Hornet’s Sting

by Derek Robinson

  Mackenzie flew the Nieuport. He’d had a bath and a nap, and he’d discarded the eyepatch. His fleece-lined coat had turned up. “I feel spiffing,” he told Dingbat. “Show me the Boche and I’ll doom him.” His left eye was bloodshot and leaking tears, and it was slow to follow the movements of the right eye.

  “That bus of yours,” Dingbat said. “It’s no good for strafing. Not rugged enough. Too ...”

  “Too frail,” Mackenzie said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But that’s the trick. It’s such a butterfly, the bullets go straight through it. They just make holes. Don’t you see?”

  Dingbat had no time to argue. He had a flight to look after. “Get in fast, and get out even faster,” he said. “Don’t hang about.”

  Woolley’s briefing had been simple. The plan was to find Passchendaele, machine-gun the German trenches and gun-pits, kill as many as possible, force the rest to keep their heads down, and give the Canadians a chance to advance. That was the plan. As the squadron flew over Ypres, the weather began to interfere. There was mist all the way to the target. Sometimes it looked more like fog.

  Woolley flew by dead reckoning. When his cockpit watch told him Passchendaele was below, he fired a red signal flare. At once the squadron split up and peeled off; each pilot went down into the mist and looked for trouble.

  Mackenzie found it almost at once. The air was so murky that he could see little of the ground from three hundred feet. He sideslipped, making it easier to search. At two hundred feet, lines of yellow tracer stabbed through the mist, so close that it scared and elated him. He dived again. At a hundred feet he saw trees poking up, not real trees, just tattered stubs. The tracer was still chasing him. The gun was very near; he could hear its kettledrum rattle above the engine roar. He kept banking, losing height, searching, and through the swirl of mist he saw a line of ruins, thick with troops, and he felt like an angel. It was such an absurd idea that he dismissed it; but as he flew at the enemy the Nieuport was Mackenzie and Mackenzie was the Nieuport. Only gods could fly. He switchbacked along the lines of ruins, rising and swooping, hammering the panicky soldiers with bursts from the Vickers and the Lewis. The ruins came to an end and so did the taste of bliss. He climbed hard to escape the rattle of groundfire. The mist closed in. Slyly, his memory offered a picture of a crackling fire in a Yorkshire beech wood, offering the comfort of warmth when what he had felt was sadness after triumph and a thirst for even more triumph.

  He was climbing when the heavy machine gun, firing blind, spraying bullets, hosing the mist in hope, got the reward for never giving in. It splashed a dozen bullets across the Nieuport. Every fourth bullet was incendiary. One incendiary hit the tank. The tank was one quarter-full of petrol vapour. The Nieuport exploded like a firework display with a stick of dynamite in the middle. Mackenzie saw nothing; not even the flash.

  Woolley saw the flash through the thin top of the mist. It was a mile away and yet it was so bright that he blinked. When he looked again there was a brief, soft glow; then nothing.

  On all sides, thin white rockets soared and died. The Canadians were attacking; the Hun troops were calling for help. In a few seconds, German shells would be drilling holes in the air and smashing gaps in the attack. Woolley dived back into the mist and shot off the rest of his ammunition.

  The squadron landed at Poperinghe in ones and twos. Several had got lost in the mist; after so much violent banking and turning, their compasses were haywire. Every machine had been hit. A gunner had a bullet in his chest. A pilot had a shattered hip. One Biff was missing, and the Nieuport.

  O’Neill asked his usual questions. Nobody had much to say.

  “Fog,” Dingbat told him. “Can you spell fog?”

  Captain Delancey stayed at the aerodrome long enough to get official word that the Canadians had taken Passchendaele. By then it was nightfall and Cleve-Cutler was already mixing Hornet’s Sting in a wooden tub. The adjutant came into the mess and Cleve-Cutler summoned him to taste it. “More rum?” the adjutant suggested.

  “Excellent.” Another jar of rum went in.

  Woolley was playing “Colonel Bogey” with one finger on the piano. He kept hitting a dead note. “This wouldn’t happen to Richthofen,” he told the adjutant. “His circus has a Bechstein double grand.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Tuned daily,” Woolley said. “By Beethoven’s grandson.”

  “Do me a favour, old chap. A couple of rooms have to be cleared out. A bit of moral support would be welcome. Frankly, it’s not my cup of tea.”

