Original subtitles

Between 1914 and 1918, a revolutionary new theatre of war was created.

The air.

It brought sites never seen or imagined before.

There were massive dogfights.

I can see the scene now.

It was just a cloud of flies in the sky.

All moving quickly, of course, very quickly, and diving.

There were terrible crashes, and a casualty rate which, at times,

meant pilots were almost certainly killed.

I pushed my mother.

I cleared everything right up, and I said, good-bye, mum.

I don't think I should ever see you again.

And that is the attitude you had to take.

You were going to die.

This air war saw airplanes which somehow took off from a platform on a ship's guns.

And the invention of a radical new concept, the aircraft carrier,

it fueled a technological arms race, as designers

on both sides sought to outwit each other.

A race which ushered in the modern age of fighters

and bombers, and a new breed of heroes, the ace.

Now this war in the skies can be seen as those pilots saw it.

In color.

In the summer of 1914, as Europe's armies marched to war, a new and dashing form of

warfare was attracting young men from all over the continent.

We went up to join what was called the Royal Flying Corps.

The minimum age for a budding pilot was 17.

The main theatre for these teenage pioneers would be the Western Front in

France, once they'd got past the recruiting office.

Up to that moment, it had somehow never occurred to us that

anyone else had thought of joining the Royal Flying Corps.

It was our own brilliant and original idea.

No one else could have had it.

So great was our dismay to find a long queue of young men waiting ahead of us.

Our hope buoyant to that moment dropped, deflated.

Are all these chaps trying to get into?

Looks like it.

Then silence, and the slow shortening of the queue, each of us staring anxiously at

the faces of those leaving, trying to read in their eyes.

Has he got in?

Shall I?

The aircraft was only 11 years old when the First World War started.

And if you think of yourself as a 19 or 18 year old boy, really, looking at these

machines, they are the Ferraris of their day.

They are the Harriers of their day.

Flying, with all its early craziness, had only just begun.

In 1903, the Wright Brothers made the first

powered flight at Kitty Hall in North Carolina.

Military commanders began to realize that flight might be useful for war.

Then, in 1909, the Frenchman, Louis Blerio, crossed 20 miles of sea,

the English Channel.

As he looked beneath him, he was seeing the world quite unlike anyone before.

And that became the plane's military purpose, to give the commander on the

ground a bird's-eye view of the battlefield.

The idea of aerial reconnaissance had come about in the mid-19th century,

with hot air balloons.

And for most of the war, balloonatics, as the British

called them, continued to be used as spotters from the air.

But the gas-filled balloon became an easy target for enemy attackers.

To make light safer, from 1916 onwards, balloonatics were allowed to use the

folding parachute, which had first appeared in America 30 years before.

Allied pilots would not be allowed parachutes throughout World War I,

as their commanders believed they might be

encouraged to abandon their aircraft unnecessarily.

Parachutes were the key to a new form of balloon defence.

When the balloonatics spotted an enemy aircraft,

he would immediately parachute to safety.

The ground crew would then try to winch down the balloon before it went up in flames.

It was hardly a satisfactory solution, and the smaller, speedier aircraft would

end up as the key to aerial reconnaissance, using

photography to spy deep into enemy territory.

If you photograph something, you can see things that an ordinary observer can't,

because you can take it home, develop the photograph, get a large-sized version of

it, have a big detailed look, and see if you can spot gun

positions, you can spot path to spot command positions.

As well as taking photographs, pilots were able to

radio their findings back to ground controllers.

The only way for the enemy to stop the information getting through, or the pilot

returning to base with his priceless photographs, was to shoot him down.

But in these early days, that was difficult.

One of the biggest initial problems with having any effective armament on planes,

be it bombs or machine guns or whatever, is simple weight.

These are very primitive aircraft, very flimsy, very low power engines.

They have problems even lifting the pilot up, let

alone a big heavy machine gun with all its ammunition.

Pilot had a further obstacle.

The propeller in front was in the way.

The first solution came in April 1915, from the French pilot, Roland Garros.

