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.