RFC/RAF: Where They Flew & Fell

In the final episode of our Air War series we travel across the landscape of the First World War and discover what we can find that connects us to the story of the Royal Flying Corps and RAF in WW1, from memorials to cemeteries and sites of former aerodromes. 

Along the way we examine the stories of some of the Aces from James McCudden VC to Manfred Von Richthofen - The Red Baron - to Bob Little from Australia and Major Lanoe Hawker VC, before seeing the battlefields where Albert Ball VC's war ended and the fields where Mick Mannock VC crashed in 1918. 

We end at the Air Services Memorial at Arras which commemorates nearly a thousand British and Commonwealth aviators of the First World War.

Mike O'Connor 'Airfields and Airmen' books published by Pen & Sword:

• Airfields & Airmen: Arras (2004)
• Airfields & Airmen: Cambrai (2007)
• Airfields & Airmen: Channel Coast (2007)
• Airfields & Airmen: Somme (2001)
• Airfields & Airmen: Ypres (2000)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

To end our air war series, we travel across the landscape of the Western Front, those battlefields of the First World War, and find what we can of where those men flew and where they fell. In this fifth and final episode in our air war series, we look at what we can find of the men of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force on the landscape of the Western Front today. The very nature of looking at aspects of combat in the air might suggest there is very little to find of what happened above those trenches, but in fact there are many places where we can uncover aspects of this part, this layer of the Great War. Back in the late 1980s, a video came out, which I purchased from an advert in Stand 2, the journal of the Western Front Association. Back in those days, videos about the First World War were pretty unusual, and this one was called Where They Flew and Where They Fell, and it was presented by actor John Graham Davis, who I understand was deeply interested in the subject matter of the war in the air during the First World War. War. Now in that film he took a journey across the landscape of the old Western Front not from the perspective of the trenches or the war undergrounds or tanks or anything like that but he followed it from the perspective of the pilots and the observers and the history of the Royal Flying Corps, Royal Naval Air Service and the RAF and that inspired me to go and look into that aspect of the Great War on the next few trips that I I did over onto those battlefields and what it made me realise that there were so many more layers to this subject of the Great War and that the landscape of the First World War extended way beyond the area where the fierce fighting had been and it wasn't just a case of looking around or looking down. It was a case of looking up as well and thinking about those events in that sky above the battlefields of the Western Front. So when it came to drawing up this air war series for the podcast, I wanted to do something similar to that video here and that's what this episode is all about. And while that video is hard to find, there is a really poor quality upload of it on YouTube, which I'll put a link to on the podcast website. One thing that we do have to help us in our journeys looking at this subject are the fantastic guidebooks by Mike O'Connor. Mike was a former Concorde pilot and he had an unrivaled knowledge of researching the battlefields from the point of view of the war in the air. And I had the pleasure of working with Mike on a BBC documentary, Aces Falling, some years ago where we looked at that war in the air and we benefited from some of his great knowledge. Now his books, Airfields and Airmen, which were published by Pen and Sword in the early 2000s, cover Ypres, Arras, the Somme, Combré and the Channel Coast. And they are easily available from Pen and Sword direct or widely across the internet and are extremely useful if you want to delve deep into this subject. He focuses on a specific area, he looks at aerodromes, he looks at memorials, he looks at the stories of pilots and observers and goes to some of the principal cemeteries where you'll find significant burials from the war in the air or large numbers of men from the flying services. So they're incredibly useful books and I thoroughly recommend them and I'll put a so you can seek them out. But the one issue with making a journey related to the air war is that it potentially covers a wide area from the UK itself, and that's a part of it, to the Channel Coast region of northern France and Flanders, to areas not just where the fighting took place, but well behind both sets of trenches. So not just behind the British sector of the Western Front, but behind the German sector as well. because that's where a lot of the air activity took place. So it's a journey that will take us far and wide and we can't possibly cover all of the sites connected with the war in the air. And listening to this, you might say, well, why didn't you visit this or that? Well, I'm sure we will return to some of those in future podcasts and future journeys across that landscape