A Deadly Caper (Innocents At War Series, Book 2)

by Andrew Wareham

  Major Case called all pilots together to inform them of the changes decreed by Wing.

  “Colonel Trenchard – who is in line for brigadier, it is whispered - told me that we are to lead the way in demonstrating the function of the aeroplane in modern warfare.”

  “I expect that’s why you were there all morning, sir. It would take him four hours to get out that many syllables.”

  “I shall ignore that irreverent comment! We are to raid targets given us, and in between to patrol the trenches and bomb anything we see of interest, as well as drive away German reconnaissance machines. We should attempt to bomb observation balloons, but only occasionally so that we are not expected. The task should be assigned to experts in that field, he said. We have three of them here, fortunately.”

  Tommy, Noah and Jack stood and took a bow.

  “Today gentlemen, you are to familiarise yourselves with your Flights and each other.”

  There was the sound of a slap and a falsetto squeal from the back, “don’t you get familiar with me, you beast!”

  “God help us all! Having done that, you will engage in patrols of the trenches, by Flights, for the normal purposes. No bombs today.”

  The two majors and the captains retired to the CO’s office to quickly discuss who would take off first and in which direction.

  “Will they ever grow up, gentlemen? You would think they had not reached their majority yet! I wonder how many of them are actually twenty-one?”

  “Speak up, Tommy!”

  “Thank you, Mike! Not me, sir.”

  “It gets more like the kindergarten every day!”

  George nodded his agreement, said that he feared it was very wrong of the people in London to permit the young to go to war, particularly such a bloody and pointless war as this promised to be.

  Tommy lined up his A Flight of Noah, Jack and a new addition, an Australian known as Drongo, quite why they were unsure, but it was a very good name.

  Tommy had spent a few minutes with Drongo on the previous afternoon, had discovered that his father was a ‘squatter’, which translated as the hugely rich owner of vast acreages of Australia, covered in sheep and cattle. He had been in England, ‘having a look at the place’, when the war had broken out. He had learned to fly, ‘for the laugh of it’, before he left Australia, so it had seemed logical to join the RFC, as he was not going to be left out of a war if there was one going. He had experienced a minor crash in training which had delayed his transit to France, but he was here now and knew his way around a rotary, so he said.

  They took off in line abreast, all very neat and tidy and then slipped into line astern at Tommy’s waved command. It made a good start that all three remembered what the hand signal meant.

  Twenty minutes of follow-my-leader was sufficient to establish that Drongo could fly; he kept station and neither lost nor gained height on his turns, enough to say that he knew what he was doing. Tommy signalled them to form two pairs, Noah on his tail and fifty yards to his left, Jack parallel to Tommy and a hundred feet higher, Drongo behind and to his right. They had talked formations the previous evening and had decided that this would give them a good coverage of the air, Noah and Drongo to the sides and above them and behind, while Tommy and Jack could watch to the front and below. Importantly, it should make it very difficult for any Hun to take them by surprise, and hopefully would let them get the first sight of anything in the air.

  They climbed to three thousand feet and followed the line of the trenches north and then back towards Droncourt, landing after an uneventful hour, seeing nothing but picking out a very useful railway line running from Dunkirk that could give them a direct guide to the field.

  “Highly satisfactory, gentlemen. Same again this afternoon.”

  The afternoon excursion was rained off; they sat in the mess and talked tactics before wandering off to the newly installed darts board. None of them could actually play darts, but it amused them to try for a while. Tommy sat with Jack Jackson for an hour, drinking a beer and chatting.

  “What are you intending to do with yourself, Jack? You’re a lieutenant and will probably make major before the war’s over, with a squadron of your own. Bit of a change in its way.”

