Herbert Dennis Cutler

Annamaria on Monday

Who?

 

Well, if I don't tell you, in my experience you won’t easily find out who he was,

 - certainly not by googling him.  The only response I got about Herbert Dennis Cutler was from the British National Archives in Krew .  

You can get copies of a few records that look like this:

 

 Yours for three pounds-fifty each.

 

To spare us all such expenditures, I will tell you what I know.

In 1914 and 15, the Brits in East Africa had a big problem.  Since the moment war was declared, the Konigsberg, a powerful low-draught German warship, had been wrecking havoc with their blockade of German East Africa to their south.  And by the end of 1914, their Gerry nemesis was hiding in the Rufiji River delta, where the water was too shallow for the typical Royal Navy ship to go.  But the K's guns were powerful enough to reach British targets.

After months of trying to block the Konigberg's escape route or fire shells that would reach it, Admiral King-Hall had a bright idea.  Suppose an aeroplane could drop a bomb on the bloody beast.

 And so Equatorial Africa's first Naval Air Service was born.  

King-Hall started to search for an aviator and a plane.  Enter Herbert Dennis Cutler, a Londoner who was earning a meager living, barnstorming in Durban, South Africa.  He came with his own plane - a Curtiss, American-made hydroplane and most important, his fearless attitude.

Planes in those days were made of wood and cloth.  Pilots sat in the wicker chair with their legs hanging out.  Cutler's was a rear-mounted, single-engine job with pontoons instead of wheels.

Our man, Herbert quickly accepted a commission in the Royal Navy Reserve, loaded his plane onto a supply ship, and headed north.  No one, not King-Hall, not Cutler himself had any idea that he would become the very first pilot ever to attack a warship.

In late December 1914, he took off for the Rufiji with a home-made gelatin bomb, but given the difficulties of staying aloft in the hot-sticky Equatorial air, the heavy bomb was too much for the tiny engine to carry.  Cutler had to return to the airstrip immediately, leave the bomb behind, and make his first mission objective one of reconnaissance: to find the Konigsberg's exact position.  Unfortunately, he had barely gotten his craft above the trees when the radiator started to leak.  Cutler managed an emergency landing on a small river island out of reach of K's big guns.  He was taking a refreshing dip in the river when a rescue party on a steam launch got to him.

The broken radiator could've ended the mission right there, were it not for an imaginative sailor on one the British ships, who remembered reading that Henry Ford and the maker of the airplane, David Curtis were on friendly terms.  There were Ford motor cars in Mombasa, and perhaps a radiator from a car would work for the plane. With a little bit of adaptation on a car radiator, Cutler was back in business.

Cutler made three more missions, all scouting expeditions. In the end, he located exactly where the Konigsberg was hiding. He made his last attempt under fire from Germans on the ground. By then, everyone was pretty sure, that – given the overheated air – the tiny plane, which wasn't much more than a kite, would never be able to carry bombs. Cutler crash landed on his last mission.  A rescue party found his plane, but not Cutler in it or nearby.  All assumed that the intrepid pilot had drowned or been eaten by a crocodile.

It wasn't until the war was over that the truth came to light.  Cutler had managed to swim to shore, was captured by the Germans, and remained their prisoner until after the armistice in 1918. Nobody really knows how he spent his time after that, but his death is recorded. He died in London in 1963.

The Konigsberg was eventually destroyed, but that's a story for another day.