Knights of the air book.., p.1
Knights of the Air Book 2: Fire!, page 1
Literary Awards Won by Knights of the Air, Book 1: RAGE, the first in this series of four books.
Praise for Iain Stewart’s
Knights of the Air, Book 1: Rage!
“A remarkable historical novel… A sharp and effective blend of WWI aviation action and adventure, a hefty dose of emotion and human drama, plus a dash of romance, keep the pages flying. Finely written and vividly imagined, this is a complex, gritty novel delving into the brutalities of war. Stewart is an author to watch.”
“Rage!, the first book in Iain Stewart’s Knights of the Air series, is about as realistic and loyal to history as they come… If Rage! is any indicator for the rest of the series, military history buffs better be making some room on their book-shelves now.”
“Highly recommended… Splendid tale of aerial warfare in WWI… Book 1 of what promises to be a highly enjoyable series, and this reviewer, for one, is looking forward to the sequel.”
“A rousing yarn that deftly delivers both a war-time adventure and a character study.”
“Stewart weaves drama, integrity, and conflict-ing emotions through a captivating story of human spirit.”
“A thriller story replete with nonstop action.”
“Iain Stewart has created a cinematic viewpoint as seen through the career of a dedicated, determined, vengeful loner.”
To my mother, for inculcating a love of good stories. To my father, for encouraging and funding my early flying. And to Cassia, for her understanding that sometimes my body was present but my mind was cavorting in the skies of the Western Front.
1
At The Hour of Death
17 June 1917.
Western Front, Ypres Sector in Flanders, Belgium.
The FE2b floated four thousand feet above the battle-scarred hellscape of Ypres, an antiquated pusher design where the pilot sat in front of the engine, and the observer sat in front of the pilot, giving the latter an unparalleled view. Nothing except a wood and fabric framework, only shin high, sat between Lieutenant Neil Middleton and the carnage below as he tapped out his Morse code correction to the British guns, not easy in a seventy-mph slipstream. The shells were damn close to the target now. Soon they would blow the blasted pillbox to hell. His squadron had lost so many planes and men while artillery-spotting on this target, they had begun to think it was cursed. But two more corrections at most, and Mid-dleton would be the toast of the infantry below and his own squadron.
While he waited for the guns to make the corrections before they fired again, he savoured the glow of incipient success. Rose would be proud of him. He fingered the un-familiar engagement ring on his finger, still unable to believe his good fortune. He had proposed on his last leave, more in hope than expectation, and been startled into silent, unbreath-ing awe when she accepted. Rose was the catch of his Surrey village, with flowing russet hair, a small nose, a laughing mouth, generous curves and eyes bluer than the summer sky.
He sighed and turned once again to peer through his bino-culars at the scabrous concrete pillbox far below, ready to spot the fall of the artillery shells. Three months to his next leave, when they would marry on his twenty-third birthday. Best to focus on the job until then. But it wasn’t easy…
~
Four thousand feet below, Major Stan Fitch, commander of the First Battalion of the King’s Own Regiment, inched his trench periscope above the sandbags, keeping it slow so as not to attract the eye of an enemy sniper. He twisted a knob until the shell-blasted morass south-east of St. Julien sharpened into focus. Even through the powerful magnification he couldn’t see any sign of the pillbox. Only four shattered tree stumps poked above the bare mud, crooked skeleton fingers reaching towards the washed blue heavens.
“Don’t worry, Major. This time we’ll nail the bastard,” Captain Dodds said with the confidence of a seasoned artillery observation officer.
Stan grunted, unimpressed. “Best that you do. Soon my battalion will go over the top at that pillbox. My boys will die if you don’t pulverise it. Where is the bloody pillbox?”
“You won’t see it sir, not from ground level,” Dodds said. “The Huns are damn good at concealment and—”
A godlike thud interrupted him. Stan’s ribcage reverber-ated, even though the massive 9.2-inch siege howitzer had fired from two miles behind them. The reinforced concrete pillboxes were impervious to regular artillery, so Stan had called in the heaviest guns in the British armoury. Even still, it required a direct hit to destroy one.