  “From a sergeant mechanic, it is that, Tommy. I want to stay in the RFC, if it should be possible. No way I can return to the mines at the back of Belper. I started out as a boy on the steam engines there, an oiler and greaser. My Dad was a miner; two brothers as well, went underground when they was twelve; I had an older sister, but she left home, don’t know where or why – they wouldn’t talk about her, so you know what that means! I joined the army to get a trade soon as I was fourteen, as a boy soldier, made it into the RFC and thought I might do well as a mechanic; now the RFC has let me do more. A lot more. I could be a general yet, Tommy, with a la-di-da missus and children – I will be, too, one day! This war is the making of me, Tommy – General Jackson will be a man to be reckoned with. What about you?”

  “Different for me, Jack. I’ve grown up with money, not a lot but enough to live on, and I’ve married a millionaire’s daughter, I discover. I shall probably go to America for a time – I think I am an American, strictly speaking. Then, maybe, an airline to fly passengers? Who knows? I don’t have to make anything of myself, Jack. It’s all been done for me. I could envy you, in many ways, for being your own man.”

  They took off next morning, still without targets to raid and so indulging in a parade along the trenches, over three thousand feet to avoid the attentions of machine-gunners. Archie gave them a going-over, his air bursts coming within two hundred feet on occasion, suggesting that either the gunners were learning from experience or that they had new sights installed. Tommy took them up to four thousand and then dropped by increments of one hundred feet. The explosions followed with a delay of a few seconds, bursting at more-or-less the height they had just vacated. He decided that they had a new range-finder, and quite a good one, but that it could be avoided by never keeping to the same height for more than a few seconds at a time.

  He kept turning his head, watching the sky all around him, noticed that Drongo tended to stare to his front; he must warn him about that. Jack raised his left arm, pointed down and about sixty degrees left. Tommy looked in the general direction, saw movement, picked out a pair of black crosses on wings, a monoplane at about a thousand feet and behind the German trench line, flying more or less to the west as if about to cross the lines. He raised his right arm, telling Jack and Noah that he was about to change course; Drongo might not see the signal but knew to conform to his movements.

  Tommy led the four Bristols into a dive that would, he hoped, intercept the monoplane, one of the Fokkers or Pfalzes, he thought, much like a low wing Morane, the new ‘N’ type they had been told about. It was a single-seater, he saw, and the pilot not looking behind him, putting up a fairly amateur performance, in fact; possibly he was a green hand, familiarising himself with the local sky. It should be possible to give him a fright; they might even drive him to crash land. Teach him to keep his eyes open at least!

  Someone in the trenches was awake, firing red flares in an attempt to warn the German pilot; he waved back to them.

  Tommy levelled out a few feet behind and to the left of the Pfalz, or the Fokker perhaps, and slowed to turn across its tail, leaning out to the Lewis and triggering a burst that should wake the pilot up. He was a better shot than he thought, the arc of fire hitting the port wing and then the engine and cockpit, the modified rounds chewing holes through the wood and canvas and then the pilot, the little plane collapsing into a fluttering spiral dive and taking fire as it hit the mud behind the German rear line. Tommy pulled up and into the fastest climb he could persuade the Bristol to accept, the full five hundred feet a minute, before any local machine-guns could be turned onto them.

  “That, Thomas,” he told himself, “was nothing short of murder. Just a learner pottering about his own bit of sky and trying out his new skills.”

/>   He levelled out at four thousand feet and led the Flight back to the west and then south towards Droncourt, back into patrolling formation. Thirty minutes more and he took them home, circling the field and landing as tidily as ever; he might be upset, but he would not display the fact for the world to see.

  Noah, Jack and Drongo ran across to him, clapping him on the back and cheering.

  “Got that one, Tommy!”

  “First one for the Squadron!”

  “First one for A Flight!”

  They clustered round him as they led him to the Intelligence Officer, Maurice and yet to be christened, waiting with his clipboard for their report.

  “Crossed the trenches at three thousand feet, and met accurate fire from German anti-aircraft guns, Maurice. Very close airbursts. I think they have a new range-finder. Followed us up a thousand feet and then down, step by step, a little bit behind us for time. Vary height, even by a couple of hundred feet, and you can throw it off. We then saw a monoplane at about one thousand feet. A Pfalz, I thought.”

