They watched as Blue eased his Bristol Scout into the wind and then took off, hand perfectly steady, rising in a clean line.
“He’s a natural, Tommy – he can feel the plane.”
“Just as long as he don’t get too confident in himself, Noah!”
Frank took off, controlled and precise but stilted almost, as if he was flying by a rulebook in his head.
“He’ll be good, Tommy. He’ll never unclench his backside!”
“This one is my worry, Noah.”
James jerked into line and took off badly, hauling the Bristol into the air, almost bumping, snatching at the control lever as he tried to line up in the climb.
“Dead man walking, Tommy. Unless he loosens up, gets over his nerves, he’s gone.”
Joe joined the line, efficiently, showing just a little of flair.
“He’ll do well, provided he don’t get too confident too soon.”
Micky followed, casually right.
“Good. Provided he don’t go to sleep one day. You can be too easy.”
Noah’s six followed, showed the same mixture of confidence and competence, two of them noticeably less skilful.
“Both from the same training field. I’d like to go there and put a bullet into that commandant!”
“Not through the head though, Noah. It would bounce off.”
“There’s your first lad making his turn, losing height, correcting gently. He’ll do, Tommy.”
“He’ll be right, cobber!”
Frank made a clean turn, dropping no more than fifty feet; James followed him, a fraction too close and not quite in line astern as he entered his turn. Noah watched in horror.
“Bloody Hell!”
James survived his first turn, dropping two hundred feet but clawing back to line and altitude; he entered the second visibly unsure, banking, pulling back, trying again, hesitating and then pushing far too hard. He snapped sharply to the right, put a wing down and flipped into a spin, frantically trying to heave the controls to the left. He hit nose down and exploded into flames on the edge of the field. Joe, immediately behind him, craned his head out of the cockpit, watched him crash and then moved perfectly into his own bank, a precise ninety degree turn, losing not a foot.
“There is a very good pilot, Tommy! You’ve got a winner in that man.”
“He’ll leave me behind, Noah. Good man!”
Micky also showed himself in control, carried on with the exercise.
Noah’s six came up to the thinning cloud of black smoke – petrol burning hot but fast – and made their turns, the two rear men very uncertainly. They proceeded, the pilot at the very end losing distance and then trying to hurry to catch up, drifting wide on the third turn which pulled him even further back; he pushed too hard and fell into a spin on the fourth.
By the end of the day, the nine remaining were in control of their planes, all of them within reason competent. None of them seemingly, allowing the fate that befell James to distract them from their training. Any bleak thoughts they may have harboured were kept firmly to themselves.
The new CO joined Tommy and Noah in the Mess before dinner.
“Major Kite, gentlemen, known, inevitably, as Balloon. From the Brigadier’s staff and prior to that I was with Two Squadron. We have, of course, met in passing, Tommy, and I have bumped into you as well, Noah. I seem to remember an evening in your Mess – actually, that’s untrue, I fuzzily recall such an event. I believe you were singing a most interesting song, Noah!”
“I only know one song, sir. I’m glad it did not offend.”
“Anything but! You’ve lost three from twelve, Captain Pearson tells me, Tommy. He is busy with the paperwork that accidents generate – your signatures will be demanded, I would imagine.”
“The figure is better than I had hoped, sir. When I spoke to General Henderson, I told him I expected to drop six.”
“The old story, I presume? Seven or eight hours in total then trying to take up a rotary.”
“Just that, sir. That leaves me with a Flight of five, self included; Noah with six. The BE2cs need another man, but I would like to keep all of ours – for spares, you know.”
“Make it so. No sense to trying to make up another Flight. What have you in mind for tomorrow?”
“Formation and a crack at low level work in the morning. Afternoon, I’m not certain. What do you say to taking them over the Trenches and dropping a bomb from height, Noah?”
Noah did not approve; he thought there was too great a chance that they might attract a Fokker. They would be one of many targets on Saturday but would be exposing the boys too much on their own on Friday.
