Wings (11 page)

‘It seemed to have no effect,’ he remembered. ‘I therefore moved to one side and gave it another drum distributed along its side.’ Again his bullets seemed wasted. He
swung round for a rear attack and from 500 feet blasted the rear. ‘I had hardly finished the drum before I saw the part fired at glow,’ he wrote. ‘In a few seconds the whole rear
part was blazing.’ He ‘quickly
got out of the way of the falling, blazing airship and being very excited fired off a few red Very lights and dropped a parachute
flare.’

Leefe Robinson seems to have felt a sort of ecstasy at his achievement. Writing to his parents seven weeks later he was still high on the memory. ‘When the thing actually burst into flames
of course it was a glorious sight – wonderful! It literally lit up the sky all around and me as well, of course . . . I hardly know how I felt. As I watched the huge mass gradually turn on
end and . . . slowly sink, one glowing, blazing mass, I gradually realized what I had done and grew wild with excitement.’ As he admitted to his ‘darling old mother’, he was
‘not what is popularly known as a religious person’, but he found himself thanking ‘from the bottom of my heart that supreme power that rules and guides our
destinies’.
³

Muriel Dayrell-Browning watched the end from her bedroom window. ‘From the direction of Barnet a brilliant red light appeared . . . we saw it was the Zep diving head-first. That was a
sight . . . the glare lit up all of London and was rose red. Those deaths must have been the most dramatic in the world’s history. They fell – a cone of blazing wreckage –
thousands of feet, watched by eight million of their enemies. It was magnificent, the most thrilling scene imaginable.’

That morning, like hundreds of others, she made the trip to Cuffley in Hertfordshire where the airship – it was a wooden-framed Schutte-Lanz, not a Zeppelin – had hit the ground. By
now her sentiments were more measured. ‘The wreck covers only thirty feet of ground and the dead are under a tarpaulin,’
she wrote. ‘I hope they will be
buried with full military honours. They are brave men. RIP!’
⁴

A fifteen-year-old schoolboy, Patrick Blundstone, was staying with family friends only a few hundred yards from the site, having apparently been sent out of London to escape the raids. He saw
the bodies before they were hidden from view. ‘I would rather not describe the condition of the crew,’ he wrote in a letter to ‘Dear Daddy’ in London. ‘They were
roasted, there is absolutely no other word for it. They were brown like the outside of roast beef.’ He collected ‘some relics, some wire and wood framework’.
⁵
Before souvenir hunters could strip the wreckage bare, the War Office carted it off and donated it to the Red Cross, who had the wires by which engines and
gondolas were suspended beneath the envelope cut into inch-long lengths and sold at a shilling apiece with a certificate of authenticity ‘to help the wounded at the Front’.

Leefe Robinson’s victory generated a flood of relief and he became an instant hero. Within four days he was awarded the VC, pinned on him by King George V at Windsor in front of a large
crowd. A fund was started for him which raised a colossal £3,500. He was obliged to have postcards bearing his photograph, smiling shyly as he emerges from a tent to respond to constant
requests for autographs. Commemorative table napkins declared that ‘his greatest reward’ was ‘the heartfelt thanks of every woman and child in England’. Billy Leefe Robinson
stands as the prototype for the barely formed young paladins who, twenty-four years later, would stand between British civilians and German bombers. Like them,
he performed his
feats in full sight of those he was seeking to protect. Half of London seems to have watched Airship SL11 sinking earthwards in a ball of fire, taking its commander Wilhelm Schramm and fifteen crew
members to their deaths. Thus was formed a direct link between combatant and civilian that was to define the way the public regarded airmen in the years ahead. Even though their domain was the air,
they were far more visible and accessible than the soldiers across the Channel or on the high seas, their daring, their prowess and their sacrifice on show for all to see.

Leefe Robinson was promoted and sent off to France eight months later as a flight commander with 48 Squadron. On his first patrol he ran into the Jasta 11 of Manfred von Richtofen, the Red Baron
himself, and four of the six aircraft in his flight were shot down, including his own. Leefe Robinson survived, but spent the rest of the war in prison, including spells of solitary confinement as
punishment for repeated escape attempts. He returned to England only to die in the great Spanish ’flu pandemic in December 1918.

His victory marked the end of the Zeppelins’ employment as a bomber. Henceforth they were easy meat for the night-fighters. In the next month, three more were shot down. During the winter
of 1916 there were no further attacks, but in the spring of 1917 a new menace appeared in the shape of twin-engined Gotha GIV bombers. With these the Germans had the means to pursue their initial
ambition to mount a serious aerial assault on the British homeland. Gothas were not the first long-range heavy bombers – the Russian engineer
Igor Sikorsky had already
designed a four-engine aircraft, which had been used effectively on the Eastern Front. They were, though, superior to anything so far developed in Britain. They got their name from the town in
Thuringia, where the Gothaer Waggonfabrik, a rolling-stock manufacturer before the war, developed them. They had a wingspan of nearly eighty feet, were pushed along at about 80 or 90 mph by twin
260 hp Mercedes engines and carried ordnance weighing up to 1,100 pounds. The payload was smaller than an airship’s, but whereas Zeppelins scattered their bombs haphazardly, the Gothas were
able to achieve some degree of concentration. The results were apparent on their first raid, on the early evening of 25 May 1917, when twenty-one bombers crossed the Channel from Ostend and made
for London. They found the capital covered in low cloud, so they headed back, bombarding the army camp at Shorncliffe in Kent and neighbouring Folkstone on the way, killing ninety-five people, the
largest death toll yet.

