Above the Battlefield: Royal Flying Corps & RAF in WW1

For the start of our War in the Air Month, we begin with a look at the real story of the 'Twenty Minuters', the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force in the First World War. We look at its history from formation in 1912, its role in the opening months of the conflict, and how the war on the Western Front changed military aviation forever.

A good overview of the Air War from the Imperial War Museum: What impact did the First World War have on aircraft and aerial warfare?

Photographs of some of the aircraft mentioned in the podcast can be found here: Old Front Line website.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

The battles along the Western Front in the First World War are impossible to understand without reference to the war in the air, the battle above those trench lines of France and Flanders. What was the history of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force in World War I? In episode four of the classic comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth, Captain Blackadder decides to join the Royal Flying Corps, which he has heard is called the 20 Minuters. Thinking this relates to the average amount of work they do each day compared to what he, as an infantry soldier in the trenches, does, this sounds like a cushy number. but he quickly discovers instead from Lord Flashard that the phrase relates to their projected life expectancy, much to his and Lieutenant George's horror. Now, Blackadder isn't a documentary, of course. It's comedy. But being good observational comedy, and for many, a segue to an interest in the Great War, it highlighted an aspect of the conflict which is easy to forget. The War Above the Battlefield. John Giles, who was the founder of the Western Front Association, always said, when we look at the history of the Great War, we look at what happened on the battlefield, often what happened beneath the battlefield with those tunnelling operations that were so widespread, but it's just as important to look up above the battlefield. And that's what we're going to do in this upcoming series. So with this episode, we begin this special series, War in the Air Month, beginning here with an overview of the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF in the Great War, and hopefully learn the true story of the 20 Minuters. Now there's a lot we won't have space to cover in just one episode as an overview of this, from the other theatres of war where the flying services were operating through to the balloonatics there was a balloon section of the Royal Flying Corps which operated as the eyes of the gunners above the battlefield to look from baskets suspended beneath balloons to observe what was happening across that static landscape of the Western Front to the role of women in the RFC and the RAF in the latter period of the war and many aspects of the specialist work that the air services did we haven't got room for all of that and that's true with so many subjects of the Great War there's always something for us to return to and while in some of the upcoming episodes the work of the Royal Naval Air Service the RNAS will be mentioned because they flew side by side with the Royal Flying Corps so often and of course became part of the RAF themselves in 1918 those naval flyers are really a separate subject subject that again perhaps we will return to. But what I hope in this special series of episodes which will include interviews with two subject experts and a special Q&A and if you've got any RFC, RAF questions that you've always wanted answered get those in and I'm going to pick the best four for a special RFC RAF Q&A episode and then we'll end with an overview of what we can find of the flying services on that landscape of the First World War on the Western Front today and hopefully all of this will give us a wider understanding of this aspect, this layer of Great War history. So where to begin? The best place to start is with the approach to the Great War and the formalisation of aerial services as aviation technology changed in that Edwardian period. The Royal Flying Corps was formed under a Royal Warrant in April of 1912, replacing earlier aerial units like the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers and the Royal Engineers' use of balloons. They were the kind of pioneers, really, of British military aviation. But it was clear that aviation was changing, developing, and there had to be a specialist branch to deal with this and to see how it fitted into the wider aspect of warfare at that time. The Royal Flying Corps was part of the Army, so not an air force at this stage, and was managed and funded by the War Office. The Admiralty had their own air service, which was for use by the Royal Navy. That's the Royal Naval Air Service. And what it meant from the perspective of the RFC is that officers and men who served in it were soldiers, not airmen. They might have seen themselves as airmen, but technically on paper they were soldiers of the army governed by the war office. And they had army ranks because air force ranks would not exist until after the Great