Winged Warfare (2 page)

You have been to Hunland, and you feel your career in the air has really begun.

Altogether I spent four months in France as an observer. How I longed during all that time for a flight in the air, but no real chances came, and finally I quit my seat as a passenger without having fired a single combat shot though the tidy little machine gun that was always near me seemed to yearn as much as I did to have a go at the enemy.

I injured my knee after an observing trip one day, when the pilot crashed the machine in landing, and while I did not have to go to hospital with it, it gradually grew worse until May, 1916, when I had to lay up several months for repairs.

My sick leave over, I reported for duty again and got a real surprise. I was told I could learn to fly! This made me happier than I can express. I pictured myself in one of the swift little fighting planes I had seen in France, and I felt in my heart of hearts that I would make good. I already knew what it felt like to fly, I knew the language of the air, the esprit of the Corps, and some of the heart-palpitating peculiarities of our best-balanced engines. But all this time I had been a sort of innocent bystander. Now at last I was going into the air “on my own.”

The first step was to go to a school of instruction—a ground school—where the theory of flying and the mechanical side of aviation are expounded to you. I went through these courses, and by special permission was allowed to take my examination three weeks earlier than would have been the case in the ordinary course of events. I worked like a Trojan, and passed without much difficulty. Then was to come the real part of it all, the part for which I had waited over a year.

On the first of November, 1916, I was sent to another school—for elementary training in the air. This consisted first of all in going up in another old machine—a steady type called the Maurice Fernam and fitted with a dual set of controls, so that the instructor could manage one while I tried to manage the other. Never will I forget those days of dual control. I tried very hard, but it seemed to me I just could not get the proper “feel” of the machine. First the instructor would tell me I was “ham-handed”—that I gripped the controls too tightly with every muscle tense. After that I would get what you might call timid-handed, and not hold the controls tightly enough. My instructor and I both suffered tortures. So when suddenly one day he told me I could go up alone, I had my doubts as to whether it was confidence or desperation that dictated his decision. I didn't worry long as to which it was; I was willing to take the chance.

Then followed my first solo! This is, I think, the greatest day in a flying man's life. Certainly I did not stop talking about it for the next three weeks at least. I felt a great and tender pity for all the millions of people in the world who never have a chance to do a solo!

An ambulance stood on the aerodrome, and it seemed to me, as it has to many another student pilot, that all the other business of flying had suddenly ceased so that everybody could look at me. I noticed with a shiver that the ambulance had its engine running. Were the doctors at the hospital expectantly fondling their knives? Everybody looked cold-blooded and heartless. But I had to do it—so into the machine I crawled, trying to look cheerful, but feeling awful lonesome. How I got off the ground I do not know, but once in the air it was not nearly so bad—not much worse than the first time you started downhill on an old-fashioned bicycle.

I wasn't taking any liberties. I flew as straight ahead as I could, climbing steadily all the time. But at last I felt I had to turn, and I tried a very slow, gradual one, not wanting to bank either too steeply or too little. They told me afterward I did some remarkable skidding on that turn, but I was blissfully ignorant of a little detail like that and went gaily on my way. I banked a little more on my next turn and didn't skid so much.

For a time I felt very much pleased with myself circling above the aerodrome, but suddenly an awful thought came to me. Somehow or other I had to get that machine down to the earth again. How blissful it would be if I could just keep on flying. At last, however, I screwed up all my courage, reached for the throttle, pushed it back, and the engine almost stopped. I knew the next thing to do was to put her nose down. So down it went at a steep angle. I felt it was too steep, so I pulled her nose up a bit, then put it down again, and in a series of steps descended toward the ground.

About forty feet from the ground, however, I did everything I had been told to do when two feet from the ground. So I made a perfect landing—only forty feet too high. Eventually I realised this slight error, and down went her nose again. We rapidly got nearer the ground, and then I repeated my perfect landing—about eight feet up. This time I just sat and suffered, while the now thoroughly exasperated old machine taking matters into its own hands dropped with a “plonk” the intervening distance. There was no damage, because the training machines are built for such work, and can stand all sorts of hard knocks.

