The Mammoth Book of Fighter Pilots (6 page)

In the Mess they treated me as if I already had my Wings. Even the No-lift-in-the-air motor salesman (
still
there) deigned to talk with me. I told him the Caudron was very apt to spin.

xiii

But upon the return journey I paid for the pride and joy of the morning. I had had a swim and an excellent lunch; had I been my own master I should also have had a short
siesta.
When at length I soared into the air, watched by a crowd of envious pupils, and set course for Gosport I felt – for the first time in my life in an aeroplane – really happy, almost drowsy. The engine no longer seemed to emit a menacing roar, but rather to hum a regular, slightly monotonous lullaby. The air had all the requisite “lift” in it, there were no bumps, it was warm even at two thousand five hundred feet and the sky was cloudless all the way to Gosport. I leaned back, very nearly at my ease.

On the way home I followed the seashore to see from the air a coast I had long known on the ground. Ahead, Hayling Island came gradually into my ken. I had done a course in machine-gunnery there before joining the Flying Corps and I thought that I would like to look more closely at so familiar a locality. After passing over it I should, of course, have to turn inland to avoid the prohibited area of Portsmouth; that would involve quite a long detour by Fareham. But there was plenty of time before sunset; the evening was calm, clear, and of such beauty as to make the temptation to stay up a little longer irresistible to a young airman.

Presently I was above marshes and mudflats and the arms of the quiet sea encircling the island. I began to recognize roads, lanes, cottages, clumps of trees, to see paths down which I had rushed perspiringly with weighty pieces of Vickers or Lewis guns. I smiled contentedly from the superior position to which I had advanced. . . . Perhaps it was over-confidence that did it. I don’t know. At all events there was a sudden change of note in the engine’s steady music, then a slowing down and much vibration. From rhythmical roaring the explosions dwindled until they were like nothing more than a faint crackling of ice in a cocktail-shaker. Then they ceased altogether. The silence seemed immense. And with it came a nasty pain in the pit of my stomach: two thousand feet up, an amateur pilot, and no engine! This must be the end. I fumbled around desperately; wiggled the throttle lever, tried the switch, buried my head in the cockpit to see if the petrol was properly turned on, fumbled some more.

When I took my head out of the cockpit I found that the noise of wind in the wings and wires had unaccountably died away. The rudder bar and control stick seemed strangely easy to move. And the nose of the machine was dropping heavily, uncontrollably . . . I was stalling – about to spin? Without thinking or hesitating I pushed the stick hard forward. The Caudron gathered speed; and within two seconds I was sighing my relief, wind had come back to the wires, feeling to the controls. I flattened to a more normal glide and began to do some quick thinking.

What were my lessons? “Keep straight on, don’t lose flying-speed.” Well, after a moment’s panic I was doing that all right. The next step? “Make sure of the direction of the wind.” At Shoreham I had been heading directly into it, how was it here? I gazed earthwards. There was a ripple of air over the cornfields, too erratic to be a sure guide. A herd of cows was obstinately refusing to obey the laws of bovine nature, for not two faced the same way. No sailing craft at sea, no flags on the houses. Ah, smoke from a cottage chimney! I had never seen household smoke so friendly. Country people should always let their chimneys smoke to help poor airmen in distress. I took the wind’s bearing with precision, turned into it at once. Now? “Choose the field in which you intend to land, and choose it as early as you can.” A glance at the altimeter – less than fifteen hundred feet – I hung over the side, goggling at the earth. Choose? Not so easy. There were innumerable fields, but only a few large enough. I examined those few attentively, Marshes! Or else green mud from which the tide had receded. . . . Under a thousand feet now. No time to lose. I had been told that, from long periods of sitting still in the air, an airman’s chief trouble was constipation. In this business of forced landing I fancied I had found a certain cure; I wanted that field for more reasons than one.