War. The whole establishment of British Air Services was in response to the development of manned flight following the Wright brothers' first manned flight in a heavier-than-air powered aircraft in 1903 and then Bleriot's first flight across the English Channel in 1909. This kind of technology, which to the generation then would have felt kind of space-age technology in so many different ways, was bringing new aspects to civilian life and with it of course potentially new aspects to the way warfare would be conducted and Italy became the first nation in the world to use aircraft when they flew planes in Libya and in the Italian-Turkish conflict of 1911 to 1912 when planes were used to bomb targets not always successfully but it was a turning point in the way that aircraft had now become weapons of War. Aircraft were also later used in the Balkan Wars just before the Great War and many nations in that period were essentially playing a kind of catch-up to ensure that they had some kind of air forces and that included Britain. So as such, the Royal Flying Corps developed during this period. It recruited pilots and technical personnel who had the required skill to maintain the aircraft. And that ground crew, that essential ground crew that would keep planes in the air, always really formed the bulk of those who served in the Royal Flying Corps and then, latterly, the RAF. Because while piloting was the glamorous side of the Royal Flying Corps, no pilot could take an aircraft into the sky unless the ground crew had worked on it fueled it maintained it armed it and all the other things that will be required as the war went on A central flying school, the CFS, was established at Uphaven on Salisbury Plain, and that opened in June 1912, a couple of months after the Royal Flying Corps was formed, and it was set up to train all pilots who had obtained licences to fly aircraft. You had to get a civilian licence to get permission to fly an aircraft, and those men went on to have their formal training at Uphaven. By August 1914, the Royal Flying Corps had 63 aircraft, around 150 pilots and over 1,000 personnel. So already you can see that the ground crew massively outweigh those who were going to get in aircraft and fly up over any potential battlefield. The aircraft that the RFC had were all monoplanes or biplanes, none were armed, and most were B-2 aircraft, which were biplanes with a pilot and observer and could fly to something like 10,000 feet. The vast majority of the aircraft in the first squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps were these BE-2s, but they also had other models of planes, like the French Farman, for example. And each aircraft had its own characteristics, and training on them could often be complex and difficult. and dangerous. There were many accidents. There were no flight simulators. The men had to get in the aircraft and take off, and often taking off was the easier bit. It was the landing bit that was quite difficult. And that whole issue of training pilots in this way without proper simulators meant that throughout the conflict that would come, many, many pilots and observers were killed and injured during that training period before they'd even got to a battlefield. At this stage in the approach to war, as the outbreak of war came, aircraft were perhaps seen as a novelty by the commanders in the forming British Expeditionary Force, and their true value, I think, was yet to be realised by most soldiers and civilians alike. But the war, of course. would change all of that. Following the outbreak of war in August 1914, the BEF, the British Expeditionary Force, was mobilised and the first three squadrons of the Royal Flying Corps, which would be part of its order of battle, began to prepare to cross to France. And the first pilot to take off from Britain and land in France was the 23-year-old Lieutenant Hubert Dunstaville Harvey Kelly. Born in Tameth, Devon, the son of an Indian Army Colonel and from an Anglo-Irish family Harvey Kelly was commissioned in the Royal Irish Regiment in 1910 and was one of those who volunteered to transfer and train as a pilot in the RFC in 1913. As part of No. 2 Squadron in 1914, he flew his BE-2A from Scotland to Kent via Yorkshire, and then on the 13th of August did a nearly two-hour flight to AMIA, just beating his commanding officer, Major Charles Burke, and sending his aircraft down on a grass airfield at AMIA, the first RFC plane to land on French soil. And for Harvey Kelly, this was the beginning of a long war in the air, which would sadly end in tragedy with his death at Arras in 1917 while flying with the famous number 56 squadron. The role of the Royal Flying Corps in this early phase of the conflict was simple really. It was reconnaissance. It was to fly up above the battlefield, spot enemy troop movements and then report back. The front was fluid. This was a war of movement. And so it wasn't clear where the enemy might be, what direction he was coming. And it was clear that aircraft had aptitude here to be able to be used to find this kind of information out. And it was in this reconnaissance role in the lead up to the first clash of