With three last flights today, Greg’s basic training is over. A successful time with the camera, at last: 18 plates exposed and no reported jamming. Greg’s final flight at Yatesbury was in a BE2e, the type of aircraft in which he had his first flight on 14 March 1918.
Log book entry
Date: 6.5.18
Hour: 2.0
Machine type and No.: RE 5146
Passenger: –
Time: 1 hr 0 m
Height: 2500
Course: –
Remarks: Photos. 18 plates exposed
Date: 6.5.18
Hour: 5.50
Machine type and No.: RE 5148
Passenger: –
Time: 40 m
Height: 1500
Course: –
Remarks: Practice turns etc. 1 landing
Date: 6.5.18
Hour: 7.25
Machine type and No.: BE 8660
Passenger: –
Time: 40 m
Height: 1500
Course: –
Remarks: Camera
It was just over seven weeks since Greg’s first flight:
So the instructors would see another batch of students off, and the young airmen would wonder what their fate would be. Goodbyes all round:
Yatesbury. Image Credit: Greg’s War Collection
Yatesbury
And no doubt there would be some convivial celebration. At the Officers’ Mess, maybe? Or perhaps at a nearby hostelry, such as the Waggon & Horses in Beckhampton, which doesn’t look as if it has changed much in the last 100 years…apart from the addition of a TV aerial:
Waggon & Horses, Beckhampton. Image Credit: Laurie Barber. Tap or click to see source
As the song goes:
Bonsoir old thing, cheerio! chin chin!
Nah-poo! Toodle-oo!
Good-bye-ee!
To Hursley Park…
Greg’s training would continue at Hursley Park in Hampshire, with the next entry in his log book being dated 16 May 1918. And before the month was out he would be posted to France.
Greg’s last-but-one day at Yatesbury, and the last on which he would fly DH.6s saw a couple of outings around the aerodrome, for aerial fighting and general practice:
Log book entry
Date: 5.5.18
Hour: 8.0
Machine type and No.: DH 5155
Passenger: –
Time: 55 m
Height: 2000
Course: Aerodrome
Remarks: Aerial fighting
Date: 5.5.18
Hour: 3.5
Machine type and No.: DH 5463
Passenger: –
Time: 50 m
Height: 2000
Course: [Aerodrome]
Remarks: Practice
Perhaps Greg would miss friends he’d made at Yatesbury. A later entry in his diary suggests that he was in touch for a while with Albert Gertrey, at least. And maybe Holmes and Jones were particular friends, too:
Following on from Greg’s work on zone calls on 29 and 30 April, today saw another exercise in doing a shoot – directing artillery fire onto a target. That was evidently more successful than the two attempts at photography that followed: one was thwarted by engine trouble, and the other by the camera jamming.
Log book entry
Date: 4.5.18
Hour: 4.0
Machine type and No.: RE 6647
Passenger: –
Time: 1 hr 20 m
Height: 1500
Course: Shoot
Remarks: Successful
Date: 4.5.18
Hour: 6.35
Machine type and No.: RE 6632
Passenger: –
Time: 10 m
Height: 1500
Course: Photos
Remarks: Engine dud
Date: 4.5.18
Hour: 7.5
Machine type and No.: RE 5146
Passenger: –
Time: 50 m
Height: 2000
Course: Photos
Remarks: Camera jambed
A Little More on Shoots
If zone calls are essentially about target acquisition for the artillery, then shoots are about target degradation and ideally destruction. In a shoot, the aircraft was again the artillery’s ‘eye in the sky’, to direct fire onto a target.
The corps squadrons of the Royal Air Force, and the Royal Flying Corps before them, worked with siege batteries of the Royal Garrison Artillery. Each battery might comprise four artillery pieces, for example 6″ or 8″ howitzers. The battery’s fire was directed from the air using ‘clockface’ radio signals in which the centre of an imaginary clockface was superimposed on the target and a number from 1 to 12 was used to indicate direction of a shell’s impact point from the target, with 12, 3, 6 and 9 representing north, east south and west respectively. The number was preceded by a letter code to indicate how far away the shell landed. The following diagram illustrates the numbers and letters:
Aeroplane to Artillery – Clock Code. From “Co-operation of Aircraft with Artillery” Revised Edition, Issued by the General Staff, December 1917
A small complication was that the letter O was used instead of the number 12, in order to shorten messages.
