The Courage of the Early Morning

by William Arthur Bishop

  Garros had contrived a primitive device to enable him to shoot through his propeller without smashing the blades—metal collars attached to the blades in the line of fire to deflect bullets. The first time Garros tried his deflector gear he shot down an enemy plane by aiming his own airplane at the target. For a short time it seemed that the Allies had stumbled on a valuable secret weapon. But two weeks after he first used his deflectors he had to make a forced landing behind enemy lines when his motor failed. He was captured before he could set fire to the plane, and the invention fell intact into German hands.

  It was turned over to Anthony Fokker, the young Dutch airplane designer who was building the Germans’ best warplanes. (It was ironic that shortly before the war Fokker had offered his advanced designs to Britain, Italy and Russia. All three Allied countries turned him down, but the Germans encouraged him and provided facilities for research and production of Fokker aircraft.)

  As a result, when World War I broke out German air strength was comparable to that of her three aircraft-building adversaries, Britain, France and Italy. “Fokker” was a menacing name to the Allies from the first day of the war. It became associated particularly with the Richthofen circus which was by all odds the most lethal formation of air fighters ever to take to the air in World War I.

  Not until the war ended did the Allied airmen discover that Fokker, far from being an arch-villain, was a mild and peace-loving young man. In his autobiography he admitted that the feats of Bishop, Ball, Richthofen and other air aces filled him with awe. “Had I been an aviator, as I intended, I could never have joined that brave crew. They were of stouter stuff than I. Indeed, if all people were like me, the world would be long at peace.”Fokker also revealed that after the war started Britain tried secretly to offer him $10,000 to leave Germany, return to Holland and start making planes for the Allies. “Perhaps I would have,” Fokker wrote, “but the offer never reached me. The German secret service, which kept me under close surveillance, sidetracked the offer. It wasn’t until years later when the German military structure had collapsed that a Berlin friend of mine in the secret service informed me of it.”

  When Fokker examined Roland Garros’ metal bullet deflectors, he told the German air force officials that there was no real future for that type of device. The constant hammering would eventually damage the propeller, he felt, and worse, might also damage the engine itself.

  But the basic idea that Garros had in mind—a device that would allow bullets to be shot through a whirling propeller—intrigued him. Using only that proposition, Fokker invented an “interrupter gear” that prevented an airplane’s machine-gun firing when a propeller blade was in its path. All the pilot had to do was to keep his finger on the firing button while the target was in his sights, and bullets would stream uninterruptedly through the whirring propeller at the rate of six hundred a minute.

  Ironically, the German High Command was highly skeptical when Fokker first demonstrated his interrupter gear. The generals ordered him to test it himself in aerial combat. Fokker, as we now know, was anything but bloodthirsty; but he accepted the challenge. For several days he cruised the aerial no-man’s-land over the trenches without finding a victim. Then one day he spotted a French Farman plane near Douai. Fokker dived and caught the French plane squarely in his sights at two hundred yards’ range. But he never fired his gun.

  “Suddenly,” he said later, “I decided that the whole job could go to hell. I had no stomach for this business, no wish to kill Frenchmen for Germans—let them do their own killing.”

  In spite of Fokker’s failure to “test-fly” his invention, the German authorities decided to adopt it on an experimental basis. Oswald Boelcke, one of the Germans’ top fighter pilots, became the first pilot to bring down a plane with an interrupter-controlled machine-gun. A few days later another German ace, Max Immelmann, claimed the second plane. From then on it was enthusiastically accepted, and for a time it gave the German air force such an advantage that it practically dominated the air over the front lines. Then, inevitably, the same chance that had delivered Gar-ros’ invention to the enemy worked in favour of the Allies. A plane fitted with Fokker’s gear was shot down intact behind the British lines. Hastily the device was duplicated in French and English factories, and once more the opposing air forces fought on even terms.

