WAR

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French surplus, since the British war industry was developing about as slowly as
Allied co-operation. These balky engines were prone to going dud in the air and
when that happened the D.H.2 would usually drop into a spin. Inexperienced pilots
might automatically try to recover from a spin by pulling the stick back to raise
the nose. But this would only make the spin worse, and unless the controls
were neutralized before the stick was pulled back the machine would spin into
the ground. There were fatal accidents with the D.H.2 and it acquired an unenviable
reputation and a ghastly nickname, "The Spinning Incinerator." Hawker
tried every stunt he could think of, including right- and left-hand spins, and
made sure his chaps knew the D.H.2 inside and out—everything it could and
could not do. As for the engines, however, there was no answer but prayer.
For besides their tired balkiness, they sometimes just simply came apart. There
were many accidents caused by the departure of one or more cylinders from the
whirling engine, and when these in their passage sundered the tail booms, the
whole aeroplane broke up in the air. With better engines and a better state of
flying instruction, the D.H.2 would have been much less of a pain in the neck.
Hawker was commissioned a Major and sent to France by boat a few days
before the squadron flew the Channel early in February 1916. The squadron set
up shop at Bertangles just north of Amiens and began flying regular solo patrols
and escort missions for photographic two-seaters.
One of the men who flew with No. 24 Squadron from the beginning was
Lieutenant John Oliver Andrews, now Air Vice Marshal Andrews, who had
transferred to the RFC from the Royal Scots and had served at the Front in
No. 5 Squadron. (At the time of the Second World War, Andrews was director
of armament development for the
Air Ministry.)
Andrews, like Hawker and most of the men in the squadron, as well as the
D.H.2 itself, was hand picked for a specific job— putting a stop to the first period
of German air supremacy, the Fokker Scourge. Things had come a long way since
",*:-
Hawker observed that the Germans were becoming "very troublesome," and in
the spring of 1916 the Eindecker was a problem of the first magnitude on the
British Front. Since the French had few Nieuport Bebes to spare for the British
Commandant de Rose was just putting together the Nieuport escadrilles at Verdun—it
was up to Hawker and his squadron of D.H.2's to insure the protection
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of the RFC two-seaters on photography and observation missions.
For a time No. 24 Squadron sent up a regular escort for two-seaters of
neighboring squadrons, but no particular action developed because the roving
J. O. Andrews.
Eindeckers had avoided attacking close formations. Late in April the first
real test came when a four-man escort led by Andrews crossed into German territory
near Bapaume with an observation mission of five B.E.2d's from No. 15
Squadron. Instead of allowing one or two Eindeckers to chip away at British
two-seater formations, a technique adequate up until now, the Germans decided
to accept the challenge of the fighter escort and show that by a mass attack the
two-seaters could still be destroyed. As the B.E.'s droned eastward and the
D.H.'s buzzed around them, a flock of Eindeckers appeared and circled to place
themselves between the British and the lines. They climbed for height. When the
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