The Flight Commander 12

…... for home and diving steeply I met him nose on as he turned to make another dive. I nearly hit this machine, for we were approaching each other at something like 300 miles per hour. After firing I saw a burst of steam come from the radiator and he took a steep dive towards the River Scarpe. At the time I thought I had set him on fire and he was going to try to come down in the water to extinguish the flames (this fight took place at under 1,000 feet), but I was attributing thoughts to a dead man, for he

bit the earth in No Man’s Land, sending up a great cloud of dust, since he fell with the velocity of a shell. This was one of the few occasions when I was sufficiently near to the ground to feel sick at the sight of a vertical plunge to earth of what was, but a few seconds previously, a breathing fellow man mounted on wings of silk, but now unrecognisable amidst the twisted mass; death dealt to him while he was dealing death.


And so we flew home, landed and made our report. Four, possibly five, of the enemy had been brought down before breakfast. We ourselves were untouched save for a few small holes in our wings from the anti-aircraft fire and, by virtue of living on the surface, by turning away our faces and refusing to acknowledge death, by casting off that thin veneer of civilisation with the excuse that we were, after all, as it were, hired assassins in the cause of patriotism, we were able to sit down and enjoy a good breakfast. How marvellously can the human mind adapt itself, how easily persuade itself that its course is right, from a nation to the individual; so that all experience, all knowledge, even religious beliefs can be laid on one side until the lust to kill is satisfied, leaving a charred and blackened earth and the sweet sickly smell of blood.


Click here to read an extract from
First Army Intelligence 16th - 30th April 1917:


This extract recalls vividly to my mind the daily fights we had against the famous Baron von Richtofen’s Squadron, commonly called the "Circus," because it was a mobile unit, being employed on any front where it was most needed. As a rule the patrols of this Squadron numbered ten to fifteen machines in a flight which made the odds heavy against our six machine flights, but nevertheless we worried von Richtofen’s crowd considerably and took heavy toll of his pilots. Most of this fighting took place at a great height, anything from 15,000 to 19,000 feet up and always well over the enemy lines. It was a standing joke in No. 8 Squadron that the mechanics of Richtofen’s Circus must have suffered from rheumatism from lying on their backs on the damp aerodrome at Douai and watching their pilots shot down.

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