of the First World War in France and Flanders. So with this episode... where do we begin our journey starts not across the channel but actually in britain at dover high on the cliffs as part of the white cliff national trust site is a memorial easy to drive by easy to miss but which commemorates that point where the royal flying corps went to war in august 1914 and that too will be our starting point for this journey. On a grass airstrip not far from here, the aircraft of four squadrons took off between the 13th and 15th of August 1914, so just over a week or so after the outbreak of war. Among them, a plane piloted by Hubert Dunstaville Harvey Kelly, who became the first pilot to land on French soil when he landed a BE-2A from No. 2 Squadron at Amiens, on 13th August 1914. He would go on to become a pilot in No. 56 Squadron, one of the famous ones, and be awarded the Distinguished Service Order and was sadly shot down near Arras after a long war in May 1917, being buried today in Brown's Copse Cemetery near Ruex. Here, at this point, this very modest memorial, the story of British military aviation in the Great War really begins with the dispatch of those aircraft to France in August 1914. And from here, we'll make our own crossing now to one of the main Royal Flying Corps and RAF bases used in northern France. That journey takes us to Saint-Omer, to the troops. In 1914, there were no major air bases across France. And as the importance of the Royal Flying Corps grew, it was clear that it would need to be a base somewhere, a major base from which they could operate. operate. Saint-Omer was selected as it had a large flat area near a racecourse where aircraft could land and take off and there was a chateau close by that could be used for pilots and personnel. The Royal Flying Corps headquarters was established here as early as October 1914 and it rapidly became the point of arrival of new squadrons as they deployed to the Western Front. It was clear not all of them could just stay here, that further facilities would be needed, But this became a major staging point for the arrival of squadrons and aircraft. One of the reasons it was so useful was its distance from Britain. It was a direct route, a short direct route of only 21 miles that took aircraft from Kent via Cape Greene direct to Santo Meir. Gradually the site expanded with temporary hangars, wooden huts for the personnel, and the whole establishment gradually extended into nearby Santa Maria itself. As the size of the Royal Flying Corps grew, and as we've mentioned in previous podcasts, the size of the personnel that was required to keep those aircraft in the sky, that grew too. and a huge establishment of buildings and structures. An estate was really needed for them as the war progressed. Later in the conflict, it became more of an aircraft depot here at Centermere to supply planes to squadrons in other locations that were often now much nearer to the battlefield area. And it was a place to carry out repairs on aircraft. And by March 1918, over 4,300 ground crew worked at Centermere. So it became an active base again in 1918 as the war on the front shifted and the front moved nearer to Saint-Omer. Squadrons returned here following the German spring offensives and aces like Billy Bishop and Mick Mannock also flew with their squadrons from Saint-Omer. It remained open until 1919. After the conflict, the aircraft had to be moved around, returned to Britain, but gradually the forces on the Western Front were demobilised and including men from what was by then the Royal Air Force, and Santa Maria became a civilian airfield after the war. It was used again in the Second World War, and then made a Luftwaffe airfield, and nothing changed. of the original First World War airfield really remains. Most of the structures that we see on this site today relate to the Second World War or the post Second World War period. It is the very nature of many of these RFC, RAF bases is that they were temporary and they included buildings that were very temporary and were just dismantled or knocked down when the war came to an end. And here at Santa Mea, many people come because of its significance, but there is very little to see. However, the main focus when you come here today is the Santa Mea Air Services Memorial, which stands on the edge of the modern airfield, it's still used as an airfield today, close to the one that was here in the First World War. And that memorial was unveiled on the 90th anniversary of the First World War in 2004. Just down the road is a military cemetery and here you'll find some of the casualties from the units that served at Santa Maria and from the airfield itself at Longaness Souvenir Cemetery, which is quite a large one with over three and a half thousand burials. There were medical facilities here during the war and many of these men died of wounds received at the front. But amongst the men from the air services that are buried here is Sergeant John Cowell, DCM, MM and BAR. Cal was an Irishman, an ordinary lad who joined the Royal Engineers, was not educated at public school and got his first military medal for bravery with the