History - World War I (4)
…... permanent site for the Squadron. On the 24th April the pilots had a grandstand view of one of their number, Flt.Lt. Little, in action. A “Hun” was spotted at 10,000 feet above the airfield and Little took off. At the same time a No. 40 Squadron Nieuport arrived on the scene. The machines engaged at 12,000 feet between the aerodrome and Ba
illeul. After twenty minutes of “dog fighting” the enemy aircraft had been forced very low and Little managed to fire a burst into the fuel tank. Forced to land by shortage of fuel, the German pilot was followed by Little who made a bad landing finishing up in the inverted attitude. Little crawled out of his machine to claim his prisoner who saluted and said in English: “It looks as if I have brought you down, not you me, doesn’t it”. Then the pair of them set about freeing the German observer who had become entangled in the machine’s gun belt. The German pilot later remarked that the war would finish soon due to England starving. He was given a large plate of meat for lunch at H.Q. No. 1 Balloon Wing. On May 16th the Squadron moved to St. Eloi where all
ranks were under canvas, but the field was popular for its distance from the front - 14,500 yards from Oppy and 11.000 yards from Lievin. The duty of the Squadron at this time was to be the strafing of enemy artillery machines. This was found to be quite a difficult task since such machines were high flying two-seaters. The following passage is an excerpt from the “Summary of Work” for the period 3rd to 16th June. “The greater part of our work this fortnight has been in connection with Enemy Artillery Machines, and high flying two-seater machines (mostly Aviatick type) attempting reconnaissance of the back areas. Few Offensive Patrols, in comparison with our earlier work, have been carried out, and very few enemy scouts have been seen. It invariably happens that when conditions are most favourable for Artillery Registration, they are equally good for high reconnaissance, and owing to the number of fast and good climbing two-seaters which have regularly crossed our lines, we have not been able to give all our attention to Artillery machines, and consequently their work has not been interfered with quite so much as we had hoped for. However, over fifty Special Missions in search of spotting machines have been carried out, and Special W/T report that enemy machines ceased their calls abruptly on forty occasions. Two-seater L.V.G. and Aviatick reconnaissance machines have been very difficult to attack with success, owing to their very fine performance and the fact that they do their work singly and very high. At first we tried to stop them by sending up a machine whenever one was sighted or reported to be crossing
