night
air defence
by Robert Craig Johnson
The First World War was not
the first conflict in which aerial bombardment of enemy cities played a
part. Austrian troops besieging Venice had tried to use free-flying
balloons to carry explosive charges and incendiaries across the lagoon to
the city. Nor was it the first time that strategic airpower made
measurable, material contributions to a war effort. Arguably, the Persian
Gulf War or the recent Kosovo War holds this distinction. The First World
War did, however, awaken European leaders to the necessity for some sort
of defence of population centres that would once have been considered out
of range of enemy action. This realization, combined with a serendipitous
lack of resources and precedents, produced an air-defence organization
that has, in most respects, served as the model for similar organizations
since. By 1918, England had invented most of the elements of the modern,
integrated air-defence system: interceptors, specialized communications,
navigation, blind-landing, and target acquisition equipment, a network of
primary and reserve airfields, antiaircraft weapons, an early warning
system, and, above all, centralized command and control. By war's end,
Britain's defenders could, in principle, assess, track, and plot incoming
raids, predict targets, issue warnings, and vector interceptor aircraft
against attackers from a central headquarters. Success was, as we shall
see, elusive, given the technology available at the time. But the basic
approach developed in Britain's between 1914 and 1918 has never been
superseded.
Pre-war
planning and the lack of preparations
When war began in 1914, no
provision had been made for defending the British Isles from air attacks,
despite the existence of strong German naval and military airship fleets
and the proven ability of airplanes to fly across the channel with modest
loads. Popular sources have at times alleged that this was the result of
lack of foresight or imagination on the part of unspecified authorities.
But there is little evidence of this.
As early as 1909, the
Committee of Imperial Defence of the British government took a look at the
threat poised by aircraft. This committee proved at once realistic and
strikingly forward-thinking. After assessing the potential of the major
extant threat, Germany's growing fleet of dirigible airships, the
committee concluded that the immediate military potential of aircraft was
strictly limited. The inherent difficulty of navigation and control under
the weather conditions prevailing over the North Sea and Britain made
militarily significant operations unlikely. But the committee nonetheless
felt that, in view of the almost universal lack of protection against
overhead attack, even modest raids on fortresses, harbours, factories, and
encampments might produce significant damage if left unopposed.
Unfortunately, the committee concluded that there was no practical way of
opposing air raids, given existing technology. Armed airplanes seemed to
be the best long-term solution, because they appeared to have more scope
for development and better ultimate performance. But, the committee
concluded, "until these machines have proved their ability to ascend to
great heights,—a point concerning which expert opinion appears
divided—this method of employing them must remain in the region of
speculation."
The Committee of Imperial
Defence was hardly the only body to consider the air-defence problem,
though it was easily the most sensible. The immediate pre-war years were,
if anything, excessively air-minded and prone to exaggerating the military
effectiveness of aircraft. For some time, air raids on population centres
had been a frequent topic of discussion for popular journalists and
forward-thinking military theorists. For the most part, their efforts were
too futuristic and too given to exaggeration to affect practical, military
policy. Instead, air-mindedness promoted a counterproductive air-raid
hysteria that would complicate the defence of Britain in later years. As
early as the winter of 1912-13, mysterious, unmarked airships were
regularly "seen" gliding through the night skies over every part of
Britain.
Given the dearth of
effective defences, the speculative nature and modest scope of the threat,
and the many more pressing demands facing the British treasury, Britain's
failure to make preparations for aerial defence seems entirely justifiable
in retrospect. A dedicated, manpower-intensive air-defense organization
was simply a luxury that Britain could not afford during the run up to
war. In 1914, with the frontline troops in France on the defensive and
with enemy submarines threatening to choke off the nation's sources of
food and raw materials, with army and navy alike clamouring for ever more
cannon, shells, machine guns, and men, no staff officer could possibly
justify diverting such desperately needed commodities to combat what was
still, at most, a potentially dangerous enemy.
As a result, the air
defence of Great Britain evolved in haphazard, improvised fashion.
Personnel and equipment were drawn from home-based training and naval
organizations. Materiel had to be hastily adapted to purposes for which it
had never been intended. Equipment had to be tried on actual operations,
then abandoned or further developed in almost Darwinian fashion.
Early
aircraft and aircrews
Until late in the war,
almost all of the operational flying units were in France. None could be
spared for home defence. But a large training organization was based in
the home isles. It supplied the bulk of the home-defence aircraft and
aircrews for the duration of the war. Night fighting was thus a secondary
duty, given the already growing demand for pilots and observers at the
front. Combat missions had to be flown by flight instructors who had
already had a long, hard day of flying training using aircraft that were
always nearly worn-out and often obsolete. But, on the plus side,
instructor pilots were among the best qualified and trained of any
available to the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service. As the
war progressed, many were crack fighter pilots posted home to pass on
their skills to the trainees.

