I.
James the One was awakened before daybreak on June 14 by the ringing of his telephone bell.
The Duty Captain at the Admiralty informed him that the Little Woman at Borkum said Anna was at the Dogger Bank going south.
Consider the ringing of the bell the pebble dropped in the sleeping pool, and observe how the ripples widened, and ever widened, until they broke on the coast of Germany.
Number One rang up the Duty Officer, who slept, or rather did not sleep, with a telephone for bedfellow, for James the One always developed a thirst for information concerning station routine between eleven o'clock at night and three o'clock in the morning.
The Duty Officer came into my cabin and turned me out. I pulled on my woolly flying-boots, slipped into my shaggy fur coat, and jammed my naval cap on my head. This early patrol costume was a perpetual offence in the nostrils of Number One, and it must have looked odd to the stolid and sleepy ratings when I danced with impatience on the slipway, but it had the advantage of being warm and quick to get into.
I knocked at the door of Number One's cabin and entered, to find him sitting up in bed examining a squared chart of the North Sea. A squared chart is used when signalling secret information concerning our own ships and aircraft or those of the enemy. I was informed of the interesting peregrinations of Anna, and that twenty minutes before she was at X.Y.B. centre.
Passing out through the mess I took a look at the recording barometer, which was high and steady, and went out on the quarter-deck to look at the weather. The stars were shining, a light east wind was barely perceptible, and a thin mist shrouded the buildings of the station and the ships in the harbour. But it looked as though the mist would lift, so I crossed the quarter-deck to the ship's office, where I turned out the Quartermaster, whom I found asleep, wrapped up in a blanket, balanced in a perilous position on the edges of three chairs.
The Quartermaster, electric torch in hand, doubled over to the officers' quarters, shook the Duty Steward, put a match to the ready-laid galley fire, and called the Duty Pilots. He then turned out the working party, the engineers, and the armourers, and warned the wireless operator and the flying engineer.
By this time I was down in the dark seaplane shed, in which only a single police light was burning, stumbling about among the monstrous shapes of the sleeping flying-boats. The marine sentry, recognising me by my language, turned on the roof electrics and flooded the shed with light.
The working party filtered in stretching and yawning, and rolled back the sixty-foot doors. They gathered round '77, which stood just inside the doorway on her wheeled trolley. She was fitted with specially large petrol tanks for the job in hand. At the word they pushed her out sideways, jacked her up, removed the sideway wheels, turned her nose towards the water, and handed her over to the engineers, who started the engines.
The armourers fitted on the machine-guns and provided them with special ammunition. The man told off for the purpose put on board a packet of sandwiches, a bottle of water, the five days' emergency ration in case the boat came down at sea, the Red Cross Box and the pigeons.
The oil in the engines being now warm, the engineers opened out one engine at a time, the fierce slipstream from the propellers shaking the whole tail of the boat and whirling up clouds of dust from the concrete. A two-foot flame stood out from each exhaust pipe, and particles of incandescent carbon, burning red, were blown backwards for many yards. In daylight you cannot see the flame or carbon.
It was now just beginning to get light. An eight-knot easterly wind was blowing, but a thick mist lay in the harbour, a mist too thick to take off in. So the engines were shut off and I went up to the mess. Here I found Billiken and Dickey devouring eggs and bacon, and joined them.
Billiken, a lad from Sault St Marie, Canada, was one of the best boat pilots ever in the service.
There are only two kinds of boat pilots—the good and the bad. In the spring of 1917 the good boat pilots could be counted on the fingers and thumbs of two hands, and throughout the year there were probably never more than twenty first-class men operating at the same time.
A good boat pilot is one who can handle his boat under any conditions, a mist flier, a stout and determined fellow; one who can navigate and trusts his own calculations; a tireless observer, who knows where and what to look for; a possessor of sea sense and seamanship; a man of physical stamina or nervous staying power; a man of quick and correct thought and action, but, at the same time, one who could endure monotony and wait for his opportunity.
And Billiken, short, stocky, and with plenty of energy, possessed most of these characteristics, and others equally as valuable. He was modest, keen, and never given to swell-headedness or boasting, the latter being unpleasant diseases which are apt to attack young boat pilots, for there is an exhilaration in handling machines of great horse power and in the flattery of, to use the term of an old naval surgeon, the long-haired things. Or to quote a flying versifier—
"For I have known the freedom of the air,
Nor crawled on earth like some coarse, dull, fat slug."
And again—
"Such subtle poisons as sweet women brew
Have stuffed my veins with fire and my brain
With fantasy, making this cooling earth
Seem paradise."
Dickey was a little button of a chap, but what he lacked in size he made up in bloodthirstiness. He was one of the best second pilots it is possible for any first pilot to desire. He was a good shot, a capable navigator, a fine observer, and always keen on going forward and loth to turn back. He always gave his first pilot the comfortable feeling of being absolutely trusted, and this is why I liked flying with him.
When his boat came down through engine trouble during a fight against heavy odds off Terschelling in 1918, he shot down a Hun machine that was attacking him while he was on the water. He then beached the boat, burned it, and was interned. While walking in a quiet street of a Dutch town just at dusk a huge German elbowed him into the roadway. He seized the coat-tails of the Hun and demanded an apology. The Hun swore in German—not a pretty exhibition.
Dickey was small, but he carried a big stick, and when the stick came in contact with the skull of the German the latter fell senseless. Informing the police that a man had been found unconscious in the roadway, the little fire-eater obtained an ambulance and tenderly removed his fallen foe to hospital.
