The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain, 1917-1918

The Sky on Fire

The Sky on Fire

Raymond H. Fredette

Afterword by

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor

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

∞

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. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10 0-8173-5424-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

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

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8827-0 (electronic)

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

1. ‘A Single German Aeroplane’

A VISION OF MODERN WARFARE

2. The Coming of the ‘Wong-Wongs’

3. Air War and Baby-Killing

4. The England Squadron

5. Gotha in the Sea

LONDON BY DAY

6. A Grand but Deadly Show

7. ‘Send Over . . . One or Two Squadrons’

8. ‘The Hammer is in Our Hands’

9. The Raid Heard Round the World

10. The Fortress of London

11. Sunday in Southend

12. Defeat of the Day Raiders

13. ‘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’

18. ‘All that Flies and Creeps’

19. Winter Twilight of the Gotha Bombers

20. The Nights of the Giants

21. Khaki and Blue: An Air Force Is Born

END OF A ROUND

22. The Biggest Raid—and the Last

23. Retreat to Oblivion

24. The First Bomber Command

A FEARSOME LEGACY

25. Only a Beginning

26. The Sky on Fire

AN AFTERWORD

By Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, 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

Sources

Index

Maps

The Bases

The Folkestone Raid, 25 May 1917

London

The Second Gotha Raid on London, 7 July 1917

The Southend Raid, 12 August 1917

The London Air Defence Area

British Casualties and German Gotha Losses

Targets of the British VIII Brigade and the Independent Air Force in Germany

Illustrations

1a 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)

5a. The funeral procession for fifteen of the children killed during the first Gotha raid on London (Syndication International: Daily Mirror)

5b. Major-General Hugh Trenchard escorting Queen Mary on a tour of an R.F.C, aerodrome at St. Omer (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)

8a. The plywood forward section of the Staaken R.VI (Archiv fuer Fluggeschichte)

8b. The nacelle of the Staaken R.VI (Archiv fuer Fluggeschichte)

9a. Pilot's position in the Staaken R.VI (Peter M. Grosz)

9b. The port-gunner-mechanic of R. 12 (Peter M. Grosz)

10a. The flight engineer's compartment of R. 12 (Peter M. Grosz)

10b. A flight mechanic rides outside the port nacelle of R. 12 (Peter M. Grosz)

11a. A gunner-mechanic of R. 13 (Egon Krueger)

11b. R. 13's two pilots (Egon Krueger)

12a. The crew of Lo-Ri 3 (Dr. Kurt Küppers)

12b. ‘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 28 January 1918 (The Times)

14a. The North Pavilion of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, struck by the first German one-ton bomb (Imperial War Museum)

14b. The wreckage of a Gotha which fell on a farmhouse while making a night landing approach (Harold Fischer)

15a. R. 13 (Egon Krueger)

15b. The ‘indestructible’ R. 12 (Dr. Walter Georgii)

16a. Lord Weir, British Secretary of State for Air (Imperial War Museum)

16b. Twin-engined Handley Page 0/400S of the Royal Air Force (Imperial War Museum)

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-power—philosophical 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 air-power, 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. Air-power 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.

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 2,200-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’.

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 I 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 I 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 I'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 part 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 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, was—despite 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 first said in 1917, that the bomber would always get though.

The German strategic bombing of the First World War left therefore, as Major Fredette puts it, a ‘fearsome legacy’ for the second war. By 1940, the British had feverishly built up their air defences and their radar chain, and even more feverishly they had built big bombers and were preparing to implement plan W.A.8—a night attack upon Germany ‘to produce an immediate dislocation of German war industry’.

The British predictions and expectations, like our own, were highly exaggerated; neither London nor Washington anticipated that the numbers of aircraft and bombs required to crush by independent action an enemy's capability and will to resist were astronomical. And no combatant fully anticipated the amazing physical and psychological resilience of the human being under stress, and his ability to carry on amidst disaster. As it was, World War II was not a victory through air-power, though it can be said that strategic bombardment was the final straw that—added to the insupportable strain of land and sea attrition—ultimately broke Berlin and Tokyo.

But the parallels of history go farther than World War II. The Gotha and the Giant bombers of World War I were too little and too late to save Germany from defeat, but they were a portent of what was to come in World War II. Similarly, the V1s and V2s of World War II, and above all the atomic weapons that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were perhaps portents of World War III.

