As his shoulder continued to improve, Greg took to the controls again without yet being restored to normal duties. But perhaps the task he was assigned made him wish he was!
Log Book
Date: 8.6.18
Hour: 10.30
Machine type: RE8
No.: E116
Passenger: Lt ?
Time: 5 m
Height: 500
Course: Aiming practice for infantry
Remarks: Engine dud. Bad landing.
Date: 8.6.18
Hour: 6.45
Machine type: RE8
No.: E116
Passenger: Mechanic
Time: 10 m
Height: 1000
Course: Engine test
Remarks: Engine OK. Good landing.
Diary
Saturday June 18th. Took up E116 to give Infantry aiming practice with anti-aircraft machine guns.
Took up an infantry officer as passenger.
Engine dud, made a bad landing on aerodrome.
Had new magneto fitted on right hand side of engine.
Took machine up again about 7.pm for engine test, with mechanic as passenger.
Engine apparently OK again.
Good landing.
What a job…
…”to give Infantry aiming practice with anti-aircraft machine guns”? Doesn’t sound like much fun. No doubt Greg hoped that they were good enough not to need much practice. And perhaps the infantry lieutenant whom Greg took up with him was less of a passenger and more of a hostage.
This was Greg’s first day on the Western Front, and it nearly ended in disaster, as his log book (laconically) and diary (rather more more fully) explain:
Log book
Date: 4.6.18
Hour: 10 am
Machine type and No.: RE8
No.: E102
Passenger: Lt. Marsh
Time: 1 hr
Height: 2500
Course: Inspection of line.
Remarks: Engine conked. Crashed at Triezennes (102 written off)
Diary
Tuesday June 4th 1918. RE8. E102.
Went up at 10am with Lt Marsh as observer.
At 11pm [sic, sc. 11am] engine cut out east of St Flories, just over our line, due to inlet valve stuck open.
Managed to make disused aerodrome at Triezennes but found Infantry Battalion on parade.
Turned off into an adjoining field, – standing crops 6 feet high.
Crashed very badly, machine turned complete somersault.
Observer thrown clear, – self buried under debris, succeeded in getting out safely, – sprained shoulder & split lip.
Had lunch with C.O. of the Battalion & returned to Squadron by tender.
The day’s events are shown on this map:
Greg’s first visit to the front, shown on 1:40,000 map (each numbered square is 1,000 yds). Rely to St Floris is ~10 miles (16 km). Click for larger image. Credit: IWM/TNA/GreatWarDigital
The Front Line at St Floris
St Floris, a settlement on the River Lys just to the east of St Venant, was where the British Amusories-Havaskerque-La Motte Line – a line just behind the most forward positions – crossed the canalised river:
St Floris and St Venant from a 1:10,000 scale trench map, revised to 22 June 1918. Each numbered square is 1,000 yds. Click for larger image. Credit: IWM/TNA/GreatWarDigital
At this point, Greg was 10 miles (16 km) from the squadron’s airfield at Rely, and needed somewhere nearer to land. He had 2,500ft of altitude to play with.
Trézennes
Trézennes, also variously spelt as Treizennes and Tresennes, was an airfield just south east of Aire-sur-la-Lys. The admirable Anciens Aerodromes website gives the location of Trézennes aerodrome as 50°37’24″N, 2°25’25″E (here on Google maps).
The airfield was known to 42 Squadron, as the squadron had moved there from Chocques on 9 April 1918 when Operation Michael of the Spring Offensives began:
The squadron’s subsequent move from Trézennes to Rely was on 25 April 1918.
Although from Greg’s description Trézennes airfield had clearly been colonised by the army on 4 June 1918 (even if, as he was later to say, “they had no bloody business being there”) the Imperial War Museum has a couple of aerial photos of Trézennes that pose a bit of a puzzle. They are described as showing the airfield in use by 14 Squadron RNAS (Hadley Page bombers) on 1 June 1918. Here is one of the photos:
It is rather hard to reconcile this description with Greg’s experience three days later. And it is odd that the IWM description should refer to the RNAS when it had ceased to exist on 1 April 1918. Possibly the IWM photographs are mis-dated.
“Standing Crops 6 feet High”
Although 6 ft (1.8 m) may seem implausible for a crop height to modern readers, it is easy to forget that today’s crops of cereals such as wheat and barley are ultra-dwarf varieties. Their forebears of the decades and centuries before the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s were much taller. For example, an ancient Italian variety of wheat (Mirabella) could reportedly grow 84 inches (7 ft, 2.1 m) tall, as reported here. Or, of course, the crop might not have been a cereal but may have been something like sunflowers! So, even allowing for a less than perfectly accurate assessment of its height by Greg, something growing to 6 ft in the field was perfectly feasible.
The Official Casualty Report
The official casualty report bears out Greg’s account of the day. This image is courtesy of Andrew Pentland of the hugely informative www.airhistory.org.uk website:
Casualty report – click for larger image. Credit: Andrew Pentland.
Short report: Pilot and Observer uninjured. Machine left aerodrome 10.0am. R.P.M. dropped to 750 and engine backfiring badly, tried to land on TREIZENNES Aerodrome, found ground covered with troops drilling, turned to the right and had to land in standing crops, turning upside down at 11.0am.
Damage:- All main planes damaged. Fin and rudder damaged. 2 rear upper cross members of fuselage broken. 2 centre section struts broken and all fittings damaged. L.H. joint plate L & M damaged. Fuselage fitting R.H. at top of No 3 strut damaged. Undercarriage damaged. Scarff gun mounting wrecked. L.H. and R.H. magnetos damaged. Magneto platform broken. Camshaft doubtful. Exhaust pipes damaged. Recommended to be struck off charge of No 42 Squadron and transferred to No 1 A.D. for repair.
Recommended to be struck off charge of 1st (Corps) Wing and No 42 Squadron and transferred to No 1 A.D. for repair.
So, a mere three days after E102 had been accepted by 42 Squadron, it was struck off its charge. Not quite a write-off, but certainly a major repair job.
“Pilot and Observer uninjured”
Both Greg and 2nd Lt. Marsh were evidently very lucky on this occasion. It was probably truer to say that Greg was only slightly injured (hurt shoulder, split lip) rather than uninjured. And all his life he had a slightly weepy left eye, as his tear duct became permanently blocked when the bridge of his nose banged on the combing above the dashboard. On that subject, Rob Parsons (Greg’s son-in-law and my stepfather) remembers him saying that when he recovered he tried to get in the same position on another aircraft, but found it impossible to get the whole of his body below the level of the cockpit combing, where he had been trapped.
2nd Lt. Marsh’s luck, however, was to desert him before the month was out.
On his penultimate flying day at Hursley Park/Worthy Down, Greg is in intensive training for his work with the artillery on the Western Front. Two shoots today, one marred by a dodgy engine (a problem that would be recurrent on active service) and the other recorded as successful.
Log book entry
Date: 26.5.18
Hour: 9.45
Machine type and No.: RE 4479
Passenger: –
Time: 35 m
Height: 2000
Course: Shoot
Remarks: Engine missing badly
Date: 26.5.18
Hour: 10.45
Machine type and No.: RE 4529
Passenger: –
Time: 1 hr 15 m
Height: 3000
Course: Shoot
Remarks: Successful
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