“Point taken. We need a bombing range, sir – a place where we could give them some practice in taking off laden.”
“Noted, but the Frogs might not be so keen on our dropping bombs on their civilians. No sense of humour – never have had.”
“Very sad. Will you be introducing yourself at dinner, sir?”
“Not a lot of choice. No time for anything else and I don’t want to delay till tomorrow.”
“Probably right. The habit of Dining In, sir, still exists in this squadron.”
Major Kite shook his head.
“I knew Wilbraham as well, Tommy. Complete prick. The habit ended with him. We dine together as a squadron when possible, but formal games are not needed. Was I you, Tommy, I would give your lads the afternoon off – you might be pushing too hard. They need to learn, but they don’t need to be driven.”
“So be it, sir.”
Tommy took the gentle suggestion as the order it was.
An hour of low-flying, which the boys all claimed to have enjoyed, was followed by a perambulation on the British side of the trench line, familiarising themselves with the lay of the land.
Lunch and then the afternoon off, granted on the grounds that they had learned more quickly than expected.
“Take off at dawn, fully bombed up. It may be noisy during the night, but not as much as it should be – they are still short of shells.”
The Scouts were ready, bombed up, before dawn.
The two Flights briefed separately but were to hold to four thousand feet in line abreast, Tommy first, Noah behind.
“Keep your heads turning, swinging left and right, up and down, and behind you as well. Watch me. Hold the line. I will dive, if we must. Follow as a line astern behind me. Drop the bombs when you see the man in front do so. That should give us a spread, I hope. Don’t stop around, looking at what you’ve done. Return to four thousand feet and join up with me. If I’m not there, form up on Blue and he will take you straight back home. If you can’t see Blue, then it’s Frank and if we get down to Micky, you just hop off on your own, mate!”
They laughed – he couldn’t be serious, after all!
“If I can see no target at the Trenches themselves, then I will lead you further over Hunland. When I see something interesting I will fire a green flare and as soon as you see it, release the bombs. If any hostile Hun comes buzzing up to you, get rid of your bomb load and dive to the right – but don’t get into a spin! Nothing can catch you in a sharp turn right. Go straight home. The Fokkers will not cross our Trenches, for fear of being shot down and allowing us to examine their front-firing gun.”
“That sounds like running away, Tommy.”
“That’s because running away is exactly what we shall be doing, Frank. We are carrying no gun, so we cannot fight. When we can fight, we will; when we can’t…”
“We won’t,” Frank finished for him.
“You have learned the first lesson. Time we were away. One last word. What do you do if your engine cuts out on take off, or, indeed, in flight?”
Frank answered for the Flight.
“Never turn back!”
“Just that – you may glide a distance in a straight line, but a turn will take you into a stall, nine times out of ten.”
“But, Tommy, what do we do if the glide is going to take us over the Ge
rman lines?”
“Practice saying the word ‘Kamerad’.”
“I’m not sure that’s funny, Tommy!”
“Did you see me laughing, Frank?”
They took off, without mishap despite the weight of the bomb load making the planes sluggish.
The great offensive had started on time, but the preliminary barrage had been half-hearted and the opposing trenches were full of machine-guns and men. Some of the attackers had made it across and had taken parts of the first trench; many lay outstretched in the mud between the lines. Nowhere was there a sign of white sheets, Tommy was relieved to see. There was some sort of fog in places, but he could see no calls for help from the air. He lifted his right hand and waved the Flight further across.
Three miles back and he could see evidence of movement, a brigade at least of German infantry forming up, troops coming out of rest to bolster the front. Archie was busier here as well, as if they had been set to protect the areas where the infantry would cluster. There would be machine-guns at lower level. Tommy slowed and loaded the Very pistol, took a quick guess of wind speed, distance and height and fired the flare and dropped his eight Hales bombs. He looked over his shoulder, saw the boys releasing theirs. He raised his hand and gave the return signal, leading the Flight to the left and trying to look for evidence of the bombs landing; he saw nothing.
