The Professionals

by Max Hennessy

  ‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘they’ll probably need a few chaps, won’t they?’

  ‘Eventually they’ll need senior officers with ideas. You ought to make a good one.’

  I’d been worrying for some time what I’d do when the war ended because there seemed no sign of it happening yet and I’d decided I was going to be rather long in the tooth to start taking examinations by then. And I’d noticed that those who’d managed to stay out of uniform were already lined up for all the best jobs. It wasn’t going to be easy to find something I’d enjoy which would also pay well.

  ‘I might join you,’ I said.

  * * *

  The day was over far too soon and the following morning we were back in our uncomfortable huts and tents at Sutton’s Farm. Two of the married officers had their wives in the village and I half-expected that Sykes might get Jane to come down now, but he didn’t agree with wives and girl friends being around to distract men involved with the sterner business of war and she didn’t appear.

  The summer weather remained good but there had been surprisingly little success against the Gothas. They’d hit the Kentish coastal towns and killed over a hundred Canadian soldiers waiting to go to France, and 163 civilians in Folkstone, and had dropped bombs on London and killed a lot of children, so that the crack 56 Squadron had been brought back from France.

  ‘What’s wrong wi’ us?’ Munro demanded indignantly. ‘Ah’m all for a fight and Ah might even pick a Blighty oot o’ the raffle an’ get tae Aberdeen at last.’

  We continued to hope and practised quick take-offs, the off-duty flights encouraging the rest with ironic cheers as they dashed for the machines. ‘Run for it, you brave lads!’ they roared sarcastically, waving and saluting and flapping scarves and handkerchieves. ‘Come on, you gallant fellows! Remember the women and children depend on you!’

  By this time rumours were flying about that we were shortly to go back to France and we were instructed to practise tight formations. With plenty of time to waste, we became pretty good at it, the whole squadron flying together when we knew there was no likelihood of an alarm. Sykes wasn’t sure it was a good idea and preferred a looser formation but some bigwig came down from London and insisted. He was probably concerned with the fact that we looked prettier that way and certainly we grew skilful at it, the three flights answering to the various signals Sykes worked out, each man with his wingtips within three feet of the next man’s fuselage, and all in as tight a bunch as it was possible to be.

  ‘Increased fire-power,’ the man from London explained. ‘Get in there, all firing together at a Hun formation. They’ll wonder what hit them when you jump them.’

  ‘What happens,’ Sykes asked blandly, ‘if they jump us?’

  The bigwig didn’t seem to have thought of that one, and he answered evasively. ‘Fire-power,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s going to win the war. That’s what’s winning it in the trenches.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed anybody winning anything in the trenches,’ Sykes said to me later. ‘Had you?’

  He was right, of course, because the war had become a sad stalemate in France, with a daily wastage of men and no results, and the whole of northern France was being churned into a dreary wasteland of mud through which the armies couldn’t have advanced at speed even if they’d wanted to.

  Because the Gothas seemed to be on holiday, things remained quiet and we became very good at the formation flying, but we didn’t become involved in the war again until July when the alarm went in earnest once more. The Germans, it seemed, were heading for London.

  Bull and Munro were the first off with their partners, heading east and north in a group. Sykes was slow off the mark because he was occupied with dealing with Gumbell who’d been relegated to pushing a broom and couldn’t even do that properly. I heard later he was let off simply because the alarm had gone. I saw Sykes running like mad for his machine, clutching his helmet and gloves and wearing an ordinary overcoat instead of his leather one, and I decided he was going to find it cold as I swung my machine round to line up with him.

  We went off together, the machines waddling into position across the ground then roaring off over the end of the field in a steep climbing turn. We lifted over the houses and began to climb towards the Thames, eyes all over the sky for those elongated crosses that would show where the Gothas were. We had reached 12,000 feet when I saw them, and Sykes must have been half-frozen by then. I saw anti-aircraft shells bursting and then the Gothas just above and away to the north. Sykes waved to me and pointed and I waved back to indicate I’d seen them, too.

