RAF Elmswell WW1 Aerodrome
Elmswell Aerodrome in the First World War
During the second half of the First World War, Elmswell was host to the headquarters of a Home Defence Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps (later Royal Air Force). In 1916 No. 75 (HD) Squadron was assigned to defend Great Britain against German Air Raids and was posted to a defence line thirty miles inland from the East Anglian coast. The squadron headquarters was set up at a newly constructed aerodrome at Lea Farm that was located between the villages of Elmswell and Great Ashfield in Suffolk. The Squadron HQ and ‘C’ Flight were stationed at Elmswell, whilst ‘A’ Flight was stationed at Hadleigh aerodrome to the south, and ‘B’ Flight was stationed at Harling Road aerodrome near East Harling in Norfolk, to the north. The new line of defence was created to allow the defending aircraft time to climb to a height of 10,000ft in order to intercept enemy airships.
The squadron had formed in 1916 at Bedford and had built up its operational strength under commander Major Henry Aloysius Petre a seasoned pilot who had flown with the Australian Flying Corps in Mesopotamia (Iraq). In September 1917 the squadron, under a new commander, Australian, Major Thomas Forster Rutledge, moved to its new positions in East Anglia as part of a radical overhaul of Britain’s hitherto ineffective aerial defences. Equipped with BE2c and BE2e aircraft (deemed obsolete on the Western Front), the pilots endeavoured to provide a response to Zeppelin Raids coming across the North Sea. It took approximately one hour for the 90hp engine to power the BE2 aircraft up to patrol height. Their missions would be flown at night, an extremely hazardous exercise in the rudimentary machines of the day. Exposed the elements in open cockpits, pilots suffered from the extreme cold and thin air at over 10,000ft altitude.
Major Clifford Squier Ross, another Australian, took command of the squadron in late September 1917. He would remain as the squadron leader until the end of the war.
The squadron’s first action against enemy raiders was on the night of 24/25 September 1917. Eleven German airships had set out across the North Sea to attack the Midlands and the Northeast of England. Weather and technical difficulties had forced several of the Zeppelins to return to their bases in Germany, but five crossed the English coast that night. ‘C’ Flight Commander, Capt. Claud Mackey took off from Elmswell aerodrome at 02:15 hrs in a BE12 aircraft, climbed to 10,000ft and began his patrol, searching for the enemy in the night sky. A second aircraft from ‘B’ Flight was sent aloft from Harling Road aerodrome at the same time. Altogether thirty-six Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) aircraft were sent up against the German raiders. Capt. Mackey sighted one Zeppelin but was unable to get close enough to engage the enemy. In fact, only one airship was engaged by the defenders on the night, but it escaped any damage and, as with all the other German airships, returned safely to base. The British defenders were not so lucky, four aircraft crashed, and one observer was killed. Another aircraft with two crewmen aboard went missing over the North Sea. Seven aircraft were forced to return from patrol due to the weather or engine trouble. Both No. 75 Squadron pilots returned safely.
The squadron flew more defence sorties during the remainder of 1917 and throughout 1918 seeking enemy airships and later, Gotha bombers. Although no pilots were lost to enemy action, several men were killed in flying accidents. The hazards of flying in the primitive aircraft of the day were compounded by night flying. After two to three hours of flying in an open cockpit without a supplementary oxygen supply, and in freezing temperatures, the pilots often lost some cognitive ability to control their aeroplane. The lack of a visual horizon or reference points in the black night sky made returning to ground extremely difficult. A series of burning lights or ‘flares’ were set out along the ground to aid the landing operation.
The commanding officer of the RFC home defence squadrons, Lt. Col. FV Holt, estimated in 1916 that he would loose 25% of his aircraft, each month. The vast majority of these would be in flying accidents, and not the direct result of enemy action.
On 30 October 1917, 23-year-old Lt. HL Chandler, who had only joined the squadron three weeks earlier, died from his injuries. He had crashed his BE2e aircraft shortly after take-off at Elmswell aerodrome. The aircraft had burst into flames on impact with the ground. Chandler was pulled out of the wreckage alive but died in hospital fifteen days later.
There were other fatalities and many serious injuries incurred in flying accidents by squadron personnel. In May 1918 2/Lt. TF Scott, a Canadian pilot, was killed when his BE12 aircraft crashed on take-off at Harling Road aerodrome. Scott had served as a private in a Canadian Field Ambulance unit on the Western Front, and earned the Military Medal, before he volunteered for flying training with the RFC in 1917. In another incident in May 1918, Lt. FTS Menendez was returning from a long training sortie when he approached Elmswell aerodrome to commence landing. He was feeling particularly faint after exposure to the cold and altitude and did not have full control of his Avro 504K aircraft. Menendez choked the 110hp Le Rhone engine whilst too low and the aircraft stalled and dived into the ground. He suffered serious facial injuries and lost his left eye. After months of reconstructive surgery and convalescence he was discharged from the RAF in 1919. Lt. Menendez had served as an observer / air gunner on the Western Front and earned the Military Cross before returning to England for pilot training.