He put steel wedges on the propeller blades, so that any

machine gun's bullets that hit them would simply bounce off.

Now, that's obviously not an ideal solution.

First of all, because of the extra weight

of the armour, to withstand the machine gun.

And also, because you've got one in ten bullets flying off God knows where,

and some of you might come back and hit your own aircraft.

Despite those dangers, Roland Garros shot down five German planes in two weeks.

Their pilots never knew what hit them.

But then Roland Garros was forced to land in German-held territory.

The Germans immediately saw why this aircraft was so successful, and we really

only talk about one aircraft, which cut a swathe, relatively

speaking, through the German Air Force at this time.

As soon as they saw the crudity of it, or how they were trying to achieve this

firing through the propeller, that they handed the whole machine over to a very

talented, very brilliant Dutch designer, Goranzny Fokker.

Fokker solved the problem and revolutionised the future air war by

inventing a gear that synchronised the machine gun's fire with the propeller's

movement, ensuring the bullet would always miss the blade.

Soon German pilots were perfecting the tactics,

which would bring slaughter to the air.

We could see it was a German machine.

And when it got above and behind our middle machine,

it dived onto it like a huge hawk on a hapless sparrow.

I was very thankful indeed to return from this outing.

Allied aircraft were defenseless.

1915 saw what became known as the Fokker Scourge.

An Allied pilot's life was measured in days.

The Fokker Scourge of 1915 was annihilating British and French pilots.

But the army desperately needed its eyes in the air.

Every day, replacements straight from flying school arrived in France.

At the time I went to France, to fly a fighter aeroplane, I had not even flown

the type which I was to fly over the lines the next morning,

let alone not having received any fighting instructions.

Many went out with as little as five hours training.

The two lads I crossed the channel with and talked to on the boat.

Both shot down.

Before I'd been over the lines.

People were being killed every day.

My best friend was there one evening and he wasn't there the next day at lunch.

This was going on all the time.

You had nobody at your side.

Nobody who was cheering with you, nobody to look after you if you were hit.

You were alone.

You fought alone and died alone.

There were certain instances whereby pilots would arrive in the morning as

replacements and be dead by the afternoon and hadn't even unpacked their kit.

The head of the Royal Flying Corps, Hugh Trenchard, ordered that fresh pilots

should be sent every day to take the places of the dead at the mess dinner table.

If there's an ordinary pilot you see no vacant places around you, the tendency is

to brood less on the fate of the friends who have gone forever.

Instead, your mind is taken up with buying drinks

for the newcomers and making them feel at home.

1915 was a continuing disaster for Allied pilots.

The Fokker Scourge lasted nine months.

During it, the average life expectancy of a bridge was made.

The British pilot was just eleven days.

You expected to be killed any moment.

Oh yes, you never thought about life in any way at all.

Just doing a job, you know?

There was quite a lot of demoralization and there was a lot of recriminations

about the inadequacy of their own aircraft.

Hugh Trenchard knew that losses were inevitable and that any effect the war in

the air was no different from the war in the trenches.

In terms of the nutritional nature of the contest and the massive casualties that

would be sustained before any kind of victory.

By the summer of 1916, the Allies had caught up in the technological arms race.

Their planes now also had forward firing machine guns.

New models came on stream which were faster, lighter and more agile.

And the Royal Flying Corps had doubled in strength from 12 to 27 squadrons.

The Fokker Scourge was ended.

For the Allies it was an immense relief.

As by now the Flying Corps was more necessary than ever.

The stalemate of the Trench War had lasted nearly two years.

Both Allied and German commanders were desperate to break it.

In February, the Germans had launched a massive offensive

at Verdun and the French were holding on for grim life.

To relieve them, the British Army planned its attack at the Somme in July.

Aerial reconnaissance was vital, not only for pinpointing German targets,

but also for guiding artillery firing.

With their new improved planes, Allied pilots went into action.

Some became household names.

Men like Albert Ball.

Albert Ball was an inspirational pilot for the Royal

Flying Corps because no odds were too great for them.

In a way mirrored the whole Royal Flying Corps approached Trench on hand.

