Biggles: The Camels Are Coming Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 The White Fokker

  Chapter 2 The Packet

  Chapter 3 J–9982

  Chapter 4 The Balloonatics

  Chapter 5 The Blue Devil

  Chapter 6 Camouflage

  Chapter 7 The Carrier

  Chapter 8 Spads and Spandaus

  Chapter 9 The Zone Call

  Chapter 10 The Decoy

  Chapter 11 The Boob

  Chapter 12 The Battle of Flowers

  Chapter 13 The Bomber

  Chapter 14 On Leave

  Chapter 15 Fog!

  Chapter 16 Affaire De Coeur*

  Chapter 17 The Last Show

  The Camel closed up until it was flying beside him; the pilot smiling. Biggles showed his teeth in what he imagined to be an answering smile. 'You swine,' he breathed: 'you dirty, unutterable, murdering swine! I'm going to kill you if it's the last thing I do on earth.' Something made him glance upwards. Five Fokker tri-planes were coming down on him like bolts from the blue. 'So, that's it, is it?' he muttered. 'You're the bait and I'm the fish. That's your game. Well, they'll get me, but you 're getting yours first.'

  Captain W. E. Johns was born in Hertfordshire in

  1893. He flew with the Royal Flying Corps in the

  First World War and made a daring escape from a

  German prison camp in 1918. Between the wars he

  edited Flying and Popular Flying and became a writer

  for the Ministry of Defence. The first Biggles story,

  Biggles the Camels are Coming was published in 1932,

  and W. E. Johns went on to write a staggering

  102 Biggles titles before his death in 1968.

  www.kidsatrandomhouse.co.uk

  BIGGLES BOOKS

  PUBLISHED IN THIS EDITION

  FIRST WORLD WAR:

  Biggles Learns to Fly

  Biggles Flies East

  Biggles the Camels are Coming

  Biggles of the Fighter Squadron

  SECOND WORLD WAR:

  Biggles Defies the Swastika

  Biggles Delivers the Goods

  Biggles Defends the Desert

  Biggles Fails to Return

  BIGGLES

  the CAMELS

  ARE COMING

  CAPTAIN W.E. JOHNS

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 978-1-4090-2250-3

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Red Fox would like to express their grateful thanks

  for help given in the preparation of these editions to Jennifer Schofield,

  author of By Jove, Biggles, Linda Shaughnessy of A. P. Watt Ltd

  and especially to the late John Trendler.

  BIGGLES: THE CAMELS ARE COMING

  A RED FOX BOOK : 9780099283218

  First published in Great Britain by John Hamilton, London 1932

  Published as Biggles, Pioneer Air Fighter by Armada 1982

  This Red Fox edition published 2003

  5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © W E Johns (Publications) Ltd, 1932

  The right of W E Johns to be identified as the author of this work has been

  asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-1-4090-2250-3

  Version 1.0

  Red Fox Books are published by Random House Children's Books,

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,

  A Random House Group Company

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited

  can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  THE RANDOM HOUSE GROUP Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Foreword

  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. 'Biggles,' as I have said, did not exist under that name, yet he represents the spirit of the R.F.C. — daring and deadly when in the air, devil-may-care and debonair when on the ground.

  * Royal Flying Corps 1914–1918. An army corps responsible for military aeronautics, renamed the Royal Air Force (RAF) when amalgamated with the Royal Naval Air Service on 1st April 1918.

  To readers who are unfamiliar with the conditions that prevailed in the blue skies of France during the last two years of the War, it may seem unlikely that so many adventures could have fallen to the lot of one man. In those 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.

  ** Slang: operational flight into enemy-held territory.

  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, René 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, and had the Victoria Cross been awarded consistently, hundreds instead of a few would have worn the coveted decoration.

  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; he was killed in a simple cross-country flight shortly after the War. 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 from 6,000 feet, yet I am alive 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.

  * Slang: Anti-aircraft gunfire

  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 terrific 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 stunning 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.

  * Phosphorus-loaded bullets whose course through the air could be seen by day and by night.