British troops at the Battle of Mons in August 1914 that the first casualties in the air were suffered. The first aircrew to become fatal casualties in the Great War were Lieutenant Vincent Waterfall and Lieutenant Charles George Goodwin Bailey. They were both of No. 5 Squadron Royal Flying Corps who were flying an Avro 504 when they were shot down by ground fire on 22nd August 1914, the day before the Battle of Mons. Waterfall was from Grimsby but had moved to Burgess Hill in Sussex and was educated at Brighton College. He'd been commissioned initially in the East Yorkshire Regiment and then qualified as a pilot in 1913. Bailey was a South African who was a great nephew of Gordon of Khartoum and he was commissioned into the Royal Engineers and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer. And these two lads, the first air crew to become fatal casualties over the battlefield are buried side by side today at Tornay communal cemetery in Belgium. At Mons, aircraft were used and were able to warn of the approach of German forces. But how did this kind of work operate without radios? Because there were no radio sets in these aircraft. The kind of radio sets that existed in 1914 were massive and were not portable in any kind of way. And they only transmitted Morse, not voice. These aircraft didn't have them. anyway so how did they do it well they would fly over an area spot the movement of troops mark that onto a map and some of these men had message pads that were strapped to their knee and this was a wooden device with a compass on it and paper on two rollers they could make notes or draw a map write a message and they had message pods in the aircraft cockpit as well so they could make a map write out a message give the indication of troop movements or locations put that in a message message pod and then fly to where they knew there was some kind of British headquarters and then drop that onto the headquarters and they would pick it up. Now this is fairly primitive as you can imagine and there was a lot of movement of troops and while headquarters might be at one location on one day it might not be there in the next so this is far from perfect and this was an aspect of ground air and air to ground cooperation that would have to be developed as the war went along, until there were, by the end of the conflict, radio sets that could be put into the cockpits of aircraft, but again, to only transmit morse and receive morse, not voice. The Germans were, of course, using aircraft in exactly the same kind of way, and also our French allies. They were rapidly on all parts of the battlefield, becoming the eyes of the army above that battlefield, but at this stage could not really clash in the skies themselves as they were not equipped with weapons of any kind. Having said that, pilots and aircrew began to take weapons up with them to tackle the increasing number of aircraft they encountered in the skies, even in 1914. From pistols to carbines, I've read about shotguns, and even bricks, where pilots took a brick up, flew over an enemy aircraft and tried to chuck the brick out the side to put a hole in the wingspan or knock the pilot out. I mean, these are all very primitive methods that were used in this early phase of the fight but the real change in the use of aircraft came with a change in warfare on the western front Everybody, as we often say on this podcast, everybody had gone to war prepared for war in 1914, but not the kind of war that the Great War would rapidly turn into, this vast static war where there were hundreds of miles of trenches across Belgium and France. But the static war suddenly gave a new dimension to the use of aircraft because they could now be used not just as a spot for the army, spot for the guns spot for whoever required that kind of information even with those limited communications and observe they could also take photographs cameras could be taken up with the aircraft and the cameras could be used to capture intelligence information about those battlefield positions when the war was mobile that wasn't really practical and one photograph taken in the morning could easily be out of date by lunchtime but on a static front where both sides were digging in and building these vast trench networks the air photographs could really chart the development of that and then be used by headquarters to decide how they could be attacked or overcome and then later by artillery to accurately bombard them and harass the enemy in building those positions and air photos led to maps they were used in the whole development of mapping on the battlefield which was fairly primitive when the war began but the ability to send up aircraft to take air photos to allow military cartographers to work accurately on maps and produce trench maps became a massive game changer and was a really important part of the whole development of the use of aircraft by the military in the first world war it wasn't just the royal flying corps doing this the germans and the french air forces they were doing exactly the same so at this stage it's still a reconnaissance role the aircraft are going up to spot what's happening take