The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Spider Web, by T. D. Hallam

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

The Spider Web

My acknowledgments are due to the
Editor of 'Blackwood's Magazine'
and to the Editor of 'The Times.'

P. I. X.

The Spider Web
The Romance of a Flying-Boat War Flight

BY

P. I. X.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
1919

TO
THE JOLLY
FINE FELLOWS,
OFFICERS AND MEN,
OF THE WAR FLIGHT,
FELIXSTOWE.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

The Spider Web.

CHAPTER I.
THE SPIDER WEB.

I.

There is magic in salt water which transmogrifies all things it touches. The aeroplane with its cubist outline undergoes a sea change on reaching the coast and becomes a flying-boat, a thing of beauty, a Viking dragon ship, a shape born of the sea and air with pleasant and easy lines, and in the sun, the dull war-paint stripped from the natural mahogany, a flashing golden craft of enchantment.

During the war nothing was published about the flying-boats, partly because they worked with the Silent Navy, and partly because they were produced in the service. They were created to harry and destroy the German submarines, and were a manifestation of the genius of the English-speaking peoples for all things connected with the sea.

There is a tang of salt in the adventures of the men who boomed out in them over the narrow waters, for they had to do with submarines and ships, and all that that implies. In their job o' work of bombing U-boats, attacking Zeppelins, fighting enemy seaplanes, and carrying out reconnaissance and convoy duties, there is as much romance as in any particular effort in the war. In the future, grown great in size, the boats will form the winged Navy, and will carry mails and passengers over the water-routes of all the world.

Boat seaplanes, or flying-boats as they are called by the men who use them, are a true type of aircraft designed for dealing with the chances and hazards of flying over the sea. They have a stout wooden boat hull, planked with mahogany and cedar, to which the wings, with the engines between the planes, are attached. They carried a service crew of four: Captain, navigator, wireless operator, and engineer. Float seaplanes, which the boats superseded, were practically land machines with two wooden floats instead of wheels, and struck you as being aeroplanes on a visit to the seaside which had put on huge goloshes in order to keep dry. On seeing one pass overhead it was usual to say: "There she goes with her big boots on."

Float seaplanes were not very seaworthy, breaking up quickly in rough water; and many a brave lad, down at sea in them with engine trouble, has been drowned. They are very much to-day what they were in 1914.

From the very beginning of things there was much faith shown by the sea-going pilots of the Royal Naval Air Service in the seaplane as a weapon to do down the U-boat. But the technical people of the service neglected float seaplanes; and flying-boats, of which they did not approve, took a long time to develop. Instead of perfecting seaplanes the slide-rule merchants developed scout land machines with the idea of using them off the decks of ships, and a strong force of aeroplane pilots was collected and provided with fast and handy aeroplanes. The Navy was not ready to use this force, only being converted to its value in 1918, and it was sent to assist the Royal Flying Corps, when the latter was in difficulties in France owing to the lack of pilots and efficient machines. Unfortunately this effort turned a great deal of the energy of the R.N.A.S. away from seaplanes and anti-submarine work.

There would probably not have been any big British flying-boats but for the vision, persistence, and energy, in the face of disbelief and discouragement, of Colonel J. C. Porte, C.M.G., who designed and built at Felixstowe Air Station the experimental machine of each type of British flying-boat successfully used in the service. His boats were very large, the types used in the war weighing from four and a half to six and a half tons, and carried sufficient petrol for work far out from land and big enough bombs to damage or destroy a submarine other than by a direct hit. The pilots were out in the bow of the boat, with the engines behind them, and so had a clear view downward and forward. The boats were very seaworthy, and no lives were lost in operations from England owing to unseaworthiness.

Porte Baby with Bristol Bullet on top plane.

In designing and perfecting flying-boats there were more difficulties than in producing float seaplanes, for the technical problems were great, while engines of sufficient horse-power were not to be had in the early part of the war, and indifference and scepticism had to be overcome. It was not until the spring of 1917 that suitable flying-boats were in being. But this was in time for them to meet the big German submarine effort, when the great yards at Weser, Danzig, Hamburg, Vagesack, Kiel, and Bremen, working day and night, with production driven to its highest pitch by standardisation, were pouring out into the North Sea an incredible number of U-boats.

During this year—a year when it looked as though the Under-sea boats would strangle our merchant shipping and the danger was greater to England than her people realised—forty flying-boats were put into commission, and sighted sixty-eight enemy submarines and bombed forty-four of them.

A submarine is a steel boat shaped something like a cigar. When on the surface it is driven by two petrol engines. Under the surface it is driven by two electric motors, the electricity being obtained from storage batteries. At the bow and stern are horizontal rudders known as hydroplanes. Under ordinary circumstances, when the submarine is about to dive, water is let into tanks until the boat is just floating on the surface with only the conning-tower showing. The petrol engines are stopped and the electric motors are started. Then the hydroplanes are turned down and they force the submarine under the water. The submarine uses its power of travelling under the water to stalk its prey and to hide from its enemies.

When the intensive German submarine campaign began, the methods of hunting U-boats from surface ships had not been perfected. The hydrophone was crude, the technique of using depth charges was not perfected, and the mines and nets were not adequate. Also, the Dover barrage was not then in being. So Fritz, as the service called the Hun submarine, went south—about from his bases to his hunting-grounds.

Picture the sinister grey steel tubes dropping away from the dock in the German harbour as the Commander in the conning-tower gave the order to cast off, the swirl of water at the stern as the twin propellers took up their job, and the gay flutter of signal flags hoisted to the collapsible mast as they passed out of the harbour—a harbour which they would not see, if all went well with them, for from fifteen to twenty-five days, and which, if things went well for the Allies, they would never see again. Once outside the harbour, the Commander would order the engines whacked up to the economical cruising speed of eight to nine knots, a speed at which he could do about two hundred miles a day, and would then turn south, and so proceed on the surface through the North Sea to the Straits of Dover.

Passing through the Straits, either at night on the surface or in the daytime under the water, the Commander would pass down the south coast of England and cruise on the surface in the chops of the English Channel or off the approaches to Ireland. Here he would meet our merchant ships coming in with food, raw material, munitions, and passengers, and either sink them by gun-fire or by torpedo. The attack would be made without warning. Sometimes survivors, who had got away in boats from the doomed vessel, would be shelled. And once the survivors were taken on the deck of a submarine, their life-belts removed, and then the submarine submerged, leaving the unfortunates to drown.

On their run through the North Sea the submarines passed between the Hook of Holland and Harwich Harbour, the distance between the two places being one hundred miles.

Harwich Harbour is a sheltered stretch of water on the East Coast made by the rivers Stour and Orwell emptying into the southern portion of the North Sea. It was the centre of intense anti-Hun activity. It was here that Rear-Admiral Tyrwhitt had his "hot-stuff" destroyer flotilla, that the hydrophone for detecting enemy submarines under the surface of the sea was evolved, that our own submarines which operated in the Bight of Heligoland had their base, and where the flying-boat station of Felixstowe was situated. And it was at Felixstowe that the service experimental flying-boats were designed and built, and a flying-boat squadron operated. During 1917 this squadron, which used an average of only eight boats a month, sighted forty-seven enemy submarines and bombed twenty-five, besides destroying enemy seaplanes and bringing down a Zeppelin in flames.

Chart showing the Southern Portion of the North Sea and the Bight of Heligoland.

It was my good fortune to be posted to Felixstowe Air Station in March 1917 and to be put in charge of the flying-boat operations. So this is a yarn about the beginnings and work of a single flying-boat station, but it is characteristic of the work carried out at the seaplane stations strung along the South and East Coasts of Great Britain, from the Scilly Islands, off Land's End, to the Orkneys and Shetlands, off the north of Scotland. If the names and deeds of the pilots at Felixstowe are alone recorded, it is not that equally gallant and skilful men were not harrying the Hun elsewhere, but that their adventures would fill many volumes.

II.

In the curious quirks of fortune and chance which moved people across oceans and continents to play their part in the war, and finally fetched them up, in some cases, in the jobs which they most desired to fill, there are all the elements of romance. Just before the war broke out I was occupying a room at the "Aviator's Home," a boarding-house in the small American inland town of Hammondsport, N.Y. This town was situated on a long narrow lake, with a forked end, a lake surrounded by steeply rising vine-clad hills to which clung the white wooden houses of the vine-growers, and in which were dug the huge cellars for storing the excellent champagne of the district.

It was here that Mr Glen Curtiss built his flying-boats before the war, having recruited his labour at first from the ranks of the local blacksmiths, carpenters, and young men with a mechanical turn of mind. And it was here that I first tasted the smoke of a Fatima cigarette, a particularly biting smoke affected by Yankee airmen, and went out in a flying-boat for the first time in July 1914. This boat, to memory quaint and medieval, had a single engine alleged to develop sixty horse-power; it belonged to the dim dark ages when compared to the latest boat I have flown, the eighteen hundred horse-power Felixstowe Fury.