  They went to Mackenzie’s room first. His valise was on the bed, unopened.

  “We’d better have a look inside,” the adjutant said. “Last week I found a small Stilton in one chap’s bag.” They spread the contents of the valise on the bed.

  “Nothing special,” Woolley said. “The usual junk. All very forgettable.”

  They began repacking. “I’ll keep it in the orderly room for a couple of days,” the adjutant said. “You never know.”

  “Bully for you,” Woolley said.

  The adjutant fastened the straps, and looked around. “Right,” he said. “Ready for the replacement.”

  “You’ll never replace that one, Uncle,” Woolley said. “Here: let me carry that.” They stepped out into the night. “Peaceful, isn’t it?” Woolley said. The rumble of gunfire had ceased; the moon was up. “Never mind,” he said, “we’ll soon put a stop to that.”

  Author’s Note

  Hornet’s Sting is fiction based on fact. The reader is entitled to know which is which. My account of the war as it was fought on the Western Front in 1917 is fact, whereas most of the characters are invented (“Boom” Trenchard is an exception). I have tried to relate the facts of what happened in 1917 to the day-to-day life of a (mythical) squadron of the Royal Flying Corps.

  Thus the descriptions of aircraft – especially the Sopwith Pup, the Nieuport Scout and the Bristol Fighter – are as accurate as I could make them. So is my reference to pilots’ skills, or lack of them. Flying training was still a pretty hit-or-miss affair in the First World War. Twice as many pilots were killed in training as died on active service. How to get out of a spin was widely regarded as a mystery. For example: two of the R.F.C.’s most successful pilots were James McCudden and Mick Mannock. When Mannock first arrived in France, in 1917, he asked: “What do I do if I go into a spin?” McCudden said, “Put all controls central and pray like hell.” That was the general state of knowledge, and I applied it to Hornet Squadron.

  “Boom” Trenchard commanded the R.F.C., and he preached the gospel of the offensive spirit at all times. His policy pervades Hornet’s Sting. There is evidence that German morale suffered from the presence of British machines, constantly patrolling behind enemy Lines. Equally there is evidence that morale in British squadrons suffered because deep patrols were always carried out at a serious disadvantage. Lieutenant A. S. G. Lee flew Pups with 46 Squadron in France for most of 1917. (He reached the rank of air vice-marshal in the Second World War.) Although he supported Trenchard’s offensive spirit, he attacked the way it was applied. Trenchard’s offensive strategy, Lee said, was “in effect, a territorial offensive”, in which Trenchard believed that “for a British aeroplane to be one mile across the trenches was offensive: for it to be ten miles over was more offensive”. Lee argued that this was nonsense. Treating the air like the land – as something to be captured – was a fundamental mistake, and Trenchard’s crews paid for it.

  Deep patrols were handicapped by the prevailing westerly wind. If a pilot was wounded, an engine failed, or a gun jammed, the crew was probably lost. Without parachutes (which were never issued to the R.F.C.) the likelihood was that the machine would be destroyed and the crew killed. There were times in 1917 when, according to Lee, British air losses were almost four times as great as German – and this when the R.F.C. was far below strength in men and machines. In his book No Parachute (Jarrolds, 1968), Lee described the R.F.C.’s
distant offensive strategy as one of “sending obsolescent machines deep into German-held territory” and said it was “incomprehensible even at the time”. In any war, soldiers (and airmen) gain experience by fighting, but Trenchard’s stubborn insistence on Deep Offensive Patrols was so costly that the question must be asked: what profit is experience to the dead?

  The Western Front was a cosmopolitan place. I have tried to reflect this, and not only in the make-up of the squadron. Chinese labour squads worked behind the Lines; there was a Portuguese division in the trenches, as well as a Russian regiment. Russian officers occasionally visited the R.F.C. There is no evidence that they served with a squadron. The Bolshevik assassins are my invention.

  The introduction of Bristol Fighters was as disastrous as I describe. In April 1917, on their first patrol, the tactics of close formation flying protected by intensive crossfire proved to be a complete failure. Five Albatros D-IIIs led by Richthofen shot down four out of six Bristol Fighters and badly damaged a fifth. Tactics were quickly changed; thereafter the Biff was flown aggressively, as a fighter, and it proved to be a great success.

