The End Of All That

By the beginning of October, seven months of the war's [WWI] fiercest fighting were beginning to make their effects felt on both sides. In the spring and summer offensives the German Higher Command had called up all the resources left to their nation for a last desperate bid for victory and failed. Now Germany stood on the brink of defeat.

Whatever may have been said or written at home about Germany's impending collapse, I must say that we had no idea of it in September, 1918. To us the things looked just as critical as they did four years previously; then there seemed to come a sudden turn of the tide, the Foch and Haig turned defeat into victory on the Somme, just as Joffre and French had done on the Marne. Back went the line over that shell scarred battlefield again, with the British and French troops gaining ground every day, until at last we were in possession of Cambrai and the ground for several miles beyond.

At that time I often used to visit Lieut-Col Jack Scott, who commanded the Wing to which No.40 was attached. We rode several times over the ground I had keenly searched from the air for traces of Ben's [Strange's younger brother] SE5, but we never found a sign of either the machine or its engine, while the inhabitants who returned to their ruined homes after the British advance could give us no help, because they had seen so many machines go down that day.

Jack Scott was a fine commander. Not many men would have flown with a crushed leg, such as he had; it was a legacy from an old hunting accident and caused him a lot of pain; but he never complained, just relieving his feelings by swearing when he broke another undercarriage in landing.

I met him a lot after the war, when his inability to walk far made him take grave risks, as he visited his friends by air and always chose to land in the most impossible places close to their houses. One day he took me off to lunch at Mr Walter Longs house, and after three futile attempts contrived to get down in the park there, among some huge elm trees. It frightened the life out of me, but when we left he suggested that I should fly him home. I got out from between those trees somehow, after another big fright, although he never turned a hair. The RAF lost a great future CAS when he was carried off by pneumonia after taking risks every day which most airmen would not have cared to take once in a lifetime.

From October right up until the armistice, the 80th Wing did its share on helping to keep up the pressure on the German armies that were weakening all along our line. At times our aggressions amounted to wholesale slaughter, especially when the Germans opposing the Fifth Army round about Lille gave way. We bombed transport on the road, troops in billets, trains, railway stations, and aerodromes most mercilessly, and yet I do not think any of us realized that the end was so near. We were never in doubt, however, that we held the supremacy of the air, for each squadron took its daily toll of aircraft and balloons.

SE5a of Captain G.H. Blaxland, 2 Sqn AFC, 1918

By October 17th we were flying low over German aerodromes, in order to find out which of them had been evacuated, and thus avoid the waste of unnecessary bombs, let alone that we did not want to be damaging aerodromes that we hoped to occupy very soon. The next day the Wing carried out a most successful raid on Tournai with about eighty machines; we burnt three hangars on one aerodrome and seven on another; in addition to scoring direct hits on four trains and blowing up an ammunition train; which caused great fires and explosions in the station. On the 20th we were bombing and raiding as far east as Ath, and settled down to occupy a number of former German aerodromes, including the headquarters of my opposite number von Leutzer, at Fives.

On the 26th, we gave Tournai another visit, and did further damage. The most interesting part of this show came later when the Huns evacuated the place and we went along and saw with our own eyes what we had achieved from the air. On previous raids we had often been left speculating as to the real extent of the havoc we hoped to create, because things are bound to look very different when viewed from the air, while even the best of photographs taken by our Bristols could not tell us everything. Smoke and flames issuing from the building on which you have dropped your bombs can be deceptive at times, so that we could never be quite sure even when we had left a most promising scene of destruction. But the damage at Tournai Station that we could identify as our handiwork was an excellent object lesson to us.

A couple of days after our second Tournai show, the whole of 80th Wing attacked an occupied enemy aerodrome at Rebaix, where five hangars and eleven machines were destroyed. The lions share od the damage was done by Major Nethersole and Lieut Corey in a DH9 as they managed to drop a 230 lb bomb between two hangars; it demolished one of them and destroyed two machines that were on the ground. Major Nethersole got his DSO, I remember, for the brilliant way he handled his DH9 Squadron on that occasion. The German Air Force fought very well, but the 80th Wing was in fine fettle. Our total bag of enemy aircraft for the day was thirty-two, for which record we were congratulated by General Salmond.

