The Courage of the Early Morning

by William Arthur Bishop

  The controversy soon died down, largely because Bishop refused to become embroiled, but his attitude was significant. He took a healthy competitive interest in his score in comparison with that of other Allied pilots, exactly as if they were all players in some apocalyptic game. But it would never occur to him to envy the success of a teammate.

  When Bishop wrote about being “glad when a man like Mannock does so well” he was referring to the extraordinary variety of difficulties Mannock had encountered in his life. His father deserted his wife and five children when Mick was twelve years old and he had to leave school to help support the family, first as a grocer’s delivery boy in Canterbury, where the Mannocks lived, later as a barber’s apprentice, and finally as a telephone lineman.

  Mannock joined the British army before the war as an ambulance attendant. Unlike most men who became pilots and fought with a grudging admiration for his counterparts on the enemy side, Mannock hated the Germans so bitterly that he asked to be transferred from the hospital corps when war came, fearing he would not be able to give fair treatment to a wounded enemy prisoner, as the rules of war required. So he was referred to the Flying Corps and, incredibly, was accepted. Mannock was an unlikely air hero for two reasons: he was over thirty years old when he got to France with the RFC, and he was handicapped in the highly competitive game of aerial warfare by severe astigmatism of the left eye. Only because medical examinations were perfunctory in the extreme (as Bishop had discovered earlier) was Mannock in the air force at all.

  He differed from the typical RFC in other ways: the youngsters who fought in the air were fun-loving types who lived for the moment and regarded politics as a dull game played by old men. Mannock was a militant socialist and he despised the English caste system and the pretensions of high society only slightly less than he hated the Germans.

  Unlike Bishop, who was a rough pilot but a deadly shot, Man-nock started off as poor a marksman as he was a pilot. Only by endless practice did he become proficient enough to shoot down fifty enemy planes.

  When Bishop got back to Petit Synthe bad news awaited him. Lobo Benbow had become the squadron’s first fatal casualty. The day had started well. Benbow, Horn, McGregor and Carruthers on practice patrol had run into a large formation of German planes east of Ypres, and McGregor had shot down one. But later in the day Benbow, in battle with four enemy planes, had had his wings shot off and had crashed to his death. His plane came down just inside the British lines, but Bishop would not let his men attend the funeral.

  They grumbled that it was heartless to let Benbow be buried and mourned only by strangers. But Bishop for once was curt in his decision.

  “It’s the first time they’ve lost one of their number in battle,” he explained to Horn, his deputy. “It might be too unnerving. I hope if they stew a bit about it they’ll go out and knock down a few Huns.”

  That afternoon, sixteen thousand feet aloft over Roulers, Bishop stalked a formation of Pfalz two-seater scouts, the new German fighters. When two of the pilots turned to attack him, he downed both in a three-minute dogfight.

  Curiously enough, Bishop believed that he had not hit the second Pfalz with a single bullet.

  “I scared him to death,” he told Springs over a few of the latter’s famous cocktails before dinner. He explained that after the first Pfalz had crashed in flames, the other tried to escape in a power dive. Bishop jammed his throttle all the way forward and began to overhaul the enemy. At one hundred and fifty yards he opened fire but shot wide. Seeing the tracers darting by his wingtips the German pilot steepened the angle of his dive until he was going down almost vertically. Bishop followed, and his airspeed indicator showed two hundred miles an hour. He fired a short burst again, but was still off the target. Then the enemy machine started to fall apart. The wings folded back a pair at a time until only the fuselage was left, floating for a moment like a huge war canoe out of its element. Then it plummeted to earth.

  After dinner Bishop went up alone. In three days he had brought down five enemy planes, and the obsession to fly, to fight, to kill—which had sometimes seized him at Filescamp—was there again. He flew over toward Armentières. Across the lines, two thousand feet below, he spotted two Albatros scouts. The sun was too low for Bishop to use it as cover. So he dived under them and attacked from the rear. Both went down, billowing smoke. The second plane disappeared into a cloud bank and Bishop did not see it crash. When he landed he learned that the nearest anti-aircraft battery had reported seeing only one plane crash in flames. Although he was sure he had killed the pilot of the second plane with a double burst of machine-gun fire at twenty yards’ range Bishop philosophically accepted the verdict: three confirmed kills in one day wasn’t bad hunting, his squadron mates pointed out not without irony.

