The Royal Flying Corps, the Western Front and the Control of the Air, 1914–1918

James Pugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317016892
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

By the middle of 1918 the British Army had successfully mastered the concept of 'all arms' warfare on the Western Front. This doctrine, integrating infantry, artillery, armoured vehicles and - crucially - air power, was to prove highly effective and formed the basis of major military operations for the next hundred years. Yet, whilst much has been written on the utilisation of ground forces, the air element still tends to be studied in isolation from the army as a whole. In order to move beyond the usual 'aircraft and aces' approach, this book explores the conceptual origins of the control of the air and the role of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) within the British army. In so doing it addresses four key themes. First, it explores and defines the most fundamental air power concept - the control of the air - by examining its conceptual origins before and during the First World War. Second, it moves beyond the popular history of air power during the First World War to reveal the complexity of the topic. Third, it reintegrates the study of air power during the First World War, specifically that of the RFC, into the strategic, operational, organisational, and intellectual contexts of the era, as well as embedding the study within the respective scholarly literatures of these contexts. Fourth, the book reinvigorates an entrenched historiography by challenging the usually critical interpretation of the RFC's approach to the control of the air, providing new perspectives on air power during the First World War. This includes an exploration of the creation of the RAF and its impact on the development of air power concepts.

1
‘By attacking and by continuing to attack’

The Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Air Force and the control of the air over the Western Front – an introduction¹

In 1918, the noted Scottish artist Louis Weirter painted An Incident on the Western Front; a work of oil on canvas, which depicted a swirling ‘dogfight’ of British and German aircraft. The painting, featuring two British fighting machines diving towards a vanquished German biplane trailing smoke, conveyed the speed, reach and manoeuvrability of aircraft, the technological character of war in the air, the vastness of the skies and the purportedly decisive nature of aerial combat.² It is such imagery, aircraft locked in mortal combat over the trench lines below, which has done much to shape popular perceptions of air power during this era. As Paris lamented, the ‘origins and early years of aerial warfare is a subject frequently ill-served by its historians … [with] … the tendency of many writers to focus undue attention on the individual combatant – to dwell at great length on the romantic icons of that first war in the air’.³ Paris’ analysis is supported by Kennett and by Molkentin, both of whom noted the distorting effects of focusing on the so-called ‘aces’; a small minority of fighter pilots who possessed large tallies of aerial victories.⁴ More recent studies of combat motivation, the sociology of pilots and their experience of aerial combat during the conflict, including narratives relating to chivalry and masculinity, have served to challenge and enrich our understanding of air power’s place in the era of the Great War.⁵

However, such analysis continues to draw attention to a ‘knights of the air’ perspective, a phrase popularised by David Lloyd George during the First World War, and scholars of First World War aviation must acknowledge their role in perpetuating these popular narratives.⁶ For example, the thousands of participants on the University of Birmingham’s Massive Open Online Course, ‘World War I: Aviation Comes of Age’, although enjoying a broader engagement with the cultural, social, theoretical and policy related aspects of air power during the conflict, were most interested in discussing fighter aircraft and the famous pilots – Ball, Mannock, McCudden, Rhys-Davids – who flew them.⁷ An interest in the ‘knights of the air’ serves two interconnected purposes: first, it clouds our understanding of the multiplicity of air power roles that developed and were conducted during the First World War. As Biddle argued, ‘virtually every important manifestation of twentieth-century air power was envisioned and worked out in a rudimentary form between 1914 and 1918’.⁸ Second, it ultimately serves to obscure the complex and multifaceted nature of controlling the air during the conflict, the contexts and processes that governed its conceptualisation and the significance and evolutionary nature of the policy and practices pursued.

This is not to suggest that historians have not addressed the subject of controlling the air in a scholarly fashion, and there is an acknowledgement that fighting in the air served to enable the activities of friendly air power while denying such freedoms to those of an opposing air force. As Morrow recorded, ‘[c]ontrol of the airspace over the battlefield became essential to victory in World War I, just at it would twenty years later in the next world war’.⁹ However, in general, three weaknesses exist in the literature: first, insufficient weight is attached to pre-war theorising, doctrine and policy relating to the control of the air; second, there is an unduly negative perception of the approach of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC)/Royal Air Force (RAF) to the control of the air, which does not acknowledge the intellectual, organisational and operational contexts in which air power was utilised over the Western Front nor the developments in the wider revisionist historiography of the First World War; and third, there is a marked level of imprecision in framing, articulating and analysing concepts and practices relating to the control of the air.

