Periodically the station’s instructors and Major Moore met to review the progress and problems of the pilots-in-training. In the course of one session Captain Gran said, “and now, Lieutenant Bishop . . .” Major Moore cut him short with an impatient gesture. “Don’t trouble to report on Bishop,” he said, “I’ve ordered his travel pass.”
In air force jargon that meant that Bishop was being dismissed.
Captain Gran pleaded for another chance for Bishop. Gran was probably the only instructor at Northolt who would have dared argue a decision after it was handed down by Major Moore. But Gran was no ordinary airman. He was a Norwegian, and the only subject of a foreign neutral country accepted to serve in the Royal Flying Corps in World War I. This unique dispensation was a recognition of the fact that Gran had served gallantly with Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated second expedition to the Antarctic, which resulted in Scott’s death on his return trek from the South Pole.
At any rate Bishop got a reprieve from Major Moore, a memorable tongue-lashing, and applied himself to the task of learning how to fly passably enough to win his wings. His last few hours of advanced training were spent in night flying.
The terrifying memory of night flying in 1916 planes with 1916 ground equipment remained with Bishop all his life. He would, he said, prefer to fight a dozen aerial battles against any odds—in daylight—than attempt one night takeoff and landing. “It was like being dumped into an unknown lake at midnight.”
Bishop consoled himself with the knowledge that at the front there was no night flying. Dawn patrols, yes; dusk reconnaissance, yes. But the hours of darkness, so seasoned pilots had assured him, were traditionally spent in the pursuit of relaxation in the squadron mess or in the nearest town. With a week’s graduation leave he went up to London, was duly congratulated and lodged by Lady St. Helier, and celebrated feverishly until his assignment came through. It was: Report to Suttons Farm, on the Thames estuary, for anti-Zeppelin night duty.
Little is remembered half a century later of the Zeppelin war into which Bishop was thrust at the end of 1916, and what is remembered is surrounded somehow by an aura of improbability, almost of grim humour. But in its own way this Battle of Britain was almost as crucial as the struggle that was to be fought a generation later. The statistics of the Zeppelin raids sound less than decisive, as military statistics go. In less than two years in 1915–16 one hundred and thirty Zeppelins crossed the coast of Britain in thirty-seven raids. They dropped 4,500 bombs, killed four hundred persons, mostly civilians; injured a thousand persons and caused six million dollars’ property damage (including farm livestock).
Royal Flying Corps pilots flew two hundred sorties against the raiding Zeppelins and the few who sighted the dirigibles attacked them with a strange variety of weapons: incendiary bullets, then in the experimental stage; incendiary darts, which were so ineffectual that they never got out of the experimental stage; and hand-launched bombs. There is no certain evidence in the official record of the Zeppelin Battle of Britain that (a) any bombs were actually thrown in anger toward a Zeppelin or (b) that any bombs ever landed on a Zeppelin. But it is a recorded fact that thirty-one of the defending pilots crashed, several of them with fatal results, on the makeshift flare-lighted fields provided for home defence pilots. It was perhaps understandable that a belief developed, and gained support even in War Office circles, that the Zeppelins were surrounded by a layer of inert gas that prevented incendiary missiles from taking effect.
But the destruction and casualties caused by the Zeppelin raids were trivial compared with the damage they were doing to civilian morale and, even more important, to Britain’s war production and transportation. In 1915 and 1916 the submarine blockade and heavy losses of men and material on the battlefield forced Britain into a situation where she could survive only by producing guns and ammunition, ships, planes and transport around the clock. But the sighting of one or two Zeppelins crossing the English coast would halt work in hundreds of factories and stop freight trains and truck convoys in areas many miles away from the airships’ course. The reason was that British officials responsible for war production and home defence had not devised an effective selective warning system that could chart the course of the raiders and warn workers to douse lights and seek shelter only in areas of possible attack. As a result tens of thousands of workers refused to stay on the job once a Zeppelin alarm was sounded.