  Captain Albert Ball’s astonishing career is accurately summarised in the story. One of Ball’s many skills was his ability to penetrate an enemy formation and fly his Nieuport so close to his target that other enemy machines were afraid to fire at him. After that, the problem was how to escape. This kind of air fighting called for enormous courage, but courage was not enough – as Ball and Mackenzie discovered. They also needed luck.

  Details of the battles of Arras and Third Ypres – the bombardments, the tunnel under Arras, the swamp maps made by the Tank Corps, the casualty figures, the persistent bad weather, and so on – are all based on records of the fighting. Passchendaele was taken by Canadian troops with the help of ground-strafing by the R.F.C. The village (or rather its ruins) was about five miles from the Allied Lines at Ypres, where the battle had begun more than three months earlier. All this gain in ground, and more, was lost six months later.

  I have tried not to exaggerate the appetite in R.F.C. squadrons for destructive horseplay and violent games during what the crews called “binges”. But records show that exaggeration would be difficult. Pianos really were destroyed, furniture was smashed, revolvers were fired, much alcohol got drunk, occasionally blood was shed, and sometimes farm animals were found in bedrooms. None of this is surprising. Life was short; while it lasted, it was celebrated strenuously.

  Which brings me to the episode where Mackenzie and Tyndall swap cockpits while their Biff is airborne. The late Squadron Leader Wally Wallens (who won a D.F.C. in 1940 for shooting down three Me-109s in one day) told me that in 1937 he and another trainee pilot performed the cockpit-swapping trick three times in succession, always without wearing parachutes. They were flying an Audax, an open-cockpit biplane not unlike a Bristol Fighter. They landed after each swap. Their purpose was to annoy an unpopular flight sergeant whose job was to record aircraft movements. He became increasingly confused when the pilot who landed was not the pilot who had taken off.

  Mackenzie himself is not a model citizen. In some respects he is similar to Cattermole, a fighter pilot in my novel Piece of Cake, about the Battle of Britain. Some retired RAF officers found Cattermole unacceptable. Others did not. Group Captain Myles Duke-Woolley, D.S.O., D.F.C., commanded a Hurricane squadron that fought in the Battle of Britain. “I go along with all your characters,” he told me; and added that when he was asked if a squadron should get rid of an especially maverick pilot, he advised them to keep him. “He was bad for discipline but good for morale,” he said. “Every squadron should have just the one.”

  The presence of Dabinett and Klagsburn in France is an echo of the visit by an American film crew to the Western Front in 1917. They came to make a film that would stimulate enthusiasm in the American people for the war. What they saw in the trenches was not encouraging, so they went to Palestine, where the British Army was visibly winning a war against Turkey.

  One of the most difficult things to capture in a story of this sort is the outlook of the people. We know now that the United States joined the Allies in 1917, and that the war ended in 1918. With hindsight, it’s tempting to see 1917 as a year of hanging on, of summoning up the strength for one last Big Push. But that was not how most people felt at the time. It was a very bad year, all blood and mud: colossal bombardments, huge battles, appalling losses, and virtually no change. Three years of massive effort had failed to break the deadlock on the Western Front. Most soldiers thought the war would last for years, perhaps for another decade, perhaps even for a generation. As late as September 1918, Lord Northcliffe, who owned the Daily Mail, and had led a mission to the US in 1917 and so might be expected to see the big picture, declared, “None of us will live to see the end of the war.” So when Hornet Squadron held its smoking concert in Trenchard’s presence, McWatters’ sketch about how the war had lasted in the 1920s or 1930s was not just gallows humour. Many men could see no alternative.

  It is not easy to enter the mind-set of young pilots whose expectation of life was measured in weeks, perhaps only days, in a war that threatened to outlast everyone. This knowledge was yet another test to be added to the everyday strains of the Deep Offensive Patrols: fatigue, bitter cold, ceaseless searching of the sky, sudden frantic combat, the sight of a flamer, the loss of a comrade, the frequent arrivals of replacements. To fly with the R.F.C. was to fight a separate war with one’s own fears, and to stretch one’s endurance to the limit. There was no science of post-operative trauma in 1917. Shell-shock was barely acknowledged. In keeping with this, I have tried to describe the treatment of mental casualties, such as Spud Ogilvy, according to the very narrow understanding of the day. If Hornet’s Sting comes across as an account of just one damn thing after another, such is the nature of war. 1917 happened to be a worse year than most.