The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots (11 page)

I can best illustrate the German tactics of the time by telling the experience of one of our faithful old photographic machines, which, by the way, are not without their desperate moments and their deeds of heroism. All of which goes to show that the fighting scouts should not get all the credit for the wonders of modern warfare in the air. The old “photographer” in question was returning over the lines one day when it was set upon by no less than eleven hostile scouts. Nearly all the controls of the British machine were shot away, and the observer, seriously wounded, fell half-way out of the
nacelle.
Although still manœuvring his machine so as to escape the direct fire of the enemies on his tail, the British pilot grasped the wounded observer, held him safely in the machine, and made a safe landing in our lines. A moment later the riddled aeroplane burst into flames. Under heavy shell-fire the pilot carried the wounded observer to safety.

One of the distinguished German flying squadrons opposite us was under command of the famous Captain Baron von Richthofen. One day I had the distinction of engaging in three fights in half an hour with pilots from this squadron. Their machines were painted a brilliant scarlet from nose to tail – immense red birds, they were, with the graceful wings of their type, Albatross scouts. They were all single-seaters, and were flown by pilots of undeniable skill. There was quite a little spirit of sportsmanship in this squadron, too. The red German machines had two machine guns in fixed positions firing straight ahead, both being operated from the same control.

The first of my three fights with these newcomers in our midst occurred when I suddenly found myself mixed up with two of them. Evidently they were not very anxious for a fight at the moment, for, after a few minutes of manœuvring, both broke it off and dived away. Ten minutes later I encountered one of the red machines flying alone. I challenged him, but he wouldn’t stay at all. On the contrary, he made off as fast as he could go. On my return from chasing him I met a second pair of red Huns. I had picked up company with another British machine, and the two Huns, seeing us, dived into a cloud to escape. I went in after them, and on coming out again found one directly beneath me. On to him I dived, not pulling the trigger until I was 15 yards away. Once, twice, three times I pressed the lever, but not a shot from my gun! I slipped away into another cloud and examined the faithless weapon, only to find that I had run completely out of ammunition. I returned home quite the most disgusted person in the entire British Army.

During the changeable days of the Arras offensive we had many exciting adventures with the weather. On one occasion I had gone back to the aircraft depot to bring to the front a new machine. Sunshine and snow-squalls were chasing each other in a seemingly endless procession. On
the ground the wind was howling along at about fifty miles an hour. I arrived at the depot at 9 o’clock in the morning, but waited about until four in the afternoon before the weather appeared to be settling down to something like a safe and sane basis. The sunshine intervals were growing longer and the snow periods shorter, so I climbed into my machine and started off. It was only a fifteen minutes’ fly to the aerodrome, but in that time a huge black cloud loomed up and came racing toward me. I was headed straight into the gale, and the way was so rough from the rush of the wind and the heavy clouds floating by that the little machine was tossed about like a piece of paper. Several times I thought I was going to be blown completely over. Occasionally, without any warning, I would be lifted a sheer hundred feet in the air. Then later I would be dropped that distance, and often more. I was perspiring freely, although it was a very cold day. It was a race against the weather to reach my destination in time.

One cannot see in a snowstorm, and I felt that if the fleecy squall struck me before I sighted the aerodrome I would have to land in a ploughed field, and to do this in such a gale would be a very ticklish proposition. Added to all this, I was flying a machine of a type I had never handled before, and naturally it was a bit strange to me. Nearer and nearer the big cloud came. But I was racing for home at top speed. About half a mile from the haven I sought, the storm struck me. The moment before the snow deluge came, however, I had recognized the road that led to the aerodrome, and coming down to 50 feet, where I could just make it out, I flew wildly on, praying all the time that the snow striking my engine would not cause it to stop. Then the awful thought came to me that perhaps I was on the wrong road. Then, even more suddenly than it had come, the snow stopped – the storm had swept right over me. There, just ahead of me, I saw the tents and hangars and the flying pennant of the aerodrome – home. This was my first experience in flying through snow, and I did not care for another.