They were not afraid of odds.

They would always go for it, even if it meant their own death.

They say I crashed to the ground at 120 miles an hour.

And to look at the undercarriage I should think that I did.

However, it's nearly ready for flying again now.

It was a rum feeling coming down, for I had time to see that my number was up.

However, it wasn't.

Ball was not future of the Royal Flying Corps.

He couldn't be.

He relied on luck to stay alive.

He'd come back with his aircraft riddled with bullets.

Albert Ball was killed at the age of 21.

He'd shot down 44 German planes.

The French, in particular, were quick to exploit their aces.

By focusing on the lives of the heroes of the air, they

could distract the public from the carnage of the trenches.

Successful pilots were courted by the press and paraded in high society.

The Germans, too, were quick to celebrate their aces.

In the German service, it was actually used as a positive tool to boost morale,

but also not only boost morale amongst the pilots, but

also to create heroes for the population back home.

So we get scores being published, we get people, parts competing with each

other, and medals are actually given for shooting down a certain amount of aircraft.

The best-known German ace was Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.

Von Richthofen would shoot down 80 enemy

planes, more than any other pilot in the war.

I am a hunter.

When I have shot down an Englishman, my hunting

passion is satisfied for just a quarter of an hour.

Von Richthofen became the icon of a romantic view of the air war.

Individual knights in shining armor of airborne steel locked in hand-to-hand combat.

To be alone, to have your life in your own hands, to

use your own skill single-handed against the enemy.

It was like the jousts of the Middle Ages.

The only sphere in modern warfare where a man

saw his adversary and faced him in mortal combat.

The only sphere where there was still chivalry and honor.

If you won, it was your own bravery and skill.

If you lost, it was because you had met a better man.

But oh, my old ma.

One can't lay down the rules while on mere

earth for people on fighting patrol in the air.

You are a different man.

At least you aren't a man at all.

That is, I am not.

You are a devil incarnate filled with the dazzling

thrill of playing a best game God ever created.

Mad after Huns and just forgetting everything else.

But showing the old Hun that there's only one man fit to be in the air.

And not two.

In a battle area where the shells are bursting around you and all black smoke

and all the rest of it, you become a different individual.

You do not become human.

Can I put it that way?

You do not in a sense become human.

You're a more machine.

And so that's what you do.

By April 1917, the Germans were again forging ahead in the tit-for-tat arms race.

Part of their advantage was tactical.

They began to operate in squadrons of 14 aircraft called jasters.

Sending three or four jasters over the lines at a time.

These massive groups became known as the flying circuses.

The jasters led to the first great scenes of squadrons rather than individuals,

dueling.

The famous days of the dogfights.

British and allied squadrons would meet the German circuses in the skies over the

trenches and battle to the death, often to the amazement of infantrymen below.

I can see the scene now.

It was just like a cloud of flies in the sky.

All moving quickly, of course, very quickly and diving and browning one another.

And we could hear the shots, of course.

But they were quite overhead.

I've seen some marvellous battles there about between two fighter planes.

And we never met the super boys.

We never knew what it was.

We used to be betting with each other.

I wasn't always going to come home.

I wasn't always going to win this day.

I wasn't generally going to be there.

Superior German planes and the jaster tactics cost the Allies dear.

In 1917, in what became known as Bloody April, they lost 150 aircraft and 316 men.

Later in 1917, the first American pilots came over.

But German superiority continued.

Yet the Allied airmen had to go on flying over the lines to provide intelligence for

their armies as they prepared for their summer offensives below.

The commanders and really the pilots knew that they didn't have the equipment.

They didn't have the best tools for the job.

And yet they were being asked to contribute to a major offensive,

knowing that the Germans had better equipment

and to some extent better tactics at the time.

So it's this tragic inevitability about the flying corps

at the time that they couldn't really do anything about.

We got into a dogfight this morning with a new

brand of foxers, and they certainly were good.

This fellow just hung right there and sprayed me with lead like a hose.

All I could do was watch his tracer and kick my rudder

from one side to the other to throw his aim off.