Finishing the course of instruction a few days after the declaration of war, and receiving no satisfaction by cabling to the Admiralty and War Office offering my services as a pilot, which rather annoyed me at the time, but which I now know was probably due to their being somewhat preoccupied with other little matters, I returned to my home in Toronto, Canada, and joined the first Canadian contingent as a private in a machine-gun battery.

Arriving in England in the steerage of a troopship in October 1914, I satisfied at Lockyears in Plymouth a great hunger and thirst, bred of army fare and a dry canteen, with a most delectable mixed grill, the half of a blackberry and apple tart smothered in Devonshire cream, and a bottle of the best. By the end of the dinner I had decided to emigrate to England. Some few days later I found myself imbedded in the mud of Salisbury Plain at Bustard Camp, a victim of inclement weather (which penetrated without difficulty the moth-eaten five-ounce canvas of the tent under which I sheltered) and the plaything of loud-voiced and energetic sergeants, who seemed to think that I liked nothing better on a rainy Sunday than to wheel, from the dump to the incinerator a half mile away, the week's collections of garbage. After two weeks of this I decided that I would not live in England.

Believing firmly in the future of aeroplanes and seaplanes in warfare, I made another attempt to transfer to one of the Air Services, the Royal Naval Air Service by preference; for having knocked about a good deal in small boats on the Great Lakes, I thought that the navigation and seamanship I had picked up might prove useful in seaplane work.

On a personal application to the Admiralty I was informed that Colonials were not required, as they made indifferent officers, that the service had all the fliers they would ever need, and, besides all this, that I was too old. And then it was suggested that I should sign on as a mechanic. I went to Farnborough, the headquarters of the Royal Flying Corps, and saw Sir Hugh Trenchard, then I believe a major, and was informed that I could be put on the waiting list, but found I would have to wait six months before seeing an aeroplane, owing to the wicked shortage of machines.

Being full of enthusiasm and impatience, and thinking that the war would be sharp and quick and soon decided one way or the other, I had another try at the Admiralty. But this time, on the advice of a friend who had lived some time in England, I attacked them in a different way. At my first interview I had appeared with my flying credentials and in the uniform of a private—a uniform, as being the King's, of which I was tremendously proud, although the tunic was about two sizes too small for me and the breeches four sizes too large. The second time I wore a suit of civilians cut by a good tailor and carried letters of introduction from sundry important people. I was this time offered a commission as a machine-gun Sub-Lieutenant, R.N.V.R., in the armoured cars attached to the Royal Naval Air Service, and believing that this was a step in the right direction, and fully determined to fly at the first opportunity, I was duly gazetted in December 1914.

I was told to report to H.M.S. Excellent for training. At the railway station at Portsmouth I asked a taxi-cab driver if he knew where H.M.S. Excellent was lying, and he replied that he did, and that he would drive me right on board. I thought that she must be a very big ship, but said nothing. Finally I found myself being driven over a bridge, and was informed a moment later that I was on board H.M.S. Excellent, or, in other words, at Whale Island. This training centre is the forcing-house of naval discipline, and everything is done at the double—an exceedingly fast double when the eye of the First Lieutenant falls upon an instructor. She is a curious ship. The Captain, when he comes on board by launch from the mainland, is driven up from the landing stage to his office in a little green railway carriage drawn by a little green engine.

For some time I trained in England, and finally sailed for the Dardanelles in March 1915. After forty days in Gallipoli in command of a travelling circus of machine-guns—and machine-guns were worth more than gold and precious stones in the first days on the Peninsula, being attached in turn to the Australians in Shrapnel Valley, sundry units at Cape Helles, and finally to the 29th Division in Gully Ravine, where I worked with the 13th Sikhs until they were practically wiped out on June 4—I again found myself in England in July 1915, my arm in a sling and feeling very thin as the result of sand colic, a horrid complaint which seized me the moment I set foot on Turkish soil at Gaba Tepe.

Following a holiday at Sunning-on-Thames, a two-week caravan trip through the New Forrest behind an old horse named Ben—a horse with whiskers on its ankles and a three-knot gait—and sundry visits to the Admiralty, I was transferred from Lieutenant R.N.V.R. to Acting Flight Lieutenant R.N.A.S. and posted to Hendon Air Station. Here I acted as First Lieutenant to Flight Commander Busteed until July 1916, having a good rest in order to get fit again, with only a few jobs to do, such as digging drains, building roads, altering machines, lecturing to the school on machine-guns and bombs, building huts for the men out of packing-cases, doing acceptance and test flights when I had regained some of my energy, and in my spare time learning what I could of the theory and practice of flight from my commanding officer, who very kindly took no end of trouble in assisting me. Then I was given the command when he left for Eastchurch.

Our Mess was livened up about this time by the frequent visits of a senior officer who, arriving about dinner-time, would discuss flying far into the night, turn out at daybreak to fly any machine available no matter what the weather was like, and then, after breakfast, hasten off to the Admiralty. It was a tremendous relief to meet a senior officer who was keen to know everything about flying at first hand, who could deal on paper with flying problems of which he had practical experience, and took the trouble to understand the point of view of the pilots.

Once when a very senior officer, in a very bad temper, was inspecting the station, he was taken into the first shed. "Quiet, very quiet," he said. "You don't seem to be doing much work for the number of men you have got." A trusty Sub. was despatched to the second shed with instructions to have the party of tinsmiths in the annex hammer like mad on a row of empty tanks. When the inspection party entered this shed the senior officer said, shouting to make himself heard above the noise—"Better; much better."

During the fall of 1916 many rumours were about concerning the developments of flying-boats at Felixstowe Air Station, along with a few facts from Lieutenant Partridge, R.N.V.R., who had been ground officer at Hendon, until after taking a course in a gunnery school he went to Felixstowe as armament officer. Also the work at Hendon was petering out, the soldiers of the R.F.C. had cast a monocled and covetous eye on the aerodrome, the submarine situation was becoming acute, and the doctor had forbidden me to fly at any altitude. I therefore put in to be transferred to a seaplane station, and was posted in March 1917 to Felixstowe.

Felixstowe town in ordinary times is a summer resort, but owing to the threat of air raids it was practically forsaken by its usual floating population and was heavily garrisoned by the military, the water front being protected by barbed wire and innumerable trenches. The people of the town in times of peace lived on the summer visitors; during the war they lived on the soldiers and airmen.

III.

When I first rolled up to Felixstowe Air Station I was tremendously impressed by its size. It was enclosed on the three land sides by a high iron fence. As I passed the sentry-box and entered by the main gate, the guardhouse occupied by the ancient marines was on my right, flanked by the kennel of Joe, a ferocious watch-dog who had a strong antipathy to anybody in civilian attire. Beside guarding the gate, Joe provided a steady income to the marines, for his puppies fetched good prices. On my left were the ship's office and garage. I entered the former and reported my arrival to the First Lieutenant.

The First Lieutenant of the station was Lieut.-Commander O. H. K. Macguire, R.N., known as James the One or Number One, who understood discipline, and reigned over an exceedingly fine mess. He ran the station under naval routine, the time being tapped off on a bell, the ship's company being divided into watches, anybody leaving the station "going ashore," and the men for leave, when marching out of the gate, were the "liberty boat." The Navy people, of course, said that the R.N.A.S. was not run on Navy lines, but it was run as close to them as everybody knew how, and as the exigencies of the new weapon permitted. The naval routine and discipline fitted the work of a seaplane station admirably, for the work approximated to that of a ship, where drill is of secondary importance, and speed, skill, and accuracy in carrying out a job of work is of the first importance.

As James the One had a shrewd tongue he was rather feared by the junior officers, especially the Canadians, who hated with a profound hatred the ever-recurring twenty-four-hour job of Duty Officer, during which they could get no sleep in the long watches of the night owing to the continuous ringing of the telephone bell. But he instilled discipline into their unruly hearts, which assisted them to carry out their work when subsequently elevated in rank.

Sheds and Slipways at Felixstowe.

He had taken over the station at a time when, owing to rapid growth, the new men were not being digested, and discipline was rather ragged at the edges; but by this time he had the men well in hand. And woe betide the defaulter, standing to attention outside the ship's office in full view of Number One as he sat in an easy-chair on the verandah of the mess, if the unfortunate so much as moved a little finger. The tiger roar which greeted such a disobedience to the order not to move, made every man with a guilty conscience on the station tremble.

On the other hand, he would brook no interference with the rights and privileges of the men, and looked after their interests as regards pay and promotion. Divisions, when the whole ship's company were mustered on the quarter-deck in the morning and at noon, was a marvel of smartness, especially when it is remembered that the men were "tradesmen." The effect was heightened by the attendance of the pipe band, of which Number One was rightly proud.

Leaving the office of the First Lieutenant I stepped out on the quarter-deck. On the mast, on the far side of this gravelled expanse, rippling and snapping in the breeze, flew the white ensign.

