The First Great Air War

by Richard Townsend Bickers

  He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross “For most conspicuous and consistent bravery from 25th April to 6th May 1917, during which Captain Ball took part in 26 combats and destroyed 11 hostile aeroplanes, drove down two out of control, and forced several others to land”.

  When Ball had left 60 Squadron to return to England in late 1916, already, at the age of twenty, a captain and decorated with the DSO and MC, he had been thought irreplaceable and his record impossible to equal leave alone surpass. And he was irreplaceable until a twenty-two-year-old Canadian, Lieutenant William Avery “Billy” Bishop, joined the squadron on the very day of Ball’s death. At the war’s end Bishop had seventy-two victories; only one less than Mannock, the RFC’s most prolific destroyer.

  Bishop’s way thither had been meandering, and, in a manner, adventitious. In 1911, aged seventeen, he entered the Canadian Royal Military College; and barely managed to stay there for the next three years: his frequent mischievous escapades courted expulsion. But, if he was not by temperament a conventional military or naval type, it was in his stars to become one of the greatest fighter pilots the world has seen; so he was lucky to be born at the right time to give full vent to his natural aptitude and fulfil his destiny. A spice of devilment and flouting of regulations may not engender the right chemistry to take a young man up to the rank of general or admiral; but they have set many a regardless junior officer on his way to an air marshal’s pennant.[12] Billy Bishop emphatically was one of the best pilots of an earlier, or any, war. And if he had given up breaking rules for the hell of it when he passed out from the Academy, his independent attitude remained undiminished when he eventually put up his pilot’s wings and reported for duty on the Western Front.

  First commissioned in September 1914 in the 9th Missisauga Horse, Bishop transferred to the 7th Canadian Mounted Rifles and left Canada in June 1915. Like many others before him he found the mud in a cavalry camp unpleasant. And, as many others had been, he was attracted to the notion of flying only when an aeroplane landed nearby. Told that the quickest way to start operational flying was as an observer, that was what he volunteered to be. After a course at the observers’ school he put up his half-wing and went to France in January 1916 to an RE7 artillery co-operation squadron. He wanted to be fighting, not observing, but admitted that it was “no child’s play to circle above a German battery with your machine being tossed about in the air, tortured by exploding shells and black shrapnel puffballs coming nearer and nearer to you”. After four months he injured his knee in a crash and was sent to hospital in England, where he was grounded until November, when he was sent to flying school.

  In December he joined No. 37 (Home Defence) Squadron, with whom he did a lot of night flying, “a fearsome thing but very interesting”. Bored, and thirsting for a fight, he volunteered for France and arrived there on 7th March 1917 to fly Nieuport 17s with 60 Squadron.

  On his first patrol, flying at the rear of a six-machine formation, and given, as usual with newcomers, an old aeroplane that was slower than the others, he had trouble keeping pace and was in constant fear of being separated. This in fact happened. A shell burst so close to him that he lost 300 feet and was left half a mile behind. He managed to rejoin, but, in common with other pilots new to battle, he found, after a few manoeuvres, that he had lost sight of his companions.

  Presently he saw them below, diving, and hurried after them. There ensued an episode of the sort that was peculiar to the first war in the air and lent welcome light relief to the fear and tension of the daily business of killing and being killed. The object of the Nieuports’ attention was a large white German aircraft that daily did artillery spotting in the same patch of sky. This familiar object was known as “the Flying Pig” because it was decrepit, slow and crewed by an incompetent pilot and observer. It was a point of honour in the squadron that the bumbling antique contraption should not be shot down. It was considered fair sport, however, to frighten it. Bishop said: “Whenever our squadron approached, the Pig would begin a series of clumsy turns and ludicrous manoeuvres and open a frightened fire from ridiculously long ranges.” The observer was a very bad shot and never succeeded in hitting any of the British machines. So attacking this particular German was always regarded more as a joke than as 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 that he never appeared again. For months the patrol leader was chided for playing such a nasty trick on a harmless old man.”

