Billy Bishop VC Lone Wolf Hunter by Peter Kilduff

Author:Peter Kilduff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
Published: 2014-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

During the 2 June attack, Billy Bishop may have encountered a sleek Albatros C.VII two-seater and mistaken it for an Albatros D.II scout. (Arthur Rahn album via National Museum of the USAF)

We cannot know what Billy Bishop perceived during that flight. But, contrary to his recollection that ‘the first streaks of dawn were showing in the upper sky,’ he took off into early morning darkness. According to the US Naval Observatory’s Astronomical Applications Department, sunrise on 2 June 1917 occurred at 6:03 am (local time in northern France and Belgium) and was preceded by some eighty-nine percent illumination from the moon.35 Therefore, two hours earlier, the Canadian pilot would have flown and fought under whatever partial moonlight shone through any localised clouding or mist.

It can be conjectured that, instead of heading south east from Neuville-Saint-Rémy, Billy inadvertently swung north over unfamiliar German 2nd Army territory to Émerchicourt, in the eastern area of the 6th Army. He would have had little help in maintaining his bearing from a standard issue aeroplane compass according to 1917 published complaints about RFC and RNAS equipment: ‘It appears that the twisting and turning of an aeroplane are so sharp and sudden that no existing compass was trustworthy in an aeroplane.’36

Likewise, Billy could have encountered aircraft taking off from Émerchicourt. In the moonlight and the mist, he might have mistaken the straight inter-plane struts and pointed nose of a Fl.-Abt 26 Albatros C.VII with the familial design characteristics of the smaller Albatros D.I or D.II, an older type, then no longer in frontline squadron use. The accompanying in-air views of the two Albatros types illustrate the point.

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