On one of these patrols Bishop made his first score in his new machine. It was July 28, three days before the attack at Ypres started. Bishop, Young and Soden were assigned O.P. duty in the vicinity of Drocourt. Their orders were to maintain vigil just over the lines and not to venture into enemy territory, because of their unfamiliarity with the new planes. As they flew up and down their patrol area they sighted three enemy planes. The Germans hovered a mile and a half behind their own lines, as if aware of the British pilots’ orders and taunting them to pursue. Bishop endured this impudence for half an hour, then signalled Young to take over the patrol and turned toward the enemy planes. He pushed the throttle all the way forward and gloried in the magnificent surging power of the Hispano engine. Two of the enemy pilots turned tail when they saw the S.E. 5 headed in their direction, but the other attacked head-on. Neither pilot scored a hit as they rushed toward each other at a combined speed of more than 250 miles an hour, but Bishop took pleasure in the rhythmic clatter of his twin guns, which he later described as being “like the unleashed power of a three-inch cannon.”
The German swerved away just before the planes collided. Bishop turned hard around and discovered that the S.E. 5 did indeed respond to rough handling. The manoeuvre put him on the enemy’s tail—not as nimbly as the Nieuport would have slipped into place a dozen yards behind the quarry, but at the respectable range of fifty yards. Twin streams of bullets set the Albatros afire and it fell trailing smoke and debris.
Bishop had never felt so elated over a victory, so sure of superiority in combat. That night he wrote home: “I’ve never enjoyed myself so much since I’ve been over here. This is positively the best machine in the world.”
Bishop was, in fact, so excited by the performance of the S.E. 5 that next morning, even though it was his day off, he teamed up on a three-man patrol with Grid Caldwell and Bill Gunner, a pilot from Grid’s flight. At ten thousand feet over Beaumont, just east of the Switch, they spotted a two-seater Aviatik that seemed to be flying nowhere in particular. Long and bitter experience of such innocent behaviour by an enemy pilot had made Bishop and Caldwell suspicious, and they approached the Aviatik cautiously. Their alertness was rewarded when four Albatros scouts dived at them out of the sun. At that moment Gunner’s engine went dead, and he was forced to turn into a glide that would carry him to safety behind his own lines.
The German pilots swerved to attack the helpless S.E. 5, and Bishop and Caldwell turned into them to head them off, firing from extreme range. Suddenly both of Caldwell’s guns jammed, and he pulled away from the fight to work on them. Bishop was left alone to face four Albatros scouts—and suddenly there were seven. They boxed Bishop in so that escape was impossible. It was only a matter of time—of very short time, he knew—before one or more of the German pilots, who were firing wildly every time the S.E. 5 came anywhere near their sights, got in a fatal burst. Bishop kept his own guns blazing in short bursts, in hope of preventing the German pilots from closing in for the kill.
Suddenly Caldwell, whose guns were still dead, burst into the midst of the swarming Germans. He darted in and out among them and the surprise appearance caused them to scatter. Bishop saw a gap and dived to escape, just as an unlucky German pilot crossed his sights. Bishop’s guns were firing to clear a path for his departure. A double burst of bullets sliced through the Albatros amidships, cutting it almost in two, and it fell out of control.
Bishop and Caldwell flew back to Filescamp side by side and landed just as a heavy storm broke. In the hangar Bishop and Corporal Bourne closely examined the precious S.E. 5 and made an incredible discovery: not a single bullet had struck the plane. Bishop walked through the rain to buy Caldwell a drink and say a simple “thanks, Grid.” Caldwell was always impatient at gratitude. Later Bishop wrote home: “It was the bravest thing I have ever seen, but typical of him. He’s always getting shot up helping others out of scrapes.”
Bishop’s second victory in an S.E. 5 was almost his last. After lunch the worst of the storm was over but rain still fell in gusts and the overcast was low. Bishop took off alone, intending to cross the lines north of Monchy-le-Preux to avoid the hated anti-aircraft concentration at that point. But he sighted a pair of two-seaters over Monchy and forgot caution. He flew toward them at five thousand feet, an ideal height for anti-aircraft gunners, who promptly threw a murderous barrage at their favourite target, the blue-nosed British plane.
