Australian Flying Corps

Chapter 1: Two airmen

The aircraft is all very well for sport—for the army it is useless.1

Lieutenant George Merz died in a Mesopotamian desert on 30 July 1915. Armed only with revolvers, he and his observer, a New Zealander named Lieutenant William Burn, fought a running battle against Arab tribesmen across several kilometres of sand before they were killed. Their broken down aircraft marked the place at which the fight began, but only those who killed them knew where it ended. Their bodies were never found. More than three years later, on 4 November 1918, another Australian flier, the former artilleryman and thrice-decorated Captain Thomas Baker, pilot and flight leader, was killed in combat, shot down over the Western Front in the war’s last week.

Both men were members of the Australian Flying Corps (AFC) but their experiences could hardly have been more different. Merz was the first Australian airman to die on operations, Baker one of the last.

Merz was let down by his equipment. Wartime aviation was only a year old when he died and his machine was completely unsuited to operations in Mesopotamia. A proud airman, he died not in the sky—conflict’s newest arena—but on terra firma, its oldest. He had never fired a shot in aerial combat or even seen an enemy aircraft. On his last flight, he took off alongside one other machine, from which he soon became separated.

Baker, by contrast, died in a fight involving more than twenty aircraft, in which another two Australians and perhaps eight German fliers lost their lives. In his war flying career Baker scored twelve victories, and on his last day was leading a flight on a squadron-strength operation.

Baker had already served more than two years as a soldier; in this and in other respects he was typical of Australia’s airmen in the closing months of the war. Merz, too, was typical of the AFC fliers of his era—he was among the earliest Australians to qualify as a pilot in the flying corps, and while Baker first took to the sky over wartime England, Merz’s first experience of flight was over a bayside Victorian grazing property on Melbourne’s outskirts. It was there, rather than in the distant theatres of war in which he and Baker fought and died, that the AFC’s story began.

• 1. General Foch quoted in K. Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia 1909–1918, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1971, p. 42.

Chapter 2: From Point Cook to Kut

It was a feature peculiar to the Mesopotamian front at that time, that one was only safe, except for Arab snipers, within the precincts of one’s own camp.2

Few Australians had flown in 1914, but aircraft held a fascination that drew large crowds to a series of demonstration flights in various state capitals. From above the mass of spectators pilots could see far beyond the showgrounds over which they flew. Height brought the distance into view and military balloonists had gone aloft to see over enemy lines since the 18th century. Their craft were, however, subject to the drift of the wind or were tethered to the ground. Powered aircraft, on the other hand, had the potential to transform warfare, and the primitive machines of 1914 were on the cusp of a rapid evolution.

In 1909, five years before the war began, the Australian Government had offered the considerable sum of £5,000 to anyone able to build a flying machine suitable for military use. The money went unclaimed but the idea that Australia should possess military aircraft remained alive and recruitment for an Australian Flying Corps began in London in 1911. Of those who answered the advertisement for ‘mechanists and aviators’, two—Henry Petre and Eric Harrison—received postings to Australia.

Described by a friend as being possessed by ‘aircraft fever’, Petre abandoned his London solicitor’s practice to become a pilot. In early 1913, as a newly appointed lieutenant and the inaugural commanding officer of the Australian Army’s Central Flying School, he covered hundreds of kilometres on a motorcycle seeking a suitable site for an airfield. Canberra’s Duntroon area had been recommended but Petre, declaring it too hilly for safe flying, headed to Victoria, where he settled on the flat country at Point Cook, south-west of Melbourne.

Among the five aircraft that made up Point Cook’s original complement was a Bristol Boxkite. For the next three years pupils at the Central Flying School learnt the rudiments of their trade on this ‘mass of booms and struts and wire’.3 The first of them, four officers—Captain Thomas White and Lieutenants Richard Williams, David Manwell and George Merz—arrived on 17 August 1914, just two weeks after Europe went to war. Before them was a task as novel as any ever undertaken by Australian service personnel.

They experienced flying at its most basic. Lessons were conducted almost entirely within the aerodrome’s boundary at an altitude of between 15 and 60 metres, usually at dawn or dusk when there was no wind. Williams was the first to earn his wings. Ahead of him lay an illustrious career in Australian military aviation. Very different futures awaited the others of his class. In late 1914, however, it seemed that the war might pass the AFC’s first airmen by. White lamented that they ‘could find no active service openings where we might be usefully employed, as our Government at that time had no intention of sending a flying unit overseas’.4

Within months, however, intentions changed. A Turkish threat to the oil-rich and strategically important Shatt-el-Arab region at the head of the Persian Gulf opened a new theatre of war and signalled the beginning of a campaign whose objectives shifted until over-reach and misplaced ambition led to disaster. In February 1915 a group of Australian airmen, mechanics, drivers and other ground staff were committed to the fighting in this scorching, wind-swept corner of southern Mesopotamia. Known as the Mesopotamian Half Flight, the Australians, under Petre’s command, were joined by two English pilots when they reached the British held port of Basra in May 1915. Their arrival coincided with preparations for an advance northwards along the Tigris River.

At that stage of the war, while aerial tactics were being tested in the skies over the Western Front and aircraft development was proceeding apace, things in Mesopotamia were considerably less advanced. In what was regarded very much as a sideshow by senior British officers, resources were limited. Badly needed though they were, the aircraft placed at the Half Flight’s disposal, three ageing Maurice-Farmans, were hopelessly unsuited not only to the climate but to war-flying in general. In the coming campaign, however, they proved valuable simply because any aircraft were better than none and in Mesopotamia in 1915 the Turks had none.

On 31 May 1915 Petre and a New Zealander, Captain H. Reilly, flew the Half Flight’s and the AFC’s first operational mission, a reconnaissance over Turkish lines. A fierce wind buffeted their aircraft on its outward journey, slowing it to less than 50 kilometres an hour. On the return flight the airmen dropped bombs on Turkish troops as the same winds sped them homewards. Subsequent operations followed a similar pattern. As the British advanced along the Tigris the airmen carried despatches between the front and Basra and made daily reconnaissance flights over Turkish positions.

In July a further two aircraft, Caudrons, characterised by White as ‘mere toys more suitable for a flying school than for active service’, arrived in Mesopotamia.5 At the end of the month Reilly and Merz flew them 160 kilometres from Basra to support ground operations in the battle for Nasiriyeh. On their return flight the machines became separated and both were forced down by faulty engines. While Reilly and his observer made it back to Basra, Merz and Burn were set upon by the tribesmen who killed them. Reilly found their wrecked Caudron when he flew over the area a few days later, but of the two airmen there was no trace.

With Nasiriyeh now in British hands, Baghdad, still 320 kilometres distant, seemed to the British commander Lieutenant General John Nixon to be within reach. Against all advice he resolved to capture the city. Towards the end of September British forces captured Kut in an audacious, cleverly conceived attack. Now less than 200 kilometres from Nixon’s prize, the Half Flight, having been incorporated into the Royal Flying Corp’s (RFC) No. 30 Squadron in August, began flying reconnaissance in preparation for a strike on Baghdad. When Petre flew over the city in early October he found it almost empty of Turks. Heartened, Nixon’s army continued northwards, all the while increasing the length and vulnerability of their supply lines until they stretched almost 500 kilometres back to the Persian Gulf.

To disrupt Turkish communications the British decided to destroy the telegraph lines leading into Baghdad. This dangerous mission required an aircraft to land beside the wires and its crew to cut them. White and Captain Francis Yeats-Brown volunteered and flew the operation on 13 November. Their maps showed the telegraph lines and the road to Baghdad to be some distance apart. The reality was different. Seeing the wires and road adjacent to each other and Turkish military traffic in the vicinity, White brought his aircraft down, but crashed on landing. Yeates-Brown managed to destroy one telegraph pole while White fought off a group of Arabs coming at them from a nearby police station. With no means of escape, deep in enemy territory and under fire, their position was impossible. Both men were taken prisoner and spent the rest of the war in Turkish captivity.

Less than a fortnight later British forces began their assault on Ctesiphon, the last major obstacle before Baghdad, just 25 kilometres away. Defeated by a well-sited and reinforced enemy, they were forced back to Kut, surrounded and besieged. Petre escaped but returned on many occasions as attempts were made to supply Kut’s garrison by air, the first such operation in aviation’s short history. The task, however, was beyond No. 30 Squadron’s worn-out aircraft which, having had the freedom of the skies for so long, were now being challenged by German machines. Kut’s defenders held out for five months before surrendering in April 1916. Among the 13,000 British and Indian prisoners taken by the Turks were nine of the Half Flight’s Australian mechanics. When the war ended more than two years later just 2000 of the prisoners emerged from captivity. Only two of the Australians survived.

