the
(36:59):
nearest in reality that theRoyal Flying Corps got to this
concept from Blackadder of 20Minuters.
That was a period when GermanGerman aviation had really got
the advantage on the RoyalFlying Corps, the upper hand,
and German pilots were able toinflict really a disaster on
British and Commonwealthaircrew.
In April 1917, the RFC lost 245aircraft of all types and over
(37:23):
200 aircrew were killed, woundedor taken prisoner.
The average life expectancy of anew Royal Flying Corps pilot
during this month, April 1917,was just less than three weeks,
sometimes as little as five to11 days when they were on the
front line.
And it's worth mentioning, Ithink here, that amongst those
(37:45):
casualty rates were men who wereprisoners of war that were
captured when their aircraftcrashed.
We tend to think with aircraftlosses that when an aircraft
came down, the men were killedor badly injured, perhaps
terribly burnt, but many wereable to survive an aircraft
landing, crash landing, behindthe battlefield, behind the
(38:05):
German front lines, but ended upas prisoners of war.
And a lot of these pilots wentoff to PO camps and as officers
had a very different experienceto the men as an ordinary
soldier another rank if you werecaptured you could be used by
the Germans for all kind oflabor tasks working in salt
mines and coal mines andfactories and any kind of dirty
(38:28):
work that the Germans requiredPOWs were used for that officers
were treated differently by theGermans were often kept in
separate camps or separate partsof a camp and it was considered
an officer's duty as a prisonerof war was to try and escape and
there were many escape storiesthat came out of the great war
(38:49):
some of them penned by men whohad flown above the trenches as
part of the rfc or raf comingback to the battlefield in 1917
this is a period when you lookat infantry war diaries you see
a lot more mention of ground toair and air to ground
cooperation where battalions onthe ground lay out coloured
(39:12):
markers to indicate that theyhad advanced so far into an
enemy position and that the 7thBuffs were here or the 11th
Sussex were there and that theaircraft could then see this and
relay that information back toheadquarters and also the Royal
Flying Corps began to spot farmore commonly for the gunners by
(39:36):
flying over the battlefieldlooking for enemy artillery
concentrations and then relayingthat information back to the
gunners so they could fire ontothose and as we mentioned while
at the beginning of the war itwasn't possible to put radio
sets into the cockpits ofaircraft by the latter stage of
the conflict that was possibleand they could communicate
(40:00):
better with the men on theground as well largely with
artillery units I don't thinkthere were too many if any
occasions in which aircraftcommunicated with infantry on
the ground portable radio setsjust didn't really exist in
terms of an infantry element by1918 it was decided to combine
(40:22):
the air forces into oneorganization and i think this
reflects the changing nature ofthe use of aircraft the
importance of aircraft and themove away from this idea of just
aces and knights of the air intothe air force becoming part of a
wider modern armed force So onthe 1st of April 1918 the Royal
(40:44):
Flying Corps and the Royal NavalAir Service were combined to
become the Royal Air Force and anew organisation which still
exists today, the RAF, wasformed.
It was still run as a militaryand army style unit so again
this was before the period ofAir Force ranks and its
(41:06):
principal purpose was now towork as one of those air forces
elements on the battlefield.
I've often described it like anorchestra of bringing all these
parts together.
Infantry with tanks, withmortars and artillery, and also
aircraft in the sky as well.
(41:26):
And on the Western Front, bombersquadrons now flew side by side
with fighters.
The RAF developed in 1918 theability to drop supplies to men
on the ground, for example.
Now, there was no World War Iequipment of a Dakota aircraft
or anything like that but forexample in the Battle of Le
Hamel in July 1918 on the Sommethe RAF flew in close support of
(41:50):
the Australian troops on theground who advanced over quite
some distance from the outskirtsof Corby up onto the high ground
around Le Hamel and one of theproblems in advances on the
ground was that the men couldn'tcarry as much ammunition as they
required they would run out ofammo having captured a position
very quickly and needed aresupply so aircraft took
(42:15):
special crates with small armsammunition in it that could be
thrown over the side of theaircraft crash and break up but
the packaging would absorb thedamage caused by the impact when
it hit the ground and it meantthey could fly up and drop ammo
onto some of the objectives sowhen the diggers got there they
had small arms ammunition fortheir rifles and their Lewis
(42:36):
guns to continue with theirbattle and that was a really big
game changer.
It wasn't without risk becausequite a few RAF pilots were shot
down flying so low over theGerman positions that they were
vulnerable to ground fire butthat use of aircraft as a method
of resupply again was anotherelement that changed air warfare
(43:00):
forever and in some of those1918 battles there was a role
that the RAF could perform thatwas far less glamorous but still
very important and that was tosend whole squadrons up into the
air to fly over the battlefieldwith droning engine noise to
drown out the noise of tanks onthe ground approaching the
(43:25):
battlefield and this was putinto good effect at amiens for
example in august 1918 so Themen who fought those battles in
the air had gone from thisperiod of being unarmed
observers through to knightsjousting in the skies, through
to being the means by which theycould drown out the noise of new
(43:45):
battlefield weapons and allowthem to approach that
battlefield and defeat theenemy.
A lot less glamorous, but wasquite literally the direction of
travel of military aviation inthe 20th century.
When the war ended...
while the life expectancy of menin the Royal Flying Corps and
the Royal Air Force had been alot more than 20 minutes.
(44:07):
Nevertheless, the casualties hadbeen immense, with thousands of
pilots and observers killed andwounded and taken prisoner just
on the Western Front alone, andof them, almost a thousand with
no known grave.
That separate section of theArras Memorial, the Flying
Services Memorial, which liststhe pilots of the Royal Flying
(44:30):
Corps of the Royal Naval AirService and then latterly the
RAF and also men from otherCommonwealth nations who were
killed, shot down over thebattlefield and have no known
grave.
It makes us reflect I think whenwe see that memorial on the
realities of air warfare in theGreat War.
(44:50):
Those very early designs ofquite fragile aircraft with
humans inside and when they camedown at a rapid rate of knots
often on fire perhaps it's notsurprising that so many pilots
do not have a known grave.
And that memorial really...
Chronicles the history of theRFC and the RAF in the Great War
(45:13):
from Major Lano Hawker who wasthe first pilot to get a
Victoria Cross for shooting downan enemy aircraft over Ypres in
1915 through to Mick Mannock,that great fighter pilot, that
great ace who was killed withthe RAF in the summer of 1918
and we'll return to his storylater on in this series of Air
(45:36):
War Podcasts.
The development of aircraft andtheir use in the Great War was
all part of the changing natureof warfare seen by both sides in
that conflict.
But the war in the air is soeasy to ignore.
It's easy to concentrate on thetrenches and the tanks and the
(45:56):
bunkers and the barbed wire andthe gas and everything else.
But it's impossible tounderstand all of that without
knowledge of what was happeningabove it.
And just as the planes flown bythose masters of the air in the
Great War once cast long shadowsacross the smashed landscapes
(46:18):
and crenellated trench lines ofnorthern France and Flanders
more than a century ago, todaytheir exploits and achievements
as pioneers of a new way ofwarfare continue to cast shadows
across that landscape.
of the Old Front Line.
(46:55):
Check out the website atoldfrontline.co.uk where you'll
find lots of podcast extras andphotographs and links to books
that are mentioned in thepodcast.
And if you feel like supportingus, you can go to our Patreon
page, patreon.com slasholdfrontline or support us on
Buy Me A Coffee atbuymeacoffee.com slash
(47:16):
oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsite.
Thanks for listening and we'llsee you again soon.
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