Bishop threaded his way among the puffs of exploding shrapnel shells and was almost out of their range, and gaining on the two-seater, when a shell burst under his plane. He heard a sharp clang, felt a sickening lurch, and immediately his engine spluttered and slowed.
He turned quickly toward his own lines, losing height. With relief he saw that he was out of anti-aircraft range. The engine was barely idling, providing less than enough power for the long glide back to Filescamp. He pushed the throttle cautiously open, hoping to coax a little more power from the damaged motor. Instead it vibrated violently—and suddenly flames enveloped the plane’s nose and were blown back toward the cockpit. The smoke and heat choked Bishop. Quickly he kicked the right rudder bar roughly and pushed the stick to the left. The effect was to throw the plane into a sideslip and sweep the flames away from the cockpit. But it also pushed the plane close to the ground, and Filescamp was still more than two miles away.
The flames licked at the fabric of the lower wing and charred pieces tore off. The earth was now only five hundred feet below. Bishop looked over the side in search of a field level enough to give him a chance of landing a crippled and unfamiliar machine. Drenching rain was falling again and Bishop could barely make out a field below, beyond a barrier of poplar trees.
Two hundred feet, one hundred feet. One of the struts was on fire. When it burned through the wing would collapse and drop the plane like a stone. Twenty-five feet. Bishop pulled back on the stick in a desperate effort to gain enough altitude to clear the trees. He ducked his head as flames swept around the cockpit; with a violent shudder the plane stopped in mid-air, turned on its side and crashed into the poplar trees.
In the sudden silence he remained conscious only long enough to feel a rush of blood to his head and to realize he was hanging upside down. Then he fainted.
Someone was trying to jab a cigarette between his lips.
“Thanks, but I don’t smoke,” Bishop said, and it somehow sounded a little ridiculous.
“You all right?”
Bishop focused his dim sight on a large, worried face staring down at him. Memory broke through the blur. The aeroplane . . . the fire . . . the trees. It was vivid, frightening. He tried to stand up but a heavy hand clasped his shoulder and held him down.“Take it easy,” the voice said. He looked around and discovered that he was sitting with his back against the trunk of a tree. It was raining hard and the foliage above dripped streams of water on his head and shoulders.
“What a mess,” someone said, and Bishop’s eye followed a pointing hand upward. What remained of his S.E. 5was a mangled mass of fabric and wire dangling carelessly between two tall poplars.
The rain of course had helped save his life. It drowned the fire that would surely have burned him to a cinder. But he might still have been hanging upside down in his harness if some soldiers driving along the St.Pol-Arras road by the edge of the field had not seen the blazing aeroplane stall and crash into the trees. One man climbed on another’s shoulders to pull the unconscious pilot from the cockpit. When the soldiers were sure he had suffered no broken bones or internal injuries, they drove him the two miles to Files-camp. The amazing fact was that Bishop did not receive so much as a scratch or the trace of a burn. But his nerves were badly affected. He wrote to Margaret:
“I don’t suppose my nerves will last more than three months out here. They are getting shaky now. I find myself shuddering at chances I didn’t think anything of taking six weeks ago.”
Cochrane-Patrick sent him to Amiens for two days’ rest, and in that friendly and re
laxing atmosphere he soon felt refreshed and calmed. When he returned to Filescamp Farm his S.E. 5 was, incredibly, ready to fly. He was amazed that Corporal Bourne and his mechanics had even been able to salvage enough of it to turn in for scrap. But the S.E. 5 was a sturdy job and it had not been as badly damaged as Bishop had thought. The wings had been smashed and burned but were easily restored. The only thing that had to be completely replaced was the burned-out engine.
Bishop decided that he had better get into the air as soon as possible. He had heard fearsome stories of pilots who had crashed, survived, taken a long rest, only to find that they had lost their nerve for flying—and for fighting.
The day after he returned to Filescamp Bishop took off on patrol with Molesworth and Horn over his favourite hunting ground, the Drocourt-Quéant Switch. The three-plane patrol had been introduced because the enemy had been resolutely avoiding the usual six-plane patrols. Ten minutes after they crossed the front lines eight Albatros scouts dived on them. The leader was in a bright silver machine. The rest were bright green. Bishop singled out one of the green machines and opened fire on it head-on. The Albatros burst into flames. Molesworth and Horn both opened fire on another Albatros, and it too went down in flames.
