A resolution had been forming for some time in the mind of Raymond Collishaw of Nanaimo, B.C. The idea had begun to germinate when the twenty-two-year-old sailor had first arrived in England in 1915, ready to join one of His Majesty’s vessels of war. Now his mind was made up; and when Ray Collishaw made up his mind, he seldom bothered with second thoughts. He immediately put pen to paper and set out his reasons for asking the Lords of the Admirality to consider favourably his request for a transfer from duty as a ship’s deck officer to training as a pilot in the Royal Naval Air Service.
It was a radical step for a young man fully qualified in ship handling and navigation. Collishaw had already worked his way up from the lower deck status of a seaman to that of an officer. All his early life had been spent mastering the intricacies of seamanship. Born close to the sea on Vancouver Island, his boyhood had been coloured with images of sea voyages and ships. At the age of fifteen, he turned his dreams into reality by signing on with a fisheries patrol vessel. The young Collishaw found himself thoroughly at home on the windswept decks of the small patrol boats plying the waters off the B.C. coast. He learned the rough give and take of shipboard life and in a few years had achieved the position of second mate aboard a passenger vessel making scheduled trips to Alaska. Following that, his ability earned him a berth on one of the exploratory expeditions in the Antarctic. When the war started in 1914, he appeared to be all set for a career as a ship’s officer. Had he remained true to his first love, the sea, his subsequent history would have been different. With his personal magnetism, sense of duty, and initiative, he would probably have soon achieved the ultimate ambition of all sailors, the command of his own ship.
As it was, one day, shortly after his arrival in England, he saw an airplane in flight. The sight of this new weapon of war fired his imagination; he decided to become a pilot. He enlisted with the Royal Naval Air Service in Canada in 1915. The RNAS had started a limited recruiting programme in this country, whereby air crews were recruited providing that each man paid the cost of his own flying training. Collishaw accepted and took pre-flight training at the Curtiss Flying School in Toronto. The School closed before he completed the course, and the RNAS shipped him overseas to complete his training, under RNAS instruction, in England. By January, 1916, he was a qualified pilot with the Royal Naval Air Service and was flying patrols over the ports along the English Channel, looking for Zeppelins and U-boats. It was a dull job, with little to offer that would satisfy Collishaw’s craving for action. So the young sailor welcomed the change when, in August, he was transferred to No. 3 Naval Wing, the first strategic bombing force ever formed. The wing was to operate from fields in the Vosges section of north-eastern France and was to attack selected industrial targets far inside Germany, at the limit of the bomber’s range. As preparation for this role, the squadron was sent to Manston, Kent, to train. While at Manston, Collishaw and a friend struck up an acquaintance with two girls in the neighbouring village. The four had planned a double date one night when orders came through for the squadron to move to France. There was no telephone connection with the young ladies so Collishaw decided to deliver his regrets personally. He took one of the squadron’s planes up, intending to drop a note in the back garden of his girlfriend’s home. Unfortunately his engine failed as he swooped over the house and the plane crashed, smashing several garden walls and ripping out the rear wall of the girl’s home. Collihaw was uninjured, but, as he said later: “The neighbours were not very pleased.”
Pilots with Sopwith F.1 Camel aircraft of No. 203 Squadron RAF, from left, Lt. A.T. Whealy and Squadron Commander Raymond Collishaw, of Nanaimo, B.C. Photo taken at Allonville, France, in July 1918.
Canada: Dept. of National Defence/National Archives of Canada/PA-002789.
Collishaw’s first major combat mission was an attack on the Mauser rifle factory at Oberndorf on October 12, 1916. The formation of French and British bombers included fourteen Canadians in its personnel. This history-making raid was not an easy operation, and the force had to fight its way to the target, battling successive waves of German fighters. The raiding force was made up of two-seater day-bombers (Sopwith one-and-a-half strutters) escorted by Sopwith Pup fighters, less than twenty planes in all. The mission was a success despite severe attacks from enemy fighters on the formation. Collishaw, who was flying an escort plane, scored his first victory by shooting the wings off an enemy scout while defending the bombers. Less than two weeks later he boosted his total by two when he shot down two of the fast new Albatros D-3’s, known among British flyers as “widow makers.”
Collishaw’s air fighting tactics lacked the duellist’s virtuosity of Barker or Bishop. They both possessed a rare combination of marksmanship and flying ability, but what the British Columbian lacked in skill with a machine gun he made up with a remarkable ferocity of attack. He would lunge close to his opponents, braving heavy defensive fire or a close-range shot that could not miss. He was the Jack Dempsey of the air, wading through a barrage of blows to deliver the knockout punch. As a result, his machine often came home riddled with bullets and he himself missed death by inches countless times. His first narrow escape came on December 27, 1916, when his plane was shot down, the engine and cowling punctured in a dozen places by bullets. With power gone, Collishaw made a dead stick landing and escaped unhurt.
A second close shave occurred after the wing moved to Ochey, near the big aircraft replacement centre of Toul, to be closer to its main target, the German steel industry of the Saar basin. Collishaw was asked to pick up a new plane one day. He left Toul in the plane, a two-seater, without a rear gunner. On his way back to the base he was attacked. During the fight, a bullet smashed his goggles and he was temporarily blinded. In a bid to lose the enemy planes, he dived away—into German territory. Soon he was alone, and, at low altitude, swung his plane towards the French lines. An aerodrome appeared and Collishaw, exhausted and still half blind from the stunning blow of the bullet, landed his plane. He was taxiing among the parked aircraft when, with a shock, he suddenly noticed they were all marked with black crosses. He had landed by mistake at a German drome. Collishaw gunned the motor and roared down the field, bullets digging into the ground behind him. His plane lifted just in time, clipping the tops of two trees.
