British squadron formed to bomb German industry

The British chronology of the war records under 28 February 1916 the formation of the nucleus of a British air squadron intended to bomb German industrial centres. This was a unit of the Royal Naval Air Service, the air arm of the British navy. According to the history of that service, in February 1916 a squadron of the new two-seat Sopwith 1½ Strutter aircraft began forming at Detling in Kent. It was commanded by Reginald Marix, a squadron commander in the naval air ranks since January, the same man who in October 1914 had destroyed a German airship in its shed at Düsseldorf. The sources do not give the exact day on which the squadron was formed, so the date of 28 February comes from the British chronology.

The idea of raids on the enemy’s rear

From the beginning of the war the Admiralty had thought of attacking targets deep inside Germany from the air. Naval airmen had already flown in 1914 against the airship sheds at Düsseldorf and Cologne and the Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen, but these were isolated sorties by a few aircraft. At the end of 1915 a proposal emerged to create a joint British and French bombing force that would systematically attack German industry. For the moment, however, there were no aircraft with the necessary range and load. Only the Sopwith 1½ Strutter changed the situation. The first examples of this aircraft, the first British two-seat fighter of tractor configuration and the first British machine to enter service with a machine gun synchronised with the propeller, began reaching the naval air service in February 1916. It could also serve as a light bomber.

Marix’s squadron was to attack from England the factories in the Essen and Düsseldorf area, the heart of the German armaments industry in the Ruhr. It soon turned out that the distance to these targets was too great. The Admiralty therefore decided to move the bombers to France, closer to the German border.

From Detling to Luxeuil

In May 1916 Wing Captain William Elder went to France to agree the terms of cooperation. It was decided that the British bombers would operate together with French ones from the airfield at Luxeuil-les-Bains near the German border, from where the armaments works of south-western Germany were within easy reach. Marix’s squadron became the nucleus of the new No. 3 Wing RNAS. The Admiralty planned to equip it by July with 35 bombers and 20 fighters, and then gradually expand it to a hundred machines.

The needs of the Western Front upset these plans. Before the Battle of the Somme the army’s air arm, the Royal Flying Corps, was short of aircraft, so by mid-September the navy had handed over 62 Sopwiths to it. No. 3 Wing made its first joint raid with the French at the end of July 1916, and its first large one only on 12 October, against the Mauser works at Oberndorf am Neckar. By April 1917 the wing had carried out a dozen or so raids, and in 1917 it was disbanded. British aviation returned to systematic strategic bombing of Germany in 1918, forming the special Independent Force.