The prophecies of Douhet, the expectations of Trenchard, the claims of Mitchell and de Seversky and the hopes of those obscure German theorists and pilots who are rescued in this book from military oblivion, were never fully realized—probably never could have been realized—until the dawn of the atomic age. Victory through air-power only, through independent strategic operations without the assistance of surface forces, was never possible until the atomic age began in August 1945. Today the strategic concept first tested in the 1917–18 German raids against Britain has come to full maturity; intercontinental ballistic missiles and hydrogen warheads permit the destruction of nations and perhaps of civilization itself.

Yet—again ironically—the immense power of modern aircraft and missiles with nuclear arms is so great that it invokes built-in limitations against its use. Politically and psychologically, as Vietnam and the wars and crises since World War II have shown, strategic nuclear bombardment has become a kind of strategy of terror, a threat that neither side—hopefully—dares to invoke. Thus history has come full circle; the trauma left in England by the bombings of 1917–18, which so affected history between the wars and during World War II, is as nothing compared to today's traumatic memories of Hiroshima. Perhaps, in the end, a recollection of history may preserve us; perhaps, in the end, the edict of the Hague Convention of Jurists of 1923 may become a cornerstone of international law:

Bombardment from the air is legitimate only when directed at a military objective, the destruction or injury of which would constitute a distinct military disadvantage to the belligerent.

It is of this historic episode, the real beginnings of strategic bombing, for far too long neglected by most historians, that Major Fredette writes. He describes in graphic but succinct prose the German bombing of Britain in World War I, the results it achieved, the failures it experienced, and above all the effects—military, political, psychological—it had then, yesterday and today.

This book goes to the grass roots of history. It is the product of intensive research. It fills a gap; it corrects many mistaken assumptions and tendentious interpretations, and it provides a new window to the past and hence, as always with history, a link to the future.

HANSON W. BALDWIN

A new day is dawning, but the clouds are blood-red over the coming sunrise.

Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (1916)

CHAPTER ONE

‘A Single German Aeroplane’

World War I, ‘the dreadful tragedy that was turning the world into hell’, was at its anguishing mid-point in late 1916. The dead and the wounded already numbered millions. The spectacle of huge armies deadlocked in battle along hundreds of miles of front seemed incapable of producing any new horror or surprise. The machine-gun, massed artillery, poison gas, the tank and the flamethrower had all been tried with deadly but indecisive effect.

Few illusions remained, except possibly in America. President Woodrow Wilson, his campaign aided by the slogan, ‘He kept us out of war’, was barely re-elected for a second term in November. Aged Franz Josef I of Austria-Hungary died a few weeks later. His death ended a reign longer than that of Queen Victoria, one of sixty-seven years, and foreshadowed the doom of a polyglot empire. The French were at an ebb, their élan drained by the bloodletting of Verdun. In December they forsook ‘Papa’ Joffre, their stolid commander-in-chief who had turned defeat into a ‘miracle’ at the Marne in 1914, and replaced him with the bombastic General Nivelle.

The Germans occupied a vast area stretching from the coast of Flanders to the plains and marshes of eastern Russia. General Brusilov's spectacular summer offensive, ‘the greatest Russian victory of the war’, had spent itself by September. Pushed to their limit, the long-suffering armies of the Czar had little more to give for a cause that was about to be engulfed by revolution. The Italians, bitterly engaged against the Austrians high in the Alps since early 1915, had gone to war with the Germans only that August. The Romanians joined the Allies that same month, hoping to profit from the death struggle of their neighbours. The Germans, Austrians, and Bulgarians overran the hapless nation before year's end, as they had little Serbia in 1915.

Great Britain was fighting on ‘in the shadows’. Herbert Asquith, who had been Prime Minister for nearly a decade, and his wobbly coalition Government fell in the first days of December. The Battle of the Somme had just ended, at least officially, if not for the troops in the line. The sacrifice of that cataclysmic clash was still too fresh, too numbing, to be fully grasped. At sea, German U-boats were sinking British ships at an alarming rate, and a serious food shortage threatened the country. Harassed at home by night-bombing Zeppelins, the British people had to turn to the air for some sign that the Germans could be bested.

In that autumn of 1916, the raiders were being brought down in flames, their incandescent death-throes setting the sky on fire for miles around London. Courageous pilots of the Royal Flying Corps flying slow but steady aeroplanes were shooting down the hydrogen-filled monsters with incendiary and explosive bullets. The Germans, stunned by the agonizing end befalling some of their best crews, called the devices ‘an invention of the devil’.

A reprieve from the raids seemed as certain as the sure-fire defences after 28 November 1916. In the early morning darkness two Zeppelins were destroyed, not on the outskirts of London, but at the coast. England's dimmed-out cities were jubilant. But the date of the double victory over the airships, the first such triumph on one single night, was to be remembered for a far more foreboding reason. In broad daylight, barely six hours after Luftschiff 21 of the German Imperial Navy disappeared with no survivors beneath a black oily scum on the sea off Lowestoft, a series of small explosions gently shook London's busy West End.