Royal Engineers on the battlefield and then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. And his DCM and his bar to his MM was awarded with the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF. He served as an observer, gunner, machine gunner in the back of the aircraft or the front of the aircraft, depending on what type of aircraft he was in. And later he trained as a pilot. and he had 16 credited hits, 15 of those as an observer gunner and the final one as a pilot. But he was killed on 30 July 1918 when his aircraft was shot down by German ace Friedrich Ritter von Roth of JASTA-16. So he's one of the many RFC-REF stories that you'll find in that cemetery, which coupled with the Santa Maria Air Services Memorial is a good starting place for our journey across this landscape of the First World War, looking at it from the perspective of the war above the battlefield. We'll move now down into the Somme region, and there'll be a map of our journey on the podcast website. We're going to a little village called Wava, and here on the sloping ground above that, will find quite a small British cemetery from the First World War. It's up a track, it's surrounded by farmland. In the summer, the swaying cornfields surround it with the occasional poppy. It's a very, very evocative place, I find, and despite its small size, it's an important cemetery from the First World War and certainly an important one from the perspective of the war in the air. It's quite a long way from where the front lines were but the 21st casualty clearing station opened up here in May 1918 and made burials in a cemetery that remained open until September of that year. There's just 44 burials here at Wawa, 41 British, two New Zealand and one German and the main reason that many come here is Jimmy McCudden. James Thomas Byford McCudden, VC, DSO and Bar, MC and Bar MM, is one of the great names of the aces of the First World War who flew in the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force. He was one of three McCudden brothers who died in the war and was born in Gillingham in Kent, the son of a regular soldier, not an officer, not from any exalted background, but just an ordinary soldier in the Royal Engineers. And Jimmy McCudden, he too joined the Royal Engineers like his father before the Great War as a sapper and then later transferred into the Royal Flying Corps as a mechanic. And this route to flying, mechanical knowledge, was often the only way for in of his background working class background to get to fly they didn't have the advantage of a public school or university education so there was no direct route to being commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps but as ordinary soldiers as other rank flyers with technical and mechanical knowledge that was often the route for them and you see this with so many like McCudden and Mannock going on to fly because of their knowledge and Initially, he served as an observer before getting pilot training in 1916. And really, McCudden deserves his own podcast episode. And I think we'll return down the line to some of these First World War aces of all nations because they are such fascinating characters. In many ways, it's hard to quantify his war and his time in the air. But part of his Victoria Cross citation, his VC was awarded in March 1918, I think gives us a bit of an insight and it reads as follows. Captain McCudden has at the present time accounted for 54 enemy aeroplanes. Of these, 42 have definitely been destroyed, 19 of them on our side of the lines. Only 12 out of the 54 have been driven out of control. On two occasions he has totally destroyed four two-seater enemy aeroplanes on the same day and on the last occasion all four machines were destroyed in the space of one hour and 30 minutes. While in his present squadron, he's participated in 78 offensive patrols and in nearly every case has been the leader. On at least 30 other occasions, whilst with the same squadron, he's crossed the lines alone, either in pursuit or in quest of enemy aeroplanes. And it shows, I think, the kind of diverse nature of this fighting in the air, the fierce nature of it with those casualties and the fact that many pilots like McCudden were kind of lone wolves, really. After all that combat, after all those victories in the air, after all those decorations, it was a sad irony that he died on the 9th of July 1918 when his aircraft seemingly stalled after take-off and he crashed in a tree line at a nearby aerodrome. I mean, there are many stories about that incident which we looked at when we made the documentary Aces Falling. Was he drunk? Was he at the end of his tether? Or was it just a simple mechanical failure? I mean, we'll never really know, but the stories still abound. And one little footnote to McCudden and his grave here is that when we were making that documentary, Ace is Falling, we heard that a local farmer had found the original brass plaque from the original wooden cross that had marked McCudden's grave. So we went to Wava, pulled up at the cemetery, And out in the field was a farmer ploughing. So I walked over to him, waved at him, he stopped, he jumped