The Courage of the Early Morning

by William Arthur Bishop

  Number forty-six. Half an hour of daylight left. Not another plane in sight. Bishop mentally closed the ledger of his career as a fighter pilot as he turned toward Filescamp. Then, in the dusk, a lone Aviatik two-seater flew toward him. Bishop instinctively dived under it and came up under its belly. His bullets struck the enemy plane under its engine at a range of twenty yards. The plane simply came apart. Pieces of wing, fuselage and engine showered to earth. The two crewmen tumbled free from the wreckage. Bishop knew they had probably not been hit by his bullets. By some strange accident of aerodynamics their plane had collapsed around them and they were falling, fully conscious, to certain death. It was a sight that Bishop had never seen in all his scores of encounters with sudden death in the air, and it horrified him. For an instant he had the urge to follow the tumbling bodies and try to put them out of their terror by giving them a quick death in mid-air. But he immediately realized it was impossible, and he turned his plane toward Files-camp, away from the sight of the falling bodies.

  That night Bishop was not noticeably melancholy at the hilarious farewell party in 60 Squadron’s mess. But for the first time he felt no regret at being done with killing—for weeks, or months, or for the rest of his life.

  FIFTEEN

  INVESTITURE

  IN LONDON Lady St. Helier was able to tell Bishop his program for the next week before the War Office informed him. She wrote Bishop’s mother:

  Billy is going to the investiture on Wednesday. While he feels rather nervous about it, being his first time, I am so glad he has not been before, because Princess Marie Louise told me last week that the King said the one thing he wanted was to give the V.C., D.S.O., and M.C., at the same time, preferably to a Colonial officer and now Billy is the first person who has won them all and the King is very pleased as he has heard so much about him from the Princess. He is very well, although he looks a little older perhaps, and one could never believe all he has gone through.

  Bishop himself could not believe what he would have to go through at the investiture. To begin with he arrived late at Buckingham Palace. Then he was not sure just where he had to go, and an equerry shunted him into the anteroom with those who were to receive the M.C. A call then came that a D.S.O. appeared to be missing and Bishop, feeling conspicuous, had to admit to the assembled gathering that he was a D.S.O. He was escorted into a second room. Then it was learned that a V.C. was missing. Once more he was identified as the culprit and he finally was led into a third room where he was severely admonished by a staff officer for delaying the proceedings.

  What happened next he described in a letter to his father: “I had learned the investiture drill thoroughly—ten yards across to the middle of the room, and then turn left and bow. Imagine my consternation when during those first ten paces one of my boots began to squeak.”

  His embarrassment mounted when the King turned to the staff officer who held the medals on a satin cushion and instructed him to show them around the room, since this was the first time all three had been awarded to one man at the same time.

  “It was too awful for words,” Bishop wrote, “for fifteen minutes the old boy talked to me in front of a huge crowd. I nearly died.”

  A week later—and it was almost anticlimax—Bishop was notified that he had been awarded a fourth decoration, a bar to his D.S.O. The citation read: “For conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty while engaging hostile aircraft. His consistent dash and fearlessness have set a magnificent example to the pilots of his squadron. He has destroyed no less than 45 hostile machines within the past five months, frequently attacking enemy formations single-handed and on all occasions displaying a fighting spirit and determination to get to close quarters with his opponents which have earned him the admiration of all in contact with him.”

  Again Bishop was acutely embarrassed. Even the citation for the Victoria Cross, the world’s top decoration for bravery, had largely been a relatively terse and factual description of his raid on the airport. Now his picture appeared in all the papers, and the captions conferred on him various titles, including one that made him wince most painfully: the Lone Hawk.

  Bishop had tasted fame in a small way during his previous leave in May, but now he was a major celebrity and eminent Londoners were pulling strings to get invitations to Portland Place. Granny St. Helier hugely enjoyed the embarrassment of her protégé for a week (shrewdly divining that he too was finding the discomfiture not entirely unbearable) then packed him off with another of her “lodgers” on a tour of country houses owned by her friends.

  “The most perfect place you can imagine,” Bishop wrote his father from their first overnight stop. “The Thames runs right in front of the house and is most restful to the nerves.” He added a postscript: “By the way, thanks awfully for the fifty dollars. It came just in time and thank the Lord for it. Being a V.C. is just too expensive on a captain’s pay.”

  At the end of his trip, though, he could no longer plead the poverty of a captain’s pay. At Portland Place notice awaited of his promotion to major. He was also requested to call on Lord Hugh Cecil on the following Monday, when his leave expired, to discuss his new duties.

  It was Bishop’s first meeting with Lord Hugh since the casual peer had admitted him into the air force two years before. “You’ve done rather well, I hear,” Cecil said. “You know, I wasn’t at all sure you were the type.”

  He explained that unexpected difficulties had been met in the construction of the aerodrome at Loch Doon in Scotland where Bishop was to be the chief instructor of fighter pilots. Huge stone formations had to be excavated to make a level field. Where there was no stone the earth became deep mud under the frequent rains and heavy construction equipment bogged down. It would be weeks, even months, before Loch Doon was ready.

