The Sky on Fire : The First Battle of Britain, 1917-1918 [1 ed.] 9780817388270, 9780817353476

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Raymond H. Fredette Afterword by Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Siessor

The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 1966, 1976, 1991 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Reprinted 2007

Originally published by the Smithsonian Institution Press and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

co

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science--Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI

Z39.48-1984.

Fredette, Raymond H. The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain, 1917-1918

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-8173-5424-4 (pbk. : a1k. paper) ISBN-lO 0-8173-5424-7 (pbk. : a1k. paper)

Cataloging-in-publication data available from the Library of Congress.

To the memory of my father, who served at sea in the First World War

Contents List of Maps List of Illustrations Foreword by Hanson W. Baldwin

I.

'A Single German Aeroplane'

2. 3· 4· 5·

A VISION OF MODERN WARFARE The Coming of the 'Wong-Wongs' Air War and Baby-Killing The England Squadron Gotha in the Sea

6. 7· 8. 9· 10.

II.

12. 13·

LONDON BY DAY A Grand but Deadly Show 'Send Over ... One or Two Squadrons' 'The Hammer is in Our Hands' The Raid Heard Round the World The Fortress of London Sunday in Southend Defeat of the Day Raiders 'The Magna Carta of British Air Power'

. . . AND BY NIGHT 14· Trials and Experiments 15· Giants to the West 16. The First Blitz 17· 'We Will Give it All Back to Them' Vll

ix xi xiii

3 17 29 34 46 53 62 68 75 85 93 102 III

121 132 137 151

CONTENTS

18. 19· 20. 21.

'All that Flies and Creeps' Winter Twilight of the Gotha Bombers The Nights of the Giants Khaki and Blue: An Air Force is Born

160 173 186 197

END OF A ROUND

22. The Biggest Raid-and the Last 23· Retreat to Oblivion 24· The First Bomber Command

207 21 5 221

A FEAR SOME LEGACY 25· Only a Beginning 26. The Sky on Fire

23 1 242

AN AFTER WORD By Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor,

253

G.C.B., D.S.O., M.C.

Tables British Air Defence in 1918 Home Defence Squadrons, L.D.A., November 1918 British Air Raid Casualties, 1915-18 Summary of the Gotha and Giant Raids on England Bibliographies

261 261 262 26 3

Sources

267 27 1

Index

279

Vlll

Maps

xx. xxi

The Bases The F olkestone Raid, London

25

May I 9 I 7

I6

50 -5 I

The Second Gotha Raid on London, 7 July I 9 I 7 The Southend Raid, I2 August I 9 I 7 The London Air Defence Area British Casualties and German Gotha Losses Targets of the British VIII Brigade and the Independent Air Force in Germany

IX

74

94 174

214 220

Illustrations

Following page 172 la and b. Gotha G. IV bombers on the airfield at Nieuwmunster in the spring of 1917 (Harold Fischer) 2a. A German airman's equipment worn on flights to England (U.s. National Archives) 2b. Liquid oxygen containers being filled prior to loading into the Gotha bomber (U.s. National Archives) 3a. Lt. Walter Georgii (U.s. National Archives) 3b. Barrage balloons joined together by heavy cables guarding the approaches to London in the autumn of 1917 (Imperial War Museum) 4a. A Gotha bomber over the East End of London (Harold Fischer) 4b. A photograph taken from the air during the daylight attack on London on 7 July 1917 (U.S. Air Force) sa. The funeral procession for fifteen of the children killed during the first Gotha raid on London (Syndication International: Daily Mirror) Sb. Major-General Hugh Trenchard escorting Queen Mary on a tour of an R.F.C. aerodrome atSt. Orner (Imperial War Museum) 6a. Sopwith Camels of No. 44 Home Defence Squadron at Hainault Farm (Imperial War Museum) 6b. A Gotha three-man crew aboard a G.V (U.S. National Archives) 7a. An observer-gunner in the forward turret of a G. V (U.S. National Archives) 7b. A G.V being loaded with nearly half a ton of explosives (U.S. National Archives) Xl

ILL USTRATIONS

Sa. The plywood forward section of the Staaken RVI (Archiv fuer Fluggeschichte) Sb. The nacelle of the Staaken RVI (Archiv fuer Fluggeschichte) 9a. Pilot's position in the Staaken RVI (Peter M. Grosz) 9b. The port-gunner-mechanic of RI2 (Peter M. Grosz) lOa. The flight engineer's compartment of Ril (Peter M. Grosz) lob. A flight mechanic rides outside the port nacelle of R.I 2 (Peter M. Grosz) Ila. A gunner-mechanic of RI3 (Egon Krueger) lib. RI3'S two pilots (Egon Krueger) l2a. The crew of Lo-Ri 3 (Dr. Kurt Kuppers) I2b. 'Lori 2 before the Grave' (Harold Fischer) 13a. A German airman captured in the early hours of 6 December 1917 (Syndication International: Daily Mirror) 13b. ·Wreckage of a Gotha bomber shot down on 2S January 1915 (The Times) 14a. The North Pavilion of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, struck by the first German one-ton bomb (Imperial War Museum) J4b. The wreckage of a Gotha which fell on a farmhouse while making a night landing approach (Harold Fischer) J5a. R.IJ (Egon Krueger) 15h. The 'indestructible' R. I 1 (Dr. Walter Georgii) J6a. Lord Weir, British Secretary of State for Air (Imperial War Museum) J6b. Twin-engined Handley Page 0/400S of the Royal Air Force (Imperial War Museum)

xii

Foreword by Hanson W. Baldwin

This book fills a gap in history; Major Fredette has resurrected the facts and the memorabilia of yesterday, with vivid phrase and pointed quotation, to illuminate today. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was prophetic when he wrote (in 'Locksley Hall', 1842) that he Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.