Unannounced and unheard beyond a few streets, the feeble blasts inflicted some damage between the Brompton Road and Victoria Station. Quite suddenly, as if struck by lightning, a baker's shop lost its chimney. A stable was wrecked and the roof of a rear addition to a house collapsed. The business office of a large dairy was mysteriously ventilated, its files and furniture scattered. A dressing-room was gutted in a noisy impromptu performance at the Palace of Varieties, a music hall near the station. ‘One cobblestone was cracked in Eccleston Mews, opposite No. 23,’ noted one meticulous report.

The detonations gave rise to some astonishment, if not alarm, in the immediate area. Rumours abounded as to what had caused them. In all London only two people could be found who were certain that they had seen an aeroplane. The others read about it in the evening newspapers.

‘Between 11.50 and noon this morning six bombs were dropped on London by a hostile aeroplane flying at a great height above the haze,’ announced a brief, matter-of-fact bulletin from the Horse Guards, Home Forces Headquarters. ‘The material damage is slight,’ the statement reassured, as if such an intrusion was nothing unusual.¹* First given as four injured, the casualties were later revised to ten wounded.

Quite regularly since 1914, single-engined German aeroplanes had braved the Channel, one or two at a time, to drop a few small bombs along the coast. Their favourite target was Dover Harbour. After more than twenty such ‘tip-and-run’ attacks, the British had come to accept them as a routine nuisance. It was the cheek of this latest incursion that surprised most people. Certainly, no enemy pilot had been so foolhardy as to fly over London before.

The first Germans to do so were Lieutenant Walter Ilges and Deck Officer Paul Brandt, two young naval airmen. With Brandt at the controls, they had taken off from Mariakerke, an airfield near the Belgian coast, in a single-engined L.V.G. (Luft-Verkehrs-Gesells-chaft) biplane. Used primarily for reconnaissance, the machine could easily reach London and return to its base.

Although Ilges had often photographed installations along the English coast, he had never flown very far inland before. With the eagerness of a schoolboy on a summer outing, he took scores of pictures of aerodromes, factories, docks, and other choice targets along his meandering course over Essex and up the Thames. Once over the capital he took more pictures and released the six twenty-pound bombs. Hopefully aimed from 13,000 feet at the Admiralty buildings in Whitehall, all missed the target by at least a mile.

The midday raider left the city from the south, and again escaped detection by flying a wide arc around the British squadrons based at Dover and Dunkirk. Over the Channel the L.V.G. developed engine trouble. Ilges had to toss his precious camera overboard to lighten the load. The pair reached the French coast in a long gliding descent, but without hope of regaining their own lines. Shortly after two o'clock that afternoon they made a forced landing at Boulogne.

The two Germans hastily set fire to their aeroplane, and tried to escape on foot. The French soon captured them with a large-scale map of London still in their possession. Even as prisoners-of-war Ilges and Brandt may have sought recognition for their rather startling flight. Its import, only seven years after Louis Blériot blazed the way across the English Channel in a tiny monoplane, was lost to the British. They were too busy exulting over the two Zeppelins.

‘London generally was quite undisturbed by the audacious visit,’ reported The Times with some concern. The paper was part of the politically powerful Northcliffe press, then publishing half the dailies sold in London. Even before the war, it had been a policy of the newspaper chain to boom aviation as having ‘revolutionized the art of warfare’. The force behind this stand was the brilliant but capricious Lord Northcliffe.

When, in the autumn of 1906, Alberto Santos-Dumont made the first public flight in Europe with a heavier-than-air machine, the colourful ‘Napoleon of Fleet Street’ was said to have been riled at the way a night sub-editor of his Daily Mail covered the event. ‘Don't you realize, man,’ scolded Northcliffe, ‘that England is no longer an island?’²

On the day after London's first aeroplane raid, The Times responded with a warning editorial entitled ‘Two Airships and an Aeroplane’. The aeroplane, being ‘relatively cheap and elusive’, was seen to have ‘far more dangerous possibilities than the large and costly Zeppelin’. The newspaper reminded its readers ‘that, like all fresh portents of the kind, this isolated visit is by no means to be ignored. . . . It is wise to regard it as a prelude to further visits on an extended scale and to lay our plans accordingly’.³

Even less tolerant of the general apathy over the attack was pugnacious Charles G. Grey, a ‘promoter of decided opinions’ who ‘did not hesitate to prophesy’. Perceptive and prolific, he had written on aeronautics since 1909. He was also the founder of The Aeroplane, a periodical he was to edit for nearly three decades. Not quite forty when the war began, and physically unfit for active service, Grey was undoubtedly the most caustic critic of British air policy then in print. His lively writings prickled with the barbs he aimed at any official he deemed guilty of ‘two-dimensional’ thinking.

