Viewing page 71 of 124

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

^[[19]]    October 29, 1973

Dear Alice:

The last two entries on my flight record from the Ferme d'Alger read thus:

"Lundi ... avec Lt. Denis ... 20/5... Reglage... 0:20

"20/5 ... aves Lt. Denis ... Reglage ... 2:15 "

On them hangs a tale of frustration, of the most unpleasant experience I had in France until the day of my final crash.  Note that I made two flights on the same day with the same pilot.  He was the commander of the squadron.  Our flight in the morning lasted only 20 minutes.  That was because Denis broke off our mission in a rage and came home.  When we got out of the plane he was so angry that he refused to speak to me.  I knew that my time with Escadrille 40 was nearly finished (actually the order recalling me was dated that day).  It looked as if I might be sent back to Amanty in disgrace.  But before we set out on our afternoon flight Denis and I were friends again., and our mission went off smoothly.

We had set out in the morning to do what the Americans in World War 2 called "spotting" artillery fire.  But in WW2 the spotter could converse freely with men on the ground by radio telephone.  That simplified the job so much that it was performed by one man, flying alone, combining the functions of pilot and observer.  In WW1 he could not have done that, for we had no radio telephones.  In August of last year I wrote you describing the clumsy ways we had for communicating between ground and air.  In the instance of which I am now writing, the technological difficulties were aggravated by a linguistic barrier between pilot and observer.

On the bulletin board of the squadron was a list of 8 or 10 numbered "reference targets" the French artillery used from time to time.Targets they really wanted to destroy were apt to be so well camouflaged that to an observer in the air they were inconspicuous.  It was hard for him to spot shellbursts in relation to such a target.  The reference targets were objects easy to identify and to locate on the battlemap.  Those maps were highly accurate.  Once the guns of a battery were properly adjusted on a reference target, they could be shifted to fire on any other in the same vicinity.

On that morning we had been scheduled to work on reference target number 4.  It was the intersection of two trenches, a quarter-mile or so behind the German front line.  An aerial photograph of the area