• 1. T. W. White, Guests of the unspeakable, John Hamilton Ltd, London, 1932, p.38.
• 2. Captain Harry Cobby, A. H. Cobby, High adventure, Kookaburra Technical Publications, Dandenong, 1981 edition, p. 22.
• 3. Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, p. 43.
• 4. White, Guests of the unspeakable, p. 28.

Chapter 3: Australians over the Holy Lands

I saw it-watched it. Even in the heat of battle, there is an irresistible fascination about seeing a machine, ours or theirs, hurtling to its doom.6

Australia was alone among the British dominions in establishing its own flying corps. On such a vast but sparsely populated continent aviation's potential was obvious and the idea of using aircraft to help in the country's defence appealed to many military and political figures. Their having played a vital reconnaissance role in the opening days of the war in Europe and in Mesopotamia proved the aircraft's value and while the Half Flight's campaign had come to an inglorious end, at Point Cook the AFC was growing.

While aircrew trained at the Central Flying School, the men charged with keeping them in the air had learnt their highly specialised trades elsewhere. If he knew about aircraft rigging or internal combustion engines a man's entry to the AFC was assured, but the Corps needed skilled men of many callings. The skills of the artisan and tradesman were those most readily suited to servicing the aeroplanes of the war's early years, and woodworkers, patternmakers, boat builders, metalworkers and coppersmiths were some of those whom the flying corps actively sought out.7

Few men had any previous acquaintance with aircraft. At Point Cook drill and basic military training occupied most of their time, and apart from learning how to swing a propeller, the first ground crews left Australia without having worked on aeroplanes.

Thursday 16 March 1916 dawned fine and cool over Melbourne. At the port a flag-waving crowd watched as tugs guided HMT Orsova from its berth out into the bay. Among those on board vying for a vantage point as the docks receded were the airmen and mechanics of No. 1 Squadron AFC, the first complete Australian flying unit to deploy overseas.

Upon reaching Egypt ground crews were dispatched to the two local British squadrons for instruction. Having never been taught gunnery, photography or bombing, some indeed never yet having flown, the squadron's airmen too had need of further training before they were considered ready for operations. Most were sent to England. When they reformed, the squadron's three flights were sent to widely separated stations in north-eastern Egypt, from which they patrolled over the deserts on both sides of the Suez Canal.

Already disadvantaged by their inexperience, the novice airmen flew markedly inferior aircraft to the German Fokkers and Aviatiks being used on that front. Described by Flying Officer Hudson Fysh as 'that poorest of all offensive, or defensive aircraft', the Australian B.E.2cs were so stable in the air that it was difficult to coax them out of straight and level flight. Against a faster, more manoeuvrable enemy, such reliability was a curse. The Australians, said Williams, depended 'mainly on luck'.

No. 1 Squadron had yet to operate as a complete unit when, in July and August 1916, some of its airmen flew in the skies over Romani with the Royal Flying Corps' No. 14 Squadron, playing an important role in the victory that brought an end to Turkish designs on the Suez Canal. Three months later, in November 1916, No. 1 Squadron was at last brought together. By then the British armies, including the Australian Light Horse, had crossed the Sinai to the Palestinian border. Beginning with photographic flights over Turkish lines, No. 1 Squadron's operations soon took a more aggressive turn when they bombed Beersheba on 11 November in the heaviest raid yet seen in the Middle East.

Despite the superiority of their machines, the Germans rarely challenged the Australians as they reconnoitred and raided, sometimes deep behind Turkish lines. During the battles for Magdhaba and Rafa in December 1916 and January 1917, Australian and British aircraft bombed and machine-gunned enemy troops unmolested. At Rafa one airman came face to face with the aftermath. Flying over the town after the battle, Stanley Muir saw scattered groups of Bedouin scavenging weapons and ammunition. When engine trouble forced him to land, he found trenches piled with Turkish corpses.8

Muir was lucky to have come to no harm during his unexpected sojourn in Rafa. Others forced down behind Turkish lines by a faulty engine or enemy fire faced a violent death at the hands of Arab tribesmen or an indefinite period in Turkish captivity. More than once, fellow airmen risked everything to rescue them.

Before the first attack on Gaza, No. 1 Squadron pilot Reg Baillieu and his observer Ross Smith landed and picked up a downed British flier from behind enemy lines.9 Both were awarded the Military Cross. A day later Frank McNamara performed a far more daring feat.10 In a damaged plane, with blood pouring from a deep wound in his leg, he saw Douglas Rutherford's aircraft on the ground.11 McNamara chanced a landing, and racing against Turkish cavalry also charging to the scene, he taxied his aircraft towards Rutherford, who climbed onto the cowling, grabbing the rigging wires as they tried to take off. But damaged by anti-aircraft fire, carrying the weight of two men and with an injured pilot at the controls, the Martinsyde crashed. The airmen abandoned the broken aeroplane and made for Rutherford's B.E.2c. Just as the Turks began shooting, the biplane struggled into the sky. On the point of fainting from blood loss, McNamara fought unconsciousness for 110 kilometres before making a safe landing and passing out at the controls. For this death-defying rescue McNamara received the AFC's only Victoria Cross.

During the opening months of 1917 the war in the Middle East stalled before the Gaza-Beersheba line. Australian and British aircraft played a critical role in the first Allied attempt to take Gaza in late March, but the Turks held on. By then the Germans were increasingly willing to give battle. They, said Bull, 'have the very latest aircraft which we have not got. The "heads" do not seem to think they are needed on this front'.12 Clearly they were. More time passed, however, before they arrived.

The air war was becoming more dangerous, but men remained keen to join the AFC. In the months before the Gaza fighting No. 1 Squadron lost some of its most experienced airmen and mechanics to training squadrons in England, where three AFC squadrons were being prepared for service in Europe. To retain its fighting strength the squadron took in new recruits, many from the Australian Light Horse, which also contributed significantly to No. 2 Squadron's ranks.

In April 1917 the Turks repulsed a second Allied assault on Gaza. From high above the battle, airmen watched a panorama of war unfold. Flying the first reconnaissance over the front, Williams, from kilometres away, noticed steam coming from the tanks taking part in the assault. As they crossed the open ground between the lines he saw Turkish guns knock them all out. The next day he saw the enemy at much closer quarters when he led an attack on Turkish reinforcements. 'There was pandemonium', he wrote, 'men and horses ran in all directions … and bombs dropped anywhere in the vicinity could hardly miss a target'.13 Ground fire killed Norman Steele.14 But Williams was pleased nonetheless, writing later that five officers in five aircraft with bombs inflicted 'such damage on a cavalry division as to prevent it making an attack'.15

With the Turks still occupying Gaza, fighting subsided as the front settled into a six month stalemate. Both sides recovered their strength and prepared for the fight they knew must come before the British could advance into Palestine. While the armies readied themselves, the sky became the main battlefield. Reconnaissance and photographic work took on an even greater importance, and rivalry in the air intensified as both sides looked for signs of where the others' forces were concentrated.

With the impending British attempt to break into Palestine drawing nearer, maps of the country between Gaza and Beersheba were compiled from photographs taken by No. 1 Squadron machines in constant danger of attack by German scouts. Escorts always accompanied reconnaissance, photographic or artillery flights, but their presence was no guarantee of safety. On 8 July two No. 1 Squadron machines were escorting a third on a reconnaissance flight when one was shot down and the pilot killed. Claude Vautin, the second escort's pilot, was forced down and taken prisoner.16 Only the reconnaissance machine made it back; five days later another was shot down and its crew killed.

German supremacy in the air was, however, on the wane. A new RFC Squadron came to relieve No. 1 Squadron of its reconnaissance duties, leaving the Australians to concentrate on bombing operations. Meanwhile the highly praised Bristol Fighters were beginning to appear in the Middle East, though not on the Australians' airfield. Instead, in late October 1917 two R.E.8s arrived at No. 1 Squadron. After he worked on one the following Saturday, Bull declared: 'I am not very keen on the R.E.8s though they are our most up-to-date machines in this Squadron'.17 Soon they were flying daily reconnaissance patrols, sometimes five abreast to meet the urgent need for photographs of the Turkish line.

The long awaited battle opened on the Turk's far left flank at Beersheba on 31 October 1917. Late that afternoon a daring mounted charge by the 4th and 12th Light Horse Regiments carried the Australians into the town, deciding the battle and opening the way for another attack on Gaza. Combat continued along the line into early November, but when patrols reached Gaza on the 6th they found the town, once so fiercely defended, to be free of Turks. They were retreating towards Nablus, chased by No. 1 Squadron. Ground crews worked day and night to keep planes flying and Australian aircraft joined British squadrons on heavy bombing raids behind Turkish lines; roads, railway stations and airfields were favoured targets. After British troops occupied Jerusalem on 9 December the ground war lapsed into a period of relative quiet.