On February 1, 1917, Collishaw was transferred to No. 3 Naval Squadron and on March 4, he raised his victory total when he shot down another Albatros D-3. His operations on the western front made Collishaw something of an authority on the aircraft turned out by the Sopwith factory in England. Early in his career, he flew the reliable Sopwith one-and-a-half strutter. At the beginning of his service as a fighter pilot, his plane was the Sopwith Pup, the forerunner of a distinguished line of Sopwith models, and, for many pilots, the favourite of the family. Designed to combat the Fokker Eindekker menace, the Pup came into action late in 1916, when the Germans had replaced the Eindekker with faster, more powerful models. Surprisingly, though it was one of the better fighters of that year, the shabbily equipped Royal Flying Corps turned the Pup down, and it went to naval squadrons. Underpowered, and designed to fight a different foe, it performed yeoman service against the powerful Albatros fighters. Collishaw learned much about air combat tactics in the Pup, which responded easily to his touch and endeared itself to him.
On April Fool’s Day, 1917, the Navy played a nasty trick on the Germans and introduced Ray Collishaw to the plane that would make him famous, the rakish-looking Sopwith Triplane. Lieutenant Ray Collishaw was handed his transfer orders that day and told to report to No. 10 Naval Squadron as the commander of B Flight. The squadron was being sent to the Flanders front to help the hard-pressed Royal Flying Corps.
Undated photo shows a Sopwith Triplane on the flight line. This aircraft has the standard 110-hp Clerget engine and rarer twin Vickers .303-in. machine gun armament -- most Triplanes carried only one -- mounted atop the fuselage and synchronized to fire between the propeller blades. The Triplane, which debuted in prototype form on May 28, 1916, was initially ordered for Britain’s Royal Flying Corps but an interservice swap meant the 140 built served exclusively with the Royal Naval Air Service. B Flight of No. 10 Naval Squadron, manned entirely Canadians, was known as the Black Flight; its five aircraft, painted overall black except for squadron and rudder markings, were dubbed Black Maria, Black Death, Black Roger, Black Prince and Black Sheep. Between May and July 1917, they shot down 87 enemy aircraft. The Triplane was replaced by the Sopwith Camel in November 1917. Top speed was 117 mph, service ceiling was 20,500 ft. and endurance was 2 hrs. 45 mins. The Triplane was 18 ft. 10 in. long, spanned 26 ft. 6 in., stood 10 ft. 6 in. tall and weighed 1,101 lb. empty and a maximum 1,541 lb. at takeoff.
Department of National Defence/AH493
This was “Bloody April.” Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s flying circus had gone into action in January as an untried group of fledglings. Now they were all aces, thanks to the superiority of their equipment, a fact not realized by one correspondent, who called them “cold-eyed killers.” Most of the machines used by the RFC were not adequate to cope with the German planes, and for a time the Germans enjoyed complete aerial dominance. The RFC, at the mercy of the British Government’s Air Board, which was still trying to standardize aircraft design to cut costs, was unable to get the variety of machines it needed. The aircraft situation became so bad that General Trenchard, the commander of the RFC, told his superiors: “I want to beat the Boche in this war, not the next.”
Number 10 Squadron, RNAS, had just been re-equipped with the Sopwith Triplane, which had passed its final production tests almost a year earlier. Despite its high performance record, the triplane had been rejected by the RFC, probably because of its unusual appearance. Consequently, most of the three-wingers went into action as naval aircraft on Channel patrol. Sopwith engineers had had no precedent to guide them when they designed the Tripe. They had wanted a plane that would incorporate maximum lift in a short wingspan, plus the ability to turn inside the turning radius of contemporary German planes. The result was the triplane, a light ship with a fast rate of climb and a ceiling of 20,500 feet. Armed with a single machine gun synchronized to fire through the propeller arc, the triplane had a top speed of 115 miles per hour at 15,000 feet. A Sopwith Triplane, probably from Collishaw’s squadron, was credited with shooting down and wounding the youngest brother of the Red Knight, Lothar von Richthofen, who was an ace in his own right with forty victories.
As losses mounted on the western front, the desperate RFC was forced to take another look at the plane they had turned down and borrowed a squadron from the RNAS to fill the gaps left by the Spandau guns of the German fighters. The squadron selected, No. 10, boasted some of the best fighter pilots in the RNAS, men handpicked by Naval Headquarters. Among them was Ray Collishaw.
Collishaw was delighted with his new command. B Flight was composed entirely of Canadians: Flight Sub-Lieutenants Ellis Reid of Toronto, J. E. Sharman of Winnipeg, J. E. Nash of Hamilton, and W. M. Alexander of Toronto.
Many German squadrons had adopted the practice of the Richthofen circus and were painting their planes with vivid colours and insignia. Collishaw decided that his all-Canadian flight should also have a distinctive trademark to distinguish them from the Army’s RFC squadrons. After consulting his men it was decided to paint every plane in the flight jet black. With light-hearted bravado they dubbed their formation the “Black Flight.” Collishaw’s plane was “Black Maria”; Reid flew “Black Roger”; Sharman was in “Black Death”; Nash christened his plane “Black Sheep”; and Alexander assumed an air of royalty with “Black Prince.”
There were, no doubt, a few covert sneers among the jaded and battle-weary RFC pilots when these cocky young navy flyers arrived on the scene in their funereal triplanes and brave noms de guerre. But the sneers vanished quickly when the group went into action, for the Black Flight proved to be one of the most successful air fighting teams of the war.
