IT WAS EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 1917. The early sun was slowly burning off the night’s mist as Jack Scott hobbled to his Nieuport, balanced himself by gripping the edge of the cockpit, handed his canes to a mechanic, and was boosted aboard by a member of the ground crew.
Scattered white clouds drifted lazily from the east as Scott led his patrol across the German lines near Vimy Ridge. For twenty minutes the flight criss-crossed the lines before Scott spotted an Albatros two-seater, far below. He dived and fired a short burst, but the German machine quickly dived away. Bishop, suspecting a trick, chased after it.
What happened during the next few minutes was described in the report Bishop wrote before 60 Squadron sat down to its Easter Sunday noon dinner:
I dived after Major Scott on a two-seater opening fire twice as he was already diving. Then I engaged a single-seater. He flew away eastward after I had fired forty rounds at him. Tracers hit his machine in fuselage and planes. I then dived at a balloon from 5,000 feet and drove it down to the ground. It did not smoke. I climbed to 4,000 feet and engaged an Albatros scout, fired the remainder of my drum at him, dodged away and put a new drum on, and engaged him again. After two bursts he dived vertically and was still in a nose dive when about 500 feet from the ground. I then climbed to 10,000 feet and five miles N. E. of Arras I engaged two single-seaters flying toward our lines. Three more machines were above and behind. I fired the remainder of my drum into the pair, one burst of 15 at one and the rest at the other. The former turned and flew away with his nose well down, the second went down in a spinning nose dive. My tracer bullets hit all around the pilot’s seat and I think he must have been hit. Then I climbed and got behind the other three about the vicinity of Vitry. I engaged them and one, a double-seater, went down in a nose dive but I think partly under control. I engaged the remaining two and finished my third drum at them. They both flew away eastward.
How many planes did Bishop shoot down on that Easter Sunday? Some of his squadron mates insisted it was five; others claimed they saw four planes crash. Jack Scott said, “Let’s not be greedy—let’s settle for three.” Bishop shrugged. The three official victories brought Bishop’s total to six. This, in the French system of scoring, made him an “ace”—plus one.
The French introduced the “ace system,” according the title to a pilot who downed five enemy planes. The Germans required a score of ten for “ace” status. The Americans at first used the French score but later raised the requirements to ten. The British, characteristically, stayed aloof from such things, and even when Bishop had registered seventy-two victories he was never officially referred to as an ace.
Corporal Walter Bourne’s jaw dropped when Bishop landed his plane at Filescamp and crawled out of the cockpit, pale and dizzy. Bourne shook his head in disbelief. The Nieuport’s fabric was riddled by bullet holes. The windshield was splintered, and the point at which the bullet entered it seemed to be directly in line with the pilot’s head.
“How,” asked Bishop’s mechanic, “could a bullet hit there without hitting there”—and he tapped Bishop’s flying helmet.
“Oh, it grazed me,” said Bishop, showing a groove in the leather of his headgear. “By the way,” he added, “keep that windshield for me.” It was one of the few souvenirs Bishop took back to Canada when the war was over.
When Bishop had departed Bourne called to his assistant: “Carstairs! A can of blue paint!” The hangar mechanics heard, and were electrified. The last time the corporal had demanded a can of paint was when he had decided to honour 60 Squadron’s greatest pilot, Albert Ball. Bourne’s accolade had taken the form of painting Ball’s propeller spinner red. Now the ack-emmas crowded around while Bourne solemnly applied the blue paint to the special spinner they fixed to the hub of Bishop’s propeller. It was cone-shaped and appropriately vicious in appearance.
Jack Scott was propped against the door of his office as Bishop came in. “I’ve phoned old Boom Trenchard about our O.P. [offensive patrol], and he insists on coming over,” said Scott. “Better get into a clean uniform.”
“Old Boom Trenchard” was none other than General Sir Hugh M. Trenchard, officer commanding the Royal Flying Corps. (His nickname, obviously, arose from the fact that the general’s voice could traditionally be heard a mile away.) When he arrived at 60 Squadron’s mess he embarrassed Bishop acutely by declaring in a voice Bishop was sure could be heard clear to Izel, “My boy, if everyone did as well as you’ve done, we’d soon win this war.”
Trenchard stayed for the celebration 60 Squadron staged that night and, mellowed by a generous amount of the Squadron’s best champagne, watched benignly as Bishop, equally thoroughly lubricated, performed a tap dance on the piano and recited the airmen’s favourite ballad:
Oh the bold aviator was dying
And as ’neath the wreck-age he lay, he lay,
To the sobbing me-chanics about him
These last parting words he did say:
Two valves you’ll find in my stomach
Three spark plugs are safe in my lung, (my lung).
