First RFC contact patrols

The British chronology of the war records under 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, that contact patrols, that is, liaison between airmen and the attacking infantry, were “first introduced” in the Royal Flying Corps, the British Army’s air arm. That day aircraft circled over each attacking corps with the sole task of following how far the troops had got and reporting it to headquarters as quickly as possible. Until then generals had often lost touch with the infantry for hours once it left the trenches: telephone cables broke under shellfire and runners were killed on the way. The words “first time” need a qualification, however. According to the British official air history, H. A. Jones’s The War in the Air, 1 July 1916 was the first large-scale use in battle of a system that the British and French had been trying out for more than a year.

From white strips to mirrors

The British made their first attempts in 1915. At the Battle of Aubers Ridge on 9 May three Maurice Farman aircraft of No. 16 Squadron, fitted with wireless sets, patrolled over the front in turn. The infantry was to lay out strips of white cloth, seven feet by two, on the ground when it reached designated points. The airmen sent 42 reports that day, but the infantry reached none of those points, and what the observers saw from above proved too general and too uncertain to convince army headquarters. Jones writes that it was not yet realised that these defects could be overcome by low flying and patient joint training of airmen and infantry. In the summer of 1915 coloured smoke candles were tried: observers of No. 1 Squadron easily spotted the yellow smoke of Brock flares even from 6,000 feet, about 1,800 metres, and in November they were issued to the armies.

The French went further. In their autumn offensive in Champagne in 1915 their infantry signalled its position with lamps, flares and cloth strips, and observers plotted them on maps and dropped these at agreed places. At Verdun the French concentrated specially trained observers, and on the basis of this experience General Joseph Joffre issued general instructions on co-operation between aircraft and infantry on 17 April 1916. According to Jones, the British organisation of contact patrols on the Somme was based on this memorandum. The Germans also tried such co-operation at Verdun, but their infantry under fire was unable to lay out white sheets, and the results were poor.

The British provisional instructions were issued on 26 May 1916. Specially marked aircraft were to be used only for observing the battlefield and were to report directly to the headquarters of the corps for which they worked. The infantry was to light flares on the initiative of company and platoon commanders, when asked “Where are you?” from an aircraft, at set times and on reaching designated lines. Some soldiers were to wear metal mirrors on their backs, whose flashes would allow the line of the advance to be followed. Each attacking battalion was to receive 320 flares and 80 mirrors, although in the first days of the battle flares were short because contracts had not been fulfilled. Battalion and brigade headquarters communicated with the airmen by means of signalling panels, a kind of shutter made of slats painted white on one side, with which messages were tapped out in Morse code. In the spring the RFC’s IV Brigade, which worked with General Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, practised all this with the infantry on a training ground west of Albert.

1 July over the Somme

The first aircraft took off at four in the morning on 1 July, but mist hid the ground. At 6.25 a.m., as the bombardment reached its peak, the contact observers saw thin lines of infantry creeping out of the trenches into no man’s land. Every corps and divisional headquarters had a wireless station to receive urgent reports from aircraft, and at selected points infantry officers with telephones waited for the airmen to drop bags of reports and special maps marked with the position of the troops.

In many places the system did not work as planned. Over Gommecourt, where VII Corps attacked, the airmen of No. 8 Squadron did not see a single flare. The only way to establish who was where was to go down low enough to recognise the colour of the uniforms, straight through the artillery barrage, and sometimes under infantry fire, when the soldiers seen at close quarters turned out to be wearing grey instead of khaki. By the end of the day three contact aircraft were so riddled with holes that they were unfit to fly, but none was lost. From above the observers watched the battalions of the 56th Division fight their way through three lines of German trenches and then, all afternoon, being pushed back. Over Thiepval Captain C. A. A. Hiatt of No. 4 Squadron examined the ruins of the village calmly and carefully from a height of only 600 feet (about 180 metres). Only the airmen could report deep penetrations into the German defences, for example through the Schwaben Redoubt towards Grandcourt. Over La Boisselle aircraft of No. 3 Squadron, which had watched the explosion of the Lochnagar mine from a distance, reported that on its right the 34th Division had got as far as Peake Wood. On the III and XV Corps sectors the forward troops lit plenty of flares, and the airmen reported them at once.

The system worked best on the right wing, where XIII Corps achieved the greatest success of the day. Captain J. T. P. Whittaker and his observer, Second Lieutenant T. E. G. Scaife, of No. 9 Squadron reached the front just after ten. Scaife saw before him a line of mirror flashes on the backs of men of the 30th Division advancing towards Montauban. When a German battery opened fire in Bernafay Wood, Whittaker came down to about 200 metres and machine-gunned the gun crews. The airmen returned just in time to see the 16th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment enter Montauban in perfect order. They were so delighted that they flew low over the ridge, waving to the infantry. The commander of the 55th Brigade later wrote that his men were “enormously cheered” when one of the airmen came down low and waved to them. By 11.15 a.m. mirrors were flashing along the northern edge of the village, and before returning Scaife sketched the line the corps had reached.

Significance

The experience of the first day showed both the strength and the weaknesses of the new method. There were too few flares, and according to many accounts soldiers under fire were reluctant to light them for fear of giving away their position to the Germans as well. Mirrors worked only in sunshine. The greatest contribution came from the courage of the observers who went down low over the battlefield. Even so, during the Battle of the Somme contact patrols became a regular part of every attack. Jones stresses that the heavier the German shelling, the less reliable ground communications became, and the more responsibility fell on the airmen, who shared it with carrier pigeons. The Germans quickly drew their conclusions: according to material from German archives quoted by Jones, in the autumn of 1916 the German air service command judged the infantry airman to be “the most important means of obtaining and transmitting information” during heavy fighting. The method was refined on both sides of the front until the end of the war.