  But these lighter episodes were few and on 25th March Bishop figured in one of a very different sort that was much more typical of life at the Front. Patrolling with three others he saw three Albatroses which the patrol leader pretended to ignore. The Albatroses accordingly fell in astern and chased the Nieuports. When the distance between the two had narrowed to 500 yards, the Nieuports turned sharply about to engage the enemy. Bishop saw that his shots were hitting one of these, which promptly half-rolled, then began to spin. Suspecting that it was departing the scene rather than going back damaged, he followed it, shooting every time it pulled out of its spin; until it crashed. In the long dive Bishop’s engine had oiled up and stopped. He thought he was behind the German lines, but had no alternative to a forced landing. Luckily he was 150 yards behind the British trenches.

  He had made his first kill, and two days later he led a patrol for the first time. He acquitted himself less than well. Seeing a single hostile below, he signalled to his pilots and dived on it. A second hostile appeared from cloud. When tracer from a third started streaking past him from astern he realised he had been duped. Meanwhile more enemy aircraft had appeared out of the clouds and attacked the rest of his formation. He looped and rolled off the top to avoid his three adversaries, then saw another fight in progress, which he joined: two Nieuports against four Albatroses. This went on for fifteen minutes without either side scoring a kill. He broke off to help another Nieuport that was on its own against two Albatroses. This combat brought them down to 2500 feet before the enemy broke off. Two Nieuports failed to return from this patrol.

  Of one of the pilots who was killed, Bishop said: “He was only eighteen and had been in France three weeks. The RFC is filled with boys of that age with spirits of daring beyond all compare and courage so self-effacing as to be a continual inspiration to their older brothers in the Service.” He was hit in the back by an explosive bullet that exploded in his stomach. He continued fighting for ten minutes, then crash-landed and fainted; and died in hospital.

  On 7th April Bishop was ordered to attack a balloon but forbidden to descend below 1000 feet. It was being winched down, so he dived, began firing at 500 feet and continued doing so until he was only 50 feet above the ground. Throughout, he was under fire from “flaming onions”, which he described as “terrifying balls of fire shot from some kind of rocket gun”. They weren’t. They were shells from a 37-millimetre cannon which, seen from the air, seemed to come spurting up in clusters of incandescent globules. His engine cut but caught again when he was down to fifteen feet, and he flew home through machinegun fire. He received congratulations from the Wing and Brigade Commanders and a telegram from Trenchard.

  The rest of the month was a succession of patrols and ground strafing. On the 25th he was promoted to captain and by the end of Bloody April had shot down at least twelve enemy aircraft.

  At the beginning of that catastrophic month the RFC had 754 aircraft, of which 385 were single-seater fighters, at the Front. The Germans opposed them with 114 single-seater fighters.

  Thirty days later 151 British aircraft had been brought down, compared with 119 German.

  The RFC lost 316 aircrew, dead and missing. The Germans lost 119.

  The expectation of life for the British had averaged twenty-three days.

  CHAPTER 15 - 1917. The Darkening Days

  “The days darken round me, and the years, /Among new men, strange faces, other minds” Tennyson wrote.

  Strange faces had been seen o
n the squadrons from the moment the first shot was fired. Even before that, the constant replacement of those killed in accidents made new men a familiar feature of life in any air force. Death in action was a different matter from death caused by engine failure, a stall, lost sense of balance and orientation in cloud, or an unsuspected hill looming suddenly through the mist. Every pilot believed that he could avert an accident. But every pilot who saw a comrade killed by bullets or shellfire brooded on what he himself could have done to avoid the same end in exactly the same circumstance and had to conclude that the answer was: “nothing”. Observers could only hope or pray that their pilot was born under a lucky star. Other minds devised new tactics forced on airmen by the changing times.