1918 began well for No. 1 Squadron. Better aircraft began arriving. By the end of January the squadron had nine Bristol Fighters and by April, eighteen. The R.E.8s, Martinsydes and B.Es were gone. One pilot recalled of the new aircraft: 'you could use it for any old job going-fighting, bombing, reconnaissance, artillery co-operation'.18 His casual description belies the fliers' and mechanics' happiness at the prospect of flying and working on these powerful machines. 'A better job than the R.E.8', said Bull, while on the other side a German diarist lamented 'Our machines are no longer a match for the English'.19

After seventeen months of war flying the Australians in the Middle East at last had an aircraft the better of any they would meet in combat. From then on the squadron carried out most of the Army's distant reconnaissance operations and all of the photography for map making. They also went after German aircraft, seeking combat when once they would not have dared.

Lieutenant Stan Nunan flew with No. 1 Squadron in 1918, completing more than seventy hours of operational work before his first aerial combat. He described the experience in a letter to his family:

Holy Sailor! There loomed out of the sky 6 lovely big fat Albatross scouts. It didn't look too healthy they were about 1000 feet above us which is a big advantage … Well it was no good sitting there and being murdered, so we pulled our noses up and went straight into the Hun formation … they split up all over the sky. I followed two … Put a long burst into one from my front gun. He put his nose down vertically. I followed him down at about 200 miles an hour. My Ob. got both guns to bear … and ripped them into him … The Hun burst into flames and crashed in an orchard. Meanwhile his mate had been 'looking' at us from a distance. I turned on him and he tooled to the hills with another. I overtook them and they adopted their favourite tactics of dodging in and out of the hills and gullies … I circled with them for 15 minutes and had the time of my life … we put into them nearly 1000 rounds of ammunition and got so close at times that we could see the colour of their eyes … I enjoyed it immensely as soon as I got over the first touch of stage fright.20

Nunan's success in his first combat speaks to his training, his already lengthy experience of frontline flying, his airmanship and to the quality of the machine in which he flew. Williams regarded the Bristol Fighter as the best British aircraft of the war-fast, manoeuvrable, powerful and well armed: 'it could deal with any fighter'.21

Never approaching the scale or intensity of the air war over the Western Front, combat in the skies of the Middle East was, even so, a violent deadly affair. In terms that any airman in France would have understood, Leslie Sutherland explained, 'the idea of war-time scraps is to get hold of a chap who is not expecting you, and do him filth before he knows what it is all about'.22

Dogfights overturned this basic tenet of aerial fighting. Sutherland's recollection of the Middle East's biggest air battle was so vivid as to make his 'pulse quicken' more than a decade later:

The air is pungent with the smell of cordite; filled with the … staccato chatter of the Vickers, Lewis and Spandaus … Half-rolling, diving, zooming, stalling, 'split-slipping', by inches you miss collision with friend or foe … stuttering streams of lead, with only tracer bullets, or a crackle or smack in your wings or fuselage to appraise you of where the enemy fire is going, or has gone. A Pfalz flashes by, and down, with a Bristol on his tail … bullets thud into the tail of the Hun … (he) zooms, and turns in an endeavour to shake the Bristol off his tail. In vain. There is a wilder, more violent noise. The Hun machine is hurtling earthwards, not diving or spinning. Not trying to evade its pursuer. Hurtling … Finish.23

In such free-for-alls and in the more calculated attacks by one airman against another were the Germans driven from the skies over the Middle East. Thus blinded to their enemy's preparations, the Germans and Turks never saw the vast British build up along the Mediterranean coast and believed until the end that the attack to drive them from Palestine would come elsewhere. Then, early on the morning of 19 September, Ross Smith, piloting No. 1 Squadron's giant Handley-Page, bombed El Afule's central telephone exchange and railway station, cutting Turkish communications. Soon British artillery was pounding enemy positions on Palestine's coastal plain, before infantry burst through the line, opening the way for cavalry and the Australian Mounted Division to charge northwards and cut off two Turkish armies near Nablus.

Within hours of the offensive beginning, Australian aircraft were flying over the battle, reporting the withdrawal of Turkish forces while also bombing and machine-gunning men and animals below. Flying in relays, Australian and British airmen killed relentlessly in what one called 'a day of slaughter'. More such days followed. Surrounded on three sides and with only one avenue of retreat, large numbers of Turkish troops tried to cross the Jordan, but the columns of humanity, animals and vehicles made easy targets for marauding airmen. Twenty thousand Turks on the Samaria-El Afule road faced fliers bent on their slaughter and when Australian Light Horsemen came upon them later in the day the traumatised survivors surrendered without a fight.

Flying dawn patrol on 21 September, Nunan and Allen Brown reported large numbers of Turks retreating along the narrow cliff-flanked road through the Wady Fara gorge.24 Having bombed the lead vehicles, the pilots and observers turned their machine guns on the trapped column from just metres away. Clive Conrick, Nunan's observer, saw the impact of his bullets on the terrified men clambering up the roadside cliffs. Then Nunan raked the column, remembering later the 'abject terror' on his victim's faces. Their ammunition exhausted, they flew from the scene as more Bristols appeared to continue the killing. Sutherland, in one of these machines, called it 'a bomber's, a machine-gunner's paradise'. The Australians destroyed the column's rear vehicles, and for the rest of the day bombed and machine-gunned the trapped men and horses in relays until 'the road was a shambles … littered with the bodies of the dead and dying …'25

Some Turks waved white cloths in a gesture of surrender, but airmen could not take prisoners and the slaughter continued into the next day. When infantry arrived expecting to meet a large enemy force they 'were absolutely appalled … they took a hundred prisoners-all that were left'.26 Writing in the 1930s, Sutherland described the killing at Wady Fara as 'not so much war as cold-blooded, scientific butchery', saying 'I feel sick even now when I think of it'.27

Under the weight of a sweeping British offensive and repeated, virtually unopposed air attacks, the Turkish armies in Palestine were in disarray. The British met little resistance as they advanced towards Damascus. Wherever airmen found bodies of retreating Turks, they attacked with machine gun and bomb. Finally, at the end of September a group of some 4000 Turks, too exhausted to move, simply sat on the road and awaited their fate as aircraft dived on them. Sated by the murderous days through which they had just lived, the Australian fliers took pity and held their fire.28 On 1 October cavalry and Light Horse units entered Damascus.

For the remaining weeks of the war No. 1 Squadron flew reconnaissance operations and attacked ground troops when the chance arose. On 26 October advance units of the British army and an Arab force entered Aleppo and five days later, on 31 October, an armistice ended the war in the Middle East. Four months later the men of No. 1 Squadron left their aerodrome for the last time:

We marched away to the railway station, but as we passed the hangers, many a head turned for a last look. There was the nose of a Bristol looking out of each.29

• 1. L. Sutherland and N. Ellison, Aces and kings, J. Hamilton, London, 193?, p. 213.
• 2. National Archives files A2023, A 38/8/188.
• 3. Captain Stanley Muir. F. M. Cutlack, Australian Flying Corps, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, vol. VII, p. 51.
• 4. Lieutenants Reg Baillieu and Ross Smith.
• 5. Lieutenant Frank McNamara VC.
• 6. Captain Douglas Rutherford.
• 7. Lax, One airman’s war, pp. 37–38 and pp. 36–37.
• 8. R. Williams, These are facts; the autobiography of Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, KBE, CB, DSO, The Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977, pp. 64–65, quote p. 65.
• 9. Lieutenant Norman Steele.
• 10. Williams, These are facts, p. 65.
• 11. Lieutenant Claude Vautin.
• 12. Lax, One airman’s war, p. 77
• 13. Lieutenant Leslie Sutherland, Sutherland and Ellison, Aces and kings, pp. 14–15.
• 14. Cutlack, Australian Flying Corps, p. 111.
• 15. Nunan, AWM 3DRL6511 (A) Item 1 of 3, letter 28 June 1918.
• 16. Williams, These are facts, p. 73.
• 17. Sutherland, Aces and kings, p. 211.
• 18. Ibid.
• 19. Captain Allen Brown.
• 20. Lieutenant Clive Conrick, C. Conrick, The flying carpet men, 1993, p. 139.
• 21. Sutherland, Aces and kings.
• 22. Ibid., p.235.
• 23. Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, p. 169.
• 24. Sutherland, Aces and kings, p. 273.