Fixed anti-aircraft batteries “defended” obviously strategic points, but many large cities were undefended. Not until later (too late to a large extent) did mobile anti-aircraft mounted on trucks stand at the ready to speed to places under attack. On March 5, 1916, the Zeppelin L-14, commanded by Captain-Lieutenant Bocker, hovered over the city of Hull from 12.05 midnight until 12.15, dropping bombs with deliberate aim on the city and the docks. The British and the German reports of this attack were essentially the same, although with different emphasis, of course.
The British report: “We counted seven high-explosive and thirteen incendiary bombs, four of the latter falling in the river. The main damage was to houses near the docks.”
The German report: “The most striking result was the collapse of whole blocks of houses, and these afterwards showed up against the snow as big black patches.”
An hour later Captain Victor Schutze guided his Zeppelin L-11 over Hull and, again unmolested, dropped bombs on the city for twenty minutes. Schutze reported: “The town, though very well darkened, showed up under the starlight like a drawing. A few lights were moving on the streets. Buildings went up like packs of cards. With binoculars it was possible to see people running hither and thither in the glare of the fires. In the harbour ships began to move out.”
Serious civilian disorders resulted from the bombings. The official British report admits: “Great feeling was aroused in Hull. That Zeppelins should be allowed to hover over the town without any attempt to attack them from land or from the air led to many forceful protests. The feeling was such that a Royal Flying Corps transport was attacked and damaged by a crowd, and a Royal Flying Corps officer was mobbed.”
An indication of the concern of British authorities over the effects of the Zeppelin raids was an order issued to RFC pilots at two airfields: “A pilot having expended his ammunition in attack on a Zeppelin without apparent effect, and observing that the enemy airship continues on its way to the target, will ram said enemy airship.” There is no record that an RFC night-fighter pilot ever actually carried out the suicide order, but years later Air Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, who was an RFC officer in World War I, said: “I certainly think a great many officers would have deliberately charged a Zeppelin if they had met it.”
Bishop, who shared with one other pilot (an awesome veteran with all of forty hours of solo flying to his credit) the defence of a strategic fifty miles of the Thames estuary, repeatedly had nightmares in which a Zeppelin loomed ahead of his plane in the night sky. “The inevitable result was that I went down in an uncontrolled spin, while the Zeppelin cruised on toward London.”
It was not until early in the morning of September 3, 1916—nearly two years after the first Zeppelin raid on Britain—that the first airship was shot down over Britain by a night fighter. The victory could not have come at a more opportune time for Britain. Emboldened by the lack of effective resistance, the Germans had been sending stronger and stronger forces. The armada that crossed the English coast on the night of September 2 was the largest yet—fourteen Zeppelins.
Lieutenant Leefe Robinson, who kept vigil at Suttons Farm field a few weeks before Bishop was assigned there, took off at eleven o’clock that night, his machine-gun armed with a new type of incendiary bullets. He succeeded in coaxing his plane to the extraordinary height of 12,900 feet and roamed the night skies over the Thames estuary until two in the morning when he sighted a Zeppelin, the LS II. Three drums of ammunition set the Zeppelin afire and it crashed at Cuffley and burned for two hours. Robinson won the Victoria Cross for breaking the
Zeppelins’ long invulnerability. In the next four raids five Zeppelins were shot down. By the time Bishop went to Suttons Farm the raids had dwindled to the point where the hazards of the assignment consisted of the ever-present dangers of night flying—and loneliness.
Bishop’s second Christmas Day in England started off to be even more lonely than his first. In the hut on the aerodrome at Suttons Farm he and his fellow pilot cooked their own Christmas dinner, including a ten-pound turkey. “While the big bird roasted,” Bishop said in a letter home, “it struck us how absurd it was for the two of us to tackle all that food alone. So we telephoned a local hotel on a sudden impulse and told the manager to send out any guests who seemed to have nowhere to go. Alas for our ten-pound turkey. The guests from the hotel kept coming until there were twenty of them. But by some miracle we managed to feed the hungry score and stir up a little jollity. But night shut in early, the guests departed, and once more we took up our wintry vigil.”
