Harold Taylor arrived back from leave on 1 May to discover that several of his friends had been killed or taken prisoner. He just had time to send a field postcard informing his parents of his safe return when, due to a shortage of personnel, he was ordered into the air at 5pm. His FE2b, flown by Lt B. King, was one of six detailed to bomb an ammunition dump at Inzel-Les-Eperchin. They had dropped their bombs and were on the way back, when Taylor’s machine became detached from the others and was attacked by three Albatros scouts from behind.
Within seconds I felt bullets in my thigh, which blew it to pieces, at the same time a bullet hit me in the right arm, going straight through the muscle. This paralysed my arm. Bullets were spraying everywhere. I felt them pass my head. My rear gun was hit many times and the petrol tank had been pierced and petrol was blowing all over the machine. I slumped onto the floor of the nacelle, bleeding profusely from my leg and arm and then there was oblivion.
Taylor came round as the machine hit the ground, ran ‘a few yards, tipped on its nose and settled on its right-hand wing tip’. If it had gone completely over, he and the pilot would have been buried under the engine. King was unharmed and had crash-landed in the middle of Arras racecourse, where infantry dragged Taylor clear. As they did so, he passed out again and came to on a stretcher on the floor of Arras Cathedral, which was being used as a Casualty Clearing Station. The place was full of wounded men, and Taylor sensed that if he did not get attention soon he would bleed to death. ‘But I was lucky,’ he acknowledged. He had no idea how many days he lay unconscious, but when he woke up he was on a hospital train. Eventually, Taylor arrived at Charing Cross Station, where he would ‘never forget’ his homecoming: ‘It had become the habit of many hundreds of men and women to meet the hospital trains so that they could welcome the wounded’; a truly heart-warming gesture Taylor thought. Cpl H.G. Taylor underwent six operations on his leg, during the last of which the surgeon stiffened the limb as the only way to save it.
On the day that Taylor was shot down, 1 May 1917, Capt Charles Brown wrote to his mother from No 40 Sqn. He was not flying at that time and had just learnt that he was to return to ‘the Home Establishment’ for at least three months. ‘I am coming home for a rest as my nerves have practically gone so I am useless out here. We have been doing a terrific amount of work out here lately and it had been too much for me.’ His logbook entry read: ‘taken sick in the air … returned to England for rest’. Between 18 November 1916 and 1 May 1917 in France, Brown had flown seventy-seven operations.
Farther south than Brown, Capt Harold Balfour, the King’s Royal Rifle Corps officer who had volunteered for the RFC from the trenches, flew on patrol near Vimy Ridge shortly after it fell to the Canadians. Misjudging the strength and direction of the wind in ‘dull and overcast’ weather, he found himself well over enemy territory facing a slow flight back in the face of a stiff breeze. Zig-zagging to avoid volleys from hostile rifles and machine-guns, he managed to escape serious damage until ‘a harsh metallic clang’ preceded the engine packing up and the propeller ceasing to turn, with Balfour still short of the Allied line. He could only glide and hope. Falling rapidly, his biplane scraped over the Ridge, and Balfour pitched head first into the mud on the edge of a shell crater. Momentarily stunned, he was found by rescuers wandering around thoroughly disorientated.
Balfour’s survival owed much to a last-minute decision. Serious disagreement existed between aircrew as to whether belts should be undone before an inevitable crash. Until that day, Balfour had vehemently advocated remaining strapped in. Mid-air as his damaged machine plunged, he changed his mind, was thrown clear and lived.
The heavy loss of aircrew during April and the concluding phase of the Battle of Arras put added pressure on the training system to produce pilots more quickly. Yet John Jeyes, the former Oundle schoolboy who avoided an attempt by the RSM at Northampton to draft him into the army, suffered from its administrative quirks. On joining the RFC in August 1916, he had been sent on a three-month cadet training course, where ‘I soon found it was no good showing any sign of fear or not trying by every method possible to stick to one’s purpose.’ He went to Jesus College, Oxford, for theoretical and practical instruction in the intricacies of engines and rigging, Morse, photography, navigation and map reading. Then it was off to Waddington, Lincolnshire, where he had flights with an instructor on Farman Longhorns and Shorthorns. ‘I could not believe my eyes’ to see flying types ‘which had first caught my schoolboy dreams way back in 1915.’
