Love and the Luftstreitkrafte

Part 7: The Reckoning

We did that ritual at the end of April.

In May, the Red Baron did not kill anyone.

The rumor was that he'd been retired, too much of a German national treasure for them to risk losing him. I didn't give that explanation much credit, though. Since when had the generals on either side worried about losing a man?

It had already got out that I had tried to curse the Red Baron, so when we had these first signs of success, people talked. Three people asked me directly if I could curse someone else for them, which I declined as politely as I could. Which is to say, I half-jokingly told them that I only had one soul to sell to the Devil.

I wanted to tell Emmaline about it, but held off, hoping for more definitive proof.

I didn't have much time to be exultant, though, because almost as compensation, the Germans ramped up their Zeppelin raids on England. With most of our dogfight-worthy 'planes on the continent, the RFC scrambled to bolster our home defense. I was working without break for weeks, jury-rigging Avros and B.E. 12s—which are useless for anything but training—to give some chance of fighting off the raids. A lot of our training 'planes didn't even have guns mounted. If they were armed, it was often with a Vickers gun, synchronized to fire through the propeller, which was not ideal for Zeppelin hunting.

Zeppelin raids were all done at night by that time. Incendiary bullets were necessary to ignite the gas and actually do some damage, but these would ruin a pilot's night vision if fired from the front. And pilots needed their night-vision to target a black airship at night. So for these night-raid defenses we would take off the cowl-mounted guns and replace them with wing-mounted guns. Ideally we'd use the lighter Lewis guns, though that depended largely on the whims of commissariat.

We would also angle them up. Zeppelins could reach over 20,000 feet. Our B.E.12s were lucky to get above 14,000 feet, so they were almost always firing from below. The one bright side to this was that flying at night, at high altitude, meant that Zeppelins often missed their targets.

We found out how much worse things could have been on May 25th, when the Germans' new long-range Gothas killed nearly a hundred people in a daylight raid in Kent—mostly women and children out shopping on the high street.

Then, on the morning of June 13th, they struck London.

I had just prepped a B.E. 12 for a training flight—it was a perfectly clear day for it—when we got the news of enemy 'planes coming up the Thames.

The trainee pilot and I looked at each other, and he tried to make a joke of it: "What a training flight! You've even got me some real targets!"

He was almost done with his 30 hours, and had a reasonable grasp of the controls, so we sent him up after the Gothas instead. There were no more training flights at Hounslow that day. We sent up every available 'plane, for all the good it did. The Gotha IVs could get up to 18,000 feet, so unless the pilot felt like descending for a little more bombing accuracy, most of our fighters couldn't reach them. And since their target was all of London, it was easier to hit than a grounded Zeppelin at noon.

It was a nightmare come true. Every report that came in was more bad news, until the bombers had unleashed their loads and sauntered back home unmolested. There was a report that one of them was shot down, but that turned out to be one of ours, struck by our own artillery.

In the final toll, 162 people were killed by the bombs that Wednesday morning, including 18 children whose primary school took a direct hit. Hundreds more were badly injured.

Most of London was angry. I was devastated. I felt if there was any point in the work I was doing—work I didn't especially want to be doing anyway—it was to prevent things like this. But we had been worse than useless.