Hot weather now with a strong north-easterly gale—we can just fly against it and that is about all. Some machines can hardly do that and therefore make an easier target for Archibald and his big brother the Crump from Krupps.
I am sending you back a bit of shell which broke a rib in one of the wings and then stuck in another. This is rather unusual, so perhaps you may care to keep it. It may interest you to know that we were flying at a height well over 10,000 feet—a pretty good shot, was it not? Luckily it didn’t do any damage that mattered.
We have recently had some very interesting and exciting work to do. We had to come down to the low altitude of about 5000 feet to reconnoitre a small piece of country very carefully, for a big long-range German siege gun, that had been annoying some of our troops well behind the lines. We took several photographs and searched the country minutely with our field-glasses, and eventually found four or five places, any one of which might quite possibly provide shelter and concealment for this big German piece.
The photographs having been developed, the number of possible places was somewhat reduced, and we then went up again and searched for the gun in the marked spots and took more photographs. Of course the German gunners were much too clever to loose off their piece when we were searching; the flash of discharge would have given away their position at once. For three days we searched and photographed, up and down, over a few square miles, using up several dozen of the best plates procurable, with a camera specially made for the work. Eventually we proved the existence of a small light railway—almost a toy—along which trucks, containing one shell only, were pushed by hand. This railway, being connected to one of the Belgian State Railways in German hands, provided the necessities of life and ammunition for the daily Hate of the gun. The blast of the gun had also destroyed and damaged some small trees and bushes on each side of the line of fire, and this gave us a further clue. The gun itself had been mounted on one of the famous concrete foundations, inside a small building which was part of an innocent-looking farm. It was completely hidden from view, and fired out through the big double doors of the barn. Having at last solved the problem of the position of this gun, it was arranged to destroy it next day. One of our own heavy guns was brought up within range and concealed behind a hill during the night. The concealment was so perfect that when we went up next day, we were at first bitterly disappointed, because we thought that our gun had failed to arrive; however, a welcome signal from the ground informed us that it was ready to perform its share of the entertainment. The gunners had been previously shown the position of the farm, with the German gun inside it, on the map, but they could not see it and had to fire entirely by calculations. The first shot went a few hundred yards short; the second a hundred yards over it; the third a little bit to the right; the fourth and fifth demolished the farm, with our latest form of high-explosive shell; the sixth and seventh also went straight in and completed the destruction of the gun and its ammunition supply, which was stored quite close, there being nothing left except a large volume of thick black smoke. The explosions were terrific and were audible for miles around.
An aeroplane also dropped an assortment of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, and nothing could have lived in the inferno, which half an hour previously had apparently been a harmless Belgian farm. We came back and took a couple of photographs, when the smoke and dirt had drifted away with the wind. It is a curious commentary on the War, that while the opposing infantry were fighting at about fifty yards range, the German gunners should have been shooting from a position of comparative quiet, five miles behind their infantry, at an undefended town some ten miles behind our infantry; and that our gun should have been shooting from another quiet position well behind our lines at the German gun, none of the gunners concerned on either side having ever seen their target at all; and it is here that the supremacy of the air told heavily. A German Aviatik aeroplane, fitted with wireless, had come over and had attempted to direct the fire of the German gun; it did not have time to complete its work before it was attacked by two of our swift fighting machines and brought down, both its occupants being wounded and the machine captured; consequently the damage done by this extraordinarily powerful weapon was not at all in proportion to the wonderful care and forethought bestowed on the manufacture and positioning of the piece. Although no German machine attacked ours with any success during the process of locating the gun and its final destruction, yet they had surrounded the spot with powerful anti-aircraft guns, which fired high-explosive shrapnel; there were also one or two high-angle Howitzers of approximately 8 inch bore, firing an enormous high-explosive shell, which burst with a tremendous rush of black smoke, and disturbed the air for a considerable area, to such an extent that it made flying always difficult and sometimes extremely dangerous, apart from the holes which the fragments of shell themselves make in one’s pet aeroplane.
On one of these occasions one of these big shells exploded so close that it capsized the machine, and the pilot was thrown out of his seat and found himself hanging on with one hand and one foot. The observer also had an extremely narrow escape from being thrown out, some of the loose gear in the machine falling down vertically for a mile and a half and, we hope, hitting some German on the head. The pilot managed to scramble back into his seat and get the machine to resume a more dignified position. It had, however, fallen about 600 or 800 feet, and both the occupants were amused and greatly relieved to see the next batch of shells burst about this height above their heads. The Germans of course knew, or guessed, what we were after and were much annoyed with our persistency. Over a hundred shells of various sorts were counted, bursting in the air, within two minutes, by an onlooker on the ground, and it is not surprising that the machine was frequently hit; but we were lucky enough to manage to get back to our own side of the trenches when we were sufficiently damaged to be forced to come down.
I never seem to get accustomed to being shelled when they get close, and I think it is beastly. It is rather different being in a trench, when the whole trench is being shelled, and where one can usually get some cover, but in the air it is an offensively personal ‘Hate’ on the part of the Strafers. One’s aeroplane is the target of the guns, and, if low enough down, of the machine guns and rifles too; and the pilot himself is the bull’s-eye in the centre of the target.