He waited; eyes glued to the periscope. Howitzers fired their three hundred-pound shells with a high arc and a long hang time.
There!
Through the magnified scope, earth fountained a hundred feet high in eerie silence. Debris rained down, seemingly in slow motion, raising splashes in the mud. Seconds later, the sound waves arrived with a thunderclap that pummelled Stan’s ears.
The massive shell-burst impressed Stan, but he couldn’t tell whether it had landed close to the enemy pillbox. No matter—the spotting aircraft, hovering four thousand feet over the target, would send corrections to Dodds’ Morse operator. But the process took time. Not that it matters. That pillbox isn’t going anywhere—until we blow it to hell.
He turned to Dodds, who was staring upwards into the sky.
“Bugger, blast, and hell!” Dodds said.
~
Neil Middleton scowled from his perch in the sky. Damn. The shells had dropped two hundred yards west-ish of the pillbox.
A thump on his shoulder made him turn back to his pilot, Captain Walters, who pumped his fist up and down. “Hurry!”
Neil turned back. “Not helpful,” he muttered. As if Neil needed reminding that Richthofen’s Circus prowled these skies like ravenous wolves. The FE2b was a sheep but at least they had an escort, a Sopwith Camel fighter—perhaps the most potent dogfighter in the skies today—that hovered pro-tectively above them. Bless him.
Neil did a quick computation. The code for artillery spot-ting was simple but effective. The alphabet letter indicated yardage in hundreds, so two hundred was “B.” The numeral worked off a clock face with the target at the centre, so twelve o’clock was due north of the target and six o’clock due south. So “B9” would inform the gunners the shell landed two hundred yards west of the target. Of course, the yardage was all the observer’s guesstimate and therein lay the skill. Neil had a gift for it, he was one of the best. He’d get it right this time and they could go home. He bent over his key.
“What the dickens …” Neil swore as his pilot bashed him from behind, jolting his fingers from his Morse keys. He turned to abuse his pilot, but then followed the latter’s point-ing arm.
“Oh, Jesus!”
Dots diving in a V formation from nine thousand feet. With the arrowhead pointed at his heart.
Huns! Nine of ’em! Neil’s heart thumped against his rib-cage like a panicked animal trying to escape. They were doomed, especially if those planes were Albatross—the Ger-mans’ best fighter. He dropped the Morse key and grabbed the spade handle of the Lewis machine gun. His lips moved of their own volition.
“Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
Walters banged him on the arm again and gesticulated urgently downwards.
“Hell and damnation!” Middleton swore.
He had forgotten about the wire cable dangling below the plane that transmitted the Morse signal. Until Middleton retrieved all 150 feet, the pilot could not manoeuvre or the wire might foul the propeller. Middleton grabbed the reel and wound in a frenzy. His lungs heaved and his muscles burned but he kept his arm pumping. Their chances were slim, but slim beat none. Which were their odds until he wound in that damned cable.
The single Sopwith Camel, bravely flung himself in front of the avalanche of Huns. Neil blessed him. Tracers sparkled both ways. The Camel exploded in a fireball and the Albatross charge swept onwards.
Middleton dropped the reel, despite the fifty feet of wire left, and grabbed his machine gun. Clumsy in his terror, he missed his first grab at the cocking handle. Machine guns crackled, and Middleton winced as tracers flashed just past his shoulder, the pungent phosphorous smell searing his nostrils. The FE2b lurched as he fired, and almost threw him over-board. His tracers soared wide into the empty sky.
An Albatross roared past, so close the black crosses loomed huge against the glistening red wings. Another Hun came at them. Middleton fired, shoulders shaking as the gun ham-mered and spent cases flew. Then the FE2b skidded and pitchforked him face-first against the machine gun. His nose and lips smacked into the hot metal and the tang of blood flooded his mouth.
