CHAPTER IX

FLIGHT-COMMANDER WILLIAM LEAFE ROBINSON, V.C.

Flight-Commander William Leafe Robinson, V.C., was the first airman to bring down a German airship on British soil, and he enjoyed the distinction of being the first soldier to win the Victoria Cross in England. The raid during which his heroic act was performed was carried out by thirteen airships in the early part of September, 1916. The principal theatre of operations was the Eastern Counties, and the objectives seem to have been London and certain industrial centres in the Midlands. The new measures taken for the reduction or obscuration of light undoubtedly proved most efficacious, for the raiding squadrons, instead of steering a steady course, as in the raids of the spring and autumn of 1915, groped about in darkness, looking for a safe avenue of approach to their objectives. Three airships only were able to approach the outskirts of London. One of them appeared over the northern district at about 2.15 a.m., where she was at once picked up by searchlights and heavily engaged by anti-aircraft guns and aeroplanes. After a few minutes this airship was seen to burst into flames and to fall rapidly towards the earth.

Not, however, till some hours had elapsed was the name of the hero of the hour made known. Meanwhile official reports were issued, the first simply announcing the raid, and the second stating that one airship had been brought down in flames near London. On Sunday, September 3, an official report stated that after careful inquiries it had been found that casualties and damage caused by the raid were quite disproportionate to the number of airships employed, the casualties being one man and one woman killed, eleven men and two children injured. No casualties occurred in the Metropolitan District, though some houses and outhouses were slightly damaged. Elsewhere the damage was very small, no military damage of any sort being done.

A great number of persons saw the airship fall. One witness relates that he saw it shortly before two o’clock, and for ten minutes, it seemed to him, it was smothered with shrapnel, held the whole time by a concentration of three or four searchlights. He had watched the bombardment on other visits, but in none of them, he says, did the shells burst in such deadly proximity to their objective. The airship, in his own words, might have been giving her own firework display. He saw the airship make off northwards. Already she was a ship in distress. ‘She yawed and dipped first this end and then that—going, all the time, at a good speed. Then she was lost behind a cloud. A long silence ensued. The sky was full of cloud patches. The searchlights were all shut off. Suddenly the airship was seen far to the northward. She had travelled behind a sheltering cloud. She slipped from its edge, and the searchlights had her at once. It was seen that she was falling. She must have been from 2,000 to 3,000 feet up. She had fallen a little, when suddenly she burst into flames! The light was everywhere. Had your back been to it, or your eyes shut, you must have been sensible of it. The thing fell like the moon falling from heaven, with a long trail of light—only the light was crimson, not green—and as it fell there broke out one of the most eerie sounds ever heard—hand-clapping and cheering from thousands of people all round, whose waking existence one had never suspected in the dark until that moment. They applauded simultaneously as at a pageant, till the sky over London seemed as full of cheering as it had been full of the rosy strange light only a moment before.’

There are many other interesting and instructive accounts. A special constable, who witnessed the raid, writes: ‘It was at about 11.30 p.m. when I heard the first Zeppelin. I could not, however, see any airship owing to the mist intervening. Several aeroplanes continued to cruise around at great heights with only their little tail lights discernible. People were beginning to return to bed on the assumption that the raid was over, when soon after two o’clock bombs were heard dropping again—this time in the direction of London—together with the noise of heavy anti-aircraft bombardment. We now saw the airship easily just over the north-eastern outskirts of London in the rays of many searchlights. After some minutes of very heavy gunfire she made a graceful sweep and turned tail, going full speed eastwards for home and safety. But though she must have been about 8,000 feet up at this time the searchlights followed with relentless persistency, while all the time the guns were barking madly after her. Then a strange thing occurred. The airship suddenly disappeared and reappeared again—caught up apparently by new searchlights further along the line of its retreating course. She looked much smaller than before. At about the same time a strange red light appeared in the sky almost directly above the airship and the guns immediately ceased to fire. The searchlights never left the invader for an instant now. The hundreds of thousands of people who were again out of doors and witnessing this new and weird development held their breath. Everybody seemed to feel that something dramatic was about to occur.

