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Show DM FINE WORKj i Every Kind of Mission Which Falls to Flyers' Duty En- trusted to Them. AMERICAN HEADQUARTERS IN j FRANCE. Sopt. 17. -(Router's.) - Magnificent work of the American aviators under most difficult weather j conditions must not bo forgotten in1 telling the story of the St. Mihlel victory. vic-tory. To them was entrusted every kind of mission which falls to a flyin? man's lot but tho task in which they distinguished themselves most, perhaps per-haps was harassing the enemy's withdrawal with-drawal from the deepest part of V.w salient. A careful study had been made of the roads by which the German transport trans-port must move and these observations observa-tions turned out to the. strikingly ac-j curate, showing that the Germans had thought out quite as carefully as tin-1 Americans the exact spot which would remain opon longest. This wns the gap between Vigneu'-les Vigneu'-les and Thaiucourt, with St. Benoit a3 the center. It thus happened' that the American airmen found the transport trains exactly where they expected Lo find them aijd their attempts to enforce en-force delay wore most daring. Owing to the weather conditions the "ceiling," to use tho airmen's technical term, was little more than a thousand fest high and the dense rain occasionally occasion-ally made everything invisible a few yards away, but not one of the selected select-ed roads was left unattacked. Tho aviators swooped down into the wood land roads, flying only forty feet from the ground to make sure of their targets. Lorry after lorry was wrecked and wagon teams torn (o pieces by skilfully - dropped bombs or machine gunfire. This is the field on which formation Hying is begun, in squadrons up lo 3S machines but usually with five. Tho squadrons fly in v-shapo, with tho commander at the apex of the v,l carrying a streamer which signals thej commands. A fleet of 15 machines was! starling as we passed, and another! had just come after two houjs in tho air, ending with a figure eight, a dif-' ficult evolution' executed by "crossing! the controls" so that the rudder serves as elevntor and the elevator serves as I rudder. At night this field is lighted by powerful searchlights, and night flying goes on from 10 o'clock until daylight. On the combat and acrobatic fields, Nos. 8 and 9, scores of machinos weio in the air going through their fighting evolutions or dipping and looping. Thej combat airplanes carried camera guns, a novel device combining a dummy machinegun and a photographic camera. cam-era. It looks like a gun, but as the trigger is pulled, the camera takes a picture of the target, showing just what would have been hit if a shot instead in-stead of a lense had blazed ahead. It was over the acrobatic field that the real wonders were going on in the vertical virage, spirals and wing slips. Spectacular as these seemed to be, each had its use in the fighting game. The "vrille" is that dizzy head-first tumble, and tho chief thing is not to do it but to undo it and come out of it. It has its uses too in deceiving an onomy into the belief that the aviator has been hit and is tumbling, then as the enemy is off guard, attacking him suddenly as the aviator comes out of his headlong drive. One of the flyers made four vrllles as we watched. "It is dangerous only when near the ground," said the escorL "High in the air there is comparatively no danger for there is plenty of time to set your levers so that you're sure to come out of the vrille." Others were doing the spiral, an other form of head-first dive except that the car is always under control whereas in the vrille the control Is lost until the aviators succeeds in emerging from his fall. Often tho machines ma-chines seemed to stop suddenly, turn over and then glide away in the opposite op-posite direction right side up. One of the best maneuvers for escape es-cape from a dangerous fight is the vertical wing-slip, as it Is the fastest means of losing altitude and getting below an unequal combat. When an acrobatic manoeuver misses or Is badly bad-ly done it la a "pancake" or a "barrel.! There is as much lingo to the aviation field as there is to the baseball diamond. dia-mond. Leaving the field we passed a crippled crip-pled aviator limping on crutches, i "He has had twenty -one crashes,", said the officer, "which is about the record. But lie goes back every time and he's eagor now to get in his machine ma-chine again. And that is tho spirit of every man here, lo be ready for combat com-bat and to beal the .3oche." |