Frederick Blakeslee painted all the covers for the entire run of Dare-Devil Aces. And each of those covers had a story behind it. This time, Eliot Todd recounts the story behind Blakeslee’s October 1934 cover for Dare-Devil Aces. . . .

THE Bristol Fighters on this month’s cover have dropped the last of their light demolition bombs on the blazing ammunition dump below and are now battling their way through a cordon of avenging Fokker D-VII’s. Will they make the lines? Well, the Bristol Fighter was so good that it was used right up to the close of the war with very few changes and could be trusted to give a good account of itself in any show.

Perhaps the most spectacular of all war sights was the explosion of an ammunition dump. Thousands upon thousands of shells and bombs of all types and sizes were stored in these dumps. And one well-placed hit was enough to transform them from orderly, harmless looking supply depots into white-hot infernos of death and destruction.

Such great concentrations of munitions as were to be found in 1918 were unheard of during the early days of the war. Open tactics prevailed for those first few weeks and not until the armies dug in did positions become comparatively permanent. Then the establishment of definite lines made supply centers necessary for the support of the armies.

The first dumps were just what the word means—piles of ammunition dumped on the ground, sometimes protected by canvas or some other rude shelter. No attempt was made to conceal the positions of the depots; secrecy was not considered necessary at that time.

But when aerial observation and photography developed from a curiosity into an important branch of the service, it became necessary to protect the depots from the prying eyes and tell-tale camera of the airmen.

Dumps were necessarily located near some road or railway. For that reason they were all the easier to spot from above when not camouflaged.

With the position of a dump located on a map or shown on a photograph, and with each section ranged, it was generally a simple enough matter to shell the target if within range of the artillery.

If not, planes were rolled out, courses set and bomb racks loaded.

Well aware of the vital importance of these dumps to the successful operation of their plans, the general staffs of each nation used every known device to protect their supplies. Camouflage was the answer. Roads were screened when it was necessary to bring up supplies by daylight in preparation for a big drive.

Some dumps were located underground, not only to mask their position but also to protect the ammunition in case of a raid. In some cases great tarpaulins were stretched and painted to resemble the ground.

As the art of camouflage advanced it became more and more difficult to recognize them. But in spite of all precautions, the dumps continued to be spotted and bombed by that new weapon which has done more than anything else to revolutionize modern warfare—the airplane.

“T.N.T. Wings: The Story Behind The Cover” by Eliot Todd
(October 1934, Dare-Devil Aces)

Check back again. We will be presenting more Stories behind the Covers.

“Haw-w-w-w-w!” That sound can only mean one thing—that Bachelor of Artifice, Knight of Calamity and an alumnus of Doctor Merlin’s Camelot College for Conjurors is back and this time the marvel from Boonetown faces a dilema—face a court martial or transfer to the Pallbearer Squadron—the most morose lot on the Western Front—to boost their morale as only a Pinkham can.

They thought Phineas could make anybody laugh—until they sent him to the Pallbearers’ drome, where even the birds sang death marches. Yes, it looked for once as if Phineas had met his match in that bunch of Crêpe Hangars!

• Download “Crêpe Hangars” (February 1935, Flying Aces)

Frederick Blakeslee painted all the covers for the entire run of Dare-Devil Aces. And each of those covers had a story behind it. This time, Blakeslee presents us with more of the approach he used for the covers he painted for Battle Aces—telling us about the ship on cover of the September 1934 cover for Dare-Devil Aces. . . .

THERE is no story behind the cover this month. The scene is simply a background to display the Boulton & Paul “Bourges” bomber. You can easily pick it out, for it is the only British ship on the cover.

The “Bourges” was produced late in the war as a fighter bomber, and had it arrived at the Front in time would have given the Germans the surprise of their lives. Not only did it have the fuel and load capacity expected of a large bomber, but the speed, climb, and maneuvering qualities usually associated with a small single-seater combat ship. It not only could carry nearly a thousand pounds of bombs, but if necessary, whip into an Immelmann, a loop or any other intricate maneuver impossible for a machine of its size in those days.

The specifications for the ship follow. It had a span of 54 ft. a gap, maximum and minimum of 6 ft. 6 in. The total overall length was 37 ft. The chord of the top wing was 8 ft. while the bottom wing was 6 ft. 6 in. Span of the tail was 16 ft.