Therefore, the study seeks to address four overarching points: first, it reconceptualises British military air power on the Western Front by moving beyond the romantic, heroic, sporting and generally technical narratives that have for too long dominated our understanding of the subject. This is not to dismiss the value of these narratives, both historically and contemporarily, but without adjusting our focus there is a very real danger of underestimating the importance and seriousness of air power and control of the air before and during the conflict.¹⁰ Second, and linked to this point, the study strives to demonstrate the growing significance of controlling the air to the British army, the British government and to the press, the public and politicians in the United Kingdom. By so doing, it illuminates the interconnected nature of air power and its influence over both military and non-military domains. Third, it attempts to rebalance more critical interpretations of RFC/RAF approaches to control of the air. In this regard the primary motivation of the study is not to provide an evaluation of effectiveness, but rather to align the study of control of the air in keeping with recent literature on the development of policies and practices on the Western Front more generally. This involves a close study of language and rhetoric, a feature generally absent from other studies, which illustrates processes of both continuity and change at the heart of RFC/RAF theory, policy and practice. Fourth, the study attaches great significance to the organisational and intellectual values and ethos of the British army, which helped govern both theory and policy in the pre-war period. Aggression, moral superiority and offensive action proved to be the enduring aspects of British policy and practice; values that provided stability and coherence in a conflict of unprecedented size and scale.

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Of course, there are a number of excellent studies that offer a close engagement with the theories, policies, practices and experience of the RFC/RAF on the Western Front, including its approach to control of the air. In the first instance, this included the much maligned official histories written by Raleigh and H. A. Jones.¹¹ Comprising some six volumes (plus a volume of appendices) of relatively dense narrative, scholars such as Goulter, Abbatiello and Paris have criticised the manner in which the series came to be influenced by RAF doctrine and policy during the interwar period, overemphasising the role of independent air power and being insufficiently critical of RFC/RAF policies and practices that led to heavy casualties over the Western Front.¹² While these criticisms carry considerable weight, the official histories continue to be a crucial source because they provide a foundational narrative from which historians can conduct forays into the archives and build their own analyses. Moreover, both Raleigh and Jones acknowledged the organisational context in which British air power was developed and utilised during the conflict, demonstrating that considerations relating to the control of the air were an intrinsic aspect of operations on the Western Front. This included evidence of the clear evolution of theory, policy and practice and the importance of an offensive, aggressive and morally driven conception of air power. In turn, these volumes included genuine criticisms about the lack of creativity and imagination with which the senior leadership of the RFC/RAF addressed control of the air.¹³

Nonetheless, the more balanced sections of the official histories are generally hidden behind the clear political, organisational and individual bias of these volumes, and in response, historians such as Neville Jones offered extremely negative appraisals of the manner in which Britain’s military aviators prepared for and sought to control the air over the Western Front. This included an almost polemic tone about the tactical focus of the RFC, its lack of preparedness for any role other than reconnaissance and the absence of forethought in establishing a capability to fight for the control of the air. For example, Neville Jones wrote of the RFC’s ‘vague ideas that aircraft might have to fight in the air to preserve their ability to fly over territory occupied by enemy forces, and to prevent enemy aeroplanes from carrying out similar flights over British positions’. Yet by the outbreak of war, ‘not even the first steps had been taken to make possible such offensive action’.¹⁴ Goulter and Paris agreed with such analysis, suggesting that the pre-war RFC was not ‘in a position to gain aerial supremacy’, especially as they possessed an unenthusiastic attitude toward conceptualising and experimenting with new air power roles and technologies.¹⁵ Such analysis contrasts with the work of scholars such as Ash, who examined military air power theory, doctrine, policy and practice to a more significant depth; highlighting the influence of the British army’s organisational and intellectual culture in shaping the RFC’s approach to air power. This included a clear focus on offensive, tactical air power and a generally coherent vision for the control of the air that stressed themes of decisiveness and moral superiority.¹⁶

