The First Air War

1914-1918

Lee Kennett

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781439105450
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Prima guerra mondiale

Historian Lee Kennett takes on the vital task of detailing the World War I aviator in this complete overview of the first air war, that Richard P. Hallion calls, "A welcome and long overdue addition to the literature of military aviation." "The whole subject of the first air war is like some imperfectly explored country: there are areas that have been crisscrossed by several generations of historians; there are regions where only writers of dissertations and abstruse monographs have ventured, and others yet that remain terra incognita, " historian Lee Kennett tells his readers. There are very few books that explore military avition and its history to the fullest extent as Kennett has done in First Air War. The purpose of this book is to act as a complete overview on topics and histories that have previously gone unexplored. He tells of World War I fliers and their experiences "on all fronts and skillfully places them in proper context" (Edward M. Coffman, author of The Old Army ). In considerate detail, Kennett tells the full story on how a few planes became the armies of the sky.

= 1 = The Dawn of Air Power

In May 1899, an extraordinary international conference opened at The Hague. The idea for a conference to promote “general peace and a possible reduction of excessive armaments” had come from the Russian government the previous year, and the response had been uniformly positive. Most of Europe was caught up in an arms race that was absorbing much of its attention and treasure. The Russian government hoped particularly for an agreement that would slow the growth of land armaments (it had learned that the fieldpieces its artillery had recently acquired at considerable expense were now rendered obsolete by advances in Germany and Austria). Other powers were concerned about new naval weapons such as the submarine and the impact it would have on war at sea, and there were other weapons whose use did not seem compatible with the customary laws of war.¹

A new dimension of warfare was already on the horizon by 1899. One year before, a Polish scholar named Ivan Bliokh had published an influential study on modern warfare in which he predicted that “very soon balloons will be used to drop explosive substances.” This prediction was accompanied by a warning: “It appears that we are very close to finding ourselves face to face with a danger before which the world cannot remain in-different.”²

The Russian government also acknowledged the danger, for in the proposals it circulated to other governments before the Conference it included as point three “the prohibition of the discharge of any kind of projectile or explosive from balloons or by similar means.” The intention of the Russians was to make the ban permanent, but when the assembled delegates took up point three it was an American delegate, Captain William Crozier, who proposed that the prohibition be temporary:

The balloon, as we know it now, is not dirigible, it can carry but little; it is capable of hurling, only on points not exactly determined and over which it may pass by chance, indecisive quantities of explosives, which would fall, like useless hailstones, on both combatants and non-combatants alike. Under such conditions it is entirely suitable to forbid its use, but the prohibition should be temporary and not permanent. At a later stage in its development, if it be seen that its less desirable qualities still predominate, there will still be time to extend the prohibition.³

Captain Crozier moved that the ban be for a period of five years, at the end of which a second international conference could take up the whole question again. To the delegates, the captain held out the same glimmering possibility that has been evoked to justify every new weapon since the Gatling gun: by making war more efficient, it would make it less bloody and indiscriminate. Crozier said an effective air weapon might “localize at important points the destruction of life and property,” and he felt it could “decrease the length of combat and consequently the evils of war.” Such arguments carried the day. The delegations voted the five-year ban, and almost all the great powers ratified it.⁴

At the time of the First Hague Conference, every major army in Europe had for some time been making an ongoing investment in military aeronautics. To be sure, in 1899 the involvement was still modest, but that would soon change. Of all the powers, France had the longest record of interest, dating back to the French Revolution, when for a brief period the Revolutionary armies had included a corps of balloonists or aérostiers. There had been other periods of sporadic experimentation, and then in 1874 the French Army made what proved to be a permanent commitment. While overhauling its organization in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the Army created a communications subcommission charged with “aerostation,” confiding to it matériel left over from the war and assigning it a base at Chalais-Meudon, not far from Paris. In 1874 aerostation meant only one thing, free or tethered balloons carried aloft by hot air or hydrogen, most commonly the latter. These devices had been used to some effect in the late war, so that in the years following, military authorities in several countries carried out tests and demonstrations, though in most cases these were soon dropped. The French, who had the most extensive experience, were thus the first to create a permanent body for work in military aeronautics, while balloons of French manufacture, particularly those of Gabriel Yon, became a modest item of export. The British followed four years later with the creation of a balloon section under the Royal Engineers.⁵

The 1880s and 1890s saw a significant increase in military interest in the balloon; in 1884 alone ballooning units appeared in the armies of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Spain. In that era their chief use was in colonial campaigns; their employment was made easier by the introduction of portable cylinders for storing compressed hydrogen. The British took balloons to the Sudan and to South Africa, the Italians took them to Ethiopia, and the French used them in Indo-China and elsewhere. Their essential function everywhere was observation, and here they generally proved their value. The balloon section which the U.S. Army Signal Corps took to Cuba in 1898 was able to confirm the presence of the Spanish fleet in Santiago harbor, find a trail up San Juan Hill, and bring artillery fire to bear on Spanish positions. When it was used against primitive peoples the balloon promised other dividends. A British officer wrote in 1886 that the very sight of a balloon might go far in pacifying the rebellious Moslems of the Sudan:

The realization by those fanatics that their camps and towns could by chemical means be fired in daylight by an unapproachable enemy, and on dark nights by an invisible agent would create the belief that we were assisted by supernatural powers and that Allah himself must surely befriend us.⁶

It was one thing to make an enemy fear that balloons would rain incendiary devices and explosives on him—the Boers in Pretoria seem to have feared that British balloons would do just that—and quite another to turn the balloon into an offensive weapon. A century after the first balloon took to the air (1783) several generations of inventors had devised nothing more effective than small bombs that could be released from a balloon when the wind carried it over an enemy position. The German aeronautical expert H. W. L. Mödebeck wrote in 1885 that “The value of the balloon as a weapon is still very much in doubt;” nor did he think the situation would change until the aerostat could become lenkbar, that is, steerable, or to use the term that would soon be on everyone’s lips, dirigible.⁷

Even as Mödebeck wrote, the dirigible or airship was taking form. By 1884 at Chalais-Meudon a French officer named Charles Renard had already constructed a sausage-shaped balloon and suspended from it a scaffolding that contained an electric motor and a propeller. In August of that year, Renard had taken off in his dirigible, which he had named La France, and flown a four-mile circuit in 23 minutes. Renard then began the construction of an even larger airship and a more efficient power plant for it (the electric motor of La France had required a half-ton of batteries). The work did not go well; the search for the new motor was particularly frustrating. Renard had immersed himself completely in the project; when the succession of disappointments became unbearable, he took his own life. An equally sad fate was reserved for the self-taught Austrian engineer David Schwarz, who began construction of a dirigible in 1890. Schwarz had an advantage over Renard in that he had an efficient power plant in the internal combustion engine, which had been developed in the 1880s; then, too, he had at his disposal a new construction material, aluminum, which became plentiful with the introduction of the electrolytic process in 1886. Schwarz built and flew what was probably the first rigid dirigible, and embarked on a long search for government support in his work. He tried the Austrian government, then the Russian authorities, and then the Germans. When, in January 1897, Schwarz finally received a telegram from the German government agreeing to finance test flights, he fell dead from shock. Count Zeppelin, who had seen Schwarz’s dirigible in flight, purchased the inventor’s notes and drawings from his widow.⁸

In Germany, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had been occupied with dirigible design for years; his first proposal was presented to the King of Württemburg in May 1887. Other proposals to various German authorities followed, but the responses he received were cautious at best. The Count argued that his airships would be able to do many things, including taking men to the North Pole and “opening up the interior of Africa without great sacrifice,” but his basic argument was that the airship would be useful in war. In principle the German military were eventually won over to this view, particularly after the French began extensive experiments with airships. In 1905 a German officer prepared a report acknowledging that the airship could be of significant value for reconnaissance, transport, and attacks on the enemy. But to be effective the new weapon would have to meet certain requirements: among other things it would have to stay in the air for many hours and cover hundreds of kilometers at a height of at least 1,500 meters. None of the Count’s early dirigibles had been capable of anything approaching such performance.⁹

Meantime, research on the dirigible was continuing in France and Italy, and by the middle of the decade it seemed the greatest progress was being made in those countries, rather than in Germany. The Italian Army contributed to the building of the first civilian airship in Italy in 1905; in 1904 its Brigata Specialisti began studies for a military dirigible, which took to the air in 1908 as the Crocco-Ricaldoni No. 1. In France the army was sponsoring research at Chalais-Meudon, and inventors were busy in the private sector as well. Among these latter was Santos Dumont, who in 1902 went aloft in a dirigible, steered it around the Eiffel Tower, and returned safely to his starting point. Then there were the Lebaudy brothers, who had underwritten the development of a promising semi-rigid design in 1903. So impressed was the French Army with the Lebaudy system that it bought the firm’s first dirigible in 1905. Before the year was out the specialists at Chalais-Meudon had begun a variety of tests with the new airship, including its use for reconnaissance, for directing artillery fire, and for bomb dropping.¹⁰

The five-year ban adopted at the First Hague Conference expired in 1904. The second conference, originally scheduled for that year, had to be postponed because of the Russo-Japanese War. When the Conference assembled in 1907, it was the French delegation that led the opposition to extending the ban; the French argued that it would be quite sufficient to impose on airships the same rules that had been adopted for land and sea forces, rules designed to shield non-combatants and their property during military operations. The delegates nevertheless agreed to propose the ban’s extension to their governments; as it turned out, this was a fruitless gesture, for by 1914 only Great Britain had ratified the ban.¹¹