He was shown ‘how to cope with – or tackle – REs’, which he found ‘tremendously exciting’. The day came when six new RE8 machines, popularly known as ‘Harry Tate’ after a music hall comedian, arrived for the pupils to fly. The first, with the pupil in the rear cockpit, took off, stalled on its initial climbing turn, spun into the ground and put the pupil in hospital. To the horror of those waiting their turn, exactly the same happened with the second and third. For the fourth attempt, the instructor decided that the pupil would fly the machine with him in the rear seat. The aeroplane took off into the wind, but suffered the same fate as the others, except that this time both instructor and pupil were driven off to hospital. Not only had four potential pilots and one instructor been immobilised but four new machines had been wrecked in a single morning. Jeyes was fifth in line, ‘filled with no confidence at all’. Asked whether he would like to go solo, he replied that he was willing to try if the instructor thought he could do so safely. Wiser counsels prevailed, and instead Jeyes was sent to Beverley, near Hull, to fly the BE2c, which he ‘thoroughly enjoyed’.
Jeyes stayed in Yorkshire only a couple of weeks before going to the Brooklands Aviation School for artillery co-operation work and further instruction on the BE2c. After three weeks, he returned to Scampton, Lincolnshire, not yet having flown solo. After a few more take-offs and landings, he at last went up alone. To compensate for the absence of an instructor, two ½ hundredweights (127 kilos) bags of sand were loaded into the rear cockpit. Jeyes taxied out, checked the controls, turned into the wind, opened the throttle and took off. Climbing to 1,000ft, he executed a left turn and ‘soon got the feel of the aircraft. Harry Tate, me and the sandbags were up and away on my first solo.’ Scampton was a large aerodrome with plenty of room and a level surface, so he landed safely at 65–70mph. After ‘five or six’ more solos and ‘two or three days more practice’, Jeyes was told he had passed the necessary tests and gained his wings. However, eight months later, April 1917, he was still a long way from active service being instructed on the Avro 504K.
The experience of Lt Ferdinand Maurice Felix (Freddie) West, who joined No 3 Sqn as an observer in April 1917, proved somewhat different. Having travelled across France from Italy to volunteer for service in England, he was arrested at Dieppe as a suspected French deserter due to his fluency in the language; the result of having a French mother. Released from custody, he was accosted by a sergeant at Victoria station and marched off to the nearest recruiting office, where Freddie ‘heard the clink of silver’ as the NCO claimed his reward. A further shock awaited the Anglo-French volunteer. Because he came from Italy, where he had been brought up by his mother and aunt following his British father’s death in the Boer War, it was assumed that he had a knowledge of Latin and he found himself in the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Having advanced to sergeant, on 15 May 1915 West was commissioned into the Royal Munster Fusiliers; he claimed because his expertise as a fencer caught an influential officer’s eye and as a Roman Catholic, he met a prime requirement of The Royal Munster Fusiliers, a regiment seriously short of subalterns due to heavy losses in battle.
From November 1915 until April 1917, West served in the trenches, in his own words ‘crawling through slime, human refuse and human carnage in sweat-caked clothes’. This was, he decided, ‘a war of rats and generals’. He began to envy the crews of aeroplanes, ‘up in the clear, clean sky’ and recalled his youthful enthusiasm for flying awakened by the exploits of Georg
es Chavez, who in 1910 killed himself after crossing the Alps. West bribed an acquaintance, Lt Edgar Golding, to take him up in return for a ride on the horse allocated to him as a company commander. West was ‘hooked’ and when a request for observers in the RFC appeared on the battalion notice board in March 1917, he promptly applied. However, his secondment was delayed for a month by a reluctant senior officer.
After attending a short Artillery Spotting Course at Brooklands, he found himself assigned to No 3 Sqn, where he teamed up with Golding. The Morane-Saulnier L Parasol two-seat tractor had an effective ceiling of 12,000ft and top speed of 90mph. To his pilot’s consternation, West tended to concentrate on familiar landmarks from his infantry days as they patrolled the Béthune area, rather than scanning the sky for potential danger. After three months and having taken every opportunity to fly with any pilot short of an observer, West applied for pilot training.
