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Captain James Bigglesworth is a fictitious character, yet he could have been found in any R.F.C. mess during those great days of 1917 and 1918 when air combat had become the order of the day and air duelling was a fine art.

To readers who are unfamiliar with the conditions that prevailed in the sky of France during the last two years of World War I it may seem unlikely that so many adventures could have fallen to the lot of one man. In these eventful years, every day—and I might almost say every hour—brought adventure, tragic or humorous, to the man in the air, and as we sat in our cockpits warming up our engines for the dawn “show”, no one could say what the end of the day would bring, or whether he would be alive to see it.

Again, it may seem improbable that any one man could have been involved in so many hazardous undertakings, and yet survive. That may be true; sooner or later most war pilots met the inevitable fate of the flying fighter. I sometimes wonder how any of us survived, yet there were some who seemed to bear a charmed life. William Bishop, the British ace, Rene Fonck, the French ace and prince of air duellists, and, on the other side, Ernst Udet, and many others, fought hundreds of battles in the air and survived thousands of hours of deadly peril. Every day incredible deeds of heroism were performed by pilots whose names are unknown.

Nowhere are the curious whims of Lady Luck so apparent as in the air. Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the famous ace, shot down forty British machines and was killed in a simple cross-country flight. Nungesser, the French champion of forty-five air battles, was drowned, and McKeever, Canadian ace of thirty victories, was killed in a skidding motor-car. Captain “Jock” McKay, of my squadron, survived three years’ air warfare only to be killed by “archie” an hour before the Armistice was signed. Lieutenant A. E. Amey, who fought his first and last fight beside me, had not even unpacked his kit! I have spun into the ground out of control yet lived to tell the tale. Gordon, of my squadron, made a good landing, but bumped on an old road that ran across the aerodrome, turned turtle, and broke his neck.

Again, should the sceptic think I have been guilty of exaggeration, I would say that exaggeration is almost impossible where air combat is concerned. The speed at which a dog-fight took place and the amazing manner in which machines appeared from nowhere, and could disappear, apparently into thin air, was so bewildering as to baffle description. It is beyond my ability to convey adequately the sensation of being one of ten or a dozen machines, zooming, whirling, and diving among the maze of pencil lines that marked the track of tracer bullets. One could not exaggerate the horror of seeing two machines collide head-on a few yards away, and words have yet to be coined to express that tightening of the heart-strings that comes of seeing one of your own side roaring down in a sheet of flame. Seldom was any attempt made by spectators to describe these things at the time; they were best forgotten.

It is not surprising that many strange incidents occurred, incidents that were never written down on combat reports, but were whispered in dim corners of the hangars while we were waiting for the order to start up, for the “late birds” to come home to roost. It was “H”, a tall South African S.E. pilot, who came in white-faced and told me he had just shot down a Camel by mistake. It was the Camel pilot’s fault. He playfully zoomed over the S.E., apparently out of sheer light-heartedness. “H” told me that he started shooting when he saw the shadow, he turned and saw the red, white and blue circles, but it was too late. He had already gripped the Bowden control and fired a burst of not more than five rounds. He had fired hundreds of rounds at enemy aircraft without hitting one, but the Camel fell in flames. He asked me if he should report it, and I, rightly or wrongly, said no, for nothing could bring the Camel back. “H” went West soon afterwards.

Almost everybody has heard the story told by Boelcke, the German ace, of how he once found a British machine with a dead crew flying a ghostly course amid the clouds. On another occasion he shot down an F.E., which, spinning viciously, threw its observer out behind the German lines and the pilot behind the British lines. What of the R.E.8 that landed perfectly behind our lines with pilot and observer stiff and stark in their cockpits! The R.E.8 was not an easy machine to land at any time, as those who flew it will remember.

Rene Fonck once shot down a German machine which threw out its pilot; machine and man fell straight through a formation of Spads below without touching one of them! The German pilot was Wissemann, who had just shot down Guynemer, Fonck’s friend and brother ace, but he did not know that at the time. The coincidence is worth noting. Madon, another ace, once attacked a German two-seater at point-blank range—his usual method. A bullet struck the goggles off the Boche observer and sent them whirling into the air; Madon caught them on his wires and brought them home. When Warneford shot down his Zeppelin one of the crew jumped from the blazing airship, and after falling for a distance generally believed to be about 200 feet, crashed through the roof of a convent and landed on a bed that had just been vacated by a nun. He lived to tell the tale.

One could go on with such stories indefinitely, but these should be sufficient to show that, in the air at least, truth is stranger than fiction.

Many of the adventures that are ascribed to Biggles did actually occur, and are true in their essential facts. Students of air history may identify them. In some cases the officers concerned are still alive and serving in the Royal Air Force.

Finally, I hope that from a perusal of these pages a younger generation of air fighters may learn something of the tricks of the trade, of the traps and pitfalls that beset the unwary, for I fear that many of the lessons which we learned in the hard school of war are being rapidly obscured by the mists of peace-time theory. In air-fighting, one week of experience is worth a year of peace-time practice. In peace a man may make a mistake—and live. He may not even know of his mistake. If he makes that same mistake in war—he dies, unless it is his lucky day, in which case the error is so vividly brought to his notice that he is never guilty of it again.

No one can say just how he will react when, for the first time, he hears the slash of bullets ripping through his machine. The sound has turned boys into grey-faced men, and even hardened campaigners who learnt their business on the ground have felt their lips turn dry.

In the following pages certain expressions occur from time to time in connexion with the tactics of air combat which may seem to the layman to be out of proportion to their importance. For instance, he will read of “getting into the sun”. It is quite impossible for anybody who does not fly to realise what this means and how utterly impossible it is to see what is going on in that direction, particularly when the sun is low and one is flying west. To fly into the face of the setting sun can be uncomfortable at any time, but the strain of trying to peer into the glare, knowing that it may discharge a squadron of enemy aircraft at any moment, becomes torture after a time.

It should also be remembered that an aeroplane is an extremely small vehicle and difficult to see. When one is on the ground it is the noise of the engine that almost invariably first attracts attention, and but for the unmistakable tell-tale hum few would be seen at all. In the air, the roar of one’s own engine drowns all other sound, and one is therefore dependent upon sight alone for detecting the presence of other aircraft. This fact should be borne in mind when reading stories of the air, and particularly of air combat.

Constant reference is also made to “archie”. Most people know by now that this was not an old friend whom we called by his Christian name. There was nothing friendly about archie. On the contrary, it often bit you when you were least expecting it, but on the whole its bark was worse than its bite. Archie was the war-pilot’s nickname for anti-aircraft gun-fire. During the war archie batteries stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier; its appearance in the sky was accepted as a matter of course, and dodging it was part of the daily round. After a time one became accustomed to it and ignored it unless it was very bad.