The distance codes were:
OK – Direct hit
Y – 10 yards
Z – 25 yards
A – 50 yards
B – 100 yards
C – 200 yards
D – 300 yards
E – 400 yards
F – 500 yards
So a near ideal sequence of signals for successive shells might be (in Morse code):
C3 – shell landed 200 yards to the eastof the target
A9 – shell landed 50 yards to the west
OK – direct hit.
Ground-to-air signals from the battery to the aircraft were by means of ground strips.
Artillery to Aeroplane – Ground Signals. From “Co-operation of Aircraft with Artillery” Revised Edition, Issued by the General Staff, December 1917
Greg’s time at Yatesbury was coming to an end, and on this windy and probably frustrating day he practised landings and tried to practice aerial firing – but he had trouble with the gun.
Date: 2.5.18
Hour: 8.5
Machine type and No.: RE 5146
Passenger: –
Time: 30 m
Height: 2000
Course: [Aerodrome]
Remarks: Very windy. Practice 1 landing
Date: 2.5.18
Hour: 10.30
Machine type and No.: RE 5146
Passenger: – Time: 25 m
Height: 2000
Course: [Aerodrome]
Remarks: Practice 1 landing
Date: 2.5.18
Hour: 1.25, 2.10 & 2.25
Machine type and No.: RE 6647
Passenger: –
Time: 35 m, 15 m & 10m
Height: 1500
Course: Aerial firing
Remarks: Gun jambed [sic].
Gun Jambed
Interesting spelling of “jambed”, which is regarded as incorrect today. It clearly wasn’t some idiosyncrasy of Greg’s, as the Aerial Combat reports of the time used the same spelling, as in this blog entry for 27 March 1918:
Whether or not the spelling was common, the problem certainly was evidently more common than it should have been – both for guns and camera jambing, or, as we would say, jamming.
Although there was no flying for Greg today, it could well have been sometime around now that he got his first glimpse of an enemy aircraft, in form of a Fokker Eindecker E.III.
Fokker E.III, possibly at Upavon. Image: Greg’s War Collection
One of these aircraft was known to be at nearby Upavon for part of the war, and it is quite plausible that trainee pilots from Yatesbury would have been shown what a real German aircraft looked like, if only as part of their necessary instruction on enemy aircraft types.
Only one original Eindecker remains. On 8 April 1916, a novice German pilot took off from Valenciennes with a new E.III (IdFlieg serial number 210/16) bound for Wasquehal but became lost in haze and landed at a British aerodrome east of St. Omer. He was forced to surrender before he realised his error and could destroy the aircraft. The E.III was test-flown against the Morane-Saulnier N and other Allied types at St. Omer before going to Upavon in Wiltshire for evaluation and finally going on museum display. It now resides at the Science Museum in London. Immelmann’s original E.I, with IdFlieg-issued serial E.13/15, also survived the war and went on display in Dresden, where it was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.
As Greg enters his last week at Yatesbury, the first flight of the day saw some consolidation work on zone calls, and the second flight didn’t end well:
Log book entry
Date: 30.4.18
Hour: 8.15
Machine type and No.: BE2E 8660
Passenger: –
Time: 35 m
Height: 600
Course: Zone calls
Remarks: –
Date: 30.4.18
Hour: 11.30
Machine type and No.: BE2E 1358
Passenger: –
Time: 40 m
Height: 2000
Course: Aerodrome
Remarks: Practice Crashed on landing
This was the second day running of zone call work, as explained in yesterday’s post:
The question arises whether the crash on landing at the end of the second flight was deliberate, so as to practice what happens in the event of a crash. The absence of a full stop or other punctuation mark after ‘Practice’ leans in the direction of that interpretation. Leaning the opposite way, though, are (a) the capital C of ‘Crashed’, and the fact that the past participle (‘Crashed’) rather than the noun (‘Crash’) was used. For my money, the crash wasn’t deliberate – though no doubt useful practice!
