SKY THEIR BATTLEFIELDS

Evening Star, Issue 23370, 13 September 1939, Page 7

SKY THEIR BATTLEFIELDS

HOW THE RAF. WON ITS WINGS DARING PILOTS OF THE GREAT WAR When the British Expeditionary Force marched away to its immortal death in the summer of 1914, there were in Britain fewer than 160 flying machines capable of standing active service and fewer than 250 pilots capable of flying them. France was, proportionally to her infinitely larger army, no better off; and even tiermany, the most formidable military machine ever to be unleashed on a hapless world (to quote the papers of the day), had so tew aeroplanes and realised their possibilities so little that the High Command did not even know the British were at the front until von Kluck’s Uhlans rode one day into the British outposts. In a series of vividlywritten articles Guy Ramsey has been telling the Sydney * Morning Herald ’ of the romantic development of aviation. In the following article from the * Herald ’ he tells of the triumph of the R.A.F. during the Great War, and of the bravery and resource of the pilots of all nations who, with unexcelled daring, made aerial warfare a new and potent part of military tactics. The British aerial force was divided into two sections—the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. The R.F.C. (do you remember the uniform—a high-necked tunic with a curving front, the palest possible cord breeches, and a tiny forage cap perched on the side of the head?) had been founded early in 1912, the R.N.A.S. a few mouths later.

Most of the pilots and their observers were children—boys in their late 'teens and their early twenties. They were, at a stroke, required to face without training service at which seasoned veterans might well have broken. It was easy either to romanticise or to belittle those young pilots. Novelists have had a shot at both. They have been pictured as insufferably gay and gallant, ludicrously given to flamboyant gestures of fantastic chivalry; they have also been pilloried as a drunken lot of dissipated rakes who found in courage and patriotism the last refuges of scoundrels. They were neither. They were a body of exceedingly brave young men, with a sorely-needed defence-mechan-ism of flippancy. They had an appalling job to do, and did it with magnificence. * This is not to say that the Germans and the French did nob do equally well. But they had nob so much to do. They had better machines; they had a (proportionately speaking) much longer tradition. Their high command was at least glad to use them, whereas the British authorities thoroughly resented having “ to tack a lot of blasted birds ” on to the fighting forces of the realm. THE " RED KNIGHT." It is a certain and accepted fact that by the end of the war the AngloFrench ah arm had established so definite a supremacy that barely a German plane dared cross the lines. But the most successful airman of all time in a military sense was Freiherr von Richthofen. He flew a scarlet Albatross machine which gave him the sobriquet of “ The Red Knight ” He was the central figure of a crack squadron of these planes, which came to be known in the defensive derision of the R.F.C. as the “ Richthofen Circus.” After his death the British, with (fortunately) an unusual lack of generosity to an enemy, sought to belittle his victories.. TJicy said he “ only

‘shot sitting birds,’ only challenged when he had superior machines or numbers, only took easy victories.” But, whatever his shortcomings (and 1 subscribe to none of them) the incontrovertible fact remains . that Freiherr von Richthofen accounted for no fewer than 80 enemy planes before, at last, a Canadian pilot sent him crashing to the ground. The man who succeeded him (less effectively) in the ■command was a slim young Junker, by name Hermann Goering. Hard on Richthofen’s heels came the British alee, Mannock. He was scarcely the type of Ouida hero from which the R.F.C. was reputed to be recruited. He was the son of a noncommissioned officer. He had weak eyes. He was always nervous; he would not be fit enough to serve; always nervous, he would be socially looked down upon. But Mannock, before he was killed at Arras, won three separate M.C.s, three separate D.S.O.s, and the German who brought him to earth avenged, by the lucky, skilful shot, 73 German planes. Only just behind Mannock came “ Bill ” Bishop, with 72 enemy machines to his credit. He was the hero of no fewer than 170 air battles. Long years after, when Bishop had not flown since the peace, he said as he took over the controls of a plane again: “ 1 was afraid 1 had forgotten how to fly. but one does not forget. It is not the air that is the enemy, 1 know: it is the earth.” It was no more than sober truth to call ’William Bishop an “ airman.” FIRST BRITISH “ ACE.” There was Ball, too, with 43 victories, who modelled his tactics on those of a hawk. He always got in close, swooping downward' on the enemy.) He was the first man to be officially recognised as a British “Ace.” On the ground he had only one interest—playing the violin. But in the air, all the music he heard was the singing of the wind between the wires of his plane, the percussion of his own and the enemy’s machine guns, and the ground-bass of the engine roar. There are epics enough to be written of those early war-flyers. Alan Bott (chairman to-day of the Book Club), for example, whose machine was set on fire by an anti-aircraft shell; who crawled along the fuselage to put it out: and whose pilot found himself challenged by two enemy machines, drove at them full-tilt, firing all the time, and finally felt the engine fail under his hand. Bott and his pilot glided to earth behind their own lines nearly a mile away amid a hurricane of bullets. Ball, who defied the average German pilot in the following jargon:— “ The Hun is a good chap, with very little guts, doing his job as well as he can ” —came to earth one day with his control shot away. He effected his landing by using his tail-fin only; the genius of airmanship.

