Page 31 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm
Bell didn’t know German aircraft to recognize them as Halberstadt D.IIs. He didn’t know the D.II was an older plane, but was being used heavily again while the more modern and far-deadlier Albatross D.III had been temporarily grounded in order to address a lower-wing defect. He didn’t know the two planes flanking the leader, one painted in a red and white harlequin pattern and the other black with a yellow nose. What he did know was the identity of the pilot in the middle plane, with its coat of hastily applied red paint, which was about to open up with a kill shot on its first pass.
Manfred von Richthofen had been a cavalry officer at the beginning of the war, but soon switched to flight training. The godfather of German air tactics, Oswald Boelcke, had been a teacher andmentor. Von Richthofen gained an early reputation as a masterful pilot and aerial tactician, and then, in January of 1917, when he painted his Albatross a bright scarlet, did he gain the nickname used by both Allied and Central Powers—the Red Baron. He was just twenty-four years old and a few victories away from his thirtieth confirmed kill. Barreling in on the F.2, he must have been thinking this was going to be another easy one.
Unlike the German soldiers on the ground who’d gaped motionless while their observation balloon plummeted to the ground like a flaming comet, Bell had used those precious seconds to reload his Lewis gun.
Von Richthofen had made the same mistake Bell had when he’d first seen the Bristol fighter and assumed it was an old lumbering B.E.2. He came in straight and fast, believing his quarry was toothless.
Bell took aim, waited for as long as he dared, and let loose a ten-round burst. He hadn’t realized the little vane on his gunsight automatically corrected for deflection and so his shots missed the leader ofJasta11 and instead slammed into his wingman’s Mercedes inline six-cylinder motor. The engine exploded in a shower of hot oil, burning gas, and scalding cooling fluid. Overcome by the savage pain of such severe burns, the pilot lost consciousness. The plane nosed over and began spiraling to the ground, a greasy corkscrew of smoke in its wake.
Whiddle threw the Bristol hard over, still trying to gain altitude, the big Rolls-Royce engine screaming above the wail of the plane’s slipstream. The two Germans kept pace, juking and making micro changes in elevation to throw off Bell’s aim. Farther east, the fight drifted, deeper into German territory. Whiddle was a good pilot who never let the German hunters gain an advantage, but he alsowasn’t able to press the fight to them, either. His combat style was always off the back foot, always defensive.
Bell didn’t know that this cautiousness was the preferred tactic the Royal Flying Corps had devised for the two-seater and so his frustration mounted because the longer this went on, the greater the chances the Germans would find a chink in Whiddle’s flying and exploit a mistake.
It happened two minutes after the initial attack. Whiddle nearly stalled the plane when he pulled back on the stick too hard. The Bristol paused for a second in midair before evening out, but it was enough for the Germans. Von Richthofen and his surviving wingman opened up with their 7.92-millimeter Spandaus. Bullets peppered the F.2, shredding its canvas skin and blowing splinters from its wooden frame. Amazingly, Bell wasn’t hit as he swung the Lewis to give them another burst as they roared past.
He expected Whiddle to engage them with his Vickers, but the gun remained silent. Bell opened up with his Lewis as they looped back to take another pass. Then he took a second to check on Whiddle to see if his gun had jammed.
The pilot was hunched over, his head loose and lifeless. The back of his flight jacket had a line of bullet holes from waist to shoulder, obscene little craters of shredded leather and blood. By some miracle, his safety belts had kept him from interfering with the plane’s controls, so they remained steady with a slight nose-up attitude.
The German fighters were almost back on them, coming in a little lower than before to make it more difficult for Bell to hit them from the rear cockpit. He had moments before taking another strafing run and he knew his luck wouldn’t hold for a second time.
Bell shucked his seat belt so he could reach over Whiddle’s corpse. Taking the full brunt of the plane’s slipstream was like standing upto a hurricane and demanded every ounce of his strength. His fingers scrabbled to find the latch for the pilot’s safety harness, but he couldn’t quite get it. He lost a few seconds’ time pulling off his glove with his teeth. He tried again and was able to spring the latch open. Whiddle was a small man, less than ten stone, as the Brits would say, but Bell had little leverage to pull him from the plane and so he would need some help.
He braced his knees as hard as he could against the side of the cockpit and reached around Whiddle with his left hand while holding on to the dead man’s jacket collar with his right. With a gentle touch, Bell grabbed the stick and put the plane into a banking turn, mindful he had no access to the rudder pedals. As the horizon swung around and the two Germans were forced to compensate their attack run, Bell put the nose down in a steep dive. He went weightless for a second and would have been tossed from the plane had he not braced his knees. At that instant he heaved Whiddle’s body from the seat and let him go. The last sight of him was as he flashed past the Bristol’s tail and started tumbling to earth.
Bell felt no pride in his accomplishment, but held on to the grim notion that life was for the living.
He managed to pull back on the stick a little and regain his sense of gravity. He legged over the cockpit’s coaming and lowered himself into Whiddle’s seat. The fit was even tighter than in the rear manning the Lewis gun. He looked back over his shoulder. To his surprise, von Richthofen and his wingman were a good quarter mile back as they dove to keep on their target. The Bristol had a rate of descent far faster than the Halberstadt’s. Bell would need to gain altitude if he was ever going to use that advantage again.
