The four Camel pilots of B Flight were a remarkable bunch. Their 22-year-old commander was South African Flight Lt. (Captain) Samuel Marcus “Kink” Kinkead, a leading ace of the Royal Naval Air Service with 32 confirmed victories and holder of the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) and bar as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and bar. Next in seniority were 21-year-old Flying Officer Rowan Daly (DSC), an ex-RNAS flier with three WWI victories, and Flying Officer William Burns Thomson, a former Royal Flying Corps sergeant pilot. Last was Flying Officer Marion Hughes Aten, son of a Texas Ranger and the only American in the squadron. The oldest member of the flight at 25, Aten was also the least experienced. Although he joined the RFC as a cadet pilot in Canada in November 1917, injuries suffered during training prevented him from qualifying until November 12, 1918, one day after the Armistice. Aten later co-authored Last Train Over Rostov Bridge, a vivid though chronologically unreliable account of his experiences in south Russia.

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The B Flight Camels were just one component of 47 Squadron and the last to become operational. The squadron’s original de Havilland D.H.9-equipped cadre had moved to south Russia from its wartime base in Salonika in April 1919. Disembarked at the Black Sea port of Novorossisk, it established itself at the muddy airfield of Ekaterinodar under the temporary command of Captain S.G. Frogley. Administratively the squadron formed part of Lt. Col. A.C. Maund’s RAF Training Mission at Taganrog, a unit with the unenviable task of teaching White Russian pilots of very mixed ability to fly the Royal Aircraft Factory’s ungainly Reconnaissance Experimental R.E.8, or “Harry Tate.” The mission in turn was part of a British military training contingent headed by Maj. Gen. Hubert C. Holman that included elements of the Tank Corps.

Number 47 Squadron was commanded by the redoubtable 28-year-old Canadian Major (later Squadron Leader) Raymond Collishaw (DSO, DSC, DFC), the third-ranking British WWI ace, with 60 victories. Collishaw arrived in Novorossisk in early June 1919 with a volunteer group of 10 officers and 255 airmen. He officially assumed command on June 13, only three days after the squadron’s newly formed C Flight had departed on the 180-mile rail journey from Ekaterinodar to Velikoknyazheskaya to bolster the Whites on the Volga front.

C Flight traveled on one of the specially equipped trains that were a unique feature of this extraordinary campaign. Eventually there would be trains for A, B and C flights, plus a separate train for Collishaw’s headquarters staff. Each train was a self-contained accommodation and maintenance unit, with special wagons for munitions and gasoline plus flatcars to transport the partially disassembled aircraft. In a campaign fought mainly on flat, open ground and with massed cavalry dominating much of the fighting, the trains acted as mobile bases that enabled the airmen to keep pace with the advances and withdrawals of the opposing forces. When they arrived near the front, the trains would be pulled into sidings and the aircraft unloaded and then flown into action from improvised airfields. In practice, with the railway system frequently blocked by refugee trains, this was often easier said than done.

The squadron’s initial operation took place on June 23, when three C Flight D.H.9s bombed a railway station and military barges near Tsaritsyn. This was the first of many similar operations that helped Denikin to expel the Reds from the city by July. During one notable raid, a 112-pound bomb demolished a building in which the local soviet had just convened, killing all but two of the 41 Red commissars inside.

Early in July, C Flight moved up to Beketova, 12 miles south of Tsaritsyn. Soon after, while bombing the railway station and gunboats at Kamychin, two of its D.H.9s were attacked by a Nieuport scout. Notching up the squadron’s first victory over the Red air force, observer Lieutenant H.E. Simons quickly shot it down with a burst from his Lewis gun.

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