And at last, just in time, I found it. The only smooth bit of pasture, it seemed, for miles, but not so very smooth at that. A sort of paddock, small, enclosed on three sides by trees, with a tall hedge upon my side. “Aim at the hedge on the near side,” I had been taught. I did so and found that I was too high. Another lesson came back to me: “if you think you are going to overshoot make ‘S’-turns so as to lose height. . . .” In the middle of the second turn the engine all at once started again. If it had happened any higher up I might have tried to continue the flight, low down it only served to remind me of one more lesson: “Always switch off before a forced landing, to minimize the risk of fire.” I knocked up the switch immediately, I might crash and crash badly, but I refused to burn. I could remember no more lessons, there was no time to think of anything else. The machine hopped over the hedge; I commenced shakily to flatten out.

The landing was not too bad, although rather fast – a better fault than stalling! – and all would have been well but for a partly filled in drainage ditch concealed by the grass. I was staring ahead, wondering whether I should be able to stop before hitting the trees on the far side of the field, when there came a heavy bump beneath the wheels. The machine swerved, listed to port, came to a sudden stop.

It took me a few moments to recover from the relaxed tension, the joy of safely landing, the surprising stillness of the summer’s evening here on the ground. It seemed very wrong of me to have thus brusquely disturbed the dignified quiet of this sweet-smelling field. Then I scrambled out to inspect the damage. It was nothing much. A wheel had been broken in the ditch, a steel undercarriage strut twisted. It could all easily be repaired on the spot . . . .

Solicitous inhabitants crowded round, offering help, advice, congratulations, food and drink, shelter for the night, first-aid or a guard for the machine. I asked for a telephone. This was the first time I had broken anything since starting to fly, and now that the anguish of the descent was past I wondered ruefully whether the breaking of a wheel would not put a black mark against my name. From the nearest house I ‘phoned through to Go-sport.

The orderly-officer to whom I spoke was non-committal, he told me to stay where I was and that perhaps help would be forthcoming on the morrow. Then he rang off. I passed an uneasy night despite hospitable surroundings. . . .

But upon the next day, back at Gosport with the repaired Caudron, they said I had not managed so badly
for a beginner – although they refused to believe that I had not got a girl hidden away on Hayling Island. No one, they said, would land there for less than that.

xiv

These ugly rumours were soon dispelled. Another and much longer cross-country flight in the same Caudron resulted in a second forced landing, this time at Winchester. And not only was it generally agreed by the pilots of Gosport that, with Portsmouth so close, no one in his senses would have a girl in Winchester, but the condition of the “Gnome” engine revealed on examination that I could not have flown another yard in any direction.

I had broken nothing on this landing and I was now considered advanced enough to pilot the famous B.E.2c. As a matter of fact I am not quite sure whether the machine I flew at Gosport was a “2c.” or some other earlier category. It had a less powerful engine – an 80 horse-power Renault – cables instead of streamline wires, and wooden skids on the undercarriage. Altogether a less modern craft than the ill-fated machine I had seen burned at Shoreham, which had been of the type just coming into fashion.

But despite some preliminary nervousness due to the rumours of spinning, I soon began to like the B.E. as much and more than the other types I had flown. She was stable, easily manageable if a bit heavy on the controls, strongly built. One of the more experienced of the Gosport pilots had been known to loop his B.E. several times and no harm done, although he had not been allowed to repeat the performance in front of the novices lest we should be tempted to emulate him, which, frankly, was not very likely. After a few practice flights in this type of machine I was allowed to take up my first passengers, luckless young men who little knew into what trembling hands they had trusted their lives. Also I was allowed to fly in windy, bumpy weather that hitherto had been the signal for machines to be securely locked in their sheds for the day. . . . I flew over the New Forest, circling above lonely heaths and dark glades and gypsy encampments, retracing a hundred boyhood rides. I flew over the Solent and peered into the secret places of that shallow sea whose waters roll over my early dreams. I learned to fly a straight course by compass and to make allowance for the wind; I learned how to bank at more than 45 degrees, and how to do a spiral glide from a height of several thousand feet. The war? It seemed far away, but I would be in it soon enough.

xv

On the ground, during all this time, instruction in rigging and engine fitting went steadily on; occasionally we were given vaguely scientific lectures upon aerodynamics. And at length the great day arrived. A few of us who were deemed worthy were driven off in a Crossley tender to the Central Flying School at Upavon to be examined in our knowledge of aeronautics.