‘Suddenly a flame flashed out from one end of the airship, and almost at the same time she began a nose dive towards the earth, the flame growing and spreading throughout the whole length of her immense body. It was a wonderful, unforgettable sight. The flames lit up the sky and land for miles and miles around with a brilliant red hue as the million and half or so cubic feet of hydrogen were being devoured by the hungry flames. I could read a newspaper with ease in this light, though I was more than ten miles away. The airship took quite two minutes dropping to earth, but during those two minutes mad, deafening cheers rose out of the night from all sides. Hooters from works and from vessels in the Thames and railways shrieked and whistled and screeched, all joining in the general pandemonium of joy. Even from a distance of five miles away I could hear the deep-throated cheers of the Irish Guards in camp there. For a full half-hour the cheering continued, echoing and re-echoing from all sides, and in the intervals of the joyous shouts of half-dressed men, women, and children could be heard the humming of an aeroplane’s uncommonly powerful engines. Again the mysterious red light appeared: then a white light and again a red light, and so on alternately, until the multitude realized that the victor of a great air battle was returning, signalling the story of his success as he made for his aerodrome head quarters, guided by friendly searchlights. Then again such cheers rent the air as may not have ever been heard before anywhere on earth in the blackness of a very early September morning.’

A crowd of persons from a radius of almost twenty miles flocked hastily to the scene of the wreckage. One records how ‘an engine, salved with the two halves of a propeller from the wreckage, lay by the side of a hedge. Men were measuring them with their walking-sticks and women by the length of their umbrellas. Pieces of wood and aluminium had been shot helter-skelter all over the field and were being gathered up as grim yet precious treasures. A cordon, half military, half constabulary, kept the onlookers at a distance of some twenty yards. And all the time the flames were steadily consuming the framework of the terror of the air.’

How the monster met her end was described by one who saw all that happened: ‘She was flying at a great height,’ he said, ‘but the anti-aircraft guns were putting in splendid work. Not once, nor twice, but many times the airship seemed to be hit, until the gondola must have been riddled through and through. She reeled. Then she shook herself like some great angry animal enraged at attack, but not disposed to turn and flee. Probably she couldn’t fly away, even at that time. Anyway, she made no attempt. The airship burst into flames in the centre first, then at the ends. She sank lower and lower, and at last, tumbling over with nose pointing downward, she fell to the earth with no bump or thud. The dull splash of an incendiary bomb and the cracking report of what was left of her ammunition were the only noises she made as her dying gasps.

‘When the crowd did talk of the awful thing that lay smouldering in the long damp grass they were emphatic in two directions. Men of our own Flying Corps, who know the perils of the air from experience, paid splendid tribute to the memory of the charred dead who lay doubled up in the attitudes of the final agony. “Whatever they meant to do, whatever they had done, they were brave men,” said one. From others of the spectators came what was, perhaps, not unnatural—satisfaction undisguised.’

People who saw the airship in full flight agreed that she was flying very high—much higher indeed than the airship which previously visited London. From the earth she looked like a small illuminated cigar set thousands of feet above the countryside. Directly she was sighted in the northern districts of London several large searchlights held her while the guns got to work. There was an incessant gunfire for a few minutes, and then there was silence. The airship had fled north. But in the course of the next few moments the lights picked her up again. Then was seen the mysterious signalling light of our heroic airmen.

The village of Cuffley, made famous by the fall of the airship, is a little village of tiled cottages resting in the curve of a white road which defines the crest of a splendid sweeping hill crowned with poplars and tall pines.

The contour of the village is that of a wide, clearly determined triangle, with the church and the inn marking the base and the cottage of Castle Farm placed at the apex. ‘The shadow of the little grey church falls athwart the yard of the inn, by name The Plough; but Castle Farm is divided from it by two smooth, rich meadows.’ A footpath crosses these meadows, uniting the farm and the inn.

The burning airship fell into a big field which lies in the direct centre of the triangle. This is a barren field; the very soil is black and unfertile, covered with tall grass, grey and parched. The splintered blades of the airship’s propeller crashed through a hedge, tearing it and breaking it down. ‘Such was the damage done,’ one writes, ‘such was the fine quality of the mercy meted out to the village of Cuffley.’

