A Summer Bright and Terrible by David E. Fisher Read Free Book Online Page A

that the war would be over before
we crossed the Channel,” Dowding said. “I used to go and worry Trenchard about
twice a week about being posted to France.” Trenchard was not the kind of
commander who enjoyed being hassled by a junior, even if it was due to his
enthusiasm, and after several weeks of this, he sent Dowding to France—but as
an observer rather than as a pilot.
    The airplanes in France carried no guns or
bombs and were used solely for observation (in the manner Dowding had pioneered
the previous year at the Staff College). The crew consisted of a pilot and an
observer, the latter being largely untrained. “It was by way of being a fearful
insult to send out a qualified pilot as an observer, but I was well enough
content.”
    At first the pilots, both German and English,
used to wave to each other as they flew past on their missions, but soon
someone threw a rock instead of waving, and from there it quickly escalated to
shooting at each other. Dowding was one of the first. “I had a Mauser pistol
with a shoulder stump. It was quite a good weapon for the purpose, but I never
hit anything.” Nor did anyone else in those early days.
    With two aircraft zooming in different
directions, it was nearly impossible to hit anything. It quickly became
apparent that the best way would be to point the airplane at the opponent and
fire straight ahead, but in that case, the bullets would hit your own
propeller. A Frenchman named Roland Garros took the first step when he fit his
propeller blades with steel deflectors, so that the bullets that didn’t slip
through the whirling blades would just be knocked away. This worked beautifully
for a while, but eventually the constant battering weakened the blades. When
one of them shattered, Garros was forced down behind German lines. Anthony
Fokker, a Dutch airplane
designer working for the Germans, was shown Garros’s setup and quickly improved
it by installing an interrupter gear.
    With this installed, the machine gun fired only
when the path between the spinning propeller blades was clear. Fokker’s new
monoplane quickly initiated the “Fokker scourge,” sweeping the skies clear of
British and French aircraft until one of the Fokkers crashed behind the Allied
lines and they were able to copy the system and restore the balance of power.
    But now the war in the air had been irrevocably
changed. With the realization of the utility of their own observation planes
came the concomitant knowledge that the enemy’s were just as useful to them.
The solution was obvious: Shoot them down. The air became a killing ground.
     
     
    Five
     
    The observation planes were being shot down
like flies, which didn’t bother the generals too much. After all, they were
losing a thousand men a day in the trenches; war is hell, and that’s just the
way it is. But what did bother them was that for the observation planes to
bring back their observations, the observers had to return home, land, and hand
over their notes. So an observation plane shot down was a plane that didn’t
bring back any information.
    By 1914, ships at sea were just beginning to be
equipped with radio sets. Eventually, it dawned on the Royal Flying Corps that
if they could fit radios into their airplanes the information could be sent
back while the observers were still up in the air, perhaps even over enemy
lines. Then, even if the plane were lost, the information would still be
received. In 1915, a year after being sent to France as an observer, Dowding
was posted as Flight Commander to the newly formed Wireless Squadron, which was
established to investigate the possible use of radio as a means of
communication between airplanes and the ground.
    After several months of hard work, he
determined that the system would work. Dowding himself was the first person in
England—perhaps in the world—to sit in an airplane several thousand feet high
and talk to someone on the ground. But there were snags to be hammered out, as in