On 13 June, a hot hazy day, the Gothas returned to London. This time the conditions were ideal and fourteen aircraft bombed the City and East End of London. Another record was set, with 162 dead
and 432 injured, some of them as they stood in the street, gawping at the machines overhead. The raid produced one of the emblematic events of the civilians’ war. One bomb landed on a primary
school in Upper North Street, Poplar, an area of densely packed terraced houses. There had been some warning of the raid, but not enough to evacuate the children. The teachers tried to keep the
pupils calm by
getting them to sing, but soon their voices were drowned out by the sound of anti-aircraft guns and bombs. Eighteen children were killed, almost all of them
infants between four and six years old, the sons and daughters of dock-workers.

With the fading of the Zeppelin threat, vigilance against air raids had slipped and aircraft were switched back to France, where they were wanted for the big pushes of 1917. The need to arm
merchant ships against attacks by German commerce raiders meant they got priority in artillery production. Even so, ninety-odd fighters took off to intercept the Gothas over Britain, but they were
too late and too dispersed to punish them. If they did manage to catch up, they were forced away by the bombers’ three Parabellum machine guns.

In the aftermath of the raid, the calls for civilian protection resumed. Against the opposition of the military, squadrons were shifted from the Western Front, weakening the balance of airpower
over the trenches as both sides prepared for their summer offensives. Pressure also mounted once again for reprisals, which would also divert resources away from a struggle which, in the view of
Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces, would be ‘the most severe we have yet had’.

It was essential, though, for the air raids over Britain to be halted or at least for the perpetrators to be punished if civilian morale and support for the war were to be maintained. The
problem was that there were not enough aircraft to meet the demands of soldiers, sailors, politicians and civilians. The development of an efficient system of producing them had been held back by
the haphazard development of airframes
and engines, as well as the competing ambitions of the army and the navy. This began to be rectified when two forceful industrialists
were given the job of boosting production. First Lord Cowdray, then Sir William Weir, promised dramatic increases in airframes and engines, but these came too late to stop another Gotha raid on 7
July, again on the East End, which killed another 54 and injured 190. A surge of public outrage generated yet another burst of bureaucratic energy. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George,
instructed Jan Christian Smuts to examine the whole question of the organization of the war in the air. Smuts, who fifteen years before had commanded a Boer army fighting the British in South
Africa, set to work producing a report which was to shape Britain’s air forces for the rest of the century. In the meantime, improved anti-aircraft defences, barrage balloons and searchlights
and faster and better organized fighter units gradually reduced the threat from the air. On 19 May 1918 seven out of an attacking force of nineteen bombers were shot down and, with mounting
pressures on other fronts, the air raids petered out.

In three years the Zeppelins and Gothas had launched 103 attacks on Britain, killing 1,414 civilians and wounding 3,866. This was a fraction of the death toll among soldiers on the Western
Front, and fewer than the 1,480 who would be killed in a single night in London in the worst attack of the Blitz (1940–41). It was the air raids of Zeppelins and Gothas, however, rather than
any other experience of the First World War, that would change the nature of Britain’s air forces when it went to war with Germany again.

Despite the great expansion of the Allied and German air forces from 1916, the struggle in the skies retained a human scale. Aeroplanes were small and flimsy and the numbers
involved in the fighting were small. It was possible for the participants to make some sense of it – unlike the nightmarish clash of steel and high explosive shaking the ground below
them.

The combatants fought at close quarters. At the end of an aerial duel the protagonists might be only a few yards apart. Writing to his parents shortly after his arrival in France in February
1916, Albert Ball described an encounter with an Albatros, one of the sleek and powerful machines that were now consistently out-performing their enemies: ‘The interesting point about it was
that we could see the Huns’ faces and they could see ours, we were so near.’
¹

Aviators could identify an opponent by his flying style. Later the German aces advertised themselves by painting their
aircraft gaudy colours: blood-red for Manfred von
Richtofen, a disciple of Oswald Boelcke, who had witnessed Boelcke’s banal death in a mid-air collision with a friendly aircraft, and inherited his crown as Germany’s top ace. Another
flamboyant flier, Lieutenant Friedrich Kempf, had his name painted in giant letters on the top wing of his Fokker triplane, and the words
Kennscht mi’noch?
(
Remember Me?
) on
the middle one.

German and Allied propagandists portrayed the war in the air as a chivalrous affair. It was an easier task than trying to prettify the swarming carnage on the ground. The public swallowed the
line and, to some extent, the aviators themselves went along with it.

‘To be alone,’ wrote Cecil Lewis, who had lied about his age to join the RFC in time to take part in the battle of the Somme, ‘to have your life in your own hands, to use your
own skill, single-handed against the enemy. It was like the lists in the Middle Ages, the only sphere in modern warfare where a man saw his adversary and faced him in mortal combat.’

The airmen were grateful to be at one remove from the dirt and stink of the front lines, returning at the end of each day to an aerodrome where they could get a bed, a bath, a drink and decent
food. They looked down on the men toiling in the churned and polluted earth below and blessed their luck. One day in July 1917 Captain Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock went to scavenge a souvenir
from a two-seater he had shot down (a habit he shared with von Richtofen).

‘The journey to the trenches was rather nauseating,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Dead men’s legs sticking through the sides
with putties and boots still on
– bits of bones and skulls with the hair peeling off, and tons of equipment and clothing lying about. This sort of thing, together with the strong graveyard stench and the dead and mangled
body of the pilot . . . combined to upset me for a few days.’
²

The airmen were in a unique position to comprehend the futility of what was happening on the ground. From their vantage point they saw all too clearly how miniscule were the gains that resulted
from all the enormous effort.