The Courage of the Early Morning

by William Arthur Bishop

  The last few days of the voyage were particularly harrowing. Off the coast of Ireland German U-boats attacked the convoy. The cavalrymen watched from the rails of the Caledonia as other ships around them were blown up and sunk. “I was petrified,” Bishop later admitted. But the Caledonia bore a charmed life and sailed unscathed into Plymouth harbour in thick fog at four o’clock on the morning of June 23, 1915.

  Five days later the Seventh moved into Shorncliffe military camp near the popular peacetime summer resort of Folkestone on the English Channel. That night the Canadians could see the brilliant flashes of artillery fire across the Channel in France. It was an eerie and frightening introduction to the reality of war.

  But after a few days such distant dangers began to seem preferable to the comforts and safety of Shorncliffe. Bishop wrote home:

  They call Shorncliffe “military Hell.” That’s an understatement. The wind swirls in off the Channel constantly. When it brings rain the whole place becomes an incredible morass of muck, mud and mire with the special added unpleasantness that only horses in large quantity can contribute. Training becomes a travesty. Horses get stuck fast up to their fetlocks and when riders dismount they sink above their ankles. When it stops raining and the ground dries out for a few days we pray for rain again because the dirty dust is worse, if possible, than the mud. It gets into the tents—or such tents as the wind hadn’t blown away. It gets into the eyes, ears, noses and other body orifices of men and of horses. It makes the horses so restless that we fear a stampede. It gives men a sort of cafard or desert madness. And to think that I had expected to go into battle astride a charger.

  On one particularly grim day Bishop had succeeded in getting mired in the middle of the parade ground. Suddenly out of the low clouds a trim little fighter plane emerged. It landed hesitatingly in a nearby field as if reluctant to soil its wheels in the mud. The pilot apparently had lost his bearings. In a few minutes he got them and took off into the clouds.

  “How long I stood there peering at the spot where the plane had disappeared I do not know,” Bishop recalled later. “But when I turned to slog my way back through the mud I knew this was the only way to fight a war: up there above the clouds and in the summer sunshine.”

  That was wishful thinking, of course. Bishop had no reason to believe that it was possible for a Canadian cavalryman to apply for transfer to the adventurous Royal Flying Corps. What’s more, he had no reason to believe that he had any qualifications as a fighter pilot. Apart from the homemade glider he had piloted on its first and only ill-fated flight, the closest he had been to an airplane was that day when one landed on a nearby field.

  A few days later he and some fellow officers of the Seventh dropped in at the Grand Hotel in Folkestone. It was a favourite rendezvous for troops training in the area. Some of them favoured the Grand because it somehow managed despite wartime austerity to serve excellent food and drink. But what really attracted the young and camp-weary officers was the prevalence of girls and a dance orchestra. Bishop discovered the Grand very soon after he arrived at Shorncliffe and on many a night he sneaked away from camp for a couple of hours of relaxation. Colonel Leonard somehow learned of these sorties and kept tab on Bishop by placing a lighted candle in his tent and noting at next morning’s inspection how much of the candle had burned before Bishop snuffed it out on retiring. Bishop saw through the ruse, and thereafter kept off the colonel’s crime sheet by substituting his own candle.

  But on this evening, with a legitimate pass, Bishop was less interested in girls and dancing than in the conversation of an airman who had landed his plane at Shorncliffe and started Bishop dreaming of going to war airborne.

  “Look here, old boy,” said the RFC pilot, “if you’re so keen on it why don’t you apply for a transfer?”

  “How?”

  “Next time you’re in London drop in at the War Office and ask for a chap named Cecil—Lord Hugh Cecil. I don’t know what his official job is but he seems to be able to wangle transfers for people who seem to be probable RFC types. He got me out of cavalry, for instance.”

  Bishop was cautious about putting too much faith into barroom conversations, and he filed the airman’s suggestion in a remote corner of his mind. He forgot about it almost entirely in the events of the next few weeks. On a night bivouac exercise in a cold and persistent rainstorm he suffered a recurrence of the pneumonia that had plagued him earlier in Canada. It had put him into hospital for two weeks and when he was discharged, cured but feeble, he was given convalescent leave and departed for London.