out of his cab, and he came over and I explained what we were doing and that we were looking for someone who we believed had found this plaque in the fields. And he said, it's me. So he went down to his farm and he pulled the plaque out and I'll put a picture of this onto the podcast website. It was about the size of a First World War memorial plaque in brass with the badge of the Royal Air Force and the details of McCudden and it was obviously a centrepiece possibly for a Celtic style cross that had been placed on the grave and when the Chinese Labour Corps and the graves registration units had come to make this a permanent cemetery after the war if no one claimed the crosses they were simply piled up close by and burned so the wood had all gone but this brass plaque had survived until the farmer found it and he was very desperate to give it to the right custodian which he felt was the Royal Engineers Museum as McCudden had been a sapper and they had his Victoria Cross and That's where it went. So as part of that programme, we were very pleased to be able to help the farmer in donating that plaque to the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham, where I believe it certainly once was on display and possibly still is. So that was a kind of nice footnote really to my cousin's story and his burial here. But McCudden isn't the only pilot buried in this cemetery, the only ace. Also here is Robert Alexander Little, DSO and Bar, DSC and Bar, Croix de Guerre. So that number of decorations kind of gives you a bit of an insight into his war. Bob Little was an Australian and he flew with 203 Squadron RAF and formerly with the Royal Naval Air Service. He came to Britain in 1915, passed his flying certificate at Hendon and then joined the RNAS and flew in France from the RNAS base at Dunkirk on Sopwith 1.5 Strutters, carrying out bombing missions until the Naval 8 Squadron was formed and he flew with them in a fighter role on Sopwith Pups and later Sopwith Triplanes. He scored a total of Thank you very much. a widow and a small child. I mean, another incredible pilot of the First World War and part of that famous Naval 8th Squadron, which is yet another subject that I think we should return to in the podcast at some point because we haven't given as much attention to the Royal Naval Air Service in this series as they deserve because they were an essential part of it, but in some ways a different part of it. So, something to return to. Our journey continues to Vertgalen Farm. So we're moving nearer to the front line now and this became typical as the way the Royal Flying Corps and later the RAF operated is having aerodromes that were much nearer to the front so that the flying time from takeoff to battlefield area was much reduced. And here we've got a classic First World War RFC RAF aerodrome on the Somme front now as we mentioned previously one of the problems with visiting aerodrome sites from the first world war is that there's almost nothing to see with wooden buildings with fabric hangers and things like this I mean all of that was removed destroyed burnt down whatever at the end of the first world war and it's not like world war ii airfields where there's dispersal areas concrete runways none of that exists the airstrips were all grass airstrips but here at Vert Galant or Vert Galant Farm there are buildings that do connect us to the squadrons that served here and that appear on quite a lot of wartime photographs taken from the air and also from the ground. Located on the Doulon-Amiens Road these farm buildings date back to the 18th-19th century and were very much at the heart of the British aerodrome that was here. Nearly 20 different squadrons operated from Vert Galant at different points during the conflict including the famous number 56 squadron which had many of the best known pilots serving with it. Albert Ball VC and Major Harvey Kelly both flew from Vert Galant on their final flights over the battlefield. Albert Ball to be shot down and killed behind enemy lines over near Anna Luin and Major Harvey Kelly shot down near Arras in that terrible period when the RFC were suffering such crippling damage. losses. The aerodrome here was opened in July 1915 serving that kind of northern area of northern France and also supporting some of the first British troops who came to the Somme front in that summer of 1915. It was a grass strip with lots of wooden huts and the photographs show canvas hangers later more kind of semi-permanent structures but of course none of those survive and it became really one of the best known aerodromes in northern France and one of the most important Now many years ago, and here's a little story to connect to Vert Ganon, many years ago when I first lived in France and we first had the house at Courcelette, we ran it as a bed and breakfast and we had a lot of really interesting people who came to stay and one of the guests, his father had served in the First World War as an ordinary soldier in the 9th London Regiment, the Queen Victoria Rifles and then he'd been commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps and his father had come back to the battlefields