Crossing the quarter-deck and steering close to the bright and shining ship's bell, which I passed on my left, I found a path leading to the harbour. The left side of the path was the starting-point of an interminable row of huts for the men. Carrying on, after stumbling over a railway siding, and passing between two of the huge seaplane sheds, of which there were three—sheds 300 feet long by 200 feet wide—I eventually arrived at the concrete area on the water front.

Before each of the big sheds was a slipway. These were wide wooden gangways running out from the concrete into the harbour and sloping down into the water, and were used for launching the flying-boats.

Here I could look across the harbour and see Harwich and Shotley, the tangle of light cruisers and destroyers lying at anchor in the river, and the outlines of the floating dock in which destroyers, battered by the seas or damaged in contact with the enemy, were lifted out of the water and their hurts attended to. As I stood sniffing in the harbour smells, one of our E-class submarines came slinking in between the guardships at the boom, fresh from patrol in the Bight, and wearing that sinister air of stealth and secrecy which marks even the friendliest of submarines.

Walking down the concrete to my left I finally came to the pre-war buildings of the Old Station. These buildings were used by Commander Porte for his experimental work. In the early part of 1914 Commander Porte was in America, at the Curtiss Company works at Hammondsport, where he supervised the designing and testing of the first American type of flying-boat. This boat was constructed with the intention, if it was satisfactory, of attempting to fly the Atlantic. It was a very big machine for that time, although to a modern pilot, familiar with the luxuriously fitted up six-ton boats with two Rolls-Royce engines giving a total of 720 horse-power, she would seem a funny old, cranky, under-engined tub.

On the afternoon of the day war was declared Commander Porte sailed for England, and a little later took over Felixstowe. Sundry copies of the original boat arrived from the United States in 1915. These were comic machines, weighing well under two tons; with two comic engines giving, when they functioned, 180 horse-power; and comic control, being nose heavy with engines on and tail heavy in a glide. And the stout lads who tried impossible feats in them had usually to be towed back by annoyed destroyers.

As the Navy people could not understand anything being made which could not be dropped with safety from a hundred feet, or seaworthy enough to ride out a gale, or as reliable as the coming of the Day of Judgment for the Hun, much criticism and chaff, some good-natured but some not, were worked off by the sailors during this period on both boats and pilots. But improvements went steadily on.

In the fall of 1916 improved and very much bigger flying-boats, built in the United States to specifications supplied by Commander Porte, began to arrive.

By this time Commander Porte had got out several experimental flying-boats. He carried out his plans with a scratch collection of draughtsmen, few with any real knowledge of engineering; with boat-builders and carpenters he had trained himself; and he only obtained the necessary materials by masterly wangling. He frequently started a new boat and then asked the authorities for the grudged permission. But in all things connected with the building of flying-boats his insight amounted to genius, and the different types of boats kept getting themselves born. His latest boat, known unofficially as the Porte Super Baby, or officially as the Felixstowe Fury, a huge triplane with a wing span of 127 feet, a total lifting surface of 3100 square feet, a bottom of three layers of cedar and mahogany half an inch thick, and five engines giving 1800 horse-power, I flew successfully—it weighed a total of fifteen tons. On this test I carried twenty-four passengers, seven hours' fuel, and five thousand pounds of sand as a make-weight. Some idea of its huge size can be had when it is realised that its tail unit alone is as large as a modern single-seater scout.

At Hendon I had assisted in dragging the first twin-engined Handley-Page, at midnight and with the greatest secrecy, through the streets leading from the works at Cricklewood to the aerodrome. The procession was headed by an army of men removing obstructing lamp-posts and cutting off overhanging branches, followed by a motor-lorry with two acetylene flares, and then sixty men hauling the machine along by ropes. At the time I thought she was a very big machine. But in the sheds at Felixstowe I found boats of equal size and horse-power and greater speed, and boats that were even larger.

There was the boat called the Porte Baby, a bigger machine than any built and flown in this country until 1918, and this boat was produced in 1915 and flown in 1916. Although it did little useful active service work, it set other designers to thinking, and was the father and mother of all big British aeroplanes and seaplanes. When fully loaded it weighed about eight and a half tons, but no scales big enough to weigh it were obtainable in the service.

It was so large that a Bristol Bullet land scout was fitted on the top plane, which, while the boat was in the air, was successfully launched and flown back to an aerodrome by Flight Lieutenant Day, of the seaplane carrier Vindex. This gallant officer unfortunately was killed later in France.

Well on in 1917 sundry young pilots took the Porte Baby out for a joy-ride, and presently found themselves off the Belgian coast being attacked by a Hun land-machine and two fighter seaplanes. Two out of the three engines were shot about and the big boat had to come down on the water. The Huns circled around firing at it until their ammunition was exhausted, and then returned joyously to Zeebrugge to report the total destruction of a giant flying-boat.

But while the tracer bullets were playing about, the crew were lying down in the bottom of the boat watching the splinters fly. When the Huns departed the crew repaired the engines, started them up, and all night long taxied on the water across the North Sea. The much-chastened pilots beached the boat, in the small hours of the morning, on the coast of England, near Orfordness. A sentry, believing, as he explained later, that at last an invasion of England by Zeppelin was being attempted, fired on them, but was eventually pacified. The crew arrived at the station very tired, very black, one of their number with a bullet hole in him, but cheerful.

When the Porte Baby was finally dismantled, her hull was placed in the grounds of a woman's hostel, a door was cut in the side, electric light laid on, and four Wren motor-drivers found sufficient room inside to sling their hammocks, stow clothing, and room even for mirrors and powder puffs.

After sculling about in the sheds for some time, I finally climbed to the look-out on top of Number One Shed.

Here I surveyed for the first time the mottled, misty, treacherous North Sea. In a southeasterly direction and some ninety miles away was the Belgian coast, with the German submarine and seaplane bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend. Some hundred and eighty miles away, in a north-easterly direction, was Terschelling Island, and just around the corner of this island was the Bight of Heligoland. On a shoal, half-way on a line between Felixstowe and the Hook of Holland, fifty-two sea miles from either place and the same distance from Zeebrugge, was the red rusty North Hinder light-vessel belonging to the Dutch, with a large lantern on its one stout steel mast, and its name painted in huge white letters along its sides. This light-vessel was to play a large part in the bombing of submarines.

IV.

After some days at Felixstowe, feeling rather like a lost dog, as no work had been given me to do, and always expecting some demonstration to be made against the German submarines, I was much disappointed to find that nothing seemed to be done.

Indeed, I got exceedingly mouldy, so mouldy that I broke out in verses for 'The Wing,' the station magazine. They were a lament for the old land hack I had left behind at Hendon—a scandalous biplane, which had been rebuilt so often that nobody could tell the breed. Her fabric was so ancient that on the last time I had flown her the covering on the top side of the centre section had blown off. The verses ran:—

To my Old Bus.

To Number One she's ullage and he's ordered her deletion,
For the grease and dirt are ingrained, and she isn't smart as paint,
And the flat-foot X-Y-Chaser helped by calling her a horror—
Although she's sweet to handle, which some experts' buses ain't.

I've tumbled split-all endwise in her from a bank of vapour,
And surprised a little rainbow lying sleeping in a cloud;
I did my first loop in her, and I've crashed her and rebuilt her,
And robbed her spares from other planes, which strictly ain't allowed.

At evening, just at sunset, I have climbed into her cockpit,
And gone roaring up an air lane till I've caught the sun again,
And feeling most important at my private view of glory,
Have watched him set splendacious with his pink and golden train.

Her crash form's all in order, and they'll strip, saw, break, and burn her,
And I'm sorry more than I can say to know she has to go;
For blue, depressed, fed-up, or sore, I'd but to climb aboard her
To leave my pack of mouldy troubles far away below.

The patrol work of the station was rather at a low ebb at this time through various causes. With the machines available much good work had been done in the previous years, but the first five big twin engine-boats to be erected and tested, together with many good pilots and engineers, had just boomed off for the Scilly Islands, leaving a rather large hole in the station resources. Weather conditions also were not very good. There was no organisation in existence for carrying out intensive anti-submarine patrol, and there appeared to be no signs of that passionate energy by which alone, in all branches of anti-submarine work, the knavish tricks of the U-boat were frustrated.

A great deal of the energy of the station was taken up in experimental work and the erection of flying-boats, of which forty in all were assembled, fitted out, and tested during the year.

The engines of the only two boats available for patrol, Nos. 8661 and 8663, were run and tested every morning before daybreak, but after volunteering many times to get up and run the engines, I found that the boats never went out. There was a feeling among the majority of the pilots at this time that there was little use in patrols from Felixstowe, as from the beginning of the war only two enemy submarines had been sighted by pilots on patrol from the station. This lack of success was not due to patrols not having been done, although intensive work had never been carried out owing to the lack of suitable machines, but was due to the few submarines that had been navigating about.

But now the enemy submarines were freely and copiously navigating the narrow seas, and the Zeppelins were nonchalantly parading in daylight outside the Bight of Heligoland.