FRENCH HERO. For France the hero of the war in the air for all times was Guynemer, a Provencal with a face like the young Shelley, and a congenital weakness that had marked him “ unfit ” to join the army. He brought down 53 enemy planes before he was killed, or, as the legend told, he “ flew so high, he flew out of sight into heaven.” ■ It was the naked necessity of war that created aeronautical technique, tactics, strategy; new turns, new evolutions, new methods of flying. Was it better to hover a mile or so above and sweep down on the enemy? Or to lurk below him and suddenly fire upwards? If you were under fire, was it safer to climb, to drop, or to run? SCIENCE OF AEROBATICS. Immelmann, the great German, was, perhaps, the pilot who contributed most to the rapidly advancing science of aerobatics. It was a British officer who discovered that the steep-banking turn, when the machine’s wings are almost at right angles to the earth, was fatal when the sun was shining; it was more effective to turn more slowly and take a shallow sweep to avoid the flash of sun on silver wings which might reveal one to the foe. The fights—you have seen them on the pictures—were impossible to follow from the ground; the planes would turn and twist in the air like live things almost as if the pilot endowed the senseless canvas and metal with his own personality. You have seen a crack tennis player, perhaps, and noted how his racket appears like a hand—as flexible, as subject to automatic control? That is how a star pilot’s machine appeared as it swooped and dived and soared to attack and defence in falling leaf and nose, dive, tail-spin, and Immelmann turn. Sometimes even a machine would surrender in mid-air, and, under the eye of the conqueror, circle slowly to earth behind the enemy lines. There were other types of aerial warfare than plain duels between plane and plane; there were duels between airship and aeroplane; aeroplanes like a swarm of bees seeking to sting a tarantula to death.

Over the lines in France, over the open towns of Britain, the long, slender Zeppelins would ride—silver cigars, serene above the clouds, suddenly losing puffs of fatality. At the first warning they had been sighted up would go the defenders, speeding and streaking through the sky, scanning the empty blue (or indigo—for airships usually came over by night) for the sinister silver shape. They glimpsed it only _ to lose it again behind a cloud; saw it suddenly in a searchlight, only to lose it for a second time as the plot was blinded by the brilliance. The long carrier beneath the envelope was filled with shooting, bomb-dropping men, just as brave, just as chivalrous, just as compelled to obey _ orders as themselves. But death did not threaten the pilots only from the dirigible; it came _ upwards at them from their own anti-aircraft guns, or raining downward at them from sprayncl shells that burst above themEven if—as was the case more than once—a Zeppelin came crashing to the earth, a swooping funeral pyre, burning to cinders and shards of twisted metal and tortured flesh, men and ship alike, the pilot whose triumphant bullet had set the lifting gas afire, was in danger of being struck by a flying spark or sucked down into the vortex with his victim.

Loafe Robinson it was who brought down the first Zeppelin on British soil; it fell, a blaze of hideous glor.y, at Cuffley, in Middlesex. Two million people, roused by the raid, cheered so loudly from the ground that Robinson, thousands of feet up, heard it in his plane. Once tho airship dropped it was not only the heat that kept the throng at a distance, but the seeming sound of machine guns —cases of cartridges fired by the' heat. Robinson flew again, in France, but was forced down behind the enemy’s lines and was imprisoned. He died—of his wounds and privation—on the last day of 1918.

Lcafe Robinson got the V.C. So did Warneford, who brought down a Zeppelin in Belgium. He received the decoration by telegram from King George V. He was killed—ironically enough, on a casual flight.—within a week.

Those weie the men who, under the pioneers, created the science of aviation. In self-defence they treated it as a game, minimising its dangers, affecting to talk of it as a sport, chattering Hike people in a Wodehouse book. But beneath the banter and the derision were two things; a genuine chivlary, in which the brotherhood of arms extended almost into the brotherhood of man; and a grim realisation of just what the war in the air meant. The young pilot, doubtful jest on his lips, drink in his hand at the aerodrome, became transformed, almost transfigured, once he was in the air. And behind tho lines the engineers and designers were working as feverishly as the pilots in the azure field— Fokker and Roe, Sopwith and De Havilland, were conning fallen enemy planes for new ideas, new developments, to incorporate into the next machine they would build. When the bird men folded _ their wings in 1918, the time was ripe to unfurl them again and cleave .wider, serener heavens, and turn what had been n novelty, and had become a curse, into a blessing for mankind.