  Continuing to climb, we headed round the stern of the formation. They had learned a few tricks since I’d last met them and were in a tight box so that it was going to be difficult to get among them. Positioned as they were, every machine was protected not only by its own gunners but by the gunners of the other machines, too, and it seemed to me we’d have to pick up a straggler or try to cut one out.

  We had reached 14,000 feet by now and I could imagine Sykes feeling like a block of ice by this time. We were above the Germans now, though, and just behind them, and they looked enormous. Then I saw smoke trails in the air heading for my machine and realized they were already firing at us.

  We tried our first attack on the rearmost machine as we’d planned but there were no other Pups around and we had to assume we were going to have to do the job alone. The German gunners were all wide awake and the shower of metal that came at us from all angles made us sheer off quickly. For a while, we sat above the Gothas wondering what to do next and then I noticed that they were changing course and that in doing so one of the outside machines had wandered out of formation a little as Catlow had always been in the habit of doing on a turn, and was separated from the other machines by a good 200 yards.

  I fired to attract Sykes’ attention and pointed, and he nodded violently to indicate he was ready. I decided to go for the German from the inside of the formation so that if he took any evading action, it would carry him further away from his friends. Sykes went in first from the outside and as the gunners began to lift their weapons round, I went down in a howling dive from the other side. Swinging up underneath the Gotha, I hung on to the propeller until the German machine seemed to fill the whole sky with an enormous black shadow. As I fired I saw pieces fly off the wings and guessed I’d done some damage but it didn’t appear to be much because I saw no smoke, and every German gunner in the vicinity was shooting at me as I swung away. I saw fabric begin to flap on the wings in the slipstream and heard the crack of the bullets passing and smelled the tracer. Then Sykes was going in for a second try.

  The bullets I’d put into the Gotha must have startled the pilot, however, because he’d swung even further away from his friends, as I’d hoped he would. I glanced round my machine, looking for damage, but there appeared to be nothing wrong apart from several holes along the wing, and as the gunners swung their weapons desperately towards Sykes, I went in again. Once more I saw fabric flap on the Gotha but I still didn’t appear to have done any damage.

  Then, as I swung away, I saw Sykes waving frantically and realized that the rear-gunner had disappeared. With the gunner downed and the huge machine drifting away from his friends, it was safe to go in directly from the rear because the front gunner couldn’t reach us and we were far enough from the rest of the formation to go in together. I saw a puff of smoke from one of the great Maybach engines as Sykes fired, then I saw the propeller slow down and eventually stop.

  ‘We’ve got him!’ I shrieked into the wind.

  I went in as Sykes swung away and saw more fragments fly off the machine. Then I noticed that one of the great ailerons was flapping loose and the machine was losing height and going down in a gentle glide, turning slightly to starboard all the time as though the pilot couldn’t control it. Eventually it was heading inland again, going clean round in a descending circle, while we chased after it. Then suddenly, while we were both firing together, the no
se dropped abruptly. I was just below it at the time, pulling out of my last attack, and as the huge machine went roaring past within twenty feet of me, I saw we’d done more damage than we’d realized. The pilot was struggling to keep it in the air but he was fighting a losing battle and it was already all virtually over – so much so, in fact, we didn’t even bother to shoot at it any more but simply followed it down, sitting just behind its tail.

  It skimmed over a row of trees near the coast, as it continued its wide descending circle, and scraped a church spire, then I saw the chimney of a farmhouse vanish in a shower of bricks as one of the huge wheels struck it. A wingtip caught a small tree and the machine swung round; then the wheels touched the ground, and the port wings flailed the air wildly for a moment like a great bird taking a dust bath. Clods of earth and fragments of wood were thrown up, a propeller blade flew into the air in an erratic arc, and the machine cartwheeled, scattering wreckage as it went, the vast wings crumpling, and part of the tail bouncing along the ground as though it were alive, then the great machine was still.