REP (Robert Esnault Pelterie) monoplane armed with small bombs and a
single shot .45 calibre Martini-Henry carbine, RNAS Eastchurch 1916
Since the latest and best
equipment always went to France, the training units were left with
worn-out examples or obsolete types, types rejected by front-line units,
and equipment developed for quite other purposes than interception, such
as seaplanes. In 1914, 1915, and 1916, many were pre-war French
designs—under-powered Blériot, REP, and Morane-Saulnier monoplanes, for
the most part, supplemented by tired Bristol Scouts and RN seaplanes, such
as the Sopwith Schneider and Baby, which were speedy but hampered by their
bulky floats. Few of these aircraft had the performance necessary for
climbing up to a Zeppelin's cruising altitude, patroling until the raider
was spotted, and then overhauling the airship. Zeppelins were not much
slower than contemporary aircraft in level flight and enjoyed a much
faster climb and higher ceiling.

Blériot parasol with jury-rigged mounting for infantry-type Lewis gun
As these
miscellaneous aircraft types gradually disappeared from the scene, a
reasonably up-to-date but altogether unsuitable design was selected as the
standard home-defence fighter: the BE2c. The BE2 was a government product,
so it was ordered in enormous numbers. Both airframe and engine were
designed and built by the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough in
response to a specification for a completely safe military airplane, an
airplane that was inherently stable and free of difficult handling
characteristics. Unfortunately, the Factory's able designers delivered
exactly what the customer ordered. The BE2's was so stable that it could
not manoeuvre against enemy aircraft. The airplane thus proved unsuitable
for combat in France. At home, however, dog fighting was not an issue.
This, ready availability, and the idea that inherent stability was
essential in training and night-flying aircraft led to the decision to
standardize on the BE2 for training purposes and, therefore, for home
defence.

BE.2c RNAS Yarmouth, damaged in landing accident after fruitless search
for Zeppelin L9, 9/10 August 1915. Pilot Sqn. Cmdr. de Courcy Ireland
Unfortunately, the type's
inherent stability was not as advantageous as had been expected. BE2s
crashed more or less as frequently as the less stable types. Yet their
performance was generally inferior to that of the old French monoplanes
and Bristols. While the RAF 1a engine, an air-cooled V-8 based closely on
pre-war Renault practice, was, on paper, the equal of the 80- to 90-hp
rotaries that powered the French types, it was, in practice, far less
powerful and less reliable. The problem was overheating, particularly
during the all-important climb. Pilots could seldom make use of the unit's
nominal 90 hp for fear of overheating and engine failure. They had to run
the engines on rich mixtures, throttle back, and climb only at the speed
and angle best suited for cooling. This, together with the high-drag
design of the BE2 airframe, made flight performance mediocre at best. To
make the best of it, the aircraft were almost always flown as single
seaters, sometimes with the front cockpit permanently faired over. Even
so, BE2s could seldom climb anywhere near a Zeppelin's altitude and
generally took so much time trying that the raider had usually done its
work and departed before the interceptor even saw it.