Heavy though their losses were throughout the war, British pilots knew that they

were a tiny fraction of the ever rising death toll on the ground.

And the life of the airmen, although often short, was at least one of relative luxury

compared with a lot of the PBI, the poor bloody infantry in the trenches.

When we were flying at about 17,000 feet, it

gave you a wonderful feeling of exhilaration.

You were sort of a king of the castle.

You were up there and you were right out of the war.

I'd been in the infantry and we were always lousy, filthy, dirty, and very

often hungry, whereas in the flying corps it's a gentleman's life.

When they were on the ground, the pilot's life was very strange because they faced

death on a daily basis in the skies, but then they'd fly back to their airfield.

And then they had a comfortable mess, good food, decent bed to sleep in.

It's quite lovely tootling back from patrol in the evening, knowing your day's

work is done with the west of flame and the east dimly mysterious.

So here I am, all alone in the gorgeous May Sun,

and a little finicky breeze making things so nice.

I can just hear the guns going, but by that the war seems very far away.

Thank God.

We are under canvas and have our mess in the open in a small wood.

It is very nice when the weather is hot as it has been lately.

Although we are within range of the shell fire from

big guns, a present you would not know there is a war.

I'm sitting in a wood out of the sun, and the only things to be heard are the

machine guns shooting away in the distance and the mess gramophone.

We live well.

We went down to Beloin and got an ice cream freezer, and were the only outfit at

the front that has ice cream for dinner each night.

In the midst of life we are in death, and in the midst

of death we managed to have a hell of a lot of fun.

Bronx cocktails, chicken livers on brochhet, champagne, strawberry ice cream,

and Napoleon branding.

They were basically normal young men who might be

killed any day, and they lived their lives to the full.

A lot of them did suffer badly from nerves as the time

went on, and they could see their death approaching.

The heat of the long summer days was terrific, and our flying hours were many.

All these facts assisted to play upon the temperaments of those who were flying.

I can remember my bedroom companion felt as I did, and how each of us lay awake in

the darkness thinking of dawn patrol the next morning.

At last we could bear it no longer, and we

admitted a mutual feeling of terror and foreboding.

We let the candles, and after that felt a bit better, and somehow got through that

night as we had to get through the next day.

One pilot was tormented by a nightmare.

A face.

The face would appear vague and distant, and would slowly come near until it seemed

as if the face, and he were literally nose to nose, staring at each other.

That's all.

Just staring.

Then he would wake up.

The sleep spoiled.

Who was it?

Was it a man he had killed?

Or was it a man waiting for him in the sun?

Even the apparently invincible red baron, though he may have been free from fear,

was not immune from death.

It was a prospect he almost seemed to welcome.

A glorious death, fight on and fly on to the last drop of blood, and the last drop

of petrol, to the last beat of the heart, and the last kick of the motor,

a death for a night.

A toast to his fellow's friend and foe.

Ironically the red baron, the greatest ace of them all, would be shot down not by an

allied plane, but by a machine gun on the ground.

While he'd ruled the skies over the land, an even

more extraordinary air war had developed over the sea.

Early in the war the Germans had the advantage.

Their Zeppelin airships enabled them to range right across the North Sea.

The British responded with their own airship, the submarine skunk.

It could fly at nearly 50 miles an hour, and like

the Zeppelin, its key purpose was reconnaissance.

Britain was under attack by U-boats.

They had to be spotted.

In early 1915, the call went out throughout the

Navy, for volunteers to form a new naval air service.

A signal came round to all the battleships and battle cruises in the Grand Fleet,

saying that each captain was to recommend one young

officer of about 18 or 19 or 20 for special service.

When we got to the Admiralty, we were escorted into the room of the first sea

lord, Lord Fisher, whose opening remarks were, you young gentlemen are going to fly.

You'll probably be dead within a year, or you may get the Victoria Cross.

But you've been selected to start a new airship service, which

will be the counter to the U-boat menace we have in this war.

If you don't want to fly, come and tell me in 48 hours' time.