  He got a room at the stately Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, which had been converted into a haven for Canadian officers on leave. Bishop found the pleasures available to a young overseas officer so much to his liking that it was not until the morning he was due to leave for Shorncliffe that he remembered about Lord Hugh Cecil. He decided to risk the penalties of being absent without leave, and make his way to the War Office.

  In the papers of Lord Hugh Cecil there is no record of an audience he gave a young Canadian cavalryman named Billy Bishop on a Monday morning in July, 1915. Nevertheless it was a somewhat historic event, since it got Bishop into the air force. To Bishop, Lord Hugh seemed a rather elderly lieutenant (he was forty-six at the time, and the rank was one of those bits of English understatement) who asked strange questions of applicants for transfer to the RFC.

  Actually Lord Hugh was a man of considerable distinction. As the Member of Parliament for Oxford University he had formed the Hughlians, a group of progressive-minded rebels within the Conservative Party. A member of the Hughlians and a close friend of Cecil’s was Winston Churchill, at whose wedding Cecil had been best man.

  When Cecil was put in charge of recruiting for the Royal Flying Corps there existed no scientific criteria of the characteristics that made a good airman, and Cecil had to improvise his own questionnaire. This he now propounded to Bishop:

  Lord Hugh: Do you ski?

  Bishop: Yes. (He didn’t, really, but he thought that to an Englishman a Canadian who did not ski would seem an eccentric.)

  Lord Hugh: Can you ride a horse?

  Bishop: I am a cavalry officer.

  Lord Hugh: Doesn’t always follow, but righto, you ride. How well can you drive a car?

  Bishop (never having driven a car): Very well.

  Lord Hugh: Can you ride a motorcycle?

  Bishop (having done so once): Excellently.

  Lord Hugh: How well can you skate?

  Bishop (at last almost truthfully): Perfectly.

  Lord Hugh: Did you go in for sports at school—running?

  Bishop (deciding that the RFC wouldn’t go back to Owen Sound to check, and anyway he had finished second in the YMCA cross-country): Yes, a great deal.

  Those seemed to be all the qualifications Lord Hugh needed. Bishop asked himself: “What sort of game is this flying, anyway?” When he had become familiar with the series of improvisations that went into the organization of the early RFC, he came to this conclusion: “I can only believe Lord Hugh’s cross-examination stemmed from the belief that you must ask the candidate something, if only to impress the young man with the importance of the occasion. Having no dossier on flight statistics on which to base a questionnaire, Lord Hugh was simply doing what he could to make the occasion seem important.”

  Next Lord Hugh tossed a bitter disappointment at Bishop: If he applied for transfer as a fighter pilot, it might be six months or a year before he could get in, but there was an immediate need for observers, or, as Lord Hugh put it, “The chap who goes along for the ride.”

  Bishop asked for a few days to think it over. He returned to Shorncliffe and a difficult interview with Colonel Ibbotson Leonard. In the first place Bishop was returning late from leave. In the second place he had to report to his commanding officer that he had applied for transfer without permission or consultation. Fortunately for Bishop, Leonard was an easygoing man. Bishop explained his dilemma over getting into the RFC imme
diately as an observer or waiting to be accepted as a pilot.

  “Well, Bish, I’ll tell you this,” said Leonard. “If I were you, knowing what sort of pilot you’re likely to be, I’d sooner trust somebody else to do the flying than do it myself.”

  Bishop was apparently impressed with this rather garbled piece of advice, for he wired Lord Hugh that he would report for training as an observer.

  FOUR

  OBSERVER

  "THIS FLYING is the most wonderful invention,” Bishop wrote home when he made his first training flight after joining 21 Squadron at Netheravon on Salisbury Plain on September 1, 1915. “A man ceases to be human up there. He feels that nothing is impossible.” “

  Actually Bishop’s enthusiasm was a rather exaggerated compliment to the primitive old Avro two-seater trainer, which looked as if it had been strung together with wire. Its design was an adaptation of Sir Alliott Verdon Roe’s pioneer tractor design. “Tractor” describes a plane pulled rather than pushed through the air by its propeller. The Avro had barely enough power to lift itself, a student and an instructor into the air with no armament whatsoever. Later Bishop admitted that in attempting to gain altitude “she struggled and shook and gasped like a freight train going up a mountain grade.”