After doing my first solo, I progressed rather rapidly, and in a few days was passed on to a higher instruction squadron and began to fly more warlike machines. I found that to qualify as a pilot I had to pass certain tests in night flying. This awed me to a certain extent, but it also appealed to me, for just two months before, the first Zeppelins had been brought down at night on English soil by our airmen. I was very anxious to get taken on for this work, and eventually succeeded.

Night flying is a fearsome thing—but tremendously interesting. Anyone who has ever been swimming at night will appreciate what I mean. All the familiar objects and landmarks that seem so friendly by day, become weird and repellent monsters at night. It is simple enough to go up in the dark, and simple enough to sail away, but it is quite something else to come down again without taking off a chimney pot or “strafing” a big oak tree. The landing tests are done with the help of flares on the ground. My first flight at night had most of the thrills of my first solo. I “taxied” out to what I thought a good place to take off from. The instructor shouted a few last words to me above the noise of the motor. I turned the machine to face down the long line of lights, opened out the engine, raced along the ground, then plunged up into utter blackness.

I held the controls very carefully and kept my eyes glued on the instruments that gleamed brightly under little electric bulbs inside the machine. I could not see a thing around me; only the stars overhead. Underneath there was a great black void. After flying straight-away for several minutes I summoned up courage enough to make a turn. I carefully and gradually rounded the corner, and then away off to one side I could see the flares on the ground. I completed a big circuit and shut off the engine preparatory to landing. Suddenly, in the midst of my descent, I realised I had misjudged it very badly, so quickly put the engine on again and proceeded to fly around a second time. Then I came down, and to my intense surprise, made quite a good landing. This was only the beginning. I had to repeat the trick several times.

On the final test I had to do a given height. I left the ground as before, and just as I did so could see the reflection of the flares on the tin roofs of our huts. It made a great impression upon me, as I climbed away into the darkness. Then my thoughts went to my engine and I realised it was as important as my own heart. I listened to its steady beat with an anxious ear. Once or twice there was a slight kick or hitch in its smooth rhythm. No matter how many cylinders you have whirring in front of you, the instant one misses your heart hears it even before your ears do. Several times my heart seemed to stop. The tension became very great as I toiled and struggled up through the night. The lack of anything upon which I could put my eyes outside the machine gave me a very queer feeling.

One other machine was up at the same time, doing its test, and somehow, although the space in the air is very wide, I had a great fear that we might collide, so I gazed anxiously out into the darkness trying to see the little navigation lights we carried on our wings. It is hard to look into jet blackness, and the strain hurt my eyes, but I was afraid not to look for all I was worth. I continued to fly as much as I could in a dead straight line. Whenever I had to make a turn I made a very gradual one, hardly daring to bank, or tilt my machine at all. It is funny, this feeling at night that you must not bank, and a most dangerous instinct to follow. The feeling that you are off an even keel upsets you, as you have no horizon or apparent ground below you to take your bearings by, and you have to go by the instruments, or tell from the “feel” of the machine itself, whether you are level or not.

However, at the stage of learning I had reached I knew nothing of the real feel of a machine and was entirely dependent upon the instruments. This isn't a very reassuring state of mind, so when the instruments at last indicated I had attained the required height, it was with a happy heart that I throttled back my engine to come down. I was afraid to shut it completely off for fear that it would get too cold to pick up when I put it on again. When you come down with your engine running it takes a much longer time to reach the ground. Every thousand feet or so, as I lost height, I would carefully try out the engine, and do a complete circuit. Underneath me I could see the little twinkling flares, and kept them in sight as much as possible on the downward journey to make certain of not losing myself. Finally I reached the ground and made a careful landing. When I stepped out of the machine I had at last qualified as a pilot. I was sent to a home-guarding squadron near the mouth of the Thames. I spent hours practising in the air both by day and by night. Several times we had flight manoeuvres at night and that was ticklish work. We would go up to patrol a certain area with lights showing on all the aerodromes in that section of the country, so that you could steer by them. I don't know of many greater tests of a pilot's skill than this flying in the dark, with a lot of machines about you in the air, their little navigation lights looking for all the world like so many moving stars. The cold of the higher altitudes at night is agonisingly intense. After half an hour or so in the frigid zone you get sort of numb and then for a long while the cold doesn't seem to affect you any more. The real nasty part is when you have landed and begin to thaw out. It is really worse than the original freezing.

