Eleven Eleven - By Paul Dowswell Page 0,29

canopy of the sky. There were few clouds in this sector, and Eddie was certain he would catch this fellow if he kept on his tail.

He looked around, anxious that he should not be jumped by more German fighters but there was no one else there. His opponent had made a fatal tactical error. The Camel and the D.VIII were well matched in speed and armament, but the Camel could go a couple of thousand feet higher. If the Fokker kept climbing, Eddie would eventually get above him and then the German pilot would be at his mercy.

Soon Eddie was flying at a height he rarely reached. His opponent was still there in front of him. Eddie steeled himself to keep his eyes firmly on the aircraft ahead and not become distracted by the great panorama below. He was so high now he could see past the wasteland of the Western Front, beyond the pockmarked mud, the livid scars of the trenches, to greener land beyond.

It was getting really cold now, and Eddie noticed how deeply he was having to breathe. His engine was struggling too, beginning to splutter. He was finding it difficult to stay focused on his quarry. He wondered if the Hun pilot was having the same problem with lack of oxygen at this altitude. He adjusted his fuel mixture and hoped his Camel would not let him down.

Perhaps it was a momentary loss of concentration, or even consciousness, but all at once Eddie could no longer see his enemy. Willing himself to raise his body up and further into the freezing slipstream, he leaned over his cockpit and spotted him. The Fokker was making a steep dive towards the German lines. Eddie waited until his opponent was slightly below his height, then turned his Camel and pulled his throttle to its full extent. The engine screamed in its housing, and the struts began to sing as the small plane strained against the forces of momentum and gravity. Eddie worried that the bullet holes in his wing might have fatally damaged the canvas, but his erks had done a good maintenance job. As far as he could tell, there was no tearing of fabric, and the Camel’s airframe seemed to be holding up to this punishing treatment.

As he closed in on the Fokker, Eddie prepared to fire his guns. He was low on ammunition now, he reckoned, so this time he would wait until he was well within range.

The German pilot was certainly not making it easy for him. Whenever Eddie lined up for a shot, the Fokker veered off to the left or right. It took four attempts for Eddie to finally get close enough to the German plane to be able to follow him into his turns and dives, and by then the altimeter told him they were down to five thousand feet.

Eddie was level behind the Fokker when he unleashed his bullets. The tracer shots showed him he had found his target and immediately he had to veer sharply right to avoid being hit by debris peeling off the stricken plane. The Fokker slowed down as its engine spluttered and stopped, and Eddie sped ahead, fearing he might fly in front of his foe and allow him to fire his own guns. But the pilot had enough on his mind.

The Fokker’s nose dropped and it dived towards the ground. Once more above his opponent, Eddie followed him down. There was no smoke, no flames. He wondered whether to fire again, but he couldn’t see the point. The Fokker was gliding now. He could see its stationary propeller. His opponent would be lucky to survive his landing.

Eddie could see hedgerows and lanes below, and the German pilot was trying to line up his machine to land on a straight empty road through the middle of a field. Eddie circled, wondering where they were. He guessed they were several miles behind the German lines – certainly somewhere as yet untouched by fighting.

The Hun was going to do it – he was flying above the road, and gently placed his Fokker down, coasting for a couple of hundred yards or so as the powerless machine lost momentum. In a flash Eddie realised he had missed his ‘kill’. Once the engine had been repaired the machine would still be flight-worthy. The pilot might have been injured, but he couldn’t have been that badly hurt to execute such a good dead-stick landing.

What was stopping him strafing the plane on