Aircraft co-operate with tanks

15 September 1916, the day on which the British Army sent tanks into battle for the first time, was also an exceptional day for the Royal Flying Corps. According to the British official history of the air war, H. A. Jones’s The War in the Air, RFC airmen spent more hours in the air that day and fought more combats than at any time since the start of the war. Forty-nine Mark I tanks were prepared for the attack, of which 42 were allotted to the Fourth Army and the rest to the Reserve Army, whose Canadian Corps was attacking Courcelette. What they did in battle was to be reported by the observers of contact patrols from the corps squadrons. The British had been using this method of following the infantry from the air on a large scale since 1 July; now for the first time it also covered the new weapon.

The night before the attack

The airmen helped the tanks even before they moved off. During the last nights before the attack the tanks drove up to their starting positions, while aircraft circled low over the German trenches, their engines meant to drown the noise of the machines. Complete surprise was not achieved, however. Jones writes that the German infantry had been warned several weeks earlier that the British might use some kind of armoured cars, and on the afternoon of 14 September an observer in a German balloon spotted some of the tanks coming up, after which the commanders in the front line received a special warning. For co-operation with the cavalry, which was to go through the gap if the front broke, No. 18 Squadron with F.E.2b aircraft was brought in from the First Army’s sector.

Reports from the battlefield

From zero hour each corps squadron kept two contact aircraft over the battlefield, relieved by successive crews. Many observers spent eight hours in the air that day. Over Flers, airmen of No. 3 Squadron dropped their first report at XV Corps headquarters at 7.20 a.m.: the infantry was following a barrage that moved forward with uncanny accuracy, and within ten minutes its flares were burning in the captured Switch Line trench. The infantry advanced so quickly that it outstripped the tanks. At 8.30 a.m. observers saw three tanks approaching Flers, and a quarter of an hour later one of them was driving up the main street of the village surrounded by a crowd of figures in khaki. According to the British official history of land operations, the air report of 8.45 a.m., passed from III to XV Corps, read: “Tank seen in main street Flers going on with large number of troops following it”. War correspondents spread it in a more colourful version, as the news that “a tank is walking up the High Street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind”. Sources disagree on which crew exactly sent the report: Jones attributes the sighting to the airmen of No. 3 Squadron, while the history of land operations states that the message came through the headquarters of the neighbouring III Corps. Nor is there agreement about the tank itself. The official history says that D16 entered the village, while D6, D9 and D17 advanced along its eastern edge. In many later accounts the hero of this scene is D17 “Dinnaken”. In the early afternoon an airman saw a tank that had ventured as far as Gueudecourt, and at the very moment he was marking it on his map he saw it hit by a shell and set on fire.

At High Wood, where III Corps was attacking, Captain C. H. B. Blount and Lieutenant T. S. Pearson of No. 34 Squadron dropped a report soon after ten o’clock on the fate of the three tanks allotted to the wood: one was stuck in its own trenches, the second had reared up against a tree, and the third was burning in the German trenches. Without the tanks the infantry was held up in front of uncut wire. The airmen went back over the wood and saw that the troops on both sides of it had gone forward and met north of it. When they landed, a frontal attack on the German trench in the wood was just being prepared at corps headquarters. According to Pearson’s account, it would have ended in the attackers being wiped out, because the trench was manned “shoulder to shoulder”, with a machine gun every few metres. After a talk with the airmen the order was cancelled, and at about one in the afternoon the surrounded garrison of the wood surrendered. Jones credits this decision precisely to the airmen’s reports; other accounts of the capture of the wood emphasise rather the hurricane mortar bombardment that preceded the surrender.

On the right wing, where XIV Corps had 16 tanks, six broke down before they reached their starting positions. An observer of No. 9 Squadron reported at eight o’clock that the 6th Division had been stopped by a strong German strongpoint east of Ginchy, called the Quadrilateral by the British, and that the only tank in front of it was not helping at all. Indeed, the tank had lost its periscope and, blinded, had stopped a few dozen metres in front of the German trench. The Guards reported that they had taken their final objective, but the airmen saw their forward troops in shell holes about 180 metres short of it, and it was the airmen who were right. On the left wing observers of No. 7 Squadron followed the Canadians at Courcelette, and in the evening, an hour after their attack, reported flares burning in a semicircle around the village, which meant that it was entirely in Canadian hands.

Bombs and air fighting

The airmen did not only observe. Artillery observers located 159 active German batteries on the Fourth Army front, and they were quickly engaged thanks to a simple system of calls by map squares. According to Jones, 70 batteries were engaged under air observation and 29 silenced. In keeping with the offensive doctrine of the RFC commander, General Hugh Trenchard, bombers flew over the German rear all day and dropped a total of about eight and a half tons of bombs, among other targets on the headquarters of General Fritz von Below at Bourlon, the stations at Bapaume and in the area, and trains carrying reinforcements. Bavarian infantrymen, whose trenches the Guards captured that day, recalled in their regimental histories that twenty to thirty British aircraft fired on them from low altitude.

The fighting took place almost entirely over the German lines. The RFC lost six aircraft with nine officers that day, and the airmen reported fourteen German machines seen to crash. In the morning one of the best German airmen, Oswald Boelcke, shot down Captain G. L. Cruikshank of No. 70 Squadron over Havrincourt Wood. Two days later Boelcke led his new fighter squadron, Jagdstaffel 2, into combat for the first time, on new, faster aircraft, which heralded the end of British air superiority over the Somme. 15 September, however, was the RFC’s day. The co-operation of the airmen with the infantry and the tanks proved to be the commands’ most reliable source of news from the battlefield and became a permanent part of British tactics.