A few days after my unsuccessful experience with the red Richthofen scouts, I got my just revenge and a little more back from the Huns. My Major had been told to have some photographs taken of a certain point behind the German lines, and by special permission he was given the privilege of taking them himself. The point to be photographed was about seven miles in German territory, and in order to make a success of the snapshotting it would be necessary to have a strong escort. The Major offered to go out and do the photographs on his own without an escort, but the Colonel would not hear of it, and so it was arranged that an offensive patrol would go out at 9 o’clock in the morning, meet the Major at a given point, and escort him over the ground he wished to cover.

My patrol was the one working at the time, and I was the leader. At 9.30 we were to meet, just east of Arras, at 6000 feet. The rendezvous came off like clockwork. I brought the patrol to the spot at 9.28, and two minutes later we spied a single Nieuport coming toward us. I fired a red signal light and the Nieuport answered. It was the Major. I then climbed slightly and led the patrol along about 1000 feet above the Nieuport in order to protect the Major and at the same time keep high enough to avoid too much danger from anti-aircraft fire. We got to the area to be photographed without any other excitement than a very heavy greeting from the “Archies.” There were a number of big white clouds floating around about 6000 feet, and these made it difficult for the guns to shoot at us. But they also made it difficult for the Major to get his photographs. We went around and around in circles for what seemed an eternity. During one of these sweeping turns I suddenly saw four enemy scouts climbing between two clouds and some distance off. I knew they would see us soon, so it occurred to me it would be a brilliant idea to let the enemy think there was only one British machine on the job. Under these circumstances I knew they would be sure to attack, and then the rest of us could swoop down and surprise them. I had no intention of letting the Major in for any unnecessary risks, but it seemed such a rare chance, I could not resist it.

I led the patrol about 2000 feet higher up and there we waited. The enemy scouts did not see us at all, but they did see the Major. And they made for him. The first the Major knew of their approach, however, was when they were about 200 yards away, and one of them, somewhat prematurely, opened fire. His thoughts – he told me afterward – immediately flew to the patrol, and he glanced over his shoulder to see where we were. But we had vanished. He then wondered how much money he had in his pockets, as he did not doubt that the four Huns, surprising him as they had, would surely get him. Despite these gloomy and somewhat mercenary thoughts, the Major was fighting for his life. First he turned the nose of his machine directly toward the enemy, poured a burst of bullets toward a German at his right; then turned to the left, as the second machine approached in that direction, and let him have a taste of British gunfire as well. This frightened the first two Huns off for a moment, and, in that time, I arrived down on the scene with the rest of the patrol.

One of the Huns was firing at the Major’s machine as I flashed by him, and I fired at a bare ten yards’ range. Then I passed on to the second enemy machine, firing all the while, and eventually passing within 5 feet of one of his wing-tips. Turning my machine as quickly as I could, I was yet too late to catch the other two of the formation of four. They had both dived away and escaped. I had hit the two that first attacked the Major, however, and they were at the moment falling completely out of control 1000 or more feet below me, and finally went through the clouds, floundering helplessly in the air.

This little interruption ended, we all reassembled in our former positions and went on with the photographing. This was finished in about fifteen minutes, and, under a very heavy anti-aircraft fire, we returned home. The episode of the four Huns was perhaps the most successful
bit of trapping I have ever seen, but it was many weeks before the squadron got through teasing me for using our commander as a decoy. I apologized to the Major, who agreed with me that the chance was too good a one to miss.

“Don’t mind me,” he said; “carry on.”

SAGITTARIUS RISING

CECIL LEWIS

Cecil Lewis served with the RFC on the Western Front, surviving three tours to become a post-war test pilot. During World War II, he again donned uniform, this time as a flying instructor.

In 1917 co-operative tactics in single-seater fighting were rudimentary. A combat was a personal matter. In a fight no pilot has time to watch others; he is too occupied in attempting to down his own man or in avoiding an enemy intent on downing him. Tactics apart, the vital question is that of performance. A machine with better speed and climbing power must always have the advantage.