By late February it became obvious that the Zeppelin raids were a thing of the past, and Bishop received his long-awaited transfer to a fighter squadron at the front. The commander of the Royal Flying Corps in France, General Hugh M. Trenchard, had asked for more pilots and more squadrons at the front in preparation for a spring offensive—even at the expense of the Home Defence squadrons.
Early in March, Bishop was told to report to the War Office for orders to proceed to France. His hopes of becoming a fighter pilot were to be realized. The night before he reported he met the leading British ace, Albert Ball, who was on leave in London. Ball, who had shot down twenty-nine enemy planes, enthralled Bishop with tales of his exploits.
Ball more than any other pilot symbolized the individual tenacity and bravery of the British airmen. He had attacked as many as forty German planes single-handed. It was due to the courage of individual fighters like him that the Allies had overcome the “Fokker menace” and had gained supremacy of the air in 1916.
The French, too, played a gallant part. Ball himself ranked Georges Guynemer, a short man, weak in physique, who some said suffered from tuberculosis, as the bravest of all. In one day Guynemer had shot down four German planes. By the end of 1916 he had brought down twenty-five enemy planes and his score was still climbing.
The Germans had suffered heavily and had lost their two top aces. Max Immelmann was killed in the summer of 1916. Oswald Boelcke crashed to his death in November that same year, when he collided with one of his own pilots. But before he died Boelcke had brought down the incredible total of forty Allied planes.
By early 1917, the Germans were preparing for an all-out effort in the air to regain their lost supremacy. In the vanguard of the attack was the man who had assumed Boelcke’s mantle and who had been his protégé—Baron Manfred von Richthofen. A former cavalry officer and a fearless fighter, Richthofen had already brought down twenty-one Allied planes by the beginning of March 1917.
“There’s going to be a whale of a scrap out there before long,” Ball told Bishop. The following morning, when Bishop reported at the War Office, he could hardly believe his good fortune. He was to join 60 Squadron—the squadron in which Ball had served and which, to a great extent through Ball’s efforts, had become the most famous fighter unit in France.
On the evening of March 17, Bishop arrived at Filescamp Farm, the home of 60 Squadron, located adjacent to the hamlet of Izel-le-Hameau. The farm had been requisitioned from its owner, Monsieur Tétus, for the duration. Its proximity to the front fifteen miles away meant only a few minutes’ flying time to get over the lines, yet it was far enough away to be out of the range of no-man’s-land. The field itself, while flat and open, was by no means ideal for landing and taking off. Monsieur Tétus, who continued to reside on the farm with his family (and the young maid who did not escape special attention from the pilots), had grown turnips on the field before it became an aerodrome. This made it hard and bumpy and many a pilot, Bishop in particular, used this as a welcome excuse on which to blame poor landings.
But to Keith “Grid” Caldwell, the swarthy New Zealander commanding C Flight to whom Billy reported on arrival, Lieutenant Bishop was just another eager, untested young pilot. He seemed likely to end up a casualty before the month of March was out.
And a week later, as we already know, Bishop sat beside his damaged plane in no-man’s-land under the guns of an anti-aircraft battery, equally convinced that he had muffed his chance to become a fighter pilot.
In the afternoon the squadron tender arrived from Filescamp field, dismantled Bishop’s Nieuport and took it in tow. By daylight it was comparatively easy to pick a route over the devastated land. Bishop noted in his diary: “Oh those villages, absolutely nothing left of them.”
Eight miles from Filescamp the tender became hopelessly bogged down in the mud as darkness fell. Bishop and the mechanics worked half the night trying to get rolling. They finally had to give up and Bishop told the crew: “Get some sleep if you can. I’ll walk back and send some help.”
He arrived at Filescamp at 6 a.m. just as the first patrol was taking off. Jack Scott gave him a warm welcome.