these air photographs relay intelligence back to headquarters allow maps to be created but there's no air combat. Tactical bombing however did become a thing during this period where BE-2Cs were adapted to carry fairly modest bombs and positions could be targeted on and off the battlefield so they could fly over a trench system and drop a bomb or fly a bit further behind enemy lines to an ammunition dump or bridges and try and bomb those and in many cases bombs were not dropped from the aircraft wings or from underneath the aircraft they were dropped out of the side of the aircraft so they were kept in the cockpit and then heaved over the side and let go so you can see already this isn't particularly accurate and it was It wasn't just bombs that they dropped as well. There were things called flechettes, which were kind of aerial darts, and there's all kinds of different types of these, and you see them being discussed quite frequently in newspapers and magazines of that early war period. And while flechettes were not banned under the rules of warfare, they were fairly controversial. The use of them was controversial because you could drop a whole bag of these aerial darts out of the side of an aircraft and they would cascade down into a trench below and you can imagine a steel aerial dart with a very fine point to it coming down at a rapid rate of knots straight onto the head of a soldier standing in that trench before helmets became a thing and even with helmets I don't think they would withstand a flechette I won't describe the kind of gory outcome of that but it wasn't good so flechettes although they were used I don't think they were used as often as the press were kind of indicating because a whole constant stream of them would have to be produced and I think they had more of a shock effect than actual military value and also at the same time to counter the use of zeppelins these massive dirigibles that the Germans were using to fly across and bomb positions behind the battlefield even fly across to Britain resulting in the first blitz where civilians became as much a part of a front line, a new front line, as those actually on the battlefield on the Western Front. So to counter the use of these zeppelins, the Royal Flying Corps began to fly longer missions across northern France and Belgium to try and take out their points of departure. But long-range bombing was still relatively new for fixed-wing aircraft and not very accurate, something that would develop over the period of the First World War resulting in much bigger bombers nothing on the scale of World War II but bombers of that period that could fly well into enemy territory and bomb key targets. But with the increase in air traffic over the battlefield essentially being used by both sides to spy on each other, the necessity to snuff out those eyes over the trenches became more and more pressing. Anti-aircraft artillery was increasingly used by both sides to bombard the sky with shells which would either rip apart the aircraft with shrapnel or kill the pilots and observers. And on the British side of the battlefield, the Royal Garrison Artillery formed anti-aircraft units equipped with 13-pounder guns which could fire shells up to 19,000 feet for example. But the real key to countering enemy aircraft with combat in the air was taking weapons up and that became more and more commonplace with pilots and aircrew frustrated at seeing so many enemy aircraft and not being able to do something about it. And Lieutenant John Frederick Lascelles of the Rifle Brigade attached to the Royal Flying Corps became the first man to shoot down an enemy aircraft with a rifle in mid-air. Lascelles was born in Sussex in 1895. He was educated at Winchester College, commissioned in the Rifle Brigade in the summer of 1914 and then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer and flew in a BE-2C with No. 4 Squadron based at Santa Maria. The incident of him shooting down an enemy aircraft happened on 17 July 1915 when he took 24 shots at a German aircrew shooting the pilot in the head and forcing the aircraft to crash for which he was awarded the military cross. Lascelles was shot down himself over the Somme and killed in July of 1915 and is buried at the communal cemetery at Beauval which has quite a lot of aircrew in it. His short war lasted just a few months and he was only 19. Eventually machine guns were added to aircraft. That was the next obvious step. But these had problems. If you just mount a machine gun on the forward part of the aircraft in front of the pilot, you've got a propeller there that moves the aircraft forward. And if you open fire with your machine gun, you're going to scythe that propeller off, and the aircraft is going to crash. If you have a rearward firing machine gun, perhaps where the observer is, he could get carried away, and in following an aircraft across the sky, he could scythe off the back of the tailplane of the aircraft. So there were problems in using automatic weapons on aircraft in that way, but it was clear that they would really be, again, the game changer that would enable aircraft to successfully shoot down other