To most laymen, Tennyson's poetic fantasy seems to have been fulfilled with the great bombardments of World War II, London and Berlin, Coventry and Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo and, most awesome, Hiroshima, that rubbled monument to the birth of the atomic age. In popular hagiography Guilio Douhet, the great Italian theorist of air-power; Lord Trenchard, the 'father' of the Royal Air Force in England; and General 'Billy' Mitchell and Alexander de Seversky in the United States have appeared to be the true prophets of the 'central blue'. These men, many have argued, were to air-power what Clausewitz was to ground-power and Mahan to sea-powerphilosophical theorists, articulators for a new doctrine of military power, prophetic historians of a new age, polemical pamphleteers whose faith in 'airy navies' was unbounded. They enunciated the doctrine of 'independent' action by airpower, of separate air forces, of so-called strategic bombardment, of attacks directed not primarily at the enemy's military forces, but upon his economic capability and psychological will to resist. Airpower alone, they claimed, could surmount terrain barriers, leap above fortified frontiers, span broad oceans and win wars. And today-in the age of nuclear plenty-their predictions may, at long last, be accurate. Xlll

FOREWORD

Yet the pilots of World War II did not originate strategic bombing, and well before Douhet wrote, or Trenchard spoke, a few Germans-little known to history-had provided the hard data, the operational experiments, the fundamental basis for the strategic bombing doctrines that have played so large a part for fifty years in the life of twentieth-century man. For it was the Germans with their Zeppelin, and far lesser known but far more important, Gotha and Giant raids against Britain in the First World War who first attempted strategic bombing with consequences still unended. It was the Germans-not the British, not the Italians, not the Americans-who evolved the concept, the theory, the strategy and the general tactics and some of the techniques of a new form of 'independent' air war. The German Giant bomber of the First World War had a wing span only three feet shorter than that of the B-29 Superfortress of World War II; it dropped 2,2oo-pound bombs on London in 1918. For a year in World War I, London was under aerial attack in squadron strength on an average of once every two weeks. In the Fall of 1917, the crump of bombs sounded in London six out of eight consecutive nights. Not even the incendiary bombs of World War II were new; the Germans had developed by 1918 a magnesium 'Elektron' bomb, never used for political and psychological, rather than military, reasons. To meet the threat of the German heavy bomber-far more deadly than the famous Zeppelins, which were destined like the mastodon to evolutionary extinction-the British, for their part, evolved in World War I all the complex paraphernalia of defence later used in the second war: guns, fighters, barrage balloons, detections nets, listening posts, searchlights, shelters, communications. Speed, scale, numbers and technology spelled the only major differences between the German raids of World War I and the raids of World War II. That-plus an historically ironic and militarily portentous difference in concept. Towards the end of World War I it might have been said (as Jean Paul Richter is quoted by Thomas Carlyle as having said in the Edinburgh Review in 1827) that 'providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, and to the Germans that of the air'. XIV

FOREWORD

For the Germans unquestionably had first developed the concept of 'independent' air operations; they far more than any other combatant had tested the theory of striking directly at populated urban areas, at industries, at the will of the enemy to resist. But, to their mind, the military results in World War 1 had not been worth the military effort; the ends did not justify the means. Partly-and importantly-because of their assessments of their World War 1 experience (and partly because they lost the war, in which air-power admittedly played an auxiliary role), the Germans built a different kind of air force for World War II-one that started with no four-engined bombers, one geared primarily to the support of surface forces. And it was this air force that was thrown into the climactic Battle of Britain in 1940; it was this air force that failed to win decision. But the scars of World War l's bombings were never healed in the British mind. The bombings, though minor as an attrition factor compared to the inferno of the Western Front, left traumatic memories in 'the tight little isle'. For the first time since John Paul Jones landed his 'pirates' on the coast of Scotland, Britain had been 'invaded'; the Channel moat had been crossed. Militarily, strategically, geo-politically Britain, in the dawning age of air-power, was now virtually a pare of the continent of Europe. The memories of shattered homes and broken bodies lingered on, fed between the wars by the ever new achievements of the aeroplane, by the over-enthusiastic proponents of air-power, and by a spate of lurid books and articles, which embellished, in horrid detail, Tennyson's 'ghastly dew'. Prophets of doom forecast millions poisoned by gas laid from the air, whole cities burning, holocausts unending, and this trauma of ancient memories and vivid expectations played a major role in British history, and in that of the world. The name of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has become, along with Munich, a symbol of appeasement. He and Stanley Baldwin and their contemporaries in power in the pre-World War II years, must undoubtedly share the blame of history for Britain's weaknesses at a time of Britain's need, but no Prime Minister of England, facing the horrid military facts of 1938, could have done other at Munich than to seek delay. For Chamberlain was faced with unanimous and emphatic recommendations of his Chiefs of Staff xv

FOREWORD

who insisted in detailed and definite terms upon peace for a time. War with Germany in 1938 would mean disaster, they warned. They were thinking then, as they were in 1939 when war actually came and millions of British women, children and the old were evacuated from British cities, of an aerial blitz, not of the Blitzkrieg tactics, geared to ground armies, which Hitler actually used. Their vision of millions slaughtered, of whole cities burning, wasdespite the heavy casualties from strategic bombing that were yet to come in World War II-one war ahead of time. It was, thus, the British-not the Germans-who nourished and developed the doctrine of independent air action the Germans first introduced; it was the British, not the Germans, who had 'a bomber obsession' prior to and during World War II; it was Lloyd George 'WHO tmtl 1>