Few hesitated to join up and fly high.

To fly a ship on a nice day was a really delightful experience.

One felt the air was entirely one's own.

You could go where you liked within the ship's range,

fly at what height you liked, what speed you liked.

British airships grew ever more sophisticated.

As well as spotting German targets, they set

out to bomb them, but it was crew technology.

We could keep up long hours, but our bomb capacity wasn't very great at all.

We had quite small bombs, which are more or

less lying loose, rolling around on the floor.

Eventually we hung them over the side on bits of string and

carried sheath knights to cut the bit of string to drop the bomb.

However, graceful balloons were hardly the ideal hunter killers.

What the Navy needed was more heavily armed and

faster aeroplanes, which could operate at sea.

The prime reason remained the need to counter German U-boats.

In 1915, Germany had declared unrestricted U-boat warfare, and was attacking any

merchant ship heading for Britain without warning.

Hundreds of ships were being sunk.

Britain, which depended on trade to survive, was under dire threat.

Though U-boats attacked from underwater, they still

had to spend most of their time on the surface.

Planes would be the best way to spot them, and could also help to sink them.

But finding a way of enabling these early short-range planes to cover wide tracts of

sea, presented huge technological challenges.

The Royal Naval Air Service's greatest contribution to

air warfare was pioneering the use of aircraft at sea.

Early on in the war, these airplanes would be float planes.

The wheels of these planes had wooden floats

attached, so they could take off and land on water.

But getting the early float planes into the air was a painful business.

To get the float plane onto the surface of the sea, you have

to stop the ship and use a crane to lift it over the side.

This is an economic waste of time, waste of energy.

Taking off from the surface needs an awful lot of power, and the floats are heavy,

cumbersome, and they slow the plane down.

Then, to get the plane back on board, the same process, landing the plane on the

sea, stopping the ship and hoisting the plane up, had to be reversed.

It was an amazing sight.

Float sea planes struck you as being aeroplanes on a visit to the seaside,

which had put on huge galoshes in order to keep dry.

On seeing one pass overhead, it was usual to

say, there she goes with her big boots on.

How to transport their sea planes bedeviled all the warring nations.

This was an early Russian version.

The Russian solution was to tow their planes at sea behind.

All very well when it was calm, hopeless in a storm.

As for the Germans, their fleet hardly ever put out into the open sea,

so their sea planes were launched from slipways.

But for pilots of every nation, the flying was chancy.

What worried me the most was the thought of being seasick.

I had seldom been afloat apart from one or two rowing boat trips at the seaside.

And I imagine that everyone except hardened sailors

was automatically ill whenever there was any swell.

After running a very long way, you pulled back with all your might.

And with any luck, lumbered into the air to stag around at three or four hundred feet.

Although, on one occasion, my logbook tells

me we actually reached twelve hundred feet.

The first British mast produced seaplane was the short.

It was more than simply a spotter, as it could be armed with bombs.

That added weight, and pilots didn't always make it into the air.

I taxied out before a full gallery, unto a sea as calms of a proverbial mill pond.

Do you think that the machine would unstick?

Not by a jugful.

I squatted about on the glassy surface like a wounded duck for twenty minutes or

more, until the water in the radiator was

boiling and the cockpit was like a Turkish bath.

These primitive seaplanes cannot operate off

anything really other than an extremely calm sea.

They can't take off or be recovered unless the sea is absolutely flat calm.

And obviously, in the North Sea, that doesn't happen very much.

A further answer to the U-boat threat was to build a much

longer range aircraft which could operate from calm harbors.

The flying boat came into being.

In 1917, a flying boat sank its first U-boat.

But their pilots had no back-up.

Personally, I considered a flying boat fighting was more

desperate work than that carried out over the French front.

I say this because, added to the ordinary chances of combat, you had the long

journey over a deserted sea, both before and after your fight.

The North Sea is a nasty customer.

Far, high seas, low cloud, etcetera, being more the rule than the exception.

You always knew that if you got engine failure or some trivial mishap,

you had the ever-present chance of being

drowned, with only the smallest chance of rescue.

