Air Stories — page 65: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AFTER THE RED BARON a number of S.E.’s, he and his men were suddenly attacked by a squadron of Camels. Formation piled upon forma- tion, and a Pfalz staffel joined the fray. Unfortunately for Staffel 11, however, their would-be rescuers had passed the bottle pretty freely at mess, and were more often shooting at their countrymen than at the enemy. Luckily for the Richthofen men, their shooting was too inaccurate to do any damage. By now, the German pilots were more than holding their own in the air, but on the ground their troops were falling steadily back under the terrific pressure of the Allied advance. In the last days of October, Notlenius, an inveterate balloon ‘‘strafer,’’ added four more gasbags to his list, whilst a fellow pilot in the Circus, Laumann, received the last Pour le Merité to be awarded to the Richthofen Squadron. On the morning of November 6th, the Squadron was engaged in its last dog- fight, and three Spads fell to their guns. Rumours of mutiny in the fleet at Kiel and of street fighting in Berlin had come to the Squadron’s ears, but, at first, were ridiculed by every officer. Then, on the 8th, came the astounding news THE STORY BEHIND THE COVER: that the Squadron was to fly to Darmstadt to be demobilised. The Circus at that time was stationed at Tellencourt, but pouring rain kept them grounded, and it was not until the 12th that they were able to obey their orders and take-off for Darmstadt. By then they had lost all their ammunition, which had been commandeered by the retreating German troops to provide a gigantic firework display. In Darmstadt they learned the bitter truth. The German Air Service was to be abolished, and the Circus was ordered to hand over its ’planes to an American unit at Strasbourg. To Géering, the Squadron’s com- mander, fell the sad task of writing the last entry in the war diary of the Rich- thofen Squadron. In its sixteen months’ existence, the Circus had scored 640 victories for the loss of 56 pilots killed and 520 officers and other ranks wounded. Fifteen officers had been awarded the Pour le Merit, the highest decoration a German airman. could win. It is a record that the Richthofen Squadron which now forms a distinguished part of the German Air Force of to-day, can and does look back upon with pride. THIS TROOP-CARRIER IS ALSO A BOMBER. NTO this month’s bold cover painting by S. R. Drigin, fly two Bristol Bombays, representative of the latest type of bomber- transport to be adopted for the equipment of the Royal Air Force. Following the present vogue in British military aircraft design, the Bombay is a -monoplane though, being of the high-wing type, it shares with the Harrow and the Lysander a certain distinction over the more common low and middle-wing types now in service with the R.A.F. The fuselage of the Bombay is of mono- coque construction, a form of building in which the main loads in the structure are taken by the ‘‘skin’’ or outer covering of the fuselage. The wings and twin- ruddered tail unit are of metal construction, and hydraulically-operated _trailing-edge flaps are fitted to the main plane to assist in securing the lowest possible landing speed. Bomber-transports, as a class, supersede the troop-carriers formerly used by the Royal Air Force, and- must be equally adaptable for use as heavy bombers or as military transport vehicles, Thus the Bom- bay can accommodate twenty-four fully- armed soldiers and a crew of three, or, with a crew of four, can carry a very substantial load of bombs, all stowed internally and released through traps in the fuselage floor. In either capacity she is well able to defend herself against attack by enemy aircraft for, in addition to a mechanically operated, rotatable gun-turret in the nose, there is also a second gun position in an open cockpit at the extreme end of the fuselage, behind the tail-unit. Fully loaded, the Bombay weighs 19,000 lb., and its principal dimensions are a span of 96 feet, a length of 67 feet 9 inches, and an overall height of 16 feet. 159 CORNICLO® (©