The prop is in splinters inside me,
To my fingers the joy stick has clung.
And get you six brandies and sodas
And lay them all out in a row,
And get you six other good airmen
To drink to this pilot below.
Take the cylinders out of my kidneys
The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain,
From the small of my back take the crankshaft
And assemble the engine again.
Bishop was roundly booed for his performance, and General Trenchard himself advised him, “My boy, stick to flying.” Bishop blamed the pianist, Alan Binnie, who in turn blamed the piano. It was, he complained, “dried out.”
“We can’t have a dry piano in this mess,” said Bishop, and poured a quart of champagne into the instrument. It was three o’clock in the morning before the weary, happy celebrants made their way to bed for a few hours’ sleep before dawn patrol.
On that day, 60 Squadron found itself in a new role—as a direct arm of the ground forces. Until now the work of the air force had been co-ordinated with the overall offensive and defensive tactics of the ground forces in the plans of the commanding officers, but not in ways that were obvious to the airmen. They understood in a general way the need to knock down observation balloons and planes that came over to photograph troop movements and military installations. But most of the time the rank and file of fighter pilots had a somewhat vague knowledge of what the “poor bloody infantry” was up to. Essentially they were fighting a private war in the skies.
But now the British airmen on the Arras front were to play their part as a sort of airborne artillery in close support of the ground forces. The British and the Canadian Corps were driving for control of two ramparts from which they could dominate the Artois Plain—Vimy Ridge to the north of Arras and Monchy-le-Preux directly east of the cathedral city.
Artillery paved the way. The great cannon laid down a furious carpet of fire—a “creeping barrage”—in front of the attacking British and Canadian infantry to hammer the German infantry. Here and there stubborn machine-gun posts refused to yield and their efforts at times seriously slowed down the Allied advance. It became the duty of British fighter planes to search them out, swoop down and rake the gun posts with a rain of fire. It was a risky job. Artillery shells screamed through the air and machine-gun bullets peppered the planes as they dived. In spite of the danger, Bishop realized the importance of the job.
“I had reached a height of only thirty feet,” he recalled of one incident, “so low I could make out every detail of their frightened faces. With hate in my heart I fired every bullet I could as I swept over, then turned my machine away. A few minutes later I had the satisfaction of seeing our line advancing and before the time came for me to return to my patrol our men had occupied all the German positions they had set out to take.”
During that first week of battle, Bishop’s blue-nosed Nieuport was a familiar sight along the front line. Time and time again the troops, crouching in the muck and mire of no-man’s-land, saw the silver machine streaking down to harass the enemy in front of them.
Sometimes Bishop led as many as four patrols a day. And when not leading his flight, he was out flying alone, in search of Richthofen’s scouts. But the hunting was poor. Only once did he encounter an enemy plane—a two-seater Aviatik observation machine—and that got away from him before he could get close enough to open fire. For twelve days he had no opportunity of adding to his score.
But Richthofen and his Jagdstaffel were not hiding. Bishop’s flight ran into it one day when he was not leading the patrol. Only one man returned out of five planes—Graham Young, a bush-haired, moustached Scotsman from Perth. In a furious fight over Monchy-le-Preux, Alan Binnie, who was leading the flight, was badly wounded in his arm, forced to land behind German lines, and was captured. Two others, W. O. Russell and L. C. Chapman, were also forced down and captured, while another pilot, J. H. Cook, was killed.
After the war, Russell told of his encounter with Richthofen:
Unfortunately it can scarcely be termed a combat. By the time Richthofen arrived on the scene I had lost the use of my engine and so I had not the honour of putting up a show against him. Five of us were on offensive patrol in the neighbourhood of Douai in Nieuport Scouts at 12,000 feet. My flight commander suddenly dived. I followed him down and at 8000 feet I sighted two enemy planes on my right. I attacked one of these machines and then discovered to my horror that I had lost my engine. After descending another thousand feet I was attacked by two enemy scouts and I was obliged to make a zigzag descent to the ground and landed at Bois Bernard. A red scout followed me to the ground and I learned the pilot was Richthofen. Our flight was hopelessly outnumbered by Richthofen’s squadron. I afterward met my flight commander, Capt. Binnie, in a German prison camp. He had accounted for four enemy machines before being hit in the arm while changing his ammunition drum. He remembered nothing more until he woke up in a German hospital, although somehow he had landed his plane safely. Three of my companions were killed and I believe one succeeded in reaching our lines.