He checked the cockpit gauges as he eased the stick toward his lap. The engine was running smoothly and not showing any signs ofoverheating. He had hit a hundred and twenty in his dive and now that he was climbing up through two thousand feet, his airspeed was starting to bleed off, but nowhere near as fast as he’d expected. The Falcon engine was truly a marvel, he thought.
He looked up at the compass embedded in the trailing edge of the top wing to see it looked like an empty eye socket. It had been hit by one of the Spandaus’ bullets and disintegrated.
Bell searched the sky for the sun, only to find it almost directly overhead. He didn’t know which way was west. Behind him, the Germans were closing the gap. Bell studied the ground. The dogfight had taken them too far for him to see the vast complex of frontline trenches. He recognized no landmarks, knew none of the roads or rivers snaking across the landscape below. It didn’t bode well that von Richthofen seemed content to follow him rather than show concern that he was about to fly into Allied territory.
Bell suddenly threw the Bristol onto its left wing in a crushing turn that sent blood rushing from his head. The Germans assumed that with the pilot dead, the observer would have been paralyzed with uncertainty in the cockpit, since few of them had ever trained to fly. They never expected the Bristol plane to go on the offensive.
The nose came around in a flash. Von Richthofen reacted quicker than his wingman and flitted upward just as Bell’s Vickers came to bear. The second pilot stayed at the same altitude for a beat too long. Bell hit him with a quick burst by triggering the lever on the fighter’s stick. The synchronizing gear did its job and a dozen .303-caliber bullets raked the D.II.
The German quickly winged over into a dive and Bell went after him, his feet dancing on the rudder pedal in harmony with his hands on the stick. He hoped to see a trail of smoke, but his rounds didn’t appear to have done any damage. He eased off the throttle so as notto overtake the German. Both men flung their airplanes around in the sky, the German trying desperately to shake his pursuer, while Bell tried to line up the Halberstadt with the center of his aiming reticle. He had very few opportunities to pull the trigger. The other pilot twisted and turned with the grace of an eagle.
Though larger, the Bristol was nearly as agile as the D.II and it was only a matter of time before Bell managed to get in a perfect shot. And just as the Vickers started to spit fire at the gamboling German fighter, a long blast from von Richthofen’s Spandau laced Bell’s plane.
Bell broke off from his pursuit of the German, having made the classic rookie mistake of not watching all around at all times. He’d been jumped, and that put him in serious danger. The German ace had him dead to rights and the reckoning was about to hit. Bell cursed his stupidity for not seeing the Red Baron coming at him to protect his wingman.
He rammed the throttle forward and dove hard, feeling the dynamic pressure building so that the Bristol’s wings shuddered and the tensioning wires screamed in protest. Only then did he try to assess if von Richthofen had done any damage to the airframe or motor. The wings hadn’t fallen off and there was no smoke boiling out of the Rolls Falcon. That was about the best Bell could hope for.
He looked over his shoulder. Both planes were in pursuit once again, diving at him like hawks. Just then, a spar on the wingman’s plane suddenly splintered under the pressure of the dive. It was one Bell had hit with the last of his Vickers ammunition. The fighter’s upper right wing collapsed in a spectacular failure that folded it back and ripped it free from the fuselage. The rest of the wing tore away and then the lower wings came off as if torn from the airframe by some unseen hand.
The plane went from a soaring, roaring mechanical marvel to a manned arrow arcing straight for the ground, its passenger’s fate already set.
Bell’s altimeter unwound through a thousand feet before he started pulling back on the stick. He’d gotten as much distance as he could from Germany’s most famous pilot and now it was time to just run and hope he could figure out the direction of the Allied lines. The Bristol reacted far more sluggishly to his inputs than he’d anticipated and was still diving far too fast. He blipped the magneto to cut the engine so the big propeller stopped turning and became a source of drag to help slow him down.
The plane began to respond, but he could feel there was something wrong, a mushiness to the controls that told him von Richthofen had done some damage after all. The nose began slowly inching up even as the altimeter continued to unwind. Details on the ground quickly grew into sharp focus. He flashed through five hundred feet before he became certain he would pull out in time to avoid plowing into some farmer’s field, though that truly hadn’t been his major concern. The plane’s sluggishness had allowed the Red Baron to eat into the lead he’d built.
The Bristol finally came out of the dive. He blipped the magneto again to refire the engine and looked back. Von Richthofen’s red Halberstadt was so close it seemed to fill the sky from horizon to horizon. At any second he expected the black maw of the Spandau to start spewing fire and lead.
But the stream of bullets didn’t come. Von Richthofen must have recognized something was wrong with Bell’s F.2 because he didn’t take the kill shot. Instead he pulled alongside so he and Bell regarded each other from a distance of only fifty feet. The Red Baron stuck his arm over the side of his plane and jerked his thumb downward.His meaning was clear, and the severity of Bell’s situation suddenly cut through the adrenaline jolt that had sustained him since he’d first been ambushed.