  “No, it was a Fokker, Tommy,” Noah interjected.

  “I thought it was a Pfalz,” said Jack.

  “It was a bloody monoplane, whatever it was,” Drongo commented.

  “Anyway, Maurice, we saw it, and sneaked…”

  “Snuck!”

  “Sneaked, you iggerant Aussie! Dived and got behind it anyway and crossed its tail at low speed – about sixty, I think – and fired a single burst from the Lewis which hit wing and cockpit and caused it to crash about two hundred yards behind the German rear line. We then resumed patrol at four thousand feet and returned to Droncourt after sixty-five minutes in the air.”

  “A single burst, Tommy?”

  “Half the pan, perhaps.”

  “Less than that, Tommy, fifteen rounds at most,” Noah said.

  “Very short,” Jack agreed.

  “Bloody good shooting, whatever!” Drongo offered.

  “Definitely went down, you say, Tommy? All four of you saw it to hit the ground?”

  The kill was confirmed later that morning by artillery observers behind the British trenches, no more than half a mile away from the scene, No Man’s Land being narrow just there.

  “Damned good show, Tommy! Wing have just been on the telephone to congratulate us. First German shot down for weeks in the British sector while the French are claiming three in one patrol for their man Pegoud. Does us all good, Tommy. The report will be across General French’s table by later this afternoon, and he’s on our side already, will be delighted and will probably add it to his diary of the day for the War Office!”

  Major Case was truly pleased – his squadron would be seen as virtually immediately successful.

  “Colonel Trenchard sends his personal congratulations, Tommy. Says that we must always attack. Everything we see in the air must be destroyed or forced down. The air is to be ours, whatever the cost may be. And this cost us twenty rounds of three-o-three!”

  Tommy was unconvinced, shook his head, pushed the office door shut.

  “He was no more than a green new boy, sir. Pottering about, familiarising himself with his own trenches, I would imagine. I came up behind him and he never knew he was at war until the first bullets hit his wing. He did not have time to turn away, to do a thing.”

  “Bloody good show, Tommy! If he was armed, he had no chance to shoot back and kill you or Noah or Jack or Drongo. What is a bloody Drongo, anyway?”

  “Black and white bird, he tells me, like an English magpie but with the colours pretty much reversed, white where the magpie is black. Makes a lot of noise and ain’t very bright. A lot of Aussies get called Drongo.”

  “No comment! What I am saying, Tommy, is that as far as I am concerned - and I speak for every professional soldier, I think - you achieved a perfect result. Do it again and I shall be more than happy! I didn’t know you could shoot, by the way.”

  Tommy thought and then shrugged – he was a soldier, like it or not. He had volunteered before the war, and that made him a professional. He could not pick and choose, perform those duties he liked and refuse anything that made him uncomfortable.

  “Never really tried shooting, sir; glad I can do it. Live and learn, I suppose. You’re right, of course, sir. It ain’t very pretty, and I don’t have to enjoy it, but we can’t have German planes in the skies observing for their guns. And if we get them early, well, they’ve just got to go through all the bother of training up another one.”

  Major Case nodded – that was the answer he wanted.

  “That makes you a brace, does it not, Tommy?”

  “It is my second, sir. The first I caught was taking photographs, so there was certainly no choice there. Nor with this one, in fact, sir. War is war, but I don’t have to like it.”

  “A good thing too. I’ve met men who liked war. I did not like them. Trenchard, as an example; there is a man who believes in war – he thinks war makes the Anglo-Saxon race stronger. I don’t. I think that war kills able young men who could build things rather than destroy them, but, Tommy, we’ve got a war on our plate at the moment, and all we can do is win the bloody thing. Just as long as you don’t dislike it too much, like poor old George, I sometimes think. No matter! By commanding the air, we bring victory closer.”

  “You are probably right, sir. I could wish you were not, but wishes won’t bring us victory. I must carry on and do all I can. I must face the mess now, I suppose.