  “Good,” said Bishop. “Then I can go back to France meanwhile.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be on the cards,” said Lord Hugh. “In fact there isn’t a job for you just now.”

  “Good,” said Bishop, “then I can get leave home to Canada.”

  “Not my end, I’m afraid,” said Lord Hugh. He explained that although Bishop was attached to the RFC and leave in England was under RFC jurisdiction, authority to grant leave to Canada was the responsibility of the Canadian officials. Bishop, a little baffled at this red tape, thanked Lord Hugh and called at Canadian military headquarters, where he made formal application for leave.

  Back at Portland Place, Granny St. Helier listened to his tale of woe and, as usual, had the answer. Dick Turner was back in London at Canadian military headquarters. He had been at her house, as a matter of fact, while Bishop was traipsing about the countryside. She had known him for years, ever since the Boer War, in fact, when he won the V.C., and he had led the Canadians at Ypres during that dreadful gas attack by the Germans.

  It dawned on Bishop that Granny was referring to General Sir Richard Turner, now in command of Canadian troops in England. She dashed off one of her famous letters, and in two days it produced results. But it was obvious to Bishop that after the order for his leave had left Sir Richard’s desk it had fallen into the hands of the economy-minded staff officers. The letter authorizing his leave read: “Approval is given for leave of absence until November 1st, 1917, subject to the proviso that he not receive any pay or allowances after one month.”

  Bishop’s financial prospects were not entirely bleak, however, as he explained to Margaret in a letter two days before he left London for Liverpool to board ship for Canada: “Lord Beaverbrook may publish a book on my combats. The royalties might mean thousands of dollars, even pounds.”

  SIXTEEN

  UNEASY HERO

  AMONG HIS FRIENDS—Lady St. Helier’s friends—in London the Victoria Cross was a bearable burden. In the confines of a Canada-bound ship Bishop learned for the first time what winning the world’s premier award for valour entailed. On the first day out he strolled into a salon where a boxing tournament was being held. The two men in the ring stopped pumm
elling each other. The spectators stood up and cheered. Bishop reddened, turned on his heels and left.

  On September 27 he stepped off a train in Montreal’s old grimy Bonaventure station. His mother and Margaret were waiting for him at the gate, and behind them a reception committee of military and government dignitaries and a milling mob of reporters, photographers and spectators.

  Bishop panicked. He leaned over to Margaret and said, “For heaven’s sake let’s get away from here.” His mother was beaming with pride and enjoying herself hugely. Margaret patted his hand and said soothingly: “Cheer up. You’ll have to get used to it—there’s more to come.”

  How much more there was to come neither Margaret nor Bishop could imagine at that time. The newspaper stories of Bishop’s return to Canada as the most decorated airman of the war made eight million Canadians suddenly realize for the first time in the half century Canada had been a nation, they had an authentic international hero on their hands.

  In the early autumn of 1917 Canadians badly needed an escape from grim reality, and they found it in this slim, unassuming twenty-three-year-old pilot. They were remote from the battle front on which thousands of their countrymen were fighting and hundreds were dying. At home the newspapers were full of news that cast doubt on Canada’s contribution to the struggle in Europe. “Is Canadian nickel being shipped through the United States to make armament for use against Canadians at the front?” one influential newspaper demanded insistently. French-Canadian voters showed a distaste for conscription, and so did the farmers who wanted their sons exempted from compulsory service. Income tax had just been introduced in Canada to help finance the war effort. At the same time doubts were being cast on the competence of the Canadian leaders.

  Bishop did not fit easily into the role of hero. The Toronto Globe in a special article headed “Seeing a Hero” described his first encounter with mass adulation thus:

  If I am any judge of expressions I should say that Bishop would rather be most anywhere else than where he was at that moment. He was more rattled at meeting that enthusiastic, admiring crowd than he would have been suddenly meeting an enemy aviator while turning a corner among the clouds. Though I had seen many receptions of this kind I admit that this was the first one that gave me a real thrill and I cheered for all I was worth. Come to think of it this was the first time I had ever seen a young hero—and heroes should always be young . . . This knight of the clouds was fresh from his triumphs, and his cheeks are still bronzed from voyaging through “lucent solitudes.” No wonder we cheered, and just because he looked so modest we cheered all the more.

  Bishop faced flag-waving, frenzied demonstrations from Montreal, through towns and villages en route to Toronto. There he was saluted by his old regiment, the Mississauga Horse, and the most fervent, if not the largest, reception came in his home town of Owen Sound.

  His mother, who was present with his fiancée at all the receptions, was no help. In vain he tried to restrain the proud little Margaret Louise from relating tales of his boyhood (“he was a born pilot”) to the receptive press.

  “Mother, I told you—don’t say anything,” Billy reproved her.

  “I wasn’t,” she replied with typical Irish reasoning and a twinkle of her blue eyes, “I was only telling them.”

  Bishop visited Royal Military College at Kingston and was duly embarrassed at his reception at the august establishment which had been on the verge of expelling him in disgrace just three years before. In Toronto he made a speech on behalf of the Red Cross war fund and the society’s objective of $500,000 was surpassed by one third of a million dollars.