Commander Porte, owing to various causes, was absent from Felixstowe for long periods throughout this year, although fortunately his advice and experience were available for operations. Number One, who was in charge in the absence of Commander Porte, was not a flying officer, but he appreciated the situation, saw the Senior Naval Officer, Harwich, under whose command the operations came, and obtained a tremendous concession from him. This was, that Felixstowe was given permission to carry out anti-submarine patrol on its own, providing that he approved of the general scheme and was kept informed of the movements of machines.

Our S.N.O. was unlike some other Senior Naval Officers under whose command for operations there were float seaplanes and boats. For some of them did not know the technical and weather limitations, and therefore frequently ordered impossibilities, and when failure resulted, damned the machines and personnel of the Royal Naval Air Service; on the other hand they would not allow possible operations to be carried out which they had not originated themselves.

In sketching out the campaign from Felixstowe against the U-boats, it was decided that the only sure method of protecting shipping was to damage or destroy submarines, and that all other methods were merely palliative. It was considered that ships proceeding in the shipping lane, which was close to the coast of England and protected by shallow mine-fields and surface patrol craft, were well looked after, and that enemy submarines, if operating in these busy waters, would be so on the alert and keep such a good look-out that the flying-boats would not be given a chance; for submarines cannot be seen from the air when once below the surface of the North Sea. It was therefore decided to expend all available flying time where submarines were to be found on the surface, and that the efficiency of the patrols would not be decided by the number of flying hours put in, but by the number of submarines sighted and bombed.

The Hun submarines streaming down through the southern portion of the North Sea were of the U-B, U-C, and U types—the smallest 90 feet in length and the largest 225 feet long. They were mine-layers and commerce destroyers, and their commanders travelled on the surface through the Felixstowe area, because the distance they could go under water was only about seventy-five miles, and they could only run submerged at eight knots for two hours before exhausting their electric batteries. And low speeds—say of two knots, which the submarine could keep up for forty-eight hours when submerged—were of no value to an impatient Fritz anxious to get to his hunting-ground. And this was important, as the hundred-mile stretch of water between England and Holland is very shallow, and consequently muddy, and presents a brown and dirty green mottled surface opaque to the eye of the observer in the air.

The exact position of the German submarines was obtained from time to time; for when their commanders reported to Germany by wireless—which they usually did when homeward bound after making up through the Straits of Dover safely, although sometimes they reported when south-bound—the signal betrayed their position. The wireless messages were picked up by two direction-finding wireless stations in England, each station obtaining a bearing of the U-boat that was sending. When the two bearings obtained in this way were plotted out on the chart they crossed, and where they crossed there the U-boat had been. This was known as a wireless fix.

Felixstowe Patrol Area with Spider Web Patrol, showing submarines sighted and bombed, and the wireless fixes for four months.

The wireless fixes of the submarines showed that they were passing in the vicinity of the North Hinder light-vessel; so a method of carrying out the search was devised, and this was called the Spider Web.

This tremendous spider web was sixty miles in diameter. It allowed for the searching of four thousand square miles of sea, and was right across the path of the submarines. A submarine ten miles outside of it was in danger of being spotted, so at cruising speed it took ten hours for a U-boat to cross it. Under ordinary conditions a boat could search two sectors—that is, a quarter of the whole web—in five hours or less. The tables were turned on Fritz the hunter; for here he was the hunted, the quarry, the fly that had to pass through some part of the web. The flying-boat was the spider.

The Spider Web Patrol was based on the North Hinder light-vessel, which was used as a centre point, and allowed for a thorough searching of the sea in a forty-mile radius. It was an octagonal figure with eight radial arms thirty sea-miles in length, and with three sets of circumferential lines joining the arms ten, twenty, and thirty miles out from the centre. Eight sectors were thus provided for patrol, and all kinds of combinations could be worked out. As the circumferential lines were ten miles apart, each section of a sector was searched twice on any patrol when there was good visibility.

A chart was kept showing the positions, dates, and times of day that submarines were fixed by wireless, and it was from this chart that the sectors which would pay for searching were determined.

The pilots were to boom out from Felixstowe to the North Hinder, a distance of fifty-two sea-miles, fly out a radial arm as instructed, and then proceed along the patrol lines in the sectors to be searched, sweeping from the outside to the centre, returning to the North Hinder and so to the base.

Navigation over the sea, where one square mile of water looks exactly like every other square mile, is more difficult than finding the way over land. The only fixed objects by which a pilot can check his calculated position are light-vessels and buoys, but in war-time these are shifted about, and there are large areas without any such marks.

The difficulty of navigation is due to the fact that unless there is absolutely no wind, the compass, after the corrections for variation and deviation are made, only shows the direction in which the head of the flying-boat is pointing and not the direction in which it is travelling, and the air-speed indicator only gives the speed of the machine in relation to the air.

For an aircraft is completely immersed in the air, so that besides its movement in relation to the air caused by its own mechanism, it moves with the air over the surface of the earth, the speed and path of the machine being the result of the two movements.

If the pilot of a flying-boat had to go to a light-ship sixty miles due east from his station when a twenty-knot wind was blowing from the north, and he flew at sixty knots due east by his compass, at the end of an hour he would not fetch up at his object, but twenty miles to the south of it. If, instead of flying on 90 degrees, which is east, he flew on 71 degrees on his compass, he would fetch up at the light-ship in sixty-three minutes, having travelled due east over the surface of the sea. To a man in a ship he would appear to be flying sideways.

Similarly, if a pilot flew into a sixty-knot wind with his air-speed indicator showing sixty knots, he would not be moving over the surface of the sea, and to the man in the ship he would appear to be standing still.

The Chaplain of the station, the Rev. W. G. Litchfield, produced for us a simple table with which the pilot, knowing approximately the force and direction of the wind, could quickly work out the compass correction for drift and the time correction for the air-speed indicator.

The patrols were to be carried out at the height of a thousand feet, because at this height silhouettes of the submarines and surface craft could best be seen, the run of the wind on the water could be spotted and its direction and force determined, and it was easy to drop down to eight hundred or six hundred feet to bomb a Fritz.

Being now ready to start, and being given the sounding title of Commanding Officer War Flight, I had No. 2 shed, the two boats 8661 and 8663, and an insufficient number of men turned over to me.

There was no intelligence hut, no flying office, no telephone in the shed, no pigeons; and Billiken Hobbs, who was the only pilot at this time turned over to the flight, had never seen an enemy submarine. And I was in like case myself; besides which, I had never flown one of the big twin-engined boats.

On the afternoon of April 12 all arrangements had been made.

CHAPTER II.
LIKE A FAIRY TALE.

I.

The first eighteen days of the life of the War Flight was like a fairy tale, for the pilots, booming out on the Spider Web in the wet triangle formed by the Shipwash light-vessel, the Haaks light-ship, and the Schouen Bank light-buoy, sighted eight enemy submarines and bombed three, one of the patrols ran into four Hun destroyers and was heavily shelled, and one boat was lost at sea, although all members of the crew were saved.

On the morning of April 13 we carried out the first patrol of the series, patrols which were to make the southern portion of the North Sea unhealthy for Fritz to travel through on his unlawful occasions.

I had hot-stuffed a big brass ship's bell from the Old Station, put up a neat white gibbet to carry it in No. 2 shed, polished it, hung it up, and fitted to its clapper a neatly grafted bell lanyard finished off with a Turk's-head knot. At ten o'clock on this day, a day with an overcast sky and a twenty-knot westerly wind blowing, I sounded off five sharp taps on the bell, the signal for patrol. The chiefs of the engineer, carpenter, and working parties reported for instructions, and the working party fell in ready to move machines.

Trim, clean, grey, and rigged true, and just tipping the scales at four and a half tons, No. 8661 stood on her wheeled land trolley just inside the shed. She was a fine machine, measuring ninety-six feet from wing tip to wing tip, and had such a long and honourable life, doing three hundred hours of patrol work, and three hundred and sixty-eight hours flying in all, that she was affectionately known to all the pilots as Old '61. Her 42-foot wooden hull, covered with canvas above the water-line, was flat-bottomed and had a hydroplane step, which lifted her on top of the water when she was getting off, and so enabled her to obtain a speed at which the wings had sufficient lift to pick her up into the air.

She carried six and a half hours' fuel at a cruising speed of sixty knots, her top speed being eighty. A knot is a speed of one nautical mile an hour, and a nautical mile is 800 feet longer than a statute or land mile, so that full out she could do ninety-two land miles an hour.

The working party of twenty men gathered around Old '61 and rolled her out of the shed to the concrete area. Here they chocked her up under the bow and tail with trestles in order to prevent her standing on her nose when the engines were tested. Two engineers climbed up to each engine and started them. After they had been run slowly for about fifteen minutes in order to warm up the oil, they were opened out until they were giving their full revolutions, the tremendous power shaking the whole structure of the boat.

In the meantime the armourers' party had fitted on the four Lewis machine-guns and had tucked up into place under the wing roots, two on each side of the hull, the four one hundred pound bombs. The bombs were fitted with a delay action fuse which detonated them about two seconds after they hit the water or a submarine. If they hit the water they would detonate when from sixty to eighty feet below the surface.