“Got a call from General Higgins about you,” he told Bishop.
Bishop’s spirits sagged. “He’s sending up my replacement?”
“Didn’t mention that, as I recall,” said Scott with a grin. “He said, ‘give Lieutenant Bishop my congratulations—tell him good show and many more of them.’ Didn’t you know that you got a confirmed kill before your forced landing?”
An immense sense of relief flooded over Bishop. “You mean I don’t have to go back for retraining? I can stay?”
“Looks like it,” said Scott. “Get some sleep and you can take the next patrol.”
“Sleep? I’ve had lots of sleep. I’d like to go up now.”
“Righto,” said Scott. “You can come now with Home, Caldwell and me. And Bish . . . take lead, will you? The rest of us are a bit bushed, what with being shorthanded with you holidaying up there in the trenches for the past three days.”
Bishop knew that Scott was handing him an unusual honour, probably to bolster his self-confidence. In the happiest hour he had ever experienced, he led his more experienced squadron mates in an offensive patrol. They encountered no enemy planes, and when they were back in the mess, Bishop collapsed into a chair and slept soundly for sixteen hours. Far from having had “lots of sleep,” Bishop actually had been awake for eighty-four hours.
SIX
60 SQUADRON,
FILESCAMP FARM
THE DAY AFTER Bishop’s triumphal return to Filescamp he and the other officers were invited to a musical evening in the sergeant’s mess. Jack Scott noted in the squadron’s diary: “It was observed that one of the few toasts proposed by the ground crew was to Bishop’s health.”
“Anybody who dives one of them Nieuports seven thousand feet needs to have his health worried about,” Corporal Walter Bourne, Bishop’s mechanic, later told him gloomily. He explained that the Nieuports were plagued by one dangerous fault. When pushed beyond normal speed, as in a dive, the lower wings tended to break off. There were two reasons for this defect, Bourne said. In the first place the scarcity of well-seasoned wood had made it necessary to use inferior wood in the Nieuport; and the design required too many screws in the main spar, so that the member was riddled with screw holes.
But Bishop decided that since his particular Nieuport had stood the severe test of what his fellow pilots called his “suicide dive,” he would trust it to remain intact under his manhandling.
On March 30, 1917, five days after his first fight in the air, Bishop led a patrol for the second time. It was the kind of day on which the pilot of an underpowered, hard-to-handle 1917-model airplane was content to stay alive, without facing the requirement of maintaining close formation and engaging the enemy. A gale wind blew from the west toward enemy territory, an advantage to the German airmen which the RFC pilots came to accept as a matter of course.
The prevailing westerly
wind meant that in the course of an aerial dogfight the drift of battle took the Allied planes deeper behind enemy lines. It also meant that Allied losses of planes and men were automatically higher. To return home, low on fuel or with a damaged plane, a pilot had to face both adverse winds and hostile ground fire. Because the German pilots rarely ventured over Allied territory, the British, French and later the Americans had to seek them out on their own home grounds. Forced landings almost always meant loss of the plane, capture of the pilot, and a “victory” for a German pilot.
With the exception of Alan Binnie, an Australian who was commander of 60 Squadron’s A Flight but had “come along for the ride”as one of Bishop’s flankers, the patrol was made up of novices.
One was E. J. D. Townesend, a classmate of Bishop’s at RMC, who had joined 60 Squadron a few days before. The others were eighteen-year-old Frank Bower from the Northumberland Fusiliers, W. P. Garnett of the 3rd Royal Berkshires, and J. A. Milot, a French-Canadian major from the Canadian Pioneers—all completely new to the game.
With the wind tossing the planes about in the air, and with the inexperienced Bishop changing speed and direction without warning, the pilots had a hard time keeping their places in formation without crashing into each other. But Bishop managed to shepherd his patrol in the general direction of Vitry by following the winding Scarpe River.
The Courage of the Early Morning Page 7