It is tempting to speculate on what might have happened had the ban been accepted by the powers. It might have had no impact whatever on the evolution of warfare—after all, the Hague Conference had banned the use of poison gas, with obvious lack of success. Yet the delegates to the Second Hague Conference did realize that their generation was taking a very fateful step in militarizing the skies, quite as fateful as that of militarizing space today. A British delegate spoke very eloquently of the need to step back from “the fatal precipice.” Some lingering doubts remained about the legality and the morality of dropping bombs, particularly if it were done over a not clearly defined battlefield. Socialist and pacifist circles continued to denounce Luftmilitarismus and the dangers it presented to the populations of Europe. A perhaps more generalized feeling that the aerial weapon was improper, an arme déloyale, lingered on into 1914. When the first British civilians were killed by Zeppelin attacks, coroner’s juries, duly convened, brought in indictments of “willful murder” against Kaiser William II of Germany.¹²

The years 1908 and 1909 were critical for flight generally, and particularly for military aeronautics. First and perhaps most spectacularly, 1908 finally saw the triumph of Count Zeppelin. On July 1 of that year his huge LZ-4—longer than a football field—rose from its mooring for a flight that captured headlines all over Europe. That day the great airship remained aloft for 12 hours, covering a distance of some 350 kilometers.

The airship had proved itself in Germany. Soon there were three types of dirigibles in the inventories of the German Army: the rigid, aluminum-framed Zeppelins, as the Count’s creations were now commonly called, the non-rigid Parseval, and the semi-rigid “M” ship, built by the army’s own aeronautical section, now known as the Airship Battalion. In 1909 Professor Johann Schütte offered the German Army yet a fourth design—a rigid dirigible with a framework of wood. The first Schütte-Lanz airship joined Germany’s growing fleet at the end of 1912.¹³

Earlier, as if to presage Germany’s lead in lighter-than-air craft, Major August von Parseval had also made a great improvement in the tethered observation balloon. The typical spherical balloon had a bad habit of bobbing and turning in a stiff wind, usually making its observer airsick in the process; if the wind blew hard enough, the balloon could even be driven to the ground. Parseval’s kite balloon, however, looked somewhat like a fat sausage with a fin or vane attached to one end; correctly tethered, it rode the wind like a kite, and indeed it soon acquired the name Drachen, the German term for kite. The new balloon entered the German service in 1896 and was soon being marketed in many other countries.¹⁴

European navies were also beginning to eye the airship with considerable interest, impelled in part by the hope that it might help them combat two new weapons that would be encountered in any future war at sea: the naval mine and the submarine. As early as 1908 the French Navy named a commission to look into the role the dirigible might play at sea, and in Germany naval authorities were following closely the German Army’s assessment of the Zeppelin and laying down performance requirements for a naval dirigible. Even Great Britain, the premier naval power of the day, could not afford to ignore the airship’s potential. In 1909 the Admiralty began investing in its first dirigible, Rigid Naval Airship No. 1.¹⁵

The airplane too, came to the fore in the critical years 1908-9. One can date the formal beginnings of military aviation from February 10, 1908, when the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps ordered a Wright airplane and arranged for the Wrights to give flight instruction to two officers. While Orville Wright gave lessons outside Washington, his brother Wilbur left for Europe on an extended publicity and sales trip. The Wrights’ flying activities up to that time had not made a profound impression in Europe; the flights had not been public, and just how well they flew was unclear; their offers of sale to the various European powers had not been well received, partly because they were asking a very high price for a machine whose performance was open to some question. But Wilbur Wright began public demonstrations in France in August 1908, and ended all doubts about the flying ability of his machine; before the year was out he had flown two and a half hours at a stretch.¹⁶

The Wright machine was not the only airplane flying in France that summer: in July, Henry Farman had flown a distance of more than 20 kilometers in an airplane of his own design. Twelve months later another Frenchman, Louis Blériot, flew across the Channel in a plane he had created. One month after that, in August 1909, a spectacular week-long air meet was held in Reims. Over 40 aircraft participated, as did a number of aviators who were acquiring international reputations: Curtiss, Latham, Farman, Blériot, etc. The meet was unmarred by serious accident and some impressive records were set, including a long-distance flight of 180 kilometers. These successes were not lost on military observers. The German military attaché described some of the flights he witnessed as “astonishing”; he reported “the technique of flying has now passed the stage of sport or fruitless trials.” The French Army was even more impressed; after the meet it bought five of the best planes exhibited. The Italians had already acted: early in 1909 the Ministry of War, the Ministry of the Navy, and a newly formed Club Aviatori pooled their resources to buy a Wright airplane and hire Wilbur Wright to come to Rome and teach two Italian officers to fly—one from the Navy, and one from the Army Engineers. In July 1910 the German government came to an agreement with the Albatros Company, which undertook to supply two airplanes and to train 10 officer-pilots. In Great Britain the army’s formal commitment to aviation came with an order creating an Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers as of April 1, 1911. That same day, seven years later, the Royal Air Fo...