5-ton Flying-boat.

Bombs detonated near a submarine might merely shake her, fuse cut-outs and extinguish electric lights, which was very bad for the moral of the Hun crew and lowered their efficiency. Or they might cause a leak, say by buckling a hatch, which the pumps could not keep under; or puncture the external oil-tanks, which would cause a large loss of oil fuel; or the periscope bases might be shaken or damaged; or the hydroplanes might be forced hard up or hard down, making them difficult to work and causing the boat to get out of control. All of which things would make the commander of the submarine return to port and so save merchant shipping. Or such serious damage might be caused that the submarine would immediately sink. Direct hits usually destroyed a submarine. In the early part of the war a U-boat was sunk by the direct hit of a sixteen-pound bomb.

When the boat was ready we climbed on board. Billiken Hobbs was the First Pilot, I was the Second Pilot, and there were the wireless operator and the engineer.

Master of seven hundred roaring horse-power, responsible for all things connected with the operation of the boat, and having to make instant and correct decisions as to the nationality of submarines seen at strange angles and oddly foreshortened, the first pilot of a flying boat had to be a very fine fellow indeed. He was the captain, and took the boat off the harbour and brought her in again, flew her on the hunting-ground and in an air fight, and saw that the remainder of the crew knew and did their duty.

From the repairing of the boats and the handling of them on shore, to the dropping of a bomb on a submarine, it was not a sport but a business, a business that had to be learned, and the making of a good first pilot was a longer task than the making of a land machine pilot. Good first pilots were few, and when found were usually worked until they cracked under the strain. For the stress due to steering careful compass courses for hours is considerable, the effort of keeping a constant and efficient look-out is very tiring, and the early boats were either tail heavy or nose heavy, which threw a strain on the heart of the pilot. Canadians seemed to be best fitted for flying-boat work, and probably as high a proportion as three-fourths of the good boat pilots came from that dominion.

Billiken took his seat in a little padded arm-chair on the right-hand side of the control cockpit, a cockpit which ran across the full width of the boat some distance back from the nose. He was covered in by a transparent wheel-house so that he did not have to wear goggles, an important point in submarine hunting, as goggles interfere with efficient observation.

Before him on the instrument board was the compass, the air-speed indicator, the altimeter which showed the height above the sea, a bubble cross level which indicated if the boat was correctly balanced laterally, the inclinometer which gave the fore-and-aft angle at which the boat was flying, the oil-pressure gauges, and the engine revolution counters. Close to his hand were the engine switches and the throttle control levers. Immediately in front of him was an eighteen-inch wheel, like the wheel of a motor-car, but carried vertically upright on a wooden yoke, with which he controlled the boat when in the air. He worked the steering rudder with his feet.

As Second Pilot I stood beside Billiken. If a submarine was sighted I ducked forward into the cockpit in the very nose of the boat, where I had my machine-gun, bomb sight, and the levers which released the bombs. In a little handbook, got out by a very wily first pilot for the benefit of second pilots, a few of the hints as to their duties are as follows:—

"Commence your watch-keeping at once and report to your first pilot buoys, lightships, wrecks, or other objects which may enable him to establish his position. Don't take it for granted that he has seen anything that you have seen until you have pointed it out.

"Observe above, below, around, in front, and behind.

"You must be prepared to give your position to your first pilot or wireless operator without hesitation at any moment throughout the patrol. Make a small pencil circle on your track on the chart every fifteen miles or so and at every alteration in course, writing the time against this mark.

"When dropping bombs remember they will only function if fused.

"If a crash is inevitable, and you can save anything, four things should take precedence—pigeons, emergency rations, Very's lights, and the Red Cross outfit.

"Learn how to tie a bowline. This is the simplest, quickest, and most reliable knot for making fast your machine to a towline. Learn other knots too.

"Study the methods of handling machines on the slipway, both going out and coming in. You may be in charge of this operation some day, and the responsibility will be yours.

"In short, make this the Moral:

"Know the boat and all that therein and thereon is, thoroughly, and its capabilities and efficiencies, if you wish to become not only a good pilot, but capable of command. This information is acquired from time spent in the sheds and not from time spent reclining on wardroom settees."

The wireless operator had climbed into his place and sat facing forward on the right-hand side of the boat immediately behind Billiken. He had his wireless cabinet, containing his instruments, before him, and could send and receive for a distance of from eighty to a hundred miles. He coded and de-coded all signals. The code-book had weighted covers, so that if the boat were captured by the enemy it would sink immediately when thrown overboard. He had an Aldis signalling-lamp for communicating with ships and other flying-boats. He also looked after the Red Cross box, which contained a tourniquet, first-aid kit, the sandwiches for immediate needs, the emergency rations for five days, and the carrier-pigeons.

The engineer was in his cockpit in the middle of the boat, surrounded by the petrol-tanks, a maze of piping, and innumerable gadgets. His duties were to keep an eye on the engines, see that the water in the radiators did not boil, and take care of the petrol system.

Two wind-driven pumps forced the petrol up from the main tanks to a small tank in the top plane. The engines were fed from the top tank by gravity, and the surplus petrol pumped up ran back to the main tanks. The engineer regulated the flow so that the petrol was drawn from and overflowed back into the main tanks in such a way that the fore-and-aft balance of the boat was maintained. If anything went wrong with an engine he had to climb out on the wing and, if possible, make a repair.

Once a flying-boat attacked a submarine from a low altitude and was met by machine-gun fire. A bullet drilled a hole in a radiator, and the water began to run out. Also the first two bombs dropped missed the submarine. The engineer quickly climbed out on the wing and put a plug in the hole, and held it there, while the pilot took the boat over the submarine again, and destroyed it with the second two bombs. The engineer held the plug in place until the boat landed in the home harbour.

All four members of the crew were now in their places. The working party attached a stout line to the rear of the trolley, knocked away the chocks, and rolled the boat out on the slipway to where it began to slope down into the water. Here six waders, in waterproof breeches coming up to their armpits, and weighted boots to give them a secure foothold when the tide was running, took charge, and steered the boat down into the water, the working party easing her down by tailing on the line.

A wader has not got a soft job. At some stations where there is a strong tide running waders have been washed off the slipways and drowned.

As the flying-boat entered the water the trolley, being heavy, remained on the slipway, and the boat floated off. The thrust of the engines urged her forward, and she taxied clear. Hobbs taxied out into the harbour, turned up into the wind, and opened the engines full out.

Driven by seven hundred tearing horse-power, the boat ran along the water with ever-increasing speed, a big white wave bursting into spray beneath her bow. As the speed increased, the boat was lifted on top of the water by her hydroplane step until she was skimming lightly over the surface. The air speed-indicator was registering thirty-five knots. Then Hobbs pulled back the control wheel, and the boat leaped into the air, the air speed jumping to sixty knots. Climbing in a straight line until he was at a thousand feet, he turned the bow of the boat out to sea.

As much doubt had been expressed about the practicability of flying the Spider Web Patrol, owing to the great number of changes in course and the absence of lightships and buoys, it was decided to do the patrol without any windage allowance. We made the North Hinder light-vessel dead on, and then started on the Web. Finally, as the wind was westerly, we fetched up on the Dutch coast, the low white sandhills of which I now saw for the first time. Coming back against a head-wind, it took so long that I thought at first that somebody had moved England, and being very tired, I lay down in the bottom of the boat and had a sleep.

I was awakened when we were in sight of the Shipwash light-vessel—a vessel with a single black ball as a day mark carried at the mast head. She was eighteen sea miles from Felixstowe, four miles off the route from the North Hinder, and many a pilot, bathed in perspiration with the stress of handling his boat in bad weather, or coming in out of the North Sea against a head wind with nearly empty tanks, has been cheered by the sight of the short dumpy boat champing at its anchor chains.

We saw no submarines on this patrol, but it proved that there was no difficulty in flying the Spider Web under ordinary conditions.

II.

After the first patrol had been carried out four more pilots volunteered for the War Flight, and two patrols were carried out on April 15th. It was on the fourth patrol, on the 16th, that Billiken Hobbs, booming along in the Web at the thousand foot level in Old '61, sighted the first enemy submarine.

The commander of this U-boat was gaily navigating along on the surface, fully blown, at a position twenty miles north-east of the North Hinder. He was feeling quite at ease, for the visibility was good and the surface of the sea was clear; he was too far out to be molested by trawlers, and if destroyers hove in sight he could dive to a depth of 45 feet in ninety seconds. The hull of his boat was painted grey and the decks black, making it very difficult to see.

Had he been expecting trouble he would have been running awash—that is, with the conning-tower alone showing above water, and with one electric motor and one Diesel-engine going. He could then have done a "crash" dive in about thirty seconds, going under with hydroplanes hard down, full weigh on, and taking in water ballast.

But he did not know about the flying-boats or the Spider Web.

He was standing in the conning-tower beside the look-out man. He may have been thinking of his sweetheart at home, or the faces of the men and women he had drowned, but he certainly was not keeping a good look-out. For he suddenly saw a black shape like a great crow in the distance, and immediately afterwards a long grey boat, fitted with wings, passed immediately over him.