The real solution was to enable sea planes to take off and land back on ships.

Some extraordinary experiments began, with the sock with the pump.

When one was required to fly off, platform was quickly rigged up,

with planks and the turret right at the end of the guns.

With the guns at a certain degree of elevation, the

total slope of the platform was slightly downward.

That gave a run for the aircraft of about 75 or 80 feet.

It was a great risk that the pilot would not get

flying speed and would stall and fall into the water.

But he would only miss the crest of the waves by not more

than a couple of feet if he judged the thing properly.

It was an extremely hazardous operation, and I used to watch these pilots with

enchantment, with great admiration for their courage and skill.

The Royal Naval Air Service was blessed with a great number of innovators,

people who were amazingly curious about what could be done with a machine.

And it's these experiments that move the Royal Naval Air Service or maritime flying

into a completely different realm, because the inevitable result of these

experiments was the development of the aircraft carrier.

In August 1917, a soft-width pup successfully landed on HMS Furious,

a cruiser which had been converted to become Britain's first aircraft carrier.

The first thing we had to do was to learn to fly on and off the forehead.

I remember the captain said, remember the captain said,

you may as well take a revolver and blow your brains out.

You have to synchronize the speed of the ship with the speed of the plane,

which is quite difficult.

Whatever the difficulties, a new type of warfare had been born.

By early 1918, HMS Furious carried out the first carrier-borne raid, which took off

from the carrier using wheeled aircraft, and bomb

and destroy the German Zeppelin-Chesit-Tonda.

And this is the pioneer of modern aircraft warfare from the sea.

The aircraft carrier comes of age in this conflict.

At the same time, yet another technological breakthrough

was happening on land, the birth of the heavy bomber.

By the summer of 1917, Allied pilots on the Western

Front had once again caught up with German technology.

Now both sides would pay more attention than ever

before to a new phenomenon the war had brought.

Aircraft had been used for bombing from the outset, but now large numbers of older

reconnaissance planes were being converted into bombers.

Special bomb attachments were fitted, and by

1917, they were in regular use by the Allies.

They came in a box, a half a dozen at a time, wrapped in cotton wool.

We had no instructions, so we got the bombs, unscrewed the top.

And when we wanted one of those detonators,

I'd just say, chuck us a detonator, Charlie.

I practiced bomb-dropping by day and night in all kinds of weather, into and with the

wind, and from all heights up to 2,500 feet.

In the centre of the aerodrome, a large circle had been painted in chalk,

and okay consisted of dropping the bomb so that it fell anywhere within this circle.

Bombing was used to try and interfere with the movements of enemy troops.

They would try and attack bridges, they would try and attack railway tracks,

stations, railway junctions, anything that could impede the enemy.

The bombers, flying low to drop their load, came

under increasingly heavy anti-aircraft fire.

The British called it Archie.

But trying to shoot down an aircraft from the ground was difficult.

They're coming up fast.

The time you got a bullet in your bowels, they're gone.

The only way it's to do it, is to know they're

coming this way, and you're facing there.

And the time you get down, you might use the chance of a bullet.

I was in a fire, you know.

They moved that quick.

Gradually, there were more and more anti-aircraft guns.

But not that many aircraft were shot down by them.

It was more a disruptive thing.

And it's a very good indicator of the nerve of a pilot, because they'd laugh at Archie.

Well, first they'd be scared.

Then they'd laugh at it.

And then, as their nerves started to go, they'd start to obsess.

And start to worry that this day that puff of

smoke next to the aircraft might actually hit them.

I wonder how long my nerves will stand this almost daily bombardment of biology.

I noticed several people's nerves are not as strong as they used to be.

Today we had a good dressing down by Archibald

and some of the shells burst much too near.

I could hear the pieces of shell whistling past.

They have to burst pretty close for one to be able to hear the shrieking of loose

bits of shell above the noise of one's engine.

The air-arms race of World War I brought a new

and potentially devastating twist to warfare.

For the first time, civilians became targets.

The Germans carried out the first civilian

bombing in January 1915 on the Norfolk coast.

