Facilities were rudimentary at airfields in France, as seen at this unknown base. Library of Congress
Low-Level Terror
By the beginning of August 1918, the Allies had just under two thousand fighter aircraft concentrated on the Western Front: ten times fewer than the number recommended by some within the RAF, but still six times more fighters than the German air force possessed. In fact, the RAF had undergone a massive expansion in the preceding two years. In 1916, the RFC, as it then was, had only 6,633 machines in total; that figure had more than doubled to 14,832 the following year; and by 1918 the RAF had 30,782 aircraft of varying types.
The 1,900 fighter aircraft assembled by the Allies in the high summer of 1918 represented the largest air operation of the war. They would play a crucial part in the impending offensive, which would become known as the Battle of Amiens. On July 24, a conference of national army commanders—Field Marshal Philippe Pétain of France, Britain’s Field Marshal Douglas Haig, and Gen. John Pershing of the American Expeditionary Forces—met to discuss the strategy for the rest of the year and into 1919. No one believed the war would be won quickly, but all sensed that Germany was weakening: a prize fighter who had given it his best shot but to no avail, and was now on the back foot, with heavy legs and hopeless eyes.
The conference was chaired by Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander in chief of the Allied Forces in France, who stated that their objective in the forthcoming offensive was to “embarrass the enemy in the utilization of his reserves and not allow him sufficient time to fill up his units.” Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army would lead the attack, the British troops—complemented by Canadian and Australian divisions—assaulting twenty thousand Germans positioned at Amiens, on the Somme River, where in March the British had been so humiliatingly overrun.
Facilities were rudimentary at airfields in France, as seen at this unknown base. Library of Congress
The first inkling 32 Squadron had of the offensive was an order to move from Touquin, in the French sector, to Bellevue in the British zone. It was the squadron’s fifth move in two months, enough to cause even the most stoic of ground crew to curse the top brass as he loaded up the trucks for the 130-mile trip north.
Bogart Rogers was lucky. He missed this move, writing his fiancée on August 2 (the day before 32 relocated to Bellevue) about his furlough in London. He was staying at the National Hotel in the heart of the British capital, and the previous evening had dined with one of his classmates from flying school in Canada. Rogers was emphatic that it had just been the two of them; old friends, both male. Isabelle had expressed her concern in a previous letter about the temptations her Bo might encounter in London or Paris. She had heard such tales. “I’m glad you mentioned the women, Isabelle,” wrote Rogers. “A great many fellows come on leave, don’t know anyone, haven’t any particular interests, and get into trouble. It isn’t hard to do. But Izzy, if war doesn’t do one other thing, it teaches you the real worth of a decent woman.”
Alvin Callender had yet to be exposed to the temptations of degenerate Britain but he soon would be; his two-week furlough was scheduled for the second half of August, and he wrote his sister on August 4 to tell her what he had planned—a tour of their ancestral home, Scotland, with the first few days spent visiting Edinburgh.
He had a few harsh words for his sister, ordering her to “quit telling me to be an ‘ace.’” There were only four aces in the RAF, he told her, and they were found in a pack of cards. Then, Callender softened his tone and described the squadron’s new home, so close to the frontline that the guns made it hard to sleep at night. But she wasn’t to worry, he added; “the worst three months is over now as far as air work is concerned.” Fall wasn’t far off, and the weather would keep the Hun out of the sky. Callender reckoned the war would be over “by the winter of 1919,” and in the meantime he was enjoying life and appreciating the eclectic personalities in the officers’ mess. “In the squadron now we have 6 Englishmen, 2 Scotchmen, 1 Irishman, 7 Canadians, 6 Americans, 2 Australians, and 1 South African,” he explained. “Pretty nearly every breed of white man there is, isn’t it?”
Lieutenant Frank Lucien Hale, “Bud” to his friends, became an ace with 32 Squadron.