To show how little one knows of what happens in an airfight, I may say that until I got back I was blissfully unaware that I had shot down a Fokker. An observer in one of the DH9's who recognized the machine I flew, reported and confirmed that I had got this enemy when he was sitting on the DH9's tail. Personally I had no idea this Hun had crashed, although I thought I got a good burst on him; but I was more worried about the question of whether I had any undercarriage left, because I hit the Fokkers wing hard with my wheels when I pulled out of my dive, having left it a bit late in my anxiety to make sure of him before he got the DH9. At the critical moment from which I was lucky to get away unscathed. At any rate, I could find no sign of damage to the undercarriage when I landed.

Sopwith Snipe of Captain E.R. King, 4 Sqn AFC, 1918

On November 4th we got another six hangars at Wattines. That was the day when Capt W.S. Wilcox of No.92 [RAF] had rather a strange adventure when leading a patrol round Landrecies. There was a low lying mist, and when attacking a howitzer battery from a height of one hundred feet, he was knocked unconscious from a shot from the ground that grazed his forehead. he crashed into some houses but actually escaped with no worse injuries than a bruised face and a sprained ankle. At all events he woke up to find himself being bandaged by a German Soldier, after which they carried him to an enemy casualty clearing station near Favril. There they put him in a house with a badly wounded German, but the next morning they took their own man away and told Wilcox to wait until our people came along. He was found by our advancing infantry the same afternoon.

Our air supremacy was now so pronounced that we did not need to be overcareful about planning our raids. In the old days, everything had to be carefully worked out to ensure a swift, hard, unexpected blow, and a quick return in good formation; otherwise we might have risked heavy losses. But now our leading squadrons just went over the lines and looked for some objectives worth raiding - which they might or might not find, because the Germans were being continually forced by the steady advance of our ground troops to evacuate their aerodromes and move into others further back. This meant that we sometimes found difficulty in locating them; but of course, the constant moves messed them up a lot, and Bolle told me afterwards that they were horribly handicapped by the lack of petrol and shortage of machines that had been worrying them for some months back was now chronic.

Consequently the effects of every aerodrome raid that we undertook weakened the enemy very considerably. Almost daily the great activity of movement by rail and road that the German retreat occasioned, gave us objective that simply asked to be bombed, but I believe that is this withdrawal had been carried out according to plan instead of under compulsion the air resistance would have been intense. As it was, the German Air Force fought bitterly to the end under circumstances which offered every excuse for a much weaker opposition than what we \actually encountered.

On November 9th I took my place in the squadron formation of No.54's Camels, commanded by Major Maxwell, who on occasion led the whole Wing in a brilliant fashion. He took us all a long way over and seemed to scent his prey from afar, for without any searching or hesitation he took us straight to Enghien. Then came the long, straight steady downward rush with full engines, commenced some miles away from his objective, that seemed to tell me he had been out scouting around before the raid.

As the detail on the ground grew larger and more distinct, we all realized that every bomb could be made to tell on the targets which offered themselves in all directions. Our first blow fell on five hangars, which we burnt. No fewer than ten machines were destroyed on the ground, after which we turned our attentions to the station. When we left it, two long trains, that must have been loaded with something highly inflammable, were burning. They had been set on fire by one of No.103's 112-lb bombs, and the blaze was visible for a very long time afterwards.

Then about two miles of motor and horse transport, guns, etc, were mercilessly shot up and bombed by No.4 Australian Flying Corps [AFC], causing the utmost confusion and destruction; while No.2 AFC and the Bristols of No.88 [RAF], found targets of all descriptions in camps and bivouacs round the town. A large proportion of the 130 bombs (a total of over two tonnes) dropped here must have been direct hits on troops and transport.

Major Maxwell and our little Camels of No.54, led us well that day. Our only loss was Smith, one of the flight commanders of No.2 AFC, and the celebrations in No.54's mess that night were of a most amazing character. Never was there such an exchange of individual accounts of the raid, and never - not even during our subsequent occupation of Germany - was there so much noise and destruction of squadron equipment. It went on until the early hours of the morning in those German built huts on Merdun Aerodrome.

A night that seemed to need no preliminary organization in No.54 Squadron, for, in addition to his prowess in the air, Maxwell was an arch conspirator in practical jokes and a positive genius as an entertainer. ...... In fact, No.54 Squadron played as strenuously as it fought, and contrived to enjoy itself mightily in both directions. This was the spirit that made for victory.