  By now, with the war almost three years long, the days had indeed darkened. The raw, often squalid existence, haunted by fear, of men teetering on the brink of mental and physical exhaustion that has so often been portrayed as typical of squadron life at the Western Front had become a reality on both sides of the battle line. The average officers’ or sergeants’ mess was cramped and its furnishing shabby. Despite the close comradeship, men whose nerves were stretched almost to breaking point were constantly irritable and intolerant of some of their companions’ mannerisms and characters. Many tried to avoid forming close friendships and became remote and introspective because they knew the grief that lay in wait when an intimate friend was killed. Drink became the solace and support of some. There were a few who resorted to the whisky or brandy bottle before every sortie.

  This is not to say that a visitor to any mess found it a dingy hovel reeking of alcohol fumes, with scruffy, surly, dispirited pilots and observers sprawled in an intoxicated stupor on sagging armchairs with broken springs and stuffing protruding through rents made in the course of robust nightly revelry. Far from it. Stress and anxiety were mostly betrayed by an air of ineffable weariness, a tendency to fall into a doze at any odd moment, a morose taciturnity; and a variety of tics: head-jerking, shoulder-shrugging, blinking, trembling hands, foot-tapping. These were the signs for which squadron and flight commanders and medical officers looked. Often it was a squadron or flight commander himself who showed symptoms of excessive wear and tear on mind and body.

  One cause of increased danger and taut nerves was the low-level ground attack that the April offensive had brought into prominence. The days when this had not been so risky a task as had been expected were gone. The men in the trenches had learned how to defend themselves against strafing from the air. Heavy machineguns and light anti-aircraft guns protected by sandbagged emplacements abounded. Even volleys of rifle fire were shooting down strafing aeroplanes.

  Danger did not mesmerise men into a state of permanent dejection. The French tended to seek their release in a local town and short leaves in Paris. The Germans, with their customary arrogance and thick skins, imposed themselves on the restaurants and brothels of Lille, Douai and Metz or kept to themselves in their own messes. In the RFC the common antidote to an oppressive sense of imminent death or disabling injury was boisterous entertainment of other squadrons and occasional excursions to St Omer, Amiens, Béthune or wherever they could do some shopping and enjoy a better meal than their own cooks could provide. Bridge and poker were popular, the latter particularly with Canadians and Americans. Gambling was seldom heavy: Service rates of pay took care of that.

  Collishaw, who had a great reputation for enlivening a party, described how the members of the squadrons on which he served worked hard and played hard. One of the main objects on guest nights was to ensure that the hosts regretted having invited their visitors. Messes were usually large wooden huts with no ceiling. A popular diversion was to jump up to grab the rafters and make concerted attempts to jerk them down and collapse the roof. These often succeeded.

  On one occasion, he says, when his squadron entertained No. 32, the guests were given the Visitors’ Cocktail, a tall glass containing everything in the bar. At the end of the revels, “we stacked them in a lorry like firewood and sent them home”. The next day, Brigadier General Longcroft, the Brigade Commander, turned up, did not specify his purpose, wandered about the hangars, peering speculatively about, then asked Collishaw’s squadron commander if his pilots had cracked up any aeroplanes that morning. Assured that there had been no accidents, the Brigadier asked if the dawn patrol had got off all right. “Of course,” said the CO, “why not?” Longcroft explained that he had been to 32’s aerodrome earlier and found the pilots in a sorry state. They had tried to send up a dawn patrol but two had crashed and the take-off had been abandoned. Few of Collishaw’s squadron had been fit to fly, “but the CO had scraped together a few hardened drinkers” and the dawn patrol had duly been carried out.

  He also said that when his squadron was at Luxeuil with the Escadrille Lafayette there were usually three poker games going on: one with a five-franc limit, another with a twenty-franc limit and the third with no limit. This last was the one that attracted most Canadians and Americans, each of whom would bring a roll of lavatory paper to the table on which to sign IOUs.

