'Bloody April' (2005) by Peter Hart.
I wrote this review a couple of years back. I am a big fan of the WW1 books of English historian Peter Hart:-
The month of April 1917, which, post-Great War, became known as ‘Bloody April’, saw the British Royal Flying Corps on the Western Front endure one of their most costly periods during that conflict. In that month alone, the RFC lost 275 aircraft destroyed with 207 aircrew killed with an additional 214 wounded or POW.
The popular perception of Bloody April is one of an increasingly demoralised air-service in which under-trained and naïve pilots were forced to again and again by their heartless commanders to venture over the Front in obsolete and vulnerable machines only to be picked off at will by the superior and ruthlessly skilled German Jastas.
Hart challenges and to some extent, refutes this popular memory of that phase of the Great War. He does so by placing the air campaign of April 1917 into its proper context of the war on the Western Front as a whole. In Hart’s view, too many historians have examined the air-war in isolation, as if believing that the aircrews on both sides fought an entirely separate battle, divorced from their counterparts in the trenches below. In his opinion, there has been too much emphasis on the fighter pilots and the ‘Aces’ and their scores which has unjustly obscured what was the primary role of the aeroplane in the Great War- the role of ground support. Popular hagiography celebrates the single-seat fighters wheeling and twisting in epic dogfights above the clouds. By comparison, the more strategically important role played by the humble two seaters is over-looked.
In April 1917, the RFC’s primary aim was to provide close air support for ground forces in the Battle of Arras, performing roles such as low-level reconnaissance, aerial photography, artillery spotting, signalling and, to a limited degree, ground strafing and bombing. Hart argues that in overall terms, not only did the RFC successfully perform this function, they did so repeatedly and with continuous determination. In Hart’s view, the bulk of the RFC’s fliers did not flinch from their tasks, their morale held despite the heavy casualties and the RFC was able to maintain the offensive and the initiative throughout.
Hart is not a retro-patriot nor is he a warmonger. Anyone who has read his books on the Somme, Passchendaele or Gallipoli can attest that Hart never downplays the horrors and the ghastliness of the Great War. But he has no patience for the modern ‘Blackadder’ view of the First World War of the docile, naïve Cockneys sent to the slaughter by their dim-witted, buffoonish generals. Hart is not attempting to be revisionist in the sense of claiming that April 1917 was a ‘victory’ (in the conventional sense of the word) for the RFC. Rather he seeks to illustrate that most of the RFC’s aircrew continued to fly and fight despite the losses, possessing a resilience, a self-belief and a conscientious sense of duty that must baffle today’s generation. The RFC’s contribution to the Arras Campaign greatly assisted the progress of the ground battle and was a key factor in the strategic success of the early phase of that battle. And despite the losses, the RFC was continuing to operate at maximum strength with the coming of May, with newer aircraft and new tactics & skills. By the summer, the dominance of the dreaded Jastas was starting to erode.
Hart’s book is not simply a dry text discussing strategy, numbers and tactics, his book (like his others) is primarily a human narrative, featuring many excerpts from pilot’s reports, diaries and letters, both German & RFC. Nor is this book a day-by-day combat narrative of April 1917. (Readers seeking such an approach should check out Norman Frank’s exhaustive 1995 book ‘Bloody April, Black September’.) Hart instead examines the experiences and reactions of the aircrew on both sides.
Despite his admiration for the aircrew involved, Hart does not shy away from exposing the deficiencies of the system in which they operated. The RFC’s persistence in using the hopelessly outmoded Royal Aircraft Factory BE2 was largely due to a reluctance on the part of the manufacturers to take the time and money to invest in new designs. By April 1917, the unpopularity of the BE2 (or the ‘Quirk’ as frontline fliers un-affectionately nicknamed it) had reached such levels that some fliers were deliberately pranging them to avoid flying them into action. The in-adequate training system for new pilots was no longer able to cope with the demands for replacements at the Front (the tiny fledgling RFC of August 1914 which had comprised a mere four squadrons had grown to over forty by March 1917). The sketchy, rudimentary training programs, run by reluctant instructors, many of whom were combat fatigued veterans from the Front, resulted in rookie pilots going into action with far too few skills and experience.
As Hart explains, while the German fighter Jastas were highly skilled and mobile and individual aces were able to rake up some impressive tallies during April, they were hard-pressed and outnumbered. Only seven Jastas covered the Arras sector and their pilots flew themselves to exhaustion trying to achieve air supremacy. Despite having superior aircraft and possessing the advantages of operating over home turf, the Germans were also just as brave as the Allied aircrew they fought against. And given that Allied two-seaters had the capacity to direct terrible artillery barrages onto the positions of German infantrymen, the German scout pilots were well within their rights to concentrate their attentions on the slower reconnaissance machines. The top-scoring German pilot was Kurt Wolff with 23 confirmed victories, close behind him were Manfred von Richthofen with 22 and Karl Emil-Schafer with 21, followed by Richthofen’s younger brother Lothar with 15. Although the German air-to-air losses were fewer during April, they were extracted from a smaller air-service and proportionately had just as big an impact. Of course, as Hart points out, there was also rampant over-optimism and false claiming on both sides and the ‘official’ victory tallies of a number of ‘Aces’ do not stand up well under modern scrutiny.
I will conclude this review by quoting Hart himself- ‘The real story behind Bloody April is one of selfless heroism for a ‘greater’ cause…..The trivialisation of the story of Bloody April as some pointless, murderous farce does not do justice to the men of either side in the tragic conflict in the skies above Arras. Both sides fought against the odds and both sides knew exactly what they were doing- and why.’