Their bomber was the Zeppelin Balloon.

In May 1915, Zeppelin's bombed London.

Seven civilians were killed.

Look, there it is.

A long black cigar-like shaped object coming very slowly.

I put my arms around my mother.

And I can tell you, I don't know how we felt.

People began to make preparations for the Zeppelin raids.

One big wine dealer was reported to have left one of his cellars.

And people we knew had furnished theirs and slept with

big coats and handbags for valuables at the bedside.

The Zeppelin raids have a great psychological advantage at first against Britain.

Because Britain has always seen itself ever

since medieval times as a secure island fortress.

Nobody can touch us as long as we retain our control of the seas.

They don't kill that many people compared to the later bombings of World War II.

But it's the sheer novelty of being suddenly under threat from the air that

causes more panic than one might expect, given the statistics.

Zeppelins were slow and vulnerable, and the Germans

developed a new long-range bomber, the Gotha.

In the summer of 1917, squadrons of Gothas took

off from Ostend in Belgium to attack England.

I could now discern a lot of big machines in good formation flying east.

I dived on the rearmost machine and fired a whole drum at close range.

I had the satisfaction of seeing my tracer

bullets strike all over his fuselage and wings.

But beyond causing the Gotha to push his nose

down a little, it had not the desired effect.

I was very disappointed.

How insolent those damn Bosch did look,

absolutely lauding it over the sky of England.

I was absolutely furious to think that the Huns should come

over and bomb London and have it practically all their own way.

The Germans deliberately fly over in these big, white-painted bombers over London by

day, to show that they can do it and that they're

invulnerable at the time to the British fighter opposition.

So it does have a significant initial impact to gain, like the Zeppelins,

in terms of the panic that's created, because of the novelty of the delivery means.

In the raid on London, 162 people died.

To calm the nation, a cracked squadron from the Western Front was quickly

dispatched home to provide air cover for the capital.

The South African general Jan Smuts was

appointed to devise a new home defence strategy.

He introduced a series of early warning systems, explosive rockets called maroons,

police whistles and placards, as well as new anti-aircraft weaponry.

The defences proved effective, so the Germans turned to night bombing.

Poor Diemeri is dreadfully nervous, so he ensconced

her in the first four passage in a very safe place.

Then Phyllis and I saw the way to the top window.

I've never seen such a sight.

The sky seemed full of shells.

Then there was a dead pause, very terrifying after all the noise.

Then, coming from the east, we heard the hum of machines.

We nearly killed ourselves trying to spot them, but we could see nothing in the fog.

Even by night, the British anti-aircraft defences

proved so effective that the bomber raids peated out.

The last gothars came in May, 1980.

The British had also developed their own heavy bombers, like the Handley Page,

which had the range to attack targets in Germany.

These new flying machines were taking war to a new level.

In 1918, General Smuts prophetically wrote...

As far as can be foreseen, there is no limit to

the scale of aviation's future independent war use.

And the day may not be far off when aerial operations, with their devastation of

enemy lands, and destruction of industrial and popular centres on a vast scale,

may become the principal operations of war.

What's most distinctive about the air war in World War I is how quickly it evolves.

You start out with very primitive techniques,

observation balloons and observation aircraft.

By the end of the war, you've got strategic bombing, fighter squadrons,

carrier air power, and the whole panoply of air

power as it would later evolve during the century.

For all the strategic and technological change that lay behind it, the war in the

air ended up with individuals from their small

machines fighting a latter day hand-to-hand combat.

The cost to them was very high.

These young pilots may have died in their thousands, rather than the millions in the

trenches, but their chances of survival were every bit as low.

The death of one ace, an American called Raoul

Loughbury, summed up how they saw themselves.

His mess song reflected a pilot's knowledge that his life was thrilling but short.

We meet beneath the sounding rafters.

The walls all around us are bare.

They echo with peels of laughter.

It seems that the dead are there.

So stand by your glasses steady.

The world is a web of lies.

He is a toast to the dead already.

Hara for the next man who dies.