One-Way Airline

(See Cover) At an airport near London one day last week a wiry little man clambered out of an R.A.F. transport plane and bustled up to the city. In the next days bigwigs in paneled Whitehall offices and hard-working operations officers in the low buildings of coastal airdromes spent time looking into a pair of piercing, watery blue eyes peering out from under uptwirled Mephisto eyebrows. Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Bowhill, one of the hottest top-ranking officers that the R.A.F. has produced in World War II, was back from Canada.

Four months ago Sir Frederick left Britain and a berth as head of the vital R.A.F. Coastal Command on two days' notice. Twelve hours later, having flown the Atlantic, he went to work in Montreal. Less spectacular than the Coastal Command, his new job was now more vital to Britain's defense. He took over for the R.A.F. the critical task of seeing that U.S. bombers got to Britain, quickly and safely.

Sir Frederick's job as chief of the Atlantic Ferry Command has been "purely administrative." What Britons and Canadians wanted to know last week was why he had left his desk at Montreal's new Dorval Airport. They wondered whether the 61-year-old Marshal was slated to get a still more important command, even though Lady Bowhill, who works in the command's code room, this week had taken a new apartment in Montreal.

Purely administrative though it may be, Sir Frederick's ferry performance could well tilt the balance between defeat and victory for Britain. To start an offensive in World War II, let alone to win the war, the first thing is to deliver the planes, the next to use them. U.S. factories supply the planes--currently some 38 a day, but between Canada, where U.S. Army ferry pilots turn the ships over to the R.A.F., and Britain lie 2,000 miles of fog-strewn North Atlantic. The job of the Ferry Command is to fly to Britain the bombers that can make the long hop.

The A.F.C. is virtually a huge one-way airline. Eastward to Britain each month fly fleets of sleek Lockheed Hudsons, big Boeing Flying Fortresses, plus some Consolidated Liberators (6-24) and a few Catalinas (PB-Y). They fly without the amenities of commercial airlines, part of the way without radio beams, with minimum equipment. The planes are built, not for transatlantic cruising, but for bombing flights.

In spite of this, the A.F.C. has hung up a proud record of deliveries. It has delivered many hundreds of bombers (the exact number is a tightly held secret) to Britain, has lost about a half-dozen ships on ocean flights. Of these only three were bombers in delivery. The others were shuttle planes, used to carry pilots and crews back to Newfoundland.

For this record neither Sir Frederick nor the R.A.F. takes full credit. The ferry route was pioneered last year by the civilian Atlantic Ferry Organization ("Atfero" for short) headed by a Montreal banker, Morris W. Wilson. Atfero hired the pilots, planned the routes, selected the airports. set up weather and radiocommunication stations. Sir Frederick's job was to smooth out rough spots until flying the Atlantic became a matter of routine.

Routine. Much of the routine is already achieved, as the record indicates. The biggest problem that Sir Frederick had to face when he began to turn Atfero into an R.A.F. organization was personnel.

Under Atfero all the planes were flown by civilian pilots, a choice Hollywood mixture of formula-wise young airline men, resourceful bush-flyers from the Canadian north, tough oldtimers who were veterans of everything from the Spanish Civil War to back-pasture flying services. The attraction was $1.000 a month ($800 for navigators, $500 for radiomen).

When the R.A.F. moved in and began to use young military pilots, the civilians looked down their noses. In spite of the high pay, some quit. Others stayed around and beefed. Their favorite complaints: that the R.A.F. treated civilian flyers like hired help, that the flight westward was not safe. All three of the shuttle planes were lost as the result of pilot error.

There are still more civilian than military pilots flying for the command, though the percentage is shrinking. Sir Frederick Bowhill believes that they are fairly well content. They know his office is open to them, and he notes that they have stopped complaining about the trip back to Canada. He has also silenced the loudest complaints that the R.A.F. pilots have voiced--by weeding out the loudest drunks among the Americans, by getting the military pilots' pay upped to something close to the civilians'.

Sail, Steam, Wings. If the Atlantic Ferry really becomes routine and, as some pilots think, foreshadows peacetime round-trip flights at $150 a passenger, one of the men to thank will be the son of a British Army Colonel, Bowhill of Bowhill from the Scottish Border, who transferred his love from square-riggers to the awkward skyships of 1912.

Sir Frederick Bowhill started his career by shipping before the mast. He sailed round the Horn in windjammers, worked his way up to a captain's berth. Today he is a Master Mariner, certified to command any ship of any size anywhere in sail or steam. But when in World War I the Royal Navy drafted him at 32, it did not put him on the bridge of a warship. Instead, he found himself on the "front porch" of an openwork biplane, learning to fly, then teaching himself the dangerous art of taking off from the deck of a merchantman. From this kind of makeshift carrier, Flight Commander Bowhill flew on the first bombing against the German Navy in World War I.