Richthofen’s own claim of victory was less than insistent: His “request of acknowledgement of my 44th victory” merely stated: “Above Harleux, one of our observer planes was attacked by several Nieuports. I hurried to the place of action, attacked one of the planes, and forced it to land south of Bois Bernard.”
In another battle with the Richthofen fighters, 60 Squadron’s A Flight lost four men: Robertson, Languill, Elliott and Kimbell: all of them killed.
By mid-April, in fact, 60 Squadron had lost thirteen pilots within two weeks and, at the height of the offensive, Jack Scott had to call a halt to offensive patrols until the squadron could be brought up to strength and reorganized. This had to be accomplished quickly. The offensive was at its peak. Five days of bad weather—rain and fog that made flying impossible most of the time—gave the unit the respite it needed to absorb the new pilots as they arrived. Bishop found himself in the startling position of being one of the squadron’s veteran pilots—and the one with the most planes to his credit after less than a month of solo fighter experience. Scott promoted him to full-time commander of C Flight when Grid Caldwell became ill while on leave.
None of 60 Squadron’s three flights were up to the normal strength of six pilots each. Only Bishop and Young were left in C Flight. Bishop chafed under Scott’s “no offensive patrol” order. He had not had a real air battle in twelve days. Then on April 20, the weather improved. Scott reluctantly agreed to allow Bishop into enemy territory to attack a balloon that was annoying Colonel Pretyman. Bishop did not find it—probably he didn’t search very hard after he spotted a two-seater Aviatik observation plane, flying above him near Monchy-le-Preux. Bishop cautiously jockeyed his Nieuport until his propeller was no more than ten yards behind the Aviatik’s tailplanes, and slightly below. He pressed the firing button and sent a dozen rounds into the big plane’s belly. The burst seemed to have no other effect than to alert the observer-gunner, who swung his machine-gun around smartly and sent a stream of bullets flying around the Nieuport as his own pilot turned away. Bishop followed and again managed to manoeuvre directly underneath. This time he pulled his gun from its fixed position, grabbed the trigger and fired manually. Still no result. Bishop pulled away, then attacked again. He fired another ten rounds. Again nothing happened. Frustrated, Bishop tried a new tactic. He climbed above the two-seater, which now twisted and turned frantically to keep out of the Nieuport’s line of fire. Bishop dived at right angles, aiming at the gunner. The gunner fired back and bullets whipped past the wing tips of the Nieuport. Bishop was still firing when his propeller was only five yards from the Aviatik’s fuselage. Then he pulled up sharply to avoid a collision. As the planes passed each almost within arm’s reach, Bishop leaned out of the cockpit and looked down. The enemy machine suddenly burst into flames, stalled, and spun out of control through a layer of scattered clouds below, trailing an ugly plume of black smoke.
Bishop flew back to Filescamp Farm, feeling less elated at his seventh victory than concerned with his poor marksmanship. Three times he had fired bursts at short range without scoring effective hits. He was aware that a pilot’s very survival often depended on his shooting accuracy. He spent the rest of the day shooting at the practice target on the edge of the aerodrome.
That evening he talked with the three pilots who had been assigned to his flight that day. Young had already taken them on a practice formation flight and his report of their flying abilities was highly favourable. “They stick together well,” he told Bishop,“ and they’re likely-looking fighters too.”
There was the small intense Spencer Horn, with sleek hair parted in the middle, a former infantryman who had fought on the same ground he would now fly over. William Mays Fry, a short man with a quick wit and a willingness to learn all his more experienced comrades could teach him about aerial fighting tactics. “You’d think he’d been flying a Nieuport all his life,” Young commented. A fellow-Canadian completed the trio. He was Jack Rutherford, wiry but strong. He had served with the 23rd Canadian Battalion before transferring to the RFC. Young told Bishop that Rutherford showed an uncanny sense of timing. He had landed the Nieuport for the first time so smoothly that it was difficult to realize it was his maiden trip in the machine.
Bishop grunted. His own landing technique had not improved noticeably. He took Young and his new flight members over to the mess for a drink. Jack Scott came in and hobbled across to the bar and slapped Bishop on the back. “Drinks are on you tonight, Bish,” the squadron commander grinned. “Word just came in from Brigade—they’ve awarded you the Military Cross.”