Don’t Let Them Bag the Nines: The First World War Memoir of a de Havilland Pilot - Captain F. Williams MC DFC

As we came racing towards the scrap, we could see the Scouts’ noses smoking with tracers, while the observers fired back. Suddenly a flame trickled along the side of a Nine, then the petrol tank burst, and she fell a blazing wreck, her wings coming off. Don’t let the Hun bag the Nines - good Lord, he’ll bag the lot, if we don’t stop him, I thought. Gripping and immediate, Williams’ vivid descriptions of his raids over the German Rhinelands and Schwartzwald at the helm of his D.H.4 place the reader right in the air with him, relaying the thoughts running through his mind in real time as events unfolded around him. The account begins when the test pilot was stationed with 55 Squadron in Nancy in early 1918, and ends when he is sent home to England, with a Croix de Guerre and a DFC to his name - as fate would have it just as his dearest friend was killed in action. These remarkable memoirs lay undisturbed in a trunk for many years. AUTHOR: Capt. Williams joined the RFC as test pilot, later flying DH4s in photo-reconnaissance and bomber raids over Germany, and winning the DFC and Croix de Guerre. He contracted Polio in Iraq and in later years he became superintendent of a service people’s rehabilitation hospital in Exeter. James Coyle’s wife inherited his memoirs from her mother, Williams’ sister.
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