  Bishop’s one-sided score, in comparison with that of his men, aroused the latter into flying overtime in an effort to get “a Hun of their own.” On May 31, when Bishop and Horn each got a Pfalz on afternoon patrol, Springs “got all full of enthusiasm and went out by himself to do battle,” as Grider noted in his diary.

  His ambition was rewarded and he managed to find six Hun scouts south of Courtrai. They chased him all over the sky and he had a time getting away from them. He finally just put his tail plane forward and dove wide open. Nothing can hit you while you’re doing two hundred and fifty miles an hour, so if your plane stays together you’re all right. But it’s not easy to come out of a dive like that alive. Springs tore all the fabric loose on his top wing doing it.

  He was so excited when he landed that he ran into the major’s plane and locked wings with it on the ground. The major was all set to bawl him out but Springs walked up to him and ran his finger across his row of ribbons and said, “You see these medals?”

  Bishop nodded.

  “Well,” says Springs, “I just want to tell you that you are welcome to them. ” With this he walked off to the bar. Bishop laughed, although he wasn’t pleased about having his machine smashed.

  Actually, Bishop put a high value on Springs’ antics, his laconic humour, and above all his inventiveness in the mixing of drinks, as a safety valve for the tensions of other members of the squadron. But periodically Springs himself suffered from moods so black that it was all Bishop and the rest of the squadron could do to keep Springs from committing some reckless act.

  But most of the time life in 85 Squadron was both merry and luxurious. “I don’t think Bishop is sorry he brought us along,” Grider commented.“We are the only outfit at the front that has ice cream for dinner every night. Springs went down to Boulogne and got a freezer. He has taught the cook to make Eggs Benedict and we breakfast well. In fact, although ‘in the midst of life we are in death,’ we manage to have a hell of a lot of fun—chicken livers en brochette, champagne and Napoleon brandy.”

  High living and late hours did not make dawn patrols popular with the pilots of 85 Squadron, but Bishop was adamant. He was, quite possibly, the most lenient squadron commander in the Royal Air Force in the matter of what his men did with their spare time (and, for that matter, what he did with his own). But he insisted that his pilots earn their freedom of action by rigid discipline during “office hours.”

  Not that Bishop’s pilots—and particularly his American trio—complained of their fate. Grider acknowledged: “We seem to be the only Americans in Europe that are really enjoying this war. All the others I have met seem to be having to work, or sleep without sheets, or eat out of mess kits, or do something unpleasant to spoil their holiday.”

  Moreover, not only was Bishop leading the same rigorous life as the others, but in addition to flying patrols he had to perform an unpleasant amount of administrative work. Nevertheless, he was outscoring his squadron mates by an almost embarrassing margin.

  On May 31 when he shot down a German scout at dusk, near Hazebrouck, he wrote his father: “That makes ten for the squadron. Not bad when we still haven’t officially gone into combat yet.” He failed to add that he had sho
t down eight of the squadron’s ten planes, and that his score was now fifty-five, just two behind the leading RAF pilot.

  NINETEEN

  ST. OMER

  NEXT MORNING, at 52 Portland Place, the pretty housemaid, white-faced, knocked on Lady St. Helier’s bedroom door to report a rumour that was spreading through London: Major Bishop was missing in action and it was feared he had been shot down.

  “Not a word to Mrs. Bishop,” Granny warned, and she got on her bedroom telephone to various high officials who, denying any information of Bishop’s fate, were ordered to take steps to find out. But for the rest of the day the rumour proliferated in the city, and Lady St. Helier had to take extraordinary steps to keep Margaret unaware of it. Late that night one of Lady St. Helier’s War Office cronies telephoned that he had got a query through to 85 Squadron, and Bishop was safe. Margaret was surprised when Granny threw her arms around her and said emotionally, “My dear, I’m so happy it wasn’t true.”