Clinging to the Lewis gun handles, Middleton shot a look backwards at his pilot. Captain Walters was slumped back in his cockpit, blood dribbling from his slack mouth, his desper-ate eyes protruding from a pale face. A bullet hole, neat as you like, had punched through his flying coat at lung height. But one hand still clutched the joystick.
“Holy Mary,” Middleton croaked, “mother of God …”
Guns hammered again and Captain Walters jerked side-ways. The nose of the plane dropped. Wind shrieked through the wires as the dive steepened.
Neil closed his eyes, strangely unafraid but flooded with regrets for what might have been. Him and Rose—the dreams had been so beautiful, but now they were less than smoke in the wind. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of death…”
~
He followed the red Albatross of Manfred Richthofen, who led the nine planes of Jasta 11 back up towards the safer heights at 3,000 metres, from where they could plunge like a falcon on their victims. Speed was the god of a fighter pilot, and altitude plus gravity granted speed. Not that the puissant Albatross needed much help. The power of Hans’s 170hp Mercedes Benz engine pulled the Albatross upwards on angel’s wings, beautiful in form and function. His streamlined red fuselage curved with a graceful nose like a cigar cylinder, and the white wings swept back in harmony with the rounded rudder and tail plane.
The exposed mechanism of the engine hypnotised Hans as they climbed. The valves, springs, and rockers hammered in a frenzy at full rpm, dripping hot oil and grease that the slip-stream smeared all over his face. But it was a tiny price to pay for flying one of the deadliest fighting machines in the sky. The sinister black cylinders of the twin Spandau machine guns crouched at either side of the engine, ready to dole out steel-jacketed death at eight rounds a second. If the British were stupid enough to send up yet more sacrificial lambs, Manfred Richthofen’s Jasta 11 would be delighted to feast upon them.
~
“Hun bastard!” Stan lowered his binoculars as the doomed British plane spun earthwards, flicking over and over like an autumn leaf, trailing a banner of thin grey smoke.
Dismay washed over him. That was the second spotter aircraft shot down today and together they’d only directed four artillery shots. Every time they had to start afresh. That bloody pillbox would never get nailed until the Royal Flying Corps could protect their spotter aircraft better.
Stan gestured at the phone. “Order another spotter plane.”
Dodds shook his head. “I can’t. It’s murder up there—we’ve lost four spotter planes and three escorts in two days on this pillbox. Eleven men.”
Stan glared at Captain Dodds, keeping his face hard. “Listen, Captain, if your guns don’t knock out that pillbox before the main assault, thousands of infantrymen will die and the whole attack will stall. It’s a harsh world, but the cost of a few more pilots versus thousands of troops is simple mathe-matics. Suggest a larger escort but order the spotting plane. Now!”
Dodds stared back with a stubborn frown. “I won’t have more deaths on my conscience.”
Stan wheeled on Dodds’ Morse operator. “Did the plane get off another correction?”
The operator grimaced and shook his head. “Nothing that makes sense, sir.”
Stan stared into the now empty sky and rubbed his forehead. Artillery was a mighty powerful thing, no doubt, but where you stood—whether you were doing the killing or the dying—determined your reality. For those who aimed and fired the guns, they ruled as precise tools of destruction, a science that hurled the maximum tonnage of high explosives onto a target in the minimum possible time, constrained only by the limits of human muscle and mechanical realities.
For those on the guns’ receiving end, its thunder fell like Thor’s hammer, awesome and relentless.
But for those troops who had to fix their bayonets and charge the artillery’s “destroyed targets,” such monster bar-rages too often proved merely expensive landscape rearrange-ment. As the troops charged forward, the battered but intact concrete pillboxes would loom, phoenix-like, from the sul-phurous grey smoke and mow down the attackers with interlocking fields of machine gun fire.
