Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (12 page)

The British formation and whatever tactical plan they’d had disintegrated immediately, as it usually does in a fight. Planes dove and turned, machine guns barked, and white tracer smoke crisscrossed the sky. As it began to rain, Ball was joined by a lone SPAD and another SE-5 flight commander, so together they continued to hunt.

Ball spotted a red and yellow Fokker triplane low off the nose and dove to attack. The German disappeared into a cloud, Ball followed, and that was the last time his pilots saw him. Rumors abounded, including Lothar von Richthofen’s claim that he’d shot down Albert Ball.
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But there were several problems with this. First of all, Lothar (or someone writing up a combat report) claimed that Ball was flying a Sopwith Triplane, not an SE-5 (#A4850). The report had the correct engine number, which would have been recovered from the wreckage, but not the right aircraft tail number. There was also the inconvenient fact that Lothar von Richthofen was actually in a Berlin hospital on May 7, 1917.

Another explanation was given later by French civilians in the village of Annoeullin, 11 miles northwest of Douai. Whenever possible, on the way back to his base at Estrée-Blanche, Ball had been in the habit of dropping down over the town and buzzing the Eglise St. Martin clock tower to check the time. As Ball’s legend grew, the Germans had become aware of him and were just as eager to kill him as the RFC was to get von Richthofen. So they’d mounted a machine gun in the pretty white bell tower and waited patiently for the British scout with the red nose spinner to appear. On that afternoon in May, one theory holds, he came.

Yet another possibility comes from Leutnant Hailer, a German infantry officer, who said he watched Ball come down through the clouds, nearly upside down. If he’d chased the Albatros into the cloud and became disoriented, then this makes sense. The German officer said the SE-5 was barely 200 feet above the ground when it appeared, and that left no altitude to regain control. A French woman swore that she pulled the young man from his shattered plane, still alive, and held him while he died. No one will ever know for certain.

Less than a month after his death, on June 3, Capt. Albert Ball was awarded a medal rarely seen on the living. For his forty-four victories, the Victoria Cross reads:

Lt. (temp. Capt.) Albert Ball, D.S.O., M.C., late Notts, and Derby. R., and R.F.C. For most conspicuous and consistent bravery from the 25th of April to the 6th of May, 1917, during which period Capt. Ball took part in twenty-six combats in the air and destroyed eleven hostile aeroplanes, drove down two out of control, and forced several others to land. In these combats Capt. Ball, flying alone, on one occasion fought six hostile machines, twice he fought five and once four. When leading two other British aeroplanes he attacked an enemy formation of eight. On each of these occasions he brought down at least one enemy. Several times his aeroplane was badly damaged, once so seriously that but for the most delicate handling his machine would have collapsed, as nearly all the control wires had been shot away. On returning with a damaged machine he had always to be restrained from immediately going out on another. In all, Capt. Ball has destroyed forty-three German aeroplanes and one balloon, and has always displayed most exceptional courage, determination, and skill.

He rests now less than 1,000 feet from the crash site in a little cemetery near Annoeullin. The gray headstone, shaped like a Victoria Cross, is sheltered by trees and cool grass. Sir Albert Ball bought the field where his son died and erected a monument on the spot where the plane fell.

The night of Ball’s death, after hearing the sad news, the 56 Squadron officers gathered around the piano to pay tribute. Cecil Lewis, with his fine tenor voice, sang Stevenson’s “Requiem”:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

These be the words you grave for me,

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea

And the hunter home from the hill.

Albert Ball was typical of the sort of man who became a pilot. He was a paradox—or perhaps he was just a young man trying to find himself during the surreal experience of war. Self-confident, highly lethal, and just a bit strange, he was a man who would unhesitatingly put fifty .303 rounds into an enemy pilot but could beautifully sing “Thank God for a Garden” to his girlfriend. A man who could have chosen and succeeded at anything in life had the war not interfered. Had he lived, Albert likely would have been a husband and a father; perhaps he would have been a musician, scholar, or businessman.

It
is
certain that he was a fighter pilot.

BY THE END
of Bloody April the French had suffered the loss of 275,000 men against 163,000 casualties for the Germans, and had nothing to show for it. Nivelle was fired (a decision he initially refused to accept) and sent to Africa.

The new British planes hadn’t arrived in time nor in sufficient numbers to make a decisive difference. During January and February only 250 were delivered, followed by 612 over the next two months. However, losses for April alone were 249 aircraft, with more than 400 men killed or wounded, and the average RFC pilot had an eighteen-hour combat life expectancy.

But despite being a tactical victory, April was a tremendous strategic failure for the Luftstreitkräfte. Germany had the technical advantage with the Albatros and had dominated air combat for nine months, yet hadn’t swept the skies of Allied fighters. Sticking to their defensive mentality, they lost the only chance they’d have to win the war—both in the air and on the ground. This would be the first graphic illustration of a new reality: while one couldn’t win a war solely from the air, losing a war was nearly certain without control of the skies.

By now the shortage of raw materials, oil, rubber, and men was beyond recovery. Though Allied technology had caught up to the Germans, Anthony Fokker was about to field the best single-seat fighter of the war. Russia’s revolution and its separate peace with the Kaiser freed close to a million German soldiers from the Eastern Front. The French army had also mutinied, so there was no better chance for a final, desperate German gamble. It was hoped that this would get them to the negotiating table from a position of strength and end the war—but they were quickly running out of time.