  For most of that day Bishop didn’t even fly. He had been informed only that morning that 85 Squadron was officially to go active immediately. From the point of view of the pilots the change of status was an anticlimax—they had already been in combat several times, had shot down ten enemy planes and had penetrated deep behind the enemy lines. Now they were assigned to line patrol between Nieuport on the coast and Ypres, and were still restricted, in theory, from crossing the enemy lines.

  Nevertheless, the new order required a great deal of paperwork that kept Bishop at his desk, and it was not until half past seven that evening that he finally finished his chores as commanding officer. It was the part of his duties that irked him most, and he used to say that an hour of administration tired him more than several hours in the air. He went up alone, but near Armentières he saw three other S.E. 5A’s flying in a neat V formation. From the numbers on the machines he knew the trio were Elliott Springs, McGregor and Horn. The four machines turned south toward Lille, well behind the enemy lines. South of Lille a formation of six black Pfalz scouts darted beneath them, and the four S.E. 5A’s dived to the attack. The dogfight that immediately developed ended in a result that would have seemed far-fetched even in a moving picture script: RAF pilots shot down one enemy plane each, in rapid succession.

  It was Bishop’s fifty-sixth kill. It placed him one victory short of McCudden’s score. Next evening at precisely the same time and place, he caught up with his friendly rival. That night he wrote his father: “This afternoon the man in charge of gunnery on General Salmond’s staff came over and he was full of buck about the squadron. He said GHQ were all talking about it, so our reputation is growing.”

  At eleven o’clock the next morning the Flying Foxes escorted a flight of bombers to Zeebrugge on the Dutch coast to raid the submarine pens.

  The bombers flew at twelve thousand feet three miles out to sea to avoid the fire of coastal batteries, and the S.E. 5’s cruised two thousand feet higher. Halfway between the ports of Nieuport and Ostend Bishop saw a formation of Albatros scouts approaching from the north. One of the enemy straggled behind the formation. Bishop needed only ten rounds from each gun to send the Albatros flaming into the ocean. It was his fifty-eighth kill, the first plane he had shot down into water, and the second time he had taken the lead as high-scoring ace of the British air service.

  By now well behind the formation of bombers and fighters, Bishop dived to gain speed and catch up—and ran into a formation of eight Albatros fighters. He fired a burst of thirty rounds at the nearest. Its top wings flew apart and the plane spun down out of control.

  “The Squadron total is now 18, and 12 for me,” Bishop wrote to Margaret that night. But it was his last victory for eleven days.

  For the first few days the weather was so bad that there could be practically no flying. Then on the morning of June 8 he was awakened by an urgent telephone call. (It was mid-morning, but there had been a party the night before, featuring an enormous bowl of champagne punch mixed by Springs.) The news was that the Flying Foxes finally had a home of their own. They were to move without delay to an aerodrome near St. Omer, where Bishop had been stationed when he first arrived in France as an observer two and a half years earlier.

  Grider wrote admiringly in his diary:

  You can’t appreciate the British airforce until you see a squadron on the move. I was taking a nap when my batman shook me and said, “orders have come, Sir, that we are to move at twelve o’clock.” It was then ten a.m., but at noon our baggage, transport, equipment and dogs left and at four we flew to our new airdrome. We hoped to pick up a Hun on the way so we had a squadron show, with Bish leading, but we had no luck. Our new beat is from Ypres to Nieppe. At one place near Haze-brouck the ground for about three square miles is a dull yellow. That’s where there has been a gas attack.

  It took several days to get properly settled. Necessary furniture—a piano, a gramophone with records (some profane, none sacred)—were secured. At the end of three days the mess was completely decorated, even to a proud array of purple garters with names and addresses of local belles. Bishop acquired another item of coveted equipment. A pilot he had known in his 21 Squadron days, who now issued all equipment for the area, wangled him a new and faster airplane.

  “It is an absolute beauty,” he wrote Margaret excitedly. “And I will be able to get 130 miles per hour on the level. It will take a good Hun to catch me now.”