Chapter 4: The Western Front

Each Battleplane was equivalent in fighting value to 2000 men.30

Towards the end of January 1916 a young Australian artilleryman in Egypt watched ‘half a dozen planes circling, rising, dropping, banking and turning … all at the same time …’ and pondered joining the AFC when he returned home. Not long afterwards he sailed for France, where his gaze once more turned skywards:

… air fights are a several times daily occurrence now and it is good fun to watch ‘em … Our latest planes are wonderful … to see them go straight up till they stop, then come down tail first, turn a few somersaults, spin around on their own axis, loop the loop … Oh, blazes, don’t I want to be an aviator. I get … green with envy at times.31

A month later Thomas Baker, MM and Bar, transferred into the AFC. He was 21 years old.

Others like Baker felt a similar yearning. Verner Knuckey recalled that as a private in the Middle East he:

… used to lay on the sand and watch German Taubes bombing us or our own machines flying overhead … it gradually got a great hold on me … I wanted to try flying, often wondered if I had the nerve for the game.32

Not everyone who joined the flying corps, however, shared their passion. Harry Cobby became the AFC’s highest scoring pilot but confessed to having no particular interest in flying when he enlisted in 1916. He, like others, wanting something ‘different from the Infantry’ followed a couple of friends into the cockpit.33

Others chose to become airmen because they wanted to escape the squalid earth-bound world of lice, mud, dust, shells and snipers. However they came to be there, many who filled the AFC’s ranks had fought in the Middle East or in the trenches of France and Belgium before experiencing aerial combat.

In the skies over the front they found themselves in a struggle every bit as pitiless, dangerous and capricious as the war on the ground. Much had transpired since the earliest operational flights in 1914 when unarmed aircraft flew with impunity over enemy lines. From each side’s attempt to deny the other an aerial view of the country beyond their trenches rose the art of aerial combat. As the years passed airmen fought each other in ever more heavily armed and sophisticated aircraft. The advantage swung from one side to the other as tactics evolved and aircraft design and weaponry improved. When the three Australian squadrons reached England during the winter of 1916–1917 the Germans held the upper hand.

Before facing the enemy over France and Belgium, however, the Australians generally faced some eight months of training. Point Cook graduates, like everyone else, had to complete the RFC course before joining a line squadron.34

Their predecessors in the RFC, the Royal Naval Air Service and even No. 1 Squadron AFC, had been poorly served by comparison. Training for the British air forces in the war’s early years rarely prepared men for the rigours of frontline flying. Even later in the war, when training standards had improved, some men still received less instruction than they might have hoped. Cobby was sent to France without ever having done air gunnery while Stan Nunan claimed to have been rushed through a two-month course in three weeks.35 Not everyone lived to reach the front, however. In November 1917 Thomas Edols wrote while training England:

A poor chap was killed here yesterday … I had just looped when his machine shot down in front of me absolutely out of control with the wings folded back … he only missed me by about fifty yards, when I got down to him he was quite dead.36

Such dramatic accidents were hardly rare, but far more common were those from which the pilot walked or was carried away, alive but injured. Royal Flying Corps statistics tell us that the average trainee pilot destroyed two aircraft and wrecked six undercarriages.37 Harry Cobby crashed one of his machines into a stone wall while trying to take off from a small field:

Just as I got off the ground the engine spluttered and I hit the wall with my undercarriage and broke the machine in two, with the tail inside the field and the nose sticking in the ground outside. A piece of broken longeron … stuck into my thigh and made a nasty gash.38

He did not, strictly speaking, walk away, but his injury was not serious.

Nothing could militate against the collapse of a machine’s wings or a trainee’s inexperience, but by the time the Australians arrived in England training had advanced considerably. Most prospective airmen were taught the science of aviation and its many military adjuncts—gunnery, photography, battery ranging for artillery work and how to observe and interpret the ground from above. Experienced pilots lectured them on conditions over the front and on the latest tactics.

At a time when millions were in mortal peril whenever they were in or near the front line, some men weighed up the thrill and excitement of flight against the possibility of dying in an accident or in combat and accepted, perhaps even welcomed, the risks. With such powerful, gravity-defying machines at their command flying could be enormous fun. On one training flight a hesitant Fred Cornish was amused when his instructor:

… spotted some German prisoners working in the open ground. He stopped the engine and sang out ‘I say Old Bean, Give me the machine and we’ll put the bally old breeze up these old boshes’. Then we dived straight down on the beggars my word they did run.39

Such stunts showed pupils what a plane could do and gave them the confidence to perform these manoeuvres themselves. In the same letter Cornish explained:

Pupils who are more advanced are given tiny scouts … called pups to manage. These machines are the finest thing in the world to fly. You travel at about 100 miles an hour and can throw them about any how. Well these chaps … spoil … golfers strokes by flying low along the ground and suddenly zooming up over their heads. The sensation is absolutely fine you have your complete sense of speed and have to follow every curve of the ground. The practice makes a chap a jolly good pilot and gives him the confidence that will beat every German airman on any front.40

Towards the end of 1917 four AFC training squadrons—Nos 5,6,7 and 8—were established in England. The thirty-two pupils buried in English cemeteries, of which twenty-five lie at Leighterton, attest to the dangers associated with learning to fly; while Cobby’s comment on instructing being ‘much worse than flying in France’, speaks volumes about how risky it was to teach ‘hard flying enthusiastic learners of the art of air fighting’.41

The AFC’s No. 3 Squadron, equipped with two-seat R.E.8s, reached the front at Savy in September 1917 before moving to Bailleul to support 1 Anzac Corps in November. When the winter weather allowed they flew observation, photography and artillery ranging operations. At that time of year, however, poor weather often made flying impossible and, having experienced war in the air, many airmen greeted rain, mist and low cloud with relief. On one bleak day a No. 3 Squadron observer and former dux of Melbourne’s Wesley College, Owen Lewis, wrote ‘this morning I was pleased when the weather was fairly dud—I am afraid I am always pleased when that is so’.42 Bad weather meant rest and another day of life.

As expectations of a German offensive grew in the early part of 1918 the squadron spent more and more time photographing the line. Then they would drop their noses and dive, seeking men and transport to bomb and strafe. Ranged against them were hundreds of German machine guns and anti-aircraft batteries that could send fifteen rounds a minute to almost 5000 metres. Flying metal might tear into the pilot, sever crucial wires, hit the petrol tank or strike a vital part of the unarmoured engine. A shell need not score a direct hit to bring an aircraft down; scouts lurking high in the blinding sun or searching among clouds could be guided to a lonely two-seater by the tell-tale black smoke of anti-aircraft bursts.

Reflecting on the deadly business of studying the enemy from the air, Tom Cundall, the semi-fictional self of RFC Camel pilot Victor Yeates, mused ‘what a misfortune it was to fly RE (8)s! Why did they use the wretched things?’43 Yeates looked upon the unfortunates in these slow-moving observation planes as men condemned. Some Australians agreed. Horace Miller, looking around the cockpit on his first time in an R.E.8 wondered ‘if this confined space might hold my last moments of flight’.44

If Owen Lewis’ experience is any guide, then Yeates and Miller had a point. One of twenty Australian R.E.8 crewmen sent to France for experience with an RFC squadron during August 1917, Lewis was involved in five combats in six days before being shot in the legs and chest on the seventh. As he made a slow recovery the pilot with whom he had flown was killed in action.45

On 21 March 1918 the Germans launched their mighty offensive and swept across the old Somme battlefields around St Quentin. In early April No. 3 Squadron followed the Australian corps southwards to face the heavy German attacks on the area. They based themselves at Poulainville alongside the Australian Corps Headquarters at Bertangles. There, Owen Lewis, recovered from his wounds and back with the squadron, wrote of going for a walk with George Best.46

Finding that they got along, the two agreed to fly together.