  One bitterly cold afternoon Bishop watched a Fokker shoot down a British observation plane in flames. With a hawk-like swoop the German pilot attacked his slower adversary from behind, poured bullets into it, then pulled up in a half-loop, righted his plane at the top of the loop and thus gave himself a head start in the direction of home and safety. It was a manoeuvre he had perfected by hours of painstaking practice, and it was forevermore to bear his name: the Immelmann Turn.

  Immelmann was the first fighter pilot to establish an unmistakable identity, a trade mark, for himself. Well, perhaps not quite unmistakable. There was a story about an English pilot whose machine was crippled in combat but made a safe landing behind the German lines. The German pilot landed nearby, drew his revolver and said to the Englishman, “Sir, you are my prisoner.” The other answered, “You are Immelmann, so I am not ashamed.” The German answered, “I am sorry to disappoint you. I am only Boelcke.”

  Bishop, in those first weeks of 1916, was no more than a highly expendable observer. By mid-January the long-promised new planes were delivered—“a strange flying contraption known as the R.E.7 (Reconnaissance Experimental No. 7),” he wrote.

  It was a machine designed to mount four guns, cameras, and all manner of other equipment including a 500-pound bomb lashed to the fuselage. The idea was to fly over the target, take a quick look over the side of the cockpit, pull the wire cable—and away the bomb would go. All that was wrong was that this machine stoutly refused to leave the ground when all this gear, plus pilot and observer, were packed into it.

  The first time we tried to take up our R.E.7, Roger Neville gunned across Boisdinghem airport at least a dozen times into the wind, but the wheels never left the ground. Consultation between senior officers followed. They decided that we should try to become airborne without the 500-pound bomb. The wheels bounced a few times, but we still weren’t in the air at the point on the runway where we would have to throttle down and turn around to avoid running off the field.

  More consultation. They decided to move us to the larger field at St. Omer, ten miles away, in the hope that with a longer run the R.E.7 might consent to struggle into the air.

  So Bishop lugged his four machine-guns aboard a truck bound for St. Omer, while Neville took the lightened R.E.7 into the air. The bombs, by common consent, were left behind at Boisdinghem. On the longer field at St. Omer the R.E.7 finally took the air with its crew of two and armament reduced to a pair of machine-guns. These guns, however, gave Bishop little comfort. “It will always remain a question of reasonable doubt whether anybody could have fired the guns at an enemy,” he recalled later, “because to fire a bullet into the clear you would first have to shoot through the maze of wires between the upper and lower wings which gave the R.E.7 the appearance of a bird cage.”

  Even with only a fraction of the equipment its designers had assigned to it on the drawing board, the R.E.7 was, in parlance of the RFC, “a pig—on a windy day a boy on a bicycle could pass it.”

  It was possibly the most dangerous plane ever accepted as operational by the Allies, for one reason. Between its top speed and the speed at which it stalled and spun out of control there was a margin of barely twenty miles an hour. It was designed to reach eighty miles an hour but seldom could be nursed to sixty, and it stalled at forty-eight miles an hour. This characteristic made takeoffs, landings and manoeuvring in the air agonizingly difficult. Yet it was impossible to treat the R.E.7 gently. “When a pilot wants to change direction he has to throw the stick in the direction he wants to go—really slam it,” Bishop complained. “Putting on rudder was done about as gently as throwing out the clutch of an automobile. The thi
ngs were nearly as manoeuvrable as ten-ton trucks, but by no means as safe.”

  The RFC tried an emergency operation on the R.E.7, in the form of heavier and more powerful engines. But the experiment was a dismal failure. The new engines were too heavy for their supports, which snapped off with disconcerting frequency if the planes were landed at all roughly—as they usually were. The Suicide Squadron, as 21 was now dubbed, hastily switched back to the old underpowered engines.

