1918 We will remember them (28 page)

This is my fifth foray into what might be called modern history.  The advantage of the Dark Ages is that there are few written records and the writer’s imagination can run riot- and usually does! If I have introduced a technology slightly early or moved an action it is in the interest of the story and the character. The FE 2 is introduced a month or so before the actual aeroplane.  The Red Baron is shot down, for the first time, six weeks before he really was. The Sopwith Camel arrived at the end of May rather than the middle. I have tried to make this story more character based. I have used the template of some real people and characters that lived at the time.

The Short Magazine Lee Enfield had a ten shot magazine and enabled a rifleman to get off 20-30 shots in a minute. It was accurate at 300 yards. Both cavalry and infantry were issued with the weapon.

For those readers who do not come from England I have tried to write the way that people in that part of Lancashire speak. As with many northerners they say
‘owt’
for anything and
‘Eeeh’
is just a way of expressing surprise.  As far as I know there is no Lord Burscough but I know that Lord Derby had a huge house not far away in Standish and I have based the fictitious Lord Burscough on him. The area around Burscough and Ormskirk is just north of the heavily industrialised belt which runs from Leeds, through Manchester, to Liverpool.  It is a very rural area with many market gardens.  It afforded me the chance to have rural and industrial England, cheek by jowl. The food they eat is also typical of that part of Lancashire. Harsker is a name from the area apparently resulting from a party of Vikings who settled in the area some centuries earlier.  Bearing in mind my earlier Saxon and Viking books I could not resist the link, albeit tenuous, with my earlier novels.

The rear firing Lewis gun was not standard issue and was an improvised affair.  Here is a photograph of one in action.

The photograph demonstrates the observer's firing positions in the
Royal Aircraft Factory F.E.2d
. The observer's cockpit was fitted with three guns, one or two fixed forward-firing for the pilot to aim, one moveable forward-firing and one moveable rear-firing mounted on a pole over the upper wing. The observer had to stand on his seat in order to use the rear-firing gun.

This artistic work
created by the United Kingdom Government
is in the
public domain
.
This is because it is one of the following
:

1. It is a photograph created by the United Kingdom Government and taken prior to 1 June 1957; or
   
2. It was commercially published prior to 1964; or
   

It is an artistic work other than a photograph or engraving (e.g. a painting) which was created by the United Kingdom Government prior to 1964. HMSO has declared that the expiry of Crown Copyrights applies worldwide.

An F.E.2
without armament

This image is in the
public domain
because the copyright has expired.
This applies to Australia, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of
life of the author plus 70 years
.

Radios were fitted to aeroplanes from as early as 1914.  They could only transmit.  The ground radios could only receive. By 1916 320 aeroplanes had radios fitted.  Oxygen was introduced, mainly in bombers, from 1917 onwards.  It was needed when the aeroplanes were operated at high altitude and by the end of the war aeroplanes were capable of operating at 20000 feet!

Sopwith Camel
courtesy of Wikipedia

Bristol F2b
Courtesy of Wikipedia

This variant was faster than the F2A of which only 52 were built. Ted and Gordy’s are the F2A variant and the later ones, the faster F2B, which could reach speeds of 80 mph.

Fokker Dr.1 Triplane

Baron Von Richthofen was actually shot down by an FE 2 during the later stages of the Battle of the Somme in one of his first forays over the Western front.  In this novel it is Bill who has that honour. The Red Baron is portrayed as the pilot of the Halberstadt with the yellow propeller. Of course the Red Baron got his revenge by shooting down the leading British ace of the time, Major Lanoe Hawker VC. Major Hawker, was flying the DH2 while the Red Baron flew the superior Albatros DIII. The Red Baron took over Jasta 11 in January 1917 and he made a huge difference.  Until he had arrived not a single aeroplane had been shot down by the Jasta.  He had a kill on his first day. His squadron was known as the Flying Circus because they were all painted differently and in very bright colours. His was all red but every one of his aeroplanes had the colour red somewhere in the colour scheme. In the summer of 1917 the Germans reorganised their Jastas so that Richthofen was in command of four fighter squadrons. He was shot down while flying a Fokker Dr1 Triplane.  It was painted in his favourite red colour.

The circle devised by Bill and Billy really existed.  It was known as a
Lufbery circle
. The gunner of each F.E.2 could cover the blind spot under the tail of his neighbour and several gunners could fire on any enemy attacking the group. There were occasions when squadrons used this tactic to escape the Fokker monoplane and the later fighters which the Germans introduced to wrest air superiority from the Gunbus. It made for slow progress home but they, generally, got there safely. It was a formation that two seaters could employ in the latter years of the war when they were faced with the newer, faster fighters.

General Henderson commanded the RFC for all but a couple of months of the war. The Fokker Scourge lasted from autumn 1915 until February 1916.  It took the Gunbus and other new aircraft to defeat them. The BE 2 aeroplanes were known as Fokker fodder and vast numbers were shot down. There were few true bombers at this stage of the war and the Gunbus was one of the first multi-role aeroplanes. The addition of the third Lewis gun did take place at this stage of the war. The Germans had to react to their lack of superiority and in the next book the pendulum swings in Germany’s favour when the Albatros D.III and other new aircraft wrested control of the air away from the RFC.

This is the Immelmann Turn as a diagram.
The Immelmann Turn was named after the German Ace Max Immelmann who flew the Fokker E1.  He was apparently shot down by an FE 2 although one theory is that his interrupter gear malfunctioned and he shot his own propeller off.  I prefer the first theory.

I have no evidence for Sergeant Sharp’s improvised bullet proofing.  However they were very inventive and modified their aeroplanes all the time. The materials he used were readily available and, in the days before recycling, would have just been thrown away. It would be interesting to test it with bullets.

The Mills bomb was introduced in 1915.  It had a seven second fuse. The shrapnel could spread up to twenty yards from the explosion.

The tunnels at Arras were astounding. Work had been going on underground to
construct tunnels
for the troops since October 1916. The Arras region is chalky and therefore easily excavated; under Arras itself is a vast network of caverns, underground quarries, galleries and sewage tunnels. The engineers devised a plan to add new tunnels to this network so that troops could arrive at the battlefield in secrecy and in safety.
The scale of this undertaking was enormous: in one sector alone four Tunnel Companies worked around the clock in 18-hour shifts for two months. Eventually, they constructed 20 kilometres of tunnels, graded as subways for men on foot tramways which had rails and was used for taking ammunition to the front and bringing casualties back; and railways. Just before the assault the tunnel system had grown big enough to conceal 24,000 men, with electric lighting. Bert and his company are part of this undertaking.  However the Germans knew of the tunnels and they were digging countermines.  Both sides fought a deadly war beneath the surface.