It had two 320 h.p. A. B. C. “Dragonfly” motors turning a 9 ft. 6 in. dia. prop. 1650 r.p.m. The weight of the machine empty was 3420 lbs. and its load per sq. ft. was 8 lbs. It carried 190 gallons of gas, enough to keep it aloft nine and a quarter hours. Its speed at 10,000 ft. was 124 m.p.h. and it could climb to this height in 11 minutes. At 15,000 ft. its speed was 118 m.p.h. and it took 21 minutes to climb to this height. Its landing speed was 50 m.p.h.

In our cover painting, two bombs are making a direct hit on the bridge. Had that painting been based on fact, the two hits would have been exceptional, for the art of bomb dropping was not as easy as it may sound.

For instance, a falling bomb will have an initial speed equal to and in the same direction as the airplane from which it is dropped. This force is compounded with two other forces which are constant, the resistance of the air and the acceleration due to gravity. The result will be a curved trajectory, the trajectory being the path the bomb follows from the point of discharge to the striking point. A head wind or a tail wind will cause the bomb to drift which modifies the value of the trajectory, which is again modified by the type and weight of the bomb used.

To successfully hit a target a bomber must know the normal speed of the particular airplane in which he flies; the height of the airplane from the target; the velocity of the head or tail wind and the weight and type of the bomb to be dropped.

If all this is known, it is reasonable to suppose that the bomb would hit the target, and it would if it wasn’t for the fact that perhaps a thousand feet lower from the height of the bomber, the wind may be blowing ten miles faster or change its direction. Add to this bursting “archie” and enemy ships and you will see why bombing was, and is, difficult. In fact, some authorities during the war despaired of ever being able to get results in aerial bombing comparable to the efforts made.

“The Bourges Bomber: The Ship on the Cover” by Frederick Blakeslee
(September 1934, Dare-Devil Aces)

Next time, Eliot Todd returns with the story of “T.N.T. Wings” on the October 1934 cover. Be sure not to miss it.

Back with another of Eugene Frandzen’s “Lives of the Aces in Pictures” from the pages of Flying Aces Magazine. The series ran for almost four years with a different Ace featured each month. This time around we have the August 1935 installment featuring the illustrated biography of the last leader of the Jagdstaffel Boelcke—Carl Bolle!

Carl Bolle started his military career in the cavalry, later transfering to the air service. During his time in the air service he is credited with 36 victories rising to the rank of Oberleutnant and transfered to command Jasta 2—the very squadron Oswald Boelcke had commanded.

After the war, Bolle became a flying instructor and in the 1920’s director of German Air Transport School—the Deutsche Verkehrsfliegerschule. Subssequently helping in the covert training of pilots for the Luftwaffe with which he served as an advisor during the second World War, reporting to Hermann Goring himself!

Carl Bolle passed away on the 9th of October 1955 in his native city of Berlin.

• Download “Lives of the Aces in Pictures – Part 38: Carl Bolle (August 1935, Flying Aces)

Frederick Blakeslee painted all the covers for the entire run of Dare-Devil Aces. And each of those covers had a story behind it. This time, Eliot Todd recounts the story behind Blakeslee’s July 1934 cover for Dare-Devil Aces. . . .

MOTORS thundering, four giant Handley-Pages trundled across the 89th’s field at St. Contay. They were off to do the impossible—bomb the enemy rail center at Harvencourt.

For months a thorn in the side of G.H.Q., Harvencourt was now the mainspring in the Germans’ last stab at victory. Every other attempt to destroy it had ended in disaster. Now G.H.Q. was pinning their faith on a bold daylight raid.

Thirty minutes later the rail center slid into view. The air became charged with flying steel as German batteries came to life. Jagged chunks of shrapnel and Maxim slugs crashed through wings, shredding fabric, smashing struts and ribs to splinters. Grimly the H.P.’s held their course through the maelstrom of lead and steel, laying egg after egg.

By now the ground was a blazing inferno, the network of tracks a mass of twisted junk. But the dump, the all important store of ammunition, was untouched.

A gunner snatched the release and the last bomb spun true to its mark. Magically a solid sheet of flame leaped upward as hundreds of tons of H.E. ignited. When the smoke and debris cleared there was nothing to mark the dump but a tremendous crater.

