WW I
During the early months of the First World War, or the Great War as it was then known, German submarines had already become a menace to British shipping in Home waters. When two Royal Navy battleships, HM Ships Triumph and Majestic, were sunk by submarines in the Mediterranean on 6 May 1915, the Admiralty gave its permission to construct an anti-submarine sea-plane base in Malta. As a result Calafrana, in Marsaxlokk Bay in the south-east of the Island, was inaugurated as such in July 1916. (The spelling is correct. For the estab-lishment of Calafrana see the History of Hal Far Airfield Part 1, Malta Flypast number 3.)
This arrangement functioned well for the purpose, except when the state of the sea made it impossible for sea-planes to take-off and alight in the choppy waters of the Bay. A search for a suitable area for the operation of land- planes was therefore carried out and the Marsa was found to be ideal. During the summer of 1918 - by which time the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps had been amalgamated into the unified Royal Air Force (RAF) –- two de Havilland DH.9As of No 562 (Malta Anti-Submarine) Flight operated from there to search for submarines when adverse sea conditions rendered operations from the Calafrana seaplane base impossible. Crews for the DH.9As were detached from Calafrana for this purpose.
The termination of hostilities brought to an end this land plane activity from Malta, which had always until then been considered to be of a transient nature, and in fact N° 562 Flight was dis-banded in the beginning of 1919. But in December 1918 an event which war-ranted extensive press coverage had occurred when the largest aircraft then in service with the RAF landed in Malta at the only known flat stretch of ground available, which was of course The Marsa. The story had started in Britain the previous year.
Handley Page V/1500
In 1917 the Air Ministry had issued a specification for a large bomber with enough range to bomb Berlin and other targets inside Germany from bases in East Anglia, England. Handley Page Ltd had already become the specialists in bomber aircraft, having designed the 0/100 and 0/400 series of night bombers in 1916 and 1917 with which the first ever sustained strategic night bombing offensive was carried out by the RAF's so-called Independent Air Force in 1918. During that war the 0/100 saw action also in the Mediterranean region, being used in Palestine under General Allenby and T E Lawrence against the Turks, and one aircraft being based in Mudros, in the Aegean, from where it took part in the bombing of Constantinople and a raid against the German battle cruiser Goeben.
For Handley Page it was therefore a question of developing further the concept, increasing the span and endowing the new aircraft with greater fuel capacity for the longer range required, and powering it with four engines in place of the predecessors' two to cater for the larger bomb load specified. The choice of engines fell on the 375 h.p. Rolls Royce Eagle VIII, and their total horsepower composed the numerical part of the aircraft's desig-nation of V/1500. The engines were mounted in two tandem pairs in between the top and lower wing. One peculiarity of the aircraft dictated by the then unknown forces of propeller slipstream was the fact that, while the front engines mounted two-bladed airscrews, the rear pusher ones mounted four-bladers. With its large span of 126 ft (38.40 m), a wing area of 3,000 feet (278,7 sq.m), fuse-lage length of 62 ft (19 m), fuselage cross-section of 8ft by 6ft 2 ins (2.44 m by 1.88 m) and take-off weight of 30,447 lb (13,808 kg), the aircraft was designed to carry 30 bombs of 250 lb (113 kg) each or two large one of the specially developed 3,300 pounders (1,497 kg), double the maximum bomb load of 1,650 lb (748 kg) then being deployed by existing bombers on the longer range flights.
Harland & Wolff of Ireland built the first aircraft, its components being assembled at Handley Page's Cricklewood works from where it was first flown in May 1918. It was unfortu-nate in that it crashed on its 18th flight, but the second aircraft incorporated sev-eral changes mainly to improve directional stability, most changes being incorporated in the machines ordered for production that totalled 255. The Armistice, however, caught up with the aircraft's development and only a few had reached squadron service by then, these going to N° 166, 167 and 274 Squadrons. Indeed, the only three air-craft ready for operational use had been bombed up and standing by with N° 166 Squadron, in Norfolk, for two days await-ing the order to raid Berlin when the Armistice was announced.
