II.
Fighting now commenced to be more or less common, the interference from the German fliers getting more intense as time went on.
The prime mover of the Huns seemed to be Commander Christianson, a full-out merchant and apparently a sportsman, who was credited by the Felixstowe pilots with developing the fast little monoplane seaplane. He was stationed first at Zeebrugge, and when the harbour was wrecked by the Navy and mopped-up by the Army, after being thoroughly bombed by the Royal Naval Air Service, he went to Borkum.
He had been in the merchant service, but his wife had objected to his occupation as being too dangerous, and he had taken up seaplane flying before the war. He now led the pilots of the Marine Krestenflegen Abteilung Flandern, and he and his pilots were as hard as their name is to pronounce correctly.
The Germans did not develop flying-boats, because the work their pilots had to do was different from the work of the British pilots. One big four-engined boat was built, a horrid-looking monoplane, with fuselage sticking out behind, but it was crashed at Warnemünde on its trial flight, killing eight men.
The British wanted to bomb the submarines and carry out reconnaissance off the German coast—the Germans wanted to stop them. Therefore the British built big machines for long distance and weight carrying, and the Huns built small handy machines for fighting. The boat type is most convenient for bomb-carrying and long reconnaissance; the float type for a light two-seated fighter.
The flying-boats, owing to their weight and two engines, were slow to manœuvre. They were fitted with four gun positions, one in the bow and three in the tail. The gun mounting in the bow commanded almost all the forward hemisphere and a fair part of the rear over the top plane. But the three gun mountings in the boat behind the planes did not together have sufficient field of fire to protect the boat from an attack from the rear. In fact a boat did not have the fighting value of a machine with a single gunner who could fire in all directions—that is, the value of a single-seated scout.
There are a good many yarns about the fighting.
There is the yarn of the three flying-boats looking for submarines out near the North Hinder.
The pilots were surprised by seven Huns who dived out of the clouds and sat upon their tails.
The leading boat was set on fire.
The pilot dived for the water. But before he got there his crew, seizing the fire-extinguishers which the boats always carried, put out the fire, and he climbed up again.
But the formation was broken and a dog-fight commenced.
One boat was brought down, but on the way to the water the engineer shot down a monoplane in flames.
A second boat was brought down, but at the same time the combined fire of its guns crashed an enemy two-seater.
And then, as the enemy having had enough drew off, the third boat, its tanks and engines riddled with bullets, had to land.
So all three boats were down forty miles from shore.
The pilots of the first boat, the engines of which were completely disabled, were taken off by a destroyer and their boat taken in tow. The pilots of the other two boats plugged the bullet-holes in the bottoms and repaired their engines sufficiently well to taxi to England, where they arrived next morning.
There is also the story of the pilots who went out early one morning for an airing in an obsolete boat.
Five Huns met them off the Galloper Shoal and interrupted their promenade. They were shot down, crashed in the water, and turned bottom side up.
But all the crew got out safely and sat on the bottom of the boat. It was floating in a pool of pure petrol spilt out of its huge tanks, and the air was scarcely fit to breathe owing to petrol fumes. Said the wireless operator to the first pilot—
"Sir, may I smoke?"
The crew were later rescued by two flying boats sent out to look for them.
But only the beginnings of the fighting are recorded, as most of the fighting took place after the 12th of April—the date on which this yarn ends.
The first success in the fighting fell to Clayton and Adamson in Old '61 on February 5.
They were out in the Spider Web with another boat looking for submarines when they found trouble. Five enemy seaplanes dived out of a cloud in formation and settled on their tail. The accompanying boat was some distance ahead, and the surprise was complete.
The engineer and wireless operator dived into the stern and got the rear guns in action. Clayton waggled the tail from side to side in order to give each man a clear field of fire alternately.
One of the enemy dived in to shove home an attack, and Robinson, the engineer, put a long burst from his machine-gun into his engine. The Hun side-slipped, struck the water at speed, the floats collapsed, and the seaplane disintegrated into a twisted mass of wreckage.
The remaining four enemy seaplanes drew off, and the boats carried on.
But on February 15 the Huns got their own back.
Faux and Bailey in one boat, and Purdy and Sturtevant in another, were twenty-five miles past the old position of the North Hinder—for this light-vessel, so familiar to the pilots at Felixstowe, had been removed by the Dutch authorities.
The pilots were some distance apart booming along looking for submarines, when seven winged Huns fell upon them. Purdy made a right-hand turn and steered in a south-westerly direction. Faux opened out his engines and started to turn after him; but his port engine failed, and he swung away to the left, thus opening the distance between himself and Purdy.
Faux found the air mixture control lever had moved forward with the throttle and had shut down one engine; but in the few seconds he took to put this right, three of the enemy were on top of him and four were on Purdy's tail.
Purdy was crashed in flames.
Faux now had five enemy seaplanes attacking him. He turned for England and roared over the sea, followed by the enemy. Each time they dived in they were met by a burst from the rear guns. Finally they kept well astern and sniped from long range. A bullet wrecked the two wind-driven petrol pumps, and the wireless operator had to leave one of the rear guns and pump up petrol by hand.
For thirty minutes the chase continued, and then Faux ran in to a bank of mist. When well in this he turned sharply to the right, the Huns overran him, lost him, and he returned safely to harbour.
This was the first boat shot down by the enemy, and there was sorrow in the Mess over the loss of the crew, both pilots being exceedingly fine fellows, and the ratings held in high esteem by their messmates.
Outside of the fighting February was a quiet month, there being only eleven flying days in all.