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CHAPTER 1
A POWER WHICH CONTROLS THE FATE OF NATIONS
When H G Wells' doom-laden vision of a London under attack, as depicted in his War of the Worlds, was published in 1898 it took the world by storm. War of the Worlds was not only a work which showed a fertile mind with a genius for story-telling, but also one which could see far beyond the comfortable closing days of the century.
Although it was conceived and written even before man had achieved mastery of powered-flight, it nevertheless served as a cautionary tale of the consequences should London ever be confronted by a form of warfare that it was unable to face on equal terms.
Yet only the previous year, the world had witnessed a magnificent Jubilee designed to impress upon it the primacy of the British Empire, celebrating the sixtieth year of Queen Victoria's rule over an empire of 387 million people and ten million square miles of territory. A quarter of the globe was under British influence and control and Britain's power traditionally supported by one single instrument of force, the Royal Navy.
Serving as the grand finale of the Jubilee was a review at Spithead where 170 warships of the Home Fleet paid homage to the Queen. It was claimed to be the largest assembly ever which, if laid end-to-end would have stretched thirty miles. One American correspondent who witnessed the spectacle bravely declared that the United States itself was but 'a part, and a great part, of the Greater Britain which seems so plainly destined to dominate this planet'.
Not everyone was impressed however. To seasoned cynics such as the author Mark Twain it was 'no more than embroidery'. Yet, apparently assured of supremacy on land and sea, the average Victorian would have dismissed the Wellsian hypothesis as preposterous.
Ever since the crushing victory against the combined fleets of France and Spain at Trafalgar in 1805, British naval might remained unchallenged. By observing the 'Two-Power Standard' she was able in theory at least to field a force ten per cent larger than the combined navies of any two potential enemies. The oceans had given Britain the means by which to defend its own shores whilst providing it with the tools with which to violate others. The sea was not merely a part of her history, it was her history. Drake, Frobisher and Nelson, the men who had helped write the greatest chapters, had done so from the decks of ships hewn from English oak. The romanticized, idealized view of the Royal Navy was bound up in the British people's self-confidence. It was all perhaps still too good to be true. A tiny island off the coast of Europe being at the epicentre of things sat well with the Victorians. But Britain, sleepy and self-confident in her 'Splendid Isolation', was due for a rude awakening.
In a different history, this complacency could have been undone centuries before, when men such as the humble Jesuit priest, Francesca Lana, conceived machines that floated in the sky, destroying foes who scampered helplessly on the ground. Before Trafalgar and the 'Two-Power Standard', the author Thomas Gray wrote in 1757 of how:
The time will come, when thou shalt lift up thine eyes to watch a long-drawn battle in the skies, while aged peasants, too amazed for words, stare at the flying fleets of wond'rous birds. England, so long the mistress of the sea, where winds and waves confess her sovereignty, her ancient triumphs yet on this shall bear, and reign, the sovereign of the conquered air.
Nevertheless, since no nation had met and outmatched her supremacy in the oceans, history would continue to give England an advantage based on this strength for 100 years after Trafalgar.
Whilst some sat and dreamt of things to come, others began to turn ideas and words into deeds. Men like the French Montgolfier brothers who in 1783, built the first balloon, unveiling their innovation before their King, and earning sufficient patronage to continue their work. Though scoffed at by numerous detractors, the brothers built bigger and better craft, each in turn demonstrating enhanced performance. Eleven years after their first flight, a balloon detachment was established within the French Army to be used to spy on enemy troop movements. It proved its mettle in June of 1794 when, at the Battle of Fleurus during one of the sporadic wars of the Napoleonic era, one Capitaine Coutelle clambered aboard his rasping air-filled monster and spent the battle observing what the Austrians were up to. Whether the noble captain helped his side one way or the other remains unrecorded, but the French commander Napoleon Bonaparte had dismissed balloons as so much hot air and swiftly dispensed with their services.
Contemporary men of foresight, however, saw things differently. One was a Prussian officer, Julius Voss who, in 1810, wrote how in future wars:
The enemy, eager to conceal his intentions, did not hesitate to send up his own light craft in order to drive back the enemy balloons, and so in the heavens above skirmishes developed between advanced patrols.
Adventurers meanwhile took the balloon even further afield. Individuals like Charles Green who, in 1836 piloted his craft 500 miles from London to Weilburg in Germany; and John La Mountain who added 300 miles to the record by flying from St Louis to Henderson, New York, in the United States. And, without one Oberleutnant Franz Uchatius, the Austrian Army of 1849 might never have known that they had the wherewithal to perform the first ever aerial bombardment.
Their achievement was made during the bitter war with Italy, which was fighting to secede from its bigger neighbour. The hapless Italians were pushed back until finally they sought safety in the walled city of Venice where the Austrians could pummel the fragile city with round after round of artillery shell.
