Captain A S M Summers, Royal Flying Corps

Captain Summers' Cavalry Sword

A friend asked me to take a sword along to the Antiques Roadshow. It’s a First World War cavalry sword. My friend had done quite a bit of research about the blade, having determined from it’s serial number to whom it belonged.
The then Lieutenant A S M Summers took delivery of his sword in October 1909 from Wilkinson Sword. When war broke out, this former Yeoman officer was with the 19th Hussars. This regiment was attached to the infantry divisions in the BEF for the early months of the war, and Lt.Summers was assigned to the machine-gun detachment of his squadron.
He later joined the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot, and saw action with 60 Squadron RFC. Amongst his peers in August and September 1916 was Albert Ball, VC. Captain Summers, by then a flight leader, was killed in action on 15th September 1916 during the Battle of Flers–Courcelette.
I tracked down the following article that explains how he died. He was involved in an attack on enemy observation balloons using a new air-to-air weapons system.



Summers in front of his Morane fighter

In 1914 aircraft armament was a carbine in the cockpit and maybe a grappling hook trailing behind and below. Then, in only a matter of months, fighter plane fire power advanced to machine guns that fired through a rotating propeller and even wing mounted rockets which were crude but effective enough to be used by both the Allies and the Germans air services.

First air-to-air missile combat victory, Lt. A. M. Walters RFC Sept. 16, 1916 at the Battle of the River Somme

And so this sets up one of the great forgotten stories of WW I— a British pilot scores the very first aerial victory by air-to-air missile but then his accomplishment—and name—is lost in the drama and fog of battle. And even more ironically, this war fighter’s exploit was recorded in a large dramatic painting by a famous artist, but he was misidentified and so his historic action has only came to light when the painting of the air battle was discovered on the wall of a modest house in Bristol, Rhode Island almost 100 years after the historic aerial event.

The man who made air-to-air missile ordinance operational was Lt. Yves Le Prieur, a French army officer assigned to Japan before the war and who extrapolated the idea of turning fireworks into an airborne weapons system. Le Prieur’s rockets were just a cardboard tube filled with black powder, attached to a wooden stick fitted with a triangular knife blade to form a spear point. They were far from accurate and a little dicey when it came time to throw the electrical ignition. But a few forward thinking military minds recognized the possibilities, and for a short time in 1916, Le Prieur fire rockets became an important factor in air war strategy.
The story of Le Prieur’s rockets is fascinating and amusing. Le Prieur had to show the Generals that his idea worked before they would install them on an airship. So the inventive inventor took a Piccard-Pictet roadster, strapped on an actual airplane wing to which his rockets were attached, and then shot down a runway at 80 mph, blazing away. Apparently, whatever was destroyed this first rocket salvo did not embarrass anyone, and so M. Le Prieur became the first person to effectively prove that air-to-air missiles were a realistic war-fighter option.
All this then circles back to the story of the long forgotten painting (above) by an artist called Farre who personally captioned his work as an exploit of a “Lt. Summers.” This was to later cause much confusion because when research on the painting began, there was lots of information about an ace named Lt. Summers—but that fellow flew a different aircraft and all his victories were in 1918.
Finally, members of the League of WW I Historians solved the mystery, and here is the (edited) story they unravelled:

On September 15, 1916—the opening day of the Third Phase of the massive Battle of the Somme— RFC headquarters wanted the German balloons in the sector of the Flers-Courcelette assault all destroyed. General Trenchard (in command the RFC) visited No. 60 Squadron (which included the famous ace Albert Ball) and asked for volunteers to attack the balloons. Capt. Ball, 2Lt. A M Walters, 2Lt Euan Gilchrist, and Capt. A.S.M. Summers all volunteered. They all took off in (French) Nieuports armed with LePrieur Rockets.
Albert Ball and 2/Lt Walters found their balloons hauled down. They therefore attacked a formation of German planes. Ball fired off eight rockets but missed so he shot down the enemy fighter with conventional machine-gun fire. His wingman, 2Lt A M Walters, fired his rockets at one of the LVG two-seaters and saw a rocket hit the LVG in the fuselage, setting it aflame. The flaming LVG fell at Bapaume. This may very well have been the first air-to-air rocket victory against a heavier than air target.
Meanwhile, Gilchrist had destroyed his balloon and another was also destroyed and credited to Capt. A S M Summers, who was sadly shot down in flames by the anti-aircraft fire. Summers died in Nieuport 16, military serial number A136.
So, it was not actually Summers but Walters who destroyed an enemy airplane with LePrieur rockets. Lt. Walters fired 4 rockets. One hit the LVG and brought it down.

And there you have it. Lt. Walters, who actually made aviation history, and has languished invisible for a century, and would be forever unknown except for a diligent artist who captured that fleeting moment in a scene of celestial beauty and dramatic death.

This painting ended up in the USA because in 1918, the French government sent the artist and his war time artwork on a tour of the United States, ostensibly to raise money for the widows and orphans of slain pilots, but more likely to increase support for the US as it mobilized troops entering the European conflict. This painting was purchased in New York at the Anderson Galleries during the first exhibit on the tour, and then stayed with that family for three generations.