in the inter-war period to visit the graves of some of his mates and see some of the places where he flew from, which included Vert Galant Farm. And this chap told the story of how his father went there on a foggy day sometime in the 1920s. And he walked across where the grass strip had been. He thought about the pilots that he'd known who'd never come back. And in the fog, he could see some figures walking towards him. And he thought, oh, I've obviously been spotted by the farmer. He's a bit upset about me walking on his land. I'll go over and apologise to him. So he walked towards these figures. And as he looked, as he got closer to the those figures he suddenly realized they were wearing what looked like flying uniforms of the first world war leathers and helmets and goggles but he thought it can't be it can't be so he walked closer to the figures again and he couldn't quite hear what they were saying but when he got closer he realized that they were calling out his old nickname from when he'd flown with the squadron here in the First World War, which totally freaked him out. He ran back to his car, jumped in the car, drove straight to the coast, took the first ferry home, and never returned to France. So make what you will of that story. It's certainly one that I think of every time I come here to Vert Ganon Farm. We're staying in the Somme region and again moving nearer and nearer towards where the battlefield was and we're going across to some sites connected to the Red Baron. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, made famous by his Red Fokker triplane, needs little introduction here, but his life and death connects us to two Somme locations, well, three in some ways. Originally a cavalry officer, he transferred to the German air services in 1915, aged 22. and he arguably became the most famous pilot of the First World War. Within three years, he was decorated with everything from the Iron Cross to the Blue Max and had 80 aerial victories. Our first location connected to him is on the high ground of the Corby Ridge. We've got the town of Corby behind us. We've got in the distance a brickworks with the remains of a chimney. Over to our right is the Somme River Valley, and across we can see the Australian Corps Memorial Park. and we're looking down the valley roughly in the direction that the Red Baron made that last flight of his and he was shot down on this ground on the 21st of April 1918 just across the roads from where the brickworks were located for some years it was thought that it was on the other side of the road but when you go over to where the German positions were they claim in their records that they could see the crashed aircraft which you wouldn't have been able to see if it was north of the road that we're standing on now. He crashed here close to the Australian lines, there were Australian field artillery units here and while there's been much debate over the death of the Red Baron von Richthofen, I think it's pretty much accepted that Australian ground fire brought him down the aircraft crashed, the pilot was recovered from the aircraft dead and they realised that this was not just any ordinary pilot this was von Richthofen the Red Baron and he was taken away for burial The aircraft was stripped clean of souvenirs. Over the years of being interested in collecting artefacts connected to the First World War, I've seen lots of bits of the Red Baron's aircraft. Whether they're all original, I don't know, but certainly it was stripped clean. But he was given a proper honoured funeral. He was taken, his body was taken back to the airbase at Bertangles, where the aerodrome was, a little tiny village behind the lines on the Somme. And he was buried in the communal cemetery there. But this wasn't just a quick funeral. It was quite a big affair. Pilots and observers from the RAF were there to honour him. They lined the route. The Australians provided the firing party. And it was filmed. There's a sequence of film of the burial of the Red Baron. And when that was shown in Britain, it caused quite a fuss because people at home couldn't understand why we were honouring a enemy pilot celebrating almost an enemy pilot and then filming it so that I think shows the gap between soldier and civilian how Both sides saw each other, how that couldn't be comprehended by those back at home, but I'm sure not every pilot on the Western Front was really that pleased about it either, because at the end of the day, the Red Baron and those like him were there to kill and shoot down pilots of the RFC and the Royal Air Force. So while there was this concept of the Knights of the Air, perhaps in some ways that faded in 1918 with the death of von Richthofen and the death of McCudden and the death of Mannock and so many others besides. Our second location connected to him is Bertangles Communal Cemetery where he was originally buried. He's no longer buried there now. There is an air services grave still there, a single war grave but the plot where he was buried is still untouched from what I remember. It certainly wasn't touched the last time I went there and I read some years ago that in the 70s a