Winged Warfare by William Avery Bishop Read Free Book Online Page B

the lines for over half an hour when suddenly I spied an enemy machine about a mile over in Hunland, and some distance above me. In these days I no longer had any misgivings as to whether a machine was friend or foe—I had learned to sense the enemy. Our greatest difficulty at the time was drawing the Huns into a close combat. I set out to see what sort of fighting material this particular pilot of the iron crosses was made of. Keeping him always within view I climbed to nearly 15,000 feet, and from that point of vantage dived upon him. I waited until my plunge had carried me to within 150 yards of him before opening fire. I had gotten in a burst of probably twenty rounds, when my gun jammed. The Hun saw me and dived away as fast as he could go. I dived after him, tinkering with the gun all the time, and finally getting it clear, fired another burst at 100 yards. This drove him into a still deeper dive, but he flattened out again, and this time I gave him a burst at fifty yards. His machine evidently was damaged by my fire, for he now dived vertically toward the ground, keeping control, however, and landing safely in a field.
    This fight gave me a new resolve—to devote more time to target practice. I should have destroyed this Hun, but poor shooting had enabled him to escape. Going home I spent an hour that day practicing at a square target on the ground. Thereafter I gave as much time as possible to shooting practice, and to the accuracy I acquired in this way I feel I owe most of my successes. Aeroplane target practice is not without its dangers. The target on the ground is just about the size of the vital spots you aim at in fighting. You have to dive steeply at this and there is very little margin of safety when plunging at full speed to within a few feet of the earth.
    April sixth and seventh were memorable days in the Flying Corps. The public, knowing nothing of the approaching attack which was to go down in history as The Battle of Arras, was distinctly shocked when the British communiques for these two days frankly admitted the loss of twenty-eight of our machines. We considered this a small price to pay for the amount of work accomplished and the number of machines engaged, coupled with the fact that all of our work was done within the German lines. In the two days that we lost twenty-eight machines, we had accounted for fifteen Germans, who were actually seen to crash, and thirty-one driven down damaged, many of which must have met a similar fate. The British do not officially announce a hostile machine destroyed without strict verification. When you are fighting a formation of twenty or more Huns in a general mêlée, and one begins a downward spin, there is seldom time to disengage yourself and watch the machine complete its fatal plunge. You may be morally certain the Hun was entirely out of control and nothing could save him, but unless someone saw the crash, credit is given only for a machine driven down. The Royal Flying Corps is absolutely unperturbed when its losses on any one day exceed those of the enemy, for we philosophically regard this as the penalty necessarily entailed by our acting always on the offensive in the air.
    Technically, the Germans seldom gave a machine “missing,” for the fighting is practically always over their territory, and every one of their machines driven down can be accounted for, even if it is totally destroyed. Many of our losses are due wholly to the fact that we have to “carry on” over German territory. Any slight accident or injury that compels a descent in Hunland naturally means the total loss of the British machine. But such a loss does not involve a German victory in combat; it is merely a misfortune for us. If the machine could only have reached our side of the lines it might have been repaired in half an hour. The public often forgets these things when reading of British machines that fail to return.
    Every class of our machines was now