The next day, General John Monash, then Commander of the Australian 3rd Division, wrote to his wife about the son of an old family friend:

I deeply regret that I have just a moment ago had word that Owen Lewis … has been killed. His plane came down in flames an hour ago.47

Lewis had teamed up with Best and on the pair’s first flight, a photographic mission, their aircraft’s engine, which had caught fire on an earlier flight with a different crew, did so again. Both were incinerated.48 At his Melbourne home five days later news of Owen’s death prompted scenes all too common in Australia during the war years. His brother Brian recalled he and older sister Phyllis ‘sobbed together … the foundation of our world had melted away.’ For five more weeks Owen’s letters continued to arrive, and long afterwards there came in a thick brown envelope a photograph of the dead boy’s grave.49

An airman’s existence was a curious one. Against the possibility of meeting such a gruesome end was the certainty when off-duty of safety and comforts beyond the hopes of ground troops. When asked by General Birdwood how he liked the airman’s life compared to the trench mortars from which he had transferred, Edols replied simply that it ‘was impossible to beat’, while Cornish regretted only that he ‘was not in the Flying Corps long ago’.50

At first glance the airman’s life appeared privileged—the thought that flying would take up a few hours a day leaving the remaining time for rest, safe behind the lines, must have been very appealing. But those long empty hours dragged. Airmen might sleep, go for walks, play tennis or some other game, eat or drink tea but real rest was elusive. Time on their hands meant time to think about the next job, about friends they had seen die or men they had killed. The transition from moments of extreme danger to hours of peaceful existence, sometimes several times a day, kept men in a constant state of exhaustion. Cundall wished the ‘times between jobs [could] be passed in oblivion’.51 Harry Cobby remembered the strain of continuous operations during the German offensive of 1918, remarking that ‘I could not eat, but champagne and brandy with an odd biscuit seemed good enough’.52 Alcohol was a crutch for many airmen when the strain of constant war flying began to tell. Little wonder that cadets sometimes commented on their instructors, who had already flown in combat, seeming ‘a little war strained’.53

On the ground the German offensive slowed and by May 1918 was defeated. In late June No. 3 Squadron began operations to support the coming assault on Hamel: flying long reconnaissance patrols, directing fire against enemy batteries and sometimes coming under attack themselves. On 4 July 1918, the day of the battle, Australian airmen patrolled, spotted for artillery and pioneered a new tactic by dropping ammunition to forward troops.

A month later the Allies launched what would prove to be their war-winning offensive. No. 3 Squadron’s R.E.8s dropped smoke bombs on the foggy morning of the battle’s first day and flew a constant round of operations throughout the remaining months of the war as the Allied armies chased the Germans from the country that they had occupied since 1914.

Until the very end R.E.8s remained favoured prey for enemy scouts and were often engaged in combat. In the hands of an experienced crew they could be a tough proposition. Few scout pilots relished taking on a two-seater single handed and No. 3 Squadron ended the war having shot down or damaged fifty-one German aircraft. Balanced against this were the losses. Eleven R.E.8s were shot down over enemy lines and many more suffered serious battle damage.54 Twenty-three members of the squadron lost their lives; almost all were airmen. On a May 1918 morning Jack Treacy saw one crew die when five German machines shot Henry Ralfe’s R.E.8 down in flames over Morlancourt Ridge. As Treacy watched, William Buckland, Ralfe’s observer, leapt from the inferno rather than be burned alive.55 With no parachute he was one of many World War I airmen forced to make that dreadful final choice. Some fliers carried a pistol with which to shoot themselves should they become a ‘flamer’.

Although they lacked the glamour of the single seat scouts, reconnaissance aircraft such as the R.E.8 were the mainstay of World War I aerial operations. In their observation role they fulfilled military aviation’s original purpose. And almost as quickly as they began studying enemy territory did the opposing side seek to destroy them or at least prevent their crossing the front. Specialist fighters—fast, compact single-seat scouts—were designed to shoot them down.

Two Australian scout squadrons, Nos 2 and 4, served on the Western Front. No. 2 Squadron was the first into action, reaching France on 21 September 1917. Flying D.H.5s, its pilots began patrolling the line shortly afterwards. Between operations the squadron spent its early months at the front practicing low-level flying.

Training gave way to reality on the wet, misty morning of 20 November when the Australians flew in support of the combined tank and infantry assault on Cambrai. Of such work a former scout pilot wrote ‘You got little credit for ground strafing, although it was the most dangerous, nerve-wracking, and perhaps most valuable work that scouts did’.56

Sitting in a cockpit where ‘the rush of wind and noise of your engine prevents you from hearing anything’57 pilots on strafes were deaf to the enormous volume of fire directed against them.

As they sped towards the ground, ready to kill with bombs and machine guns, enemy troops opened up on the diving aircraft. John Bell was shot through the chest and died of his wounds months later. William Robertson was brought down by a German pilot. Harry Taylor came down in no-man’s-land, picked up a rifle, began firing at German troops, was picked up by an advance British patrol, tried and failed to start another crashed aircraft and ended up at a casualty clearing station where he helped the medical staff before returning to the squadron. Leslie Ward broke his leg when his machine was brought down in German territory. He spent the rest of the war in captivity. Frederick Sheppard was shot down and wounded, and Robert McKenzie survived a crash landing when ground fire hit his petrol tanks.58

Of the eighteen No. 2 Squadron aircraft flying on the battle’s first day, seven were destroyed or severely damaged. Over the next few days another three pilots were lost to ground fire. On 22 November, Frederick Huxley brought down the squadron’s and the Australians’ first enemy aircraft on the Western Front. Just an hour later Richard Howard drove down two more and Roy Phillipps another. The following day Sydney Ayers was shot down. He died of his wounds a day later.59

During such intense fighting pilots could find themselves one moment firing on German troops and the next engaged by an enemy aircraft:

Coming out of a dive after dropping a bomb, I found 5 scouts above me … I attacked one scout who turned and fired … and then climbed up into the clouds. I fired … till I lost him. I then dived on the trenches to machine gun infantry, and on coming out of the dive, I saw [a] three-seater about 400 feet above me … with the two gunners standing up and firing at me. I zoomed up under him and fired …60

Flying at speeds beyond those ever travelled by most people of the time—a D.H.5 could do more than 160 kilometres per hour—much could happen to airmen in mere moments.

In the adrenaline-charged world of ground strafing, burdened by their own fear and tense with excitement, few pilots spared a thought for those whom they killed. Later, however, when they had time to reflect, some pondered the morality of their deadly work. Of Cambrai one AFC colonel was recalled to have said ‘it was not war this flying low, it was too deadly on the enemy, turning the machine guns on the infantry from the air at short range’.61

As the battle drew to an end so did No. 2 Squadron’s association with the D.H. 5s. In December they were equipped with the formidable S.E.5a, which they flew both on ground attack operations and high level patrolling for the rest of the war. A series of combats through February and early March yielded some victories for the squadron’s pilots but winter’s short days and inclement weather kept aircraft on the ground for much of the time.

While No. 2 Squadron were getting used to their S.E.5as, No. 4 Squadron, flying Sopwith Camels, arrived in France in late December 1917. They were stationed at Bruay, and made their first sorties over the lines on 9 January to escort photography machines and conduct an offensive patrol. Edgar McCloughry recalled the squadron using its early weeks on the Western Front to build the airmen’s confidence. They went on strafing runs, finding amusement in machine gunning ‘Bosche’ horse transport. McCloughry commented that the whole squadron ‘did nothing else but annoy the Hun on the ground’.62

During the winter, Australian scouts, when they could fly, engaged in low-level reconnaissance and offensive patrols, escorted photography aircraft and bombers and machine-gunned villages in which Germans were billeted behind the lines. ‘Hunland’, as airmen called the country on the German side of the line, was where most Western Front air fighting took place. German pilots rarely sought combat over Allied territory and north western Europe’s prevailing westerly winds often carried fights even deeper into German territory, where the ground was thick with anti-aircraft batteries. The flight over the lines might be relatively fast, but the flight back against a headwind—perhaps in a damaged machine, pursued by German scouts, chased by anti-aircraft fire or peppered by machine-gun bullets—could be a terribly slow one.

Encounters with enemy aircraft were common. Captain Manfred von Richthofen—the ‘Red Baron’— prowled these skies. A born killer, he, and his famed circus, like other such formations, existed only to hunt and destroy Allied machines.63 Sometimes they used two-seaters as decoys, what Cornish called ‘traps for young players’. ‘The old Hun is not what one could call brave but certainly he is a very crafty enemy’ he wrote.64 Experienced Allied airmen knew better than to attack a lone two-seater before searching the sky above with a thoroughness born of mortal fear. ‘There is a lot to learn and I have to go very canny for a little while yet,’ concluded Cornish.65 Perhaps he was familiar with his squadron leader, Oswald Watt’s, dictum that ‘At this game—those who live learn—and those who don’t, teach others by their mistakes’.66

As spring drove away the glum winter weather and preparations for the German offensive continued, aerial combats took place almost whenever Australian scouts took to the sky. But the battles were relatively tame. While the Germans, bolstered by the arrival of aircraft from the Eastern Front after Russia’s collapse, were sending up large formations, they were also avoiding battle, preserving themselves for the onslaught to come. When the advantage was theirs, however, they attacked.