big von Richthofen collector from America went there and dug up the grave site because he believed that the original brass plaque from the coffin was still in the grave. It wasn't. And that kind of activity is not something I would condone in any kind of way. Totally unacceptable, but I think it shows the fanaticism behind some people when it comes to aces from the First World War and collecting artifacts connected to them. Post-war, von Richthofen was moved to Free Corps German Cemetery. Then he was moved again subsequently and reburied in Berlin at the Invalidenstrasse Cemetery, which was an old military burial ground. There is still a plaque where his grave was there, which is very close to the site of what became the Berlin Wall. And then eventually he was moved again, this time for good, to the family grave in Wiesbaden. But today on the Somme battlefields, when you go to the crash site, there's an information panel, and then you can follow these other locations in pursuit of the history and the story of the Red Baron. As I say, probably the most famous pilot of the First World War. Connected to him, not far up the road on the Somme battlefields, is a memorial to one of his victims, and a pilot who had achieved great records in his own right, And this is an area where the fighting had intensified by the autumn of 1916, just as the war in the air above it did as well. So we're on a spot between Factory Corner of Fleurs and the village of Ligny-Tilloy where von Richthofen fought one of the best pilots in the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, Major Lanno Hawker VC of No. 24 Squadron. Now, if you're interested in von Richthofen and the men that he flew against, there's a really good book called Under the Guns of the Red Baron, which is a chronological history of his air combats and the men he fought against, who they were and what happened to them. And it's a really good insight into the kind of men that were in the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF and also how some of these dogfights unfolded. And this one between Hawker and von Richthofen says, was certainly a classic First World War dogfight. Hawker had been the first RFC pilot to get the Victoria Cross for shooting down an enemy aircraft near Ypres at Sanctuary Wood in 1915. But in this encounter, his last combat patrol, Hawker was in an Airco DH2 and von Richthofen was flying an Albatross D2. Hawker's attack on Richthofen's patrol scattered the German formation that was flying over this part of the battlefield, but Richthofen latched onto him, possibly seeing that he was a skilful pilot. The two engaged in a very prolonged aerial dogfight, estimated to have lasted well over 30 minutes. Now this was extraordinarily long for dogfights at this time, as most First World War aerial combats lasted just a few minutes. Hawker's DH-2 was slower and less heavy heavily armed than Richthofen's Albatross, but it could turn more tightly, so gave it a bit of an advantage. Both pilots repeatedly tried to gain the advantage, Hawker using his superior turning radius to evade Richthofen's firing from his machine guns, and then Richthofen stayed patient, using the Albatross's speed to climb and dive and gradually herding, pushing Hawker westward, deeper into German-held territory. then was running low on fuel and also ammunition that's the problem with a prolonged dogfight you can easily run out of ammo he tried to break away and head for home but that exposed him to Richthofen's line of fire and as Hawker zigzagged towards the British lines Richthofen closed in from behind and fired a short burst at around 60 yards Hawker was struck in the head and killed instantly and the aircraft crashed the crash site was visited by von Richthofen who as as he often did, took away souvenirs from an aircraft that he'd shot down, but he made sure that Hawker was properly buried. However, shellfire later on in the Battle of the Somme and possibly in the battles here in 1918 destroyed the grave, and Hawker today is commemorated at Arras, which we'll visit at the end of our journey. There's a new memorial to him. I say it's new, but this is one that perhaps is lesser known on the Somme battlefields. It's not on the gravesite or where he crashed, but in Ligny Village, and it was a local initiative, the memorial being unveiled in 2011. It looks a little bit like a headstone embedded in a wall, with the badge of the Royal Flying Corps and the details of Hawke are on there. but it's an important one because it remembers perhaps the most classic dogfight of the Great War, which took place in the skies just beyond this village in 1916. Continuing our journey, we're going to move up into northern France now, away from the Somme area, and we're going to a small village called Anneleuyn. Here we'll find the story of Albert Ball V.C., He was perhaps one of the most celebrated fighter aces of the First World War, known for his daring solo tactics and relentless pursuit of enemy aircraft and incredible bravery and for his penchant for being a lone wolf to go off and fight the enemy on his own. Born in 1896 in Nottingham, he grew up mechanically minded and