BE.2c 7324, 39 (home defence) Sqdn Lt R.C.L Holme, Houslow, 1916

Single-seat BE.2c conversion, RNAS Eastchurch Flt Sub-Lt Buck 23/24
September 1916
Most aircraft retained the
normal finish used by the training squadrons for daylight operations. But,
early in the war, special night finish and markings were widely adopted on
an informal, ad hoc basis. In photographs, RNAS aircraft appear to carry
patchy or mottled camouflage applied over the natural-linen colour of the
airframe, possibly in blue or green. In August 1916, the commander of 50
Sqdn, Maj. Malcolm Christie, had all of the unit's BE.2s finished in a
black dope made from a clear carrier (such as nitrocellulose dope or oil
varnish) mixed with lamp black. Other units applied similar dope to the
undersurfaces only or used a light overspray to tone down the standard
camouflage and markings, an unofficial practice that continued with some
units right through the end of the war. To identify the aircraft during
daylight training flights, Christie replaced the roundels with simple
white circles. Others over painted the white ring of the standard roundel
with red, blue, or the standard PC10 camouflage dope.

BE.2c 50 Sqdn (home defence)
Navigation
and blind flying
Inadequate flight
performance was not the interceptor pilot's main worry, however. Prior to
the war, military aviation was primarily thought of in terms of visual
reconnaissance, and, since one did not generally reconnoitre when one
could not see, few had thought about the difficulties of night flying.
Consequently, little provision had been made for blind landing aids or
flight instruments. When night operations became necessary, it was too
late to do anything quickly. As a result, for the first three yeas of the
war, cross-country navigation and landing were so fraught with difficulty
that few aviators could manage a nocturnal mission without damaging or
demolishing an aircraft. The simplest navigational tasks, such as flying
to a town that was under attack or reaching an air field (any air field)
at the end of a patrol, became largely a matter of luck.
Navigation was a particular
problem. In daylight, pilots tried to follow roads, trench lines, and
railways wherever possible. In a pinch they might try to match visible
landmarks to their maps or fly a compass bearing until something familiar
appeared. While wind drift, unreliable compasses, inaccurate airspeed
indicators, and the difficulties of map-reading in a cold, vibrating
cockpit made these methods extremely inaccurate, they were generally good
enough in daylight and clear weather. The few intrepid pilots who
experimented with night flying prewar had found these methods were
perfectly acceptable at night, given the brightly lit towns and rail lines
of an industrialized nation at peace. Once it got really dark, however, on
moonless nights in the wartime black out, these navigational shortcuts
failed miserably.
Compasses, charts, and
flying instruments were, in any case, in short supply, and most were of
little practical use when fitted. The harsh vibrational and magnetic
conditions common inside early aircraft made compasses, manometers, and
similar instruments unreliable. The available maps and charts were
intended for ground troops or naval use, and cockpits were almost
invariably unlit except for a hand-held flashlight or two.
Ground-based navigational
aids were nonexistent. Some units attempted to use bonfires and the like
to locate targeted towns and landing fields. But such expedients were at
least as much help to the enemy. They were thus discouraged by
officialdom. The difficulty of locating blacked-out targets was, after
all, the most potent defence that Britain had against the airship.
Target-location and command
and control practices were absent or highly inefficient. Pilots had to
take off at the first warning of an incoming raid, because otherwise they
stood no chance of climbing to the attackers' altitude. Yet the early
reports seldom identified the correct targets. In the absence of any way
of communicating with the ground, pilots had to mill about in the dark,
chasing shadows, until lack of fuel forced them to risk a landing.
Landings were fraught with
peril. Landing is always the most dangerous part of a flight, particularly
so at night. But in WW1, the dangers were far greater than at any time
since. Landing fields were just that—fields, often parcels of waste ground
that did not recommend themselves to other agricultural or military uses.
They were often sloping, uneven, or rough, frequently boggy, and not
always free of dangerous obstructions, like boundary walls, fences,
ditches, streams, trees, even livestock. There was no runway per se and no
real landing pattern: pilots just gauged the wind and landed willy-nilly,
wherever they could. While such air fields were, perhaps, more dangerous
than they had to be, the risk was judged acceptable in daylight. At night,
when pilots had trouble judging their height above the ground and had
little more than a vague notion of being in the vicinity of the field,
they were lethal. In 89 RNAS sorties studied, 20 airplanes were wrecked or
seriously damaged, three pilots were killed, and eight were injured, two
seriously. Such human and material losses were unacceptable, given the
number of sorties flown, the results achieved, and the value of aviators
who were being risked.
By 1915, efforts were
underway to solve or at least mitigate the worst of these problems. Due to
its considerably greater experience in night and instrument flying, the
Navy took the lead. The RNAS Air Department provided pilot-adjustable
cockpit lighting for the BE.2 and extended naval-style instruments and
daytime training in blind-flying and navigation training to the RFC.
Command and control proved
a highly intractable problem and was not really solved until radar and the
ground-controlled intercept system came into use in the Second World War.
Nevertheless, some strides were made. A spotting network was established
and connected to coordinating centres by telephone. To give early warning
of incoming raids, large sound collectors were tried. In 1915, a 16-ft
parabolic sound mirror was carved into a chalk cliff in Kent. It could
detect a BE.2 30 to 90 secs before it could be detected by ear and was
effective at ranges up to 10.5 miles. A trainable concrete mirror was
planned but never installed, because the improved performance was not
great enough to justify the effort. Better results were obtained by the
simple expedient of feeding observer reports from Flanders to the
Home-Defence organization. To communicate the latest target information to
patrolling night fighters, an RNAS officer, Lt. Ingram, perfected a code
conveyed through white cloth panels: three, 20 x 4-ft (6 x 1.25-m)
rectangles and up to three 8 ft-diameter disks. The rectangles were
arranged in a "T" on the ground and the circles were placed around it in
any of 40 different positions. This system could pass instructions and
signal the presence of raiders in 25 pre-defined land and sea locations.
At night, it could be seen at 14,000 to 17,000 ft (4310 to 5230 m) under
normal weather conditions. Sample Ingram messages are shown below.