On the morning of June 27, 1917, four jet-black triplanes roared across the bumpy pasture land that was the landing field of No. 10 Naval Squadron, climbed at a steep angle, and slanted their way towards the shell-scarred Flanders battlefield. Ostensibly this was a routine offensive patrol for the Black Flight. Actually the four Canadian flyers were setting out to pursue a vendetta with a certain German pilot who flew a vivid green Albatros fighter. Flight Leader Ray Collishaw and his three wingmates had a score to settle with the German.
The Black Flight had been in action almost three months. Through the darkest days of “Bloody April” the five Canadians seemed invulnerable, though disastrous casualties were being suffered by other British flying units. In their black triplanes they opposed the top German squadrons on the Flanders front and came away unscathed. Each had downed the required number of German planes to become an ace. By June 5, Collishaw had brought his personal score to thirteen with the destruction of an Albatros two-seater. The following day he shot down three Albatros D-3’s in a single fight. Several other individual victories followed and on June 15 he downed three Halberstadt fighters and an LVG two-seater, bringing his victory tally to twenty-three, sixteen of them shot down in a twenty-seven-day period.
But the charmed life of the Black Flight could not last. On June 26 the Canadians, rushing to help a flight of British planes, ran head-on into the entire Jagdstaffel of von Richthofen. Despite the stiff odds, the five black triplanes held their own against the foremost squadron of the German Air Force. In the mêlée, Richthofen and his leading ace, Leutnant Karl Allmenroeder, whose thirty victories had won for him the ribbon of the Blue Max, Germany’s highest decoration, pounced on the tail of Nash’s “Black Sheep.” It was Allmenroeder’s guns which sent the black triplane crashing behind the German lines. Other members of the Black Flight, busy with their opponents, could do little but note this fact and mark Allmenroeder’s all-green Albatros for a future reckoning. After an indecisive battle with the German formation the four surviving triplanes flew home. That night a pall of gloom hung over the usually gay billets of the Canadians. Nash had gone down pretty fast and it seemed probable that he was dead.
While badly shaken by the crash, Nash was actually not seriously hurt. German soldiers pulled him from the wreckage of his plane and took him prisoner. It was a custom among flyers to offer a downed foe a night’s entertainment at the squadron mess before he was shipped away to the dreary life of a prison camp. Nash was lodged in a small cell near the Jasta 11 base at Marcke on the Ypres front. His wounds were treated and he was told he would spend the night there.
The next day, while Nash nursed his bruises and contemplated a dismal future as a prisoner of war, the Black Flight set out to find the German in the vivid green Albatros. They found their quarry leading a formation of Jasta 11 aircraft high over the German-held industrial city of Lille. The Albatros at the head of the vari-coloured formation acted like a magnet for the four black triplanes, but it was Collishaw who managed to break through the wildly manoeuvring German fighters and close in on the green ship. The Canadian attacked with a single purpose: to get the man who shot down Nash. Collishaw had no way, of knowing that Nash was still alive and almost within earshot of their roaring motors.
The green plane avoided Collishaw’s charge with a fast wingover and the aerobatics of the two master flyers soon carried them clear of the main battle. It was no easy contest, for Allmenroeder was an accomplished aerial duelist. But the greater speed of his craft and its heavy motor were not fitted for such a fight. On the other hand, Collishaw’s infighting tactics were aided by the easy manoeuvrability of his triplane, designed for exactly this type of action. Again and again the lighter British plane danced away from the faster German, gaining vital altitude each time they circled each other. Then Collishaw spotted an opening and rushed in. At point-blank range he fired a long burst into the fuselage of the Albatros which plunged to the ground.
Later that day, the tolling of a church bell caught Nash’s attention as he waited in his tiny cell to be transported to the prison camp. From the barred window he saw a group of German officers accompanying a coffin into the nearby churchyard. The helmeted guard at his cell door, who could speak English, provided the explanation. The funeral, he said, was for Leutnant Karl Allmenroeder, “a very famous Kanone [ace] . . . the man who shot you down yesterday.”
This anecdote illustrates Collishaw’s deep sense of responsibility for the men under his command. A group photograph of his squadron shows him, a smiling, stocky young man, standing with his wingmates. His hands rest on the shoulders of two of them, much like a proud eldest son among his younger brothers. It was this quality in his nature which made him react as he did to the shooting down of Nash. A former member of 203 Squadron, Collishaw’s last command of the war, had this to say about him: “Most of the ‘stars’ were extremely conscientious about making sure they were given full credit for their victories. There was always a semi-official competition among the better flyers to top each other’s scores. Collishaw wasn’t like that. He seemed at times almost indifferent to confirmation of his victories. And one of his practices was to give away victories to new men. He felt that this bolstered their confidence and helped them to survive. If he and a rookie fired on the same plane, ‘Collie’ would always maintain it was the rookie’s bullets that had got it.” Thus, had Collishaw claimed his victories as jealously as other flyers, his official total of sixty, placing him third in the RAF, would have been considerably higher.
The Black Flight became a familiar sight over the tragic marshlands of Flanders. Between May and July the flight had destroyed the phenomenal total of eighty-seven enemy aircraft. Collishaw personally accounted for sixteen enemy losses in June alone. By the first week in July his personal score had risen to twenty-seven, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. During that month, ten more enemy fighters fell before his guns.
It was during the same month, on July 15, that Collishaw had another narrow brush with death. It was on an offensive patrol over the German lines. His squadron tangled with a formation of German fighters, and Collishaw found an enemy aircraft riding his tail. Tracer bullets ripped into the wings and tail of his machine and his control wires parted. By using the motor and ailerons to compensate for controls that had been shot away, he managed to glide his crippled fighter to the safety of British lines, pancaking his plane into a muddy field. The plane was a total wreck, but Collishaw escaped unharmed.
He was back in the air again the next day and, on July 20, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for shooting down three Albatros fighters in a single combat. Eight days later he was granted two months’ leave in Canada.
Collishaw returned to France in October, 1917, and was given command of No. 13 Naval Squadron, a formation equipped with the Sopwith Camel. By this time the Black Flight had been disbanded, its members having been sent to different areas of the conflict. In his position as squadron commander, Collishaw found himself chained to a desk, facing an ever-mounting stack of paperwork. Even when he did manage to wade through this paper war, there were new restrictive orders issued by the High Command, prohibiting squadron commanders from flying combat patrols. Number 13 Squadron was a seaplane defence unit and the tempo of the war along the Belgian seacoast was slower than at the western front, where daily battles raged. Nevertheless, despite the paperwork and High Command’s orders, Collishaw managed to shoot down two German seaplanes and a two-seater during his tour with the squadron.
On January 23, 1918, he was again transferred, this time to the post of commander of No. 3 Naval Squadron. Administrative duties kept him grounded until June, but when he again took to the air, he soon proved that he had not lost his touch, and three new Pfalz fighters fell before his guns.
At this time, the main threat to the British bid for aerial superiority was the new Fokker D-7, one of the finest airplanes to be developed during the First War. “Fokker fever” was taking a heavy toll of Allied pilots and a brace of D-7’s almost ended the career of Collishaw. He was patrolling alone near the lines one day when he spotted a British plane in serious trouble. The plane, a Spad, had evidently become separated from its formation and, while trying to get home, had been jumped by a pair of high-flying Fokkers. Now the lone Britisher weaved and dodged frantically as he ran a gauntlet of tracer bullets that sparkled from the guns of the Fokkers. Collishaw was still some distance away, but he shoved the nose of his ship down to gain flying speed and sped to the rescue of the hemmed-in Spad. Still out of range, he saw the British plane spout smoke, then point its nose towards the ground far below.
The triumphant German planes zoomed up and split to the right and left, hoping to catch a second victim between their guns. Collishaw, hot with anger, gave them no chance to develop their attack. He plunged at the nearest Fokker head-on, and when the German broke right to avoid collision, the Canadian raked his floorboards. The turn of the German plane tightened into a spin and it went down. The second plane was now on Collishaw, its guns pounding. Bullets thudded and crashed into the light aluminum that covered the motor of the Camel but, again, the Nanaimo flyer closed to point-blank range and poured a volley into the German plane. It shed a gout of smoke and fell into a dive.
Collishaw had won, but whether he would live to talk about his victory was another matter. The bullet-riddled rotary engine of his plane coughed and fell silent, the prop windmilling without power. He was still over the German lines and a landing here meant capture. Gaining flying speed by diving, Collishaw expertly handled stick and rudder to glide the plane across the British lines to a crash landing.
A few days later, with a new plane, he was back again over the German lines on offensive patrols. Relentlessly, he built up his score until it reached sixty victories. By this time he had added a bar to his DSO and had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. It was at this time that the RNAS and RFC were merged to become the Royal Air Force, and Collishaw’s squadron, No. 3 Naval, was redesignated as No. 203 Squadron, RAF, a unit in which more than half the pilots were Canadian. On October 1, a little more than a month before the Armistice, Collishaw was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and ordered back to England to help form the new Canadian Air Force. He was one of about 450 Canadian flying officers in England when, at a special ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the colours for the new service were presented.
The war had ended, however, before Canada’s Air Force could enter the fighting. Collishaw, along with thousands of other men, returned to his home, but his farewell to active service was only temporary. The guns may have been silent along the western front, but there was still a battle raging in the East. The Russian Revolution, at first hailed by western liberals as a triumph of democracy against the rule of a despot, had been snatched from the hands of the liberal forces by the Bolsheviks. Russian fought Russian in that most bitter of conflicts, civil war, as the Reds of Lenin struggled for supreme power against the White counterrevolution under the military leadership of Admiral Kolchak.
The western world viewed with alarm the growing power of the Bolsheviks and their doctrine of world revolution. Britain, mainly on the urging of Winston Churchill, sent men and machines to the White Russian Army. Led by General Denekin, the White Army was trying to push northwards from the Crimea into the heart of Russia. Collishaw, still attached to the RAF, returned to England in 1919 and found an exciting offer awaiting him: the command of a squadron whose job was to provide aerial support for Denekin’s army. The Nanaimo flyer was now twenty-seven years of age and had seen enough military service to satisfy the average man’s taste for action, but he readily accepted the new assignments. He then spent many days visiting a number of RAF units in Britain, hand-picking the men who would accompany him.
His new command, No. 47 Squadron, RAF, was a composite group of three flights of single-seater Camels and three flights of de Havilland 9 day-bombers. Collishaw made it practically all-Canadian, for fifty-three of the squadron’s sixty-two officers came from Canada. Russia had always been an enigma to the people of the West and now, into this remote country that brooded alone on the eastern boundary of Europe, obscured further by the smoke of battle, Collishaw led his Canadians.
The squadron landed at Novorisisk, in southern Russia, and joined up with the forces of General Denekin. It acted as air support for three White Russian armies: the Kuban Cossacks, operating from a small city on the Volga known as Tsaritsyn, which was later named Stalingrad; the Don Cossacks, who operated in the territory between Stalingrad and Kharkov; and the Volunteer Army of the Ukraine. Collishaw’s men were appalled at what they found. The fratricidal conflict lent new horror to the savagery of war. Prisoners were shot callously by both sides, and the fate of foreign mercenaries was even less gentle. The men of 47 Squadron soon learned that they could not expect to be treated as prisoners of war if they were forced to land behind enemy lines.
It was a strange, gypsy-like campaign for these battle-tested Canadians. Used to the static warfare that had existed along the western front for four years, they found themselves living the life of nomads, moving with Denekin’s army from place to place, advancing or retreating with the ground forces.
By the autumn of 1919, Collishaw had established his headquarters at Krasnodar. At first a few enemy planes were encountered, piloted by German flyers. Collishaw was the first pilot serving with the White Army to score a victory on the southern Russian front. His victim was a familiar foe, a German Albatros D-5, its black crosses painted over with the red star of the Bolsheviks. Although it did not take long for Collishaw’s crack pilots to dispose of the enemy air force, it was not a simple operation. Adventure was evenly distributed among the flyers of 47 Squadron. An incident that occurred to the Canadian crew of a de Havilland 9 day-bomber illustrates the dangers of the squadron’s task.
The bombers were engaged in a low-level strafing attack against a large body of Red cavalry when a bullet disabled the engine of the plane piloted by a Lieutenant Elliot. He managed to bring the big two-seater down to a safe landing, only to face a line of charging Red cavalry. Elliot and his observer fought off the Red soldiers with twin Lewis guns in the rear cockpit. Meanwhile, another plane in the same formation noticed their danger and a second de Havilland, piloted by another Canadian, a Captain Anderson, circled to land, while the observer poured bullets from his Lewis guns into the mass of cavalry below.
Under the combined firepower of four Lewis guns, the Communist horsemen kept their distance. No doubt they thought it was only a matter of time until the machine guns ran out of ammunition. Stripping the guns from their crippled plane, Elliot and his observer dashed to Captain Anderson’s aircraft, firing from the hip as they ran. They had just reached the plane when a Communist bullet punctured the gas tank of the rescue machine and gasoline gushed out through the hole.
Undaunted, Anderson’s observer calmly climbed onto the lower wing and plugged the hole with a gloved thumb. Elliot and his companion leaped into the empty rear cockpit and Anderson hit the throttle. As the heavy-laden DH lunged forward the wildly shouting horsemen galloped after it, firing furiously as the plane gathered speed. Amid a hail of bullets, the DH lifted sluggishly from the ground. With its precious gas load saved by the resourceful observer, the plane returned safely to its base. The only “casualty” was the observer’s thumb, which became temporarily paralyzed by its immersion in gasoline.
Rapid troop movements created some problems for the flyers, since there was always the possibility, when they returned from a flight, of finding their field in enemy hands. Collishaw related one such incident, when the field was encircled by Red cavalry after the White forces had retreated. The aircraft had to take off and hold back the Reds with machine guns and bombs until the ground crew could pack up and move out.
Beside the dangers of war, famine and disease stalked the land. Collishaw almost fell victim to the latter when, on a reconnaissance patrol in a de Havilland two-seater, his engine was damaged by ground fire and he was forced to land. With his observer, Collishaw had to walk six miles to the nearest railroad station to find transport back to the squadron. Aboard the crowded troop train, filled with verminous Russian peasants and soldiery, he fell ill. Back at Stalingrad, a doctor packed him off on a hospital train for evacuation from the front line. For five days Collishaw lay delirious and racked by deadly Typhus fever on a bunk in the baggage car of the train. Had it not been for the kindness of a refugee noblewoman he would have died. The train stopped for fuel and water at a small village, where an elderly Russian countess heard of the gravely ill British pilot. She had him carried to the small, one-room cottage where she had lived since fleeing the Revolution, and for six weeks, while Collishaw lay unconscious, she nursed him.
Although Collishaw survived the disease which killed more people than the battles of the Revolution, he needed further care. Finally, a British plane from his unit landed near the village. The pilot, hearing that a British flyer was lying ill nearby, sought Collishaw out and flew him back to his unit. “I was never able to thank the countess, who disappeared in the turmoil of the Revolution,” said Collishaw.
He returned to battle in the winter of 1919, when the White Army had reached the zenith of its success against the Reds. But the tide of fortune changed when rumours spread through the country that the White Army would restore the Czar if it were victorious. The peasantry pledged their support to the Bolsheviks and the front collapsed.
The RAF unit was all but encircled, deep within the Caucasus, hundreds of miles from the sea. With the Don and Kuban Cossacks, the RAF units began to fight their way through the encirclement. While the squadron’s baggage and ground personnel travelled in their own armoured train, the planes flew daily missions, blasting a hole through the Bolshevik forces with machine guns and bombs. The planes were forced to take off and land from the open steppes, which were, fortunately, frozen as hard as a concrete landing strip. As it was, each day at least one plane would fall victim to hard service; it would be stripped of usable parts and burned.
The retreat progressed at a snail’s pace. The goal of the hard-pressed airmen was the Crimea, five hundred miles away over open country. They armed the train with machine gun turrets taken from scrapped aircraft, and the guns were often used to beat off the attacks of marauding Red cavalry. Fuel and water for the locomotive were another problem; Collishaw had to order armed parties into each village that was passed to commandeer what was necessary. And so they crept through southern Russia in the dead of winter, pursued relentlessly by a Red Army armoured train armed with a nine-inch gun.
Collishaw’s train carried a number of Russian civilians, the families of White Army officers. These unfortunates, terrified of being captured by the Reds, had begged to be allowed to accompany the RAF unit in its break-out to the sea. To make matters worse, Typhus broke out among them. Every morning the cars of the train had to be searched and cleared of the bodies of the elderly men, women, and children who had succumbed to the dread fever.
They won through, though, and Collishaw led his haggard band into the safety of the Crimea, where the British and French armies and navies had established a strong base. Offensive operations against the Reds were being continued here, even while preparations were under way to evacuate the Allied Expeditionary Force from Russia, and it was here that Collishaw once more barely missed capture and death. Intensive ground fire from a strong body of Bolshevik cavalry damaged his engine while he was on a reconnaissance mission. While the plane would not remain in the air, Collishaw found on landing that the engine would still turn over. Over miles and miles of bumpy ground and frozen waterway, he taxied the plane all the way back to the base.
Through the first months of 1920, the RAF pilots continued the fight, but by March it was all over. The Bolshevik Revolution was triumphant and the British airmen sailed out of Sevastopol for Constantinople, then to Britain. For his service in Russia Collishaw was awarded three Czarist decorations and the Order of the British Empire.
On his return, Collishaw found plenty of opportunities for making use of his flying skill. British planes were now being used in place of troops to police the more remote parts of the Empire. Collishaw was first sent to Persia, a British protectorate threatened by an outbreak of tribal warfare and Bolshevik expansion across its borders. Collishaw commanded a squadron stationed at Kalvine, on the Caspian Sea, and the unit saw hard fighting against Communist irregulars raiding into Persia. His service to the Crown was again recognized: in the King’s New Year’s Honours List of 1921 he was gazetted a Commander of the British Empire. Later he led another squadron which helped put down a rebellion among the Arab tribes in Mesopotamia, after which he was appointed to the command of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, operating from the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous.
Up to this point, Raymond Collishaw had crowded the adventure of three lifetimes into one; but World War Two and the most important challenges of his life still lay before him.
The summer of 1940 was no better nor worse than any other, as far as the people of the tiny Libyan harbour town of Tobruk were concerned. They were well used to temperatures that climbed over 100 degrees. True, there was some added inconvenience. It was hard to find shelter from the burning sun when most of the habitable buildings had been taken over by an occupying army, but with Arabic fatalism they accepted their lot and moved their families to meaner quarters.
Thousands of Italian soldiers and airmen had turned this natural harbour on Africa’s north coast into a sprawling military base, and to them the oppressive heat was almost a living thing that sapped them of their strength and will. Under the relentless sun many had lost the enthusiasm with which they had greeted Benito Mussolini’s announcement that Italy would be united with Hitler’s Germany against her former allies, France and England.
It, was on one typically blistering day that bemedalled Italian generals stared with astonishment into the sky, where a lone plane, bearing the red, white, and blue roundels of the RAF, swooped out of the sun to pass just above the rooftops of the fortified town. It was a solemn occasion: a military funeral for one of Italy’s great soldiers. The Italians showed their displeasure at the impertinent Englishman as flak batteries erupted around the harbour and airfield. Steadily holding its course, the plane passed through the barrage and flew directly over the funeral cortege. From an open hatch, a small, brightly coloured object plummeted to the earth. Italian officers in full dress uniform dived into the dust to escape the bomb blast they were sure would follow. The object thumped onto the hardbaked earth and . . . lay silent. The plane shot skyward, executing violent evasive action, and vanished towards Egypt.
On the ground, there was silence. Finally a general peered over the rim of a slit trench at the object in the middle of the airfield. He nudged his aide, a full colonel: “Go see what it is,” he snapped.
“Si, signor generale,” the colonel replied, and summoned his aide. “Capitano, the generale wants to know what was dropped,” he ordered.
The captain beckoned to a sergeant: “Go find out what the Englishman dropped,” he snarled at the wide-eyed noncom.
“Caporale,” roared the sergeant, “examine the object dropped by the plane.”
The corporal surveyed his machine gun crew: “Giuseppe, you heard the sergente. Go find out.”
A disconsolate private loped reluctantly to the object and prodded it gingerly with the ‘muzzle of his rifle. A word passed back up the chain of command. The Italian officers brushed sentimental tears from their eyes and smiled after the rapidly disappearing dot on the horizon. The object was a wreath of mourning, swathed in the traditional black banners and bearing the condolences of a legendary flyer, Air Commodore Raymond Collishaw, RAF, for the death of another gallant airman, Marshal Italo Balbo of the Italian Air Force. Marshal Balbo had been killed by mistake several days earlier when his plane had crossed the Italian anti-aircraft defences of Tobruk before giving the proper recognition signals. The plane was promptly shot down by his compatriots and the Marshal killed. The gallantry of Collishaw’s gesture was fully appreciated by the Italians, even though Ray Collishaw’s pilots were to blame for the quick trigger fingers of the Italian gunners. The Tobruk garrison had come to expect that any plane which came on them unannounced would bear the markings of an RAF aircraft.
From the beginning of the campaign in the Western Desert, when Italy first entered the war on Germany’s side in June, 1940, Collishaw’s pilots had seized the initiative in combat and held it, despite the vastly superior forces of the enemy. Mussolini’s war was only a few hours old when the RAF had struck from Egypt. Bombers and fighter bombers under the Canadian’s command flew on El Adem, the main Italian air base in Cyrenaica, a province of Libya. In the dawn attack the bombers caught Italian aircraft on the ground and riddled them with bullets and bombs. The runways were’pitted with craters and the buildings smashed. Italian losses were disastrously heavy, for the raid struck the heart of the main concentration of Italian air power which was poised for a thrust into Egypt.
Collishaw, as the commander of 202 Group, had carefully watched the build-up of Axis forces in Cyrenaica. When the news arrived that Italy had declared war, it was only a matter of hours before operational orders for the sortie had gone out from the group’s headquarters at Maaten Bagush. The raid on El Adem was a master stroke that robbed Italy, supposedly the aggressor, of the initiative from the beginning of the desert campaign. The attack was the culmination of the lessons in strategy that Collishaw had learned during his twenty-four years as a military flyer. At no time during his career, however, had he faced a situation as challenging as that presented by Italy’s entry into the Second World War.
Collishaw’s command was outnumbered almost two to one by the air strength Italy mustered in Cyrenaica. His group was part of the Middle East Command under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore. The command encompassed a total area of four and a half million square miles and included Egypt, the Sudan, Palestine, TransJordan, East Africa, Aden, Somaliland, Iraq and adjacent territories, Cyprus, Turkey, the Balkans (Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Greece), the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. The air defences for this vast area consisted of twenty-nine squadrons of 300 first line planes. This force had no auxiliary support, such as local industry for repairs, and supplies from England were scarce, for they were needed in the Battle of Britain. Half of those first line planes in the Middle East Command were based in Egypt, under Collishaw’s direct command. The task of his force was to defend Egypt and the Suez Canal, and maintain communications through the Red Sea.
Although his planes were described as “first line,” they were actually a collection of old fighters, bombers, and defenceless reconnaissance machines. But they were the best available throughout the Middle East Command. Collishaw persistently campaigned to give his pilots the most efficient equipment that could be had. Even so, his main bomber squadrons were equipped with vintage Blenheim 1 medium-range bombers or slow-moving Sunderland flying boats, while the five fighter squadrons at his disposal flew the antique Gloster Gladiator biplane. Other squadrons in the group were equipped with old warhorses such as the Fairey Battles, Hardys, Audaxes, Hawker Harts, Londons, and other types designed and built in the mid-1930’s, a total of less than 200 aircraft.
Against these modest forces the Italians mustered a front line force of 479 planes: 282 based in Libya, 150 in Italian East Africa, and another 47 at the Dodecanese whence they could easily strike at Egypt. Behind this front line force were 1,200 more aircraft based on the Italian mainland, while strengthening Italy’s hand further was a short supply line from Sicily, to provide repair and auxiliary forces to keep the front line force operational. For the Allies the situation was grim.
The Italian ground force, mainly infantry divisions but with some added motorized and armoured forces, was concentrated in Eastern Cyrenaica while its commander, Marshal Graziani, laid his plans for a rapid advance against the British in Egypt. His preparations were completed by midSeptember and the signal for the advance was given. Meanwhile, Collishaw had not been idle. Following the initial raid at El Adem, his Blenheims struck along the frontier against Italian ports, communications lines, and troop concentrations. The heavy Bombay bombers of his group thundered through the night to bomb Tobruk, while the highly vulnerable Lysanders of his reconnaissance squadrons ferreted out information about the forward positions of the enemy forces. The bombers achieved a notable success at Tobruk, scoring repeated hits on the Italian battle cruiser, the San Giorgio, which was burned out and beached. Fighter planes from Collishaw’s group also provided air support for a naval raid on the staging areas and installations at Bardia. During the bombardment, the Gloster Gladiators shot down eight Italian fighters.
At the same time, Collishaw launched another attack against Italian airfields. Along the entire frontier, British planes “fumigated” the air bases, destroying Italian planes on the ground. At sea, fighters from the group provided air protection for the convoys to Malta and escorted Swordfish torpedo bombers in their attacks against Italian naval units and installations. Another success was recorded on August 15, when Collishaw’s group attacked the seaplane base at Bomba, crippling twelve seaplanes. But the most successful and audacious attack was a raid on a heavily defended ammunition dump at Bardia. Successive blasts from burning ammunition rocked the bombers as they roared over the target and a huge shroud of smoke from the burning base was visible for miles.
The greatest achievement of Collishaw’s aggressive policy was the instillation of a timid, defensive attitude into the enemy. As a result, the Italians managed to launch only a few attacks against such vulnerable British bases as Alexandria. Their only success of note was an air attack on Haifa, where several oil storage tanks were set afire. Collishaw recognized that operations such as he planned could not be carried out without casualties, and was prepared to accept the risk on the grounds that the end justified the means. On the other hand, it was only natural for his superiors to watch the casualty list instead of counting the number of British bases that escaped air raid because of Collishaw’s attack strategy. The huge RAF repair depot at Aboukir was but one of the many juicy targets available for Italian bombers. Had the Italians regained the initiative, a series of blows at such installations could well have crippled, if not dismembered, the RAF in the Middle East. Collishaw’s superiors must have overlooked this fact, for twice during this part of the campaign, Collishaw was rebuked for pressing the attacks far behind the enemy lines. “I consider such operations unjustified having regard to our limited resources, of which you are well aware,” wrote Air Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, Air Officer Commanding, from his headquarters in Cairo. Under his orders, reconnaissance flights were drastically reduced and bombing attacks against troop concentrations were forbidden for forces greater than one squadron.
The Italian attack, when it finally developed, was stopped cold by the British Eighth Army, under the command of Sir Archibald Wavell. With Egypt secure, the British themselves launched an attack that winter. Now the tethers were loosened, and Collishaw’s aircraft worked in close support with the attacking army. The Canadian, still restricted by the lack of equipment, worked far into the night at his tented headquarters in the sandy wasteland near Mersa Matruh, devising methods to obtain the best possible results with the ancient aircraft at his disposal. One thing he had noted was the negligible effect that Italian aircraft had had on British tanks. Aerial machine gun fire just rattled off the tough hides of the armour-plated monsters. He therefore ordered his own planes to avoid attacks on tanks and instead to concentrate against the columns of trucks carrying gasoline and ammunition up to the front. Collishaw reasoned, correctly, that without these necessary supplies the Italian tanks would soon be forced to withdraw from the fight.
Another example of his ingenuity was the single Hurricane fighter that came to be known as “Collishaw’s air force.” As Italian aircraft losses mounted, Italy was forced to count on supplies from her German ally. Soon superior German types of aircraft, notably the Junkers 87 dive bomber and the ME-109 fighter, began to appear wearing Italian markings. To give the Italians the idea that his Desert Air Force was also being resupplied with improved aircraft, Collishaw made unorthodox use of a single Hurricane fighter. The plane had been sent to acquaint the pilots of the Desert Air Force with its features before large numbers of its type were dispatched. Collishaw used the single fighter as a propaganda weapon. He moved it from airfield to airfield, flying his single modern fighter close to Italian positions so that it could be recognized, and leaving the Italian air force with the impression that the fast new eight-gun fighters had arrived en masse in Libya. Pilots in the group quickly dubbed the plane “Collishaw’s air force” and went out to battle again and again in their ancient Gladiators and Blenheims.
Another Collishaw innovation that played havoc with the enemy was a special impact bomb he devised for use against enemy airfields. The standard aerial bomb, he found, was unsuited for targets as widely dispersed as aircraft were when parked at their fields. It wasted much of its force digging a deep crater. Collishaw’s new missile spread shrapnel over a wide area, thus damaging, if not destroying, planes parked a good distance from the impact point..
By the close of 1940 British arms, both on the ground and in the air, had won unqualified success. The Italians had been driven completely out of Cyrenaica and were in danger of losing even a toehold in North Africa. This was the period to which Hitler often referred when, later in the war, he said that England could have surrendered to Germany and still retained her honour because of her brilliant victories against the Italians. Despite odds that had increased to almost six to one, 1,200 Italian aircraft had been destroyed by Collishaw’s air group. The entire Fifth Air Squadron of Mussolini’s proud air force, the Regia Aeronautica, had been virtually obliterated. In addition, Wavell’s ground forces had administered total defeat to the Italian Tenth Army and had captured most of the enemy’s artillery and armour.
Then, on New Year’s Day, 1941, the Luftwaffe arrived in the Mediterranean. The shipping route via Gibraltar was thus closed. There had been a redistribution of the RAF’s Middle East air forces and 202 Group had been pulled out of Cyrenaica. Many of the Desert Air Force’s experienced pilots and their planes had been sent to Crete, where they were lost. Some of its forces, redesignated 204 Group, had been moved into the former Italian territories, with several squadrons based at Tobruk itself. With the appearance of German fighters and bombers, and the imminent arrival of German ground forces, Collishaw renewed his appeals for newer and faster aircraft. But now, with Gibraltar sealed, the supply line from England was even longer, stretching around the African coast to Takoradi. Some of Collishaw’s South African squadrons were equipped with Hurricanes, but the group was still far below the strength required to meet the new threat.
In the see-saw battles fought across the burning Libyan wastes, the tide had turned against the British once more. The lack of equipment made itself apparent when Wavell launched a strong attack against Sollum. He was hoping that the arrival of a Tiger convoy loaded with tanks and planes, the first to come through Gibraltar since the Luftwaffe had arrived, would offset losses in this attack. Collishaw’s air group was called on to maintain a standing patrol over the attacking British ground forces. But because the group was underarmed the patrols were weak. As a result, the RAF lost three planes to the German one and the attack failed to achieve its main objectives.
It was at this time that Collishaw made a direct appeal to the Air Ministry in England for more planes and men. Indeed, they were on the way; but so were orders for a change in the command of both the air and ground forces. Collishaw had been unfairly criticized for his handling of the slim forces at his disposal. One war correspondent went so far as to describe him as an “individual style fighter who preferred spectacular tip and run raids to the concerted bombing attacks on enemy forces which were necessary for Wavell’s success . . . [His replacement,] Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Coningham, had none of Collishaw’s drawbacks.” This despite the heavy losses at Sollum which should have demonstrated that Collishaw’s forces were far too slim for such “concerted bombing attacks.”
The desert campaign was one fraught with very special hardships. The heat, sand, dust, and lack of water destroyed both men and machines. Engines overheated and burned themselves out, gears became choked with sand and were crippled, tanks and aircraft had to be specially serviced for desert work. On men, the desert was equally harsh. For the better part of a year, working day and night, enduring the same conditions as the least of the men in his command, Collishaw had fought a successful battle against superior odds only to find a fresh, better-equipped enemy opposing him on the road to victory. Though exhausted, he was still ready to continue the fight with the fresh men and machines which were at last arriving, but his orders were explicit. He turned over his command to Coningham and left the front. On returning to Britain, he commanded a fighter group for the better part of a year.
In 1943, buried on an inside page, a Toronto paper carried the story of Collishaw’s retirement from the RAF. In a reprint of an article from the London Gazette, The Globe and Mail gave Collishaw’s age as forty-eight and stated that he was among the first six most successful pilots of the First War, only outranked among the Canadians by Bishop and Barker. The brevity of the story and its secluded spot deep within the pages of the newspaper probably suited the publicity-shy Raymond Collishaw perfectly. On leaving the service he returned to Canada and moved to British Columbia, where he now lives.
Slowly, and with great difficulty, heavily armed convoys fought through to win the battle of supply in North Africa for the Allies. More and more planes, tanks, guns, and men were pumped into the Western Desert to build up a strong force that, after bitter fighting, defeated the Afrika Korps of Field Marshal Rommel at El Alamein. Among the victorious forces were the survivors of Ray Collishaw’s Desert Air Force who had gathered in the tented headquarters at Maaten Bagush a year earlier to hear the Canadian commander outline his attack philosophy. They had learned their profession under this master flyer, and they in turn had passed on their knowledge to the new pilots who played such a vital role in the Allied triumph. Thus Air Vice Marshal Raymond Collishaw contributed to the German defeat, even in his absence.