aircraft in the sky But as aircraft types changed the Royal Flying Corps invested a lot in planes like the Vickers FB-5 Gunbus which had the observer in a forward cockpit with a machine gun so they could fire straight out the front of the aircraft and fire from left to right, up and down and not interfere with the actual aircraft itself or do potential damage to it, focus that machine gun fire and try to shoot down the enemy. And other twin winged aircraft could also have of a machine gun, usually a Lewis gun, mounted on the upper wing of the aircraft so it could fire over the propeller at targets beyond and not do any damage to the aircraft itself. But this had all kinds of problems in changing the magazine of the Lewis gun, for example, and also accurately firing the weapon. These things were sighted up in a fairly basic way. And again, that use of weapons, using them so they could fire accurately was all part of aircraft development these were perhaps easy solutions to a complex problem but the enemy the germans were looking for more complex outcomes and as they gradually got the upper hand in aircraft technology and development with the fokker e1 for example becoming the first aircraft with a synchronized machine gun mounted in it that gave them an edge an upper hand in those skies above the battlefield because a synchronized machine gun could be fit to the forward part of the aircraft and it worked in cooperation with the turn of the propeller so that the bullets passed either side of the propeller blades and not did damage to the propeller itself. But the Royal Flying Corps eventually got there themselves with synchronised machine guns and they brought in the Sopwith 1.5 strutter for example that had a synchronised machine gun in 1915-16 and over the next year or so the use and development of these weapons continued creating the first proper fighter planes. And if we kind of look at that 1916 period, so about halfway through the Great War, from a German and a British perspective, those two air forces clashing in the skies above the Western Front, the Germans were using the Fokker E3 that had a Spandau machine gun on it. This was that first properly successful synchronised fighter plane, the synchronised machine gun. The British had the aircraft DH2 that had a Lewis gun on it, it was a pusher design initially to try and counter the Fokker threat in the skies above France and Flanders they also brought in that Sopwith 1.5 strutter that had one pair of fixed forward firing machine guns that were synchronised with the propeller and also a machine gun in the observers cockpit as well and the FE2B with one or two Lewis guns was a two seater fighter reconnaissance aircraft that was a bit outdated by that stage, but this was the kind of common aircraft used in that mid-period of the war. And bigger, faster, better aircraft would be developed as the conflict moved forward. And with this development of fighter planes and the idea of fighter pilots, a new phase of aerial warfare came in. This was the time of the Aces, or the so-called Knights of the Air. With the ability to now fight battles in the air, with fighter aircraft sent up to specifically target aircraft being used for reconnaissance or aerial photography and shoot them down, and aircraft then being dispatched to bring down those fighter aircraft to protect the spotter planes, the whole war in the air changed completely at this stage of the conflict. And this became a period of the Knights of the Air, as the press reports often called them. Men, pilots, jousting just like knights of old, in the skies above the Western Front. There was this idea that there was some kind of chivalry amongst the air crews who flew. that it was a cleaner, perhaps more civilised form of warfare in what was rapidly becoming a total war with gas and flamethrowers, chemical warfare and mass artillery bombardments. It was believed that pilots respected each other, signalled to each other in the air during and after combat, saluted each other even and dropped messages of condolence when an enemy pilot was killed. And while some of this of course did happen, it was in some ways a clever foil on the home front to the brutality of aerial warfare, where men could drop from thousands of feet on fire and die horribly, and where pilots could pursue an enemy until he was riddled with bullets or smashed to pieces on the ground. Was there really any honour in an industrialised war, a total war, that the Great War was by 1916? With this concept of knights on both sides came the development of the concept of aces, air aces, some of the most skilful and in many ways deadliest pilots flying over the battlefield. In Britain, this was arguably led initially by Albert Bull, a teenage pilot from Nottingham who'd achieved 44 victories and was decorated numerous times until he was shot down in May 1917, crashing behind the German lines and being awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. He was a typical lone wolf pilot, preferring to fight alone in those duels over the battlefields and being intensely religious with strong Christian beliefs, it began to bother him. in the way that he