The Royal Flying Corps in the First World War

The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) was the air arm of the British Army from 1912 to 1918. In August 1914 it flew to France behind the British Expeditionary Force and from the first weeks supplied it with reconnaissance reports. Over the following years it grew into a great force that fought for command of the air over the Western Front, flew in Palestine and Italy, and defended Britain against air raids. On 1 April 1918 it was merged with the naval air arm into the Royal Air Force.

Birth and 1914

The corps was created by a royal warrant of 13 April 1912, and a month later, on 13 May, the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers became its Military Wing. The beginnings were modest: according to the RAF Museum, in May 1912 only eight naval officers and 11 army officers could fly. The corps’ Naval Wing broke away on 1 July 1914 as the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) and from then on was the fleet’s separate air arm.

At the outbreak of war the Military Wing had, by the usual count, 147 officers, 1,097 other ranks and 179 aircraft, and was commanded by Brigadier-General David Henderson. On 13 August the aircraft of Nos. 2, 3 and 4 Squadrons flew from Dover to France and landed near Amiens, and a few days later No. 5 Squadron joined them.

During the retreat from Mons the airmen tracked the columns of the German First Army, and in September they spotted its change of direction, which helped win the Battle of the Marne. Field Marshal Sir John French praised them in his dispatch of 7 September. Over the Aisne RFC observers directed artillery fire by wireless for the first time, which became one of the main tasks of military aviation.

Trenchard and the Fokkers (1915–1916)

From August 1915 to January 1918 the corps in France was commanded by General Hugh Trenchard. He was convinced that aviation had to fight for superiority in the air, not merely carry out reconnaissance, and he demanded a relentless offensive over the German side of the front. He could count on the support of the commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig. In the autumn of 1915, however, the “Fokker Scourge” began: German monoplanes with a machine gun firing through the propeller fell on slow British reconnaissance aircraft. On 14 January 1916 RFC headquarters ordered that each of them fly with an escort of at least three other machines. The Germans lost their superiority to new fighters, among them the British DH.2 and F.E.2b, which in the spring of 1916 changed the balance.

In the summer of 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, the Allies held command of the air. The RFC was still twelve squadrons short, so by mid-September the navy handed over 62 Sopwiths to it. On 1 July the airmen flew contact patrols on a large scale for the first time, following closely how far the attacking infantry had got. In the autumn the Germans regained the upper hand when their new fighter squadrons received Albatroses with two machine guns.

Part of the corps fought over England itself. In February 1916 the army took over the country’s air defence from the navy, and by December the RFC had 11 home defence squadrons hunting airships at night. On the night of 2–3 September Lieutenant William Leefe Robinson of No. 39 Squadron set the airship SL 11 on fire over Cuffley, the first destroyed over British soil, and was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Bloody April and the Gothas (1917)

The hardest time for the RFC was Bloody April 1917. Over Arras the corps had 25 squadrons and 365 serviceable aircraft, more than the enemy, but the German fighter squadrons flying Albatroses, among them the squadron of Manfred von Richthofen, shot down, by various counts, between 245 and 275 British machines. About 211 airmen were killed or missing, and 108 were taken prisoner. In the whole of 1917 the RFC lost 2,094 aircrew killed or missing. From May better aircraft reached the front, such as the S.E.5 and the Bristol Fighter, and in November at Cambrai fighters dropped out of the clouds to attack German troops and batteries from low altitude, paying for it with heavy losses.

In the same year the corps had to defend London against aeroplanes. After the Gotha daylight raid of 13 June the Germans switched in the autumn to night raids, against which the defence was almost helpless: on 4 September eighteen RFC pilots took off, and only two managed to glimpse a bomber for a moment. The corps’ airmen also worked far from France. In Palestine at the beginning of March they reported that the Turks were abandoning their fortified position at Shellal, and in the autumn of 1917 two squadrons went with the British troops to Italy.

The end: the Royal Air Force (1918)

The raids on London sealed the corps’ fate. In his report of 17 August 1917 General Jan Smuts recommended creating a separate air service, equal to the army and the navy, because two rival formations were wasting men and equipment. On 29 November the Air Force Act received royal assent, and on 3 January 1918 the Air Ministry began work. Trenchard became Chief of the Air Staff, and from January Major-General John Salmond took over the RFC in France.

At the end of March 1918 the RFC numbered about 150 squadrons. It lived through its last days under the fire of the great German offensive, when its airmen attacked the advancing columns without pause. On 1 April 1918 the RFC and the RNAS were merged into the Royal Air Force, an independent air force alongside the army and the navy. The squadrons went on flying from the same airfields with the same machines, and at the Armistice the new force was the largest military air arm in the world.