In spite of the discomforts and the dangers of night flying you could not fail to admire the great beauty of the scene below you when the lights were on and sparkling. These lights would mean nothing to a stranger, but to us in the air they were friendly beacons of safety and gave us a feeling of absolute security. On such nights the skies would seem full to overflowing with myriad stars. We finally became so accustomed to flying in the dark that nothing troubled us except ground mists or light fogs that would occasionally shut in from the sea, obliterate the lights and make landing a difficult and perilous task.

My luck as a Zeppelin hunter was very poor. I used to dream occasionally about stalking the great monsters in the high thin air, pouring a drum of blazing bullets into them and gloating as they flared into flame. But no real Zeppelins ever came my way. The cold nights that we stood by on duty waiting for them were very long, but not without their compensations. There would be two of us at a given station. We would play cards, strum on some sort of instrument, read for an hour or so, play cards again, and all the while hoping for an alarm that would send us aloft in pursuit of a marauding gasbag from over the sea.

Christmas Day we cooked our own turkey and the rest of the meal. Then in a burst of yuletide hospitality, we telephoned in to a local hotel and told the manager to send anybody he wanted to out to the aerodrome for dinner. Alas! for our ten-pound turkey. The guests from the hotel kept coming until there were actually twenty of them. However, in some miraculous way, we managed to feed the hungry score. Having partaken of our food they did not tarry long. Night shut in early and once more we took up our wintry vigil.

Toward the end of February, word came through from the War Office one night that I was to go to France. I had become convinced that the winter would not offer much opportunity at Zeppelin hunting, and had applied several times for duty at the fighting front. Before I went, however, there was another course at a special school, where I learned to fly the smallest of our single-seater machines. Now I felt I had reached the height of my ambition at last; to actually fly one of these tiny, wasp-like fighting machines seemed to me the most wonderful thing in the world. A few days later when I reported for my orders to cross the Channel it was with a gay heart and a determination to reflect as much honour as I could upon the double-wings on my left breast.

With a dozen other flying men I landed in Boulogne on the seventh of March, 1917, for my second go at the war. At the Boulogne quay we separated, and I wish I could say that “some flew east and some flew west,” but as a matter of fact we didn't fly at all. Instead, we meandered along over the slow French railroads for nearly two days before reaching our destinations.

One other pilot and myself had been ordered to join a flying squadron on the southern sector of the British line. The squadron to which we were assigned had a great reputation, one of the best in all France, and we were very proud to become members of it. Captain Albert Ball, who was resting in England at the time, but who came back to France in the late spring and was killed within a few weeks, had brought down twenty-nine machines as a member of “our” squadron. That was an inspiration in itself.

The first day of my stay with the squadron there was no flying and so I wandered about the field hangars looking at the machines. They were all of a type I had never seen before at close range Nieuport Scouts, very small and of course with but a single seat. Being a French model, the Nieuport Scout is a beautiful creature. The distinctly British machines—and some of our newer ones are indeed marvels of the air—are built strictly for business, with no particular attention paid to the beauty of lines. The French, however, never overlook such things.

The modern fighting scout, and to my mind the single-seater is the only real aeroplane for offensive work, may have the power of two-hundred horses throbbing in its wonderful engine. Some of the machines are very slender of waist and almost transparent of wing. Aeroplanes do not thrust their warlike nature upon the casual observer. One has to look twice before definitely locating the gun or guns attached so unobtrusively to the framework, and synchronised, where necessary, to shoot through the whirring propeller in front. Such guns are connected to the engine itself by means of cams and are so arranged that they can fire only when the propeller reaches a given position, thus allowing the bullets to pass safely between the blades. It seems like a very delicate bit of timing, but the devices are extremely simple.

