Germans on his tail

First World War Audio Archive

Germans on his tail

Transcript

They could, of course, get higher than we could but they didn’t

Pilot wearing heavy mitts

have the range. We used to be able to get, oh, about half way to our target before we’d normally encounter any enemy aircraft over Germany, over the German lines and back. By the same token, our Camels couldn’t escort us all the way either. The SE-5 was a little bit better. Then, there were a couple of squadrons of... after a month or two there, about June - a couple of squadrons of Bristol fighters, two seat fighters and they fooled the Germans quite a lot, because the Germans thought they were DH-9's at first and they found out they weren’t. The Bristol fighter had a Rolls Royce 275 horsepower engine in it, much quicker on the uptake and much more manoeuvrable and built for that. He had two machine guns in the front and two in the back. And they helped us

Photograph of pilot wearing a fur coat.

an awful lot, because we had to go to the target and then make your bomb run. You couldn’t start flipping around, if you were going to do any good at all, and then turn and come home. And we often would try to swing out over the North Sea and come back. We weren’t supposed to fight, you see. That was the other definite order was not to try to stop and fight. Fight your way out, but get home. And a pal of mine I know, one of them, he, perhaps he was straying a bit anyway. He got outside the formation somehow. His aircraft was a little faster than ours, I guess and he didn’t hold off or anything. He just kept going and he got too far ahead of us, as a matter of fact. All we could

Pilot receiving his commission.

do was stick tight ourselves and hope for the best and, by golly, a couple of Germans got on his tail. They didn’t quite shoot him down but they shot his observer through the leg and he was pretty short of fuel by the time he was coming back home. So the tide was out and we knew the Belgian coast there pretty well, too. And there was a hospital just about, oh, five kilometres or so inside our lines, right on the coast, at a little place, I’ve forgotten the name of it now. And he landed on the beach there and got his observer out and into that hospital, which was a pretty smart thing to do and he was out of fuel. And then they salvaged the airplane, because he got it back to the squadron the next day and they went all over it and fixed it up and he flew, he took part again, but he never strayed out of the formation again.

Description

Mr. Dickins describes the strengths and limitations of the German and British fighters, and the vulnerability of aircraft flying outside of a protected formation.

Clennell Haggerston ‘Punch’ Dickins

Clennell Haggerston ‘Punch’ Dickins was born in Portage la Prairie on January 12, 1899. He interrupted his education at the University of Alberta in 1917 by enlisting in the 196th Battalion, having already completed an officer training course. After being sent to England, he joined the 21st Reserve Battalion. His brother, an observer with the Flying Corps, convinced him to join the Air Force. Mr. Dickins jumped from the Canadian to the British Army in order to facilitate a transfer to the Air Force. Once there, he trained at Tetford in a Morris Marmon Shorthorn. His active duty was with 211 Squadron at Dunkirk. Mr. Dickins and his gunner are credited with 7 enemy aircraft destroyed, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, he spent time in the RCAF, with whom he did aerial photo-survey work. However, most of his civilian career was spent flying in Canada’s North, adapting aircraft for Arctic flight. He became one of Canada’s most famous bush pilots and a pioneer in aviation. Mr. Dickins and his wife Connie (nee Gerrie) lived in Gold Pines, Ontario. Mr. Dickins died on August 2, 1995.

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