To make landings less
eventful, the Eastchurch naval air station developed a system of landing
lights based on a pair of automobile headlights mounted on the outermost
inter-plane struts. Though too weak to give much view of the ground, the
lights made it somewhat easier to gauge height during the final approach
and made the airplane more visible to other aircraft in the landing
circuit, thus minimizing collisions. A 30-ft, weighted line attached to a
warning light provided a primitive, ground-proximity warning system.

But Capt. F. V. Holt, RFC,
introduced the single most widely used landing aid, the Holt flare system.
Holt reasoned that most serious landing accidents could be avoided if the
pilot could be given a rough idea of his surroundings and even the
briefest glimpse of the ground just before touchdown. The latter would let
the pilot judge his height accurately (inaccurate height assessments were
a frequent cause of crashes) while revealing any gross inadequacies in the
landing surface. While battery-powered car headlamps and generator-driven
searchlights were available, they were never powerful enough to supply
useful amounts of light. So, to provide the overview of the landing field,
Holt produced a magnesium parachute flare that the pilot could launch from
the cockpit. To provide the crucial glimpse of the ground, he developed a
smaller flare of his own design mounted on an underwing stanchion. A
wind-driven generator and a pair of small, teardrop-shaped landing lights
completed the Holt equipment. To land, the pilot would drop the parachute
flare (over the side or through a special chute) from about 2000-3000 ft
while making a circuit of the field. The flare would burn for two to
two-and-a-half minutes—enough time for the pilot to get his bearings and
select a touch-down point. At about 300 ft, the pilot would light one of
his two under-wing flares by pushing an electric button. It would burn for
one minute—enough time to check height and surface conditions. If
necessary, the second flare could then be lit.

