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Aviation History
1917
1917 - 0630.PDF
l/ilCHT| JUNE 21, 1917. AIRCRAFT IN THE MESSINES BATTLE. IN a message to the Daily Telegraph, dated June 9th, Mr. Philip Gibbs said:— p; " As scouts of the gunners, as their Watchers and signallers, were the boys of the Royal Flying Corps. I said yesterday that they were uplifted with a kind of intoxication of enthu- siasm. A youthful madness took possession of them. Those squadrons which I saw flying overhead while it was still dark on Thursday morning, did dare-devil, reckless, almost incred- ible things. They flew as men inspired by passion and a fierce joy of battle. They were hunters seeking their prey. They were Berserkers of the air, determined to kill though they should be killed, to scatter death among the enemy, to destroy him in the air and on the earth, to smite him in his body and in his works and in his soul by a terror of him. This may seem language of exaggeration, the silly fantasy of a Writing man careless of the exact truth. It is less than the truth, and the sober facts are wild things. Early on June 7th, they were up arid away, as I described them, passing overhead on that , fateful morning before the crimson feather clouds appeared over the battlefield. They flew above the German railway stations far behind the lines and dropped tons of explosive, blowing up rolling stock, and smashing rails and bridges. They attacked the German aerodromes, flying .low to the level of the sheds and spattering them with machine-gun bullets so that no German airmen came out of them that day. One man's flight, told in his own dry words, is like the wild nightmare of an airman's dream. He flew to a German aerodrome and circled round. A German machine gun spat out bullets at him. The airman saw it, swooped over it, and fired at the gunner. He saW his bullets hit the gun. The man ceased fire, screamed, and ran for cover. Then our air- _ man flew off, chased trains, and fired into their windows. He flew over small bodies of troops on the march, stooped, fired, and scattered them. Afterwards he met a convoy going to Comines, and he circled over them, hardly higher than their heads, and fired into them. Near Warneton he came upon troops massing for a counter-attack, and made a new attack, inflicting casualties and making them run in all directions. " Another man found himself under fire of the. Archies mounted on lorries. He dived and fired on the gunners, who ran away and hid. One of our flying men attacked and silenced four machine-gun teams in a strong emplacement. Others cleared trenches of German soldiers, who scuttled like rabbits into the dug-outs. They fired everything they carried which Would kill the enemy or destroy his material. Having used up all his Lewis gun ammunition upon the marching troops, one lad fired his very lights, his signal rockets, at the next group of men he saw. The airmen flew at the field gunners and put them to flight; at the heavy guns crawling along the roads on caterpillar wheels; at transport wagons, motor lorries; and one motor car, whose passengers, if they live, will never forget that sudden rush of Wings four feet overhead, with a spasm of bullets about them. The aeroplane was so low that the pilot thought he would crash mto the motor car, but he just planed clear of it as the driver steered it sharply into a ditch, where it overturned with its five occupants. The airman went on his journey, scattered 500 infantry, and returned home after a long flight, never higher than 500 feet above ground. " Meanwhile, during the progress of the battle, our air squadrons appointed for artillery observation work were all over the enemy's batteries signalling our gunners and sending back ' O.K.' flashes when our counter-battery work was effective. There were an amazing number of ' O.K.'s.' One air squadron alone helped a group of heavies to silence 72 batteries. Everywhere over the battle ground our air scouts were out and about, Watching the progress of the infantry, speaking to them by signals, picking up their answers, flying back to headquarters with certain information, so that the direction of the battle Was helped enormously by this quick intelligence. It was a day of triumph for the Royal Flying Corps and for all those boys with wings on their breasts who after their day's flight come down to French estaminets to the rattle of ragtime on untuned pianos, to give glad eyes to any pretty girl about, to fling themselves into the joy of life which they risk so lightly." The special correspondent of the Times, writing on June 7th, said :— " Simultaneously with the merciless pounding of our guns and the unceasing raiding by the infantry, our airmen have waged a fierce and brilliantly successful war on the enemy machines, so that on the front of this one army, General Plumer's