They landed and reported to the Intelligence Officer, quickly briefing the boys.
“This is important, we must give all of the information we can. One at a time.”
The boys told all that they had done, which did not sound very much: ‘flew somewhere, dropped the bombs when we were told, came home again’.
“Did any of you see explosions?”
“We hit a farmhouse, two or three hundred yards away from the troops.”
“Well spotted, Micky.”
The Intelligence Officer told them that the fog they had spotted was chlorine gas, which had probably not been very effective, due to the light wind which would hardly have blown the gas across the German lines.
Noah landed with all of his Flight; they reported missing a railway junction.
The CO came out and told them they would be carrying the one-hundred pound bombs next; they were to take off and drop them on artillery emplacements, ideally on the German side of the trenches.
“The attack has been halted by concentrated barrages in our sector. The Germans have brought guns forward and set them up on a temporary gun line, which, being new, will probably be unprotected from the air. So Intelligence informs us; they say it takes a day at least to emplace an anti-aircraft gun. The gun line is some two miles to the rear of the trenches and it is very important that we should hit it.”
Tommy and Noah walked off to the side.
“Low-level, Tommy.”
“No alternative. Go in at three thou’ and locate the line, fly over to the east, make a fast right turn and dive to fifty feet, cut speed to just above stall and drop. The old story.”
“Climb out? I’m more inclined to run remaining at low level, zig-zagging but making speed.”
“Give it a try. If it’s a long line, we can go in abreast, all eleven of us. What do you say to carrying a gun, Noah?”
Noah added-up for a second, decided that the weight would work. They turned to their mechanics, instructed them to fit the Lewis, left wing, angled out to avoid the airscrew.
“Get the Armourer to bring us out a spare!” Noah called after them.
“Why?”
“I’ll bet they’ve never touched one, Tommy.”
Joe had been to a Military College – a beast that none of the others had heard of; he could strip a Lewis blindfold, so he said. He demonstrated how to load and remove and replace a pan with a minimum of effort, and he gave advice on firing.
“Bursts of five to eight rounds – time yourself by saying ‘and one’. In the air, with the flow of cold air preventing overheating, you can double that in safety.”
“Exactly, lads,” Tommy interrupted. “When flying, say ‘and two’.”
It was instructive to see the order in which they started laughing; Frank had to have it explained to him.
Joe grinned and repeated his words, for the benefit of those who did not understand first time.
Tommy took over the demonstration.
“Right, gentlemen. Now for the bit you may not like. We do not indulge in things called ‘fair fights’. In Joe’s terminology, being an American, we bushwack the Hun. Get behind, take him by surprise, and shoot him to pieces. I have four kills to my name, and Noah has three, all achieved by firing from behind. You will attempt to match us, and that’s an order, and you will do so without taking unnecessary risks. We are not knights in shining armour, gentlemen – and, thinking on it, we ain’t gentlemen either! By the way, do you remember what happened to the knights in shining armour?”
Joes answered, his American twang exaggerated.
“Agincourt and Crecy, Tommy. You bloody English peasants shot ‘em to bits with your longbows. As I recall reading about the battle, the Frogs thought it was most uncouth of you.”
“So they did – and we are just as uncouth as our ancestors!”
“Cry Haro! And loose the dogs of war, Tommy?”
“Rather literary for a Digger, Micky?”
“You know us Aussies, Tommy – dirty dogs to the last man!”
“Was that Shakespeare, Micky, seriously now?”
“He was having an off-day at the time, boss.”
Tommy retired from the fray – he had heard of Shakespeare, but that did not mean he had actually read him, still less seen a play.
“I see our mechanics and the armourers leaving the planes, gentlemen. Time to go. Line abreast, follow my lead. Come home again!”