could inflict such heavy losses in the air on his German counterparts and the strain I think generally on pilots during this period of duels above the battlefield pilots fighting pilots and then seeing the terrible outcome when an aircraft was shot down two of the veterans that I interviewed in the 1980s and 90s had been pilots one in the RFC and one in the RAF and they'd both seen friends shot down in flames over the battlefields one of them carried a pistol in his cockpit to shoot himself if his aircraft ever caught fire and the other one carried a cyanide capsule in case the same thing happened to him. And then later, this mantle of air race that was championed by Albert Ball was also picked up by Canadian Billy Bishop, who had a staggering 72 victories and was also awarded the Victoria Cross. And then James McCudden with 57 victories and Mick Mannock with at least 61. The latter two collected just about every medal going, many with bars and both of them the Victoria Cross, which was a common trait with these aces, how much they were deceptive. and then were given really high profiles in the press to set this kind of example for other men to perhaps follow into the Royal Flying Corps and also to show I guess from a propaganda point of view how well Britain was doing in that air war over the battlefield. The other trait that really was commonplace amongst them all with just a few exceptions was not surviving the war. The idea as we mentioned at the That wasn't ever really true. Life expectancy was short and pilots like Mannock and McCudden did have quite long wars in many respects but so many of them did not survive the Great War. Billy Bishop being one of the more unusual ones to survive in that list of great pilots in the First World War. On the German side stories of their aces also dominated the popular press of both nations, both on the British and the German side with Manfred von Richthofen and his 80 confirmed victories and legendary status flying that red Fokker triplane through to pilots like Max Immelmann the Eagle of Lille who may have had fewer victories than Richthofen but developed for example the Immelmann Turn an aviation manoeuvre still in use today both of them died in the Great War along with many other German aces but not everyone was an ace So who were the pilots and aircrew of the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War? In the early phase of the war, aircrew came from a middle and upper class kind of background. And that was true of all officers of the British Army at that time because the RFC, you remember, was part of the Army. And to get a commission in the Army, when you applied, you were asked what school you'd attended. And there was a list of approved schools. Now, if you'd gone to Eton or Winchester or Harrow, schools like that, then that's the kind of school that they were looking for. State schools were not on that list so it meant that the kind of men that became pilots in that early phase of the history of the Royal Flying Corps particularly in that period from its formation in 1912 through to the outbreak of war in 1914 came from a fairly narrow background but as the war went on and changed this also changed this background of the pilots changed with many working class men finding a route to flight and flying men like McManacher we mentioned before a working class lad who'd been a telephone engineer on the outbreak of war he worked his way through to becoming a pilot and with the change in the army acts in 1917 allowing men from any background any schooling to be commissioned that brought in a lot of pilots as well there was also a change in the way that pilots did not have to be officers to actually fly aircraft as well so non-commissioned officers NCOs could fly aircraft and that allowed men from humble backgrounds to fly including Britain's first black pilot William Robinson Clarke who was from the West Indies. He paid to come to Britain to serve initially as ground crew in the Royal Flying Corps but because of his technical knowledge and ability that got him into the pilot seat and enabled him to fly and he flew aircraft with Royal Flying Corps over Ypres in 1917 until he crashed and injured himself and he couldn't fly again. I've told a bit of his story in an episode that we did on black soldiers in the British Army in an earlier podcast you can go back and find out more about him there but aside from black pilots from the West Indies there were also Indian pilots like Indra Lal Roy DFC who was an ace with 10 victories until he was killed in 1918 and eventually men from every corner of Britain and the British Empire would become pilots or observers in the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF in that latter phase of the First World War. But we have to ask, I guess, considering this period of the Knights of the Air, was it really truly representative of the Royal Flying Corps and eventually the RAF? Not everyone was an ace. Not everyone managed to shoot down a large number of German aircraft. For some pilots and observers, their role was to act in that reconnaissance role, to take photographs, and that became increasingly, as the war