The Americans were coming.

CHAPTER 4

THE YEAR OF THE FIGHTER:
APRIL 1917–APRIL 1918

GERMANY WAS STARVING
. Flour, heating oil, and all other staples—even potatoes—were in critically short supply. Paper underwear was issued to soldiers because there was no cotton. Kaiser Wilhelm, impotent and vacillating, had no answers, and Chancellor Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg resigned. This left Ludendorff and von Hindenburg exactly where they wished to be—in total control. They essentially took over the Empire, transforming it into a military dictatorship. Baghdad had fallen to the British, and T. E. Lawrence’s guerilla war against the Turks had turned Arabia upside down. Austria-Hungary was on the verge of collapse. The young emperor Karl I had attempted a separate peace with the Entente and offered the Alsace-Lorraine region to France.

But the Allies had their problems as well. Within the French Army the mutiny had rendered nearly half its frontline divisions ineffective, and the new commander, Henri Philippe Pétain, had only just started to restore order and discipline. The leaders of the mutiny had been arrested and condemned to death while Pétain personally addressed the soldiers’ grievances. Leaves were granted, food improved, and new clothing and equipment delivered. Most of all, he used his reputation as a soldier’s general to promise his men that there would be no more futile offensives—and they believed him. The mutiny had been a protest, not a revolution, and France had both the resources and the governmental will to resolve such a problem.

Russia did not. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March, and Moscow was in turmoil. Whole units of Russian soldiers declared an impromptu Easter truce, sometimes shooting officers and sergeants who tried to stop them. By mid-April, Lenin had returned from Switzerland and the Bolsheviks were on the rise against the provisional government. Yet Russian forces would still mount an offensive along a 30-mile front in Galicia during July. When the combined German and Austrian army counterattacked, tens of thousands of soldiers simply quit. The writing was on the wall: Russian participation in the Great War was ending.

Douglas Haig, the BEF commander, apparently saw none of this. Or if he did, he didn’t care. He was more concerned with finishing the Arras offensive and he would do so without the French, whom he openly despised. Before dawn on May 3, the British First, Third, and Fifth Armies clambered out of their trenches and headed east. Along a 16-mile stretch between Vimy Ridge and Bullecourt the tired British, Canadians, and ANZACs once again walked into the German guns. Their covering artillery barrage had been insufficient to tear holes in the German wire or destroy the machine guns now pointing at them.

It was a disaster from the beginning and was halted the following day. With the exception of the spectacular (for World War I) gains during the opening forty-eight hours, the Allies didn’t have much to show for several hundred thousand dead, wounded, or missing men.

It was clear to the British that specialized equipment, including tanks and aircraft, attacking with infantry and artillery could breach the strongest defenses before them. But at the moment the exhausted, overextended infantry was vulnerable. As they fought back, the RFC came to the rescue with “counterattack” patrols, a newly conceived solution to an old problem.

Only two days before we had received orders that were specially designed for such an event, and which, new in conception, were known as counter-attack patrols. . . . I was given instructions that my squadron should make very low-level machine and bomb attack on the enemy positions. We flew at heights varying from 50 to 300 feet, shooting up and bombing scattered parties of the enemy troops, trench positions and transport . . . the Sopwith 1½ Stutter came into its own in this work.

—MAJOR SHOLTO DOUGLAS, 43 SQUADRON, RFC

Out of necessity, the first seeds of combined warfare and dedicated close air support were born. All of this in just over two years since Roland Garros, with his frail monoplane and bolted-on gun, graphically illustrated the military potential of the aircraft.

IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING ARRAS
, the British had begun moving men and equipment into the Ypres area of Belgium on an unprecedented scale. Douglas Haig, never one to change his mind, had decided to launch his long-awaited amphibious assault behind the German lines in conjunction with an attack near Ypres. He felt that if a breakthrough was made here, along the coast, then the Belgian ports harboring U-boats could be retaken and the far end of the German line turned. If this was done, then the BEF could attack the enemy flank, roll up the Hindenburg Line, and force the Germans back.

Estimating that meaningful American intervention was at least a year away, Ludendorff was very secure in the effectiveness of the Hindenburg Line. It had been proven during the April offensives, and he was counting on this strength, added to French military weakness and English political issues, to give him time. But he miscalculated.

The Royal Flying Corps had not only caught up in technology but in training, too. Between 1914 and 1916, British flight schools were abysmal; pilots were given little or no instruction in aerobatics, they were taught no aerial gunnery, and nothing in the way of tactics had been formulated well enough to pass on. Pilots generally had two hours of dual instruction followed by another few of solo flight. If they passed their half-hour flight check, then they were granted a certificate from the Royal Aeronautical Club and went on to the Central Flying School at Upavon.

There, the students received little in the way of ground schooling or lecturing, and they would spend about six weeks flying the BE-2. Anywhere from fifteen to twenty flying hours was normal to complete the course (weather depending), concluding with another check ride examination. Given the situation in France, graduating pilots were usually sent immediately to their line squadrons and often with no time at all in the type of aircraft they’d take into combat. Most squadrons tried to give a new arrival at least a “joy ride” to look at the airfield, learn a few landmarks, and make a landing or two. Sometimes this wasn’t possible and the new man simply had to “cut it.” Even so, with loss rates as high as 100 percent in some units, numerical superiority was the only thing keeping the Allies in the sky. This had to change.