There were a few machine-guns and a number of rifles around the gun line, but they were looking forwards and were taken by surprise by the low-flying planes, hit none of them. The half a ton of high explosive landed on and about the guns, destroying one or two, they thought, but scything through the gunners and detonating ready rounds and cutting the field-telephone wires that contacted them with their observers. It was an effective attack, in terms of what was possible, and reduced artillery fire in that sector for the remainder of the day. They landed unscathed and elated – they were real airmen now, they believed.
Major Kite stood with the Intelligence Officer, listening to their reports and congratulating them. He took Tommy and Noah into his office afterwards.
“The BE2cs went out as well, Tommy, spotting for the guns and trying to map the success of the attack. There was a pair of Fokkers up and we lost three, including both Flight commanders.”
“Five left?”
“They go up again this afternoon. They think that Peter Parker’s observer damaged one of the Fokkers as he went down, so there might not be two up this time.”
“Three months before the FEs and DH2s come out, sir. Not before January.”
“Then we must resign ourselves to greater losses, Tommy. There is nothing we can do about them. Two more patrols for you this afternoon, Tommy, Noah. Deep penetration, the first. Hales bombs, four of them, twenty pounders, and then machine-guns. There is said to be a concentration of cavalry, massed against the possibility of a breakthrough at Loos, about six miles back. Intelligence says that the Hun has discovered the existence of our brigades of horse waiting to exploit any breach in the trench lines and has set their own in place to hold them if the breakthrough occurs. You are to locate the cavalry and seriously upset them.”
It was unpleasant; they did not like the idea of going out to slaughter hundreds of horses.
“I might be more concerned about the men – but, each to his own.”
“The horses didn’t volunteer, sir.”
“Maybe.”
“Low level again, lads. Drop the bombs and then bank left, port wing dipping and allowing you to scatter machine-gun fire on the target. We are to destroy the threat of cavalry.
We will do so.”
“What about Archie, Tommy?”
“We are hunting cavalry, dear boy. They might throw their lances at us, or even wave a sabre or two, but firearms are a little too advanced for their thinking. Yoicks, Tally-ho does not work against aeroplanes, but they have yet to discover that fact. We shall teach them.”
“Will they learn, Tommy?”
“Not a hope in hell, Micky – if they had the capacity to learn they would not be riding horses into a modern war.”
“Pity about the horses, Tommy.”
“Agreed, but we must cripple the brains of the cavalry.”
It had not occurred to Tommy that the cavalry would be dismounted, the horses tied in their lines and the men lounging in theirs, mostly sat about their cooking fires. He had had an unformed vision of the troopers waiting in their squadrons, about to perform a charge. As it was, they flew in search of the horsemen, spotted their camp and were able to swing into a dive and drop their bombs at fifty feet and then machine-gun the scattering men while the horses screamed, dragged out their picket ropes and ran, mostly unharmed. There was a grove of tall trees to the side of the meadows where the cavalry had deployed, Lombardy poplars Tommy thought, as he hastily pulled up to one hundred feet. One of Noah’s youngsters saw them too late and hit hard against a trunk, but there were no other casualties, except, they hoped, among the cavalrymen.
Major Kite was not displeased.
“Lost one – could have been much worse, Tommy. What sort of damage did you do?”
“We bombed and scattered a large camp of cavalry. I cannot imagine that they would be able to reform today, sir, and expect they will have injured and exhausted horses to bring back into condition. Two days before any of that brigade are useful? Might be longer, but I doubt it. That sort of attack would be very useful in the minutes before they went into battle – but I don’t see a lot of value in it in the days beforehand, sir.”
“Point taken, Tommy. What’s your view, Noah?”
“Much the same, sir. We would have been better used hitting a supply dump, in my opinion. Better still if we could have found the cookhouses sending hot food up to the front. Kill the cooks and destroy their kitchens and the men at the front will fight worse for being hungry.”
No Longer A Game (Innocents At War Series, Book 3) Page 10