During the next ten days Offensive Patrols were carried out daily and, unfortunately, it soon became clear that, good as the SE5 was, it was still not equal to the enemy. Scrapping at high altitudes, fifteen to eighteen thousand feet, the Huns had a marked superiority in performance. This naturally tended to make us cautious, since we knew that, once we came down to their level, we should not be able to get above them again. Height, apart from its moral superiority, means added speed for the one above, who in his dive and zoom away has gravity on his side. Since machine guns in a scout are fixed, firing forward in the line of flight, it follows that the pilot aims the whole machine at his adversary. If that adversary is above him, he will be forced to pull his machine up on its tail to get him in the sights. That means loss of speed, manoeuvrability and, if carried to an extreme, a stall, and wandering about at stalling speed is asking for trouble when there are enemy guns about. This inferiority of performance was an initial difficulty. Later, when the SE5 got a larger motor, things looked up.

Single combat, a duel with another machine, was, performance apart, a question of good flying. Two machines so engaged would circle, each trying to turn inside the other and so bring his guns into play. Ability to sustain such tight vertical turns is the crucial test of a fighting pilot. Once the balance of the controls is lost, the machine will slip, lose height, and the enemy will rush in. Then, by all the rules of the game, you are a dead man.

But when a number of machines had closed and were engaged in a “dog-fight”, it was more a question of catch as catch can. A pilot would go down on the tail of a Hun, hoping to get him in the first burst; but he would not be wise to stay there, for another Hun would almost certainly be on
his
tail hoping to get him in the same way. Such fights were really a series of rushes, with momentary pauses to select the next opportunity – to catch the enemy at a disadvantage, or separated from his friends.

But apart from fighting, when twenty or thirty scouts were engaged, there was always a grave risk of collision. Machines would hurtle by, intent on their private battles, missing each other by feet. So such fighting demanded iron nerves, lightning reactions, snap decisions, a cool head, and eyes like a bluebottle, for it all took place at high speed and was three dimensional.

At this sort of sharpshooting some pilots excelled others; but in all air fighting (and indeed in every branch of aerial warfare) there is an essential in which it differs from the war on the ground: its absolute coldbloodedness. You cannot lose your temper with an aeroplane. You cannot “see red”, as a man in a bayonet fight. You certainly cannot resort to “Dutch” courage. Any of these may fog your judgment – and that spells death.

Often at high altitudes we flew in air well below freezing point. Then the need to clear a jam or change a drum meant putting an arm out into an icy 100 m.p.h. wind. If you happened to have bad circulation (as I had), it left the hand numb, and since you could not stamp your feet, swing your arms, or indeed move at all, the numbness would spread to the other hand and sometimes to the feet as well. In this condition we often went into a scrap with the odds against us – they usually were against us, for it was our job to be “offensive” and go over into enemy country looking for trouble – coldbloodedly in the literal sense; but none the less we had to summon every faculty of judgment and skill to down our man or, at the worst, to come out of it alive ourselves. So, like duelling, air fighting required a set steely courage, drained of all emotion, fined down to a tense and deadly effort of will. The Angel of Death is less callous, aloof and implacable than a fighting pilot when he dives.

There were, of course, emergency methods, such as standing the machine on its tail and holding it there just long enough to get one good burst into the enemy above you; but nobody would fight that way if he could help it, though, actually, an SE5 pilot could do the same thing by pulling his top gun down the quadrant. He could then fire it vertically upward while still flying level.

This was how Beery Bowman once got away from an ugly situation. He had been scrapping a couple of Huns well over the other side of the lines. He managed to crash one of them, but in so doing exhausted the ammunition of his Vickers gun: his Lewis was jammed. The other Hun pursued him and forced him right down on to the “carpet” – about a hundred feet from the ground. There was nothing to do but to beat it home. The Hun, out to avenge the death of his friend, and having the advantage of speed and height over Beery, chivvied him back to the lines, diving after him, bursting his gun, zooming straight up
again, hanging there for a moment in a stall, and falling to dive again. He repeated this several times (he must have been a rotten shot) while Beery, with extraordinary coolness and presence of mind, pulled down his Lewis gun and managed to clear the jam. The next time the Hun zoomed, Beery throttled right down and pulled back to stalling speed. The result was that when the Hun fell out of his zoom, Beery was not ahead of him as before, but beneath him. As the Hun dropped into his dive Beery opened fire with his Lewis gun, raking the body above him with a long burst. The Hun turned over on his back, dived, and struck the ground, bursting into flames. Beery laconically continued his way home. He was awarded the D.S.O.