In his highly entertaining book, _Winged Warfare_, Colonel Bishop
introduces an amusing incident as the finish of this night’s patrol. He
says:
“We continued to patrol our beat, and I was keeping my place so well
I began to look about a bit. After one of these gazing spells, I was
startled to discover that the three leading machines of our formation
were missing. Apparently they had disappeared into nothingness. I
looked around hastily, and then discovered them underneath me, diving
rapidly. I didn’t know just what they were diving at, but I dived,
too. Long before I got down to them, however, they had been in a short
engagement half a mile below me, and had succeeded in frightening off
an enemy artillery machine which had been doing wireless observation
work. It was a large white German two-seater, and I learned after we
landed that it was a well-known machine and was commonly called ‘the
flying pig.’ Our patrol leader had to put up with a lot of teasing that
night because he had attacked the ‘pig.’ It seems that it worked every
day on this part of the front, was very old, had a very bad pilot and a
very poor observer to protect him.
“It was a sort of point of honor in the squadron that the decrepit old
‘pig’ should not actually be shot down. It was considered fair sport,
however, to frighten it. Whenever our machines approached, the ‘pig’
would begin a series of clumsy turns and ludicrous maneuvers, and would
open a frightened fire from ridiculously long ranges. The observer was
a very bad shot and never succeeded in hitting any of our machines, so
attacking this particular German was always regarded more as a joke
than a serious part of warfare. The idea was only to frighten the
‘pig,’ but our patrol leader had made such a determined dash at him the
first day we went over that he never appeared again. For months the
patrol leader was chided for playing such a nasty trick upon a harmless
old Hun.”
As Colonel Bishop’s story is that of one thrilling and perilous
adventure following fast upon another, it is impossible to give his
career in detail or recount even the chief of his many engagements. The
fight in which he won the Military Cross is a good illustration of the
clear judgment and fearlessness which characterized his exploits in
general.
The Allies had been preparing for the great offensive that began with
the battle of Arras, and for a week in advance of the date set for the
initiative (April 9th, 1917) the airmen had been carrying out orders
to keep the sky free from prying eyes of men in planes and to attack
and destroy enemy observation balloons. The balloons flew from the
same places every day because there were batteries of anti-aircraft
guns stationed below that area. Bishop was assigned to the destruction
of a particularly annoying balloon that went up daily in contempt of
scouting planes. The balloon, because of cloudy weather, did not go up
the first day after the assignment. The character of the fighting may
be determined from the fact that in two days, April 6 and 7, the Allies
lost twenty-eight machines as against fifteen German machines accounted
for. But, says Bishop, “We considered this a small price to pay for the
amount of work accomplished and the number of machines engaged (every
class of machine was thrown into the clearing process) coupled with the
fact that all our work was done within the German lines.”