The nacelle, or cockpit of the modern machine, I have heard people say, suggests to them the pilot house of a palatial private yacht in miniature. They generally are finished in hard wood and there are polished nickel instruments all about you. They indicate height, speed, angle, revolutions, and about everything an airman ought to know. There are ingenious sights for the guns and range-finders for bomb dropping. When he is tucked away in the nacelle, a little well-like compartment, about as big around as an ordinary barrel, only the pilot's head is visible above the freeboard of the body of the machine—the body being technically known as the fuselage. Directly in front of the pilot is a cute little glass windscreen, a sort of half-moon effect.

We newcomers at the squadron—the other pilot and myself—had to stand by the next day and watch the patrols leaving to do their work over the lines. It was thrilling even to us, accustomed as we were to ordinary flying, to see the trim little fighters take the air, one after the other, circle above the aerodrome, and then dropping into a fixed formation, set their courses to the East. That night we listened with eager ears to the discussion of a fight in which a whole patrol had been engaged. We stay-at-homes had spent the day practice-flying in the new machines. There were three days more of this for me, and then, having passed some standard tests to show my familiarity with the Nieuport type, I was told the next morning I was to cross the lines for the first time as the master of my own machine.

The squadron commander had been killed the day before I arrived from England, and the new one arrived the day after. It rather pleased and in a sense comforted me to know that the new commander was also going over in a single-seater for the first time when I did. He had been flying up to this time a two-seater machine which calls for entirely different tactics during a fight. Two-seater machines as a rule have guns that can be turned about in different positions. On the fighting scouts they generally are rigidly fixed. This means that it is necessary to aim the machine at anything you wish to fire at.

The night before I was to “go over” I received my orders. I was to bring up the rear of a flight of six machines, and I assure you it was
some
task bringing up the rear of that formation. I had my hands full from the very start. It seemed to me my machine was slower than the rest, and as I wasn't any too well acquainted with it, I had a great time trying to keep my proper place, and to keep the others from losing me. I was so busy at the task of keeping up that my impressions of outside things were rather vague. Every time the formation turned or did anything unexpected, it took me two or three minutes to get back in my proper place. But I got back every time as fast as I could. I felt safe when I was in the formation and scared when I was out of it, for I had been warned many times that it is a fatal mistake to get detached and become a straggler. And I had heard of the German “headhunters,” too. They are German machines that fly very high and avoid combat with anything like an equal number, but are quick to pounce down upon a straggler, or an Allied machine that has been damaged and is bravely struggling to get home. Fine sportsmanship, that!

The way I clung to my companions that day reminded me of some little child hanging to its mother's skirts while crossing a crowded street. I remember I also felt as a child does when it is going up a dark pair of stairs, and is sure something is going to reach out of somewhere and grab it. I was so intent on the clinging part that I paid very little attention to anything else.

We climbed to a height of more than two miles on our side of the lines, then crossed them. There were other formations of machines in the air, patrolling at various places. I could see them in the distance, but for the life of me I could not tell whether they were friendly or hostile. On the chance that they might be the latter, I clung closer than ever to my comrades. Then, a long way off, I was conscious that a fight was going on between a patrol of our machines and a Hun formation. I could make little of it all until finally I saw what seemed like a dark ball of smoke falling and learned afterwards it was one of our own machines going down in flames, having been shot and set on fire by the enemy airmen.

A few minutes after this my attention was attracted elsewhere. Our old friends the “Archies” were after us. It is no snug billet, this being in the rear of a formation when the “Archies” are giving a show. They always seem to aim at the leading machine, but come closer to hitting the one at the end of the procession. The first shot I heard fired was a terrific “bang” close to my ears. I felt the tail of my machine suddenly shoot up into the air, and I fell about three hundred feet before I managed completely to recover control. That shot, strange to relate, was the closest I have ever had from anti-aircraft fire. The smoke from the exploding shell enveloped me. But close as it was, only one piece of the flying steel fragments hit my machine. Even that did no damage at all.