On the next day, November 10th - it was the SE5's turn to lead the raid; but Major Murray Jones took his No.2 AFC farther afield still, past Enghien into Hal. No.85 Squadron joined us in this raid, which brought the total up to over a hundred machines. Anticipating little or no opposition in the air, we loaded our machines up to their utmost capacity, and dropped 240 bombs, ranging from 25 lbs up to 230 pounds, as well as firing 16,000 rounds of ammunition at ground targets which consisted mainly of troops and transport, all moving back eastwards in long columns. In one major transport column I counted eight lorries burning when our squadron had attacked it; while No.2 AFC looked just like huge hornets in the air when they attacked a train that fled full speed towards Brussels until a bomb on its engine derailed it most effectively just as it was passing through a small station. Troops scattered in all directions, while No.2 AFC went off in search of more alluring targets.

Major Murray Jones was awarded a bar to his DFC for fine leadership on this raid. He was a quiet unassuming fellow, but a most resolute leader, whose magnificent services were never properly recognized, partly because he never made a fuss about anything; but took it for granted that a good show by his squadron was all in a days work. Under his leadership, No.2 AFC accounted for over one hundred machines in one way or another in four months.

At 2.a.m. the following morning an orderly woke me up with the following message: "Hostilities will cease from 11.a.m. today. No machines to cross east of the balloon lines."

I gave instructions for the message to be sent out to the squadrons. Then I turned over and went to sleep again, dimly wondering why I could not wake myself up enough to become enthusiastic about it, and what on earth we were going to do with ourselves in the morning without a war.

Early in the morning of November 11th, I drove over to No.4 AFC's aerodrome at Grand Ennetieres, as they had always looked after my Sopwith Camel, and I thought I should like just one more flight over the lines before the war was due to stop. Moreover, I half expected another message from the brigade to say that the armistice talk had only been a rumour.

When I got to the aerodrome, I could not find a single serviceable machine on the ground. Even my own Camel was gone. The Flight Sergeant said something about someone testing the guns for me; I forebore to press him, but drove on to the other aerodromes, where I found the same state of affairs.

About 11.a.m, pilots started coming back, and shortly afterwards we got another message through to the effect that the armistice had been signed and hostilities ceased at 11.a.m. I was not quite so sure about this last point, because when I questioned several Australian pilots, they said they had not seen any balloons, and asked most innocently how far east the balloon line was supposed to be. But I noticed their bomb racks were empty.

At noon some belated Snipes and SE5's put in an appearance, and when asked to give an account of themselves, the pilots said they thought it would be alright for them to go out and look for Smith [an Australian pilot from No.2 AFC who had been shot down], the man who had been missing since the Enghien raid. But their bomb racks were empty too.

As a matter of fact, Smith turned up a few days later. I was not there to greet him because I flew my Camel home on leave November 12th, taking two and a half hours for the journey from Lille to Winchester. But according to the story told me, he arrived at No.2 AFC's mess one evening looking like a scarecrow and making a most dramatic entrance just when everyone was in the middle of a more than usually hilarious celebration.

It seemed that a rifle bullet through one of his cylinders forced him to land on the outskirts of Enghien, where he got his machine safely down into a field, but was spotted by a party of Huns close at hand before he had time to destroy it. He bolted, but thought they were bound to catch him as he could not run properly in his flying kit; but he kept ahead of them until he gained a sunken lane. The he dodged around a bend and buried himself in a convenient haystack.

When the enemy passed on and the coast was clear, he made for a cottage, where a peasant lent him an old disreputable suit of clothes, but dared not shelter him. So he marched to Enghien, where he found a temporary resting place in an estiment; the following day he hung about Enghien, and finally started to walk back, passing for a Belgian labourer among the demoralised remnants of the German Army, who were trekking eastwards.

Occasionally they asked him the way to Brussels in broken French. Smith had just sufficient smatterings of the language to grasp what they meant, but dared not trust himself to answer in detail. So he just jerked his thumb over his shoulder and muttered, "a droit" or "a gauche" as the fancy took him, and the Huns were all too demoralized to suspect him. I fancy his return was made the opportunity for a celebration even more riotous that that of the armistice night. It even surprised some of our guests from No.54 which is saying a good deal.