  The history of aerial warfare was barely one year old when Bishop made that first flight, and the list of casualties by enemy action was negligible. On August 19, 1914, both sides made their first aerial reconnaissances across each other’s lines over the battlefield in France. German and Allied planes passed within a few yards of each other, but because both were unarmed they could not do much harm to each other short of ramming.

  In fact, the greatest hazard of airmen was rifle fire from the ground. On the day of the first reconnaissance Sergeant Major Dillings, an observer, was struck in the leg by a rifle bullet fired from the ground and became the first air casualty.

  On August 25 Lieutenant H. D. Harvey-Kelly became the first Allied airman to bring down an enemy plane, by crowding it from above and forcing it to land. It came down behind the British lines, and when Harvey-Kelly landed to claim the crew as prisoners he was astonished to see the German observer kicking and punching the pilot. The observer, it turned out, was the superior officer and was punishing the pilot for his poor airmanship.

  Soon after that the airmen started to smuggle weapons aboard their aircraft (neither side had yet authorized airborne armament). This armament included rifles, pistols, light machine-guns—and some pilots even took up bricks to drop on enemy planes. But the real value of aerial reconnaissance as a vital weapon of war first became apparent early in September, 1914, when British and French airmen returning from flights over enemy lines reported that the German army had overextended itself, and seemed to have walked into a pocket. On the basis of this information General Joffre, the French field commander, decided to attack. The result was the Battle of the Marne, which was the first engagement to turn the tide of German advance, repulsed a possible march on Paris, and forced the first retreat of the German army.

  On September 7 Sir John French, the British commander, issued the first dispatch to mention the Royal Flying Corps—and incidentally to give the first RFC score against the enemy:

  They have furnished me with complete and accurate information which has been of incalculable value in the conduct of operations. Fired at constantly by friend and foe, and not hesitating to fly in every kind of weather, they have remained undaunted throughout. Further by actually fighting in the air they have succeeded in destroying five of the enemy’s machines.

  The lessons of the Battle of the Marne caused the British high command to change its attitude toward military aviation abruptly. Where once the generals had regarded the airmen as wild young desperadoes and the airplane as a dangerous toy, the airman now assumed a serious place in war strategy. By the time Bishop joined, the RFC was working hard on new techniques and new equipment.

  British reconnaissance planes were now being equipped with one-way wireless to signal the artillery batteries and direct their fire, and cameras were mounted to photograph enemy positions for scrutiny by the battery commanders. The one-way Morse signalling never developed into an efficient liaison between air and ground, largely because the observers never developed much skill with Morse.

  “And no wonder,” Bishop recalled. “To learn Morse we were sent off every afternoon with huge searchlights and divided into two groups about a thousand yards apart on the level plain. Our procedure was to memorize our messages before we went out and send them to the other fellows while an instructor watched and checked. They were always correct, of course. Then he would leave us with instructions to ‘carry on,’—whereupon we would find the nearest haystack and sit behind it chatting and smoking and dozing while one member of each team kept flashing the lights in case anyone from the base turned a suspicious eye in our direction.” It wasn’t until two years later that Bishop, home on leave, saw Henry Ford first demonstrate two-way ground-to-air wireless at Dayton, Ohio.

  Bishop found aerial photography much more interesting and challenging because it required great concentration and precision. Bishop gave a preview of the superb muscle-nerve-eye co-ordination that was later to make him the deadliest of aerial fighters, by taking photographs so expertly that the War Office used them as standards of excellence.

  In December, 1915, Bishop was put in charge of all new observers who joined the squadron at Netheravon, and was responsible for their training. In later years when planes were perfected to the point where it was difficult to select and train men efficient enough to handle them, Bishop recalled mournfully that the airmen of 1916 were saddled with machines that were too primitive for the capabilities of the men.