Bishop glimpsed the leader’s silver plane overhauling him from the rear. He looked about for Horn and Molesworth. They had disappeared. Later he learned that the guns of both their planes had jammed and they had been forced out of the fight.
Bishop now had all six Albatros fighters to himself, and he was interested only in escaping. But the silver plane kept darting at him from behind and from the flanks. Finally Bishop tried a desperation manoeuvre. He flew head-on at the enemy plane. The German pilot had no appetite for such an attack and swerved aside. This gave Bishop the opportunity he had been seeking—to concentrate on the other machines in the hope that he could bring one down and so frighten the rest. He hurled his plane around and got under the belly of one of the green fighters. Then his guns jammed too. He dived out of the battle and fumbled with the unfamiliar firing mechanisms of the S.E. 5’s guns.
Presently they started firing again (Bishop never did figure out what he had done to get them back into operation) just as one of the enemy planes crossed his sights. He fired a short burst and the plane’s fuselage disintegrated and it fell out of control. The silver Albatros dived out of the action and the rest of the German planes followed. Bishop did not pursue them. Gratefully he returned to Filescamp—just in time. When he landed it was almost dark, and his motor was sputtering from lack of fuel.
That night Bishop wrote home: “Tonight I got two more Huns. One in flames and another that spun down and crashed. That is forty for me. Eight more and I will have the same as the French flyer Guynemer who is the highest. And I might even be able to beat his record and lead the Allies. I am only three behind Albert Ball.”
He came close to his objective on August 5, when he followed a decoy enemy plane into a trap east of Monchy-le-Preux at seven thousand feet under clouds, and shot down one of the three Albatros scouts that ambushed him.
Two to go to catch Ball. Shooting down enemy planes became an obsession with Bishop, and he did not try to conceal it from Margaret. He wrote to her, three nights after his forty-first victory: “I am due for leave in a fortnight but I don’t think I’ll take it as the last few days have been dud and there had been no flying. I am sufficiently rested from loafing around to do another six weeks here. If it is clear tomorrow I’ll shoot down every Hun in the sky.”
August 9 did dawn clear, but Bishop shot down only half the Huns in the sky—but then, only two showed up. Next day it rained again. Horn watched Bishop pacing about the mess until he could stand it no longer. “There’s a cavalry regiment up at the lines,” he told Bishop. “Let’s drive over and see if any of your old pals are there.” They borrowed a car and as Bishop reported, “darned if Horn’s hunch hadn’t been right. The place was overrun by Royal Canadian Dragoons, and Royal Canadian Horse Artillery. I had a merry reunion with Gordon Cassels, John Crerar, Ham Roberts and a dozen other Royal Military College people.”
Horn and Bishop got back to Filescamp late—very late. Corporal Bourne was waiting for them: “C.O. wants to see you—no matter how late you get back. He’s in the mess. And by the way, Sir, congratulations.”
“What for?” asked Bishop.
“Don’t know, Sir. At least, it’s only a rumour. C.O. will tell you.”
Late as it was, all 60 Squadron was in the mess. Cochrane-Patrick told Bishop: “Old Boom Trenchard has been trying to reach you all afternoon. You’re to phone him right away.”
Bishop lifted the telephone nervously. In a few seconds he was speaking to the General Commanding.
“That you, Bishop?” he bellowed.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Good! Allow me to be the first to congratulate you on winning the Victoria Cross.”
The celebration of Bishop’s award of the highest honour the British monarch could bestow was to go down in history as the most frantic ever held on the Western Front. At some time during the proceedings Jack Scott showed up, and so did Colonel Pretyman.
Before it was over [Molesworth reported in the only coherent description of the event], Boom Trenchard may have joined the proceedings, for all we knew, to say nothing of Sir Douglas Haig himself. There was a dinner at which several people made speeches and the piano received about as much champagne as we did. After dinner we had a torchlight procession to the other squadrons, led by our Very light experts. Luckily for us the night was very cloudy or the Huns would probably have come over to see what was going on.