One of the six Americans was a recent arrival, Lt. Frank Lucien Hale, “Bud” to his friends, who hailed from a prosperous family in Fayetteville, New York, but who considered himself more of a Syracuse boy. The twenty-three-year-old arrived at 32 Squadron with the name of the city painted on the fuselage of his S.E.5a air-craft. He also walked through the door of the mess with the unmistakable air of a man who knew what he wanted from life. This single-mindedness had taken Hale in the space of two years from a driver with the 4th Ambulance Company of Syracuse on the Mexican border in 1916 to an officer pilot in the RAF. Hale’s forceful personality had “made life interesting for the company’s officers” in the Ambulance Company and they were mightily relieved when, on arriving back from Mexico, he left the unit to become a pilot in the Aviation Corps. But Hale was in for a shock. Presenting himself at the recruiting station, he was informed that his “lack of a college education was an insurmountable bar.”
Outraged, Hale traveled to Washington and browbeat high officials until they “agreed to waive the four years in college.” One hurdle was surmounted, but the next proved impossible to overcome, even for a man of Hale’s ambition. He failed the equilibrium test on account, so he said to his family and friends when he returned home, of a kick in the head from a horse when a child. Hale was “crestfallen,” his dreams of becoming a pilot in ruins. However, he didn’t stay whipped for long. He learned of the long road to Canada, and in 1917 enlisted in the RFC. A serious injury sustained in a crash during take-off, a result of engine failure, postponed his graduation, but, by the summer of 1918, Hale was in England, waiting to be posted to France.
A blanket of gray mist greeted the dawn on August 8, 1918, a date later described by Ludendorff as “the black day of the German army.” Within a few hours the British Fourth Army had thrust through the German positions with the same exultant ferocity as Ludendorff’s troops had displayed five months earlier. The gap smashed in the German lines was fifteen miles long, and Kaiser Wilhelm II soon realized that his soldiers had “reached the limits of our capacity.” Ludendorff knew also the war was now lost, but both he and his monarch agreed to fight on in the hope of strengthening the bargaining position when the inevitable surrender came.
The rapidity of the Fourth’s advances caught everyone unawares—officers, infantrymen, and airmen. Reconnaissance aircraft were soon reporting that all roads to the Somme were clogged with demoralized enemy soldiers. Consequently, “existing bombing arrangements were cancelled and a maximum effort directed towards destroying the Somme bridges.” There were fourteen road and rail bridges between Bray and Pithon, but they were just the permanent structures. German engineers had also improvised numerous temporary bridges to facilitate the flight of their troops and supplies.
By late summer 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II (center) knew the war was lost, as did his generals, Hindenburg (left) and Ludendorff. Library of Congress
At 1:45 p.m., twelve aircraft from 32 Squadron were ordered to bomb Béthencourt Bridge, but heavy ground fire staved off the British attack. Like a swarm of angry hornets, the S.E.5s sought out other targets, strafing columns of enemy troops and dropping their bombs on A.A. batteries. Later in the day they returned to Béthencourt, a six-strong flight containing Callender and a nineteen-year-old Canadian called Walter Gilbert.29
They dropped their bombs firstly on the north-east end of the bridge, then its middle, and then Gilbert made one final pass, coming in impossibly low, his Sopwith pockmarked with small arms fire, and dropping his load on the approach to the bridge. The flight returned to Bellevue, replenished their bombs, and took off once more for Béthencourt. A second flight joined the raid, among their number John Donaldson, but still their target bridged the Somme, damaged but too strong to be destroyed by a deluge of 25-pound Cooper bombs.
Breaking off the attack, Donaldson spotted a flight of five Fokker D.VIIs headed their way. He and two other Sopwiths accepted the odds, and engaged the enemy over the town of Licourt, Donaldson leading the assault with a frontal attack on the German leader. “Firing about fifty rounds without result, [I] then made a climbing turn and dived on a second enemy machine, firing 100 rounds at him, at very close range,” he wrote later in his report of the dogfight. The German fell “into a straight dive and crashed to earth, midway between Licourt and Morcham where it remained with its tail vertical.”
Donaldson’s victim was one of sixty-five enemy aircraft shot down on August 8, for the loss of forty-five RAF machines. In truth, however, the British had lost far more machines with a further fifty-two aircraft returning across the lines so badly damaged they were no longer airworthy. In all, almost twenty five percent of Allied aircraft on low-level flying missions were put out of commission on August 8.