When the crew of the flying-boat first sighted the submarine the second pilot fired two recognition signals, and as no answer was made Billiken decided it was a Fritz. He took the flying-boat across it at the height of eight hundred feet, but the second pilot in the front cockpit, not having been trained in bomb dropping, failed to release the bombs. Swinging the boat round in a split-all bank he again passed over, but again the second pilot failed to pull the release levers, pulling instead at the bowden wires, which came away from their fastenings.

Recovering from his astonishment, the Commander of the submarine realised that the flying-boat was there with no very friendly intentions, and tapped the look-out man beside him on the shoulder, at which signal the latter dropped through the hatchway in the conning-tower down into the boat. The Commander then pressed a button which rang the alarm bells below, and the men at the hydroplane wheels and ballast cocks caused the boat to dive.

As she began to submerge he shut down the hatch of the conning-tower and the submarine slowly vanished from the sight of the infuriated Billiken.

The second pilot, poor lad, was killed in a small float seaplane a short time afterwards, by ramming a flying-boat with which he was practising fighting, and so had no second chance at a submarine.

When the submarine was sighted the wireless operator had got off a quick signal to the station, so when the first faint intermittent roar of the twin engines of Old '61 could be heard, and she was seen as a small black speck over the wreck of the Dutch steamer Juliana, mined early in the war, the whole ship's company seemed to have found work to do on the slipways and concrete area. Ten men were preventing each other from coiling down a hawser, twenty men were noisily rolling empty petrol barrels about, and innumerable men were shifting trolleys or merely standing still and trying to look busy.

The sheds and the workshops were deserted.

As Billiken boomed in over the harbour and shut off his engines to glide down, somebody on the slipway cried: "He's dropped his bombs." And everybody cheered. And then a man with binoculars shouted: "He hasn't dropped them," and thrust the glasses into the hand of the man next to him so that he could verify it.

When the motor-boat had taken Old '61 in tow and tied her up to a buoy, the crew were brought ashore. The two pilots were almost mobbed by the officers, and the wireless operator and engineer were surrounded by great groups of men to whom they told the tale. It was not very long, however, before a flying-boat could come into the harbour after bombing a submarine without anybody looking up from his work.

There was considerable excitement in the mess that night. Great enthusiasm had seized everybody. They realised that there were submarines outside and that they could be seen and bombed, and there was a tremendous surge of pilots asking to join the War Flight. In all, another eight pilots were taken on.

And then the gilt was put on the gingerbread, for on the eighth patrol Monk Aplin presented a Fritz with four one hundred pound bombs. Fritz saw the flying-boat coming and ducked, but the swirl where he had gone down was still showing on the surface when the four heavy underwater explosions occurred right across his probable path.

The success of the War Flight was now assured.

Eager young pilots waited on the padre to gather wisdom concerning aerial navigation, and went about muttering strange things about "variation, deviation, triangle of forces, and courses made good." Uncle Partridge, the armament officer, was running a continuous performance for their benefit entitled: "Bomb the Boche Boys, or Frightfulness for Fritz." Spring-heel Jack Lyons, the wireless merchant, whose shore aerial was a makeshift affair attached to a stick on top of a shed, panicked for a proper wireless outfit. And C.C. Carlisle, the Old Man of the Sea, approving of the activity, put some ginger into the working party and the crews of the motor-boats.

The Old Man of the Sea, or Jumbo, as he was called, because of his appearance and methods on the football field, was an institution on the station. He was in charge of the working party which did all the pulley-hauley work, and of the piratical crews of the motor-boats who looked after the flying-boats when they were on the water of the harbour. He had all sorts of fascinating model sheerlegs and derricks for training his men, and on occasion headed the salvage crew or the wrecking gang.

He was a merchant service officer who had spent thirteen years at sea, part of the time fetching oil from Patagonia, and it was rumoured that he had also fetched from that salubrious spot his picturesque language. Some week-end trippers to Felixstowe, standing outside the barbed wire enclosing the beach, after watching and hearing, with eyes popping out and ears flapping, the unconscious Jumbo handling a working party bringing in the Porte Baby, wrote an anonymous letter to the Commanding Officer complaining of the earache, and adding, "it was Sunday too." This effusion was signed "A Disgusted Visitor." It was quite evident that the writer had never been with our armies in Flanders.

When the War Flight was first started Jumbo had palmed off on me, being new in the mess, all the halt, lame, and blind for a working party, for he had a habit of secreting away all the best men for nefarious jobs of his own. But after the first submarine was bombed his heart was completely softened, and with a great wrench, and protesting that his own work would never get done, he turned over to me one man who knew his job.

III.

It was on the eleventh patrol carried out on the 23rd that I bombed my first submarine.

On a pleasant morning, with a clear sky, a slight haze, and a 15-knot wind blowing from the north-east—ideal weather conditions for submarine hunting—Holmes and myself were shoved down the slipway in Old '61 and took to the air at six o'clock. Thrusting out into the North Sea on a course for the North Hinder, I steadied at the thousand foot level and throttled back until we were doing an easy sixty knots.

Looking back inside the boat I saw the wireless operator doing a pantomime of unwinding a reel, and I nodded to him, at which he began to let down the aerial through the tube in the bottom of the boat. This was a copper wire three hundred feet long with a weight attached to the end.

If the boat was on the water this trailing aerial could of course not be used, so a telescopic wooden mast was carried. The top of this mast when it was set up was about thirty feet above the surface of the water, and the aerial was led from the bow, tail, and ends of the upper plane to the tip. With this aerial the operator could send and receive for a distance of about thirty miles. Before these masts were carried a boat came down at sea through engine trouble near a light-ship. The first pilot made the flying-boat fast to the stern of the light-vessel and the wireless operator led the aerial to its mast. In this way the shore station was called up and a ship was sent out to tow in the disabled boat.

Boat on Patrol. 230-lb. bomb showing on machine from which photograph was taken.

After passing over the well-known buoys at the approaches to the harbour, we crossed a fleet of trawlers in the emergency war channel busily engaged in the pleasing task of sweeping up enemy mines laid the evening before by an optimistic Fritz from Zeebrugge. Fifteen minutes later we had the Shipwash four miles on our port beam, and were over the shipping channel which ran parallel with the coast. Here, as far as the eye could see in either direction, was a thick stream of cargo boats, of all shapes and sizes, ploughing along on their various occasions, a striking example of the might of the British Mercantile Marine.

My ears were now deadened to the noise of the engines, and I would not hear them again unless something went wrong and the note changed. I had got the feel of the controls and was flying automatically, and was unconscious of being in the air. It was merely like rushing over a very calm sea in a fast motor-boat, except for the absence of shocks and the wide horizon.

Leaving the shipping channel behind we pushed on into the open sea. Presently Holmes slapped me on the shoulder and pointed over the starboard bow. Some seven miles away were four white waves rushing across the surface of the water, apparently without any means of propagation. Taking my hands from the control-wheel I made the signal "wash-out," on recognising the bow-waves of four destroyers in line ahead pushing through the water at top speed, although the low, slim, grey ships were invisible, and of course no Huns would be playing about in such dangerous parts.

The wireless operator came forward—for the crew of a flying-boat can move about easily and change places if necessary—lifted the flap in the side of my flying-cap, and shouted in my ear "Hun submarine working. Heading towards her." All the four of us were now keeping a keen look-out, my own method being to swing my head from side to side with a slow steady motion, thoroughly searching the half-circle of the horizon, keeping my eyes focussed for a distance of four miles, as this was the average distance for sighting submarines, although they have been sighted from a distance of fifteen miles.

And then I saw a black speck on the water dead ahead. Involuntarily I shoved down the nose of the boat and opened out the engines. And then I saw that it was the North Hinder. As we passed over her the Dutch flag at her stern was politely dipped in salute. Changing course here we boomed off towards the Schouen Bank buoy on the first arm of the Spider Web.

Suddenly, with a nerve shock, a pleasant tingling which cannot be described, I saw a submarine dead ahead, about five miles away, fully blown, and running directly towards us. Slamming on the engines, and pushing the controls forward so as to lose height and gain the maximum speed quickly, I hurled the 4½-ton machine through the air towards the submarine at a mile and a half a minute.

As our own submarines operated in this area I did not know whether it was a Fritz, but fervently hoped it was.

I noticed that it was running at about six knots, in which case it was probably a Hun travelling on one engine and charging the batteries with the dynamo on the other. The submarine statement received from the Naval authorities the evening before had not mentioned one of our own submarines as working in this vicinity, but then submarines were a law unto themselves as regards time and navigation, and had a habit of appearing in the most unexpected places.

With the opening of the engines, the signal for action stations, the engineer thrust himself up in the rear cockpit and seized the stern guns in case hostile seaplanes had been sighted, the wireless operator quickly wound in his trailing aerial to prevent it being carried away if the boat came down near the water, and Holmes, who had seen the submarine, ducked into the front cockpit. He snapped back the lever which removed the safety device from the bombs and set the bomb-sight for height, speed, and wind.