During the rest of the war, Sir Frederick managed to turn up wherever there was an odd job to be done. In Mesopotamia he commanded a squadron of seaplanes flying off the Tigris. (He picked seaplanes so he could still fly if the Turks flooded the country.) He campaigned with General Smuts in Tanganyika. After the war he fought with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks.

In 1920 he was sent out to end the career of the Mad Mullah of Somaliland, whose troop of fanatically religious bandits had bothered the British for 21 years. To get within striking distance of the Mullah, Bowhill and his flyers had to pack planes, fuel and equipment on a caravan of 2,000 camels, trek 150 miles across the desert. When Bowhill's planes first roared across his camp, the Mullah was so sure that Allah had sent chariots to take him to heaven that he put on his finest clothes. Learning his mistake when a bomb nearly killed him, the Mullah fled, died next year in Ethiopia.

Tiger-Moths and Submarines. In September 1939, Sir Frederick was chief of the Coastal Command for the R.A.F., which--on paper--was supposed to be equipped with far-ranging reconnaissance ships and bombers. Actually, it had almost none. Its job: to protect British shipping, to catch submarines, to spot German naval units.

Sir Frederick decided to attack submarines with pure bluff. Banking on the well-founded fear that submarine men have of planes in general, he sent his flyers out in almost anything he could buy, beg or borrow. His motley "Honeymoon Fleet" consisted mostly of light Tiger-Moth trainers, no more lethal than the tiny yellow Cubs that put-put around U.S. airports. But against German submarine commanders, grooved in routine, the Tiger-Moths were almost as effective as dive-bombers. Whenever the U-boats saw a speck in the sky they submerged and stole away.

Before the Germans caught on, the Coastal Command had proper planes of its own, although for a time at least, the British did not understand how to make full use of the good U.S. equipment which was sent to them. The Coastal Command's range of operations now covers 600,000 square miles of sea, as far west as Iceland, north and south from Narvik to Africa.

To admiring subordinates in the command (not all of them R.A.F. men, for the Marshal had a knack of wheedling able officers from the other services), "Ginger" Bowhill seemed to cover a good proportion of this area in person, to know exactly what was going on in all the rest. He worked in a hectic blast of radiograms, reports, phone calls, saved a second or two by having the telephones on his desk painted different colors to show where the lines ran--to the Air Ministry, the Admiralty, various flight headquarters.

He also developed a knack of interpreting German radio messages, of prophesying from plane and ship movements what the enemy would be up to next. One of the command's greatest coups was breaking up a German raid on a British cruiser squadron. Though he had predicted the attack to the minute, reports of it caught the Marshal in the bathtub and he directed the whole action clothed in a bath towel, dripping on the rug beside his home telephone. Top achievement of the command was tracking and trapping the Bismarck this spring, just before Marshal

Bowhill took over the Ferry job--although if the stories which reached the U.S. are true, the credit for that success properly belongs to an American pilot who persuaded the British to let him take out a Catalina on a far longer flight than the British thought feasible.

Operational Flight. When he flew to Britain last week, the Ferry Commander called it an "operational flight," gave no hint of his purpose. Whether or not he was due for promotion, it was Sir Frederick's first chance to check up on the way his long airline operated.

If he was checking up, he perhaps made some notes on his cuff as he went along: noted how the wind seeped through the flimsy walls of the Eastbound Inn at the Newfoundland base as the ferry crews waited for the weather to lift. He would need no notes to remember the radio jam as the squadron approached Britain, and plane after plane called for bearings from ground stations.

The rest would have been "routine." The long screaming run down the airport as the plane labored to lift its heavy load of gasoline. The plane-hungry bogs around the airport giving way to the long swells of the Atlantic under the plane's wings. The long slant upward above the overcast for a tailwind and air too cold and dry for icing. The navigator's intent face reflected from the cabin windows as he read his sextant. The creeping cold of high altitude. The bulbous oxygen masks.

The ferry flights, according to the command, are all routine, as monotonous for passengers as they are for the men who make them regularly. The only thrill comes when the plane passes the invisible point of no return, the point where it has enough gas to get across, too little to turn back against headwinds that blow from the west. The only real excitement is the landing--circling a field so well camouflaged that even experienced pilots have a hard time finding it, taxiing the plane into the line of delivered bombers whose next job is to fly over Europe with bombs in their bellies. Looking at that neat line last week, Sir Frederick had good reason to cock his eyebrows and be proud.

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