  The major personal event of Bishop’s leave in Canada was his marriage to Margaret Burden on October 17, 1917, at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto. Bishop’s best man was Earl Smith, Margaret’s brother-in-law. Smith called for Bishop with time to spare for the drive to the church, but en route Smith mentioned to Bishop that, of course, the reception would be “dry.” So they decided to stop off for a little fortification, and were late in arriving at the church. They were refused entry to the vestry by two members of the honour guard who did not recognize them.

  Finally Smith told the stolid guards in exasperation: “Let me put it this way—if we don’t get in there isn’t going to be any wedding!”

  Thousands lined the four blocks between the church and the Burden residence on Avenue Road to cheer the handsome young couple as they rode to the reception in an open car. And there were still some hero-worshipping onlookers gathered outside the house and at Toronto’s railroad station as the couple left for their honeymoon at Yama Farms in the Catskills.

  Bishop expected to return to England at the end of October as chief fighting instructor of the Gunnery School at Loch Doon, and intended to take Margaret with him. The problem of obtaining passage for his wife on a ship in wartime was easily overcome by the fact that Margaret qualified for overseas service as a V.A.D.(Voluntary Aid Detachments). But there were still difficulties in finishing the aerodrome and when he returned from his honeymoon he learned that it might be the end of the year before Loch Doon was ready. Meanwhile he was assigned to the British War Mission in Washington as assistant to the American staff in building an air force.

  The United States was justly proud of the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of American volunteers who had joined the French Foreign Legion to fight in the air alongside the French. In the Somme battles of 1916 the Escadrille destroyed more than thirty enemy planes in bitter fighting against the formidable Boelcke formations. But American eagerness to join the fight was handicapped by a serious drawback. Not enough fighting machines were available. It was all the British could do to manufacture enough planes to supply the demand for more squadrons at the front. And the French had already reached the limit of their resources.

  Even with its reputation for mass production the United States had been unable to keep pace in the manufacture of aircraft, and to help in this respect a British War Mission was set up in Washington in the summer of 1917 with Lieutenant-Colonel L. W. B. Rees, V.C., as the aviation representative.

  When Bishop was attached to the staff in November he was joined by Major F.G.Blomfield who had commanded 56 Squadron, the unit in which Ball had been killed. Soon after his arrival in Washington Bishop and Blomfield went to Dayton, Ohio, to test the new American Liberty engine. It had been designed in 1917, shortly after the United States entered the war, with two objectives: to produce an engine superior to the German Mercedes, and one that could be produced in quantity. American ingenuity and enthusiasm lacked at that time only one thing—experience with combat aircraft.

  The host of Bishop and Blomfield at the Dayton Wright Company was that legendary figure of aviation, Orville Wright. But what they saw made them pessimistic. Production lagged far behind prediction and it would obviously be a long time before the United States could make an important contribution in the fight for supremacy of the skies in Europe.

  These duties, while interesting, were not onerous or too time consuming. Bishop, in fact, found time to write an account of his experiences which he titled Winged Warfare. It quickly found acceptance by the noted publisher George Doran, and Bishop for the first time was able to cash in on his notoriety to the tune of a tidy advance against future royalties.

  At the end of 1917 Bishop was informed that he would be returning to England at the end of January, when it was expected that the new Scottish aerodrome would be ready.

  Before he departed for England with his bride he took it upon himself to express his views of the development of United States aircraft production in a speech to the Canadian Club in Montreal on January 11, 1917, which the American Press duly reported:

  Germany will have nothing to fear from the United States air-fighting forces during the coming spring because the American aircraft program is far behind schedule. . . . Major Bishop characterized as “unfortunate” the advertising which had been given the United States’ aircraft program. He said that while France woul
d find it impossible to enlarge her aeroplane fighting forces during the coming half year, Germany, knowing America’s intention, had greatly expanded her flying corps in an effort to gain supremacy in the air warfare. Consequently, he declared, during the next few months Great Britain will have to face the most terrible time she has faced and especially from the point of view of war in the air.

  When Bishop and Margaret disembarked from the troopship they were greeted by two items of bad news: the gunnery school project had finally been abandoned. And he was under arrest. True, it was an open arrest, which meant he was not behind bars. Nevertheless he was required to appear before Admiral Sir Godfrey Paine, Master General of Personnel for the British Air Council, which controlled all air policy. Theoretically Bishop faced a court-martial, but he was unabashed.

  “Well, I’m really back on active service again,” he grinned to Margaret when he received the news of his arrest.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE FLYING

  FOXES

  FLANKED by a senior officer on each side, Bishop stood silently and nervously before Sir Godfrey Paine, who scowled at him for a full minute without speaking. Then suddenly the admiral barked:

  “Bishop! You have behaved like an impertinent idiot. Your conduct is unforgivable. You have exceeded your authority. You have disgraced yourself as an officer. You have abused the hospitality of a friendly country and given comfort to the enemy by revealing the weakness—er, the alleged weakness, of an important ally . . .”