Quote:
Originally Posted by RussGannon
In an earlier post, note was made of the hopeless of the RFC's losses over Arras in the Spring - but again we must not look at the air fighting in isolation to the ground war - the naive body count appraisal so popular particularly with Germanophiles which leads to the flawed reasoning that as the Germans shot down 4 for 1 so they were winning in the air!
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I expect, Sir, it was this post of mine you refer to:
"...Of course, because there were so many more English aeroplanes the percentages were lower, but another factor would surely be that German losses were higher that month than in the previous April. The thing about 'Bloody April' was not just the numbers lost by the R.F.C., but the sheer hopelessness of it, reflected in a ratio of losses running four or five English to one German. People's attitudes are much different when they honestly feel they are giving as good as they get...."
It seemed to me there was an unstated question hovering in the O.P., namely, why does September 1917 have no great dismaying name in English air annals while April 1917 does, since fewer men and machines were lost during the latter than the former. That piqued my interest and I gave an off-hand answer, that I stand by. The difference in the quality of equipment operated by the R.F.C., and its manifest effectiveness in contrast to the earlier situation, made a great difference in the attitude of R.F.C. fliers towards the losses they suffered.
I have said in other discussions that I do not feel that in any meaningful sense the Germans 'won' an air campaign in
Bloody April, because I know of no evidence that they produced a situation in which English staffs were dissatisfied with level of information and assistance to artillery fire the R.F.C. provided them during the Arras fighting. That was the point of all aerial activity, and losses are immaterial to it, at least so long as the training and production facilities behind the air component are sufficient to bear them and maintain it in operation, and the moral of the men holds up despite them. By that standard, actually, it is pretty hard to point to any 'victory' in an air campaign during the Great War, since there are not many instances where it can be said one side of the other was 'blinded' by the activities of its aerial opponents, though of course General Weather can be said to have inflicted numerous setbacks to one side or the other.
That the men of the R.F.C. knew they were terribly outmatched in terms of operational equipment in the spring of 1917, and went into battle knowing their prospects for survival were poor if it came to a fight in most cases, seems beyond reasonable question. They were not fools, after all, and the technical mis-match had been obvious for months. That they went up and over anyway speaks with great credit to their sense of duty and qualities as fighting men, even as it indicts the men in charge of procurement and production harshly.
The equipment situation changed markedly to the favor of the R.F.C. during the summer of 1917, not only through the improvement of English equipment, but the lack of any improvement in quality of German equipment. No less than the Herr Rittmeister himself was complaining bitterly about the obsolescence of the Albatros, after all, and it was by then a design that was year old, which given the tempo of technical change in the field was practically pre-historic. It is not that all obsolescent types were removed from the English inventory, but newer, much more effective types did appear in sufficient numbers to alter both the actual and the perceived balance of the aerial contest, and to spread among the fliers of the R.F.C. a sense that a corner had been turned, and things were getting better, and would go on getting better.