After recovering control I looked about hastily for the rest of my formation, and discovered that by now they were at least half a mile away, and somewhat higher than I was. Terrified at being left alone, I put my engine on full and by taking a short cut, managed to catch up with them. Much relieved, I fell in under the formation, feeling safe again, and not so alone in the world.

We continued to patrol our beat, and I was keeping my place so well I began to look about a bit. After one of these gazing spells, I was startled to discover that the three leading machines of our formation were missing. Apparently they had disappeared into nothingness. I looked around hastily, and then discovered them underneath me, diving rapidly. I didn't know just what they were diving at, but I dived, too. Long before I got down to them, however, they had been in a short engagement half a mile below me, and had succeeded in frightening off an enemy artillery machine which had been doing wireless observation work. It was a large white German two-seater, and I learned after we landed that it was a well-known machine and was commonly called “the flying pig.” Our patrol leader had to put up with a lot of teasing that night because he had attacked the “pig.” It seems that it worked every day on this part of the front, was very old, had a very bad pilot, and a very poor observer to protect him.

It was a sort of point of honour in the squadron I that the decrepit old “pig” should not actually be I shot down. It was considered fair sport, however, to frighten it. Whenever our machines approached, the “pig” would begin a series of clumsy turns and ludicrous manoeuvres, and would open a frightened fire from ridiculously long ranges. The observer was a very bad shot and never succeeded in hitting any of our machines, so attacking this particular German was always regarded more as a joke than a serious part of warfare. The idea was only to frighten the “pig,” but our patrol leader had made such a determined dash at him the first day we went over, that he never appeared again. For months the patrol leader was chided for playing such a nasty trick upon a harmless old Hun.

During my dive after the three forward machines, I managed to lose them and the enemy machine as well. So I turned and went up again where I found two of my companions. We flew around looking for the others, but could not find them, so continued the patrol until our time was up and then returned to the aerodrome. The missing ones arrived about the same time and reported they had had a great many fights, but no decisive ones.

About this time the Germans were beginning in earnest their famous retreat from the country of the Somme. There had been days upon days of heavy fogs and flying had been impossible. A few machines went up from time to time, but could see nothing. The wily old Hun had counted upon these thick days to shield his well-laid plans, and made the most of them. Finally there came a strong breeze from the southwest that swept the fog away and cleared the ground of all mist and haze. This was on that wonderfully clear March day just before the Germans evacuated Bapaume and left it a mass of ruins. We were early in the air and had no sooner reached our proper height to cross the lines than we could see something extraordinary was happening behind the German trenches. From 15,000 feet we could see for miles and miles around. The ground was a beautiful green and brown, and slightly to the south we could see the shell-pitted battlefields of the Somme, each shell-hole with glistening water in it.

A few miles to the east there were long streaks of white smoke. Soon we realised that the Germans had set fire to scores of villages behind their front. From where we flew we could see between fifty and sixty of them ablaze. The long smoke plumes blowing away to the northeast made one of the most beautiful ground pictures I have ever seen from an aeroplane, but at the same time I was enraged beyond words. It had affected every pilot in the patrol the same way. We flew up and down over this burning country for two hours hunting, and wishing for German machines to come up and fight, but none appeared. We returned at last to the aerodrome and told what we had seen during our patrol, but news of the fires had long since been reported by the airmen whose duty it is to look out for such things, and our general staff had at once surmised the full import of what was happening.

The next week was full of exciting adventures. For days the clouds hung at very low altitudes, seldom being higher than 4,000 feet, and of course it was necessary for us to fly underneath them. At times during the famous retreat it was hard to tell just where the Germans were and where they were not. It was comparatively easy for the soldiers on the ground to keep in touch with the German rearguard by outpost fighting, but it was for us to keep tabs on the main bodies of troops. We would fly over a sector of country from east to west and mark down on our maps the points from which we were fired at. It was easy to know the Germans were at those particular points. This was very tense and exciting work, flying along very low and waiting each second to hear the rattle of machine guns or the crack of a shell. We were flaunting ourselves as much as possible over the German lines in order to draw their fire.