When a bomb is released it travels forward on the same line as the machine, and, at first, at the same speed, but its speed forward gradually diminishes owing to the resistance of the air. At the same time it travels downwards owing to the force of gravity at an ever increasing rate of speed. It thus reaches the surface of the sea just after the machine has passed vertically over the spot. Therefore a bomb is released some time before the machine is vertically over the target, and this time is determined by the speed of the machine over the sea, the height at which it is flying, and the size, shape, and weight of the bomb. All these factors are worked out on the bomb-sight, and the bomb-dropper has only to pull the release-lever when two projections on the sight and the target are in line.

Holmes, in the front cockpit, looking over the sight and with his hand on the release-lever, waited.

The broad white wake behind the submarine began to diminish in length and width. The deck disappeared beneath a tumble of broken water. The conning-tower alone showed. And then the submarine dived.

It had all the air of performing a clever sleight-of-hand trick, and vanished with such lazy insolence that, arriving over the place where it had gone down one minute too late, our hearts were filled with astonishment and anger.

There was nothing to be done. "See you later," we said, and carried on, for we knew that the Spider Web would bring us back again to the same place, and we reasoned that the Commander of the submarine would say, "Here she comes, and there she goes," and would come to the surface shortly. There was no use waiting around the vicinity, for before Fritz came up he would search the air with a "sky-scraping" periscope, a periscope with the lenses so arranged that the whole arc of the heavens could be viewed.

Pushing on we sighted the Schouen Bank buoy in the distance through binoculars, and turned north up the Dutch coast. On the next two legs of the patrol, more or less parallel with the shore, we broke out the package of sandwiches and broached the thermos flask, taking this opportunity of having a drop of early lunch. Then after steering various courses as requisite, we again approached the position where the submarine had been first sighted.

She was sighted again three miles on the port bow, fully blown, her engines stopped, and the crew on deck enjoying a breath of fresh air. But now we were near enough to recognise her as of the U-B class, from the one gun mounted close before the conning-tower, the deck sloping down aft to the stern where it was awash, and the net-cutter mounted above the stem.

As we burst on towards the U-boat full out at a height of six hundred feet we could see puffs of smoke coming from the conning-tower. The crew were firing at us with a pom-pom.

And then I lost sight of the submarine.

But Holmes in the front cockpit, with his view unobstructed by the hull of the boat, could still see the submarine and guided me by hand signal.

Keeping my eyes in the boat, watching the cross level to keep on an even keel, the air-speed indicator to keep to a steady speed, and the eloquent hand—for under these circumstances the hand almost seems to talk—to make small adjustments in the course, I waited. For, to do good bomb-dropping the boat must pass on a line vertically over the submarine, on an even keel, and at a constant speed.

As the sights came on Holmes pulled the release-lever, which dropped all the bombs in quick succession, threw up his arm to show that he had done so, and then, leaning far over the side, saw the four bombs travelling forward and downward and burst on a line diagonally across the submarine.

When the dunt of the first explosion shook the flying-boat I heaved her over on one wing-tip, so that I could look down and back, and saw a line of foam completely across the submarine, so closely had the bombs fallen together. And then, getting into a side slip, I had to attend to my flying duties. The engineer saw the submarine heel over to port and disappear with men still on the conning-tower.

At ten o'clock I landed Old '61 on the harbour, and not knowing whether the submarine had been sunk or only damaged, I immediately sent out another boat. An hour later, piloted by Billiken, I again pushed out on patrol, but returned without having seen any signs of the U-boat, having put in during the day nine hours and fifteen minutes in the air.

IV.

The quality of the dental platinum, requisitioned from the dentists to make points for the magnetos, brought the first boat down at sea on the eleventh patrol. This platinum, specially prepared for dental work, was not up to the job, and Jimmy Bath and Tiny Galpin had to come to the water forty-five miles out from land. They were found by a destroyer and towed in.

John O. Galpin—known as Tiny, because of his comfortable proportions—was, as he said himself, followed by a hoodoo. He held at this time the record for the greatest number of engine failures out at sea in float seaplanes, and was quite hardened to spending the night adrift.

At this time, if he got up early in the morning on a fine day to go out on patrol, while he was having breakfast it would rain. If it did not rain, the engines would refuse to start. If the engines started, he would be delayed in getting away by finding there was no petrol in the tanks. If he got away, he would get to the point in his patrol farthest from shore and have engine failure. If he was picked up by a destroyer, there would be a collision and his machine would be sunk. And if none of these things happened to him, and he arrived home safely by air, all the submarines had been navigating in other waters.

He describes the state of affairs in 'The Wing' as follows:—

Cheerioh!

The Seaplane is my Hoodoo,
I shall not fly another,
It maketh me to come down on rough waters,
It spoileth my reputation.
Though I fly from the harbour
It returneth by towing.
Its Magneto discomforts me.
Its tank runneth over.
Its rods and its engines fail me.
Yea, even by mechanics is my name held in laughter.
Though I strive to overcome them
Its weaknesses prevail.
In the hour of my need its engines mock me
And bring me down with great bumpings,
And there is no health in it.
Verily, verily, if I continue to fly these things
I shall end by drowning;
For my friends they desert me
And call me a Jonah.
My luck smelleth to Heaven
And I am disheartened,
Therefore shall I turn my hand elsewhere
And become a Tram Driver.
For again I say unto you, that of all Pilots
I am the most unlucky,
Yea, d——d unlucky.

So distressed was he over his bad luck, and so sad was it to see one built for mirth so melancholy, that a small silk bag was made, a pebble from the beach put in it, and he was presented with this mascot, which he was told had come from Egypt. So great is the power of suggestion, that from that moment the hoodoo vanished. So gay did he become that on Guest Nights, after making one speech he would make another, and would make half a dozen more unless forcibly restrained.

Four Hun destroyers, after bursting out into the North Sea from Zeebrugge on the 30th of April, were on their way back when they were overhauled by Lofty Martin and Holmes in Old '61, about ten miles south-east of the North Hinder.

The North Sea was shrouded in mist, so at first the pilots saw only two broad white wakes. Then they made out through the haze two large destroyers steering on the same course as the flying-boat, and running at a speed of about twenty knots. They did not know at this time that they were Huns. Rapidly coming up with the destroyers from the stern, they were half a mile away when they were challenged with a green light, a single ball of fire shot up into the air, lighting up the mist with a sickly glare. The wireless operator in the boat replied with the proper recognition lights for the day.

The lather of foam beneath the bows of the destroyers increased, and the white tumbling wakes tailed out, as the engines of the destroyers were whacked up and the slim long ships thundered along at thirty knots. But the flying-boat was booming through the air at a good eighty, travelling two and a half miles to their one, and overhauled them as though they had been nailed to the water.

Immediately spurts of fire, followed by little black balls which opened out into nasty brown clouds, appeared in front of the flying-boat, and the pilots found themselves in the centre of a barrage of bursting shells.

Banking sharply to the right, Martin saw two more destroyers about a mile away, firing at him, ranged by the first two destroyers. He drew out of range and tried to get into wireless communication with Felixstowe, but failing, he returned to make an oral report.

Billiken and myself started out immediately to look for the destroyers. We saw no destroyers, but came upon a submarine of the U-C type twenty-five miles south-east of the North Hinder. She was just going under when we arrived. As she dived she made a sharp turn to port, and, as the bombs had been dropped a little short, she turned right under them. She could still be seen when the bombs detonated, apparently all around her.

So pleased were we with this little show that we steered a south-east course instead of a north-east course, fetching up at Margate instead of Felixstowe, and had to toddle up the coast to Harwich, where we arrived just in nice time for luncheon.

There was a great shortage of bombs about this time, for the number of bombs that had been dropped had depleted our store. There were only enough bombs left to arm one boat, so that each time a boat came in from patrol the bombs were taken off and put on the next boat going out. Uncle Pat, the armament officer, went about praying that a submarine would not be sighted.

It has been said that the Admiralty up to this time had rated bombs supplied to seaplane stations as "non-expendable stores," and that the officer in charge of the Main Bomb Stores, when notified of the shortage, had replied: "Impossible! Felixstowe? Why, I supplied you with sixteen bombs two years ago."

When I first arrived on the station, Uncle Pat confided in me that he had just ordered a 1½-horse-power electric motor to run his lathe, for which his soul thirsted. From time to time, as the months went by, he would draw me into a corner and tell me of his latest move—for he was a past-master in the art of intrigue—whereby the motor was to arrive from London by the very next train. And then one day there was great excitement: he had word that the motor was actually on the rail. Finally, some considerable time later, a square box arrived at the Stores, and upon the lid being removed a beautiful new grey 1½-horse-power electric motor, with pulley-wheel complete, was revealed.

But by this time Pat had left the station.

And now we lost the first boat at sea. Poor 8659, just handed over to the War Flight, was destined never to grow up and follow in the slip stream of Old '61. She was lost on her first patrol.