quite adventurous with an early love for engines, another one of those roots to being involved in the flying services, but initially he joined the infantry, the Sherwood Foresters, in 1914 and then transferred to the Royal Flying Corps the following year, earning his wings by January 1916. Ball quickly gained a reputation for preferring to fly and hunt, as I've said, alone often flying beneath enemy formations to ambush them from below all these kind of tactics were really developed in the first world war and would go on to be hugely influential to the later fighter generation of a second world war as we mentioned a couple of times in this series about the war in the air Initially he flew Newport 11s and later SE5s and achieved a remarkable tally of victories 44 confirmed by the time of his death making him Britain's top ace in early 1917 and his bravery earned him the military cross the service order with two bars and he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. On the 7th of May 1917 during the height of that bloody April period which extended beyond April 1917 as the Germans continued to inflict heavy losses on the Royal Flying Corps, and for him, just weeks after joining the elite No. 56 Squadron, Bull took off from Vertgalant Farm and engaged a formation of German enemy aircraft over the village of Anneleuyn in northern France, where we are now. In this chaos, his plane went into a steep dive in the midst of that aerial combat and crashed nearby in a field. The exact cause of the crash remains heavily debated. Was it enemy fire? Did he get disorientated in the clouds? Or was there mechanical failure as there often was with these First World War aircraft? But at the time, it was credited to German ace Lothar von Richthofen, Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron's brother, though later research into this incident has brought all that into question. Incredibly, Albert Ball, when he died, was only 20 years old. Now, the aircraft had crashed well behind the German lines and his body was recovered by the Germans and was taken for a proper burial in the nearby German cemetery, at Annelewyn itself. And this was common practice. The Germans buried British and French, American, all kinds of Allied dead in their cemeteries, just as the Allies buried German dead in theirs. And you see this in many burial grounds of the First World War. So it wasn't uncommon for British soldiers to be buried like this during the war. Now, post-war, they were usually concentrated to British cemeteries. In theory, his grave should have been taken from Annelewyn and probably moved to Cabaret Rouge Cemetery at Suchet, which was a large concentration cemetery for northern France and contained many RFC, RAF pilots and observers who were shot down behind German lines and once buried in German cemeteries. But that didn't happen here. His father wanted him to stay where he was originally buried. Having been properly buried and honoured by the Germans, he wanted that grave to remain in the German cemetery. It also gave him the opportunity, because this was not a Commonwealth cemetery, it was a German war cemetery, it gave him the opportunity to place his own memorial monument on his son's grave. If it had been moved to Cabaret Rouge, for example, or any British cemetery, that would not have been possible so the father Albert Ball's father pushed for him to stay here because he didn't want the grave disturbed but more than that he saw it as an opportunity to properly memorialize his son so when you visit today there is no Commonwealth headstone there it's quite an ornate Celtic cross standing on that grave, the only British grave in the cemetery now, amongst all those German burials. But the memorialisation didn't stop there. Albert Ball's father went out to where the aircraft had actually crashed and he placed two memorial stones on the spot where the aircraft came to rest, one at each end of where the aircraft had been. Only one of these stones survives today and it reads, In loving memory of Captain Albert Ball On the back of the column is a rather curious inscription which reads... This plot of land is given for the free use of French soldiers by Sir Albert Ball on condition that this stone is protected. Now one of them survives, the other one disappeared many, many years ago. I remember talking to Rose Coombs about this and she tried to investigate as to what had happened to it. but no one seemed to know. Whether it was a casualty of the Second World War, probably we will never know. But here at Annelewyn, Albert Ball, that famous ace of the First World War, is commemorated with the unusual memorial on his grave, by this monument in the field, and also by the locals. The French people of Annelewyn celebrated, commemorated this young man by naming their local school after him back in the 90s, early 2000s, which I think shows how often these communities can get connected to the story of the First World War. We'll continue travelling up through northern France and we're heading into the top end of France now where the Western Front moved into Flanders, crossed the border into Belgium and in an area that for