.... Stranges leave back home .....

The last month of the 80th Wings existence was spent in collecting German machines and all the material that was left scattered over the countryside. We were more interested to visit all the scenes of our bombing raids and listen to the accounts of them retailed by the local inhabitants, most of which more than proved the truth of our reports of the damage done. We also had some good fun flying various types of German machines.

In the last week of January 1919, the 80th Wing was disbanded by the simple process of posting its competent squadrons to other Wings, and then I went up to Nivelles to take over command of 51st Wing. .....

The Australian Squadrons

Nos. 2 and 4 Squadrons of The Australian Flying Corps need no praise of mine for their work in the summer of 1918. Their records show that they were the finest material as an attacking force in the air, just as their infantry divisions on the ground were the best that the war produced on either side.

It became the practice for our Australian Squadrons to lead the 80th Wing's bombing raids. When later in the year over a hundred machines set out on one of them, the spearpoint was always formed of Australian Airmen, led by an Australian. Major McCloughry[McClaughry], Major Murray-Jones, Capt Cobby, and Capt King are the names I remember best, but the others that were equally famous have slipped my memory for the moment.

In individual squadron fighting these Australians had no equals in their best days, and more than once they raised the record for numbers of enemy aircraft destroyed in one day by any squadron. The secret of their success was, in my opinion mainly due to their sense of initiative, which they inherited from ancestors who had been cattlemen, sheep-ranchers, poachers, trappers, outriders, overland post and transport drivers. You only need to read the tales of the early Australian Settlers to realize the conditions under which these men grew.

They had to fend for themselves against known and unknown dangers in the wide, open, lonely spaces of the continent. It was nothing to them to be in the saddle for days and days when crossing mountain ranges. deserts, or forests; their sense of direction never faltered on these long trails, and they were equally at home when cutting out their cattle at a round-up or shooting the rapids in a canoe. In fact, they were all good scouts, and what ideal training their life in their native country gave them for work in the air!

On the ground I must admit this same sense of initiative proved a source of much trouble to their superiors at times. It was impossible to convince an Australian that a nice piano in a deserted and half looted house was loot if he decided to take care of it temporarily without troubling to find and get permission from the absentee owner. It also might have been insulting to hint at cattle-stealing ancestry, but when we others were existing on tinned milk, the Australians always had their own fresh milk from their own two cows and a spare lorry to transport the cows whenever a move had to be made. Moreover, these cows always had calves with great regularity. Of course, it would have been bad form to question the origin of the new piano, the cows and the calves which they had invited a Wing Commander to see. These accessories meant so much to the amenity of their life on the ground and so the Wing Commander could only let them get away with it, even though he knew it was his pidgeon if anyone raised awkward inquires.

Nevertheless, we had our differences of opinion at times. One of them was due to the unofficial use of service cameras, and another time there was the trouble over the bartering of rations with the local inhabitants. No one minds the swapping of a tin of bully beef for a few fresh eggs, of course, but a Wing Commander has to draw the line somewhere when he finds one of his Australian Squadrons running the village grocers shop and general store. Even so, my Australians were discreet enough in the way they went about their business, so that I might have ignored it, had it not been for the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages. When the latter got to hear of the bargains, they turned our place into a sort of fair and market on Sundays, and so I was compelled to put my foot down.

I do not want this to be considered a reflection on Australian discipline, which was good - good enough in fact, to ensure the highest efficiency in their work, but it was a different standard of discipline to that in force in our own squadrons. I cannot put down Tom Purdey's remarks about the combat reports sent in by these Australian Squadrons; suffice to say that they were couched in such language which would have shocked the sedate officials of the War Office, but the number of victories they related covered a multitude of sins.

Taking it all round, we got on amazingly well with our Australians, and from the day they joined the 80th Wing I would not have exchanged them for any other squadrons on the western front. Perhaps I have some sheep-stealing and cattle-lifting ancestors, whose blood gives me a sneaking sympathy with their habits of feloniously purloining anything they take a fancy to.