went on, more and more important, and the use of air photographs became so commonplace that gunner officers on the ground, for example, could commission a flight from the Royal Flying Corps to go out and photograph a trench system or a series of bunkers bring those air photos back get them developed, deliver them to the gunners who would then work on their fire plan based around those air photographs, carry out their fire plan, drop shells onto the targets, and then commission another flight of RFC planes to go over and photograph it to see what damage had been done. So while there were these knights jousting in the skies, from Mick Manor to McCudden to Albert Ball to Billy Bishop and so many others, they were the kind of high-profile pilots. There were many others who just did their bit. often their war in the air was short not necessarily because they were shot down and killed but because they crashed on landing injured themselves while flying or because of the psychological pressures of flying could end up being transferred out of a squadron with severe psychological issues so while in that kind of mid period of the war the aces the knights of the air dominated the story the history of the royal flying corps that was only really part of the story. And as the war progressed to its final phase, things would change again. Beyond that period of the Knights of the Air, as modern warfare on the ground changed, the role of the air forces changed with it. Aerial photography remained dominant, a dominant, dominant part of their task over the battlefield. Not just fighting enemy aircraft, not just bombing targets, but taking air photos because it was so important and that battlefield intelligence was so important. Air combat of course continued, but the focus on aces lessened as the war went on. Perhaps the old idea of it being chivalrous began to fade when they looked at the casualty rates of units of the Royal Flying Corps, for example. And that was especially true during bloody April in 1917, the nearest in reality that the Royal Flying Corps got to this concept from Blackadder of 20 Minuters. That was a period when German German aviation had really got the advantage on the Royal Flying Corps, the upper hand, and German pilots were able to inflict really a disaster on British and Commonwealth aircrew. In April 1917, the RFC lost 245 aircraft of all types and over 200 aircrew were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. The average life expectancy of a new Royal Flying Corps pilot during this month, April 1917, was just less than three weeks, sometimes as little as five to 11 days when they were on the front line. And it's worth mentioning, I think here, that amongst those casualty rates were men who were prisoners of war that were captured when their aircraft crashed. We tend to think with aircraft losses that when an aircraft came down, the men were killed or badly injured, perhaps terribly burnt, but many were able to survive an aircraft landing, crash landing, behind the battlefield, behind the German front lines, but ended up as prisoners of war. And a lot of these pilots went off to PO camps and as officers had a very different experience to the men as an ordinary soldier another rank if you were captured you could be used by the Germans for all kind of labor tasks working in salt mines and coal mines and factories and any kind of dirty work that the Germans required POWs were used for that officers were treated differently by the Germans were often kept in separate camps or separate parts of a camp and it was considered an officer's duty as a prisoner of war was to try and escape and there were many escape stories that came out of the great war some of them penned by men who had flown above the trenches as part of the rfc or raf coming back to the battlefield in 1917 this is a period when you look at infantry war diaries you see a lot more mention of ground to air and air to ground cooperation where battalions on the ground lay out coloured markers to indicate that they had advanced so far into an enemy position and that the 7th Buffs were here or the 11th Sussex were there and that the aircraft could then see this and relay that information back to headquarters and also the Royal Flying Corps began to spot far more commonly for the gunners by flying over the battlefield looking for enemy artillery concentrations and then relaying that information back to the gunners so they could fire onto those and as we mentioned while at the beginning of the war it wasn't possible to put radio sets into the cockpits of aircraft by the latter stage of the conflict that was possible and they could communicate better with the men on the ground as well largely with artillery units I don't think there were too many if any occasions in which aircraft communicated with infantry on the ground portable radio sets just didn't really exist in terms of an infantry element by 1918 it was decided to combine the air forces into one organization and i think this reflects the changing nature of the use of aircraft the importance of aircraft and the move away from this idea of just aces and knights of the air into the air