During one escort mission against an enemy airfield, the Reds attacked the White D.H.9s and British Camels with what Aten described as “their grab-bag of captured Allied and German ships—Nieuports, Spads, an Albatros, a Sopwith one-and-a-half strutter….I had a glance at the goggled faces as we passed. One with a white streamer flying from his helmet, the squadron leader, flew with style, and I wondered if he was a German flying for pay, a bloodthirsty Turk, or an idealistic Bolshevik.” After firing on a Nieuport, Aten had to take evasive action to avoid a stricken White D.H.9, its pilot slumped in his cockpit. “I pulled the Camel into a vertical turn and swerved as the flaming mass plummeted past. As I watched, the observer jumped, tumbling down to the river like a trapezist who had missed his grab for the bar.” The D.H.9 had been shot down by a black Fokker, whose pilot then lined up his sights on an already engaged Kinkead. He raked the flight commander’s Camel with a long burst, narrowly missing the pilot. A Red Spad then moved in to finish off Kinkead, but was shot down by a vengeful Bill Daly. Aten recounted what happened next: “Kink, his motor dead, landed safely on the riverbank, and Bill followed him down. I circled over them protectively while Kink struck a match to his Camel, then squeezed himself beneath the small center section atop Bill’s guns.” Kinkead’s return flight must have been only marginally less uncomfortable than Mitchell’s.

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All too soon for the gung-ho pilots of B Flight, their glory days in Russia were over. After advancing northward to Oryol on the Kharkov front, 200 miles from Moscow, the White offensive collapsed. Starving and critically weakened by desertions, Denikin’s overextended Volunteer Army had lost the support of the peasantry, which turned against the Whites and cut their supply lines. As a result, on October 20, he ordered a retreat.

Collishaw, meanwhile, had come down with typhus. When he resumed command of the squadron at Beketova on November 27, he found B Flight’s train about to depart on the long journey into the Ukraine and the crumbling Kharkov front. It arrived on December 5. Collishaw and A Flight followed three days later, leaving C Flight, recently reequipped with R.E.8s, on the Volga front to support General Wrangel’s forces.

Another unusual RAF unit had also been making its way to the Kharkov front. Comprised of volunteers from the Training Mission at Taganrog, Z Flight was an R.E.8 unit commanded by Squadron Leader J.O. Archer. Somehow it acquired its own train. This unit’s achievements were closely linked to those of Collishaw’s squadron. While based northeast of Kharkov, Z Flight almost achieved immortality in December 1919 when Archer sought permission for his R.E.8s to bomb Moscow. Holman curtly turned him down.

Six days after its arrival on the Kharkov front, and after only a few sorties against the Reds, B Flight was withdrawn to Taganrog to reequip. Its war-weary Camels had become more dangerous to their pilots than to the enemy and badly needed replacing. Once reequipped, B Flight was to return to the Kharkov front. In so doing, it ran into what Collishaw called a series of disasters, specifically an unexpectedly rapid Bolshevik advance that, coupled with the onset of the Russian winter, forced the airmen to abandon their new planes and equipment at Taganrog and escape to Ekaterinodar.

Aten described some of the dangers along the route: “Hundreds of trains had joined the hegira from stations along the way; on long stretches of track the trains were piled up cowcatcher to caboose. Guerrilla bands began raiding on the second day out and Kink inaugurated a system of standbys and alerts that kept us in uniform around the clock. The outlaw bands would most often attack at night, riding in close to the coaches on their fast ponies, sending up an assortment of vari-coloured flares they had captured in their depot raids and trying to pick us off through the windows.” Their fire did not go unreturned by the airmen. Aten wrote: “Usually after a skirmish we would count ten to fifteen bodies in the snow; our own casualties would be nil or at most one or two superficially wounded, from ricochets….Others though were less fortunate. We passed several trains tipped over, looted and burned, with only a few charred corpses to show that refugees had met their deaths there. What had happened to the hundreds of men, women and children who had been on these trains we never found out.”

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