One of the villagers records: “I was running downstairs at the time the airship was falling. The whole house was lighted up. I saw all of the furniture in the hall, and the table and the carpet. My husband was down there. He hadn’t had time to get dressed. He was putting on his clothes down there in the hall. They were all streaked with red, his face and his hands, too. The red light stopped, but it was still light—just a little light.”

‘I could hear him talking. I was trying to ask him what he was saying, but my tongue wouldn’t move in my mouth. I was shaking all over. I thought I was going to fall down the stairs—the steps in our house are very crooked.

‘“We are lost—we are lost!”’ I said. But my husband says I said nothing at all. I’m sure I don’t know.

‘“We must get out of here,” he said, “It’ll be on us in a minute.”

‘But we couldn’t get the front door unlocked. We were trying to break it open, hammering on it. And I was wondering all the time if it was going to fall through the roof. I thought it was hours we were there. “What a dreadful way to die,” I said. And he said, “There, there, everything’s all right.”

‘Then the red light came back in the sky again—and all of the time we couldn’t get the door open. But all at once it came open quite easily.

‘We were out in the yard. We saw a flaming mass drop into the field by The Plough. We thought the people there were killed. We began to run. We could see the fire burning. But nobody was hurt—what a wonderful thing! I felt, almost happy—but I knew I shouldn’t be happy when such an awful thing had happened.

‘My husband took me with him into the field. He said I couldn’t stand to see those things out there. But I thought that when it’s war everybody can stand everything. And I didn’t know—maybe, somebody had been hurt. You couldn’t tell, you know—somebody might need help.’

Another villager records that the airship just missed The Plough, and fell in a field close by. ‘When we got over to the field we could still hear the crack, crack, crack of the cartridges exploding in the fire. This must have kept up for about twenty minutes. The thing I was thinking was that there wasn’t much of a wreck there for an airship—only about twenty-five square yards of it. I had a great fear at the back of my mind that it might be one of our smaller airships, after all. Then we found the propeller. We saw four bodies burning in the wires—they were all black and charred, still burning. There’s no doubt about it—not a man in that airship came down alive. There was a lot of burnt wood sticking in the ground everywhere around—everything had stuck in the ground end on. We even saw a broken Thermos flask.’

It is well that these statements of eye-witnesses, which with the passing of time will take on peculiar interest, should be set down in these pages.

In appraising the heroic achievement of Flight-Commander Robinson, V.C., we should bear in mind that night flying presents peculiar difficulties. A contributor to _The Aeroplane_, October 11, 1916, writes: ‘The actual bodily peril of flying at night may not be as great as is the peril of crossing the German lines in broad daylight, but the nerve strain must be greater. The aviator over the German side of the lines has generally something on hand to keep him from brooding, such as a battle with a German machine or the dodging of good shooting, and he generally has a passenger by way of company. The night pilot, on the other hand, flies entirely alone. He flaps around for hours on end, with nothing to do but think and keep a look-out for other aircraft. And nothing is so great a strain on the nerves as unlimited time for thinking, a pastime for which the pilot has considerable leisure, now that all respectable aeroplanes are inherently stable.

‘If there is any mist about, there is the constant danger of collision with other machines, for in the dark there is not even that chance of dodging which a pilot gets from the few seconds during which he can see another aeroplane approaching in a cloud which is illuminated by daylight. Over and above it all is the constant imminence of the landing problem, with the prospect of being smashed up, and possibly burnt to death, if the pilot makes a mistake, or fortune is against him.’

Flight-Commander Robinson showed remarkable skill as well as great valour—a hero in the good British sense of the word. On September 3 he had the honour of being foremost at the investiture at Windsor Castle, when the King decorated him with the Victoria Cross.

The first of the money rewards received from grateful admirers of his valour was £500 from Mr. L. A. Oldfield. Mr. William Bow also sent the £500 which he offered to the first pilot to bring down an enemy airship on British soil. A further £2,000 came from Col. Joseph Cowen, and public recognition was made by Sir Charles Cheers Wakefield, Lord Mayor of London. All united in paying a tribute to the young aviator’s heroic deed.

We have seen that he bore his honours with fine spirit. He claimed for himself no peculiar gifts of gallantry or skill. It was, he said, merely his good fortune. There were many, he said, waiting for the opportunity to do what he had done. Later the opportunity came, and we know to our just pride that amongst our airmen there are _many_ heroes.