Free Marked for Death by James Hamilton-Paterson Page B

like a deathtrap when confronting the enemy. On the British side Sopwith’s Pup, Triplane and Camel, as well as the Royal Aircraft Factory’s S.E.5a, were a revelation to those who first flew them in combat; and atthe time, as also today, each aircraft had its dedicated supporters. W. E. Johns’s punning title for an early collection of his stories, The Camels Are Coming , shows that fighter still had a certain legendary quality to it fourteen years after the war’s end, even though its active service life lasted a scant eighteen months after its introduction in the summer of 1917.
    The stumpy little Camel was neither beautiful nor easy to fly. In fact it was notoriously tricky, ‘a fierce little beast’, as one airman described it, although those who mastered it found it a highly effective fighting machine. All the same, by late 1917 many German pilots reckoned their new Pfalz D.III was easily the Camel’s equal and in less than a year the Fokker D.VII was plainly the better fighter. One aviation historian, the late Peter Grosz (son of the German Expressionist painter Georg Grosz and an acknowledged expert on German aircraft), described the Camel baldly as ‘probably the most over-rated and accident-prone fighter in the Allied inventory’, going on to add that ‘surprisingly, only the D.H.5 was superior to the Pfalz in speed, climb rate and manoeuvrability’. 31 ‘Accident-prone’ the Camel certainly was, which must partly explain why it so easily heads the list of British types lost. Many an experienced British pilot dreaded having to convert to it:
    They were by far the most difficult of service machines to handle. Many pilots killed themselves by crashing in a right-hand spin when they were learning to fly them. A Camel hated an inexperienced hand, and flopped into a frantic spin at the least opportunity. They were unlike ordinary aeroplanes, being quite unstable, immoderately tail-heavy, so light on the controls that the slightest jerk or inaccuracy would hurl them all over the sky, difficult to land, deadly to crash: a list of vices to emasculate the stoutest courage, and the first flight on a Camel was always a terrible ordeal. They were bringing out a two-seater training Camel for dual work, in the hope of reducing that thirty percent of crashes on first solo flights. 32
    Nevertheless, once in the air the Camel had an agility all its own, partly down to the lightness of its construction and the weight of engine, guns, tanks and pilot all being concentrated in the nose. The gyroscopic effect of the engine was very marked, as might be expected with a mass of 350 lb whirling around at 1,250 rpm. Seen from the pilot’s little wicker seat the propeller rotated clockwise. This meant that if he climbed or turned to the right the nose would drop sharply, and if he dived or turned to the left the nose would rise. It also meant that lightning-fast right-handed turns were easily performed. Left-handed turns were another matter, however, and pilots found they could often turn 90 degrees left quicker by making a right turn of 270 degrees. This is not an ideal characteristic in any aircraft, but the most skilled pilots eventually found ways of instinctively going with rather than against the engine’s gyroscopic pull. The Camel is credited with being the top-scoring fighter of any side in the war, with 1,294 victories. 33 On the other hand it killed 350 trainee pilots, or more than one non-combat death for every four enemy aircraft downed (but not necessarily with a fatality): a high price to pay. 34 Like the contemporary French SPAD S.XIII, it stalled readily and spun viciously. Because of its tail-heaviness it could never for a moment be flown ‘hands-off’ and was therefore a very tiring aircraft to fly. Its combat success rate unquestionably makes the Camel one of the best fighters – and by that sole yardstick the best – of WWI. Yet that still does not make it a great aircraft because it so obviously could