BE.12b C3088. 77 (home defence) Sqdn with toned-down markings and multiple
Holt flares
The only problem with Holt
flares was glare. The parachute flare proved all but unusable. Magnesium
light created harsh and confusing shadows that made an intelligible
overview of the ground all but impossible. Worse still, the large,
slow-falling flare ruined the pilot's night vision when he needed it most.
Most pilots skipped it and used the under-wing flares alone. To alleviate
the glare of the latter, a metal shield/reflector was at first fitted. But
it proved more trouble than it was worth and was soon abandoned. Pilots
were instead told to look out from the side opposite a burning flare, but
reflections from the airframe often made this tactic less helpful than one
might expect. Consequently, crews blacked the rear blades of propellers
with lamp-black and black-doped the under-surfaces of the wings (or the
whole airframe). Some experimented with alternative locations for the
flares and mounted multiple units under the fuselage or tail-plane.
Despite its limitations, the Holt flare was successful, so much so that it
remained in service throughout the world until shortly before WW2.
At established airfields,
ground crews developed an even simpler aid which is, in principle, still
in use today. Cans filled with gas-soaked rags or sand were lined up in a
"J" pattern to designate the boundaries of the landing area. When a
returning aircraft approached tthe field, the ground crews would ignite
the cans to form a flare path.
Armament
All the aircraft carried
woefully inadequate armament in the early years. Their proverbial
inflammability not withstanding, Zeppelins were tough targets. The
airship's enormous size was protection in its own right. There was so much
hydrogen and so little air inside the hull that fires were extremely hard
to start (the nitrocellulose dope on the hull fabric was probably a bigger
fire hazard than the gas inside). Vital components, such as engines,
control cables, and structural members, were duplicated, widely
distributed over the hull, and accessible to damage control teams in
flight. Gas bags could, of course, be punctured, but it took many, many
strikes and considerable time before such large craft noticed any loss of
lift. Meanwhile, many well-sited, crew-served machine guns would be firing
back at the attacking pilot from a considerably steadier platform than he
enjoyed.
Machine guns were an
obvious anti-airship weapon, and a suitable machine gun was, by chance,
readily available: the .303-in calibre Lewis, a remarkably light
(25-lb/11-kg) infantry weapon fed from a 47- or (later) a 96-round drum
magazine. It was reasonably handy, reliable, and easier to load in flight
than most of its contemporaries. Unfortunately, while a 50- to 100-round
burst of machine-gun fire would cause major structural failure in a
contemporary airplane, it had little effect on an airship. Zeppelins were
large enough to soak up enormous quantities of the standard .303-in (7.7
mm) ball ammunition without serious damage.
With this fact in mind, the
Woolwich arsenal developed a theoretically more lethal anti-airship round:
the "flaming" bullet. This contained an incendiary compound sufficient to
ignite the hydrogen in a Zeppelin. But the amount required was so large
large that it would not fit the high-velocity, .303-in service bullet.
Instead, the obsolete, .45-in calibre Martini-Henry bullet had to be used.
This had been developed for a single shot, lever-actuated, breech-loading
rifle that had preceded the .303 Lee-Enfield SMLE as the standard infantry
weapon. This used a short-range, low-velocity cartridge designed
originally for black powder. The Woolwich flaming bullet was too
temperamental for use in machine guns (it was prone to exploding in a hot
barrel), even if the only weapon chambered for it, the obsolete, .45-in
Navy-pattern Maxim gun, had been light enough for aircraft use. So aircrew
were issued with Martini-Henry cavalry carbines. Trying to hit a moving,
airborne target at long range with a single-shot carbine while flying an
unstable light plane was hardly a promising tactic, even if the Woolwich
round had not proved incapable of piercing Zeppelin fabric at combat
ranges (British authorities came away convinced that the Zeppelin featured
a double hull containing inert engine exhaust as a fire suppressant).
Incendiary and explosive bullets were also contrary to the Hague
Conventions, which were still being observed in Britain at this time.