army, our airmen between June 1st and 6th crashed 24 enemy machines and drove down 2 3 out of control, losing in all tlie fighting only 10 machines themselves. " Among the squadrons included in this area is that of which I recently told the extraordinary tale of how five of our machines fought 27 Germans, wrecking eight of them and themselves all getting home safely. The whole record of our air service during these last few weeks has been extra- ordinarily fine." Writing on June 10th, he said :— " Information as to enemy movements and battery positions, and so forth, is largely got from aeroplane observa- tion, and the value of our airmen's contribution to the victory is beyond computation. In the official comminqui of Friday evening there was a simple sentence, namely, ' The enemy's aircraft were prevented from taking part in the battle.' This is absolutely true, and no higher tribute to our Air Service could be paid. " The general public thinks of the Air Service chiefly in terms of air fighting and in numbers of machines brought down. In my despatch of Thursday I gave the figures, which showed that even by that standard, our airmen were vastly superior to the Germans. But air fighting, with the bringing down of enemy machines, is only an incident of the work of the Flying Corps. " The essential work is, first, observation, and secondly, harassing, by bombing raids, &c, the enemy's communications. " Before this attack, it must be remembered, that the enemy held the high ground on the Ridge, and he could see us, While we, from the ground, could not see him. We have had to rely for observation chiefly on the air. Yet, on the day of the battle itself, our guns assigned to counter-battery Work simply smothered the enemy's artillery. " One squadron of the R.F.C. alone on that day gave observation reports which enabled our gunners to silence no fewer than 72 enemy batteries. One brigade sent in 390 shells, in response to which our gims are known to have obtained 160 direct hits on objectives, and it should be noted that, after a call is turned in, an aeroplane is usually too busy elsewhere to note whether the shooting in response is effective or not. So the total number of effective bits was doubtless much larger than is known. " Besides this, in the early morning of the day of the attack, and during the course of the action, our airmen raided all the enemy aerodromes in the area, and dropped over three tons of explosives on them, or on other points of military importance. " Beyond this, during the battle, our airmen flew down and attacked from close at hand some 60 different concentra- tions of German troops or battalions marching on the road for reinforcements, thus immensely impeding the movement of the Gerrnan rnilitary'inachine. " This is only part of what our aircraft did while ' the enemy's aircraft were prevented from taking part in the battle.' Never, I believe, in any operation of this war has any branch of any Army been more splendidly effective than has our Air Service, but the performances of our Flying Corps in this battle must be made the subject of a separate despatch." Mr. W. Beach Thomas, in the Daily Mail, gives the following stories of the fighting :— " One further story of the battle. A British airman fighting for the first time engaged in a big battle with a number of craft on both sides. At a crisis he tried a spinning dive, but fell some 8,000 ft., before he could straighten himself. Just as he did so, when within some 2,000 ft. of the ground, he saw two German planes in quick succession tumble past him. They had been shot down in battle high above. But this was not the end of his experience of thunderbolts. As he began to mount again to try to join battle, "a third German plane almost fell down' on top of him. Did ever man before experience in such a measure what Tennyson in prophetic mood called ' the ghastly dew of airy navies ' ? But it is all in the day's work. " At sunset yesterday I went to a big aerodrome to see the birds come home to roost. The ground was almost empty and the air almost full. Our fighting patrols had failed to find a single enemy, though they had sought far and wide. Full of unexhausted vitality they, expended it in playing every imaginable trick. They turned somersaults, spinning head- long in twisting tumbles like a blown leaf ; they looped and flew on their backs ; and played hide and seek with trees, and swooped like hawks and skimmed like swallows, and towered like cranes and drummed like snipe. It was all training for battle, and this evening all was well, for every bird had come home to roost. The naval triplanes that climb straight like a lift, the fighting bullets with the bullet flight, and the slow and dignified biplane observers—to-day none of all these had lost a bird." 63O
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