20 JULY 1918, Page 14

WINGED WARFARE.*

MAJOR Bunior, one of Canada's brilliant airmen, has written a wonderful book about his fighting in the air. A man who last year won the Victoria Cross, having destroyed forty-five enemy aero- planes and two balloons in less than five months, would presumably know his subject. We are delighted not merely with Major Bishop's. courage and good fortune in the air, but also with his literary power. His descriptions of his duels and " dog-fights " are nearly as thrilling as the combats themselves. He tells his readers simply and clearly what happened in those meteoric encounters, which seldom took more than a few minutes, and were often to be measured by seconds. Most airmen, like their comrades in the trenches, cannot or will not recall their experiences in detail, but Major Bishop, a sportsman born, has the sportsman's excellent memory for every incident in his daily " hunting of the Hun," and sets them down with unfeigned satisfaction. Every boy who reads this book will certainly want to join the Air Force. Those of us whose youth is past will be grateful to Major Bishop for describing the sensations of an expert in the most exciting form of warfare that man has invented.

" It was the mud, I think, that made me take to flying." The author confesses that his early days in Flanders with the Canadian Cavalry were miserable. He exchanged into the Flying Corps in 1915, served as an observer for a few months, and then, after a spell in hospital, began to learn flying in November, 1916. He gives an amusing account of his first " solo," in which, at forty feet and then at eight feet from the• ground, he did everything he had been told to do at two feet from the ground, so that at last the " exasperated old machine" dropped of its own accord. He found his first flight in darkness especially trying. He tells us that there is no greater test of a pilot's skill than his ability to fly at ',tight in formation, " with a lot of machines about you in the dark, their little navigation lights looking for all the world like so many moving stars," while the cold of the higher altitudesis " agonizingly intense." The airmen who help to defend London and the night- bombers at the front deserve this indirect tribute to their devotion, as the true nature of this work is little known to the public. The author had no luck in Zeppelin-hunting, but his luck changed when he went to France in March, 1917, and joined the late Captain Albert Ball's squadron of fighting planes. The first time he crossed the enemy lines with his squadron he was nearly hit by a shell from " Archie " ; ever after he seemed to bear a charmed life. To illustrate the spirit in which our young airmen approach their task, he says that his patrol leader that day was teased because he had dived at an enemy artillery machine which " was very old, had a very bad pilot and a very poor observer to protect him," and was known as " the flying pig " " It was a sort of point of honour in the squadron that the decrepit

• Winged Warfare : Hunting the Huns in the Ain By Major W. A. Bishop, V.C. London liedder sad Stoughton. (Ge. aet.1

old pig ' should not actually be shot down. It was considered fair sport, however, to frighten it. Whenever our machines approached, the pig ' would begin a series of clumsy turns and ludicrous manoeuvres, and would open a frightened fire from -ridiou- lously long ranges. The observer was a very bad shot and never succeeded in hitting any of our machines, so attacking this particular German was always regarded more as a joke than a serious part of warfare. The idea was only to frighten the pig,' but our patrol leader had made such a determined dash at him the first day we went over, that he never appeared again. For months the patrol leader was chided for playing such a nasty trick upon a harmless old man."

Major Bishop began his patrolling just before the German retreat from the Somme, and the business of his squadron was to fly low over the enemy's country, drawing his fire, and thus dis- covering his new positions. On March 25th he had his first fight and his first victory. An enemy attacked one of his com- panions :—

" I flew straight at the attacking machine from a position where he could not see me and opened fire. My' tracer' bullets—bullets that show a spark and a thin little trail of smoke as they speed through the air—began at once to hit the enemy machine. A moment later the Hun turned over on his back and seemed to fall out of control. . . . When my man fell from his upside-down position into a spinning nose-dive, I dived after him. Down he went for a full thousand feet and then regained control. I had forgotten caution and everything else in my wild and overwhelming desire to destroy this thing that for the time being represented all of Germany to me. I could not have been more than forty yards behind the Hun when he flattened out, and again I opened fire. It made my heart leap to see my smoking bullets hitting the machine just where the closely hooded pilot was sitting. Again the Hun went into a dive and shot away from me vertically toward the earth. Suspecting another ruse, and still unmindful of what might be happening to my companions in their set-to with the other Huns, I went into a wild dive after my particular opponent with my engine full on. With a machine capable of doing 110 to 120 miles an hour on the level, I must have attained 180 to 200 miles in that wrathful plunge. Meteor-like as was my descent, however, the Hun seemed to be falling faster still and got farther and farther away from me. When I was still about 1,500 feet up, he crashed into the ground below me. For a long time I had heard pilots speak- ing of crashing' enemy machines, but I never fully appreciated the full significance of crashed' until now. There is no other word for it."