We charged into the other messes and threw everything out of the windows including the occupants. We bombarded the messes with Very lights, the great stunt being to shoot a Very light through one window and out the other. I can’t imagine why the blessed place didn’t go up in flames. After annoying these people for a bit we retired to our mess, where we danced and sang till the early hours of the morning.
Next day Bishop, red-eyed and in delicate health, was summoned to lunch with General Trenchard. The general told Bishop—and everyone else within earshot—that the Victoria Cross was for “the aerodrome show.” He also informed Bishop he was recommending him for the post of chief instructor of fighter pilots at a large new air school the RFC was organizing in Britain. He would probably not return to 60 Squadron after his forthcoming leave.
“I’m sure he thought he was giving me good news,” Bishop said later, “and I had to pretend it was. But I hated the thought of leaving Filescamp Farm and 60 Squadron, which had become home and family to me.” But the biggest disappointment was that he might not be able to catch up with Albert Ball’s leading Allied score of forty-three enemy planes downed. He still had one plane to go—and one week of operations left. As a pilot instructor in England he might never get into combat again.
But next afternoon, August 13, ten thousand feet over Drocourt he tied Ball’s score by shooting down an Albatros—and seconds later he became the leading Allied airman by downing another Alba-tros. He took particular satisfaction in the fact that the first of his victims was the shining Albatros that had eluded him in several dogfights; the plane he had dubbed “old Silversides.” In one surprise dive through a formation of three enemy scouts he got in short bursts at two and watched them crash into a field one after another.
With only three days of flying left, Bishop was determined to stay in the air from dawn to dusk. But that night Cochrane-Patrick told him he was grounded for the following day. “Orders from headquarters,”he said with a grin.“The official photographer chaps are coming over to see you.” Bishop described the ordeal in a letter to Margaret: “They were here today taking all kinds of pictures, and of course I am being ragged to death by the others. To add to this something has already appeared in the London papers about me, aged 19 and V.C., D.S.O., and leading British airman with a lot of other rot. I’ll never hear the last of it. Surely they could have checked
the official records and found out I’m 23.”
The Canadian newspapers were full of Bishop’s exploits, too, and his father wired him to be cautious during his last days with the squadron. Bishop replied: “I now know the fighting game well and I am successful at it because I fight with my head. Worry not about me, I am playing a safe game although it may not sound so. Believe me, I feel the days of risk have passed. This life is too good to leave. I never felt better in my life.”
At dusk on the evening of August 13 Bishop shot down his forty-fifth plane over Hénin-Liétard, further behind the enemy lines than he should have strayed. It was, he told Cochrane-Patrick on his return to the mess, the easiest kill he had ever made. He used that as an argument against being required to return to England before his new duties.
“It seems damned silly,” he complained, “to let someone get competent at his business and then switch him to something else.” Pat made sympathetic noises and pointed out to Bishop that he couldn’t countermand Trenchard’s order if he wanted to. Pat knew that Bishop would be horrified if he told him the truth: the Allied brass considered him more valuable as a symbol—Victoria Cross winner, top-scoring airman, and a colonial to boot—than as a pilot who took his life in his hands every day.
On his last day at Filescamp Bishop took off at dawn, determined to add to his score before he was grounded. There wasn’t another plane in the skies. But over toward Lens there were flashes of artillery fire and clouds of smoke. He flew in that direction and circled, a lone spectator of an attack on Hill 70 by the Canadian comrades he had visited a few days before. The battle seemed to be going well for the Canadians, and since there was nothing he could do to help, Bishop took up the hunt again. With only a pause for lunch and refuelling, he quartered the sky in a vain search for a scrap. After dinner he went up again, and with less than an hour of daylight left he met his first enemy planes of the long day, a pair of Albatros scouts. They turned and fled, helped by a strong west wind. After a short pursuit Bishop realized that he could not hope to close in on them without going deep into enemy territory. He opened fire at almost hopeless range—two hundred and fifty yards. He had never shot down a plane at such a distance, but the plane at which he aimed lurched and went into a spin. He thought it might be the old German trick of throwing off pursuit by pretending to be damaged, but the Albatros did not pull out of its spin. Instead it crashed into a building near Drocourt and vanished in a cloud of smoke and debris.
The Courage of the Early Morning Page 15