On 16 March ten No. 4 Squadron machines bombed the Douai railway station. Returning home at 4800 metres, they were set upon from above by sixteen enemy scouts.67 In a desperate defensive fight one Australian, William Nicholls, was brought down and taken prisoner.68 Two Germans were sent plunging from the sky in flames and another spiralled towards the ground out of control. ‘Gerry Schafer’, wrote Cobby, ‘was shot badly in this fight’. He came home with dozens of bullet holes in his machine, a shattered windscreen and his guns destroyed. Having spun earthwards through more than 3000 metres of sky before crossing the line at ground level, Schafer made it home but ‘went all “goofy” and was not much use for some time’.69

Two days later a thick fog set in, making flying difficult and keeping all but a few aircraft on the ground. On 21 March the German offensive began. In a frantic round of combat flights the Australians fought German aircraft and dived to within metres of the ground to bomb and strafe German troops. Every available Allied machine was cast into the battle. Cobby described it as the busiest period of No. 4 Squadron’s career.70 Both of the Australian scout squadrons ran at a frenetic pace. The first sortie took off before dawn and the last finished after dark:

All this flying was done under 500 feet and our targets were point blank ones … the havoc caused by our bombs and machine guns (sic) fire was tremendous.71

Air battles took place from just above the ground up to more than 6000 metres. Ground strafing machines were set upon by German scouts, which were in turn attacked by Allied aircraft. No. 2 Squadron would cross the line at about 300 metres protecting those strafing even lower down before diving onto the advancing masses of German troops themselves.72

Their aerodrome became home to an assortment of other British units and aircraft: Dolphins, Bristol Fighters, and, said Verner Knuckey:

… our own squadron … [and] our neighbours 40th Sqdn with their S.E.5’s … we were all working day and night, [I] could not write even a note home, for the first time during my army career I used Field Service post cards in place of letter writing.73

Flying during these desperate days was a nerve-wracking experience. As Cobby recalled:

… the air was full of aircraft, and continuously while shooting up troops on the ground we would be attacked by enemy scouts. They would drop through the clouds and the mist, have a quick snap at us and would then duck back into the clouds again … The smoke of the battle mixed with the clouds and mist above, rendered flying particularly dangerous, quite apart from the risk of running into both the enemy’s and our own shells.74

Remarkably No. 4 Squadron had only two pilots killed in four weeks; two others were taken prisoner. Everyone else returned from sorties with their machines ‘shot to ribbons’.75

In June, two and a half years after having gazed in wonder at aircraft flying overhead in Egypt, Thomas Baker joined No. 4 Squadron. The Western Front was familiar to the young pilot, but he had never seen it like this during his years in the artillery:

It is quite funny getting back but not at all bad. … I went up to the lines yesterday and had a look around. Looks pretty desolate from above though. Am going on my first show tonight, which is looking after balloons or some such thing.76

Balloons, suspended up to more than 1000 metres in the air, carried a single observer in a wicker basket hanging under a giant gas-filled bag. From up there the observer could see for tens of kilometres and report on the location of enemy batteries and troop movements. Floating peacefully, tethered high above the trenches, balloons looked a tempting target, but they were heavily protected by anti-aircraft guns, machine guns and often scouts as well. Running the gauntlet to get within range of one was a dangerous business. Destroying a balloon counted towards a pilot’s score with the same value as an enemy aircraft. Nor, as Edols learned, were they always what they seemed:

… we were out over Hun-land and fell into a very nicely baited trap … they had a very tempting dummy balloon up, which we dived on. As soon as we dived four of us, we were dived on by twelve Huns all firing for their lives, a race for seven miles ensued … it was quite exciting.77

When ‘balloonatics’, as airmen called the observers, were in danger of being caught dropping to earth under a burning balloon, they jumped, deploying a parachute to arrest their descent. Even then they were not always safe. Herbert Watson gained a reputation for firing on observers once their balloon was aflame. He, said McCloughry, used to ‘annoy the Bosche in his parachutes and on one occasion severed the Hun from his parachute’.78

Rare though such killings may have been, the example illustrates just what a merciless affair the air war was. Successful airmen generally killed, as Sutherland found in the Middle East, when the enemy was unaware of their presence. ‘When an experienced pilot is out waiting for single enemy machines, the hostile pilot he is stalking is as good as dead before even a shot is fired’, concluded Cobby.79 At greatest risk were new men. More than 40% of No. 2 Squadron’s casualties had less than four weeks of frontline experience.80

Simply seeing other aircraft in the sky was an acquired art and even nearby machines could be invisible to a novice. Owen Lewis on an early flight ‘was bang on the lookout the whole time and could only distinguish the machines when they were quite close’.81 Cornish, having only been over the line a few times, wrote to his mother:

… we dived from about 17,000 to 12,000 I am blowed if I could see anything but people say that we chased away a few Huns. Our leader gave one of them beans. I wasn’t far behind and to think that I never saw anything really is very annoying.82

Sometimes even more experienced men found aerial combat confusing. Louis Strange remembered on one occasion being ‘blissfully unaware that I had shot down a Fokker’.83 No wonder that pilots with months or years of frontline experience found their victims among men who barely knew what was happening around them.

Aware that they were soon to face mortal peril over the battlefield, trainee pilots could be assailed by fear and doubt long before reaching a line squadron. Cobby recalled that were it possible he would have left nothing undone to delay his arrival at the front.84 Once there he felt a ‘physical shrinking from meeting the Hun’.85 A new pilot’s early days of flying over enemy country, remarked Cobby, were:

… characterised by … the sort of fear that robs a man of his initiative and determination, the two greatest factors in the character of a successful fighter.86

Patrol work over the lines did not always allay these fears, as many hours of flying might pass before an airman encountered enemy aircraft. Knowing that sooner or later it must happen only increased the tension. Cecil Lewis flew with the RFC and knew well the terror that gripped men facing a sudden and violent death:

It was the fear of the unforeseen, the inescapable, the imminent hand of death which might … be ruthlessly laid upon me. I realised … why pilots cracked up … nobody could stand the strain indefinitely, ultimately it reduced you to a dithering state, near to imbecility … always you had to fight it down, you had to go out and do the job.87

Cobby shot down his first German almost two months after reaching the front. In a turning fight he got into a favourable position and shot a Pfalz’s right wing off: ‘the machine went hurtling earthwards, and finally burst into flames when about 2000 feet from the ground’. Seeing a man die so horribly by his hand Cobby leant out of his cockpit and was ‘just about as ill as he had ever been’.88

Even in the crowded skies of mid-1918, Thomas Baker was also two months at the front before he managed to shoot down his first German. From then on his letters home recorded his growing ‘bag’. On 1 October he dived on the unsuspecting crew of a German two-seater, killing the pilot with his first burst and sending the doomed machine tumbling to earth. It was the fifth of his twelve victories.89

Holding one’s fire until sure of putting a burst in the cockpit and engine was the hallmark of a successful scout pilot. Thus, as Cobby found, airmen often saw their victims die. A pilot or observer might slump into his cockpit; might jump in agony from a burning aircraft, his clothes aflame; or might be sent plunging to earth, unharmed but doomed, in a crippled machine. Some men enjoyed aerial combat—Baker was such a one—but even the most enthusiastic must have been worn down by the pace of fighting in the last months of the war. His log book reveals that between 26 June and the beginning of November, apart from a period of leave, Baker flew on all but sixteen days, often on several sorties.

After the August offensive Allied squadrons combined to conduct great sweeps over enemy held territory, bombing rear areas, disrupting communications and attacking troops, stores and artillery batteries wherever they were found. German airmen also appeared in ever larger formations over the front. Strange recalled that, whatever was being said about an imminent German collapse, there was no evidence of this in the skies over the battlefield. ‘To us’, he wrote, ‘things looked just as critical as they did four years previously’.90

The two Australian scout squadrons participated in these sweeps with the Bristol Fighters of the Royal Air Force’s No. 88 Squadron. They would typically rendezvous over a conspicuous landmark—No. 4 Squadron’s Camels at 3000 metres, No. 2 Squadron’s S.E.5as at 4200 metres, and the Bristol Fighters above them all at 5500 metres—then fly up to 30 kilometres beyond the trenches, looking for combat.

In mid-August, as part of such a formation, Australian scouts bombed and strafed the German aerodromes at Haubourdin and Lomme under the protective cover of British Bristol Fighters and S.E.5as. Cobby flew on these raids and wrote of Harboudin:

[I] fired a red light to let everyone know the game was on, I put my nose further down and made for the nearest hanger … I let my first two bombs go from about fifty feet then circled out … to shoot up several Fokkers.