When the victor regained his presence of mind, he found that his engine, choked with oil during the long dive, had stopped, and that he must land. When he reached the ground at the end of a long glide, he found that by sheer good fortune he was just clear of the enemy outposts, and some of our men crawled out and rescued him. Then it came on to rain, and Major Bishop took nearly three days in conveying his machine back to the aerodrome, fifteen miles away, so thoroughly had the retreating enemy destroyed all the roads. In the early days of April our air patrols were furiously active in preparation for the great offensive of Easter Monday north and east of Arras. The author recalls the concern with which the public learned that in two days the Flying Corps had lost twenty- eight machines and destroyed fifteen enemies. He does well to point out once more that our airmen never report an enemy machine as " brought down " unless it has been seen to " crash," and that as the fights almost always take place over the enemy lines, any slight accident to a British aeroplane, compelling the airman to descend, means the loss of the machine, whereas the German machines, being " brought down " or " driven down " within the enemy lines, are not counted as " missing " though they may be totally destroyed. This explanation needs to be borne in mind by those who study the daily air reports. At Arras the British air offensive contributed in no small degree to the success of the attack ; hundreds of our machines patrolled the sky and the enemy was blinded. The author on Easter Sunday brought down three enemies in a series of fights. He was detailed with others, when the battle began, to fly low over the advancing infantry, firing into the enemy trenches, and dispersing any groups of men behind the lines. One day, as he was hovering above, he noticed that the line was being sadly thinned at one point. Then he discovered five Germans with two machine-guns hidden in a flanking trench. He dived almost vertically at them, and from a height of thirty feet swept them with bullets from his machine-gun. In a few minutes our infantry had resumed their advance and occupied all the ground that they were expected to take. Such taeties, which were new fifteen months ago, are now practised in every action. The author reminds us that the airmen who thus lend direct assistance to the infantry are exposed to the greatest danger from our own rolling barrage as well as from the enemy's fire, and that at Arras some British machines were hit by British shells.

The author soon became an " Ace," having brought down more than five machines, and was accordingly presented by the sergeant. with a " nose " for his propeller-head, which he had painted blue. On " Blue Nose " he had a remarkable series of fights in the next few weeks, and soon found himself trying to keep second to Captain Ball. " So I was over the enemy's lines from six to seven hours every day, praying for some easy victim to appear." One day he had a fight nearly four miles above the earth, where the air was so rarefied that he found it difficult to get his breath, while thepropeller would not " ' bite ' into the thin atmosphere with very much of a pull." Another day he had nine fights in an hour and three- quarters, and a tenth before tea with the German champion Richt- hofen and three others on scarlet, planes. He made up his mind, he tells us, that two things were needed for success in the air—" one was accuracy in shooting, and the second was to use one's head and take no unnecessary risks." Later he was able to boast that in three summer months he had only lost one member of his patrol, and that unlucky man was shot down in the author's absence. In June Major Bishop took to hunting alone whenever he had a day's holiday. Ohe morning early he started alone in his single-seater to attack'an enemy aerodrome, and, taking the Germans by surprise, shot down three machines out of seven as they rose in pursuit of him. In a single week he accounted for five enemies. Everything went well with him, even in the most desperate encounters. A fortieth victory gained him the Victoria Cross, and he was ordered home, presumably lest he should exhaust his strength and his good luck. But with characteristic pertinacity, he went on hunting, and on the very last night before leaving France he attacked and destroyed two out of three German planes that oame in his way. Major Bishop's admirable book will help people at home to realize the full significance of Sir Douglas Haig's brief daily reports of the air-fighting which is helping in so great a measure to gain victory for the Allies.