I learnt to value them for their wonderful sense of direction. In spite of all that is said about navigation and map reading as aids to aviation, it is a great thing to have squadron leaders who can take their formations safely home in thick weather by that so called "sixth sense". You need that extra quality badly when you have to break out of a dog fight suddenly with a failing engine and every second saved may mean the difference between landing on our side of the lines and coming down in Hunland, especially if visibility is too bad for you to spot that river or wood on your map and a bullet has smashed your compass. Those Australians were natural pathfinders; they did not need to look at a bush twice to know where it was the next time they saw it. Having flown once over a tract of country on a clear day, they would think you deserved all you got if you failed to know your whereabouts the next time you came that way just because it was a bit foggy, and I suppose they were right.

I often used to think of Murray Jones and his squadron as the sheriff and his posse going out to catch some bushrangers who had been reported to be stealing horses and cattle in the neighbourhood, and if matters became desperate - as they did with us later on - searching them out in their lairs, burning their strongholds, and giving them no quarter. They were uncommunicative folk, for they always had some plan or other that had to be kept a secret. Whether they thought the enemy would get wind of their schemes if they discussed them too openly or whether they preferred to hush up possibilities of failures, I cannot tell, but the result was always the same - they never advertised their intentions.

I often wondered what was in Cobby's mind when he went off on his own in the dark, a good hour before the dawn patrol was due to start. In all probability he was spying out the land - sitting high above von Leutzer's aerodrome and waiting to see how many machines were being run out on the tarmac by the other side for their dawn patrols. Then he would pass on the numbers by signal to his own squadron when he met them over the appointed rendezvous, after which they would go back to Recklingham for more petrol and warn Murray Jones that there were plenty about that morning.

But sometimes he was out to play the lone hand. The mechanics, pilots and observers at Fives or Lomme would be too busy seeing to the machines on the tarmac that were to take them up for the dawn patrol, and so they failed to notice the high pitched note of the Clerget and the screaming wires of Cobby's Camel as he streaked down on them from the first glimmer of dawn in the east to pour out a stream of lead from his two Vickers guns and release his twenty-pound bombs. Just a momentary vision of destruction he was; then he would disappear again into the still murky west, leaving behind him one or two machines in flames, some bits and pieces of two or three more on which his bombs had got home, and a number of dead and wounded foeman on the hard cinder track in front of the hangars.

In short when an Australian Squadron went out to fight, someone had to suffer or else the business was not worthwhile, and the Australians were not going to be sufferers if they knew anything about it. It was the old game of getting the first blow in at a time when the other fellow was not looking for it.

They continually laid traps in the air; you could depend on it that the simplest-looking Australian patrol was part of some scheme or other. If, for instance, they decided to attack a balloon, it was a dead certainty that you would find a party of them high above the assailant, watching out with eager eyes for any misguided Huns who might be foolish enough to interfere with him and thus lay themselves open to sudden deadly streams of lead. They used to take it in turns to attack balloons, and when you sent one down in flames you earned an extra turn, but they never made a habit of indulging in balloon hunts everyday, for that would have given the Hun time to get a surprise packet ready for them. They had plenty of variations to keep themselves amused and the enemy annoyed; his trains, for example, were continually interrupted on their journeys by Australian airmen and always in a different part of the line. Another playful little trick of theirs was to attack an enemy aerodrome in the evening, just when its machines were being put away for the night and the light was fading too quickly for any chance of pursuit.

In fact, Nos 2 and 4 AFC, were past masters in the art of guerrilla warfare, but it was only by becoming one of themselves, so to speak, that I could manage to adapt Wing Routine Orders to suit the methods and at the same time satisfy the demands made from higher up. Consequently I spent a good deal of time with my Australians, and my admiration for them increased daily.

I found that there was little chance of them getting rattled by persistent ill-luck or a series of heavy losses. Likewise there was no fear of their morale deteriorating from the monotony of routine work, because, given a sufficiently free hand, they could be relied on to take care that it did not become monotonous. "We came all the way from down under to help you win the war." their actions seemed to say, "and we're in a hurry to get back again, so just leave things to us, because we know what is good for ourselves and bad for Fritz."

Lieut-General (Now Field Marshall) Sir William Birdwood, who commanded the Australian Division at the time, often used to come round to Recklingham aerodrome and tell us all about the doings of other Australian units in the field. But I think his real motive was to glean the news and successes of those wonderful Australian Pilots who were making history and establishing a tradition that will never fade as long as Australia has an Air Force.

Lt Colonel Louis Strange