force becoming part of a wider modern armed force So on the 1st of April 1918 the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service were combined to become the Royal Air Force and a new organisation which still exists today, the RAF, was formed. It was still run as a military and army style unit so again this was before the period of Air Force ranks and its principal purpose was now to work as one of those air forces elements on the battlefield. I've often described it like an orchestra of bringing all these parts together. Infantry with tanks, with mortars and artillery, and also aircraft in the sky as well. And on the Western Front, bomber squadrons now flew side by side with fighters. The RAF developed in 1918 the ability to drop supplies to men on the ground, for example. Now, there was no World War I equipment of a Dakota aircraft or anything like that but for example in the Battle of Le Hamel in July 1918 on the Somme the RAF flew in close support of the Australian troops on the ground who advanced over quite some distance from the outskirts of Corby up onto the high ground around Le Hamel and one of the problems in advances on the ground was that the men couldn't carry as much ammunition as they required they would run out of ammo having captured a position very quickly and needed a resupply so aircraft took special crates with small arms ammunition in it that could be thrown over the side of the aircraft crash and break up but the packaging would absorb the damage caused by the impact when it hit the ground and it meant they could fly up and drop ammo onto some of the objectives so when the diggers got there they had small arms ammunition for their rifles and their Lewis guns to continue with their battle and that was a really big game changer. It wasn't without risk because quite a few RAF pilots were shot down flying so low over the German positions that they were vulnerable to ground fire but that use of aircraft as a method of resupply again was another element that changed air warfare forever and in some of those 1918 battles there was a role that the RAF could perform that was far less glamorous but still very important and that was to send whole squadrons up into the air to fly over the battlefield with droning engine noise to drown out the noise of tanks on the ground approaching the battlefield and this was put into good effect at amiens for example in august 1918 so The men who fought those battles in the air had gone from this period of being unarmed observers through to knights jousting in the skies, through to being the means by which they could drown out the noise of new battlefield weapons and allow them to approach that battlefield and defeat the enemy. A lot less glamorous, but was quite literally the direction of travel of military aviation in the 20th century. When the war ended... while the life expectancy of men in the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force had been a lot more than 20 minutes. Nevertheless, the casualties had been immense, with thousands of pilots and observers killed and wounded and taken prisoner just on the Western Front alone, and of them, almost a thousand with no known grave. That separate section of the Arras Memorial, the Flying Services Memorial, which lists the pilots of the Royal Flying Corps of the Royal Naval Air Service and then latterly the RAF and also men from other Commonwealth nations who were killed, shot down over the battlefield and have no known grave. It makes us reflect I think when we see that memorial on the realities of air warfare in the Great War. Those very early designs of quite fragile aircraft with humans inside and when they came down at a rapid rate of knots often on fire perhaps it's not surprising that so many pilots do not have a known grave. And that memorial really... Chronicles the history of the RFC and the RAF in the Great War from Major Lano Hawker who was the first pilot to get a Victoria Cross for shooting down an enemy aircraft over Ypres in 1915 through to Mick Mannock, that great fighter pilot, that great ace who was killed with the RAF in the summer of 1918 and we'll return to his story later on in this series of Air War Podcasts. The development of aircraft and their use in the Great War was all part of the changing nature of warfare seen by both sides in that conflict. But the war in the air is so easy to ignore. It's easy to concentrate on the trenches and the tanks and the bunkers and the barbed wire and the gas and everything else. But it's impossible to understand all of that without knowledge of what was happening above it. And just as the planes flown by those masters of the air in the Great War once cast long shadows across the smashed landscapes and crenellated trench lines of northern France and Flanders more than a century ago, today their exploits and achievements as pioneers of a new way of warfare continue to cast shadows across that landscape. of the Old Front Line. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline or support us on Buy Me A Coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our website. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.