“One enduring and particularly popular misconception of the period holds that the British military was so manifestly uninterested in aerial warfare that crews had to literally buy their own cameras to experiment with.”

By Greg Baughen

OF ALL THE changes that took place militarily during the First World War, perhaps none were as striking as those that occurred in the air. In four short years, the nascent Royal Flying Corps had mushroomed into the mighty Royal Air Force.

To be sure, the concept of aerial warfare was still in its infancy in 1914, but it’s flat out wrong to suggest, as many do, that the RFC was not battle-ready in the war’s opening months. Conventional wisdom maintains that the aircraft Britain sent to the front that first summer were ill-suited for combat, the technology and weaponry improvised, the tactics virtually non-existent.

In reality, Britain’s air corps was surprisingly professional and well-equipped at the start of hostilities. Aircrews were well trained and frontline planes like the B.E.2 were the cutting-edge technology of their time. In fact, the Royal Flying Corps was as ready as it could be.

One enduring and particularly popular misconception of the period holds that the British military was so manifestly uninterested in aerial warfare that crews had to literally buy their own cameras to experiment with.

It’s certainly a good story, and one that speaks to the widely held belief that the War Office and the army brass simply didn’t understand the potential of air combat in the period leading up to the conflict. To be sure, in later years, the “camera myth” made for a pithy introduction to any history of the RFC. Like all myths, there was more than an element of truth in the story. Pilots did indeed buy their own cameras. However, what actually happened was not quite as it was portrayed.

Long before the outbreak of war, the War Office was indeed taking aviation very seriously, despite subsequent claims to the contrary. Upon returning to Britain from India, General Douglas Haig was supposed to have proclaimed: “I hope none of you gentlemen is so foolish as to think the aeroplanes will be able to be usefully employed for reconnaissance.” Interestingly, this quote only surfaced in 1942 in a book written by Frederick Sykes, someone who was not particularly fond of the BEF commander. In fact, before Haig supposedly expressed such an idea, he had actually set about creating an air corps in India. In Britain too, interest in the combat potential of aircraft was high. “Aviation is one of the most important subjects to which the modern officer can pay attention at the present day,” Field Marshal John French, the new chief of the army declared as far back as 1912.

The War Office was very keen to push the development of aviation and to accelerate the process. It appointed Mervyn O’Gorman, a highly qualified civilian engineer, to run the Royal Aircraft Factory and develop the planes the army needed. In 1912 the Royal Flying Corps was created and O’Gorman set about developing long and short-range reconnaissance planes and fighters to shoot down enemy reconnaissance planes.

One of these planes was a photo-reconnaissance version of the Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2. It had a camera mounted in the rear of the fuselage pointing down through the floor of the plane. The unit was positioned on horse hair to cushion the vibrations. The idea was that the camera would take overlapping images of the ground below. Photography in the early 20^th Century was a complicated affair. Cameras required plates to be loaded, exposed and then stored away protected from the light for later processing. O’Gorman’s proposal was for a semi-automatic system with a single lever triggering each exposure. The idea was to have it working by the summer of 1913.

However, like all O’Gorman’s projects, it was very ambitious and it was soon running behind schedule. The same seemed to be happening with all of O’Gorman’s work. There was particular concern about the time it was taking to develop a suitable fighter aircraft. An increasingly frustrated War Office sent a stream of memos asking for explanations as to why it was taking so long. The replies were all fairly similar: These things could not be hurried; everything had to be worked out from first principles; it was important to get the basics right.

In the summer of 1913, the War Office finally ran out of patience. In future, O’Gorman would concentrate on developing aircraft, while refinement of weapons and equipment was turned over to the flying squadrons themselves. There was no shortage of urgency. The RFC could not afford to wait and see what other countries might come up with. Nor could it rely on ‘civilian inventors.’ Every squadron was given a list of items or skills that needed to be developed and each pilot was given a particular challenge to solve (e.g. how to fight other aircraft, attack enemy ground troops, observe and direct fire, manage wireless communication, fly at night, develop safety equipment etc.) Pilots were expected to send weekly reports to the War Office on progress made. They were also directed to read up on their particular subject and use their own initiative to do whatever it took to get things done. If that meant buying some item of equipment locally, they should do so, rather than wait for gear to come down through official channels. Squadron commanders were given strict instructions to reimburse any expenses immediately. (One commander putting in his squadron’s claims, mentioned that he had lent his own personal pistol to a pilot who had then accidentally dropped it overboard during a flight. He wondered if he could be reimbursed for this too, ‘if the War Office is feeling generous’!)

One of the tasks for No. 3 Squadron was photo-reconnaissance and the pilots did indeed go out and buy cameras. But this was not a case of improvisation in the face of uninterested officialdom. It was a deliberate policy to bypass the sophisticated and systematic, but rather laborious, approach adopted by O’Gorman.

The pre-1914 War Office Air Department was a vibrant, innovative body. Its members did not get everything right. The huge multi-engine, cannon-armed, ‘flying dreadnoughts’ they were proposing were definitely not a good idea. But they were not lacking in imagination.

Many are surprised by the rapid progress made by the Royal Flying Corps in the first weeks of the war. It was all down to the groundwork done in the years leading up to war.

Greg Baughen is the author of several books about air power in the World Wars including Blueprint for Victory; The Rise of the Bomber, The RAF in the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain and The Rise and Fall of the French Air Force. His most recent book, RAF on the Offensive — The Rebirth of Tactical Air Power 1940–1941 hit the shelves in September 2018. Baughen has also published articles in RAF Air Power Review, Air Britain’s Aeromilitaria and The Aviation Historian. Some of the themes in his books now provide the basis for a series of lectures on various aspects of British military aviation. Follow him at www.facebook.com/gregbaughen.