There were many more severe injuries and several more fatalities within the squadron during its deployment to Elmswell, which ended in May 1919. The officers assigned to No.75 Squadron were drawn from across the globe. They came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Malta, South Africa and India, as well as England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
The squadron, saw personnel come and go, as men were posted from one assignment to another. Officers were supported by two hundred skilled aircraftsmen and women. The various trades employed on maintaining and repairing the aircraft, vehicles and equipment included fitters, riggers, armourers, photographers, medical orderlies, clerks, storemen, instrument repairers, drivers, m/cyclists, carpenters, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, cooks, batmen, waitresses, and fabric workers.
The men were drawn from across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and drew on traditional trades such as clockmakers, carpenters, fabricators, electricians, motor mechanics etc. A premium was paid to men who had skills vital to the business of the air services. Most had enlisted for the duration of the war. The women were originally recruited into several supporting organisations, such as the Woman’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the Woman’s Legion, and the Woman’s Civilian Subordinated (WCS). Some were recruited direct into the Woman’s Section, RFC. Most of these women were transferred into the Woman’s Royal Air Force on its creation in April 1918. Many of the members of the WRAF were recruited locally through the nearby Labour Exchanges and travelled daily to work from their homes. Some, however, were enlisted into the service centrally and were obliged to serve anywhere in the UK or overseas. Such WRAF members at Elmswell aerodrome were billeted at Ashfield House in the village of Great Ashfield.
The Squadron HQ at Elmswell included a Medical Officer, Capt. Hugh Paul Helsham, who was supported by orderlies. A GP from Beccles before the war, he was commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) in 1914 and posted to the RFC. He was attached to No. 75 Squadron for most of the war and was first to the scene of many flying accidents. He became an officer in the Royal Air Force Medical Service in 1918 and was witness to the birth of aviation medicine. Previously, the Army medical services had not sufficiently considered the unique physiological risks to aviators. Flying at high altitudes in open cockpits exposed aircrew to hazards such as hypoxia (oxygen starvation) hypothermia, frostbite, and aero-otitus media (inflammation of the inner ear), all of which combined to seriously degrade the pilot’s cognitive ability to control an aircraft. The RAF Medical Service began the systematic monitoring of aircrew’s health and introducing measures to mitigate the effects of flying at altitude (10,000ft +).
The First World War witnessed a rapid advancement of communications technology. Combatant nations quickly harnessed and developed the use of wireless telegraphy and later wireless telephony in the air. The RFC and RAF were aided by the Marconi Company who produced wireless sets for aircraft and ground transmission and receiving stations. In the early years of the war W/T sets in aircraft were bulky and weighed 110lb (50kg) and required a 250ft wire trailed out behind the aircraft to act as an antenna. By 1918, W/T sets had been reduced in size and weighed 20lb (9kg) and some machines now had the antenna installed as a loop inside the top wing.
As the communications technology developed, specialist officers were trained and appointed to RFC / RAF units at home and abroad. No. 75 Squadron had several W/T Operators on its strength. These men were employed on ground stations. Pilots were trained to use the wireless telegraphy sets, and later the wireless telephony sets. The officer in overall command of the W/T operators, all W/T equipment and the three transmitter stations at Hadleigh, Felixstowe and Harwich was 2/Lt, Hyman Cohen. A veteran of the Western Front, Cohen had been an RFC W/T Operator attached to artillery batteries operating just behind the lines. This was an extremely hazardous occupation, as he was co-located with the battery commander, receiving signals from spotter aeroplanes and passing target co-ordinates to the commander. Artillery batteries were often hit by counter-battery fire from the enemy. Approximately four to five hundred W/T operators were killed each year in these circumstances. Cohen, a mathematics graduate from London University, was commissioned in September 1917 and subsequently appointed to No 75 Squadron. An additional duty assigned to the squadron was artillery cooperation (spotting) for the Coastal Defence Batteries in East Anglia. Squadron W/T operators would be co-located with these shoreline batteries during training exercises.
No. 75 Squadron was also required to prepare for photo-reconnaissance duties in support of home defences in the event of an invasion. The squadron had several photographic technicians assigned to it and had a mobile processing unit in the form of a dark room installed in a trailer.