His friend ‘Bo’ King joined him on the strafing run.91 They came back at the hangers, firing until the machines inside caught fire. Then two extraordinarily brave Germans flew through the mass of Australian scouts, the observer firing at ‘everyone in sight’ but hitting no one. With most of the Australians out of ammunition the Germans flew on unscathed.92

In the war’s final months German airmen, now in dwindling numbers, were still capable of inflicting disaster on the Allies. On 5 September a No. 4 Squadron patrol of five aircraft was attacked by three formations of Fokkers, totalling about thirty aircraft, at 3300 metres. The Australian leader signalled to avoid action and dived away. His four comrades, either not seeing the signal or being unable to escape the Germans, were shot down. Only one survived to become a prisoner.

In October No. 4 Squadron replaced its Camels with Sopwith Snipes. In these aircraft the squadron destroyed thirty German machines in the last five days of the month. On one of these late October days the Australians fought in one of the war’s largest air battles, when fifteen No. 4 Squadron Snipes encountered some sixteen Fokkers. King shot down a German two-seater that crossed his path as he dived away from five pursuers. George Jones led three Snipes into an attack on ten Fokkers, destroying two.93 Arthur Palliser shot down three.94 Other Australians also claimed victories, ten Fokkers in all for the loss of Percy Sims.95 On 30 October in a similar fight King fought off four Germans. Zooming ‘up through their formation’ he turned in front of the highest enemy machine, which he had not noticed previously. It fell over on its back to avoid a crash but struck a second Fokker then climbing after King. Both fell to earth.96 In the same fight Baker shot down his twelfth victim.

On 4 November No. 4 Squadron’s Snipes escorted No. 2 Squadron on an attack against the German aerodrome at Chapelle-à-Wattines. Leading the formation back across the lines after the raid, the Snipes engaged twelve Fokkers of the famous Jasta Boelcke—one of the most successful German squadrons. When the Australians reformed after a few brief, chaotic minutes of battle, three were missing, among them Thomas Baker. The 21-year-old, a three year veteran of ground and aerial combat, was last seen diving and firing on a Fokker. He fell to one of Germany’s elite air fighting units in their last battle of the war. In far-away Adelaide, his home town, a pair of stained-glass windows dedicated to Baker’s memory flank the baptistery of St. John’s Church of England.97

Baker’s death preceded the armistice by seven days. He was one of some 175 AFC personnel to have lost their lives during the war, a seemingly low rate of loss by World War I standards.98 However, in a line squadron fewer than 10% of personnel—the airmen—engaged in combat. Their losses were comparable to those in the infantry. During the course of their eleven months at the front, No. 4 Squadron, for instance, had its fighting establishment wiped out twice over. Nos 1, 2 and 3 Squadrons suffered a similar rate of attrition.99

As the only Australian unit in the British Army of Occupation, No. 4 Squadron crossed the German border on 7 December 1918 and spent more than two months at Cologne. No. 2 Squadron remained near Lille until demobilisation and No. 3 Squadron ran an aerial postal service between various army and corps headquarters. By late February 1919, having handed over their machines and stores, the Western Front squadrons went to England before embarking for home in May. No. 1 Squadron preceded them, leaving Egypt in early March.

Over the burning Mesopotamian and Egyptian deserts to the Holy Lands and north-western Europe, Australian airmen went from flying run-down obsolete aircraft in 1915 to piloting the deadliest machines of the war in 1918. Attaining heights and speeds greater than any yet achieved by humans, they learnt how to fight in a new dimension and laid the groundwork for a separate air force in which many AFC veterans served—the Royal Australian Air Force, formed in 1921. Men like Williams and Cobby became leaders in the new service while others, including Ross Smith and Hudson Fysh, went on to carve out successful careers in civil aviation. All who flew with the AFC and the thousands who toiled to keep their aircraft flying were, in a very real sense, pioneers in warfare’s newest arena.

• 1. Lord Kitchener quoted in Bennett, Highest traditions, p. 31.
• 2. AWM 1DRL/0084 Papers of Captain Thomas Charles R. Baker DFC, MM Bar, No. 4 Squadron Australian Flying Corps, Folder 1 of 3, letters 21 January 1916 and August 19 1917.
• 3. AWM PR03913,Papers of Verner Knuckey, diary, Oct 28 1917.
• 4. Cobby, High adventure, p. 19.
• 5. M. Molkentin, Culture, class and experience in the Australian Flying Corps, Honours thesis, School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 2004, p. 27.
• 6. Cobby, High adventure, p. 32, Molkentin, Class, culture and experience, p. 36 and Nunan, Letter, 12 July 1917.
• 7. 2nd Lieutenant Thomas Edols, AWM PR86/385, letter 12 November 1917.
• 8. Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 17.
• 9. Cobby, High adventure, pp. 29–30.
• 10. AWM 1DRL/0214 Handwritten letters of Captain F.W. Cornish, MC and Bar, 2 Squadron AFC (formerly of 13th and 45th Battalions AIF) No. 2 Squadron AFC, letter 21 March 1918.
• 11. Cornish, letter, 21 March 1918.
• 12. Cobby, High adventure, pp. 94 and 97.
• 13. Lieutenant Owen Lewis, AWM PR00709, letter 23 February 1918.
• 14. V. M. Yeates, Winged Victory, Jonathon Cape, London, 1934, p. 236.
• 15. 2nd Lieutenant Horace Miller, H. Miller, Early birds; magnificent men of Australian aviation between the wars, Rigby, Australia, 1976, p. 57.
• 16. M. Molkentin, ‘Fire eater’, Wartime, 34, pp. 48–50
• 17. Lieutenant George Best.
• 18. F Cutlack (ed.), War letters of General Monash, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1934, p. 234.
• 19. Jack Treacy interview http://www.3squadron.org.au/subpages/treacy.htm.
• 20. Brian Lewis, Our war, Australia during World War One, Melbourne University Press, 1980, pp. 299–300.
• 21. AWM PR86/385 Papers of 2nf Lt. T.R. Edols, AFC and Cornish, letter 10 September 1918.
• 22. Yeates, Winged victory, p. 209.
• 23. Cobby, High adventure, p. 50.
• 24. R. Hoddinot, AWM MSS0791, p. 105.
• 25. Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, p. 65.
• 26. Lieutenant Jack Treacy, http://3squadron.org.au/subpages/treacy.htm, p. 7. Captain Henry Ralfe and Lieutenant William Buckland.
• 27. Yeates, Winged victory, p. 119.
• 28. Knuckey, Wallet 1, diary, 18 May 1918.
• 29. J. Bennett, Highest traditions, the history of No. 2 Squadron, RAAF, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, pp. 36ff. Captain John Bell, Captain William Robertson, Lieutenant Harry Taylor, Lieutenant Frederick Sheppard and Lieutenant Robert McKenzie.
• 30. Ibid., Lieutenant Frederick Huxley, Lieutenant Richard Howard, Captain Phillips and Lieutenant Sydney Ayers.
• 31. Ibid., p. 40.
• 32. Knuckey, diary, 23 November 1917.
• 33. Captain Edgar McCloughry, AWM 1DRL/0426, McCloughry, E.J. (Captain)1st Divisional Engineers, AIF and Australian Flying Corps.
• 34. Jagdgeschwader commander, Manfred von Richthofen.
• 35. Cornish, letter, 10 September 1918.
• 36. Ibid.
• 37. Lieutenant Colonel Oswald Watt quoted in Bennett, Highest traditions, p. 50.
• 38. Cobby believed that he had come up against Richthofen’s Circus but German evidence shows the Australian’s adversaries to have been another unit, Jasta 29. Information on this point provided by Michael Molkentin.
• 39. Lieutenant William Nicholls.
• 40. Lieutenant Percival Schafer, Cobby, High adventure, p. 48. See also Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, p. 225 and Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, pp. 93–94.
• 41. Cobby, High adventure, p. 49.
• 42. Ibid, p. 50.
• 43. Bennett, Highest traditions, p. 55.
• 44. Lieutenant Verner Knuckey, AWM PR03193, diary, 5 April 1918.
• 45. Cobby, High adventure, p. 50.
• 46. Ibid.
• 47. Baker, letter 17 June 1918.
• 48. Edols, letter 21 July 1918.
• 49. Captain Herbert Watson, McCloughry, and Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, pp. 284–5.
• 50. H. Cobby, Aerial fighting, at http://www.australianflyingcorps.com/2004_2002/articles/article_aerialfighting.html, p. 1.
• 51. Molkentin, Culture, class and experience, p. 72.
• 52. Ibid., p. 40.
• 53. Cornish, letter 10 September 1918.
• 54. Lieutenant Colonel Louis Strange, The end of all that, at http://www.australianflyingcorps.com/2004_2002/articles/article_aerialfighting.html, p. 4
• 55. Cobby, High adventure, p. 34.
• 56. Cobby, Aerial fighting, p. 4.
• 57. Ibid.
• 58. C. Lewis, Sagittarius rising, Peter Davies, London, 1936, p. 66.
• 59. Cobby, Aerial fighting, p. 6.
• 60. Baker, letter 4 October 1918.
• 61. Strange, The end of all that, p. 2.
• 62. Captain Roy King.
• 63. Cobby, High adventure, p. 89.
• 64. Captain George Jones.
• 65. Lieutenant Arthur Palliser.
• 66. Lieutenant Percy Sims.
• 67. Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, p. 103.
• 68. Vigilant, German war birds, Greenhill Books, London, 1994 edition, p. 81, and http://www.stjohnsadelaide.org.au/history.html
• 69. J. Beaumont, Australian Defence: Sources and statistics, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 215.
• 70. Molkentin, Culture, class and experience, pp. 60–61.

