The Black Flight

Raymond Collishaw

The Memoir of Raymond Collishaw, CB, DSO, DSC, DFC

Raymond Collishaw
CEF Books 2008

It’s remarkable that four of the greatest British flying aces of WWI are Canadian. Billy Bishop, with 72 officially credited victories, has the top score for the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) while Raymond Collishaw, at 60, tops the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). Donald MacLaren, at 54, is not far behind and achieved more victories in Sopwith Camels than anyone else. William Barker, with 50 victories, won the VC in one of the most celebrated air combats of all time, ending the war as the most highly decorated pilot in British service.


Amazingly, all four survived the war, and three returned to Canada to be celebrated and showered with business and professional opportunities. Billy Bishop even became a figure of pop culture and appears in various media to this day. You don’t have to be a history nerd to recognize his name. Donald MacLaren was a major pioneer in BC aviation history. And anyone with any interest in air combat at all knows of William Barker’s famous final duel, alone in his Sopwith Snipe, taking on fifteen or more Fokker D.VIIs.

Raymond Collishaw, in comparison, has remained obscure — despite being, perhaps, the most extraordinary member of this quite extraordinary group. Perhaps this is because he flew for the publicity averse RNAS, or because he continued in British service after the war. But it’s typical that his 1973 memoir, Air Command, wasn’t even released in Canada. Fortunately, it has been republished as The Black Flight (2008) and is now more widely available. I purchased a copy at The Museum of the Regiments during a recent visit to Calgary.

If there’s any justice, this new edition will introduce Collishaw to a wider audience. It’s a slender volume at 272 pages (with notes) and moves along briskly, concentrating on the highlights of his well-packed military career. Significant events are recalled in sharp detail, though, including things Collishaw couldn’t have known at the time. So the text has also clearly benefited from some post mortem research. (The original release, Air Command was written with the help of ex-RCAF historian Ronald Dodds.) There’s not a lot in the way of personal or family detail, but the book is well written, with a wry sense of humour, that seems to capture Collishaw’s personality.

The story begins in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where Collishaw was born to British parents who had immigrated in search of adventure and fortune in the gold fields. Their son soon showed that the apple doesn’t drop far from the tree. He joined the Fisheries Protection Service (a sort of proto-Coast Guard) as a cabin boy at the age of just fifteen. Having worked his way up to rank of First Officer by the time war broke out in 1914, he promptly sought a transfer to the Royal Navy. This looked to be a slow process, but the air service was short of flyers and actively recruiting in Canada. The only hitch was the requirement to have your own flying certificate before applying. Collishaw promptly raised the necessary cash and headed to Toronto for private lessons at the only flying school then operating in Canada. He was in a navy uniform and on his way to England by January 1916.

World War I

After completing advanced flying training, he was posted to 3 Naval Wing in the Alsace region. This was flying the first independent bombing missions against deep targets and pioneering the techniques of what we would now call strategic bombing. Collishaw flew escort to these raids in Sopwith 1 ½ Strutters and, despite the weather often limiting their flying, soon showed himself a skilled and useful combat pilot.

After some home leave, and promotion to Flight Commander, he was posted to 10 Naval Squadron, near Ypres. There he achieved what fame he does have with air enthusiasts, commanding the famous “Black Flight”, an elite, all-Canadian flight of black-nosed Sopwith Triplanes. 10 Squadron amassed an extraordinary combat record during the dangerous days of 1917, shooting down 84 enemy aircraft in the critical period of April to July alone. Collishaw accounted for 27 of these himself in his personal Triplane, Black Maria.

On average only one of the original flyers in each five-plane flight survived Bloody April unwounded. Remarkably, and despite several close calls, Collishaw came through unscathed. More than once enemy bullets passed close enough to shatter his goggles. On another occasion his controls were shot away, resulting in a crash landing. Once, in thick fog, he landed on a German airfield by accident. Upon noticing the black crosses on the other planes, he cracked the throttle open and barely managed to take off before capture. In one dogfight he even manoeuvred so severely, to avoid a collision, that his seat belt snapped and he was flung out of the cockpit. He managed to grab onto the upper wing struts of his Triplane and, despite the plane’s uncontrolled swoops and lunges, eventually levered his legs back inside and regained control.

Collishaw in a Sopwith Camel
Collishaw in a Sopwith Camel

Various observers of this period have noted Collishaw’s outstanding qualities as a leader. To boost the confidence of new pilots, for example, he would take them up as his wingman for their first few flights. If they found a German aircraft, he would lead them into an attack, with the new pilot typically filling the sky with holes while Collishaw put a few short, well-aimed bursts into the enemy’s vitals. Upon return, Collishaw would clap the novice on the back and exclaim: “Well done, old boy — you bagged your first hun!” The terrified and confused novice would swell with pride, and the new-found confidence probably boosted his chances of survival significantly. More than one commentator has calculated that Collishaw’s official victory tally would be significantly higher if it included all the kills he gave away.

Typically, Collishaw himself says nothing of this. Throughout The Black Flight he does pause the narrative occasionally to comment on various topics, including the true nature of chivalry in the air war, how pilots coped with the dangers they faced, the role of a combat leader, and so on. These asides are always thoughtful and interesting but, the one time he discusses victory claims, it’s only to note how fleeting and fraught are the circumstances in which they’re made, and therefore how unreliable they are (regardless of even good faith efforts to verify them).

After a period of leave in Canada, and promotion to Squadron Commander, Collishaw commanded a coastal defence squadron for most of 1918, racking up yet more kills in Sopwith Camels. Despite the drastic downsizing of the services at the end of the European war, he was offered and accepted a permanent commission in the newly formed Royal Air Force (which absorbed the old RFC and RNAS).