Put Stan Fitch in the sceptic’s camp, for when the assault came, he would lead the First Battalion of the King’s Own Regiment over the top. At the thought, a strong fist gripped his stomach and squeezed.
He pulled a folded reconnaissance photograph, 8x12 inch-es, out of his blouse pocket, and smoothed it on an ammuni-tion crate. “Look at this,” he said to Dodds. He jabbed a dirty finger on two roughly parallel lines that zig-zagged across the page like scars from a mad razor slasher. “Those are the Germans’ first two lines of trenches. On the day of the attack, your guns preliminary bombardment is due to blow those apart. But when that bombardment starts, we know from experience that the Huns will slip away to the third line of trenches, where less artillery can reach them. They will make their stand there.” Stan pointed at a third scar, darker and thicker than the others, the line broken by an ominous round black blob “And here is the pillbox we are trying to destroy. You can’t see it on the photo, but there will be roll upon roll of razor-sharp barbed wire to funnel my battalion’s thousand men into a concentrated kill zone in front of the pillbox. That fortress, impregnable to infantrymen, will be bristling with nests of machine guns—each gun firing five hundred rounds a minute. That pillbox will pin down my men, and the Hun artillery counter-barrage will massacre them in the open. The attack will founder right there. Unless we destroy that pillbox before the attack starts.”
Stan picked up a trench phone and held it out to Dodds. “So make that phone call now, ordering another spotter plane, or I’ll have you cashiered and find someone else who will do it.”
Dodds’ shoulders slumped and he took the handset. Stan turned away and walked towards his command post. He heard Dodds mutter “ruthless bastard,” but Stan didn’t turn back. He knew secrets that Dodds did not.
The capture of Messines Ridge a few weeks ago had drawn the Germans’ attention into Flanders and away from the mu-tiny-riddled French. Now another crisis had erupted. Ger-many’s U-boat campaign was sinking more Allied merchant vessels every week, tightening like a tourniquet on the life-blood of men and raw materials flooding into Britain by sea from her Empire and the rest of the world. Without these supplies, the island nation’s capacity to fight was withering.
So General Gough’s Fifth Army would attack through Pas-schendaele Ridge and cut the railway supplying the German garrisons from Ypres to the Belgian coast. The Fourth Army would then launch an assault on the coast to destroy the Germans’ main submarine bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. Then the British Empire’s maritime lifeblood would resume its flow.
The date of the attack was still secret, but the briefing by Stan’s commanding officer had been emphatic. For Gough’s attack to succeed, Stan’s battalion had to take that pillbox on the first day and push on towards Passchendaele, an impos-sible task if the howitzers didn’t pulverise the pillbox.
To do that, the guns needed an artillery spotter plane and the spotter plane needed fighter escorts. Otherwise, the guns would be firing blind and hoping for the best. Three years of war and millions of dead infantrymen provided overwhelming evidence that Hope was a lousy artillery aimer. So sitting ducks or not, the RFC crews must fly.
But as Major Stan Fitch strode away after ordering up fresh cannon fodder, he prayed that his son Lance, a captain in the Royal Flying Corps and based at Bailleul Airfield nearby, would not be one of them.
Today was Sunday, a good day for prayer.
2
Cock O’ The Walk to Feather Duster
Same day - 17 June 1917.
Western Front, Ypres Sector.
To each their own religion.
Let others go to church services on Sundays, seeking heavenly redemption on their knees. Lance Fitch flew to the heavens to extract revenge.
His SE5 clawed upwards through the thin air towards its maximum altitude of seventeen thousand feet, a beautiful frigid wasteland where only the hardiest ventured. Or those who nurtured bloody intent with the zeal of a Spanish Inqui-sitor.
The Huns had killed Lance’s friend, Albert Ball, and revenge was his best form of grief control. Curious how revenge was the answer to so many questions. It filled the hole inside, got you out of bed burning with a purpose. Lance welcomed its cold rage; it was like a much-missed lover, familiar but still arousing.