The final operational First World War sortie flown by the squadron occurred on the night of 5/6August 1918. In response to an airship attack coming in over the coast at Yarmouth, Lt. J Hutcheson of ‘C’ Flight took off in an Avro from Elmswell, and Sgt. Pilot R Mann of ‘A’ Flight took off from Hadleigh aerodrome. The weather over Norfolk and Suffolk was particularly bad with heavy cloud and squalling rain. Hutcheson and Mann could not find the enemy in the dark and rain lashed sky, however, other home defence units were more successful. The German raid was led by Zeppelin L70, on board of which was the head of the German Naval Airship Division, Korvettenkapitan Peter Strasser. Strasser had an unshakeable belief in the ability of naval airships to knock Britain out of the war through strategic bombing. On this night, however, L70 was shot down with explosive bullets by Maj. Cadbury and Capt. Leckie from Yarmouth aerodrome. The blazing airship crashed into the sea off the coast of Wells in Norfolk, all the crew including Strasser perished. This was to be the last airship raid on Britain. Both No. 75 Squadron pilots had difficulty in finding their way through the thick cloud: Lt. Hutcheson eventually managed to land at Thetford aerodrome, and at 22:10hrs, Sgt Mann landed his Avro at Elmswell aerodrome. This was to be the last combat mission flown by the squadron in the war.
Shortly after the armistice a new commanding officer was appointed to the squadron. Maj Claud Alward Ridley, he was just twenty-two years of age. Ridley was an experienced aviator; he had seen much action in the skies over the Western Front and in the night skies over England. He had been awarded the DSO and the Military Cross for his actions in these theatres of war. Ridley would preside over the squadron as it contracted over the months following the war, and he would see it disbanded in May 1919.
‘B’ Flight had vacated the aerodrome at Harling Road in the early summer of 1918 and co-located with ‘C’ Flight at Elmswell. In January 1919 Maj. Ridley consolidated the entire squadron at Elmswell, moving the remaining personnel of ‘A’ Flight up from Hadleigh. The squadron strength was slowly decreasing as men were transferred or demobbed. An operational posture had to be maintained in the short term, however, and the squadron started to receive Sopwith Camel fighter aircraft to replace its Avro’s. Unfortunately, the Sopwiths had seen better days and were the end of their operational lives. There were several accidents with the powerful fighter aircraft, and one proved fatal.
Lt. Ernest George Forder had emigrated to Canada before the war, he had served in the Canadian Infantry on the Western Front in 1915-1916 and saw action at the Somme and Ypres. He transferred to the RFC in 1917 and was posted as a pilot to Italy to fly Sopwith Camels with No. 28 Squadron in March 1918. After two months of flying operations Lt. Forder was forced down and taken prisoner. He was repatriated at the end of the war and was posted to No. 75 Squadron at Elmswell in January 1919. The following month Forder was killed whilst flying a Sopwith Camel. He lost control of the aircraft and crashed into the ground at the aerodrome.
The squadron continued to operate in the first few months of 1919, albeit at a much-reduced level. Officers and men were slowly being de-mobbed or transferred out. Contrary to expectations, seventeen brand new aircraft were received by the squadron in March 1919. The Sopwith Snipe’s, each with a powerful Bentley BR2 230hp engine, arrived direct from the manufacturers, Ruston & Hornsby in Lincolnshire. The aircraft were assembled by the remaining crews and put into the air. This proved to be a false dawn however and the Squadron was divested of its aircraft and equipment during April and May 1919. No. 75 Squadron vacated Elmswell aerodrome on 22 May 1919 and was nominally moved to North Weald aerodrome where it was finally disbanded on 13 June 1919. The squadron had been at the forefront of the development of aviation, communications technology in the second decade of the twentieth century, and it played a central role in the creation of the world’s first national integrated air defence system.
No. 75 Squadron was reformed in March 1937 at Driffield in Yorkshire as a heavy bomber squadron, later the squadron become a training unit, and was renamed No. 15 Operational Training Unit in April 1940. The title of No. 75 Squadron was passed to a new unit of New Zealand crew equipped with Wellington Bombers and based at Feltham in Norfolk. Now known as No.75 (NZ) Squadron, the unit flew 8.017 sorties against Germany, more than any other unit in Bomber Command during the Second World War. The cost was high, the squadron lost 193 aircraft and suffered 1,139 casualties. Disbanded in October 1945, the squadron number, badge and colours were transferred to New Zealand in perpetuity in April 1946. It is the only RAF squadron ever to have been gifted to another country. The New Zealand squadron was eventually disbanded in December 2001.
For the full story of Elmswell aerodrome and No. 75 Squadron during the First World War read the book ‘Forgotten Sentinel’ produced by Elmswell History Group.