Given the limitations of
the available small arms, many elements in the army and navy recommended
air-to-air bombing. Suitable weapons were available in the form of the
20-pound (10-kg) Hale HE and 16-lb (8-kg) Woolwich incendiary bombs,
supplemented, possibly, by army rifle grenades. These were certainly
destructive enough to destroy something as lightly built as a Zeppelin,
and they had been successfully tested in action. Their advocates could
point to RNAS Flt Sub-Lieut R.A.J. Warneford's victory over LZ37 on June
6/7, 1915, using Cooper bombs dropped from Morane-Saulnier Type L Parasol
No. 3253, and to the Royal Navy's spectacular successes attacking
dirigible hangers in occupied Belgium. But contemporary aircraft could
only carry 2-4 at a time. To improve the chances of a hit, the Royal Navy
thus developed a specialized anti-airship bomb that could be carried in
large numbers, the Ranken dart. The Ranken dart was a slender,
drogue-stabilized, 1-lb bomb with a sharp steel nose and four, pivoting
vanes at the tail. When the dart hit the airship's skin, the head would
punch through while the vanes snagged on the envelope and fired the
detonator. The darts were dropped from a 24-round box angled 45º to the
rear of the airplane. The pilot approached from 150-700 ft. above the
target (300-400 ft. was ideal) and from about 20 degrees off its fore and
aft axis. He could drop the darts singly or salvo the load. A 5-lb version
was developed later.
Bombs and darts could be
supplemented by the unlikely-sounding and worse-looking Farnborough Fiery
Grapnel. This consisted of a pair of four-fluked, anchor-like grappling
hooks packed with incendiary composition and fixed to a length of cable.
The fighter was supposed to troll with it until the thing snagged on a
Zeppelin. Then the grapnel would rip the airship open and set it alight.
Bombs, Ranken darts, and
the Fiery Grapnel were all top attack weapons, of course. While they were
more than destructive enough to bring down a Zeppelin, the airplanes
available in 1914 and 1915 had little chance of climbing to above a
Zeppelin. Warneford had the good luck to spot LZ37 while en route to a
bombing raid on the Zeppelin sheds at Berchem St Agathe. He was already
airborne and at a considerable height when he began his famous pursuit.
The Zeppelin was still climbing away from its shed over comparatively
friendly territory. Had Warneford taken off from an English airfield in
response to a Zeppelin warning, the results might have been rather less
satisfactory. In fact, in every case where a Zeppelin fell victim to
bombing, the British pilot enjoyed an atypical height advantage that
allowed an attack from above. Since Zeppelins could climb as high as
20,000 ft (6154 m) in a matter of minutes at a time when a good airplane
could struggle up to 10,000 to 14,000 ft (300-4000 m) in a couple of
hours, such circumstances were seldom to be repeated. When carrying the
standard load of two to four 20-lb bombs, a box of Ranken darts, a
.303-cal service rifle with rifle grenades, and a Martini-Henry carbine
with ammunition or a Lewis gun, plus, perhaps, an observer to help with
all the weaponry, a contemporary airplane could have trouble even getting
off the ground.
In the hopes of alleviating
this difficulty, the British investigated a series of weapons that would,
it was hoped, carry the bomb's destructive charge up to the airship from
below. Rockets, recoilless rifles, and cannon were all tried.