Landing in Malta
With the long-range strategic bombing role - the aircraft's raison d'etre - becoming redundant, the RAF cancelled all out-standing orders and decided to use one of the V/1500 on the first England-India through flight. For this venture the third prototype was used, serialled J1936 and named HMA Old Carthusian by its pilot Maj. A Stuart C MacLaren, HMA stand-ing for 'His Majesty's Airliner'. Its interior was built such that it could be fitted with seats for passengers in lieu of racks for bombs. The aircraft left Marltesham Heath, Suffolk, on 13 December 1918 with five other persons on board besides MacLaren: co-pilot Capt. Robert Halley, Sgts Smith, Crockett and Brown, and a distinguished passenger, Brig.-Gen. N 0 K McEwan. Flying through Le Bourget, Marseilles, Pisa, Rome-Centocelle and Otranto, J 1936 arrived in Malta on 21 December with nine further passengers picked up at Otranto. The Daily Malta Chronicle of Monday, 23 December 1918 had this to say of the event:
"The Handley Page aeroplane with Major-General MacEwan on board, last reported in our Latest News column to be at Rome, arrived in Malta on Saturday morning trave/ling at such low altitude that her crew could easily be dis-cerned. The huge machine which is the biggest we have seen amongst us, is lying close to the aerodrome at the Marsa whither a large number of people flocked to see the aerial visitor.
"The aeroplane, which bears the name of 'HMA Old Carthusian' on one of her sides, is carrying six persons - three officers including of course Gen. MacEwan and three mechanics. Handley Page machines, however, are capable of taking 40 persons; a feat they have performed in London. We do not know how long it took the monster aeri-al ship to flyover here from its starting point in the Peninsula, but we heard it said that the velocity of the wind which was very strong on Saturday did not affect in the least the aeroplane in its progress. Indeed, the crossing was as comfortable as it could be. The airship was to have resumed its trip en route to India in the small hours of yesterday."
The V/1500 was indeed an enormous aircraft for its time, with its large wingspan and fuselage length, together with the aircraft's weight of no less than 30,000 Ib (13 608 kg) fully loaded and four engines. Among the details in which the Chronicle reporter was wrong was in the position of the aircraft's name: the wording HMA Old Carthusian was car-ried across the nose of the aircraft and not along its side, as the accompanying photos show. Further markings on the aircraft included full-length tricolour stripes on each rudder to make plain its nationality in the event of a forced land-ing, serial J1936 on the rear fuselage, and standard RAF contemporary roundels in six positions. It is interesting to note that The Marsa was already being referred to as "the aerodrome", obviously owing to the previous regular use by the RAF DH.9As of N° 562 Flight. The Chronicle reporter, obviously non--technical, was misinformed about the V/1500's flying ability in the face of a strong wind: on its subsequent Baghdad-El Amara leg the strong head-wind reduced the aircraft's speed to 50 mph.
But the Daily Malta Chronicle reporter had every reason to describe the aircraft as a monster. The Maltese had become accustomed to the relative-ly diminutive 30-foot long (9 m) DH.9A at The Marsa or, at most, at the 45-foot (13.7 m) Felixtowe F2A or similarly pro-portioned Curtiss America seaplanes at Calafrana. The gigantic size of the V/1500 must have been impressive to anybody watching it, even allowing for the perhaps exaggerated sensational reporting of the paper.
After Malta
The aircraft left Malta on the next day, Sunday, 22 December, at two o'clock in the morning according to the Chronicle of Friday 27 December. It flew 1,050 miles (1,690 km) non-stop over the sea to Mersa Matruh, and thence via Helipolis, Baghdad, El Amara, Bandar Abbas, Jask and Ormara, arriving at Karachi (then still part of India) on 16 January 1919 on only two engines.
Old Carthusian was destined to end its life in India. After being used to bomb Kabul during the Afghan war the following May - the only time a V/1500 had been used in action, and thanks to which the Afghan rebels surrendered - termites caused irreparable damage to its wooden wing spars. The aircraft was definitively grounded and its fuselage survived for some years as the squadron office at Risalpur.
The Handley Page V/1500 came too late take part in the First World War and was too big for the peace that fol-lowed. One aircraft did find employment for a short time by the Handley Page Transport Ltd in 1919 for the London--Brussels service, and probably the same aircraft had been the one to carry 40 passengers over London at 6,500 ft (1,981 m). It certainly was too large, complex and costly to become a viable commercial aircraft, and not one appeared on the British civil aircraft reg-ister. But it reserves the right to a place in the history of aviation. It was the first four-engined British bomber to enter production, it was also the largest British aircraft produced during that war, and it had the distinction of being the first dedicated British, and first practical any-where, strategic bomber for which the RAF was to become famous. For Malta it has certainly found a place in the Island's aviation history as the largest aircraft to appear over our skies until then and for many years later.