At the Front, by mid-May 1917 the Nivelle offensive, launched so optimistically on 16 April to seize the Chemin des Dames highway overlooking the Aisne river, had failed, and the enormous losses incurred prompted serious mutinies in the French armies. About a half of the front line divisions (54/100) refused to obey orders and reputedly, one regiment which did, marched forward bleating like sheep. Fortunately these disruptions were undetected by the Germans and in due course, General Philippe Pétain would restore discipline. Inescapably, however, the grandiose Allied plans had come to nought. On the French left, at Arras, Haig’s advance had managed a maximum 4 miles (6km) at a cost of 158,600 casualties by 27 May when it came to a halt, with the Germans still occupying high ground at Lens.
The Battle of Arras provided a particular shock for the RFC. Albert Ball had remained in England attending various courses and undertaking instructional work during the winter of 1916–17. He shrank from public recognition, wearing a trench coat to conceal his decorations when off duty. Ball did accept the freedom of his own birthplace, Nottingham, and became involved in the design and building of a single-seat fighter by the Austin Motor Company, which never saw service. On 25 February, Ball was posted to No 56 Sqn and went with it to France in April.
During the evening of 7 May, Ball was part of a force engaging German fighters in poor weather. He was seen chasing an opponent into cloud, but failed to return to base. His loss was confirmed the following day when Trenchard wrote to his father about ‘the most daring, skilful and successful pilot the Royal Flying Corps has ever had … His good spirit was infectious, as whatever squadron his was with, the officers of it tried to work up to his level and reputation.’ In his diary, staff officer Maurice Baring wrote: ‘This has cast gloom through the whole Flying Corps.’ Ball was only twenty and beyond the official forty-four victories, may have actually shot down forty-seven enemy machines and one kite balloon. Two days before his death, he had hinted at mental and physical exhaustion in a letter home: ‘It is all trouble and it is getting on my mind. Am feeling very old just now.’
There is no dispute that Ball crashed fatally near the village of Annoeullin, though considerable doubt exists about the precise nature of his end. One eyewitness colourfully described how he tangled with three enemy machines, shot down two and the third made off, but Ball was then low enough for anti-aircraft guns to bring him down. One German account credited Lothar von Richthofen, Manfred’s brother, with Ball’s demise. Another reported that Ball emerged from cloud with his propeller stationary and simply glided to his death; his only injuries caused in the crash and no battle damage apparent to the aeroplane. This has prompted speculation that Ball may have become disorientated in cloud and even that, with his engine switched off, he was attempting a forced landing.
Albert Ball was buried by his enemy with full military honours. A cross placed above his grave read: ‘He gave his life for his Fatherland.’ On 3 June 1917, he was posthumously awarded the VC
… for most conspicuous and consistent bravery, from 25th April to the 6th May, 1917, during which period Capt Ball took part in twenty-six combats in the air and destroyed eleven hostile aeroplanes, drove down two out of control and forced several others to land.
In June 1917, British attention switched from Arras to Flanders, where, occupying surrounding high ground, the Germans dominated the defenders of Ypres. To the east stood the prominent Passchendaele Ridge, but a shallower rise lay to the south from which the enemy could observe preparations for any assault on Passchendaele. The British planned to attack the Messines Ridge on 7 June after massive mines in tunnels under the German troops on the forward slope had been exploded.
To obtain control of this ridge, the British had to penetrate the German line to a depth of some 2½ miles (4km) over a 10-mile (16km) front. Three corps from the Second Army were allocated for this task, each closely supported by an RFC squadron with twenty-one machines.
For a week before the battle, 2,266 guns on a 12-mile (19km) front, three times the concentration on the Somme the previous year, pounded 3.5 million shells into enemy positions. They sought not only to neutralise troop formations and installations, but to cut defensive barbed wire. As well as spotting for the artillery, from 31 May squadrons other than those attached to a corps carried out reconnaissance as far east as Ghent and Bruges, offensive patrols and bombing operations up to 17 miles (27km) beyond the Messines Ridge. These operations were designed to minimise German aerial activity once the ground operations began and to prevent enemy machines from helping their own artillery to counter the British batteries before it.