BE. 12, 50 Sqdn, Dover, August 1916 armed with Le Prieur rockets
From 1915 to at least 1917,
British authorities viewed the French Le Prieur rocket as an ideal
anti-airship weapon, despite its many operational deficiencies. The weapon
had been used with success against stationary observation balloons on the
western front, and contemporary fighters could carry 8 to 10 of them in
tubes attached to their inter-plane struts. The Le Prieur weapons looked
exactly like large bottle rockets and worked on the same principle,
igniting balloons much as bottle rockets ignite roofs today. The large
black-powder charge was extremely effective once it hit a lighter-than-air
craft. Unfortunately, in the home-defence role, that never happened. To
have any chance of a hit, the pilot had to get unrealistically close to
the Zeppelin, and he still had to be above it. With the added weight and
drag of the rocket installation, this was even less likely than it had
been with bombs. No airship was ever downed by a rocket.
Throughout the war years,
the Royal Navy experimented extensively with the Davis gun, a recoilless
rifle developed by a US Navy commander between 1911 and 1914. The Davis
gun worked on the counter-shot principle, in which a mass equal to the
shell is ejected to the rear upon firing. In essence, the weapon consisted
of a pair of equal-length, light-weight gun tubes mounted breech to breech
on a common chamber. For loading, the rear-facing, counter shot barrel
could be unlocked and pivoted around a rod parallel to the axis of the
gun. The round consisted of the high-explosive shell and an equal weight
of lead bird shot, with the propellant charge in between. Guns were
available for aircraft use in a range of calibres: 2-pounder (~40-mm cal),
6-pounder (~57-mm), 12-pounder (~76-mm), and 50-pounder (~127-mm). The
guns had a muzzle-velocity of about 1200 ft/sec (370 m/sec) and an
effective range of about 2000 yds (1846 m). The weapons were light, but
bulky—10 ft (3.1 m) long. The 2-pounder weighed 70 lbs (32 kg), the
6-pounder 208 lbs, and the 12-pounder 208 lbs, all with mounting.

6-ponder (57 mm) Davis gun with Lewis sighting machine gun
While all the guns
performed impressively and fired extremely destructive shells, it was
quickly found that they could not be readily trained when mounted in
ordinary service airplanes, such as the BE.2. The formidable, dual muzzle
blasts could severely damage structural members within three ft (1 m) of
either muzzle, and the heavy shot charge could destroy any part of the
aircraft in its path. This discovery led to a range of designs for
bizarre, special-purpose cannon fighters, most of which took their
inspiration from warship design practices.
The Robey-Peters Davis-Gun
Carrier was a three-seat, single-engined biplane with a pair of upper-wing
gondolas for the gunners and their Davis guns. The pilot sat well aft,
where his view for night takeoffs and landings must have been awful. The
3-bay wings spanned 54.5 ft (16.75 m), and the aircraft was 29.75 ft (9.2
m) long. The gunners sat 12 feet (3.7 m) in the air. The aircraft featured
a large, anti-noseover skid and wing-mounted air brakes. Even with a
250-hp Rolls-Royce Eagle engine, the aircraft could barely get off the
ground, and it was destroyed in a crash on its first flight.
More remarkable still, the
Supermarine PB.31E Night Hawk was a twin-engined, 3- to 5-seat, 6-bay,
fighter quadruplane equipped with a heated and enclosed cockpit, a bunk
for an off-duty crew member, a trainable nose-mounted searchlight, a 5-hp
2-stroke APU, armoured fuel and control lines, a 2-pounder Davis gun with
20 shells, and 2 .303-cal Lewis guns. The airplane spanned 60 ft (18.5 m),
stood 17.75 ft (5.5 m) high, and was almost 37 ft (11.4 m) long. With two
100-hp Anzani air-cooled radial engines, it was supposed to reach 75 mph
and manage patrols of 9 to 18 hours. To give the Davis gun the best
possible arcs of fire, it was mounted above the top wing. Unfortunately,
the prototype only managed 60 mph at 6500 ft and took an hour to climb to
10,000 ft—both totally inadequate for intercepting airships. Given the
Anzani's reputation for unreliability and overheating, it is unlikely that
the airplane would have delivered the advertised endurance either. The
aircraft was scrapped. (It is however notable that one of the design team
was none other than R.J. Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire.)

