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Soon duels were being fought in the air with rifles and pistols. With some awe, the B.E.F. Commander wrote home: "By actually fighting in the air, they have succeeded in destroying five of the enemy machines." Thereafter, fighter pilots spent most of their spare time cleaning, readying their rifles and newly installed machine guns. They tied steel helmets over vulnerable parts of the aircraft—scanty protection when, in 1915, German Fokkers sprang a surprise with machine guns designed to fire through the propeller blades. As their planes grew sturdier, British pilots not only filled their pockets with grenades but also carried bombs in slings on their bodies. Bomb sights they made with a length of wire stretched between two nails.
How to Fly Backward. By August 1918 a mixed collection of 200 planes was able to launch a mass bombing attack on a German advanced airfield. Unorthodox were the tactics of two pilots who landed on the field, fired machine guns into the officers' mess, took off again safely. Unwritten laws, such as wining & dining captured pilots and never shooting up an enemy plane that had been forced to land, were usually observed by both sides. Flowers floated down after an enemy pilot had been killed. Messages were sometimes dropped by German pilots, requesting clothes for some fallen Britisher who had crashed with nothing but pajamas under his flying suit.
Worst off, perhaps, were the pilots who patrolled Britain's coastal waters and hunted U-boats in ancient de Haviland training planes. They felt safer in the daylight, because when they flew home at dusk they could clearly see their eight-cylinder engine becoming red hot. When flown into a wind of more than 50 m.p.h. velocity, the de Haviland "would float sedately backward, its propeller thrashing the air with undiminished enthusiasm." Conveniently, the de Haviland not only landed as gently as "an old hen settling on her eggs," but also floated "like a balloon" on the surface of the water.
Mr. Roe Keeps Going. Britain emerged from World War I with the world's largest air force—22,171 planes. Within a few weeks of the Armistice, says Author Michaelis, she destroyed "more than 20,000." Between 1919 and 1939, R.A.F. chiefs labored to make the best available force with the minimum material. They based their force on the earliest foundations of British planecraft. The company founded by the first man to fly a plane in England (1908), A. V. Roe, is today the builder of Avro Anson, Manchester and Lancaster bombers. From the Bristol Box Kite descends today's Bristol Blenheims, Beauforts, Beaufighters.
This continuity of development, says Michaelis, was Britain's salvation. Germany, disarmed for ten years after World War I, suffered a vital loss in experience. And when General Göring took over the Luftwaffe in 1933 he kept bomber models of that year in mass production "in order to build up a big air force at once." Armor and armament were sacrificed for the sake of speed.