  But for another two days he was unable to test it. The weather remained dull, and Bishop busied himself with decorating the new machine, painting it in gay colours, with an Indian crawling along the side, giving the nose the inevitable coat of blue.

  His first flight in his new plane was nearly his last—and all because of the cherished helmet Margaret had given him. It was an expensive model from André’s in Piccadilly. Bishop’s head was large, so Margaret had picked out the largest model. It was comfortably lined with soft zebra skin, but was still a very loose fit.

  In his new plane and wearing his new helmet, Bishop climbed to fifteen thousand feet over the Flying Foxes’ new sector. Over Estaires he sighted four Pfalz scouts diving to attack him. At this critical moment the loose helmet slid around, covering his face. He was blind to the enemy’s attack, his face wrapped in a blanket of soft zebra fur. At that moment the German opened fire. Bishop’s plane was out of control. With his left hand he pulled his helmet around, and peered cautiously around, not knowing what he would see but afraid that it would be four enemy scouts in close attendance. Instead, the enemy planes were far below. If they had realized that Bishop was blind and helpless, they would have pressed home the attack, but instead when Bishop pulled up they continued diving. His efforts to evade them now turned to his advantage. He was well above and closing fast.

  When Bishop neared them he realized he was being led into a trap. A thousand feet below a group of twelve Albatros fighters awaited him. He decided to make a fast attack, then escape. Twin streams of bullets set one enemy scout afire. It fell through the midst of the rest of the German planes, which scrambled to escape. By the time Bishop levelled off his fifteen surviving opponents had disappeared. He wasted no time, but swiftly returned to his aerodrome at St. Omer.

  By way of celebrating his first victory in over a week, Bishop took Springs, Grider and Callahan on a visit to his old 60 Squadron, now based a few miles to the south. The squadron’s losses had been heavy during the spring, and some of the spirit had gone out of the group, but the visit of the Flying Foxes developed into a exuberant “rag.” Springs, of course, took over the cocktail bar with the assistance of Grider, and Callahan presided at the piano which Bishop remembered so well. “It was a good party,” Grider noted in his diary. “And I think we won because when we left their C.O. was doing the Highland Fling with a couple of table knives as swords.”

  When the Flying Foxes got home an air raid was in progress. The raid was an unusually long one, and it was almost dawn before the Flying Foxes got to bed. Horn took the dawn patrol while Bishop,
as squadron commander, slept soundly until noon. He pretended to be annoyed, but was actually delighted when he learned at lunch that Horn and Callahan had each shot down an enemy plane on that early patrol.

  85 Squadron sector in 1918

  Later that morning Cunningham-Reid brought down an observation balloon. The day that started off well for the Flying Foxes had still more glory to come. That evening, a time of day which had become his favourite hunting period, Bishop shot down two more planes in the span of eight minutes.

  He was in high spirits when he landed at St. Omer. The two victories brought his score up to sixty-two, well ahead of McCudden, who was still in England. In only nine days of actual fighting he had accounted for fifteen enemy machines and all fifteen had been destroyed with approximately three hundred bullets, an average of twenty rounds per enemy destroyed. Not once in those nine days had Bishop’s plane been struck by an enemy bullet.

  But ten minutes after he climbed out of the cockpit, his mood was abruptly changed. He received a telephone call from General Webb Brown, the brigade commander.

  “You have been recalled to England to help form a Canadian flying corps,” the general told him. Bishop said nothing of his keen disappointment in the mess that evening, but before he went to bed he wrote to Margaret: “I’ve never been so furious in my life. It makes me livid with rage to be pulled away just as things are getting started.”

  Next morning, still angry, Bishop went up after a late breakfast and in half an hour shot down three planes. It was the third time in his career that he had scored a triple on one patrol. But he thought it worth no more than casual mention in his next letter to Margaret. He was much more concerned at his imminent transfer.

  No more news today. I went over to see the Colonel and he is furious that I am likely to go. By the way, as a sideline I got three more Huns today. I went out this morning and carefully searched the sky, finding a two-seater at 18,000 feet.