Supermarine PB 31E 'Nighthawk' 1388, with 2 pounder Davis Gun - a 2
cylinder ABC auxiliary power unit is installed aft of the main engine
Experiments with the Davis
gun soon showed that a devastating shell was not enough to make a weapon
effective in air combat. The Davis gun suffered from a low rate of fire,
because, for each shot, the gunner had to manually unlock the breech,
swing the rear barrel aside, wrestle the oversized cartridge into place,
and close the action again, all while trying to keep the gun trained on
the target. In action, this made the Davis a one-shot weapon, and, even
with the help of a tracer-firing Lewis gun for aiming, single-round hits
were all but impossible. In any case, by 1917, when the Robey-Peters and
Supermarine gun carriers finally flew, minimally modified, standard,
service fighters had proved entirely satisfactory. The Davis gun was
relegated to anti-submarine use, mounted on flying boats and RNAS
Handley-Page bombers, and soon abandoned altogether.
The RFC and RNAS did not
give up on the shell-firing aircraft gun, however. An automatic cannon
would, it was thought, overcome the principle limitations of the
recoilless gun. Fortuitously, two such weapons were available.
The more sophisticated
design, the 37-mm "C.O.W. gun" from the Coventry Ordnance Works was a
pre-war invention, but development was so protracted that it failed to see
service use before 1918. It used a long-recoil action, weighed a
remarkably light 140 lbs (64 kg), and fired 1.5-lb (0.68-kg) shells from
5-round clips at 60 rpm. Muzzle velocity was 2000 ft/sec (615 m/sec).
Unfortunately, recoil was horrific enough that few aircraft could fire it
without damage.
Many aircraft were designed
around the C.O.W. gun in the expectation that its development would
proceed smoothly. One of the most extraordinary was the Royal Aircraft
Factory FE.6. This combined standard RE.5 wings with a two-seat nacelle
and a 120-hp Austro-Daimler engine driving a four-bladed pusher propeller.
The tail surfaces were carried on a slender, tubular, metal tail boom that
passed through the hollow airscrew shaft. All elevator- and rudder-control
cables were routed through the inside of the boom to a point just ahead of
the tailplane. A substantial oleo-strut undercarriage was fitted. Needless
to say, the structure was dangerously weak and prone to distortion. The
aircraft flew for 45 min on its first flight in 1914. But its subsequent
history is obscure. By 1915, it had been broken up for RE.5 spares.

Royal Aircraft Factory FE 6 with 37mm COW gun
The second weapon was a
19th-century gun created by Hiram Maxim himself, the 1-pounder Maxim QF,
better known as the Pom-Pom, for its distinctive sound. Vickers obtained
the rights to these weapons pre-war and exported them widely. They were
used by the Boers in the Boer War and by both Germany and England as AA
guns. The pom-pom was basically a Maxim machine gun chambered for a 37-mm
explosive shell, fired from 40-round belts at a muzzle velocity of 1800
ft/sec (554 m/sec) and at 300 rpm. It weighed a hefty 420 lbs (191 kg) and
was over 6 ft (1.9 m) long.

FE 2b fitted with 1 pounder pom-pom gun, Lewis gun and French CFS landing
searchlight. 51 Sqdn March 1917
Few aircraft types could
carry such a weapon. But, in 1916, experiments at the Admiralty's
Orfordness experimental station showed that the Royal aircraft Factory
FE.2B pusher biplane could carry the weapon when fitted with the 160-hp
Beardmore engine, a license-built version of the Austro-Daimler
six-cylinder. Single- and two-seat layouts were tried, but the
temperamental belt-feed doubtless required a gunner. For the operational
versions, plywood, side-by-side cockpit nacelles were provided for the gun
and the two-man crew. The gunner sat to the pilot's right, with the gun
directly in front of him on a high-angle mount. A pantographic gun sight
sight was provided. No less than five of these aircraft were issued to 51
Home-Defence Sqdn in 1917, but by then it was obvious that the performance
of both the gun and the airframe were inadequate for attacking Zeppelins.
No interceptions were made. Two similar aircraft went to 100 Sqdn in
France and were used for nocturnal train strafing.
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