Biplanes collide

It just had broke daylight. Two of our planes were coming over, the observation planes, with a pilot and an observer in the back, two. And we were watching them, and they’re up about, oh, they were up about the level of the observation balloons and there was no balloons up. But that’s about the height that they were flying. It must have been four thousand, five thousand feet, something like that. It was a nice clear morning. The sun was, the sun, we just happened, the sun was rising, we happened, we heard the plane, we looked back to see and my God, look at that. Them two buggers are going to collide, for sure. And they sure did. Tore off the two inside, the left and the right wing off the, the right wing off of the left wing of the one further over. Whoop together. They were those biplanes, two deckers as we called them. There were no parachutes in World War One, not as far as, far as the fliers. There were parachutes for those fellows in the balloons, but I never saw anybody bail out of a plane. You had to go down with it. No, that’s true, that’s right, no parachutes. This one fella was coming out, you know, his hands were stretched out. He was spreadeagled himself, you know, in the air and he started rolling over. We heard afterwards that they were all killed We were in the battle of the Somme then. They were doing the observation work as to how far, I guess, the Germans had backed up or what, and they were looking for . . . I don’t know how many, there must have been thousands of troops seen that.