Certainly the belligerence of the Germans had surprised the RAF, more used to the enemy waiting for the fight to come to them. Different tactics were deployed on August 9, with many fighter squadrons instructed to leave the bridge raids to bomber squadrons. No. 32 Squadron were involved in an attack on a bridge at Falvy but two German Jastas were patrolling the sector. The sky darkened with aircraft as the battle was joined. Donaldson claimed his fourth victory, a flamer at 12,000 feet, but then his own aileron was shot away from a burst from his rear. A fellow American, Reuben Paskill, saved the life of his compatriot by chasing the Fokker away, but Donaldson was out of the fight. Callender and another pilot took on three Germans over Villers, but thick cloud made it hard to score a clear kill.
The cloud had dropped even lower by late afternoon when 32 Squadron provided an escort to bombers from 49 Squadron. In the murk, the bombers became separated from their chaperone, and were attacked by the twenty Fokkers. Some of the S.E.5s managed to grope their way through the clouds to come to the bombers’ rescue, but in the ensuing mêlée Paskill was shot down and killed.
The following day brought no respite for the RAF. Although its army was on the retreat, Germany’s air force was moving in the other direction, including the famous Jagdgeschwader 1, now commanded by Hermann Göring, following the death of Manfred von Richthofen and his successor, Wilhelm Reinhard.
Although Donaldson and Callender both scored their fifth victories (the former beating the latter to the accolade of ace by a mere ten minutes during the same dogfight), 32 Squadron lost another pilot—Lt. Peter Macfarlane, a twenty-three-year-old Scot—while another was shot down and captured.
Wilhelm Reinhard had also led Jagdgeschwader 1 before his death in action.
Two days later, Callender finally had a chance to write home. The bitter fighting of the past week had earned the Germans a new-found respect in the American’s eyes. They no longer ran from a fight. “We have a good way to go yet before we fight over German territory,” he told his mother. He said little of his own experiences, preferring to look forward to his forthcoming leave. Not long to go now. Callender would be off across the Channel just as soon as Bogart Rogers returned from his furlough in “Blighty,” as the British called home.
Rogers reached Bellevue on August 14. It took a while for him to come to terms with the many changes: not just the new airfield, but the new faces, and the new German tactics. Rube Paskill’s death hit Rogers hard. The two had been friends. But, on the bright side, he wrote his fiancée, Wilfred Green and Sturley Simpson had both been decorated for gallantry. Rogers had run an eye over the clutch of new pilots and three “are very good, have all been instructors in Canada, can surely fly, and are regular fellows besides.”
One of the three was Hale, already blooded in battle despite the fact he’d been at the front barely more than a week. The era of easing new pilots gently into combat was long gone. There was no time for that now, not if the RAF wanted to take control of the sky. Hale’s first letter home had been written on August 13, the brio of the newcomer’s prose matching the zeal in his eyes. “We have had only two real scraps so far since I arrived,” he wrote. “I managed to get back safely but have no Huns to my credit so far.”
He described his first dogfight, how the guns of an enemy Fokker sound like “a riveting hammer,” and then turned to his own S.E.5a. “Breaking in a new airplane is like breaking in a new auto. The engine has to be nursed along for 20 or 30 hours before it can be run at top speed. It seems great to have my own machine, and I surely am in love with it. I tell you, when everything depends on you and your machine, a fellow is bound to know, absolutely, what the machine can and will do in an emergency.”
The men in the squadron weren’t bad either. He mentioned that he knew five of them from RFC training in Canada the previous fall—Callender, Jerry Flynn, Harry Carson, John Trusler, and Montague Tancock, the latter an American from New Jersey. “We live like real men and have real fun, too,” he said. “It is great out here.…[B] elieve me, if a fellow survives this war, he will have some thrilling experiences to tell.”
Hale ended his letter with a throwaway sentence about a recent German air raid. From his account he’d hardly looked up from his armchair. His parents had enough to worry about without the thought their boy could be blown to bits as he sat reading the paper in the squadron mess. It was Rogers who gave a more detailed account of the raid to his fiancée. The squadron had just finished dinner when suddenly the airfield klaxon sounded and the lights in the mess went out. Pilots stopped talking and glanced skywards, or nervously at one another. Up above they “could hear the peculiar drone of a couple of Huns.” For a couple of minutes the bombers circled the area and then “suddenly dropped some parachute flares. Fortunately they weren’t right over us, for they light the whole place up like day.” The Germans were after the town, not the airfield, but now the British anti-aircraft guns opened up and for several minutes “the usual Fourth of July celebration followed.”
Lothar von Richtofen, brother of Manfred, survived the war but died in a flying accident in the 1920s.
If Allied air losses had been heavy in the days following the launch of the Fourth Army offensive, the damage inflicted upon the German air force was catastrophic. The Richthofen Circus lost thirty-nine of its fifty aircraft, and among the casualties was the high-ranking ace Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the Red Baron, badly wounded in action on August 12, probably a victim of American Capt. Field Kindley of the 148th Aero Squadron.
No. 32 Squadron was no longer subjected to the same intense low-level work of early August, but the second half of the month brought frequent patrols and escort assignments. Already Hale’s letters had lost some of their ardor. First there was the heat, he complained to his parents, and the flies, too, “so thick that sleep is quite impossible.” And he craved sleep. “Day before yesterday we had two patrols, and yesterday we had three. First at 5 A.M., second at 11:30 A.M., and third at 5 P.M. Each one lasted more than two hours. I was absolutely dead tired last night. Six hours of flying at 18,000 ft, or higher, and all the time dodging Archie, and expecting to meet some Hun machines, is no easy job I state.” He mentioned that his ears were “ringing like a dozen church bells tonight” on account of the altitude, and then admitted he lacked the energy to write any more. “Have to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning.”
On the morning of August 25, 32 Squadron provided an escort for a bombing raid “so far over the line that I shiver every time I think about it.” Rogers then hurriedly ended his letter to Isabelle Young, telling her “this afternoon we’re doing a nastier show. I can’t go into details but it’s a retaliation affair and the worth the effort involved.”
Captain Field Kindley was an ace with the 148th Aero Squadron.
The attack was a revenge strike for an air raid the previous evening on Bertangles, the aerodrome shared by 48 and 84 Squadrons. George Vaughn and Alex Matthews of the latter had been invited “across the railway tracks” to a concert party laid on by 48 Squadron. The pair were sat side by side enjoying the show when “a bomb dropped without warning squarely on the adjacent hangar full of Bristol fighters, starting a fire.” Other bombs followed, and people jumped from their seats, fleeing for their lives. “Alex ran one way and I another,” wrote Vaughn. “I fell into a bomb crater, immediately followed by several other people still in their performers’ costumes.”
The raid lasted several long minutes and when the last raider had vanished into the darkness, the survivors emerged from their hiding places to survey the damage. “Alex had been hit by machine gun fire from one of the bombers and had been instantly killed,” wrote Vaughn. “There were many casualties among the personnel of the 48th.”
By early evening on August 25, the bombing raid was underway and 32 Squadron were patrolling the skies in the vicinity of Hancourt, approximately ten miles northwest of Saint-Quentin. A flight of thirteen Fokker D.VIIs were spotted approaching the RAF bombers. Donaldson swooped on four blue-gray enemy aircraft and picked out one as his sixth victim. A long burst of one hundred rounds ripped through the colorful fuselage and the machine “went into a sideslip-dive, and after falling about 2,000 feet, the left wing of the enemy aircraft broke off.” Donaldson watched with cold interest as the pilot leapt from his cockpit. Suddenly the American started. A parachute had blossomed and the German was floating gently down to earth.30
Hale had followed Donaldson into the fray, firing one hundred rounds into one of the other three Fokkers at very close range. “E.A. immediately turned over on its back, and went down into a spiral dive,” Hale wrote in his combat report. “Pilot followed it down, observing it to crash about 2 miles East of an aerodrome, on side of road at Hancourt.”
Hale was delighted. When he first joined the squadron he’d had reservations, heard rumors that 32 wasn’t up to that much. “This hasn’t been such a very good squadron up to now,” he wrote his parents, “but we are going to try to buck it up a bit, and make it a crack squadron.”
By “we,” Hale probably meant those who had arrived from North America. One of them, Donaldson, was certainly creating a name for himself. On August 29, he took his tally to seven E.A. in thirty-eight days and on September 1, he anticipated adding an eighth to his score card when the squadron were ordered to provide an escort to a long-range bombing mission.
The British were faced with a strong westerly wind, a clear advantage to the Germans, who would be able to attack the British when they were laboring into the wind on the way back home low on fuel. (In a letter home Frank Hale said of one mission on a westerly wind that “it took us less than 20 minutes to go over but one hour and 45 minutes to come back.”) Sure enough, that was when the Germans struck. Donaldson’s A Flight, providing close escort, became separated from the top cover and were set upon by seven Fokkers. Montague Tancock managed to down one enemy aircraft, but Lieutenant Sandys-Winsch was wounded and neither Donaldson nor another American, Lt. Edwin Klingman, an insurance clerk from Greensboro before the war, returned to Bellevue. Someone claimed to have seen Donaldson shooting down his eighth German before being forced to the ground by damage to his own aircraft.31
Frank Hale’s guns had jammed in the first few seconds of the fight and in a letter home he described the unenviable position he found himself in. “The clouds were quite thick at about 3,000 feet so I dived into them. The two Huns were quite persistent and evidently thought that they would get me. I flew due east in the clouds, going further into Hunland all the time. Suddenly I came into the open. They started shooting everything at me from the ground.…I tried to spoil their aim by stunting, but couldn’t. Then I dived into another cloud. They just filled this with Archie and flaming onions…so down I went to within a few feet of the ground and headed for our lines. For 10 or 12 miles I contour chased. Every time I would get anywhere within sight or range of a machine gun they shot at me. Finally I reached our lines, and you can’t imagine what a relief it was. I certainly said a prayer of thanks to God for getting me out of that scrape.”32
Two days later, 32 Squadron was out on a routine patrol in the early afternoon. No one expected trouble, they wouldn’t be up for long, just a quick sortie over the line. Three miles over, “a dozen Fokkers appeared from nowhere.” They dived on the flight commander, Jerry Flynn, the small Canadian with the lionheart, who had as his shadow a new pilot, young Canadian 2nd Lt. Frederick Pacey, a teacher from Ontario in civilian life. The pair were shot down in flames before the rest of the patrol could come to their rescue.
The squadron was stunned. Flynn’s best friend, the veteran Wilfred Green, was hysterical when he landed. “Poor little Jerry!” he screamed. “Oh my God! They got him in flames.” He blamed himself. “I let him down! I didn’t protect him.”
His fellow pilots tried to calm him. Consoling arms were draped around Green’s shoulder but Rogers said “everyone was on the verge of tears. It was too great a tragedy to conceal. It penetrated their calloused exteriors and jabbled at their hearts.”
The men retired to their quarters, lay on their beds, trying to get out of their head the image of Flynn’s machine parceled in flame. There was a febrile atmosphere at dinner that night. Rogers said “more cocktails than usual” had been served before they sat down. People were drinking to forget. “But for once they didn’t work…they only made matters worse.” Rogers later wrote an account of what followed:
By the time the soup appeared everyone was three sheets to the wind but the teetotalers. There were guests for dinner and champagne was in order on guest nights. They guzzled it like water but it had no effect—the place was a morgue. Nobody talked—nobody dared talked. Jerry’s seat was vacant, there wasn’t a soul who would occupy it. It happened suddenly. A kid named John Trusler, grabbed his champagne glass, hurled it the length of the mess, leaped to his feet and started a vivid impression of a lunatic.…[H]e swore and cursed and cried. He cursed God and the Germans. He cursed the war and the army. He cursed his parents because he was born. He told Little Jerry Flynn—who he knew was sitting in the room listening to him, who was sitting right there in that chair—that he didn’t have to worry. They couldn’t kill him and get away with it.…[T]hey tried to stop him, and finally pulled him down into a chair. He hid his head in his hands and sobbed horribly. Half of the fellows were bawling. The rest were trying to quiet things down but feeling no better than the weepers.
The next morning, Flynn was just a statistic, a name in the squadron’s lengthening roll of honor. Everyone, recalled Rogers, climbed into their cockpits having slipped on their “hard-boiled masks.” Trusler grinned sheepishly when ribbed for his outburst. Green went off on patrol as sanguine as the rest, but once in the air, something seized possession of his mind. He landed a broken man. Gentle hands eased him out of the cockpit, this brave man whose “nerves snapped with the twang of a broken flying wire.” Green was invalided back to England, never to fly again in combat, just as Callender returned from leave and was appointed Flynn’s replacement as C Flight Commander.
