Aten described a typical ground attack sortie: “We formed an endless chain of attack. Dive. Shoot. Zoom. Cartwheel. The Red cavalry was helpless. We came so fast they had no chance to defend themselves. A few raised rifles from pony backs. Some stampeded both forward and back, but Kink concentrated the attack at both ends of the column, and the narrow gulley was choked with horses and men at entrance and exit. On my third trip round I saw an officer whipping his horse up the steep side of the gully towards the steppe….I pulled my stick back a fraction and the dust spurts travelled closer and closer in an ineluctable geometry of line until the horse reared and the man flung his arms upward and fell….I felt neither elation nor guilt but only a knifesharp sense of concentration. In the air a man is in a different element of action and response…he is himself and at the same time he is not quite human.”

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Collishaw, among the greatest exponents of the Camel, often flew with B Flight. Later he recalled how, after the Camels had bombed and strafed the enemy, Ulayai’s Cossacks, their battle-flags streaming, would “then follow up with a wild cavalry charge, sabres flashing….

Watching one of these cavalry charges from the cockpit of a Camel was an exhilarating but odd sensation, almost as if one had suddenly turned the controls of some Wellsian time machine and was watching a battle that had taken place a hundred years or more before.”

Political expediency touched 47 Squadron on October 1, 1919, when, owing to disquiet at home over the active involvement of a regular RAF squadron in support of the Whites, it was renamed A Squadron of the RAF’s Training Mission. The change was entirely cosmetic. The unit carried on with its unremitting attacks on Bolshevik troop concentrations, armored trains and river transportation. Keeping up the attrition of the Red air force, Kinkead sent a Nieuport down out of control on October 7. Two days later Collishaw destroyed an Albatros D.V. Other victories soon followed.

Next came a combined operation involving all three flights against ships of the Bolsheviks’ Caspian Fleet on the Volga. Although the Reds had already suffered heavy losses in river craft, they managed to assemble 40 vessels nearby, some mounting 9.2-inch howitzers intended to bombard Tsaritsyn as cover for a ground assault. Over two days the D.H.9s and D.H.9As of C and A flights, operating against intense anti-aircraft fire from both the vessels and the shore, dropped 20-pound, 112-pound and 230-pound bombs on the Red flotilla. B Flight’s Camels joined in by dropping 20-pound bombs and then sweeping the decks of the enemy vessels with their twin Vickers machine guns. After two days of intensive air attack, 11 Red vessels had been sunk. The survivors, all badly damaged, retreated up the Volga. Never again did the Bolshevik flotilla pose a serious threat. The squadron’s history noted, “Indeed prisoners taken some time later stated that when the fleet was ordered to attack again in December there were minor mutinies because (the sailors said) ‘it was murder to come within reach of the English aeroplanes.’”

B Flight often drew the unpopular duty of escorting the “Wanderers,” as its men called D.H.9s of the Beketova-based White Russian bomber squadron. Aten wrote despairingly of these comrades in arms: “They were not merely incompetent, they were feckless, and sometimes they endangered our own skins. Incapable of keeping formation, their planes would wander off in all directions, and we would have to shepherd them in like a flock of stupid sheep. In a fight the guns of their observers were likely to jam, and even if they didn’t jam, they missed. Sometimes their planes disappeared altogether, and on several occasions we had landed to find them neatly hangared, with their Russians on their third glass of vodka.”

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