homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Battle of Britain + Battle of Britain II Here's what happened (Continued)

Folks,

kinda windy here today but much less rain. The majority of the rain fell upon the just and unjust in SC and the western part of our state. Even then low tech people in the eastern part of our state were forced to empty their loaded rain gauges way too often. We're north of you Fittop old pal. Maybe some of this will run downhill? No, I don't suppose your drought is a laughing matter and I apologize for that.

OK fellows, I've put you to sleep with chapter two or maybe you reasonably lost all interest after chapter one. Regardless, brace yourself for chapter 3. Pay attention, those who survive may be tested at the end of chapter 5.

The Dead of Winter
Chapter Three

The winter of 1916-1917 in France and Flanders is the coldest in living memory; the trenches flood sometimes to waist height whenever it rains. Men suffer from exposure, frostbite, and trench foot. In the air all is clean and sometimes beautiful. We are far above the misery below. If we survive to return home there are relatively clean, warm accommodations and a hot meal waiting as our reward. Some take it for granted. Others, like me, know better.

The losses are unimaginable. At this time Britain is losing more than half its pilots just in training. Soon we will be losing 12 aircraft and 20 crew every day. Life expectancy for new pilots is only 10-15 days depending on which side you play for.

At the start of the war the airplane was barely a decade old. Kites were quite basic in the beginning. Take the rotary Avro 504 for instance. That thing was shaped like a box. I was made of linen stretched over a wooden frame. Brave men risked their lives just going up in those.

Great progress has been made in aircraft design since and especially in the year of 1916. It is the year in which the single-seat fighter has come of age. Our Sopwiths are some of the best machines of the war. Yet even now if your engine dies on takeoff that is deadly, you haven�t the time or speed to recover.

Back to my story. I was numb from the terrible cold and constantly wiping a fine mist from my goggles. My eyes were fixed upon the target now.

Ahead of our flight of four, just materializing against a broad expanse of distant cloud, we could now make out the silhouettes of our foe. Monoplanes! The monoplane Fokker Eindecker had granted the German Air Service a degree of air superiority from July 1915 until early 1916. This period was known as the "Fokker Scourge."

Fokker E-IIIs had a span of 32 feet and a length of 23 feet. They were powered by an Oberursel 110 HP engine and armed with one or two Spandau machine guns. Their maximum speed is 87 MPH and a max ceiling of 12,000 feet. One had been captured and its secrets learned. The �scourge� was now over. Our Sopwiths were more than a match for these still deadly birds of prey.

Our prey were slipping into and out of the mists at the outside of towering cumulus clouds. We were approaching out of the sun falling upon them from their rear. So far they had not even noticed us. A flock of neophyte pilots out on a training flight I thought to myself and as I did I smiled. Their leader would be a veteran, perhaps an ace so he must be asleep. As that pleasant thought settled in to comfort me the first bullet holes appeared in my starboard wing!

It was I who had been asleep! We were lured into a deathly trap and the blindly led monoplanes were just the bait. Already one of our Sopwiths was afire and falling toward the distant earth below. The monoplanes were turning in to meet us and sailing past my tattered starboard wing, their Spandaus blazing, were three very dangerous Albatross D-III fighters. There are only 3 of us and it is every man for himself.

(To be continued)