  Chapter 7

  There was a tremendous celebration in the mess that night. The Gothas had had a bad day. One had been forced down in the sea with engine trouble, a second had been so badly hit by anti-aircraft fire it had had to force-land in Belgium, and the third was there for everybody to look at. Its huge rudder already decorated our mess and we had sneaked away the pilot, who was the only survivor, before the army came to take him prisoner, and filled him with whisky before sending him on his way to a prisoner-of-war camp.

  There were no further attacks and it was said that the raid had been so disastrous the Gothas were abandoning daylight raids for hit-and-run attacks after dark. We felt like sitting back and resting on our laurels, and Munro even put in a plaintive application for leave, thinking that perhaps the authorities, who had already promised medals to the squadron for the victory, might take pity on him and allow him at last to get to Aberdeen.

  It was Sykes who brought him the news.

  ‘It’s come through?’ Munro asked. ‘Ah’m gaein’ tae Scotland?’

  Sykes’ smile was sad. ‘No, Jock,’ he said. ‘You’re not. You’re going back to France. We all are. There’s a bit of a fuss building up in Flanders and they want everything there is.’

  Munro flung his cap furiously at the wall. ‘Och, ye’d think they’d gie a chap a bit o’ fun first,’ he said.

  The following few days were occupied with hasty packing, with a horde of local tradesmen in a panic that their bills wouldn’t be paid, and a few final parties. Jane turned up unexpectedly from Fynling by train, then the following day we climbed into the cockpits, waved goodbye to the few civilian figures standing along the fringe of the field forlornly waving handkerchieves, then the Pups lifted into the air and set out for France.

  Bayeffles, from where we were to operate, turned out to be a wretched place. Our equipment had not arrived and we had to sleep in tents on damp ground in borrowed blankets, and I suddenly began to feel an old man – too old for camping out in indifferent weather at any rate. There was a squadron of Camels on the field and the pilots were mad about them. They were stubby, blunt-nosed and roomy, and with a 130-horse Clerget engine and two guns they made me positively drool. The pilots said they could run rings round the Germans, who now had Albatros DVs, which were an improved version of the DIIIs that had done us so much damage in the spring. Pups, they said, were completely out-classed now so we had better start praying for Camels.

  It seemed a good idea. Albert Ball had been killed in May, disappearing during a dog-fight near Annoeuillin, and as he’d shot down forty-four enemy machines by then and been flying one of the new SE5 fighters which had come out with the Camel in answer to the Albatroses, it occurred to me that if he, with his skill, could end up dead, it wouldn’t be very difficult for me in an ageing Pup.

  Munro’s face was sad and his eyes faraway as he watched them taking off and landing. ‘Mon, mon!’ he said. ‘Fancy an aeroplane that’ll turn like a bat and climb like a lark!’

  ‘And kill everybody who flies in it,’ Bull added, trying to offer some consolation. ‘I’ve heard they’ve got a nasty habit of taking off sideways and when you try to straighten out they do a sideways dive into the ground. No flowers by request.’

  Thinking I might as well be ready for when we got them, I sneaked across the field whenever I could and talked to one of the Camel pilots I knew. He was a flight commander called Pack and he was clearly impressed by them, but didn’t hesitate to let it be known that they weren’t an aeroplane for ham-fisted beginners.

  ‘Just take your attention off ’em for one second,’ he pointed out, ‘and you’ll find yourself on your back or in a spin.’

  ‘At least,’ I said, ‘they’ve built us a machine at last that isn’t easy to hit.’

  ‘It isn’t easy to fly either, but you can’t have everything. Take it up and try it.’

  The Camel was a wicked-looking aeroplane with none of the sweet lines of the Pup, and it seemed all engine and had a curious aggressive look about it that appealed to me.

  ‘They’re tail-heavy as hell,’ Pack warned. ‘And so light on the controls you can throw ’em all over the sky. And just remember she swings like the blazes taking off.’