‘When the aeroplane raids start, and prove more damaging than the airship raids, the authorities cannot say that they have not had a fair warning of what to expect,’ he lectured in his weekly editorial. Grey added his fond and facetious hope that ‘the London shopkeeper’ would now ‘realize that there is a serious chance of proper war being carried into the very heart of his sacred city’.⁴

That danger was far better understood the following summer when German bombers came to London in formation. Nearly everyone recalled then that lone aeroplane which practically no one had seen. And a thoughtful few, ever looking ahead, seemed to have been awe-stricken by a vision of modern warfare. Among them was Lovat Fraser, a Times leader-writer.

‘If I were asked what event of the last year has been of most significance to the future of humanity,’ he wrote in July 1917, ‘I should reply that it is not the Russian Revolution, nor even the stern intervention of the United States in a sacred cause, but the appearance of a single German aeroplane flying at high noon over London last November.’⁵

Among the fateful turns of 1917, a pivotal year of this century, was the début of the heavy bomber in warfare. The nightmare dignified with the name of combat by professional soldiers at the front would henceforth come to the cities; and warfare, once so waged, would quickly lose whatever dignity one could still claim for it in an age of modern weapons.

World War I in the air is popularly recalled as a romance of dawn patrols, a tale of chivalrous duels between Spads and Fokkers. Strategic bombing is not commonly associated with that war. This notion ignores the coordinated Allied bombing effort directed against Germany in 1918. It also neglects the earlier bomber raids made by the Germans against England.

Obscured by defeat and disbanded after the Armistice, the airmen who flew for the Kaiser have long served as foils for the air successes of the Allies. The beginnings of strategic bombing are invariably recounted in terms of British achievements. Lord Trenchard is cited as ‘the architect of air power’, and Sir Frederick Handley Page is widely recognized as ‘the father of the heavy bomber’. Their contribution, however important, is only part of the story.

While limited and indecisive, the German raids on England during World War I are significant as the first systematic strategic air campaign in history. Besides the notorious Zeppelins, two distinct types of bombers were used in these raids—the twin-engined Gotha and the much larger Riesenflugzeug or Giant aeroplane. Depending on the weather and other factors such as crew replacements, these aircraft attacked Britain in squadron strength on an average of once every two weeks for an entire year.

In October 1917, London was raided on six of eight consecutive nights. The German concept of attack incorporated the idea of ‘round-the-clock’ bombing. This goal could have been achieved if the Army High Command had been willing to commit the bombing squadrons it would have required. Fire raids were also attempted, first with the Zeppelins and later the bombers, only to fail because of defective incendiary materials. A much improved ‘Elektron’ magnesium bomb was available in quantity in the summer of 1918. Political reasons alone deterred the High Command from permitting its use against London in the last months of the war.

The German raids caused considerable unrest. Unlike World War II, the British people were not expecting to be bombed by enemy aircraft. Faced with severe political repercussions at home, an ‘enlightened’ Government headed by David Lloyd George hastily legislated the world's first independent air force in 1917. The British, as a consequence, are credited with providing the lead in a ‘revolution of arms’. But the maze of circumstances from which the Royal Air Force emerged as a third Service in 1918 is all but forgotten today. Least remembered of all is the way in which nascent German air-power spurred the British to establish that independent Air Force in the first place.

Britain's indisputable pioneering claims lie more in the field of air defence. During the first Battle of Britain, a complex network was installed around London combining anti-aircraft guns, fighters, barrage balloons, observer and listening posts, and a direct-line telephone communications net. A marvel of ingenuity and organization, the London Air Defence Area finally prevailed against the German bombers in 1918. Except for some technological refinements, notably radar, it was essentially the same air defence system which was to serve Britain so well in 1940.

All this happened several years before General Giulio Douhet, the Italian air prophet, published his first book, and his American counterpart, General William Mitchell, sank his first battleship off the Virginia Capes. That the strategy of bombing cities far from the battle lines should have been born of the Teutonic mind should come as no surprise. In two World Wars the Germans seemed capable of bridging all obstacles save one—the English Channel.

The Gothas and the Giants were, in a sense, the V2s of World War I. These early bombers and the first rockets in warfare traversed the same skies to strike at the same target—London. Both came too late to stave off a German defeat. And though they were without decisive effect on the war in which they were first