That the tests were not entirely easy was a matter of common knowledge. If we passed we would be qualified as pilots, if we failed we would be set back many weeks, perhaps months. Failure was by no means unknown. In my own case it happened that I was a little ahead of the customary time, but there were only two things I had cause to dread: that I might not yet have enough flying hours to my credit or – much worse – that I should not have sufficiently mastered the Morse Code, a thing which for years had tried my patience. We were required to read messages at a fair speed, so many words a minute. My average rate was so many minutes per word. All the way to Upavon I practised with a portable buzzer.

The examination started as soon as we had disembarked, and I quickly found that it was less terrifying than I had been led to expect. I was conducted round the sheds by a venerable naval airman – anything over thirty
with pre-war flying experience was considered venerable – who asked all the hard questions of which I had had warning and who seemed surprised that I could also answer the easy ones. Another old gentleman – his hair was grey at the temples – took me to the repair shops and asked me what most generally went wrong with “Gnome” engines. From personal experience with the Caudron I was able to tell him quite a lot of things, in the manner of an expert, and I gathered from his friendly smile that I had scored a good mark. Then came the Morse. In a darkened shed a nasty little lamp flashed irritatingly before my dazed eyes. Pencil and paper were handed to me; I made a pretence of scrawling. And to my amazement the dots and dashes assembled themselves in the correct order. The letters, even the words came out right. But I must have been helped by some guardian angel, for never again was I able to repeat the performance.

The dreaded business was over. In the cool of the evening we motored home, singing and occasionally stopping at a way-side pub to drink to our own success.

xvi

Before leaving Upavon I had made fairly sure that I had qualified, but the official result was not announced at Gosport until a day or two later. At length the news came through. I was summoned to the squadron office to hear it. The Squadron-commander beamed, offered congratulations. I was no more a fledgeling, he said, I was a pilot, a member of the Corps, entitled to wear the badge and uniform,
sic itur ad astra
and so on. But to me it meant even more than that. I felt that I was no longer temporarily “attached” to the Flying Corps; I was permanently devoted.

In a momentarily serious frame of mind I hurried from the office and across the sunlit barrack square of Fort Grange. Barely six weeks previously, at Shoreham, I had seen a man burnt to death because of a pilot’s error. Since
then I had learnt to fly. I had made no fatal errors so far, I must see to it that I made none in the future. I had been taught all the essential lessons. Now to apply them.

In the tailor’s shop I watched a man sew the Wings to my tunic. When this was done I went to the sheds and had the old training machine brought out. By my orders and upon my responsibility she was started up. As soon as she was ready I took her into the air. For half an hour I flew steadily and, in a Longhorn, for the last time.

Grinnell-Milne was captured, after a forced landing, in winter 1915. He escaped from a German POW camp two and half years later, returning to active service on the Western Front in May 1918.

THE RED AIR FIGHTER

MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN

At first in the cavalry, von Richthofen joined the German air force to become commander of the 11th Chasing Squadron (“Richthofen’s Flying Circus”), where his habit of painting his aircraft red earned him the soubriquet of “The Red Baron”. The victor in 80 aerial combats, and thus the highest-ranking ace of World War I, he was mortally shot down himself on the morning of 21 April 1918 during an encounter with Sopwith Camels of No 209 Squadron RAF. His brother Lothar, who survived the war, was also a fighter ace, with 40 confirmed victories. The extracts below are from Rittmeister Manfred Freiharr von Richthofen’s own memoir, written in 1917.

17 September 1915

We were all at the butts trying our machine guns. On the previous day we had received our new aeroplanes and the next morning Boelcke
³
was to fly with us. We were all beginners. None of us had had a success so far. Consequently
everything that Boelcke told us was to us gospel truth. Every day, during the last few days, he had, as he said, shot one or two Englishmen for breakfast.