  “No booze this morning, Tommy. We have a target for this afternoon, and the weather looks good enough.”

  They cheered Tommy and enjoyed veal for lunch and then sat back to listen to Major Case explain their afternoon’s job.

  “All of us – me, too. Thirteen planes up, and no, it ain’t unlucky!”

  They laughed politely.

  “We have a consignment of the Hales Bombs, delivered while you were out announcing our presence to the Hun. My congratulations to Tommy and A Flight; my certainty that B and C will not be left behind on the honours board!”

  They cheered and yelled at that, much as they had for their successes on the rugger field not so many months previously. Tommy glanced across and saw that George was distinctly unimpressed, not a smile on his face at the prospect of his Flight killing Huns.

  “We are to fly almost due east for some thirty miles to discover a large railway junction. I shall lead you there, gentlemen, on the grounds that I can read a map!”

  They booed, several of them claiming that they could read quite well.

  “By way of an experiment, we shall drop from four thousand feet. We shall then circle the target to observe what we have achieved before returning home. Bomb by Flights, gentlemen, following the example of your Flight Commander. The Bristols will be fully loaded with eight bombs, the Parasols with six so as to maintain the same speed. This amounts to a little less than three-quarters of a ton of bombs, which might well be expected to do some good. I do not know what the effects of wind might be.”

  A voice from the back said that it made him fart.

  “Thank you for that comment, sir! I was thinking more of the extent, if any, to which the bombs may be blown off course. That is one of the things we shall be looking out for, of course. Check that the bombs are properly loaded into the clips before you take off; it may be too late afterwards. They are designed to explode on impact, so do not pat them on the nose to wish them well!”

  They wandered out in a gossiping mob, ambling across to their planes and glancing around them.

  The Lewis Guns had been removed and the planes had been bombed up while the pilots had been having lunch and slapping each other on the back. The mechanics were waiting for the chance to eat their own meal and rather hoped that take off would not be delayed.

  Major Case started up and taxyed out, followed by the three Flights, taking off sedately under the weight of the bombs. Jack’s engine cut out at fifty feet and he kept straight on and glided into a good landing on the rough grassland beyond the field
, bumping just a little, sufficient only to shake one bomb out of its clips; the other seven exploded sympathetically, but the first had probably been enough to kill him.

  The Flight closed up and the squadron carried on.

  Forty minutes to climb to four thousand feet and reach the target, Major Case intentionally leading them beyond it to the north east and then turning onto a course home to cross his dropping point on the railway line. The clips all opened and the bombs fell, mostly in a clean trajectory, a few choosing to tumble; they scattered in the wind and dropped over a good square mile of countryside, the great bulk of them seeming to explode. They were sure they saw some explosions in the junction that had been the target, and thought they saw a fire started in at least one railway truck. They maintained formation and followed a zig-zagging course back to Droncourt, passing over the crater that had been Jack as they swung into the wind.

  They made their reports to Maurice and wandered across to their billets to clean up and change out of working uniforms, meeting in the mess for afternoon tea and discussing the results of the bombing. Jack’s name was not mentioned.

  Later in the month they were told that the Hales and Cooper bombs now had a little propeller on the nose which must unwind to prime the detonator; they could not be used at less than a thousand feet. They had forgotten Jack’s name by then.

  “We shall be bombing morning and afternoon every day for the next two weeks, gentlemen. The reason has not been given, but spring is coming and there must be a Push against the Hun very soon. We shall continue to aim at the railways and canals and at any other targets of opportunity that we can identify. Mostly, we shall work in Flights rather than in squadron shows.”

  Fred Petersham had been sent across from Three Squadron to fill the gap in A Flight, at his own request, and they were four strong again. Noah slipped a couple of times and addressed Fred as ‘Jack’, but he quickly grew used to the change.

  “Don’t think I shall aim to be a general, Tommy. Seems to have a bad effect on the life expectancy!”

  Noah made no other comment on the loss of his oldest friend in the service; it was not done to show grief.