Cecil Arthur Lewis The Great War Interviews

'BBC Four Collections,

'specially chosen programmes from the BBC Archive.

'For this Collection, Max Hastings has selected

'interviews with Great War veterans, filmed in the 1960s.

'More programmes on this theme

'and other BBC Four Collections are available on BBC iPlayer.'

Well, you see, when I got to France

I only had 20 hours' flying, about.

And when I was posted down

to

a 2C squadron on the Somme,

the CO took one look at the log book

and said, "My God, it's murder,"

you know, "sending you chaps out

with

nothing on the log book.

"You'd better put in a bit of time."

So they gave me an aircraft

and I walloped off, you know,

to have a look round

and see what the form was.

And...to have a look at the lines,

to get used to the French maps,

all the things that are different,

you know,

and the country was obviously

a different country

from the

country of England

that I'd been

flying over a bit.

And so it was that I really first

had a look at the lines.

You know, one always heard,

"behind the lines",

"this side of the lines",

"the lines, the lines, the lines."

But I hadn't a clue as to

what the

thing looked like.

And so, one good, fine May afternoon,

I got up to about 10,000 feet,

well on this side, you know,

to have a dekko.

The, um...

The thing was quite fascinating

because you realised that,

I mean, what had happened was

the battle had become crystallised

and had to stop somewhere

and just,

as it were, stopped

in this particular

point and somebody

had

started to build a trench.

And from that trench,

people had begun to dig back

communication trenches

so they could get to it without being

shot as they got into the trench.

And this whole system had been

built

up over months and months

until really, from the air,

it looked like, er...

it really looked

like...more like,

you know, one of

those...

edges to a...to a lace doily.

You know, it's got

a sort of fairly hard edge

and then there are all these

little

fillets running back in.

Well, you put two of those

together side by side,

not of course regularly, but moving

with the contours of the ground.

And that was really the effect.

And of course the new digging

in the

earth showed up light,

so that when you went over, after experience,

and you knew what the digging

in your particular section was like,

if there was any new digging,

you could always see it

because the

earth was fresh and rather yellow.

And all this went weendling

away right down from Thiepval,

up in the north, right round

the Somme, Fricourt salient,

right round to the marshes of the

Somme, where our section ended.

And it was just really like

two

pieces of lace

put together...in that way.

And after I'd had a look at that,

and you know, I'd put in a bit

more time

and got my log book up to,

I think, something like 30

hours

or something ridiculous like

that, the Flight Commander said,

"Well, you'd better have a go this

afternoon, we want some photographs

"of the front line trenches,

so

you can take Sergeant So-and-so."

I can't remember

what the dear chap's

name was.

"And go and have a bang."

So we got on board the 2C,

and the 2C was totally

unsuited to the job, of course.

You know, it had the observer

in front and the pilot behind,

whereas with any sense

it should

have been

the pilot in front and the observer

behind,

but it wasn't.

So the observer sat in a sort of...

He had four struts very close

each side of him,

and wires to brace him well in,

and in front, none behind.

And a little seat

which he could

just get into.

And he could do nothing at all

except keep a lookout,

you see, and when it got at all hot -

and we're liable to be attacked from

the tail,

not from anywhere else -

he simply had to get up in his seat

and kneel on the seat, you see,

which was a jolly cold,

draughty

business

at 8,000ft, you know, even in the summer.

So we set out on that afternoon,

and the pilot was me,

had to look after

the camera as well,

you see,

because the camera was

the only...

The pilot's seat, at least you could look straight down.

But the camera was, you know,

one of those real antiques

made by them ancient Greeks.

It was

absolute mahogany,

good, square

mahogany box

with a nice leather

concertina pull-out -

I don't know

what the technicians would call it -

with a good, big

lens on the bottom, and a nice polished mahogany...

surround to the box,

and a little

handle that you

pushed and pulled

like this

to change the plates.

They were real

good old

glass plates.

And in addition to that,

a bit of wire or a bit of string,

I can't remember, with a ring, a little sort of curtain ring on it,

which of course was skittering

about in the wind,

to pull every

time you wanted to take a picture.

That was the technique of the thing.

The whole thing was strapped

on the outside of the aeroplane

and it had a sort of ball

sight at the back,

ball and ring

sight at the back,

so

to take the

photo you had to lean

over the side of the cockpit

and look down through

this ball sight,

which was just

behind the

camera,

fly the aeroplane

with the left hand, move the

camera handle,

changing the

plates

with the right, and every time

you changed plates

you then pulled the string and waited until you'd flown along a bit more

and

thought...you know, had to judge the

overlap

and did it again,

on a box

full of... I think it was 24 plates.

And so we were going fine.

We had to do these second-line trenches,

just over about a few hundred yards behind the German front line,

right around from Montauban to

Pozieres,

right around the Fricourt

salient and up the other side.

And it was a beautiful afternoon,

you know,

not a cloud in the sky, and the

whole thing looked absolutely peaceful.

One didn't imagine

there could be a war.

There didn't seem to be anybody

firing,

the whole thing was asleep.

It was really remarkable.

This was

the middle of the war,

after

all,

three or four weeks before the...

No, two

months

before the Somme battle opened.

So we got down in position

and, you know,

got the thing more or less

chewed up

over the job and started

to fly along,

and everything

went according to plan

and the

Sergeant was twizzled round in his

seat

looking excitedly over the tail

to see if there was anything about.

And he had a Lewis gun, of course,

on a...what we used to call

a spigot mounting.

He had a spigot...one spigot this

side

and one spigot that side,

and he could take the gun off

and put it in the spigot that side

or put it in the spigot that

side

according as to

whether he wanted

to

fire

right or left.

And he just had it there

and it was hanging there,

with 50 rounds on it, until such

time as anybody attacked us.

And so we went on for, oh, I suppose

the best part of 20 minutes,

half an hour, taking these photos,

and just about getting to the

end when I...

..saw two or three

things

just at the

end of that

patrol

which were amusing.

The first thing I saw was

a curious

sort of...

You know how it is,

out of the corner of your eye

when you're not really

looking

at something and see it...

something moving, like a...a lump.

I really didn't

know what the devil it was.

You know, it was a mystifying

sort of effect.

And then I looked again and focused,

and about 100 yards ahead

there was

a...

what was in fact the business

part

of a nine-inch howitzer shell

right at the top of its trajectory,

which was just about 8,000 feet,

just about where we were, you see.

It had come up like

a lobbed tennis

ball, you know,

right up and down again.

And right at the top... It was

going

quite slowly, and, you know,

it

was a pretty hefty bit of metal,

and

it was doing this.

It was turning

in this sort of way,

you know,

before it gathered speed again,

just on the top of the trajectory,

and then it would go down.

And this was such

an extraordinary thing to see,

because no-one imagined somehow

you'd ever see a shell, you know.

However, there it was, and

I was

able, after having spotted it,

and there were two

three... The battery was evidently firing

and we saw two or three shells,

and

they...

And you could even actually,

when you once caught them

you could

follow them right down to burst.

But unless you caught them

you couldn't, you know.

So that was the first thing,

but that was all right.

And then

a little way off to the port side,

about a minute,

a minute or two more -

we were in between photographs.

I was doing this, and looking,

and looking around and making sure

everything was all right, you know -

there was a couple of puffs,

with like, sort of dark mushrooms.

Archie, as we used to call it.

I can't think why it was called

Archie.

Ack-ack, anti-aircraft.

And this was...quite a usual thing,

and at any distance of more than

about 100 yards

it looked quite unreal,

because although it was a bursting

shell

you didn't hear anything over

the noise of the engine.

So these sort of things

appeared like

little puffballs in the sky,

for no particular

reason

as far as I could see.

Then you sort of twigged

that they were after you.

And...when they got a bit nearer, when they got...

When you could smell them, we used

to say, you know, it's a bit tricky.

But they didn't do us

much harm that afternoon,

and so having got the photographs,

we just turned off and came home.

WOMAN: Cut.

By the time the Somme

battle was about to build up,

I'd been posted down into the middle

of the Somme area,

to No. 3 Squadron,

which was a squadron that flew

an aeroplane called a Morane,

a Morane-Saulnier,

a French aeroplane.

Looked like a cigar...

as you can see.

And this had at least the pilot

flying in front

and the observer behind.

And it had the great advantage

that

everything was under...

everything underneath was clear.

There was a plane above your head,

which was the reason it was

called a "parasol",

and you had

a marvellous view down below.

So it was ideal for dealing

with

contact with the infantry,

which was our main job -

reconnaissance and contact patrol.

And on that aeroplane I flew

the whole of the Somme offensive.

During the build-up period,

of course,

we were doing the old job,

which was so terribly important,

particularly before a big

offensive of this kind,

and that was the photography

of the lines,

to see what new digging

had been done,

how the effect of the

bombardment was going and so on.

Meanwhile, of course,

the batteries

were being piled in,

and night after night, as soon as

it

fell dark the roads were roaring

with the traffic going up

and the guns going into position,

and this enormous feeling

of the build-up of a big offensive,

you know.

We were 15 miles behind

the

lines,

and this...

The day was peaceful,

deserted.

There wasn't a thing on

the road, nothing about to happen.

As soon as dusk came, it started

and it went right through the night,

you know.

We were... Our billets

were right on the road, and the noise of this...

Really one

had a tremendous feeling of war

and what it meant in those moments.

When

everything was in position

and they began to build up

towards

the main bombardment,

which lasted, I think,

for about a week

before the actual

offensive

took place,

we used to go out and photograph.

And these jobs were among

the most

terrifying

that I ever did in the whole war.

Because by that time,

we were flying very much lower.

We were flying down

to

a thousand feet.

And when you had to go right

over

the lines, you see,

you were

midway between

our guns firing

and where the shells were falling.

And during that period,

the intensity of the bombardment

was

such that it was

really like a...

..a sort of great, broad

swathe

of dirty-looking cotton wool,

you know,

laid over the ground.

And so close were the shell bursts

and so continuous

that it wasn't

just a puff here

and a puff there,

it was a continuous band, you know.

And when you looked the other side,

particularly in the evening,

when the light was falling dusk,

you know -

I did many evening patrols -

the whole of the sky,

the whole of the ground beneath

the

darkening evening

was just

like a veil of sequins

which

were

flashing and flashing and flashing.

And each one was a gun, you know,

and one knew that these things

were

coming over all the time.

And...they had orders, we were told,

you know, the artillery,

not to fire when an aeroplane

was in their sights.

They cut it pretty fine, you know,

because really one used to fly along

the front on those patrols,

and

that lasted for

two or three days,

and the aeroplane was flung up, you

know, with a shell

which had just

gone underneath and missed you by

two or three feet,

you

see, or flung

down when it had gone over the top.

And this was... This was continuous,

so the machine was

continually bucketed

and jumping

as if it was in a gale, but in fact it was shells.

You didn't see those -

they were going much too fast.

But this was really terrifying.

And I remember particularly on,

I

think,

two days before the attack opened

and we had to get some

photographs

because they were

terribly

badly needed,

we were down

to about a thousand feet in murky

weather

with a cloudbank

overhead,

and this grey swathe on one side

and

these flashings,

continual flashing...

One had the sort of feeling, you

know, it's...

"They're firing at us.

It's us they want to get," you know.

And this was extraordinarily

ridiculous, of course,

but quite terrifying at the time.

And then at last having finished

the photos and moved over

and turned over the barrage

and got out of the buffeting

and thought, "Well, heavens alive,

I've come through that."

Because so many of the boys,

and my best observer

and many of my friends, were just

hit by this barrage, you know

and destroyed... HE CLICKS FINGERS

..by a direct

hit from a passing shell.

WOMAN: Cut.

- Sound running. - 141, take 1.

141, take 2. Sync to second clapper.

- Take 4. - 141, take 4.

Sync to third clapper.

As the days wore by

and we got

nearer and nearer

to the zero

hour of the Somme

offensive,

the bombardment increased.

It was a sort of crescendo.

And our patrols

got closer

and closer.

We kept really a steady patrol

all day

to see what was happening.

On the morning of July 1st,

when the zero hour was to come,

I was on the first patrol on the

northern

part of the salient

from Pozieres

down to Fricourt.

And at Pozieres, they'd been - I'd

taken the engineer up weeks before -

they'd been...put down two enormous

mines right in the salient

on

the front line, hoping to clear

the

whole of the front line

with this enormous burst.

And so this, of course,

was what

we were looking for.

And really it was a fantastic sight

because when the hurricane

bombardment started

every gun

we had,

and there were thousands of them,

had all been let loose at once,

you know, and the thing was a wild..

I mean, you could hear the roar

of the guns

above the noise of the

aircraft

like... almost like wind on a...

like rain on a pane, you know.

Extraordinary, this roar of thousands

of guns at the same time.

And then came the blast,

you know, eight o'clock,

and we were looking, of course,

at the Boisselle salient.

And then suddenly the whole

earth heaved

and up

from the ground came

what

really

looked more like

two enormous

cypress trees,

the silhouettes of

great, dark, cone-shaped...

lifts of earth up

to three, four,

5,000 feet.

And we watched this and then

a moment later, of course,,

we struck the repercussion

wave of the blast and it flung us

right away backwards over

on one side away from the blast.

And then a second later

came up

the second one.

And then after that we thought,

"Well, now we know,

"that's the beginning, the infantry

should have moved forward on that."

We had all our contact

patrol

technique perfected

and we went right down to 3,000

feet to see what was happening.

Actually, the mines didn't go up

quite in the right place.

They weren't quite far enough over,

so that, in fact, this was a setback

right from the very first

moment

in

that particular

part of the offensive.

And then of course we had this very

well worked-out technique,

which was, very broadly speaking,

that we had a klaxon horn, believe

it or not,

on the undercarriage of the Morane, a great big 12-volt klaxon,

and I had a button

and I used to

press out a letter

and that

letter

was to tell the infantry

we wanted to know where they were.

And when they heard us

hawking at them from above,

they had little red Bengal flares,

just like the things one lights

on 5th November, you know.

They carried them in their pockets.

And the idea was,

as soon as they heard us make our noises above,

they would put

a match to their flares, and

all along the line,

wherever there

was a chap, there would be a flare.

And we would note these flares down

on the maps, and Bob's your uncle.

I mean, that was where the infantry

were at that moment. It was fine.

But, of course, it was one thing to practise it,

but quite another thing to really

do it when they were under fire,

and particularly

when things began to go a bit badly.

Then, of course, they jolly well

wouldn't light anything,

and small blame to them,

because it

drew the fire of the

enemy onto them at once, you see.

So we went down on that particular

morning looking for flares

all around Boisselle

and all down to Fricourt,

and we didn't get... I think only

about two flares on the whole front.

And, of course, we were bitterly

disappointed because this, we hoped,

was our part to help the infantry

and we weren't able to do it.

And, in fact, that did never work,

right until two months later

when the attack had gone

further forward.

One afternoon, the CO sent for me

and said he wanted me

to go off on a special job,

and he gave me a designation

on the map,

and another aircraft

and I

and my observer went off

to see what this unknown thing was.

And we found that

it was

a curious

group

of heavy-looking iron

vehicles

which

were lumbering over

the ground at about 2mph

with a whole lot of chaps

standing around, you know,

and petrol tanks,

and obviously a kerfuffle going on.

And they were, of course, tanks.

And so we... From that moment on,

we started to do attacks with them,

mock attacks, in order to do

the same thing as we'd done before

and note where they were,

get them to light their flares

so we could take back

records

to the brigade headquarters.

And this we did, until the actual

day when they were to be used.

Then, this was about mid-September,

if I remember it,

and quite a nice afternoon, with

no

preliminary bombardment at all.

We thought, or, rather,

the high command

thought

that it

would be a good idea not to

give any

warning of this,

which was

the first time such

vehicles had

ever been used

in warfare.

And so there was a half-hour

hurricane bombardment,

and then the tanks were put over.

Well, from the air at about 5,000

or

6,000 feet behind the lines,

watching this whole scene,

there was again

this extraordinary, solid carpet

of wool, you know,

but

just as if

somebody had taken his finger in the

snow

and pulled it through the snow

and left a sort of ribbon, you see.

And there were four or five of these

ribbons, as I remember it,

between

Fricourt and Boisselle and

running

back there towards High Wood.

And through these lanes,

you see, at zero hour,

we saw the tanks

beginning

to lumber.

They'd been cleared

for the tanks to come up in file.

And they came up... I think

they were three or four in file,

one behind the other,

and, of course, utterly unexpected.

The first lot went sailing over

the trenches and we thought,

"Well,

this is fine," because

the

whole

thing was, you know,

the year's

getting a bit late. If we

don't get

through now we never shall.

This the great opportunity.

And hope was high and we thought,

"If they can get through

the third-line

defences

"we can put the

cavalry through

"and

the whole war

will become mobile again," you know.

And so we watched pretty

carefully to see how things went,

and by this time, as you can

imagine, also

all this area had been shelled

for the

best part

of three months,

you see, and it

was contiguous

shell

holes, like the

Ypres salient,

for miles and miles.

There was no

configuration from the ground.

From above it looked like a

pockmark...a

pockmarked skin, really.

All the trees had been shot.

There was no greenery.

There was nothing, you know,

except among this wool,

this grey wool,

these lumbering chaps,

and one of two of them

with red petrol tanks on their back.

And one even with a little mascot,

a little fox terrier, you know,

running behind the tank.

And then one would stop,

and we'd no idea why -

obviously been shot or

somebody had

thrown a bomb at it

or a grenade at it

or something,

or it had had a breakdown,

but it had stopped.

And at the end of two hours

they'd

moved about, I suppose, a mile or two.

And we thought everything was

going well, and we came back

because our petrol was finished -

we

had about two hours' petrol.

We came back to the aerodrome,

went out again in the afternoon.

In the afternoon we found

they'd

made about another three,

no, possibly

another

two miles.

And the little fox terrier

was still there,

the one that we'd noticed in the

morning,

so we knew he was all right.

And there were three or

four or them,

or a group of them,

grouped around High Wood.

And then that was really the end of it.

They didn't in fact ever get

through, as everybody knows,

and...that's it.

In 1917 we may have had superiority

of numbers in total of aircraft,

but we were in a minority as far

as fighting scouts were concerned.

And certainly 56 Squadron, the first

SE5 squadron, was the only squadron

for some months, I think

I'm

right in saying, or weeks anyway,

on the front which had what might be

called an up-to-date machine.

The SE5 was a fine machine.

It was a machine that pretty

well couldn't be broken up

through hard handling in the air.

It had a good engine, it was

reliable,

it was manoeuvrable,

it had no vices,

it was a fine aeroplane.

But still it wasn't as good

as the enemy

whom we were sent up to deal with.

And this was chiefly noticeable, not

in manoeuvrability, but in height.

If we were up at 16,000 feet,

we would find the Albatrosses

and the Fokkers

at 17,000

and 18,000 feet.

And this is crucial

in any

aerial combat,

because the man with the height

dives on you, zooms up again -

he's got his height, he's driven

you down perhaps a thousand feet.

You come up again,

but you're

always below him, you see.

And this is a very tricky

situation to be in, really,

because you're always, as it were,

at a disadvantage.

Not that our own morale, I must say,

was in any way hurt by this.

Morale was terrific

right

through the summer.

There was no question

of being

browbeaten, as it were,

by the enemy. We didn't worry.

We could engage,

we could fight.

When we got him

down on our

own

level,

we could engage

and we were just as manoeuvrable and

even more manoeuvrable than he was.

But we had this disadvantage always

that our performance really

wasn't quite so good

as the people

we were up against.

And we were also numerically

outnumbered most of the time.

It was nothing for us to

meet 30 or 40 enemy aircraft

in one

formation,

and we were never more than 12.

Our squadron was

a 12-aircraft squadron,

so we couldn't exceed that number.

So we had to fight

in those

conditions

and, of course,

the hazards are obvious -

the hazards of war,

the hazards of being shot down.

But over and above that,

the hazards

of not being able

to get

out of the aeroplane,

not

being able

to jump,

having nowhere to go to.

I mean, you had to just sit tight

and take what came.

We used to take off on these

big

squadron offensive patrols,

usually in the afternoon,

kitted up, of course,

in our long

sheepskin thigh boots

and leather coats and little sort

of motorcycle helmets and goggles.

And by the time you got all that in

the cockpit, there wasn't much room.

We were wedged into our cockpits.

Ran our engines up

for two

or three minutes -

water-cooled engines,

time to get them warm -

and then took off severally,

and at about 500 feet would begin to

get in formation

and head slowly

out towards the lines.

We were about 20 miles

or

so behind the lines

so we had time to climb

up on our way over.

Our business was offensive.

That is to say, we used to climb up

to get height this side of the

lines,

and then when we'd got our

height, go over and look for trouble.

And we usually got up

to about 15,000 or

16,000 feet

before we

actually

crossed

the lines into enemy territory.

This was a good height,

and, of course, very cold.

And our eyes were, of course,

continually focusing, looking,

craning our heads round,

moving

all the time,

looking for those

black specks,

which

would mean enemy

aircraft

at a great distance away.

And we'd be perhaps between clouds,

you know,

and not be able

to see the ground,

or only parts of the ground,

which would sort of slide into

view like a magic lantern screen

of

something far, far beneath.

Clinging together about 20 or 30

yards between each machine,

swaying, looking at our neighbours,

keeping our throttles,

setting ourselves just right so that

we were all in position, as it were.

And then sooner or later we would

find the enemy, or spot the enemy.

If it was lucky,

it would

be below us.

But in those days

we were always...

under the enemy.

That is to say, our machines, good

as

they were in the spring of '17,

were not really still up to the

Huns, who usually had

1,000-to-2,000-feet

ceiling clear above us.

So even at 16,000 feet, we were still

liable to be jumped from on top.

But that, of course,

didn't

have to worry us.

And we were usually outnumbered, too,

two or three to one.

We were very rarely

fighting on equal terms.

In those sort of engagements,

when we spotted the enemy formations

below us, we used to engage,

irrespective if there was anybody

above or not and just chance it.

And usually the top flight of enemy

aircraft who were above us

would come down

and jump us as we went down.

You know, it's not really

possible to describe

the action of a fight like that,

because, having no communication

with each other,

we simply had to go in

and take our man and chance our arm

and keep our eyes

in the back

of our heads to see

if anybody was trying to get us

as we went down.

But there was always the point

where

you had to go down anyway,

whether there was anybody

on your tail or not.

And so the fight began

at these

altitudes

and engaged

and disengaged with

bursts of perhaps 30 or 40 rounds,

tracer ammunition, you understand.

Three-in-one tracer.

So there was always some

idea of where you were fighting,

because your sights really were

no

good in these quick dogfights.

There wasn't time to focus anything,

it was just really snap shooting.

And so the whole squadron

would

enter the fight like that,

in good formation,

but within half a minute

the whole

formation had gone to hell.

There was nothing left except just

chaps wheeling and zooming

and diving

on each other's

tails perhaps,

or four in a row even, you know.

A German going down,

one of our chaps on his tail,

another German on his tail,

another Hun behind that.

I mean,

extraordinary glimpses one got,

of people approaching head-on,

firing at each other as

they came

and

then just at the last

moment turning and slipping away -

the fight lasting

perhaps for altogether ten minutes

or

quarter of an hour would

come down from 15,000 feet,

right down to

almost to ground level -

by that time probably

ammunition exhausted,

guns jammed or something like that,

and then there'd be nothing left

but to come back home again,

because you only had

two hours'

petrol anyway,

so you couldn't stay

up for very long

and by that time,

you'd

have exhausted a good

hour of your petrol

in getting

up there.

So that was how it went.

The real preoccupation that a pilot

had on going into combat

was

whether his guns would continue

to fire or not.

The SE5 had two guns.

It had a Lewis gun on the top plane,

with 100 rounds of ammunition in it,

on drums.

And we carried spare

drums in the cockpit.

It had a Vickers gun,

which fired through

the propeller

by

the Constantinesco

gear, which was an oil-driven

gear

which stopped it

firing

the blades of the propeller off.

Those guns could jam,

and very often did jam.

And when they jammed

in the middle

of a fight,

a pilot

was in a very precarious

position,

as you can understand.

Um...the unjamming of a gun

when

you're

flying at 100mph plus, with icy hands at 15,000 feet,

was a very difficult thing,

because you had to put your hand out

round the windscreen,

round into the

wind and get hold of a

handle on the gun

and try and jerk it over

in order to clear the belt,

which

was a collapsible belt

which

got...used

to get jammed in the breech.

That was one sort of jam.

Of if you'd had a good go at a Hun

and possibly got

rid of all

your Lewis gun ammunition,

you'd have to change drums.

Now, changing drums on the SE5

was

a terrific job,

because the gun was up

on the top

plane,

clear of the top of the

propeller,

and there was a sort of

brass quadrant down which it slid.

When you caught hold of the back

of it to release the catch,

the gun came down into your hand

and then was then vertically...

firing vertically upwards,

or pointing vertically upwards.

The drum was quite a heavy thing,

and when the wind was blowing

past it at 100mph,

as soon as you unclipped it, it flew

back, you see,

and you had an awful

job to get it down into the cockpit.

Then you had to get the full drum

up, again out into the wind,

and push it onto the gun, and then

you had to push the whole gun up

onto the top plane

and lock it in position.

So you can see this was quite

a thing to do with your right hand,

flying with your left hand,

Huns about, chaps coming down on you

in the middle of it.

It wasn't a situation

to

be caught in.

I was caught in such a situation

more than once.

And it was really frightening,

because as soon as that drum was down,

the resistance of the wind

formed all

sorts of eddy currents round you,

so you felt you had no windscreen. The thing was buffeting you about.

You were in a great hurry

to

get your new drum on

and get it up into position.

The quadrant was liable to jam,

even though we'd greased them

and greased them

to get them to work.

This was a terrible position

to

be in,

and more than one pilot was

caught with his drum down

and unable

really to do anything about it.

It destroyed the performance

of the machine, it upset the pilot.

He couldn't use it.

And that was no fun at all.

Of course, the dogfight wasn't

the only way of bringing down Huns.

And, in fact, probably

the great

aces of the war

brought down more

Huns in other means

than

they did in actual dogfights,

which was, after all,

a dangerous

operation, so to speak.

The favourite method was

to stalk

a reconnaissance.

Usually this was

a reconnaissance

German aeroplane

that you wanted to bring down.

And the way would be to stalk him.

And this, of course,

meant

accurate shooting,

usually at extreme range.

About 200 yards would be

the sort of range on which

some of the ace pilots -

like Guynemer

particularly,

who used

to do a lot of

stalking -

would bring down his Hun.

And that meant hours at the butts

with your machine crewed

up

in flying position,

getting your sights

synchronised on

your gun

bursts at 200 yards,

to save

shifting

your gun mountings about

until they synchronised with the

telescopic sight

which came through

the middle of the little windscreen.

In addition to that, of course,

there was the loading of the guns.

The Vickers gun had a sort

of disintegrating belt,

which was

made of

little aluminium links,

and the bullets themselves were

the pins between the links

that held

the whole thing together.

In '56, we weren't allowed

to have

the armourers

do any of the ammunition, preparation

of ammunition belts for fighting.

We all did it ourselves.

We loaded it.

We spent perhaps two or three hours

every morning

loading

and making the belts that we

should

use on the afternoon patrol.

So that we avoided,

as far

as possible,

by taking care with

the way

the belts were put together,

because that was where the

difficulty was -

how to get them so that

they

wouldn't jam in the breech.

So then, having got the guns as good

as you could and your sighting

right,

you would then go out

and wander up and down the lines

looking for a likely chap who was

too preoccupied

doing artillery

observation

or photography

to

notice there was anybody else about.

And you'd be very cunning. You'd

perhaps go a mile or two away

and stalk him slowly,

coming up just under his tail

where

he couldn't see, you see.

There's a certain angle below

the

tail plane

at which you could

stalk a man and he

wouldn't know

you were there at all.

And then having got up close

to that position,

or just within range, then,

if your guns were well synchronised

and you held the machine steady,

you

were...you

were on for a certain kill.

But, of course, it was quite

possible

to get very

preoccupied

in the stalking,

and that was how Guynemer, at least,

was shot down,

because he was

so preoccupied in stalking his Hun

that he was jumped from above,

and

before he knew it, it was all over, you see.

That was the other

and

more

successful way

really

of destroying enemy aircraft.

When we were on the ground,

of course, all the strain was gone.

And, you must remember,

the strain

was only there

for two

and a half hours,

perhaps twice a day.

The rest of the time was your own.

The messes and the huts

were

stationed round where...

The messes and the huts were round

the edge of the aerodrome.

And life on the whole

was

fairly quiet there,

unless the squadron happened

to have a band or anything like that

which used to play in the evenings.

We used to have

something of that kind sometimes.

Some squadrons had,

some squadrons hadn't.

But generally speaking, once

you

were out of the air,

it was quiet.

But it was safe.

You see, you were 15 or 20 miles

behind the lines,

you had a comfortable bed,

you had sheets,

you had even electric light

or

something like that.

You didn't have this terrible

strain that could occur

if you never could get

out of gunfire,

never could get

out of

the possibility of being hit,

even when you were asleep.

So that we lived, as it were, always

in the stretch or the sag of nerves.

We were either in deadly danger

or

we were in no danger at all.

And this conflict between something

which was really more or less

just like being at home,

and being really in quite a tight

position,

had a great effect on us

all.

It produced a certain strain,

probably because of the change.

We used to occupy our time

on the ground in several ways.

During the daytime there were other

patrols up besides our own,

and very often our best friends

were on these patrols.

So naturally we were

up on the airfield

waiting for them to come down to see how they'd fared.

Waiting for them to come back,

indeed. Sometimes they didn't.

Then when they came down,

there was

always the gossip of how

they'd done -

had they met anybody,

had they had a kill, and all that sort of thing,

and the damage to their machines.

Perhaps they'd been a dogfight

and got shot up

and they might

have holes

through their rudder,

holes through their engines.

We wanted to see what had gone on,

in fact.

Then the pilot had to go, of course,

into the orderly room

and make

out his combat report and

then

he was free to do as he liked.

And the messes, you see,

were right out in the country.

We were living usually

on the outskirts of quiet villages.

So when we wanted to whoop it up

we usually went into town.

The messes themselves were

sometimes

the huts we lived in

and sometimes,

on the edge of a village -

they might be actually

farmhouses in the village.

Old rooms, you know, simple rooms,

whitewashed rooms

with terrible old furniture.

And the food, good

but rough, fairly rudimentary.

And things like, you know,

lamps hanging on strings

from the ceiling,

which were thick

with dead flies

and a general...

..rudimentary, primitive sort of life.

Sometimes, as in one case

that

I remember very well,

an old piano, an old upright

piano in the mess with keys so yellow

they looked as if the keyboard had

been smoking for about 50 years.

And we had one chap

who

played the piano,

and he'd sit down in the evenings

and

there were two or three notes

missing

and it was out of tune and

it was...it was a terrible piano.

But it didn't matter, you know.

He'd play the tunes

of the time, the revues on in town,

the things we knew by heart

and used to sing in chorus and the...

Occasionally a bit

of Chopin or something like that

on the nights when we felt that

that

sort of thing was appropriate.

All very easy and go-as-you-please.

And then usually after that,

turning

in fairly early and going to

bed,

because one might be up on the

dawn patrol the day after, you see,

perhaps up at four o'clock or more

in the morning, ready to get out

and wanting to get some

sleep in before that happened.

It was a quiet life

really on the airfields themselves.

It was only in the town

that the

binges occurred,

when the squadron

had had perhaps

a

particularly bad

time,

or a particularly good time.

Either was an excuse to go in

and whoop it up a bit.

And when that was over,

back to the country,

back to the quiet of the mess again,

and doing the job.

Because people were killed

too

frequently...

..the spirit in the mess itself

was

usually quiet, not gay.

Not frightfully gay,

just workmanlike,

professional, in a sense.

Usually, of course, what we used

to

do when we were allowed away -

and we were allowed away

two or

three nights a week -

we used to take a tender

and go off to the nearest town.

And there we'd find some sort

of estaminet or restaurant going,

you know,

and probably a girl or

two around the place,

and we'd begin to have a drink or

two and start singing songs

and enjoying ourselves and

whooping

it up till, say, midnight,

and then we'd get into the tender

and come back to the airfield again.

That was more or less the life,

when one was not in the air.

And one mustn't think of it

entirely as being lived up,

because, you see,

people were being killed every day, your best friend.

My best friend was there one evening

and he wasn't there

next

day at lunch.

And this was going on all the time,

And people, you know,

reacted to that.

You couldn't live that

sort of a life and be entirely

indifferent to...

You may have been

cold-blooded in the air,

because you had to fight

as

if there

was nothing but you and your guns.

You had nobody at your side,

nobody who was cheering with you,

nobody who would look after you

if you were hit.

You were alone, you know,

and you fought alone and died alone.

But those who died weren't there

when we came back.

WOMAN: Cut.

All bombing attacks up to 1918

had

always been in the daytime.

There'd never been a real

night raid,

except zeppelin raids, of course.

So that although I was on the

defence of London at this time,

stationed just outside Ilford,

it was always Camels defending

London in the daytime.

Nobody ever thought that there

would be night raids.

And I certainly had never

been up at night.

I never had flown at night at all

until that point.

Then suddenly one evening,

just after sunset,

when everybody had gone off

to

town

except two or three chaps who

happened to be hanging round,

a warning came through.

And you can imagine, pandemonium.

No aeroplanes

with luminous

instruments,

no lights in the

cockpits, none of

the pilots had

flown at night,

Germans overhead. So what do you do?

I mean, somebody's got to go up

and see about it, you see,

if they can.

So I had a torch, I remember,

and I was terrified,

because I'd not idea what it

was like to take off at night.

I thought it would be

absolutely

black.

You know, I thought that I...

I didn't know

how I should ever

be

able to control

the aircraft at all.

I shouldn't have a horizon, you see.

So this was one of the moments

in the war

when I was really,

really frightened,

because I just

didn't know

what was in front of me.

And anyhow, with a torch,

you couldn't really switch it on

and fly the aeroplane and switch

if off again and check your revs,

check your oil pressure,

check

your attitude.

You know, you couldn't do all

that

and fly,

so it was

really like flying in the dark.

However, there it was.

We had to get into the air.

The Huns were coming over London.

Somebody must have a crack at them.

So I and another

couple of chaps took off.

You know, paraffin flares.

Misty night, bit of a moon,

which, of course, I didn't realise

made all the difference.

And once the excitement

and tension of taking off was over,

one was up in this magical,

magical landscape

you know, with the Thames

estuary

and the plumes of the

trains

as they came into London,

and the clouds, and a little bit of a moon.

A marvellous romantic, Midsummer

Night's Dream sort of atmosphere.

I'm climbing up and up

and up to 14 or 15,000,

seeing nothing, of course.

Looking, searching, probing

the

darkness with one's eyes,

which got

night-adapted

in about 25

minutes or

so,

so that you could see a little.

But in fact, of course,

quite incapable of finding a Hun

even 200 or 300

yards away.

He would have been quite invisible.

The only thing you could

hope for

would be to see the glow

of the exhausts,

and you had to be

pretty close to see that.

So that was the way

the night raids began,

and they began like that and went

like that till the end of the war.

The difficulty was always

the last

200 or 300 yards.

You might know roughly

where the

raid was coming,

you might know the direction,

you might even know the height.

But you couldn't, in fact, do anything

unless you could close

that

last 300-yard gap.

And so very few people ever

managed to find Huns over London.

One or two did. Flossie Brand, for instance,

who was the first man to fly

to

South Africa, he found one.

He went in so close that

he

singed his eyebrows

when the German caught fire.

He must have been

within 20 or 30

feet of that aircraft

before he opened fire,

you know, after he'd opened fire.

Stuck on its tail.

WOMAN: Cut.