It was his bombing work that attracted most attention, however, for he made a raid on Adrianople and dropped a ton of bombs, destroying 3,000 houses, blowing up an ammunition-train, and razed a fort. Out of the thirty-six bombs he dropped on that expedition twenty were incendiary and sixteen high-explosive. Accurate knowledge of the damage he had inflicted on that September day in 1917 did not come until after the armistice was signed, but Alcock did not have to wait until the armistice to discover that his adventure had been a military success. Ninety miles from Adrianople on his return flight he could still see the glare in the sky from the fires his bombs had ignited.
He was the first man to bomb Constantinople, and it was on his return from his second bombing expedition over the Turkish capital that one of the engines in his twin Handley Page failed him. He managed to fly seventy-six miles on the other engine before he was forced to descend on the island of Imbros, within twelve miles of the home station.
But that twelve miles meant all the difference between friends and enemies, and the aviator was taken prisoner and confined in the civil jail. Later he was removed to Constantinople and then to Asia Minor, where he was held until the armistice was signed. He returned to England December 16, 1918.
Immediately upon his return Alcock joined the Vickers concern as a test pilot. It was due to his persuasion that the conservative directors of the concern, which controls the British Westinghouse works, committed themselves to the enterprise of entering an aeroplane in the transatlantic flight for the Daily Mail prize of $50,000 for the first non-stop flight.
America Shares Alcock’s Triumph
There is hardly any comparison to be made between Captain Alcock and his navigator, Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown. While Alcock is large of frame, Brown is a full head shorter and boyish in build. There are gray threads in Brown’s hair, mementoes of twenty-three months in a German prison-camp. His left foot is crippled, too, the result of a crash when he was brought down by German anti-aircraft guns behind the German lines at Bapaume.
Brown is an American born of American parents in Glasgow in 1886. His father was connected with George Westinghouse in the development of an engine. It was that engine that took him to the British Isles, and he took part in the organization of the British Westinghouse Company, now controlled by Vickers, Limited, the concern which built the plane in which the transocean flight was made.
Lieutenant Brown
Lieutenant Brown’s mother was a member of the Whitten family of Pittsburgh, and his grandfather fought with the famous Hampden’s Battery at Gettysburg. Brown himself has lived in Pittsburgh, where he went to continue the studies at the Westinghouse works that had begun in the works in England.
He enlisted in the university and public school corps in 1914, and in 1915 took his wings. Most of his service was as an observer and reconnaissance officer. One time the machine in which he flew as an observer was shot down in flames. He says of that experience that he “was burned a bit,” but was glad enough to escape capture. The machine he was in crashed. He passed nine months in a German hospital and fourteen more months in a German prison-camp, and then was repatriated by exchange. He spent the latter days of the war period in productions work for the Ministry of Munitions.