When pilots took to the air into combat during World War I, it was less than 15 years after the Wright brothers’ famous first flight in 1903. The planes were still in development, and were made of fabric over a wooden frame and held together by something similar to a piano wire. .
They were weak in strength. C said. “These planes were very flimsy, and if they landed hard, they would sometimes get damaged,” said Brent Wilson, a historian who has just published his book “The War Among the Clouds: New Brunswick Pilots in the Great War.”
He noted that even training could be fatal for pioneer pilots.
Wilson said in a recent interview that about 22,000 Canadians served in the British Air Services during World War I, most of them from well-educated families in Ontario and western Canada. But at least 252 of them were from New Brunswick, many of them from small farming communities.
Wilson said the planes flew not only on the Western Front in France and Belgium, which were the main theater of operations, but also around the Mediterranean and in Italy, Russia, Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine.
Wilson’s book is based on accounts of their service given in letters home and in other records. He said he wanted to document the lives of the pilots who came from rural New Brunswick. “I think it’s important to remember that they made an important contribution to the broader war effort in defending the country,” Wilson said.
Although aviation was relatively new and exciting at first, it evolved during the war to include large-scale air battles involving dozens of pilots fighting for control of the air, said Tim Cook, senior historian at the Canadian War Museum.
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While the “sky knights,” as the flamboyant pilots were sometimes called, captured the public’s attention, he said, of greater importance to the armies on the ground, mired in the mud, were the slower observation planes. They photographed the front and provided important intelligence to commanders, artillerymen and infantry.
Wilson said one of the pilots he found most interesting was Major Albert DeBrissay Carter, a graduate of Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. Born in Westmoreland County, New Brunswick, near Nova Scotia, on July 3, 1892, he became a great leader. “The ace of war,” Wilson said.
On October 31, 1916, Carter shot down his first two planes east of Ypres. In his detailed combat report in the book, he describes the engagement.
“I dived on board three enemy aircraft, selected one, and dived perpendicular to it. “I got within 10 yards of it and had to pull out so as not to collide,” the report says. “I fired several shots into the pilot and observer seats, starting at 150 yards.” Until I had to withdraw…. I could not see what happened to the enemy plane as we approached the ground; I finished great at less than 1,000 feet.
Over the course of the war, Carter shot down 28 German aircraft before being captured on May 19, 1918. The book tells the story of one of Carter’s friends from Saint John, New Brunswick, Captain Stuart Bell, who recounted a conversation between the two. king. Carter described his demand that British officers receive better treatment in German concentration camps.
“To this,” the book says, “the German replied, ‘I will show you that you are in Germany and will do as well as we ask you to do.’”
“Major. And Carter replied to that: ‘Yes, and that is why the whole world is fighting you.’ You have no sense of honor or respect for agreements. That is why he took bread, water, and necklaces for three days.”
On May 22, 1919, 27-year-old Carter, who had survived a bout of Spanish flu, died during training when his plane crashed. He was buried in Old Shoreham Cemetery in England.
One of the other men mentioned in the book is Lieutenant Alfred Beliveau of Fredericton. He began his pilot training in Shoreham, England, in a two-seat Maurice Farman aircraft. His diaries of the aircraft are documented in the book, in which he wrote that it was “stable and easy to fly”. Bellevue went to the Graduate School of Fighter Pilots in Turnberry, Scotland, where he trained in aerobatic flying, the book says.
“We also did a lot of air combat in man-to-man air combat, but with cameras instead of machine guns. The cameras were synchronized with the propeller blades like machine guns, so as to enable us to take pictures” through the rotating propellers, in the same way that combat is done. Actual machine-gunning,” said an entry from the pilot, as recorded in the book.
New Brunswick residents were in the minority among the pilots, but they made a significant contribution, Wilson said.
“We had never had airplanes in wars before, so they were pioneers in this new form of warfare, and it made very strong advances. … By the end of the war, from a technological point of view, airplanes and the role of the Air Force had advanced very significantly.”
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
