Viewing page 8 of 171

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-2-
and the speaking tubes were reinstalled. They never failed to work. So when early in July we went where the real action was and got our Salmsons, we left undisturbed the speaking tubes that came in them.

We had of course no radio beam to guide us to a landing. When it was raining, or when the ground was obscured by fog or low clouds, we simply did not fly. With no view of the ground, there was nothing that we could accomplish. Moreover we should have become hopelessly lost. We did not carry compasses, for they went haywire because of magnetic disturbances in the machinery of the plane. The observer was the navigator, and he depended entirely on a view of the ground. In strange territory he navigated by the map, and if he could not do that he had no business trying to be an observer.

When flying in formation with other planes we had absolutely no [[strikeout]] wa[[/strikeout]] way of communicating with them except to wave our arms or point. On my last flight Littauer and I were there to protect an observer from another squadron. He was leading our little formation of three, and his mission was to get photographs of the German railhead of the St. Mihiel salient, then under attack by the Americans. Our leader [[strikeout]] beca[[/strikeout]] became lost soon after we entered German territory, and we just wandered around. I could have set him right, but I had no way of communicating with him. I told Littauer, and we exchanged comments about our leader. But we could only stick behind him and hope that he would recover his bearings. He finally did as we approached Metz, the only sizable fortified town anywhere near us in German territory. Our leader could tell that we were in German territory because of the antiaircraft shells that kept cracking around us. So he turned and headed toward his objective, but before we reached it the German chasse attacked us.

Signals could be sent to us from the ground, by means of panels of white cloth spread out at a place where the observer was looking [[strikeout]]fo[[/strikeout]] for them. The simplest case of that kind was when an infantryman, responding to rocket signals from the plane, spread out a square of white cloth 20 inches on each side. The plane's rocket meant "Where are you?". If there was a response the observer noted on the map the position of the panel and reported it. The only other source of such ground signals was the headquarters of an artillery battery. We used to spot shots for them when they were firing at an enemy

Transcription Notes:
Duplicate page?