Arse About Face

 

I've been selecting stories from It Never Was Worthwhile to include in Discollection and one of them caught my eye. It's called Gunbus Driver, and I rather like it, which is my prerogative, so there.

Having spent some time aloft in open cockpits I can attest to how bloody cold a place it is when you're tootling around Norfolk for an hour or so. That's when you're doing it for fun, and the likelihood of some Fokker trying to ruin your day is very slim indeed. What it must have been like to do it two or three times a day - or more - with little sleep and two or more hours of high altitude winter is something that I can only imagine.

With this in mind I wrote a short story about the cold, the isolation and, yes, boredom of a patrol over enemy lines. I put my protagonist at the controls of a Vickers F.B.5, known to most as the Gunbus. It was designed at a time when Great Britain was yet to mass-produce a viable interrupter gear to allow the machine gun to shoot through the propeller. The Gunbus circumvented the problem by placing the propeller behind the pilot and the gunner forward in the nose. It struck me that those who, unlike me, don't regard the anorak as the peak of male fashion, might have difficulty in visualising this layout, so I did this little pencil sketch to sit above the story in the new collection.

As you can see, the gunner has a good field of fire above and below and around 200⁰ of arc from side to side. That's a good thing, but the weight of an extra bod in 1915 was a huge impediment, so the Gunbus was much slower and less manoeuvrable than its arch rival,  the Fokker E.111. This was the fearsome adversary that became known as "the Fokker Scourge".

I hope you'll enjoy joining my pilot in his freezing lattice of wood and Irish linen.

Spoiler alert: He does get his bar of chocolate back.