Marked for Death (38 page)

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Even so, an idea had taken hold that was to dominate strategic – and particularly air force – thinking for decades to come, above all in Britain and the United States. This was that bombing was the way forward, despite evidence from the First World War that for all the localised panic the air raids had at first caused, civilian morale overall had been very little injured by it – had maybe even been strengthened, especially once it could be seen that the air force was putting up a serious defence. Moreover, what appeared from aerial photographs to be grievous damage inflicted on an enemy’s factories and infrastructure often turned out to cause no very great reduction in industrial output.

Yet between the wars the idea that strategic bombing was the key to winning future conflict took hold strongly in various air forces. In 1932, in the wake of Japan’s indiscriminate bombing of Shanghai which killed thousands, the Geneva Disarmament Conference tried vainly to outlaw aerial attacks on vulnerable citizens, Clausewitz or no Clausewitz. Britain’s then-Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, said resignedly that the man in the
street had to realise ‘there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed… the bomber will always get through’.
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And so it was to prove. All the same, the ensuing world war provided no evidence that, with the sole exception of America’s use of nuclear bombs against Japan in 1945, strategic bombing, area bombing or ‘precision’ bombing was ever the critical factor in the war’s outcome. Even massive damage to Germany’s Ruhr industries by the RAF and the USAAF did less to disrupt Hitler’s war machine than did an increasing lack of raw materials from outside Germany. Neither did the setting on fire of entire cities bring about a mass uprising of citizens willing to sue for peace. Yet the idea of bombing’s supremacy persisted in the military mind, and after the Second World War it became enshrined as an eternal truth that has to some extent dominated strategic thinking ever since, above all in the United States. Aerial bombing by drones in the Middle East has yielded its daily ‘collateral damage’ of limbless children and disembowelled donkeys and nothing remotely approaching a victory has yet been achieved, and nor can it be. Quite the reverse. As the first air raids a hundred years ago demonstrated, attacks that leave dismembered children strewn among rubble are more likely to strengthen a people’s resolve than to weaken it.

Yet that first air war did establish one military principle that has endured unchallenged: that of the vital importance of air superiority in general. By the end of 1918, with sheer weight of numbers, the Entente had at last achieved aerial dominance over the battlefields of Europe. The critical advantage this conferred was noted by all sides and was to be confirmed many times in the Second World War as, indeed, ever since. As one senior RAF officer recently remarked, ‘The Gulf War of 1991 was a sharp reminder of what can happen to even a large and well-equipped army [i.e. Saddam Hussein’s retreating from Kuwait] when caught in open ground by an opponent enjoying total air supremacy.’
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That was decisive; whereas the shattering bombardment of ‘Shock and Awe’ in the second Gulf War of 2003
was not. Baghdad fell, but it brought the Coalition forces no overall victory in the war. Back in 1918 a few wise heads on all sides might have predicted that.

Pilots and observers have consistently maintained the ever-changing fortunes of the day and in the war zone our dead have been always beyond the enemy’s lines or far out at sea. Our far-flung squadrons have flown over home waters and foreign seas, the Western and Italian battle line, Rhineland, the Mountains of Macedonia, Gallipoli, Palestine, the Plains of Arabia, Sinai and Darfur…

King George V to all RAF squadrons after the Armistice

‘Our far-flung squadrons… battle-line…’ Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ was evidently echoing
in the unconscious of whoever drafted the King’s message. The poet’s anxious prayer to the ‘Lord of our far-flung battle-line’ embodied the worry that without His blessing Britain’s global empire represented vainglorious overstretch. ‘Far-called, our navies melt away…’ It was inevitable that the war in Europe should have had tentacles reaching overseas into the Balkans, Middle East and Africa since the major combatants – Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy – all had empires or spheres of interest and influence far beyond the main European fronts. As usually happens in wars, well before the end men in suits were cooking up post-bellum deals, scheming how various frontiers might be redrawn and what colour the new maps should be. Among the more notorious of these deals was the secret Sykes–Picot agreement in which one Briton and one Frenchman decided how the entire Middle East should be
carved up. The fallout from those arbitrary lines drawn across a map in crayon on a May day in 1916 has now persisted for a century and may yet become literal.

The political geography of the Middle East was considerably determined by the twin fading dynasties of Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Persia. The protracted struggle for the Ottoman Empire’s former possessions had already been a background factor of the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1914 Turkey sided with Germany and the Central Powers, which left the Entente – chiefly Britain, France and Russia – with regional wars on its hands, Britain fighting the Turco-German forces from the Balkans to Sinai and Palestine and on through Mesopotamia. It was above all vital for Britain to maintain its lifeline with the Empire via the sea route that included the Suez Canal and Aden, an important coaling station. But in view of the Royal Navy’s gradual switch from coal to oil at this time (the new
Queen Elizabeth
-class battleships were oil burners), it was equally vital to secure the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s oilfields in Mesopotamia, and especially its huge refinery at Abadan in what is now Iran. In order to drive the Turks out of Palestine and elsewhere, Britain entered into an alliance with Sherif Hussein bin Ali of Mecca, who was leading an Arab nationalist movement that also wanted the Turks out of the Middle East. The British army officer under General Allenby’s command working with Sherif Hussein to free the Hejaz (the western coast of Arabia) was T. E. Lawrence, who gave this assessment of the Arabs’ campaign:

Of religious fanaticism there was little trace. The Sherif refused in round terms to give a religious twist to his rebellion. His fighting creed was nationality. The tribes knew that the Turks were Moslems who thought that the Germans were probably true friends of Islam. They knew that the British were Christians, and that the British were their allies. In the circumstances, their religion would not have been of much help to them, and they had put it aside. ‘Christian fights
Christian, so why should not Mohammedan do the same? What we want is a Government which speaks our own language of Arabic and will let us live in peace. Also, we hate those Turks.’
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The armies involved in the Middle East conflict were naturally accompanied by air support which, especially in desert landscapes with little cover, was useful for observing troop movements and bombing supply lines. As far as maintaining an air presence went, the British had an advantage over the Germans for purely logistical reasons. The merchant fleet, escorted by the Royal Navy, could reliably supply Britain’s protectorate, Egypt, via Alexandria and Port Said, whereas the Germans had to bring their aircraft, spares and equipment overland from Germany on the long and difficult haul down through the Balkans and Turkey.

