Royal Flying Corps

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The Royal Flying Corps ( RFC ) was the British Army - Air Force from 1912 to 1918.

history

Founding time

In May 1890, the Royal Engineers' balloon unit was founded. In East Church in the County of Kent which opened British Navy flight school in December 1911th

On April 13, 1912, the British military founded the Royal Flying Corps, or RFC for short, on the basis of a royal order . The RFC included army, navy and reserve units, a central flight school in Upavon , Wiltshire , and the Royal Aircraft Works in Farnborough . On May 13, 1912, the Royal Engineers' balloon unit was subordinated to the RFC.

The RFC's motto was Per Ardua ad Astra (Through Difficulty to the Stars).

The RFC's first fatal accident occurred on July 5, 1912, when a two-seater plane crashed near Stonehenge, killing both occupants. The command " Flying will continue this evening as usual ", issued later afterwards , then became a tradition .

A competition was held in Larkhill , Wiltshire in August to determine the best aircraft for the purposes of the RFC. The double-decker Bristol Tractor emerged as the winner.

The first maneuver involving 24 Army aircraft took place in East Anglia in September .

At the end of 1912, the Royal Flying Corps was already under 12 manned balloons and 36 double-decker combat aircraft .

The naval unit of the RFC was split off on July 1, 1914 under the name Royal Naval Air Service , or RNAS for short . This happened because the planes were not supposed to be under the control of a division of the army. The first squadrons were formed in September of that year . The Air Board was established on May 17, 1916 to resolve the conflicts between the RFC and the RNAS over the scarce aircraft and materials .

Soldiers from other Commonwealth nations such as Canada , Australia , New Zealand and South Africa also served in the RFC . Some Americans also served in the RFC before the USA entered the war .

The First World War

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At the beginning of the First World War , the RFC was mainly responsible for the deployment of manned reconnaissance balloons for the artillery on the Western Front . Most combat missions at this time flew the French Air Force, which outnumbered the British in terms of aircraft. But under the strong leadership of Major General Hugh Trenchard , who took command in France on August 19, 1915, the RFC increased its activities and achieved increasing combat successes with heavy losses. In 1916 over 700 men died, the highest rate during the war.

The first war casualties occurred before the RFC even arrived in France: an overloaded machine that wanted to join the main fleet near Dover crashed. Both planes died. One of them was Lieutenant Robert R. Skene , the first British man to fly a loop on an airplane. Shortly afterwards, the RFC crossed the English Channel with 60 aircraft from Squadrons 2, 3, 4 and 5 .

The first British casualty in a military flight was Sergeant Major Jillings, who was shot in the leg by a rifle shot during a reconnaissance flight over German lines on August 22, 1914.

On August 25, 1914, the first success in aerial combat was achieved, in which a German Etrich Taube machine was forced to land. The pilot could be followed into a nearby forest.

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At the beginning of the war, the British aircraft were marked with the Union Jack , which led to frequent friendly fire , as British ground troops mistook the cross from a distance for the cross on German aircraft and fired at the machines. Therefore, the RFC took the round Flugzeugkokarde the French aircraft with a modified color sequence.

The British experimented early on with radio devices in the aircraft, since the transmission of messages from the aircraft to the ground had previously only worked by means of dropped and collected pieces of paper. For example, the pilots announced corrections for artillery fire or the situation of enemy troops. The devices used weighed too much, however, and took the place of the second man on the plane. In addition, the devices in the aircraft could only send but not receive. It was therefore not possible to consult the ground stations with the pilot.

The big breakthrough, however, was the clearing up of the gap between the German armies. This made it possible to stop the German advance in the Battle of the Marne .

The importance of aerial photographs was also quickly recognized and as early as September 1914 the crew of a British RFC reconnaissance officer photographed the enemy positions on the Aisne . The recordings were developed on the floor in a mobile darkroom . The technology also enabled a high hit rate when bombing enemy railways and command posts during the British offensive at Neuve-Chapelle on March 10, 1915. The maps for the pilots were based on aerial photographs taken beforehand.

Another important task of the RFC was to drop spies behind enemy lines. The first operation of this kind failed on September 13, 1915 because the machine crashed and the pilot and the spy to be dropped were seriously wounded and taken prisoner by Germany.

At the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in mid-1916, the RFC had 421 aircraft and four captive balloon squadrons with 14 balloons. For the first time the Sopwith 1½ Strutter was used, which had a built-in machine gun that was synchronized with the propeller .

As a merger of the commandos for Macedonia , Mesopotamia , Palestine and German East Africa , the Middle East Brigade was founded on July 15, 1916 under the leadership of Brigadier General W.GH Salmond .

In March 1917, the hundredth squadron reached the front. It was the first night bomber unit.

During the Battle of Cambrai , in late November 1917, British machines dropped bombs on enemy positions in order to take out artillery aimed at tanks .

On April 1, 1918, the Royal Air Force was founded as a merger of RFC and RNAS.

See also : The aerial warfare in the First World War

organization

The basic unit of the Royal Flying Corps was the Staffel / Schwadron (Eng. Squadron ), consisting of several swarms (Eng. Flight ). A squadron was usually commanded by a major , a flight by a captain . At the beginning of the war the RFC had seven squadrons, at the time the RAF was founded in April 1918 there were 150. The increase in squadrons led to the introduction of wings (German equivalent: group ) as a combination of several squadrons at the end of November 1914 . Initially two wings were formed, No. 1 in Merville and No. 2 in Saint-Omer . With the division of the British Expeditionary Force into two armies a little later, each army was assigned a wing.

In the course of time, the idea that all squadrons should perform the same functions were abandoned and they switched to specialization. In January 1916 it was decided to assign two wings to each army, a Corps Wing to support the ground forces and an Army Wing at the disposal of the Army Commander in Chief with tasks such as long-range reconnaissance, aerial combat and bombing. Corps and Army Wing were combined into a brigade , which also had a balloon section and an aircraft park. Up until the founding of the RAF, a total of eight brigades (numbered with Roman numerals) were set up for use on the Western Front (three more under the RAF), two for the theater of war in the Middle East ( Middle East Brigade and Palestine Brigade ) as well as a training Brigade .

The commanders in chief of the RFC in France were:

fleet

The RFC and the RNAS use the following aircraft:

literature

  • Ralph Barker: A Brief History of the Royal Flying Corps in World War I. Constable and Robinson, London 2002, ISBN 1-84119-470-0 ( Brief Histories Series ).
  • Terry Treadwell, Alan C. Wood: The Royal Flying Corps. Tempus Publishing, Stroud 2000, ISBN 0-7524-1733-9 ( Images of Aviation ).

Web links

Commons : Royal Flying Corps  - collection of images, videos and audio files