You find yourself moving at 40 mph in a contraption of wood and wire that would have been a piano if it wasn't the very latest in war technology...
It's weaving from side to side, essential if you are to see past the long nose while taxying, it feels like it wants to take off, but you grab the joystick and it slows and skews, no tailwheel, it only has a piece of bent wood as a skid to support the tail and you've tried to lift too soon and it has dug into the ground, ease off and gather some more speed. Obligingly, the tail begins to lift, and now you begin to be able to see out in front of you, albeit through a complex of struts, wires, gunsight, windscreen and gun butts...
Your comrades in A Flight are visible to either side as you finally coax enough speed from your engine to thankfully clear the trees at the end of the makeshift aerodrome...
Fiddling with the throttle you manage to keep your speed up and with relief you are soooo glad you are flying an SE5a, mindful of the fact that more Camel pilots were killed by their own aircraft than by enemy pilots...
But then again, McCudden was killed by his own SE5a, stalling on take-off, and veteran that he was he still made the beginners error of trying to turn back to the airfield...
The gyroscopic torque from the Camel's rotary engine once airborne was enough to take a beginner by surprise and quite simply kill him... Late model Bf109s and Mustangs had similar problems in WW2, try and move them off the ground and they would just slam ye back at full throttle... The Camel is the glamour machine, but yours is still faster, stronger and steadier, after all the whole point is to put lead where it counts and that's all you want your machine to do...
Rotary engines... very strange things, the crankshaft was bolted to the airframe and the entire engine assembly of up to 9 cylinders with the propellor rotated around it, with a huge amount of gyroscopic force... There were two throttle settings, FULL and OFF! Nowadays instability in a fighter plane is essential, but then in 1917 they hadn't got computers to deal with it for them... Anthony Fokker exploited that fact in selling his DVII to the German Air service, turning a design problem in the tail into a virtue by describing its whiplash turn as its 'special feature'... The castor oil lubrication of rotary engines blowing back into the airstream would also give all those dashing Aces the thing that castor oil does to just about anyone.... Which is why the poor bastards were all out of their faces most of the time to counteract it, they claimed brandy stunned the guts, but I don't blame them for wanting some sort of cushion...
No parachutes either... The Germans got them eventually, but the British weren't allowed them as it was feared it would damage morale. As if anything could possibly dent the power wielded over eager young men by British militarism... Udet saved himself with his parachute and not only lived to fight another day, but also in the next war too...
Anyway...Circle the aerodrome gaining height and join up with your flight and head off on your mission for the day.
Suddenly there's a small dot sighted, friend or foe?
Jockey into position, make sure the sun is behind you, and most importantly, gain height... your machine is such a piece of crap, that if you haven't got an immediate height advantage, your opponent can simply fly above you, and in the words of the day 'piss into your cockpit'...
There is no honour in this, you get into the best position, either dive and zooom, take a shot and run for it if it's not successful, or sneak up under someone and kill him....
People who get themselves into dogfights are only talking 50-50, the whole thing is stealth and observation... Strategy is everything, Mannock,the greatest ace of them all, was at first suspected of having 'cold feet' as he was so circumspect about approaching the enemy on his first patrols. He was in fact honing his ideas of air fighting tactics, where each encounter was to be completely on his terms as he led his men into the precise position from which to launch an attack. His maxim, 'always above, seldom on the same level, never underneath' summed up his strategy, while his statement that 'good flying never killed a Hun yet, and when you shoot, don't aim for the plane, aim for the pilot', was one that was echoed by none other than Richthofen himself.
So you sneak up on your opponent, for such as it would have been in 1917, you probably even know his name, and know him by the colour of his aircraft, Voss, Wolff, Udet, Fonck, Nungesser, Mannock, Bishop, McCudden, Ball, Rickenbacker, Lufbery. Some died, some survived, immortals all...
Cold bloodedly you do the deed and zoom away, whether you hit him or not just RUN!!! or maybe you made the mistake of trying it on Ball, who made a whole career out of enticing people to sneak up on him while he watched in his rear-view mirror, and now you're falling in flames...
Perhaps you might find yourself in a dog-fight that seemingly appeared from nowhere, a twisting mass of more than 100 screaming assemblies of wood and wire, taking a snap shot when you can, and hoping it was a craft from the other side and not a friend, but who can tell? Collisions are commonplace in such things. Crosses and roundels flash past...
But with the intimacy of 80 mph anything can happen, and did....
Madon squeezes off a few rounds at a Boche two-seater which hits the goggles of the observer and sends them flying through space to be caught in midair by the French attacker in his Nieuport....
Louis Strange stands and reaches up to change the ammo drum on the upper wing mounted gun on his SE5a, the machine turns upside down, he is thrown out of the cockpit and he is hanging on by the drum, he somehow climbs back into his machine and rights it...
Who would have invented a crash at 800 feet between an aircraft and a balloon cable where not only did the plane remain transfixed to the cable, but the pilot survived and escaped by sliding down the cable to safety? It happened nevertheless!
Suddenly, from a world of whirling Albatrossi you look around and there is nothing, looking down there is still the scars of no-mans'-land and you know which way you have to go to get home, always against the prevailing wind that slows your progress to a crawl and can make you a stationary target for half a million men in trenches that will shoot at anything that passes...
Your engine is cackling, you took a hit somewhere, maybe from your own gun as it tried to clear the propellor and the interruper mechanism just didn't cut it this time, you try and nurse it down, not too fast...
Find a suitable spot..., suddenly some bastard dives on you and pours a stream of lead into your engine, that cunt knew you where going no-where fast but maybe his friend was the one who got collected in a canvas sack yesterday and he's the one who's burned right now...
There's a stream of white vapour pouring back from your machine right now, and it's pure petrol...
Maybe you'll make it down OK, your control surfaces are undamaged, you've switched off the engine too, white-faced and in panic as you watch the leaking fuel making it's way back to the red-hot exhaust...
Many pilots carry pistols, not to defend themselves, but to shoot themselves in the event of their flying deathtrap being set on fire, preferring instant death to burning all the way down... Some pilots reckon it's better to just jump clear, as they are going to die anyway, better a clean death from a fall than to have to either commit suicide or burn all the way down...
The FE2b, one of the mainstays of the British effort, was guaranteed to be completely consumed by flame in 5 minutes simply by putting one match to any single point on it's entire assembly, some bright spark someplace somewhere thinking it a good idea to cover warplanes with canvas stiffened with a sort of varnish... and they were ALL like that!
Luckily, you are in an SE5a, and you can deadstick in, a Camel might well have dived in, a SPAD would have come in too fast for it's wheels and maybe killed you, but you find a piece of open ground in a field and touch down...safe!
And only last month you were a schoolboy in England...
Last revised: June 4, 1998.