Russia

Western participation in the Russian Civil War has become an obscure footnote of history, but this became the scene of yet more dramatic adventures for Collishaw. He was offered the poisoned chalice of commanding the air contingent being sent to assist White Russian forces against the Bolsheviks. Although this meant cancelling a planned attempt at the first cross-Atlantic flight, Collishaw’s reaction was immediate: “what I had thus far heard about the Bolshies led me to believe they were a thoroughly bad lot, and I accepted without hesitation.”

Between his arrival in south Russia in June 1919, and the collapse of the enterprise in March 1920, Collishaw’s mixed squadron of fighters and bombers gave air support to Deniken’s White Army. To cope with the vast distances, all his ground support elements were based out of three steam trains (one per flight). Thus organized they could quickly deploy forward or back, hastily setting up flying strips wherever they stopped. For months on end the rapidly changing fortunes of war took Collishaw and his squadron all across Southern Russia. He took part in several missions and even shot down a Red Army Nieuport himself to increase his final score to 60 victories. Less happily, he caught typhus at one point and almost died, surviving only by the lucky chance of falling into the care of a refugee Russian Countess who had been trained as a nurse.

Collishaw in Russia
Collishaw in Russia

When the White cause began to fall apart, Collishaw consolidated his remaining aircraft onto a single train and began a fraught retreat, over the snow-covered countryside, to Crimea and the last Allied held port. Their progress was frequently slowed by weather and the need to repair rails torn up by local Red sympathizers. And, soon, a Bolshevik train was spotted behind them in hot pursuit. This was only kept at bay by frantically tearing up the newly repaired rails as they passed. The fate for anyone who fell prisoner in that murderous internecine conflict didn’t bear thinking about, but the air contingent reached port without losing a man – a remarkable feat of leadership. Collishaw and his squadron remained in Russia almost until the end; when the last Intervention Forces were finally evacuated, he brought the remaining elements of his squadron home with almost no loss of life from their Russian service.

Between the Wars

Seemingly allergic to a quiet life, Collishaw then commanded RAF squadrons in Iraq and Palestine, pioneering air re-supply techniques and the use of punitive air raids to quell local rebellions with minimum loss of life (and expense). Energetic and open to new ideas, a typical Collishaw scheme was his decision to fill the inner tube of a bomber tire with water to see if this could speed up re-supply by air. The test, however, did not go well: “The wretched tire and inner tube hit the ground as planned, but as if possessed of some evil intelligence immediately bounced up onto a rolling position and changed course for the hanger line. Those who saw the 750-pound monster bounding toward them at close to 100 miles per hour took violent evasion action, but nothing could save the hanger…” (The book is full of anecdotes like this, though many are such that the other parties must remain nameless.)

Service with a home squadron in England followed, which he describes as the most boring period of his whole career. This gave him the time, though, to finally marry his sweetheart, the sister of a fellow pilot he met while on leave in Canada. He hadn’t felt able to marry during the war (possibly leaving her a widow), and active service in Russia and the Middle East had interfered since, so it had been a Very Long Engagement indeed. Now happily joined, the couple promptly produced two daughters.

World War II

Service on an aircraft carrier followed, and then command of the Desert Air Force in Egypt. Here Collishaw seems to have been in his element, improvising madly as he prepared for another world war in a secondary theatre that would receive only very limited resources. When the Italians attacked out of Libya in 1940, he put his theories of air power to the test, hitting their ground elements with pinprick raids that caused them to disperse their much superior Air Force in a futile attempt to defend everywhere. The odds were so uneven he resorted to rigging machine guns on the undercarriages of his old bombers to make up for the lack of proper fighter escorts. His only modern fighter (a single Hurricane) was kept busy moving from field to field and flying one plane patrols over different sectors each day in an attempt to fool the Italians about his strength. When a supply of ancient (and probably unsafe) 20 lb bombs were found in a warehouse, he had bombers fly over the the Italian positions at night with the crew manually fusing and flinging them out an open door. The 20 pounders were too small to do much damage, but they could ruin the sleep of the infantry.

Then Collishaw struck with concentrated force, not letting his own squadrons be tied down defending static positions. Despite having to divert planes to Greece and then Crete, he supported the British desert offensive so successfully that the Italian Air Force was almost completely swept from the skies. All for remarkably little loss to his own squadrons.
Things got tougher when the Germans arrived, of course, but by then Collishaw was approaching fifty – ancient by the standards of wartime command. The reward for his accomplishments was promotion (to the permanent rank of Air Vice-Marshall) and being shuffled off to a quiet command in Scotland. In 1943 he was retired from the service, to spend the rest of the war in the UK as a civil air liaison.

Retirement

In 1945 Collishaw and family returned to Canada, laden with decorations and honours: Companion of the Order of the Bath, Officer of the Order of the British Empire, DSO, DFC, Croix de guerre, etc, etc. Unsurprisingly he approached civilian life with the same energy he’d shown in military service. Settling in Vancouver he took up the family business and, for the next two decades, initiated various mineral exploration and mining operations in northern British Columbia. For five years he was president of Craigmont Mines. In 1976 Raymond Collishaw passed away, unknown to most of his fellow Canadians.

Fortunately, he completed this book before then, in whatever free time his other activities allowed. The Black Fight is a terrific account of a remarkable personality. Amazingly, for a senior officer’s wartime memoir, it is entirely without rancour or score-settling. Collishaw seems to have been that most rare of animals: a hugely successful person who remained utterly humble, self-aware, and at peace with himself. The final paragraph is typical of his tone, so he gets the last word: “I am often asked whether – If I had it to do all over again – I would do it differently. So far as the basic pattern of my life is concerned, I do not think so, although I might try to do everything just a bit better. I must qualify this, though, for my wife may some day read this book. Perhaps, given another chance, I should not wait so long to get married.”

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