Some RFC and RNAS squadrons were even further-flung than King George’s message-drafter knew, for they were also present in a minor way in East Africa and India. In India a few squadrons were based almost exclusively on the North-West Frontier in what today is Pakistan, dealing with the ‘troublesome tribesmen’ in Waziristan who were part of Britain’s continuing imperial headache, albeit one that was independent of the Great War. In Africa, though, the Kaiser’s colonial presence was fought with varying success in both German South-West Africa (Namibia) and German East Africa (today’s Tanzania).

Probably the most famous air action in the latter was the destruction of the German light cruiser
Königsberg
in 1915 after it had hidden some ten miles inland in the complex delta of the Rufiji river, temporarily immobilised by engine failure. The
Königsberg
had long been a menace to British shipping in the Indian Ocean and the Admiralty viewed her elimination as a priority. Royal Navy warships arrived off the Rufiji delta but failed to find the German vessel because its crew had camouflaged the ship with foliage cut from the surrounding forest. It was a clear case for aerial reconnaissance. A local pilot was hired,
together with his privately owned Curtiss F. seaplane, but this did not survive many missions. Two G.III Caudrons and two Henri Farman F.27s were sent down from Dar-es-Salaam (the F.27 was essentially a ‘Rumpty’ with a bigger engine and without its ‘horns’: the curved skids on the undercarriage) but nor were these up to the task. The Navy then deployed two RNAS Sopwith ‘Folders’: Type 807 biplanes with folding wings for shipboard storage. However, their Gnome Monosoupape (single valve) rotary engines proved too weak in the hot climate even as their airframes came unglued in the tropical damp. Three of Short’s ‘Folders’ were then deployed that, while also suffering in the heat and unable to climb above 600 feet, did manage some useful photo-reconnaissance work and finally pinpointed the
Königsberg
’s position. Two shallow-draught monitors were sent whose guns fatally crippled the German ship, thereby removing a major threat to Allied traffic in the Indian Ocean.

However, the
Königsberg
’s menace did not end there because most of its crew went to join an extraordinary guerrilla force led by a true genius in the art of bush warfare. This was General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck who was the officer in charge of all military forces in German East Africa. Between 1914 and 1918, living off the land and with a mere 14,000 men – German and local African – he managed to tie down and harry 300,000 Allied troops, remaining uncaptured at the time of the Armistice. It is pleasant to record that ‘The Lion of Africa’ survived until 1964. He was the only German commander ever to invade British imperial territory in the First World War, and his four years of improvised bush tactics mark him as probably the greatest-ever exponent of this form of warfare.

It was against Lettow-Vorbeck and in support of General Smuts that 26 Squadron flew reconnaissance missions in their B.E.2cs and ‘Rumptys’ (by that time the sort of antiquated aircraft most easily spared from the Western Front). But theirs was a tiny contingent and the task proved hopeless since little could be observed in thick bush from the air. Apart from that the
African climate proved too much for fragile wooden aircraft designed for northern Europe, susceptible to wood-boring pests and warping as well as to weakened adhesives. No airman is much comforted by the thought of termites in his airframe and still less by the possibility that at any moment it might come unglued in the air. Thirty years later in the Second World War this same problem had to be addressed when the wood-framed de Havilland Mosquito was deployed in the Far East. By then new formaldehyde-based adhesives had been devised that seemed mostly to work; occasional airframe failures were attributed to sloppy assembly in de Havilland’s factories at Hatfield and Leavesden.

King George’s reference to Darfur in his message was significant for the way in which it related to the wider picture of the British campaign in the Middle East. Since the turn of the century the Sudanese sultanate of Darfur (the land of the Fur people) had effectively been independent under its ruler, Ali Dinar. From its geographical position of sharing frontiers with Italian-administered Libya and the French-administered district of Chad (then part of French West Africa), Dinar felt himself drawn into the wider conflict, being already estranged from Sudan’s British administration ever since Kitchener had ordered the mass killing of wounded Mahdists after the Battle of Omdurman in 1899. Instinctively, the Sultan sided with Libya’s politico-religious Senussi tribe, who were waging their own anticolonial war against the Italian occupation. He believed Turkish and German propaganda that promised the creation of an Islamic state in North Africa after the war was over and the Italians, the French and the British had all been driven out.

Ali Dinar’s rebelliousness led to British intervention in 1916, motivated half by needing to keep the peace in Sudan and half by macro-political considerations. Four B.E.2cs flew observation and reconnaissance missions over remote Darfur territory as well as dropping propaganda leaflets on the town of Al Fashir, Dinar’s stronghold. After fierce ground battles between the
British Army and Dinar’s men Lieutenant John Slessor in his B.E.2c bombed the Fur troops retreating to Al Fashir, during which he was hit in the thigh by a bullet. Shortly afterwards all four aircraft and Lieutenant Slessor himself were withdrawn to Egypt for repair and the Darfur campaign ended with Ali Dinar’s death in November 1916. Many years later John Slessor was to become Air Marshal Sir John and finally a hawkish Cold War Chief of the Air Staff in the early 1950s.