Warriors by Ross Kemp

Author:Ross Kemp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

RAF

Captain Albert Ball

At 5.30 in the afternoon on 7 May 1917, Captain Albert Ball led a formation of eleven light-brown SE5 biplanes into the menacing skies above northern France. The weather conditions were not ideal for flying, let alone for aerial combat. Cecil Lewis, another brilliant young pilot who would make a name for himself during and after the war, described the scene: ‘. . . the May evening is heavy with threatening masses of cumulus cloud, majestic skyscrapes, solid-looking as snow mountains, fraught with caves, valleys and ravines . . .’ Below, the bloody Battle of Arras was into its fifth and final week. Tens of thousands of young men on both sides of no-man’s-land lay dead. The decisive breakthrough for which Allied planners had been hoping had yet to materialise.

Somewhere over the Cambrai–Douai road, four red German Albatros D111 fighters burst from one of the thick cumulus clouds and ambushed the British formation. The attackers belonged to the unit commanded by Manfred von Richthofen, aka the Red Baron. Germany’s celebrated flying ace was on leave at the time and, in his absence, his brother Lothar was handed temporary command. A furious dogfight ensued with over a dozen planes at a time weaving in and out of each other’s paths and filling the fading light with thousands of rounds. Planes spiralled from the air, smoke pouring from their tails, others spluttered back in the direction of their airfields, too damaged to continue the fight. The scene was little different from any other that had taken place over the shell-blasted terrain of Flanders over the preceding months and years: dozens of brave young men in their newfangled flying machines circling, diving, climbing and strafing each other in a crazy, noisy, almost choreographed aerobatic spectacle. The combatants were so close that at times they could look straight into each other’s eyes and hear their shouts.

As darkness began to descend and the drizzling rain was threatening to turn heavier, the visibility deteriorated, the formations became fractured and the dogfight splintered into a series of smaller contests. In the skies above Loos, Captain Ball dived to attack a German straggler in what was likely to be his last engagement of the day, possibly even of the war. Any day now, he was expecting to be withdrawn from the front line. The senior commanders of the Royal Flying Corps were eager that the leading Allied fighter ace of the conflict should finally be removed out of harm’s way. No airman had earned his right to a less hazardous role in the war effort more than the twenty-year-old national hero from Nottingham.

Ball squeezed a short burst of Vickers machine-gun fire towards the red biplane with its distinctive black cross emblazoned on its wings and fuselage and, followed by one of his colleagues, chased the German into a towering black cloud. When the aircraft re-emerged, heading west towards the village of Annoeullin, Ball was right on the tail of the struggling German. With petrol spilling from his riddled tank, the Albatros crash-landed in the field below.

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