After his spell at the front the Boer War veteran, Capt Harold Wyllie, received a first-hand account of a night attack on 30 May from Lt E.A. Worrall, who opened by revealing that ‘Castle has been wounded and so has your humble.’ He apologised for writing ‘with my left hand as my right is hors de combat’. Worrall admitted to ‘promiscuous bombing’ after dropping a 112lb bomb ‘on a Boche train’ and derailing ‘the blighter’. ‘Naturally I was delighted and I tootled off to another spot where I knew there would be something worth strafing.’ He never reached his second target. Searchlights were ‘whipping the air and occasionally a few “flaming onions” [anti-aircraft shells] came up at me but they fell a few yards short.’ In the half moon and at about 800ft, Worrall saw ‘our recognition light fired from the ground’. On closer investigation, he saw what he took to be an FE machine in distress. ‘Feeling rather elated and having room in the old FE for a passenger, I thought I’d land and give him a lift.’
As he prepared to do so, at 50ft from the ground ‘a most colossal machine-gun fire broke out and made me realise I’d struck a Hun aerodrome. By gad, I opened the throttle and made off like stink.’ As bullets hit his machine ‘like rain … a spasm of pain in my right arm and leg told me plainly I was not wanted there’. Worrall rapidly ‘got out of the way’ until he remembered that he still had a 112lb bomb left: ‘Well my rag was out and I wanted to square matters so I turned back.’ The enemy were waiting ‘with their blasted tracer bullets, but I got there and left an impression which will make them have a regard for us in the future.’ With his right hand useless, he had to manipulate the controls with his left. The petrol tank must have been damaged ‘for the old FE burst into flames and I thought the end had arrived. I jammed back the throttle and dived for earth and wonder of wonders the fire went out.’ Worrall ‘put her nose for home’ and managed to get to 600ft, when ‘she conked out’ again. However, he switched to the service tank and the engine picked up. After evading a probing searchlight, ‘I felt myself fainting and I decided to land.’ Unsure of which side of the line he was, Worrall put down ‘in a good field’ only to have the machine burst into flames on landing. He ‘made a jump for it’, and knew nothing more until he came round ‘in the hands of Australians half a mile behind the lines’. It was, he declared, ‘a narrow escape and an experience which I don’t want to have again. It will be a few months before I am ready again.’
Worrall’s raid was only one of those in the build-up to the Messines Ridge attack. During the
night of 2/3 June in bright moonlight trains and railway tracks were bombed at Menin and Warneton stations. On the evening of 6 June, airfields behind the battlefield were hit with 179 20lb or 25lb bombs; other formations used 112lb bombs against railway bridges over the Escaut river.
Due to the demands of the army at Ypres and the RNAS base at Dunkirk, in June 1917 Capt W.L. Elder RN’s No 3 Wing established at Luxeuil the previous year with such high hopes of long-range bombing, was disbanded. Including the three squadrons supporting the corps and two attached RNAS fighter squadrons, there were 17 squadrons and a Special Duty Flight with 348 aeroplanes available when the Messines Ridge battle commenced. Two more squadrons with thirty and thirty-six machines were ready on the flanks, which represented an aerial superiority of almost three to one in the vicinity.
At 3.10am on 7 June, nineteen mines went up and the Germans were so disorientated that the ridge quickly fell. As the infantry advanced, the air forces played a critical role. Two flights from each of the corps squadrons directed artillery on enemy batteries, the third on uncut wire and trench positions. Escorts were provided for photographic aeroplanes, crucial for accurate assessment of progress. Two contact patrol machines were allocated to each corps area to communicate with the infantry; five fighters were given a roving role to attack troops, guns or transport at will. During the battle, the corps squadrons had responsibility up to 5,000yds (4,500m) from the enemy front line. Beyond that, other squadrons carried out deep penetration operations and day and night, continued to bomb aerodromes and railway facilities.
Cavalry of the Clouds Page 17