  The casualty rate among Bishop’s students was high. Wings fell off planes, engines failed. Forced landings occurred daily. One pilot set a record of seventy-five forced landings, and many more came close to this record. The reason for this extremely high figure was very simple—there was no means of escape from a disabled airplane; the parachute was still a long way from becoming accepted as a reliable method of escape. Bishop could claim only one forced landing. His pilot was unhurt and Bishop hobbled away from the wreck with no more damage than a sprained ankle. “The haystack,” he reported, “was demolished.”

  At Christmas, 1915, 21 Squadron’s training was, in theory, completed, and it needed only its new planes to be ready for front-line service. The move to France was planned for New Year’s Day. The men of 21 Squadron were given a week’s leave. Bishop went to London with a fellow officer, Harry Kennedy. They tried to make every minute count. They went to matinees at the Hippodrome, to the durable revue “Chu Chin Chow,” to dancing at the Four Hundred club, and held hilarious reunions with RMC classmates.

  Christmas Day was spent at the liveliest hotel in London. “Merry Christmas,” Bishop wrote his parents. “Much merrier, I hope, than it is here. Harry and I have decided not to call on anyone we know today as they will look at us in such a ‘poor boy so far from mother’ sort of way. Instead we are going to the Regent Palace Hotel to watch the gay life. It is full of people on ‘weekend honeymoons’ and the grill and restaurants are full of love girls and men intent on picking them up. It is one of the most amusing spots in town and the only place that does not look like a cemetery at Christmas.”

  Twenty-One Squadron was supposed to take delivery of its new improved planes in time for its departure to France on New Year’s Day, 1916, but they had not arrived when the squadron crossed the Channel. (“Being flyers we crossed the Channel by water, of course,” Bishop wrote home.)

  The weather in southern England had been miserable. The January weather in northern France, at Boisdinghem, near St. Omer, reminded Bishop of his native Owen Sound on the shores of Georgian Bay. Cold winds and sleet storms blew in from the Pas de Calais. At times the planes had to take off and land in four inches of snow. Pilots and observers piled on all the bulky clothing they could lay their hands on—long leather
coats lined with sheepskin, leather helmets, waist boots and heavy gauntlets—but they still returned from the long patrols chilled to the bone. On his first flight over enemy territory Bishop’s face was severely frostbitten. Even on clear and relatively mild days the weather was a hazard. The prevailing westerly wind meant that the homeward journey was a constant struggle against headwinds and dwindling fuel supplies. Many a pilot and observer had to walk back to their base after making forced landings with dead engines. The casualty rate of aircraft undercarriages and wings was depressingly high.

  Anti-aircraft fire, which in the early months of the war was regarded as a noisy nuisance, now was becoming increasingly accurate. “It’s perhaps more frightening than destructive,” Bishop wrote home. “Without warning greyish-white puffs burst all around the machine, followed by a terrifying shriek of shrapnel fragments flying in all directions. You suffer a terrible moment of suspense while your pilot changes course to get out of the aim of the anti-aircraft gunners.”

  Once Bishop’s pilot, Roger Neville, failed to get out fast enough and Bishop became one of the few airmen to be wounded by anti-aircraft fire. It was only a slight bruise on the side of his head, but a few inches difference in direction could well have killed him.

  But now the Allied reconnaissance planes were encountering a new and infinitely greater danger—the “Fokker menace,” new Fokker planes equipped with synchronized machine-guns firing through the planes’ propellers. When Sir John French announced on September 7, 1914, that Allied airmen had shot down five enemy planes he did not specify what weapons or tactics were involved, but obviously they were the primitive ones: pistols, rifles, light unattached machine-guns, menacing manoeuvres, perhaps even bricks. Certainly no authentic gun-and-plane combination was attempted before April 1, 1915—nearly nine months after the start of the war. On that day a French pilot named Roland Garros, flying a single-seater Morane Bullet, with a fixed machine-gun pointed forward and firing through the propeller, streaked down behind a German observation plane, riddled it with bullets and sent it spiralling down in flames.