  For a time 21 Squadron was placed in semi-retirement by being withdrawn from the front and assigned to fly aerial cover over General Sir Douglas Haig’s headquarters at St. Omer. It was a strategic target that housed not Haig and his staff, but visiting political dignitaries and even royalty from time to time. Bishop was dubious about the wisdom of defending it with 21 Squadron’s lumbering aircraft: “Day in and out we beetled over headquarters and the adjoining town. Fortunately the enemy did not seem to know we were there, for what we could have done to defend the place I do not know. Presumably we would have tried to join issue with the enemy if he had come along and, I imagine, have been shot down ingloriously for our pains.”

  But in March, 1916, the Allies’ need for air power was so desperate that the Suicide Squadron was recalled to front-line duty. Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, had decided to launch an unprecedented aerial offensive in hope of breaking the stalemate of trench warfare. On March 9, 1916, six R.E.7’s from 21 Squadron were part of a formation of thirty-one aeroplanes that bombed Carvin Junction some twenty miles behind the enemy lines. It was the largest formation ever assembled for a raid. To enable the R.E.7’s to lift the bombs they were stripped of their guns and ammunition. They had to fly deep behind enemy lines, find their targets, drop the bombs and make their undefended way back home.

  Next day Bishop wrote to Margaret: “In the air you feel only intense excitement. You cheer and laugh and keep your spirits up. You are all right just after you have landed as you search your machine for bullet and shrapnel holes. But two hours later when you are quietly sitting in your billet you feel a sudden loneliness. You want to lie down and cry.”

  In April the Suicide Squadron moved to another aerodrome at Hesdin. Now the unit was assigned to observation in the area between Albert and Péronne—the Somme. This open country—the clumps of woods had long since been reduced to ragged stumps by shellfire—was the front on which the summer offensive would be launched. As the weather improved so the number of reconnaissance flights increased. A Prussian soldier complained in a letter to his parents that the “English will soon be taking the very caps off our heads.”

  In addition to fatigue and nervous exhaustion, Bishop was plagued with misfortune on the ground. Driving a tender loaded with equipment to repair a crashed machine a few miles from the aerodrome, Bishop collided with an army lorry and was severely shaken up.

  A few days later he was inspecting his machine in the hangar when a supporting cable above him broke and struck him on the head. He was unconscious for two days and medical examinations showed that he had narrowly escaped a serious skull fracture.

  Some days later he had a tooth pulled. It became infected and he had to stay in hospital for a week. Next Roger Neville cracked up the plane in a rough landing. Bishop was thrown heavily forward and cracked his knee against a metal brace. He could barely walk and the pain was severe, but he refused to be relieved of flying duty.

  In spite of his apparent accident proneness, Bishop believed that having survived such incidents he had been granted some sort of immunity from fatal or serious injury. In a letter home he said fatalistically, “If I am for it, then I am for it and nothing can save me. But I firmly believe that I am NOT for it.” And as if to emphasize this conviction he added, “I have the most fantastic luck under fire. The others call it the luck of the devil.”

  Actually Bishop’s great fear was being made prisoner. “If I can barely live with British discipline, how could I live in a German prison camp? The other day a poor German pilot lost his way and landed on our side of the lines. He was only testing his machine at that. I felt terribly sorry for him when I saw the dazed look on his face. I would rather die fighting than be captured.”

  Bishop was due for three weeks’ leave at the end of the month. No one yearned for it more—three weeks with no flying, twenty-one days of nothing but the joys of London. He was physically exhausted and his nerves were at breaking point. But one more major operation remained to be carried out. The exercise was an experiment in liaison work between the Royal Flying Corps and the infantry, which could be launched at the height of an attack. Smoke bombs and flash shells were to be used as markers and the reflection of pocket mirrors were to be used for signalling. It was the idea of the British Commander-in-Chief, and the airmen called it “Dougie Haig’s show.”

  First there was a week of diligent practice. Mail bags were used in place of smoke bombs. Bishop so perfected his aim that he could drop the bag within eighteen paces of the target. A hit anywhere within sixty yards was considered accurate.