Other studies, including the Canadian official history and Cooper’s Birth of Independent Air Power (1986), also acknowledged these contexts. Taking their analysis into the conflict itself, they emphasised the generally inflexible and costly approach adopted by the RFC, consistently pushing fighting patrols into German airspace. Apart from well-known periods such as the ‘Fokker Scourge’ of 1915/16 and ‘Bloody April’ in 1917, the RFC was able to maintain a level of control in the air that, in spite of high casualties in aircrews and aircraft, enabled their tactical support aircraft to provide consistent support to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).¹⁷ Such arguments were echoed by Jordan’s PhD thesis and Biddle’s comprehensive study of British and American strategic bombing theory, policy and practice. These works stressed the freedom enjoyed by the Corps’ tactical aircraft set against the costly nature of RFC operations to control the air and the failure of the British to respond to tactical developments at the front.¹⁸

These studies also addressed the role played by the Corps’ most (in)famous commander, Hugh Trenchard (see Figure 5), an individual who embodied the ethos and values of the British army during this period. As his most well-known policy statement declared,

[t]he sound policy then, which should guide all warfare in the air would seem to be this: to exploit this moral effect of the aeroplane on the enemy, but not to let him exploit it on ourselves. Now this can only be done by attacking and by continuing to attack.¹⁹

Criticisms of Trenchard’s dogmatic and inflexible approach to the control of the air, although not without foundation, have served to saturate the history of First World War British air power policy with a ‘lions led by donkeys’ quality; a perspective fatally undermined by the increasingly sophisticated scholarship of the British army’s performance on the Western Front. Indeed, the influence of this vibrant historiography, which considered the wider role of the British army in the First World War, including work by Badsey, Boff, Griffith, Foley, Fox-Godden, Palazzo, Philpott, Sheffield and Simpson (among many others), has only recently filtered into the literature on British military air power during the conflict.²⁰

This includes a new wave of air power scholarship by historians such as Dye and Molkentin; studies that have embraced the revisionist literature to offer more positive, although not uncritical, appraisals of the RFC/RAF. For example, Dye stressed the evolving nature of the RFC’s logistical system that was able to sustain the Corps’ ability to control the air and to ensure the almost continuous provision of tactical support from the air for the BEF. Molkentin, in a broad study of both British and Australian air power during the conflict, offered detailed analysis of RFC/RAF policy relating to the control of the air and a demonstration of evolving operational practices, which embraced flexibility and increasingly sophisticated tactics and technologies.²¹ However, even with the appearance of these key studies, control of the air is rarely the central theme discussed in the historiography. This is surprising given that the control of the air is recognised as the primary role of all the major air forces of the world, including those of the United States, Britain and Australia. As the RAF stated, controlling the air possesses ‘doctrinal primacy because it enables freedom of manoeuvre in all of the Service environments: air, land and maritime’.²² Linked to this point, while most studies do address aerial fighting and the control of the air, at least to an extent, they offer only limited analysis of the language used to explore these concepts. There is also only limited evidence of sustained critical reflection on how such language changed and the reasons for its development and evolution.

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Difficulties with air power terminology and language have vexed both air power professionals and academics since at least the 1930s. As Winston Churchill recorded in his autobiographical history of the Second World...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of charts
• Series editor’s preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 ‘By attacking and by continuing to attack’: the Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Air Force and the control of the air over the Western Front – an introduction
• 2 From birth to battle – The Royal Flying Corps and control of the air, 1911 to 1914
• 3 ‘The essence of fighting in the air is to attack first’ – RFC doctrine, policy and practice on the Western Front, August 1914 to November 1916
• 4 ‘An even more vigorous offensive’: the RFC and the control of the air on the Western Front, 1917 and 1918
• 5 Defending the vigorous offensive: control of the air in strategic, political and organisational contexts, 1914–1917
• 6 A ‘kindred field of activity’: the creation of the Royal Air Force, air defence, independent air power and control of the air, 1917–1918
• 7 ‘A serious war and a costly one’: the Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Air Force and control of the air in the First World War and beyond – conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index