• 1General Foch quoted in K. Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia 1909–1918, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1971, p. 42.
• 2T. W. White, Guests of the unspeakable, John Hamilton Ltd, London, 1932, p.38.
• 3Captain Harry Cobby, A. H. Cobby, High adventure, Kookaburra Technical Publications, Dandenong, 1981 edition, p. 22.
• 4Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, p. 43.
• 5White, Guests of the unspeakable, p. 28.
• 6L. Sutherland and N. Ellison, Aces and kings, J. Hamilton, London, 193?, p. 213.
• 7National Archives files A2023, A 38/8/188.
• 8Captain Stanley Muir. F. M. Cutlack, Australian Flying Corps, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, vol. VII, p. 51.
• 9Lieutenants Reg Baillieu and Ross Smith.
• 10Lieutenant Frank McNamara VC.
• 11Captain Douglas Rutherford.
• 12Lax, One airman’s war, pp. 37–38 and pp. 36–37.
• 13R. Williams, These are facts; the autobiography of Air Marshal Sir Richard Williams, KBE, CB, DSO, The Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977, pp. 64–65, quote p. 65.
• 14Lieutenant Norman Steele.
• 15Williams, These are facts, p. 65.
• 16Lieutenant Claude Vautin.
• 17Lax, One airman’s war, p. 77
• 18Lieutenant Leslie Sutherland, Sutherland and Ellison, Aces and kings, pp. 14–15.
• 19Cutlack, Australian Flying Corps, p. 111.
• 20Nunan, AWM 3DRL6511 (A) Item 1 of 3, letter 28 June 1918.
• 21Williams, These are facts, p. 73.
• 22Sutherland, Aces and kings, p. 211.
• 23Ibid.
• 24Captain Allen Brown.
• 25Lieutenant Clive Conrick, C. Conrick, The flying carpet men, 1993, p. 139.
• 26Sutherland, Aces and kings.
• 27Ibid., p.235.
• 28Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, p. 169.
• 29Sutherland, Aces and kings, p. 273.
• 30Lord Kitchener quoted in Bennett, Highest traditions, p. 31.
• 31AWM 1DRL/0084 Papers of Captain Thomas Charles R. Baker DFC, MM Bar, No. 4 Squadron Australian Flying Corps, Folder 1 of 3, letters 21 January 1916 and August 19 1917.
• 32AWM PR03913,Papers of Verner Knuckey, diary, Oct 28 1917.
• 33Cobby, High adventure, p. 19.
• 34M. Molkentin, Culture, class and experience in the Australian Flying Corps, Honours thesis, School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 2004, p. 27.
• 35Cobby, High adventure, p. 32, Molkentin, Class, culture and experience, p. 36 and Nunan, Letter, 12 July 1917.
• 362nd Lieutenant Thomas Edols, AWM PR86/385, letter 12 November 1917.
• 37Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 17.
• 38Cobby, High adventure, pp. 29–30.
• 39AWM 1DRL/0214 Handwritten letters of Captain F.W. Cornish, MC and Bar, 2 Squadron AFC (formerly of 13th and 45th Battalions AIF) No. 2 Squadron AFC, letter 21 March 1918.
• 40Cornish, letter, 21 March 1918.
• 41Cobby, High adventure, pp. 94 and 97.
• 42Lieutenant Owen Lewis, AWM PR00709, letter 23 February 1918.
• 43V. M. Yeates, Winged Victory, Jonathon Cape, London, 1934, p. 236.
• 442nd Lieutenant Horace Miller, H. Miller, Early birds; magnificent men of Australian aviation between the wars, Rigby, Australia, 1976, p. 57.
• 45M. Molkentin, ‘Fire eater’, Wartime, 34, pp. 48–50
• 46Lieutenant George Best.
• 47F Cutlack (ed.), War letters of General Monash, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1934, p. 234.
• 48Jack Treacy interview http://www.3squadron.org.au/subpages/treacy.htm.
• 49Brian Lewis, Our war, Australia during World War One, Melbourne University Press, 1980, pp. 299–300.
• 50AWM PR86/385 Papers of 2nf Lt. T.R. Edols, AFC and Cornish, letter 10 September 1918.
• 51Yeates, Winged victory, p. 209.
• 52Cobby, High adventure, p. 50.
• 53R. Hoddinot, AWM MSS0791, p. 105.
• 54Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, p. 65.
• 55Lieutenant Jack Treacy, http://3squadron.org.au/subpages/treacy.htm, p. 7. Captain Henry Ralfe and Lieutenant William Buckland.
• 56Yeates, Winged victory, p. 119.
• 57Knuckey, Wallet 1, diary, 18 May 1918.
• 58J. Bennett, Highest traditions, the history of No. 2 Squadron, RAAF, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, pp. 36ff. Captain John Bell, Captain William Robertson, Lieutenant Harry Taylor, Lieutenant Frederick Sheppard and Lieutenant Robert McKenzie.
• 59Ibid., Lieutenant Frederick Huxley, Lieutenant Richard Howard, Captain Phillips and Lieutenant Sydney Ayers.
• 60Ibid., p. 40.
• 61Knuckey, diary, 23 November 1917.
• 62Captain Edgar McCloughry, AWM 1DRL/0426, McCloughry, E.J. (Captain)1st Divisional Engineers, AIF and Australian Flying Corps.
• 63Jagdgeschwader commander, Manfred von Richthofen.
• 64Cornish, letter, 10 September 1918.
• 65Ibid.
• 66Lieutenant Colonel Oswald Watt quoted in Bennett, Highest traditions, p. 50.
• 67Cobby believed that he had come up against Richthofen’s Circus but German evidence shows the Australian’s adversaries to have been another unit, Jasta 29. Information on this point provided by Michael Molkentin.
• 68Lieutenant William Nicholls.
• 69Lieutenant Percival Schafer, Cobby, High adventure, p. 48. See also Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, p. 225 and Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, pp. 93–94.
• 70Cobby, High adventure, p. 49.
• 71Ibid, p. 50.
• 72Bennett, Highest traditions, p. 55.
• 73Lieutenant Verner Knuckey, AWM PR03193, diary, 5 April 1918.
• 74Cobby, High adventure, p. 50.
• 75Ibid.
• 76Baker, letter 17 June 1918.
• 77Edols, letter 21 July 1918.
• 78Captain Herbert Watson, McCloughry, and Cutlack, The Australian Flying Corps, pp. 284–5.
• 79H. Cobby, Aerial fighting, at http://www.australianflyingcorps.com/2004_2002/articles/article_aerialfighting.html, p. 1.
• 80Molkentin, Culture, class and experience, p. 72.
• 81Ibid., p. 40.
• 82Cornish, letter 10 September 1918.
• 83Lieutenant Colonel Louis Strange, The end of all that, at http://www.australianflyingcorps.com/2004_2002/articles/article_aerialfighting.html, p. 4
• 84Cobby, High adventure, p. 34.
• 85Cobby, Aerial fighting, p. 4.
• 86Ibid.
• 87C. Lewis, Sagittarius rising, Peter Davies, London, 1936, p. 66.
• 88Cobby, Aerial fighting, p. 6.
• 89Baker, letter 4 October 1918.
• 90Strange, The end of all that, p. 2.
• 91Captain Roy King.
• 92Cobby, High adventure, p. 89.
• 93Captain George Jones.
• 94Lieutenant Arthur Palliser.
• 95Lieutenant Percy Sims.
• 96Isaacs, Military aircraft of Australia, p. 103.
• 97Vigilant, German war birds, Greenhill Books, London, 1994 edition, p. 81, and http://www.stjohnsadelaide.org.au/history.html
• 98J. Beaumont, Australian Defence: Sources and statistics, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 215.
• 99Molkentin, Culture, class and experience, pp. 60–61.

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