  The full-scale performance was held on the morning of May 2, 1916, the day that Bishop and a group of others from the Suicide Squadron were to go on leave. It was a complete success and Haig sent a message of congratulation. But Bishop and his comrades did not wait to hear it. As soon as they had taken off their flying clothes they hailed the first available motor transport for Boulogne, where they boarded a boat for England.

  Bishop’s jinx sailed with him. During the short voyage bottles of champagne began furtively appearing, first from one kit bag, then from another. By the end of the Channel crossing spirits were high. A khaki mob surged on deck as the boat pulled into the harbour at Folkestone. There was much good-natured jostling in an effort to be first ashore. In this exuberant scramble, Bishop slipped on the gangplank and stumbled forward on the concrete pier with three other men on top of him.

  He felt a sharp pain in his knee—the same knee he had injured in the crash landing with Neville. But Bishop refused to let this change his plans for a riotous leave. He denied himself none of the feverish pleasures that London and its people offered so eagerly to men on leave from the battlefields. He almost succeeded in forgetting that he had a crippled knee. “When I thought of it, it hurt like hell—so I stopped thinking of it.” But late at night, after the festivities, the pain kept him awake. Bishop found that generous doses of brandy brought unconsciousness that passed for sleep. On the last day of his leave Bishop faced the bitter fact that he would have to get medical attention, and secretly he hoped that the doctor would find him unfit to return to France. With a feeling of deep guilt Bishop hobbled into the RFC hospital on Bryanston Square.

  “It was almost a relief,” he confessed, “when the doctors found that in addition to the cracked knee, which was my fault for neglecting, I had a severely strained heart—which was comfortingly blamed on the tension of the long patrols and on the continual changes in altitude and temperature.”

  The verdict: confinement to bed for an indefinite period of treatment and rest.

  FIVE

  PILOT

  IN MID-AFTERNOON a few days after Bishop had been bedded down he awoke from a drugged sleep and found himself gazing into the eyes of a woman who was bending over him. She was old and lean, with sparse hair severely drawn back to show unusually large ears. Her most remarkable features were her wide-set luminous eyes that appeared much younger than the rest of her, eyes that penetrated and probed and yet were kindly and reassuring. Bishop had met one of the three most important women in his life.

  Lady St. Helier was at that time nearly seventy years old and already a legend in English and international society and politics. But an important chapter of the legend remained to be written, and young Bishop was to be part of it.

  Years later the London Times published a memoir of Lady St. Helier that might have been written with Bishop in mind: “One might say that many a person’s first intimation of approaching success was the discovery that Lady St. H
elier knew all about him. She begged him to come and see her; she introduced him to those who might be useful to him. She made much of him. She put new heart into him.”

  The importance of this woman who so quietly entered Bishop’s life, and so profoundly influenced it, is indicated by the celebrities, dating back to the mid-Victorian era, who were proud of her friendship—Lord Randolph Churchill, Whistler and Millais, Tennyson and Browning, Parnell, the ill-fated Irish patriot.

  But, [the Times memoir continued] the general society that gathered at her house can only be summed up in the word “everybody.” She literally went everywhere, including public as well as private houses, and she knew everybody—not merely those of high station, but quite simple toilers and moilers. First in Harley Street, then in Portland Place she was almost world-famous as a hostess. Of her one could say that she did really have the world and his wife at her house.

  It was open house upstairs. Above the entertainment floors she had staying visitors, whom she called her “lodgers,” and sometimes when the evening guests were leaving, they could see one or two of the “lodgers” discreetly mounting the staircase towards their resting places. . . .

  But she did not wait for people to be excessively well known. She recognized talent and genius while their possessors were still poorly rewarded by the world. I think she was the first London hostess of importance who sprinkled her gatherings with quite young people. . . .

  Another tremendous originality in Lady St.Helier’s method of entertaining was her mixing up the people who might be described as enemies in public. She refused to admit that a sound old Tory must not be invited to meet a Radical of dangerously advanced views, or that one of the old-fashioned critics must not encounter the author or actress who had been his victim.