Monk Aplin and Rees had pushed off at six o'clock in the morning to look in the Spider Web, and should have been back in harbour at eleven o'clock. But they did not return. Wireless signals sent out to them were not answered.

The strain of sending out long patrols and waiting for the pilots to come back is almost greater than flying on them. I stood on the slipway with an ear cocked to catch the first faint beat of the engines.

I ran over in my mind all the possibilities.

Petrol: yes, the tanks had been filled. Engines: perhaps it would have been better to have changed the spark plugs in the port engine as the revolutions had not been quite good enough. Controls: they had just been overhauled, but the aileron control-wire, with the two broken strands at the fairlead, had not been renewed owing to press of work. Hull: leaking slightly, but nothing to worry about even if the boat came down at sea. Wind: the patrol was not too long for the wind blowing. And so on, and so on.

I followed the boat round the Web in my mind and wondered where she had come down and why, or whether she had run into a crowd of winged Huns.

I telephoned to the pigeon loft and warned them. A speedy messenger was standing-by in the wireless hut, for at this time there was no telephone. The look-out man on top of No. 1 Shed had answered my questions in the same way many times. The seaplane and wireless stations up and down the coast had been warned. And then I took a piece of paper and worked out a little calculation like this—

The engines used thirty-two gallons of petrol an hour and the boat carried two hundred and fifteen gallons in her tanks. She could stay in the air for six hours and forty minutes, and as she had left at six o'clock she would have to come down at half-past twelve through lack of fuel.

At twelve o'clock a little knot of anxious pilots were gathered on the slipway. I ordered two boats to be got ready and turned to the chart to work out probabilities and possibilities for the coming search. At half-past twelve, as the requests for information up and down the coast had drawn blank, two boats were boomed out to the Spider Web, and the Senior Naval Officer, Harwich, was asked to notify all destroyers.

When The Monk was out on the Web eighty miles from Felixstowe one of his engines began to give trouble. He turned for home, which he should have reached in an hour and a half, but at the end of this time he could see no land. As a matter of fact he was off his course and was flying more or less parallel with the coast, but out of sight of it. He shoved along, his failing engine gradually getting worse and worse, and his petrol tanks becoming exhausted.

His main petrol tanks finally gave out and he flew on his gravity tank, which contained sufficient petrol for forty minutes. He had just made up his mind that he would have to land through lack of fuel when he sighted a group of trawlers near the Haisboro' light-ship, and, on his last teaspoonful of petrol, reached them. They were working over a shoal. A thirty-knot wind was blowing, and a heavy breaking sea, with steep crests, was running. As the boat touched the water it was thrown into the air and came down again on one wing. The seas tore off a wing-tip and a wing-tip float, and as the boat yawed, burst across her in a smother of white foam.

A trawler came alongside, and the pilots shouted to the skipper and asked for assistance. But the skipper, to their astonishment, bawled through a megaphone—

"I won't rescue any d——d Huns."

And then the pilots remembered that two trawlers had been sunk a few days before by a submarine. They shouted to the skipper that they were English, but he replied—

"If you're English, give us a sight of the Union Jack."

Flying-boats do not carry a flag, but the skipper would not be convinced. The fins of the boat had been damaged and the water was pouring in. The bilge pump could not keep the leaks under. When the boat was in a sinking condition The Monk thought of throwing across his naval cap, and when the skipper had fished it out of the water and examined it, he put a dingey out and took off the crew. An attempt was made to salve the boat, but without success, and she was a total loss.

Aplin, known as The Monk, because of the way his hair grew, or rather, did not grow, received a severe blow, when landing, on the identical spot from which he took his nickname, and never flew on patrol again, turning over to school work, at which he made a great success.

And so ended April and the first eighteen days of the War Flight.

CHAPTER III.
THE PHANTOM FLIGHT.

I.

To appreciate the work of the flying service, it must be remembered that the pilot in the machine is only the spearhead of the weapon, and behind the spearhead must be a stout and reliable haft, so that the business end can be driven home with full effect.

The helve of the haft consists of the carpenters who true-up, inspect, and repair the machines; the engineers who clean, test, and keep the engines in order; the armourers who adjust the bombs and machine-guns; and the working party who push about the boats and fill the tanks with petrol.

These men constantly worked against time at night, for long periods at a stretch, frequently rocking on their feet with fatigue, engaged on work which had to be done honestly and without mistake, for on it depended the lives of the crew, the safety of valuable material, and the success of the operations.

In the popular mind all work done by the flying service seems to be credited to the pilot, and the work of the men behind him gets overlooked—work which is hard and exacting, and with little honour and reward. Owing to the shortage of machines, and the booming out of patrols in the summer months from three in the morning till ten o'clock at night, the men were driven at high pressure.

On the afternoon of the last day of April the Engineer Chief reported that the engines of one of the boats had to come out and be replaced. It was a job that usually had taken four or five days. The bomb-gears had to be stripped, the wings unshipped, the petrol piping and water connections cast adrift, and the engines whipped out. And then the whole process had to be reversed. But the tom-tom was beaten, a War Council of the four Chiefs held, and in the grey misty twilight before dawn next morning the boat was rolled out on the concrete to have her new engines tested, the men who had shoved the work through in the fierce stabbing of the blazing yard-arm groups, standing about her, pallid, drooping, and haggard.

Two hours later she took the air.

'Twas May-day, and the happy pilots, Perham and Tiny, went off in her to look in the Spider Web. They were out past the North Hinder intently sweeping the horizon for signs of Fritz, when the engineer passed forward to them a signal pad, on which was scrawled—

"Sir, a float seaplane on our tail."

Perham popped up through the front cockpit like a Jack-in-the-box, and looked back. He saw a large and nasty-looking twin-engined machine right behind, and the smoke of tracer bullets lacing the air. On his frantic signals, Tiny shoved forward the controls, and dived for the water at a rate of knots. Just above the surface he made a sharp right-hand turn.

The Hun dived after them, all guns going, but failed to get a burst home. He flashed past when the boat changed direction. Having lost the advantage of surprise, the Hun pilot carried straight on, and quickly disappeared at high speed towards Zeebrugge, both propellers rotating briskly.

This Boche, when he got back to his base, must have told tall tales of the encounter; he was finally interned in Holland, where he was met by Perham, who unfortunately also became a guest of the same neutral country some time later. The flying-boats were painted a light grey, and the enemy pilot was spreading the pleasing report that it was no use attacking them, as they were made of armoured steel. He knew this, he said, because he had attacked one at close quarters, and had seen his bullets bouncing off. As a matter of fact, a careful examination of the boat failed to bring to light any traces of bullet holes.

Retribution fell upon us on this day for the loss of 8659, for it was found that she should have been sent to the seaplane station at Killingholme, and sundry unjust people, accusing us of performing the act of hot-stuffing, demanded one of the War Flight's precious boats in lieu thereof. Two "alien" pilots arrived and picked out our newest and best, a boat which had just been painted, provided with wireless, and fitted with all possible conveniences and comforts, and in spite of our shrieks of protest shoved her down into the water and flew her away.

Seven enemy submarines were sighted and five bombed during the month of May; the first attempts to convoy the Beef Trip were made, not very successfully; and the first anti-Zeppelin patrols were carried out.

The Beef Trip, as it was called by the pilots at Felixstowe, or the Dutch Traffic, as it was known officially, was a convoy of merchant ships which ran two or three times a month between England and the Hook of Holland, and was alleged by the aforesaid pilots to carry Dutch beef to England and English beer to the Dutch.

In the dark hours of the chosen morning fifteen or sixteen cargo-boats would gather in X.I. channel near the Shipwash, and would be picked up there by destroyers and light cruisers from Harwich. The merchant ships would get into formation and start across the North Sea. The keen destroyers, sharp as needles, would zigzag and throw circles around them, like a group of rat-terriers chasing a cat around a knot of old ladies. They did this in order to intimidate any submarine commander out pot-hunting. While the swift light cruisers, stately and imperturbable, would boil along well out on the dangerous flank, apparently ignoring the fuss and fury of the show going on near them, but keeping a good look-out in case a striking force of Hun destroyers made a snatch at the convoy.

At the Hook of Holland another fleet of cargo-boats would be waiting in neutral waters to be escorted back, and the whole circus would start off again for England.

The pilots of the flying-boats patrolled the ever-changing route the night before, in case a hungry Fritz, bent on sinking the beef and beer, was lying in wait, and the following day would provide an aerial escort for the convoy, looking out for submarines, enemy seaplanes, which might desire to lay explosive eggs on the ships, or Hun surface craft.

When attacking single ships Fritz endeavoured to close to a range of from three hundred to six hundred yards before firing a torpedo. But when attacking a convoy they fired at ranges between five hundred and a thousand yards, and sometimes longer, in which case they did not pick out an individual ship, but merely fired into the brown. They waited in front of a convoy until the ships were sighted, and then submerged, therefore the pilots in the flying-boats flew in great loops from from five to ten miles in front of the surface craft.

Destroyers on Beef Trip.