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six pound bombs would fall. But the nightly raids which
were accompanied by the dropping of banners and leaflets
announcing that
The German army stands before the gates
of Paris – you have no choice but to surrender,
maddened
the French government and military. Eric Fisher Wood an
American attaché in Paris at the time of the Six O’Clock
Taube wrote in his diary:
Nothing could better have been calculated to disquiet the
French. They have always considered themselves kings
of the air.
Indeed the French were innovative aviation pioneers and
one of the very few nations to have any pre Great War
combat flying experience having used aircraft when
quelling Arab uprisings in Algeria and Morocco in the
two years before 1914.
At the start of the war half of Germany’s total of 246
planes were Taubes whose name, rather grotesquely,
means dove. The design of the wings had been based on
the shape of the flying seeds of a tropical flowering plant
called the Zanonia, part of the cucumber, pumpkin and
squash family: the seeds shaped not unlike those of the
sycamore tree. These tiny aircraft were so stable the pilot
could climb out and lie on the wing while the plane made
great circles. A Taube would be the first to drop bombs
on London having earlier flown escort to the Zeppelins.
Flying Death Notices
Pre-radar, the Taube was a sort of low tech Stealth aircraft
as the linen wings were painted with clear nitrate dope
(a plasticised lacquer designed to tighten and stiffen the
linen rendering it airtight and waterproof), which made
the aeroplane virtually transparent and almost impossible
to see against a clear sunny sky. Some early aircraft of the
Great War had the structure outlined in black which gave
rise to the description of flying death notices but few
aircraft had national markings – until being shot at and
brought down by your own side became a problem.
At first British aircraft were painted with the Union flag
but on 26 October 1914 two men called Hosking and
Crean of No 4 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps were shot
where AV Roe had built the first all British aeroplane
(the 1909 Avroplane with a JA Prestwich motorcycle
engine). Sopwith would go on to build 18,000 aircraft
for the British and allied forces during World War One:
the Baby, Pups, Dolphins, Snipes, Cuckoos, Salamanders
and most famously of all the single seat biplane twin-gun
Camel which was credited with shooting down more
enemy planes than any other allied aircraft. Biggles flew
a Sopwith Camel. The Imperial War Museum due to
reopen in July following a major refurbishment has one
of just seven surviving Sopwith Camels – one that was
shot down by a Zeppelin in August 1918.
Sopwith (right) described how at the outbreak of the war
Britain had no fighter craft and we had to get our skates on:
Development was so fast! We literally thought of and
designed and flew the airplanes in a space of about six
or eight weeks. Now it takes approximately the same
number of years.
Relatively inexperienced pilots flying barely tested
aeroplanes meant that many lives were lost to mechanical
failure and accidents and, as we’ll see later, the pilots,
determined to bring down the Zeppelins, customised their
own aeroplanes, tinkering with the engines, the wings and
the fuselage and thus further risking their young lives.
Cavalry of the Clouds
In each of the Great War nations the new air services were
seen as an extension of the cavalry. In Germany at the start
of the war the pilots who learned how to fly the machines
were all but chauffeurs for the Prussian officers with
Napoleonic training who had traditionally performed the
duties of observation and reconnaissance on horseback.
These officers took to the skies magnificently, if not very
practically, as though still on horseback, with sabre, spurs
and traditional picklehaube helmet. It was a German officer
Lieutenant Ferdinand von Hiddesen, who had learned to fly
during the closing years of the Belle Epoque, who, on 30
August 1914 flew over Paris and dropped the first bombs
ever to fall on a city from an aeroplane. Two people were
killed. That night Paris ordered the world’s first blackout
and for the next few weeks the German bombers returned
every evening at 6.00pm. Parisians called the raids the
Six
O’Clock Taube
. It is said that Parisians would gather at
pavement cafes and place bets on where the three or four