  Another diversion at Luxeuil when the weather turned freezing cold and the airfield was a morass, was provided by flooding a hangar to form an ice floor. On this, the British, Canadians and Americans played hockey. They had their own rules. “If a player was within ten feet of the puck he was fair game and could be tackled.” Such sport as this held no more appeal for the Aviation Militaire or Luftstreitkräfte than did playfully wrecking other squadrons’ messes as an expression of the greatest of good will and mutual esteem.

  Carousal was not a nightly event. Collishaw said that everyone was too tired. Flying six or seven hours a day was “a dreadfully fatiguing business” and even though they had all the energy and resilience of youth, it left them “too drained physically and emotionally to carry on late into the night”, unless bad weather prevented flying. The only break for the pilots on an RNAS squadron was the Navy’s traditional “make and mend” weekly half holiday. “The sensible thing, of course, would have been to spend the brief period in relaxation and roll into bed at an early hour. That was a little too much to expect of a group of young men such as we were.” What they did was rush through lunch and then make for the nearest large town for a “bangup” dinner and whatever other entertainment, “respectable and otherwise”, was on offer. They would return to base “befuddled but happy”, snatch a couple of hours’ sleep, then be roused for dawn patrol. “The onrush of cold fresh air into the open cockpits had a remarkably sobering effect.” Later generations of pilots would gratefully clamber aboard with a hangover and switch on the oxygen to obtain the same therapeutic effect.

  *

  If any Allied pilot relished killing as much as Richthofen, it was Billy Bishop. But whereas Richthofen enjoyed killing for its own sake, Bishop enjoyed killing only Germans. He hated them because they were the aggressors who had deliberately started the war. He also despised them.

  Collishaw declared himself not to be one of those few who hold the view that war is an ennobling and welcome experience. Only a psychopath or person without pity or principles who sees personal profit in war could hold such an opinion, he maintained. Bishop felt the same. Richthofen plainly did not and represented everything that these two sane young Canadians abhorred.

  Because he was killing the enemy, Bishop had enjoyed himself in April and he added to his enjoyment in the following few months. On 25th April he had been made a captain and given command of a flight; so was able to go off on his own when he felt like it, to emulate Ball and the other great British and French loners and try to exceed their scores. His excuse was that he preferred not to have others’ lives in his hands: a poor one for a professional officer at any time and for a flight commander hardly a good qualification. Typically, when on contact patrol and ground strafing he saw infantry in attack being slaughtered by machinegun and artillery fire, it exacerbated his hatred of the Germans. One day when he saw his own troops being cut to ribbons and forced to stop
and drop prone, he spotted a group of the enemy in a corner of a trench manning two Spandaus. He dived vertically at them, shooting. One of the guns returned his fire. From a height of thirty feet he “could make out every detail of the Huns’ frightened faces. With hate in my heart I fired every bullet I could at them.” A few minutes later he saw the British troops advancing again.

  “Soon after this new Hun-hatred had become a part of my soul,” he attacked a two-seater which presently turned tail and landed. To see the German alight under perfect control “filled me with a towering rage. I vowed an eternal vendetta against all the Hun two-seaters in the world.” He dived to within a few feet of the ground, firing a stream of bullets into the machine. “I had the satisfaction of knowing that the pilot and observer must have been hit or nearly scared to death.” He waited a while, but nobody emerged from the riddled aeroplane. Half an hour later he saw three Albatroses in combat with a Nieuport and shot one of them down with a short burst. The other British pilot sent another down. The third Albatros departed.

  Another day he saw three two-seaters artillery spotting and attacked them. Each fired a few rounds at him with both its guns, then they all fled. He followed and soon saw five scarlet Albatroses overhead. These belonged to Richthofen’s Jasta, No. II. He climbed above them, and while the two-seaters drew off he made a series of dives on the fighters. Their pilots had expected him to dive through them, but instead he zoomed when still over their heads, to make a series of diving attacks. This confused the rigidly drilled enemy, who scattered. He then set off to find the two-seaters, incensed because although they outnumbered and heavily outgunned him, they had refused combat. He shot one down, killed the observer in another and the third got away altogether.