Gentlemen pilots waved to Germans in 1914 – then airborne warfare began
Richard Jones takes to the air ahead of the launch of a £2 coin to commemorate First World War pilots
‘Does this plane go any faster?” The pilot pushes the stick in front of him, and we start to nosedive. “No, stop, please, I was just wondering…” I am in the passenger seat of a Miles Messenger, a Second World War observer plane, doing a leisurely 85knots somewhere above Sywell Aerodrome in Northamptonshire. With its maroon colouring and mahogany dashboard, it is a study in aviation’s bygone elegance. But, as with all planes of the era, it is also a martyr to the elements, rattling and juddering with every gust of wind.
And today it is rather windy. I was meant to be up in a BE2C, an observer plane from the First World War, to promote a new commemorative £2 coin that will be unveiled at the Duxford Battle of Britain Air Show this weekend.
The coin, which will shortly go into public circulation, depicts two airmen, a pilot and his observer, performing a reconnaissance flight over an area of the Battle of Arras in April 1917, a reminder of the dangerous and inspiring work of First World
War pilots.
But with breezes in excess of 20 knots, the BE2C was not safe to fly today. At least I had the option; First World War pilots did not.
One such hero was Charles Watson, who served as an observer on the Western Front in 1918, giving a thrilling account of being the last surviving pilot to be shot down in the First World War to the RAF Museum in 2002, aged 104.
“You went up [in the sky] as the sun was rising, got your camera and took six photos overlapping each,” he said. “It was a funny feeling, aged 18, going up in the dark, and then, as you hit 6,000ft, seeing the sun rising across the world… I went up to 20,000ft in [a Bristol Fighter]. They were all right, but a bit flimsy.”
We had hoped to take the BE2C up to 1,500ft – a safe height for the plane under modern regulations. So the idea that Watson flew as high as 20,000ft is astounding. The BE2C kept at Sywell is actually a replica, built by my pilot Matthew Boddington’s father and uncle in the Sixties, for Biggles Sweeps the Skies, a film that, sadly, never went further than the production stage. “It’s a family heirloom,” says Boddington, “so if you put your foot through it, it will be off with your head.”
Biggles’s dogfights to the death with Nazi pilots were miles from the experience of those BE2C
‘I went up to 20,000ft in a Bristol Fighter. They were all right, but a bit flimsy’
pilots who arrived in France at the outbreak of the First World War.
“Initially, when the planes went to France, it was purely to observe the advancing German army below,” says Boddington, who will be flying his BE2C at Duxford’s Battle of Britain Air Show. “In 1914, they started off with no armaments, in a very gentlemanly war. If they passed a German plane, they waved at each other.”
Eventually, the observer pilots realised that if they took a potshot with a rifle instead, they could down an enemy plane – and one that was monitoring British troops. They stuck a Lewis gun on the side of the BE2C, and airborne warfare was begun.
“The application of an airplane as a weapon was basically conceived in the First World War,” Boddington tells me. “As such, the pilot in 1914 was a different man to the pilot at the end of the war.” In 1918, the Royal Air Force was founded, the world’s first aerial warfare force independent of any army or naval control. At the Great War’s outbreak, the total allied air war effort was just 184 planes. By contrast, at the height of the Battle of Britain in Sept 1940, the RAF sent out in excess of 1,500 aircraft to defend the capital.
That Miles Messenger observer plane that I went up in, the one that rocked about like a theme-park pirate ship? It had a top speed of 120mph. Three decades after the end of the Second World War, a conflict that claimed upwards of 60million lives, air speeds reached 550mph. Does this plane go faster? It will do… but at a great cost.