  It is not surprising that many strange incidents occurred, incidents which were never written down on combat reports, but were whispered 'with wrinkled brows, with nods, and rolling eyes' in dim corners of the hangars while we were waiting for the order to start up or 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 that 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 only 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.

  ** Scouting experimental single-seater British biplane fighter in service 1917–1920

  *** Sopwith Camel, a single-seater biplane fighter with twin machine guns synchronised to fire through the propeller. See front cover for illustration.

  † The 'trigger' to fire the guns, usually fitted to a pilot's control column.

  * Slang: was killed

  What of 'T—L—' still in the Service, who was attacked by a Belgian scout? For ten minutes he endeavoured to escape, and then, exasperated, he turned and shot the Belgian down, narrowly escaping court-martial as a consequence. Almost everybody has heard the story told by Boelcke, the German ace — and he was a man to be believed — 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 bear witness.

  ** British two-seater pusher biplane with the engine behind the pilot and the gunner in the forward cockpit.

  *** British two-seater biplane designed for reconnaissance and artillery purposes.

  René Fonck once shot down a German machine which threw out its pilot; machine and man fell straight through the middle of 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 a distance generally believed to be about 200 feet, crashed through the roof of a convent and landed on a bed which had just been vacated by a nun. He lived to tell the tale. When it comes to pure coincidence the following tale goes rather farther than a fiction writer would dare to venture. It was told to me by the principal actors themselves shortly after they had been led into the prison camp where I was confined. They themselves were still finding the thing difficult to believe.

  * Derogatory term for the Germans

  ** Airships of rigid construction used by the Germans mainly over Britain for strategic bombing and reconnaissance

  It came about through Pat Manley losing his propeller. For the benefit of the reader who is not conversant with air jargon, to lose one's propellor does not mean that it fell off, or anything like that. It is said to be 'lost' when it stops turning round.

  Pat Manley and Swayze were friends who joined the infantry and came over with the Canadian contingent. They were hit on the same day, went to different hospitals and completely lost touch with each other. A year later Pat, beetling around over the line in a Bristol Fighter***, saw another Bristol going down under a cloud of enemy aircraft. He throttled back and put his nose down in a steep dive to join the party; but he was too late and he saw the other Bristol crash in a field. Perceiving that no good purpose could be served by hanging around, Pat was about to make for a healthier quarter of the sky, when, as previously stated, he lost his propeller. Being very low he was unable to dive to get it back so he landed beside the crash, just in time to see Swayze crawl out. Thus, they were both taken prisoner within one minute of each other on the same field in France.

  *** British two-seater fighter with remarkable manoeuvrability, in service 1917 onwards. It had one fixed Vickers gun for the pilot and one or two mobile Lewis guns for the observer/gunner.

  Here is another story which illustrates the sort of thing that could happen to a pilot in those days. It happened I believe to Carter, who told me the story when we were prisoners of war together. I see he is now commanding the Iraqian Air Force. He was a Camel pilot then, and was so tickled to death one day at finding a column of enemy troops on the march that he could not tear himself away from them.

  He amused himself for a time by unloading his 20-lb. Cooper bombs on them, and when this began to pall he came lower and sprayed them with his gun. So fascinating did this pastime become, and so vastly entertaining were the antics of the warriors below in their frantic haste to remove themselves from the locality, that he quite failed to notice the telegraph wires which, as so often happens, accompanied the road on its winding way. He hit the wires at the bottom of a zoom and took them, together with a snapped-off post or two, for a short joy-ride. It was a pity he could not have given the troops a treat by taking them all the way home, but the Camel, not being designed for such work, gave up the ghost and spread itself over the landscape.

  The tables now being somewhat turned, his erstwhile victims proceeded to amuse themselves by battering him to pulp with their rifle butts, a comparatively tame pursuit from which they were only compelled to desist by the arrival of a senior officer.

  Carter was taken to the same hospital as the men he had wounded, where a state of affairs prevailed for the next week or so that can be better imagined than described!

  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 will have no difficulty in identifying them. In many cases the officers themselves 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 war 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 flack! flack! flack! 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.