most of the war was behind the British front lines. So we're not on the front line of 1914 to early 1918, but we are on a front line that became the forward positions, the battlefield itself, after the Battle of the Least, the big German offensive in this area in April 1918. And we've come to a place marked on the British trench maps as La Pierre-Aubeur, often Busser Lane, at a place called Bois-Paco, just south of Calan-sur-Alice, a village in this area where the front line stabilised in that April-May 1918 period. It was here in July 1918 that Mick Mannock crashed, the subject of an earlier podcast we did with Andy Saunders in this Air War series. Edward McMannock, Britain's top-scoring ace of the First World War, with over 60 confirmed victories, was a cautious and methodical tactician who drilled into his pilots the rules of survival. Never fly alone, never chase an enemy too far over the lines, and never go down, never descend after a kill. Despite this, on 26 July 1918, he broke some of his own rules. Leading a patrol for No. 85 Squadron in his SE-5A, Mannach downed a Fokker D-7 near Lestrum, close to the front lines. He was flying with a relatively new pilot, Lt. Donald Inglis, and decided to follow the stricken German plane as it fell. They crossed low over enemy trenches and Mannach's SE-5A was hit by intensive ground fire. Inglis, who'd pulled up to avoid the danger, avoid the fire, later reported seeing Mannock's machine burst into flames almost instantly. Still burning, the SE-5A spiralled down and crashed. Malik's death was a heavy blow to the RAF not just for the loss of a brilliant ace but of a mentor who had saved probably countless young airmen's lives through his training and leadership. The Germans buried him, buried the pilot who crashed there in a field grave which was recovered post-war and moved to Levante British Cemetery where he was buried as an unknown aviator because nothing found with the body to identify the casualty except that he was an airmen of the First World War who'd flown with the RFC or the RAF but the link with Mannock when that grave was moved and recovered and reburied was never realised or accepted or was just never made and it still hasn't been now despite many people submitting cases and despite Andy's book and I hope as he mentioned in the podcast interview that this is a subject he might return to to submit a new case to see if the commission have a different view of this. For now this location and that grave of an unknown aviator in Levante Cemetery remain poignant very powerful memories of that great pilot of the First World War. So we're going to move on to our final location that will visit connecting us to the story of the RFC and the RAF in the Great War and that's in the centre of the city of Arras in northern France. The Arras Flying Services Memorial is located within the wider Arras Memorial to the missing itself and for us this is our journey's end on this trail of following the airmen of the Great War across that landscape of the Western Front. The memorial was designed by Edwin Lutyens, one of the principal architects of the Commonwealth Imperial War Graves Commission, and was unveiled by Lord Trenchard, who commanded the air services on the 31st of July 1932. It commemorates 991 officers and men from the Royal Flying Corps, the Royal Naval Air Service, and latterly the Royal Air Force, including many from Commonwealth nations like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India. Many of these men were lost in aerial combat, they crashed behind enemy lines, their aircraft completely destroyed, they disappeared over the battlefields, never to be seen again, or were lost in circumstances where the recovery of remains was impossible. There are nearly a thousand different stories of bravery and heroism and the terrible, brutal nature of air combat in the First World War commemorated on the panels of this separate part of the Arras Memorial. Atop the monument, with the panels, four panels, listing the RFC, the RNES and the RAF, there's a globe. And that globe is said to depict the position of the Earth at 11 o'clock on the 11th of November 1918 when the war came to an end. And it symbolises the worldwide reach of the air war and the fact that the men commemorated here came from across the British Empire too. The band around it of the zodiac which encircles the globe represents the sky itself, the sphere in which these aviators fought and died and battled above that battlefield. And when you stand here and cast your name across the lists, we find Major Lanno Hawker, we find Mick Mannock, and we find so many other aces and pilots of the First World War who we can research and understand and discover their stories. It's a unique memorial in so many ways to a unique layer of our understanding of the Great War. And here at Arras, at our journey's end, those criss-cross paths that stretched across the skies of Belgium and France somehow meet and show us that the landscape of the sky as well as the landscape of the ground is just as much a part of the old front line. www.oldfrontline.co.uk patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon