Chapter Thirty-Five
The Usual Thing, With Subtle Variations
The rocket attack was the usual thing, with subtle variations. We were planning to move again. It was such a simple little idea. To put a thermometer in our cockpits and to look at them once in a while, yet it paid handsome dividends.
One reason we only used nine Biffs for the rocket attack, was because we only had nine properly modified with carburetor heaters. In the iffy spring weather, there was a tendency for the aircraft to run fine up to five or ten thousand feet, then for some reason, above that they would bog out. And sometimes it was even possible to notice a distinct drop in temperature. It wasn’t so much the cold you noticed, as the ‘warmth,’ when you came back down. The fact that the engine cleared up and ran better hadn’t exactly gone unnoticed. Our coolant and cylinder-head temperature gauges weren’t all that precise, but the needles moved, essentially.
Nothing is more frustrating for a fighter pilot than to return to base, and then to find out there’s nothing wrong with the motor. It was very demoralizing, and it had to be fixed. Sometimes the best way to evade an enemy is to out-climb him, yet the men lacked confidence in their engines…bad news.
And it didn’t always happen, which made it pretty difficult to analyze at first. It depended on the throttle setting, and how much of the fuel-air mixture the engine was sucking, and how hard, if you take my meaning. The lower the air pressure, and the lower the temperature, the less moisture the air can hold. That moisture was choking up the carb in the form of ice, deposited there by the venturi effect.
The faster the air goes into the carb, the lower the pressure. It was the Bernoulli effect.
Why were we always the first ones to figure it out? We went looking for the problems, where other guys just said, ‘it doesn’t work,’ and complained about the equipment. We went looking for solutions.
Our research wasn’t useless. We proved these necessary modifications in combat.
The fact that we had the privilege of creating our own fireworks just helped to break the monotony.
“Are we trying out the colored goggles?” Someone asked.
Some amber ones, a whole box-full, to test for the Ministry. I actually liked them myself, but only in daylight. They made the colors just jump out at you, and that’s a help when trying to locate a distant, dull-colored object such as an enemy aircraft.
“It’s your choice, but I just plan on ducking down while I launch the rockets.” I told the pilot.
Kowalski hunkered at his shoulder, a gunner, but the name of the other guy just wouldn’t come, a sign of fatigue. Owens.
“Don’t watch them fly.” I added.
“Yeah. Don’t watch them.” Agreed one or two others, helping to brief the fledglings, the inexperienced ones.
We all chipped in on briefings.
“Just fire and forget them.” I noted firmly.
“The trouble is, if you want to change back to the clear ones in flight.” Snotty said.
You certainly couldn’t fly without them on, like having them up on your forehead.
Your eyeballs would literally freeze solid.
“I don’t expect a whole lot of enemy fighters up there in the middle of the night.” I mentioned. “But it’s not impossible. After all, nothing is impossible. We’ll be up there, after all.”
“Yes, you might have time to switch goggles.” Put in Powell. “The trouble is if you lose orientation, because it’s a very dark night, and if a heavy band of cloud comes along, well, then you’re just pooched.”
“Just duck down, and concentrate on your instruments,” I told the group. “Learn to trust your instruments.”
A light overcast, and an early-setting moon promised to be useful. We had other tricks up our sleeves. The train would be moving, we would be taking off from two separate fields, et cetera. Just a quick note, but we had various little aids to navigation, and for returning to base especially. For one thing, we had guys with lanterns ride out on my motorbike and a couple of other machines the boys ‘found.’ They would light their lanterns and put them ten or twelve feet out in front of the west side of a farmhouse.
The Fritzies couldn’t see them, but hopefully we would, on our return journey. We set them out at two farmhouses, laid out north-south, about two miles apart, and then one to the west, a mile away. These made a triangle seen from the air. The pilots had to look down once in a while, they had to look back once in a while, but it was a useful aid. The boys went all around the neighborhood on bikes, and so they knew the actual distances, to some degree.
Now, at all of our fields, including the satellite fields, we had those five-cell torches the Bobbies use in lieu of more credible weapons. We stuck them in a three-foot long piece of four-inch pipe, then stuck a nail through a hole to stop them from falling out. These pipes had a spike welded on the bottom end.
We could shove torches in them, stick them in the ground, and while it was a pale and faint guide, the beams of light could be seen in the air from a short distance. At best, maybe a half a mile, but anything was better than nothing. There was always dust or fog or mist in the air, but the faint beams were barely visible even up close, sometimes.
We had smudge pots, flares and water barrels for quick signals in an emergency, we had railroad-type emergency flares with the spikes on the end, we used those in various ways, and by the most careful choosing of the field, the terrain masked our lights.
We had a three-inch spotlight mounted on a tender, that’s a personnel vehicle in the RFC. We parked it, after backing it halfway up the east side of our little vale on a cow trail. The eastern rim of the little hollow had lots of scrubby, thick brush.
The crew pointed the light west and down at the valley floor, and, ‘voila.’ Instant runway. We made smudge pots out of soup cans. These were used on the downwind side to avoid smoking out the pilot’s view. We kept a candle in the window for our boys. The use of a little foresight kept it away from the enemy’s prying eyes.
The whole system could be shut down in moments, with a quick call from one of our field telephones, or in some instances a couple of blank-cartridge pistol-shots.
Admittedly, all this took some man-power.
My big worry was enemy planes out at night and roaming around. Enemy balloons were not such a problem.
According to Intelligence, tethered balloons were used sporadically at night, although they had no recent reports. In their opinion, the sightings might increase with better weather. But taken all in all, we had a pretty good system. It was a wonder that no one had ever thought it all through logically before. From my point of view, it only made sense to bomb at night, when with our equipment we never really hit anything to speak of. I mean in daylight, that is. If the bombing is ineffective, why waste men’s lives and lose a lot of expensive machines? Far better to make the enemy lose sleep. Never let them get any sleep. If they don’t like it, they can move further back, or devote a lot of precious time and resources to countermeasures. They can bring up their concerns at the surrender negotiations.
To destroy an enemy airdrome takes a lot of bombs and a lot of time. Most bombs just land in an empty field, after all.
Sometimes we had to re-invent ourselves.
We were waiting for a package, and at some point a phone call informed us that Major Dawley was on the way back from Army Divisional HQ. The nearest one was just down the road about ten miles or so.
One of my guys began one of those interminable stories, a sordid tale of alcohol, sex, wild music-hall antics and utter debauchery. We listened patiently, until finally Dawley arrived. I waved him in as the story concluded.
“…I thought she was the most passionate woman in the world, until I realized we were laying on an anthill…”
The conclusion of the rather predictable tale brought gales of uproarious laughter.
It relieves the tension.
“I did my best.” Dave said hopefully. “I think it will be enough.”
Dawley was pleased with himself, a very good sign.
“What did you get us?”
The resident general was offering us anything from his mess, ‘anything we wanted.’
We accepted the offer.
The booze was for us.
“Pass that around.” I told the corporal in a mellow tone, all filled with confidence.
“Once in a while, on a cold night, it’s O.K. to drink and drive.” Dawley mused. “It helps you to stay awake.”
“Yes, and cigarettes are healthful, refreshing, and help to maintain proper vitality.” Muttered the good doctor, and we all nodded sagely, exchanging grins all around.
I had a good slug myself, and another. That was fine, and it gave us all something to look forward to after a good night’s work.
“Promise you won’t tell Les Flics,” I winked. “La loi du cauchon.”
A little Quebecois for the boys’ edification.
“That means, ‘the law of the pigs.’” Explained the rather educated Howard-Smythe, raising an eyebrow in mild disapproval.
The cabbages would raise a few eyebrows, of that there was no question. Who in his right mind would request cabbages? The most vital item, a case of squid, all smelly and wet-looking, and not too fresh in spite of thoughtful packing in dry ice. If our generous general-friend thinks I’m mad, he wouldn’t bother us too much with trivialities.
***
In war you talk to your enemy. It is more than a tradition. It’s necessary. That’s why we have ambassadors, and diplomats, and attaches, and charges d’affaire. That’s why there’s always at least one country that remains neutral. It wouldn’t surprise me if King George sent birthday telegrams to his cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, in the midst of the war.
That’s right, cousins.
Cousins.
There was a wait of a few short minutes, as the Crossley tender took four pilots and four gunners over to our auxiliary field two miles south. We planned on sending a message of our own.
One top-secret and very special little rig was attached to my plane, and all the other boys had three or four cabbages on board to toss at the enemy aerodrome. It sounds crazy, but there was an important psychological aspect to it.
‘We can do anything we want, and you can’t do a damned thing about it,’ a nice, pathetic, childish, and immature little message.
Along with rockets, bombs and tracers, that should let them know who we are. All I had to do was to pull the lanyard at the right time and fifty pounds of fresh squid were going to plop down right in front of their squadron office. If I was lucky enough to be able see it.
(We used to drop flechettes from such boxes, but I was having trouble ordering them. I would have dropped a million of them on Manfred, given the opportunity.)
They would get the idea. Convention calls for a wreath under these circumstances, but fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Just for the record, while the author may be a little crazy, he ain’t stupid.
***
My gunner for the night was Aweemowep. Chandragupta put me on to this guy. A qualified machine gunner, he was the one from the little village up the road from Bombay.
He told me the name of the place, but I’ve forgotten. He invited me to visit after the war. That was nice of him, but unfortunately I never got around to it. I would have liked to have seen his ranch.
“Are you ready to go?” I queried.
“Yes.” He responded, distracted by three buddies there to see him off.
“I am saying goodbye now.” He told them cheerily.
They all waved like it was the train station.
“Cheerio. Cheerio.” They called at an unnecessarily loud volume.
“Hop in,” I said.
“I fervently pray that you are a good driver.” He admonished. “A long time, have you been doing this?”
“I’m very smooth.” I muttered acerbically.
He thinks he’s in command.
“I’m a qualified machine gunner too, you know.” I told the guy.
Who in the hell does he think he is?
At least we had something in common, and he eyed me with new respect. What the heck. He was new around here, and we are pretty unrecognizable in all the get-up. I helped him to strap in, no doubt adding to his impression that I was merely a chauffeur.
“You are all being so very, very kind.” He said, tipping me a farthing.
Hopefully he listened at the briefing, but he didn’t seem to be all there. Shock, I guess, at being the first. The first man from his village to fly. Something to tell his nine-hundred and sixty-three grandchildren.
“Promise you won’t mutiny on me?” I asked with a quick grin.
Then I climbed into my seat.
Chandra stood there.
“He’s not as dumb as he looks, and he really does know how to run that thing.” He assured me.
“Any idiot can fire a machine-gun.” I said shortly.
He moved to the rear, where he repeated the remark verbatim to the muffled-up figure of Aweemowep. Smart ass. These freakin’ Sepoys are all alike.
“Any idiot can fly an aeroplane,” I was startled to overhear from the man in the back.
The mechanic looked ready, and so we fired it up. After waiting two or three minutes, it was time to launch. A member of the ground staff on the far end of the line fired a flare. One red flare, and they waited, and then each one followed in sequence. One green flare, and it was time for me to go. It was very dark, with just a smudge of moonlight on the bottom of a few clouds to the south, low in the sky.
Everything seemed to be in order.
***
I took a deep breath and focused on what was important. There was a line of Lombardy poplars planted as a windbreak at the east and west end of the field. Along the north side was a river, its banks covered in brush and huge oaks. To the south were more fields, but this was also the short axis of our ‘drome, so we never took off north or south.
A low rubble fence separated us from those other fields. They weren’t much good for livestock, but once in place few folks would dispute the property lines…and useful enough for all of that. I guess there was still some farm-boy in me yet.
(They had to have some place to put the rocks. – ed.)
There was virtually no wind, as I opened up the throttle and began rolling to the east. There were two guys down at that end of the field, standing in front of the tree line. They pointed powerful torches at the branches. My cockpit lights were on, and the speedometer needle crept around, ever so slowly. The plane got lighter, and then I rode her up and out of our sleepy little hollow in the groves. Behind those trees there was a hillside.
It was a nice, simple mission, with sporadic artillery fire from the north and south drowning out our takeoff noises. At low altitude and in moonlight, navigating was fairly easy.
There were tanks moving on the road behind Moreuil. Our train got bumped by the French rail authorities due to an important freight going down our little line. This was no problem, as we would use the noise of these movements for cover.
The longer you’re in the air at night, the greater the chance of navigational error. But the boys around the Somme in the vicinity of Matigny started a firefight with machine- gunners on the Hun side. The tracers flew across right on schedule, and the Fritzies found themselves unable to ignore it, and so their tracers answered back.
Then we knew where the river was.
With the moon-glow through the clouds to guide us, it was really just a matter of keeping an eye on the old chronometer. Follow the river, looking for the church steeples.
Every village has its own steeple.
They’re very much like the vertical white signposts that dot the intersections in this part of the world.
In Canada we usually just put a skinny little post in the ground, and a strip of metal or a wooden sign on top, about six feet up. Without illumination, they’re invisible from the air. But French signposts are concrete obelisks. They’re whitewashed and they can be seen. They’re not always so easy to interpret, but they can at least be seen. The land had a sheen to it, probably from frost or at least a very heavy dew. Hopefully the mist and fog wouldn’t spring up in the next hour. The air was very moist. Hopefully all the boys were following instructions and using the carburetor heaters.
Sometimes you can’t see any roads at all. Sometimes a two-lane cow path sticks out like a sore thumb, shiny and wet. It depends on the angle of the moon and the thickness of the clouds. The first time I ever flew, what startled me was just how white roads look from the air. The conventional, modern thinking is that roads are black.
Maybe no one ever really looked.
The mucky, often-reprinted reconnaissance photos we were trained with hadn’t done justice, of course they were black and white. There’s not much color at night anyway. I can’t describe the difference. Perhaps reality focuses one’s mind, or maybe some of the photos got left in the soup too long.
Von Krumholtz’s aerodrome wasn’t easy to find, due to the fact that he had no major roads nearby, no rail lines, no villages. The river was a mile from the aerodrome. Even the farm-field polygons, the little tetrahedrons of the countryside had a characteristic pattern, like the whorls of a fingerprint. Blackbirds navigate. They do it by lining up on distant marks, like notches in the tree-lines.
Some nights the wind howls and you can hear the shingles rattling on the roof, but sometimes it’s dead calm. Tonight it was easy to calculate for drift. The Biff was very stable in a cruise. I was already planning our next escapade…each mission brings new insights. Fresh opportunities open up.
It was the usual chateau. It had a dark mansard roof, and the usual row of dormers, but the white walls showed up like a Currier and Ives postcard. Oh, my God. They had lights streaming out like fucking beacons, staining the ground outside with a golden tint.
Were they having a wake for the fallen?
My goal was to be first. It was unlikely that anyone had caught up. Diving to about three hundred feet, I pulled the ‘D’ shaped handle and felt the tug, and then the cord relaxed. Throttle up and climb.
“Sushi, coming right up.”
I hope you like it smashed in the dirt, you sons of bitches.
I could imagine the sound as it hit the graveled driveway. Hah.
Flying on to the east, I did a full one-eighty, carefully watching the instruments.
The lights still hadn’t gone off in the chateau.
What the fuck was the matter with them guys?
And it wasn’t even a decoy. Men came out and stand there studying the mess by the front steps. They know that I’m not friendly. I’m not a straggler. I’m not just another idiot pilot lost in the night. After another hundred-eighty degree turn, I put the nose down and opened up with the machine gun.
Dirt-splashes spurted and bloomed, and they all ran back into the house…mostly.
Yanking on the next handle, a couple of piddly twelve-pound bombs fell into the gloom. The man behind me didn’t fire, but there was little to see as yet, and then we were too far away. That’s cool. It’s better not to waste ammunition when you can’t hit anything from here anyway. Then, as if to make me look dumb, he popped off a few rounds in a tentative manner. I gave a shake of my head.
What the hell, it’s the thought that counts.
Do another circuit. Have two minutes gone by?
I asked myself this question. For some reason the clock seemed frozen in time.
Once again, the planes were lined up just in front of the southern tree line. These guys all think alike, not that my planes weren’t dispersed along similar lines of reasoning. I put them in the trees, they put them in front. Tracers slashed upwards in the night, seeking us out.
“Right. I’ll do you for that.” I barked, full of the hubris of youth and the foxy light of the ambient moon.
What I needed right now was a frigging hole in the clouds. Sudden flashes of light illuminated the tree line, and a whole row of planes was suddenly revealed, all lined up wing-tip to wing-tip.
“Oh, my, my.” Was all I could say, but after all that’s why we’re here.
A zig to the left and a zag to the right, chandelle, chandelle, ‘Allemaine left,’ as the caller says at a square dance. I unleashed the hounds of hell, personified by six Le Prieur rockets, and finally the gunner opened up on something.
We had friends in the neighborhood, as more flashes provided intermittent clarity to the scene below.
We figured at the briefing that the nine of us could clear this target in less than twenty minutes, and it would be preferable if it were ten or fifteen minutes.
With nothing better to do, I climbed up to a nice height. Turning back, I could see tracers reaching up in a great arc into the night, and answering fire from yet another of our planes on site at last. From 6,000 feet, I fired off a few green flares in case one of the boys was lost on the way.
The reader may think I’m crazy, but the enemy machine guns couldn’t reach that high, the likelihood of fighters was small, and if there was anti-aircraft artillery in the vicinity they were being awful quiet about it. Some kind of weird noise began scratching at my attention, which was concentrated upon the sheer act of flying at night over enemy territory.
“Take us back. Take us back. Damn you.” It was Aweemowep, and he was yelling his damn-fool head off in sheer, unmitigated frustration.
I finally got it, and now he was shouting at me again. What a nut.
So, I hauled it around in a semi-circle again and we went back to let him hose down the line of enemy planes with a couple of magazines.
“Take that. You dirty Imperialist German dogs.” He was shouting like a maniac.
He was loonie.
“Take this,” and, “Take that.”
He was shouting like a mad whore. For some reason it simply never occurred to me that a guy from India might hate the enemy as much as anyone else. Like it wasn’t personal to them after a while, and that they could be objective.
I mean the guy was nuts. He really was.
Aweemowep was a very accurate gunner though, as I assessed the results. Now came more bomb flashes and the distant ‘crump,’ more felt than heard. More rocket’s red glare in the night. The German Imperial flag was revealed on a big pole in front of the chateau. The dummies should’ve taken that down at dusk. Their CO would have given them proper shit for that, but of course he’s dead. Still, his second-in-command should have more sense. Discipline and routine have their uses.
“Hah.” I barked at the rear-gunner though the tube, the crazy Indian guy in the back. “Want some target practice?”
“Why certainly, young man.” He said.
The accent almost disappears when they shout or sing, have you ever noticed?
“See if you can hit that flag. Hold your fire until I say.” I shouted, hoping that he heard properly.
The gunfire from the back seat let up.
Keeping the flag’s position firmly in mind, I dipped the nose and shoved in major rudder, reducing throttle with my left hand. I rolled it so that the right wing was vertical, pointed at the stars, several of which were clearly visible.
There was a sudden, ‘Yipe,’ from the back seater, then it cut off as quickly as it started.
Another flash, and another, ‘whump.’ My guys were still out there. There was some risk of collision.
There it was. Hold it, hold it. A little down, a little left rudder, a little aileron, a little throttle, a little down, a little up. You get the picture. The Huns were throwing up a lot of frightfulness, but most of it was going the other way. We came at them unexpectedly.
“Fire.” I yelled, and the little son of a gun stitched it something pretty.
The line of his tracer-fire went right though the Imperial Eagle of Germany. What a kook. That silly fucker was shooting alternate red, green and amber tracer rounds.
What an enthusiast. Truly psycho. I wanted him for my gunner on all subsequent two-seater flights. That is to say, if he was willing to go with me. I resolved to try and make a smooth landing when we got back.
Our flight was the longest. We were slated to head northwest, to land at our original field. They were ready for us with lights and flares. The other planes would disperse to no less than three other locations. We had the two fields down south, and one just short of this one, where two planes were due to land shortly. Let the enemy sound-trackers make sense of that.
I could see a couple of preliminary lights on over there as I swung in to line it up.
Wracking my memory for the layout, but it was fine, and we soon had her down on the ground again. The sudden silence, a roaring in the ears, the ticking of the motor as it cooled down. We beat the fog by moments. Thin streamers of it were flooding the wide open spaces of our field. Perhaps it was the dim landing light system, that simply revealed the fog creeping up from the river.
A voice called out in the night. All the lights were suddenly extinguished.
The few men on hand pushed her in to the last fuel rig on site. The tarps went up, and it was a little painful getting out this time. The effects of long-term sleep deprivation are cumulative. You become more and more impaired in your ability to make decisions, especially snap decisions. With two more attacks scheduled for tonight, the enemy pilots would be plenty tired by tomorrow. All we had to do was to outlast them.
But we knew what was planned, and they didn’t. We also had three times the men.
Now was my chance to work on that sleep deficit we keep hearing so much about.
My back hurt like hell.
I prayed for a good night’s sleep, but as they say, ‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’
Off in the distant night, the sound of more aero engines. That would be the boys landing at the satellite field. It was just down the road, after all.
We went into the former command tent, and found a cubicle at the back with a couple of folding cots prepared and waiting. On each was a fresh pillow, blankets, a sleeping bag. One cot had a brown paper package with my name on it.
“Ah.”
Fresh socks are always good.
“Take that one over there.” I told Aweemowep. “I’ll go rustle up some hot water.”
“I’ll go along with you.” He suggested. “If it should devil-op, that there is hot stew in the brick cook-house…”
He was always thinking, that guy.
***
There is much to remember when you’re a professional pilot. For example, there are six different kinds of altitude. To remember five out of six isn’t good enough. There is indicated altitude, the uncorrected height in feet as read by the pilot directly from the dial, then there is actual altitude, or elevation of the terrain expressed in feet above sea level, then true altitude, this is actual height of the aircraft above sea level, then there is absolute altitude, which is the actual height of the aircraft above the terrain, you get that by subtracting elevation from true altitude. Then there is pressure altitude, which is the setting adjusted to the standard atmospheric pressure of 29.92 inches of barometric pressure. The density altitude is pressure altitude corrected for temperature variations.
Five out of six isn’t good enough. Biggsy could lose a leg to the mistake. His gunner was in a coma. While the doctors were both hopeful, (the shrink had stuck around, ‘to help out,’ as he put it,) the truth was he was still in a coma.
That was not the best phone call I ever woke up to.
Mind you, we were grateful that both men were alive.
Insofar as Biggsy was concerned, he’s out of it all now. More power to him. As for the gunner, Malarkey, all we could do was to ship him out as quickly and as gently as possible, and pray like hell. If he survived the trip to the field hospital, he stood a pretty good chance of making it. Biggsy flew from field to field and hadn’t re-set his altimeter. He forgot that one field might lay at a different elevation than another.
He was relying on it too much, when it came time to land in the dark. Of course I felt responsible. Would another couple minutes of lecturing have helped? And I was always telling them to, ‘trust your instruments.’
As for Malarkey, we’d know more when we got some information from the hospital.
I could say that sunny, late winter morn was like any other day, for after all it was.
With our aircraft scattered in groups all over the French countryside, it was a good chance to vary our tactics. We had groups engaged in a ‘long patrol,’ from the southern aerodromes. This was a sweep in strength as well as a photo mission. We sent twenty planes where normally there would have been six or eight. They bagged three enemy machines, to boot.
We had planes giving other squadrons a helping hand with trench strafing. We sent out a couple of pairs of planes on balloon duties. Their role wasn’t so much to shoot them down, as to prevent them from being launched. It seemed like a much better use of young lives. But all we had to do, was to show the enemy balloon corps some fighter planes cruising above, and they got the hint. We kept a pair of Camels in the air almost continuously, as best we could, over our major fields. We made ourselves useful. We did a few favors to earn a few brownie points.
I won’t say we were stretched thin, but the day is long. We had over fifty pilots and a grand total of forty-seven planes. While my old Avro 504-C might not be good enough to penetrate enemy airspace in daylight, pilots could patrol with another hack, a worn-out Camel, and watch for enemy reconnaissance machines looking for our operations.
Some of our less-experienced pilots were flying these machines. I made it quite clear they were to remain in the ‘cone,’ where they could be effective as air cover, and yet stay within ‘gliding range,’ of the aerodrome at any given altitude. One pilot shot down an AEG-IV bomber that was seriously astray, so they weren’t too unhappy about obeying orders. You know what some of these young bucks are like. They get their first car, a crappy old heap of junk and they immediately think they can race it. I had to nip that attitude in the bud. That guy’s wingman was jealous as all hell. The urge to roam must have been overwhelming. But he disciplined himself, they both did. In the end, they were both better pilots because if it. Both of those guys survived the war, incidentally.
After a predictable and not entirely unexpected engine failure in the Camel, the pilot brought her in for a perfect landing right on the field. I buttered him up real good for that little exploit, and why not? We could put another engine on it.
He was alive, and that’s always good.
With the two main fields, plus our satellite fields, we had to remain in constant contact with each other. The wires hummed with communications traffic. We shot telegrams, teletypes and phone calls back and forth, with me standing in front of the big board at field number one and perhaps Howard-Smythe, or Bernie, or Dawley on the other end, staring at the map on their board. One telling the other how many planes were available, results, mission requests, latest intelligence, at either end jotting notes and thinking furiously.
Bernie was proving useful. He had sources Army HQ did not. Dawley had his own sources. I could call any aerodrome on the Western Front and get answers. Howard-Smythe knew a few people, in his role as a rich bastard, and we pieced together a pretty good picture. By doing our homework, we learned what was going on.
The funny thing was, we had it all cleared up by ten, and the photos were on their way to the relevant agencies such as MI and GHQ.
I now had four planes at my ‘drome, all fueled up and ready. Two guys had dropped in at the north end of their patrol line for fuel and ammo. I was holding them on site for the next phase of the day’s activities.
Dawley was on the phone again.
“We have strong action up here.” I informed him. “Can you get me more fighters?”
“We already have another four Camels on the way.” He reported. “The Angels will be refueled, re-armed, and take-off within a half hour.”
“Any losses?” I asked, holding my breath on the phone and straining to hear him over the static on the line.
Static is caused by sunspots or something in the atmosphere, or distant thunderstorms.
It plays hell with communications by wireless. It’s no military secret.
“None so far, but opposition is light down here today.” The Major said. “I pulled a pair of machines out of the line-up due to engine and cooling problems.”
His promotion seemed to be agreeing with him. When he got the notice, I was as surprised as anyone, I swear. But of course I put him in for it—
“That’s fine.” I mused. “Keep every plane on the ground except for your air cover, and if you guys launch about three o’clock, just tell the boys to cruise north along the battle lines. They have to draw enough Archie so that they can be seen, and rendezvous with us about four p.m. They’ll have to fly low enough for Archie to shoot at them, with a fair degree of, of, temptation…”
We modified the plan to ‘S’ type turns along the Front, at varying altitudes. All I wanted was to leave a trail of smoke puffs, like bread crumbs, so that Hansel and Gretl would know where to find us. Small arms couldn’t get you much over three thousand feet, but Teutonic efficiency was always devising bigger and better anti-aircraft ‘kanone.’
“If you have to sit a few out, that’s fine. Put up our best twenty or two dozen. I’ve got close to a dozen up here.”
We’ll take it from there. It was the classic von Schlieffen plan. A pincers movement, conceived, planned and executed by yours truly. Sometimes I amaze myself. Even more so if it works.
We know they’re out there. It’s been confirmed by several reliable sources.
That’s the trouble with being famous heroes like the Von Richtofen brothers.
Lothar and Manfred. Everyone knows you by name, everyone knows what you look like.
It’s easy to find you.
“How soon can you have the men finished with lunch?” I queried.
“About half are just finishing breakfast now.” He reported.
“Really?”
Flexibility is the key to success.
“I’ve got an idea.” I told him. “See if you can get them all in the air by noon or one o’clock. All of them. Every damn plane you got. Call me the minute the last one takes off, and we’ll set the clock from there.”
So that’s how it started. March 13, 1918, pretty much a day like any one before or since. The sun came up, the northwest wind came up, the clouds cleared, the fog cleared. The battle raged on around Amiens. Men died in the muck and filth.
The men in the mess tent were in good spirits. Things were going our way, except for poor old Biggsy and Malarkey.
“Enjoy your lunch, boys.” I told them. “Not much going on yet.”
Okay, so I lied, but in my experience you’re better off hearing about it in the briefing room, after lunch, and not before.
***
It was a little after noon when the phone rang. Strange, how a call so anticipated can make your guts flip over inside, but this one did.
“I’ve just launched ten Biffs, eight Camels, and eight SE’s.” Howard-Smythe told me.
“At exactly twelve-oh-eight, the last one cleared ground.”
“They will cross the lines at point ‘A,’ going in, come out at point ‘D,’ then follow through points ‘F,’ through ‘L.’” He specified further.
I studied the board as he talked me through it.
“They should enter your little zone at about twelve-forty-five, if they’re not engaged by enemy fighters, and they will cruise at fifteen thousand in your planned vicinity.” He said.
“Thank you.” I hung up.
“Would you be so kind as to get the pilots and gunners into the briefing tent?” I asked Aweemowep.
“What’s that name mean, anyhow?” I queried as he headed for the mess area, and me to the latrine.
“It means, ‘mighty tiger, king of the jungle.’” He replied. “It’s an old family name.”
“You don’t mind helping out?” I joshed as we parted.
“There are no accidents.” He admonished rather didactically. “The CO put you with me for a reason.”
It’s a good thing he cleared that up for us.
END
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