Such was Dickey.
The quarry these two pilots were crossing the North Sea to hunt was a Zeppelin, an airship over six hundred feet long. It carried a crew of captain, second in command, a warrant officer who did the navigation, a warrant officer engineer, two engineer ratings for each of the five engines, a petrol man, and six other hands, of which two worked the elevators, two steered, one attended to the wireless and signalling, and one repaired the fabric.
All these men had received a highly specialised training at Nordholz, the course lasting not less than six months. Also the deck-ratings and the engine-room mechanics were trained in aerial gunnery, and when at action stations the men not on watch were employed as machine-gunners.
Throughout this month there had been great Zeppelin activity over the North Sea, for early in the year the German military craft had been handed over to the German navy, and the best airships of the two services had been concentrated near the German coast at Nordholz, Wittmundshaven, Ahlhorn, and Tondern. Until May 1916 the Zeppelins had carried out their patrols at a height of a thousand feet, looking for our mine-fields and scouting for our naval forces, but in this month L-7 was destroyed by gun-fire from a naval unit, and they were now, excepting on rare occasions, carrying out their work at a great altitude.
At four o'clock the mist began to lift; we went down to the shed, the engines were started, the crew climbed on board, and at five o'clock Billiken took the flying-boat off the harbour.
When he turned '77 out to sea and steadied on the course, Billiken saw below him through the mist, within the encircling arm of the harbour, the tall sheds of the station, the light cruisers and destroyers at anchor, the submarines nestling close to their mother ships, and the mine-sweepers disentangling themselves from their own particular crowded dock preparatory to beginning the day's work.
'77 in the mist.
He then glanced back down inside the hull of the boat, and saw Dickey busy with note-book and wind-tables working out the allowances, the wireless operator fingering his box of tricks as he tuned in with his shore station, and the engineer going over his petrol-pumps. This was the eighth time he had been out on a similar errand, but so far he had not been successful.
As he passed out of the approaches to Harwich the mist shut in; so he brought the boat down to five hundred feet, and fifteen minutes later he passed the Shipwash. This was the last thing he was to see until he sighted the Dutch Islands, and from this time on navigation was done by compass, dead-reckoning, and inspiration.
To a land-machine pilot a compass is an instrument in which he has no trust. It may show him the way over the lines and the way back, or it may not. It may apparently go mad, and swing round and round, or the north point may steady on anywhere but north.
But the flying-boat pilot has to rely on his compass. He uses a big one, and puts it in a place where it will not be affected by iron or steel; or if it is, and he cannot correct the error, he marks the errors on a card and sets it up where it can be seen. He understands variation, which is the difference between the true and magnetic bearing, and which varies all over the world, and at any one place, from year to year. And he can steer a course within two degrees.
When Billiken was over a big mine-field well out in the No Man's Land of the North Sea, the mist thickened, and, just to make it more difficult, the sun, large and red of face as if with the exertion of climbing above the horizon, was on a level with his eyes, and made it hard for him to see his instruments.
After they had plugged along for two hours and fifteen minutes, frequently coming down to two hundred feet to pass under a particularly heavy bank of mist, Dickey, through a rift, saw the flat shores of the island of Vlieland.
Here course was altered, and at half-past seven they were off the island of Ameland. Now, sweeping in a twenty-mile circle, they headed back down the coast homeward bound. The mist was lifting in patches. At half-past eight they were off Vlieland again.
Dickey suddenly saw a Zeppelin.
It was five miles on the starboard beam, at a height of only fifteen hundred feet.
Billiken swung the bow of '77 towards the airship. He opened out his engines. He climbed straight for the Zeppelin.
Dickey was at the bow gun, the wireless operator was at the midships gun, and the engineer was at the stern guns. The Zeppelin was barely moving. Her propellers were merely ticking over.
They were now at two thousand feet, a thousand yards away from the airship, and above her. Now the look-out on the Zeppelin saw the flying-boat. The propellers vanished as the engines were speeded up. She moved forward. She swung away on a new course. Two men raced to the gun on the tail and the gun amidships on top.
Billiken dived on the Zeppelin's tail at a screaming hundred and forty miles an hour. He passed diagonally across her from starboard to port. When one hundred feet above and two hundred feet away Dickey got in two bursts from his machine-gun.
He used only fifteen cartridges.
As he cleared the Zeppelin, Billiken made a sharp right-hand turn, and found himself slightly below and heading straight for the enemy. He read her number, L 43. Her immense size staggered him.
Then he saw that she was on fire.
Little spurts of flame stabbed out where the explosive bullets had torn the fabric, and the incendiary bullets had set alight the escaping hydrogen.
Pulling back his controls, he lifted the boat over the airship, and just in time. With a tremendous burst of flame—a flame so hot that all on board the flying-boat felt the heat—the millions of cubic feet of hydrogen were set off. She broke in half. Each part, burning furiously, fell towards the water.
The top gunner rolled into the flames and vanished.
Three men fell out of the gondolas. Turning over and over they struck the water in advance of the wreckage.
The remnants of the Zeppelin fell into the sea, and a heavy pillar of black smoke reared itself to the sky.
The crew of the flying-boat fell on each other's necks. Everybody crowded into the control cockpit. During the demonstration Billiken got the heavy boat into extraordinary positions.
Just in nice time for luncheon, at fifteen minutes after eleven o'clock, having completed a flight of nearly four hundred miles, Billiken brought '77 into the harbour, Dickey firing Very's lights and the handkerchiefs of the crew fluttering from the barrels of the machine-guns.