No flying the following day. Greg’s next log book entry is for Thursday 2 May 1918.
In an important training exercise, Greg begins today to practice ‘zone calls’.
Log book entry
Date: 29.4.18
Hour: 2.35
Machine type and No.: DH 5155
Passenger: –
Time: 55 m
Height: 3000
Course: Aerodrome
Remarks: Practice.
Date: 29.4.18
Hour: 5.55
Machine type and No.: DH 5155
Passenger: –
Time: 1 h 20 m
Height: 3000
Course: –
Remarks: Zone calls
Date: 29.4.18
Hour: 8.0
Machine type and No.: RE 5146
Passenger: –
Time: 30 m
Height: 2500
Course: Aerodrome
Remarks: Practice 1 landing.
Zone Calls
Zone calls are one way wireless messages by Morse code from aircraft to artillery batteries giving information about targets, such as enemy batteries firing, enemy transport and troop movements.
A zone call might be something like:
NF L 26 c 2 0
Example of a zone call, with map reference – somewhere in France. All will be revealed on 8 August (although there is enough information in this post to identify where…). Adapted from 1:10,000 scale trench map (credit: Great War Digital).
This would mean: Guns Now Firing from a position at map reference L 26 c 2 0. Maps of the Western Front (and presumably maps used by Greg’s Training Squadron at Yatesbury) used a reference system that was a combination of squares and a grid.
Each 1:40,000 map sheet was divided into twenty-four 6,000 yd squares, arranged in a 6 x 4 array and lettered A to X – in our case, L.
Each 6,000 yd square was in turn subdivided into thirty-six 1,000 yd squares, numbered 1 to 36 – in our case, 26.
Each 1,000 yd square was then subdivided into four quadrants (a, b, c, d) – in our case, c.
Finally, a decimal grid reference (eastings and then northings) was used to specify the intended position with the required degree of precision. This could be to one significant figure as in our example (2 0), which identified a 50 yd square. Or it could be to two significant figures if greater precision was desired and achievable (22 01, for example), which would identify a 5 yd square within the 50 yd square denoted by 2 0.
Fine levels of detail are not visualisable on a 1:40,000 map. The artillery and infantry tended to use 1:20,000 and 1:10,000 scale maps, depending on the purpose in hand, which were revised periodically as trenches and other ground features changed. These revisions, incidentally, would rely heavily on the aerial photography of work of the corps squadrons. The complete map reference would include the number of the 1:40,000 sheet (eg Sheet 36A, to give 36A L 26 c 2 0), but the sheet number was typically understood in context and therefore omitted in zone calls.
If this combination of squares and grid references sounds complicated, it is not actually different in principle from an Ordnance Survey grid reference, which in one of its incarnations uses a combination of an identified square and a decimal grid reference within the square. For example, the OS reference SU 053711 is based on a 100 km square designated SU and then, within that square, a three significant figure decimal grid reference 053 711. This in turn identifies a 100 m square – which, as it happens, is on the former Yatesbury airfield (1:50,000 Landranger sheet 173 in today’s OS maps).
A zone call was a one way wireless message from the aircraft to an artillery battery on the ground. Ground to air communication was done by ‘ground strips’, as explained in this earlier post:
Only one flight today after yesterday’s four, but still practising landings:
Log book entry
Date: 27.4.18
Hour: 5.30
Machine type and No.: RE 6647
Passenger: –
Time: 55 m
Height: 3000
Course: [Aerodrome]
Remarks: Landings 4.
You can’t really over-practice landings. After all, in aviation it was as true in 1918 as it is today that although takeoffs are optional, landings are mandatory.