Eventually young Uchatius suggested the outrageous alternative of bombing the enemy from above their heads. The terror and fear it would unleash, he insisted, would have them unfurling their white flags in no time. Though no doubt dubious, his superiors decided that they had little to lose and so listened. He described how they could launch a number of paper balloons, carrying 22lb each of explosives, let them drift slowly with the wind until, in accordance with a predetermined time fuse, they would hit the ground, to send the defenders of Venice running in all directions.
The day came, and the balloons were launched. At first it seemed as if the Austrians had provoked the very reaction they wanted, the first few explosions causing dreadful panic among the Italians. But as time wore on, the defenders realized that, although they were capable of killing, the small bombs were no greater danger than the cholera and starvation which also plagued the city. Venice eventually did fall, but it was not due to assault from the air.
It is hardly surprising Uchatius' invention received scant attention, no doubt being dismissed by most contemporaries as, at best, a novel improvisation. However, whether or not they were prompted by the Austrians, or by some other phenomena, twelve years after the events above Venice, the United States' Army of the Potomac formed a Balloon Corps during the American Civil War, under the command of one Thaddeus Loew. The same year John La Mountain took up a balloon from the deck of the ingloriously named USS Fanny, effectively the world's first aircraft carrier, to observe Confederate troop movements over Virginia. The Confederacy also employed balloons from the tug Teaser.
Across the Atlantic, the value of these devices was also being demonstrated. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, balloons were effectively employed to carry dispatches and VIPs out of Paris. The besieging Prussians succeeded in shooting down some of the sixty-six launched from the capital, but most reached safety. One of them succeeded in a flight of 1,400 miles to Narvik in Norway.
By 1879, even the conservative British War Office approved a budget of £150, with which the Royal Engineers were to set up a balloon detachment at Woolwich Arsenal in London. Three years later, an establishment of one officer and fifteen men took three balloons to serve as scouts with the ill-fated expedition under General Hicks to recover the Sudan. However, the entire column was wiped out in the Battle of El Obeid. Whatever other services they may have provided, they clearly failed to anticipate tens of thousands of whirling Dervishes descending upon them.
In 1884 three more balloons accompanied a British Expeditionary Force dispatched to annex Bechuanaland in southern Africa. In 1887, Major Templar became the British Army's first Director of Ballooning, and three years on an Army Balloon Section was officially sanctioned. In 1899, the Second war against the errant Boer farmers presented the new unit with an ideal opportunity to show what it could do. It was used with some success at Lombard's Kop and Magersfontein, where 'Filled Balloon Titania', under the command of one Captain Jones, reported enemy movements and directed artillery fire. Meanwhile, over a hundred miles away Kimberley was being besieged by Boer troops. The British outflanked them in their attempt to relieve the town, and then the enemy withdrew to Paardeburg twenty-three miles south-east, where they established defensive positions in a dry river bed. Despite numerous British assaults, the farmers held firm. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, decided to blast them out. Here the balloons came into their own, directing the gunfire until, after nine days of relentless pounding, the enemy finally succumbed and surrendered.
This distant triumph in a far-flung corner of the world created little more than a ripple beyond the veld of South Africa. And in any case, as the stuffy generals in Whitehall would confirm, no ungainly gas bag would ever successfully usurp the graceful cavalry in the unique role of scout. The horse had provided the British Army with all the intelligence it needed for as long as any of them could remember and they saw no good reason to change now.
The Royal Navy was also otherwise occupied, watching with justifiable concern the growth of the Imperial German Navy. With little hope of any air borne interest or investment from the British it seemed that, in the short term at least, amateurs and adventurers would have to be relied upon to take technology another step.
* * *
By the end of the nineteenth century the work of men like Count Ferdinand Zeppelin had firmly superseded the concept of the balloon with the 'airship'.
Born in 1838, Zeppelin joined the Prussian Cavalry in 1852, serving in the American Civil War as a volunteer in their Balloon Corps, and later in the Austrian and Franco-Prussian Wars. He had been persuaded that the balloon had proved itself as a capable resource during that conflict, and in the Austro-Prussian War was further convinced of its efficacy. His love of flying soon became a near obsession, and before long his mind was directed towards the fulfilment of a single goal - mastery of the air. Upon retiring from the cavalry he was able to pursue his dream with vigour. Following up on the work of men like Charles Renard and Otto Krebs, Zeppelin spent days hidden away from family and friends struggling to produce what he knew would be the natural successor to the balloon. Although Zeppelin was not the only man toiling towards this end, his name would become synonymous with the end result.
This was the age of science. All over Europe men were tinkering in workshops and poring over drawing boards to secure what had thus far eluded them. Many experiments were doomed to failure, like the petrol-engined airship designed by Karl Wolfert. This was flown in 1888, using what was known as a 'hot-tube' ignition Daimler engine. His efforts not only failed, they sent him plunging to his death in a ball of flame.
