OUR FIRST WORLD WAR
In part 43 of his personal testimony series, Peter Hart reaches December 1917. While soldiers endured grim conditions in freezing dugouts, the crew of an airship was lucky to survive a disastrous final voyage. Peter is tracing the experiences of 20 peopl
When war broke out, the then 27-year-old Elizabeth ‘Dolly’ Shepherd, from Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, was a recently retired professional parachutist. In late 1917, Dolly Shepherd was a driver mechanic with the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps based at Calais. Even behind the lines, conditions of service were harsh in the deepest months of winter. Eight of us lived in a Nissen hut – a block at the bottom with basins in. There was no running water, but we had a standpipe outside where we used to go to get water. When it froze we used to collect the snow and melt it over a Tommy’s cooker. We used that water from melted snow to wash in and to fill our hot water bottles. They were the only comfort we had. No heating, no, no! There were stoves, but I never saw them alight. One girl used to walk in her sleep; one girl snored; another one spoke in her sleep – we used to take it in turns to go and shake them.
There were no breakfasts until eight o’clock. Well, we were off by just after six, so we were too early for breakfast and too late for supper. We had a hut for ourselves at the garage – just for the girl drivers – and we had a little stove there where we used to make a cup of tea. But if by any chance we were home at lunch time (which was not often), we gave a franc a week to the sergeants’ mess, and they let us have a meal. The female drivers seemed to be nobody’s children. But two of the women serving in the canteen took pity on them and gave them a bottle of Benedictine liqueur. Four of us filled tin mugs with Benedictine and drank it all. You can imagine the state we were in! Well, there came the usual air raid and I went out and sat on a little white stone in the compound. Every time they came to get me another bomb would come down, so they left me! There were 25 men killed in the next compound. We all woke up in the morning in the sickbay. Then we were given a court martial because we were unfit to perform duty when called upon.
The colonel, I happened to be driving the day before. He said: “What have you got to say for yourself?” We all said the same thing: “If it happened tomorrow we should do exactly the same, because we’re tired out!” He said: “Well, what days do you have off?” I said: “We haven’t had a day off!” They were confined to barracks for a week, but were also given a half day off every week in future, which made all the difference. Joe was born in Alnwick, Northumberland in 1899. Joining up underage, he trained with the 21st (Provisional) Northumberland Fusiliers based at Blyth and Longbenton in 1915–16. Private Pickard was serving with the 1/5th Bn Northumberland Fusiliers in the Ypres area. A battlefield in winter is a terrible place, where the freezing men are surrounded by reminders of the recent fighting. There were burial parties, but often enough the bodies were just put into shell holes. A fellow was generally buried where he fell. I was coming along this trench
and, God, I was blinded by the smell. You’ve never smelt a dead body, have you? It turns sweet, sickly, worse than incense.
Many soldiers suspected that rats fed on the bodies.
I didn’t like rats. I was in a small dugout. I was just sitting on the blankets and Mr Rat comes out of a hole. He had a look round and went up the dugout steps. He came back again and went back down his hole. I thought: “I’m not sleeping with that coming out of the bed every night!” So I waited, put a sandbag on him, fixed my bayonet and, ‘Boosh!’ I nailed him to the floor. Victor was born in 1897. After attending Dartmouth College as a cadet, he served as a midshipman on HMS Britannia from 1914 to 1915. Following balloon training, he was posted onto airships with the Royal Naval Air Service in June 1915. Sub Lieutenant Victor Goddard was made first officer of North Sea Airship 5 (N.S.5) and they were to fly from Howden to the East Fortune Royal Naval Air Service station near North Berwick to commence operational duties. Weather forecasts were not entirely reliable at this time and although a depression had been identified over the North Sea it was not seen as a threat when they took off on 12 December. What hadn’t been foreseen was a deep secondary depression passing over East Fortune. We began to confront headwinds soon after we had taken off. These became stronger and steeper, the clouds came lower. We were in pretty heavy rain, and – from the time we crossed the [Scottish] border to the north of Newcastle – in adverse conditions. We might have turned tail and gone back to Howden, but we thought we’d get there all right. We were optimistic, and were making headway. What we weren’t aware of was that there was increasing overheating in the engines, and the water was being boiled away. Over the last stretch, when we were going from the region of Dunbar to East Fortune, we happened to be going along a road at about 60 feet up – quite low down, to get the minimum wind we could – and we were overtaken by a pony and trap.
When we got within about half a mile of the boundary of East Fortune, we could see the landing party in the dusk, waiting for us. Our engines had been going at full speed for about an hour and a half, and at that point, when we were just about to cross the boundary, one engine stopped, and we began to go astern. A moment or two later the other engine stopped. We became a free balloon, and were rapidly drifting backwards in a south-easterly direction. We crossed over St Abb’s Head and were soon out to sea.
One had to conserve one’s gas and not use water ballast unless you simply had to. Well, we did have to in the end, because we actually hit the sea! We got one engine started, then the other. By that time, the speed of the wind had abated a little, and we crept back towards the coast. You could see the breakers, but not really the land. You can imagine that we were relieved on board to see those craggy cliffs of St Abb’s Head and to feel sure that we had land underneath us. Goddard had seen an airfield under construction by a large party of German prisoners of war near Haddington. They decided to land there, hoping to use the PoWs and guards as a landing party. There had been no response to their SOS signals, but as they were fast running out of fuel, they decided to risk a landing anyway. We dropped our trail-rope and dropped the grapnel down it, hoping that it would catch in something. Then, with the engines still running, lowered ourselves towards the ground, although we couldn’t see it. All of a sudden, there was an upheaval in the car; we had landed in the middle of the only trees left on the airfield: two big oaks, which hadn’t yet been felled. These penetrated the car and the envelope. We pulled the ripcord and stopped the engines. Mercifully, nothing caught fire, but we were in a dark tent with a large smell of gas and smothered by our own envelope. The car was at an angle of about 45 degrees, and everybody in a bit of a mess, but we managed to clamber out on to dry land.
Dawn revealed a sad scene of the airship envelope draped over the concealed trees. The N.S.5 never flew again.
“Mr Rat came out of a hole and I thought: ‘I’m not sleeping with that coming out of the bed every night!’”