  I listened to the crackling hiss as the engine warmed up then I taxied down the field. Not far away another Camel was taking off and I could see the crab-like motion I’d been warned of quite clearly. As I opened the throttle and roared across the ground, the tail well up, the engine spraying castor oil over me in a fine mist, I felt I’d never experienced such excitement in any other aeroplane before.

  I was up to 3,000 feet in no time and I noticed if I relaxed the pressure on the stick for a second the tail dropped and the machine shot upwards vertically again at once. I tried a turn, closing the throttle a little because the speed seemed tremendous, but the controls became sloppy at once and I tried again, with the throttle open, and the machine hurtled round, neat, tight and secure. This was just what I’d been praying for. At last they’d built an aeroplane for fighting not joy-riding, and as I looked along the two machine guns in front I remembered the old BE2 I’d tried to fly as a fighter the previous year, with the observer able only to shoot backwards so that we’d had to fly away from an enemy in order to hit him; and the strange device I’d fixed on the first DH1 I’d flown, with a gun lashed in the front cockpit which broke loose during a fight so that I’d nearly shot myself down.

  Straight flight in the Camel was much more difficult than manoeuvring but I managed to crab my way to the ground again, thinking all the time, though, that it was going to be murder flying Pups after this. As I stopped and sat listening to the click and sizzle of the cooling engine dropping spots of clear yellow oil to the grass, I saw Pack staring at the sky. There was another Camel up there, moving slowly into a turn.

  ‘He wants to watch what he’s doing,’ he said. ‘With Camels you end up either dead or another Albert Ball.’ He squinted at the sky again and suddenly, as though he sensed what was going to happen, began to walk towards the centre of the field.

  The Camel’s nose dropped as he set off and it flicked into a spin. The pilot managed to pull it out but he was too late to save himself and the Camel hit the ground at a shallow angle not fifty yards away to vanish in a cloud of dust, flying pieces of aeroplane and clods of turf. People began to run but we saw the pilot scramble clear and stumble to safety, his face bloody. Pack stopped dead.

  Then I noticed Gumbell not far away. We still hadn’t got rid of him, and his jobs – postman, messenger and general dogsbody for the squadron – carried him all over the field. It was a job that suited him down to the ground because it enabled him to shove his long nose into everything that was going on, and he was staring now across the grass at the unhappy pilot standing by the wrecked machine dabbing at his face.

  He saw me looking at him and grinned. ‘That’s the way to fly an aeroplane,’ he observed cheerful
ly.

  Pack gave him a bitter look. ‘It’s the way not to fly a Camel,’ he said.

  * * *

  The closeness of the Camels and the sight of them taking off and pulling themselves up like lifts made us all a little heartsick. There was only one bright spot on the horizon, and that was that Richthofen was no longer around. An FE crew claimed to have shot down the pilot of an all-red Albatros and at first he’d been claimed as dead. It seemed, however, he’d only been wounded and was shortly expected back, and since he had over fifty victories to his credit now, I personally found myself hoping that his wound would keep him in hospital a long time, as his brother, who was also said to be pretty good, was in hospital, too. How the stories crossed the lines I had no idea and I could only suppose that neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland and Holland got hold of copies of German papers which our agents there passed on.

  Despite the absence of the two Richthofens, however, the Circus seemed to have lost none of its fight and was still doing a lot of damage. It was a cheerless prospect, and the battlefield seemed to match it. The army had been battering away at the German line for months now and for miles all the way to the east of Ypres the countryside stretched in a flat oasis of shell craters, each touching the next and even overlapping, and all filled with the water from the heavy rains of the summer. The only signs of life were the white dots that showed as faces turned to look up at us, but it was impossible to see the individual soldiers in their sandbagged defences – probably because their uniforms were so coated with mud they blended with the countryside. I couldn’t imagine how they could even live in such a swamp, let alone fight in it. They’d been at it for months now and so far had gained a matter of about four miles with a casualty list nearly as big as the Somme.