The world's first proper rigid airship was the result of the work done by an Austrian engineer called David Schwartz, and complemented by an aluminium frame developed by Frenchman, P Heroult, and American, C M Hall. It was given its test flight in November 1897 but a strong wind blew up, tossing the machine like a child's toy. It barely managed to return to the ground intact.
Meanwhile, Zeppelin had produced a multitude of drafts and early prototypes, until in July 1900 he rolled out LZ1. It had a modest beginning with a range of ten and a half miles and an endurance of twenty-three minutes, but was merely the small shape of greater things to come.
* * *
Entrepreneurs were also venturing into the field of what was being referred to as 'heavier-than-air-machines'. Few trials and experiments would lead further than their imagination or the wastepaper basket, but they were spurred on by the coming of a new century and continued to happily give vent to wild ideas.
One of these was Hiram Maxim who between 1889 and 1894 had been experimenting with a steam-powered aeroplane. He built a biplane weighing some 3.5 tons, powered by two 180hp steam engines and carrying a crew of three. It cost £20,000 to develop, and was finally unveiled in Baldwyn's Park in Kent on 31 July 1894. Maxim watched his £20,000 go up in smoke as it crashed moments after it took to the air, and humiliated by the experience, took a long sabbatical before he endeavoured to repeat the exercise.
Others persevered, alternatively grasping and failing to master the laws of aerodynamics. Then two bicycle repairers from Dayton, Ohio, USA, Orville and Wilbur Wright, stumbled upon the beginnings of a solution. Captivated by the search for the secret of powered flight, they studied every aspect of the subject and, on 17 December 1903, achieved the first controlled powered flight at Kill Devil Hill. English Boer-War hero Lord Baden-Powell declared with admiration that, 'they were in possession of a power which controls the fate of nations'.
Another Briton who shared these sentiments was Lieutenant Colonel J E Capper, then Commandant of the Royal Engineers Balloon School and Depot at Aldershot and later, Superintendent of the Balloon Factory at Farnborough. Because early interest by the US military in the Wrights' achievement had waned, they were forced to look elsewhere for a market for their aeroplanes. Capper invited them to England, where they generated a certain amount of interest in the War Office but none where it counted, in the Treasury, where they were met with a cool response.
Capper was not to be deterred however. Observing how matters were developing in Europe, he was moved to comment in a speech to the United Services Institute in November 1909 that:
In a few years we may expect to see men moving swiftly through the air ... such machines will move very rapidly ... up to a hundred miles per hour ... they will be small and difficult to hit ... their range will be very large.
Despite the Wrights' early achievements, the concept of an aeroplane as anything other than an aberration still held sway. The airship seemed a far more tangible manifestation of scientific advance.
Zeppelin, now a man in his sixties, was still working unstintingly towards his own goal. Zeppelin LZ3 made several successful flights in 1906 and 1907 and the Imperial German Army was becoming attracted by their potential. They eventually approached him with a brief to build a vessel capable of flying for twenty-four hours non-stop with a ceiling of 10,000 feet to enable it to avoid ground fire.
The resulting labours produced LZ4, but it was wrecked during trials, and with waning interest, it looked like Zeppelin might never realize his ambition to make Germany master of the air. It was the public no less, who, enthusing of his endeavours, held collections to finance further work. By 1909 the name had become a byword for Teutonic industrial might and prestige. The Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had embraced the project and, at one airship trial, was driven to hyperbole:
Our Fatherland may well be proud of possessing such a son, the greatest German of the twentieth century who, by this invention has opened a new epoch in the development of mankind.
Zeppelin appeared to warrant fully such an accolade. LZ5 achieved the specifications originally set by the Army and was duly commissioned, but few military orders followed. The Count turned his eyes increasingly towards commercial designs and his LZ10 of 1910 proved very successful, carrying 1,500 passengers in twelve months. The German Navy did not want to be left in the shade by its more august brother-in-arms, however and in the following year took possession of its first machine L1. Still things refused to go all the Count's way. Nine of the twenty-five commercial airships constructed between 1900 and the outbreak of the First World War came to unfortunate ends.
* * *
By now, the die had been well and truly cast. Gradually, rumblings of interest had worked their way through to Whitehall where it was finally accepted that European developments might very well warrant closer scrutiny. In 1908, the same year that Zeppelin hauled LZ4 out of its shed, the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), formed in 1904 and designed to give the impression of cohesion in matters relevant to the defence of the Empire, charged one Lord Esher with the task of undertaking a thorough review of any danger airships might pose to the security of the Empire and Britain in particular.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The First Blitz"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Andrew Hyde.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
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