During the early years of the war, bombing was more or less haphazard and unreliable. Equipment was crude. Bombs consisted mainly of hand grenades, and bomb sights were nothing more than a couple of nails and a few pieces of wire.

But with the rapid strides made in aviation during 1917-18, bombing leaped from the hit or miss, hope-we-get-there-stage, into a powerful weapon of offense. Very few things got more respect than the bombers as they droned overhead with a cargo of eggs along about two ack emma.

When objectives were deep in enemy territory, as happened in the story depicted on this month’s cover, the bombers were forced to leave their escorts after crossing the lines, and, because of the shorter cruising range of the smaller ships, penetrate miles behind the lines alone. As early as 1916 one R.F.C. outfit flew more than ninety miles to reach its objective.

And if the objective happened to be an important one they were usually met with a hot reception. Batteries of ground defences flung up shrapnel, flaming onions and Maxim slugs until the air was literally charged with flying steel. In many instances the crews were trapped in the pits of their lumbering busses and blasted out of the sky by Fokkers.

Even if they sucecded in reaching their objective, escaping anti-aircraft fire and the savage attacks of Fokkers, they were still faced with many minutes of flying over hostile territory that was by tins time fully aroused to their presence.

Crouched in the pits of their clumsy, sometimes crippled crates, the crews fought their way mile after mile back to the Front until they contacted their escort over the lines.

In that case the escort went into action, driving off the Boche planes. But when they missed the escort, as they sometimes did, the entire job was up to them.

The odds against them and the difficulties that faced them were all in the day’s—or night’s—work to the men who flew in those giant crates. They were real airmen and they did a real job.

“Suicide Buzzards: The Story Behind The Cover” by Eliot Todd (July 1934)

Check back again. We will be presenting more Stories behind the Covers.

This week we have a tale from the pen of a dare-devil adventurer, aviator, soldier and war correspondent—Kenneth Brown Collings, whose interest in aviation began in childhood when he saw the Wrights brothers and their flying machine perform at Fort Myer, Va., in 1908. From the pages of the February 1935 number of Flying Aces, it’s a smashing yarn of night bombers—”Raid of the Unseen!”

The C.O. of the 7th Marines Squadron was not new at the fighting game. He’d taken lessons from blood-crazed Moros in the Philippines, from slant-eyed Boxers in China. And he’d learned one thing—you’ve got to hit what you shoot at, whether you’re on the ground or in the air. And because he’d learned that lesson so well—he was faced with a court-martial!

• Download “Raid of the Unseen” (February 1935, Flying Aces)

Frederick Blakeslee painted all the covers for the entire run of Dare-Devil Aces. And each of those covers had a story behind it. This time, Eliot Todd recounts the story behind Blakeslee’s April 1934 cover for Dare-Devil Aces. . . .

SUNSET. The lone Spad droned on, headed directly into the blazing rays of a dying sun that flushed the western skies with crimson. A Yank pilot sat in the Spad’s tiny “office,” his back to Germany, his two hour evening patrol over. From time to time he turned and searched the sky for enemy ships. He had nearly reached the lines when he saw them—four black specks, one larger than the others, all spinning about in crazy gyrations.

He snatched for binoculars. Three Fokker D-7’s were ganging a French Salmson. One, a blue Fokker, was just dropping on the Salmson’s tail. Spandaus flamed. Twin Lewises flashed in the sun. The Fokker seemed to shudder. The motor belched a billowy sheet of livid flame, then, falling into a right-hand spin, the Boche plane blazed its final trail across the sky like a fiery comet.

Instantly the two remaining Fokkers caught the Salmson in a deadly cross-fire. That was enough for the Yank. He stood the Spad on its prop, spun around and roared toward the fight.

A blue Fokker swelled in his ring-sight. He estimated the distance. Two hundred yards, one hundred yards. He reached for the trips. But just as his fingers tightened on the stick a red ship appeared like magic at his right. Spandaus steel smashed into his motor. The Hisso ground to a stop with a grating of metal parts.

Numb terror gripped the Yank’s heart. Engine dead, he was cold meat for those Boches. The red ship had looped upward, probably intending to swoop in a death-dealing dive; and from the corner of his eye the Yank could see the blue Fokker swinging in on his tail. He began gliding earthward.

As he flashed past the Salmson, he glanced up—and gasped. For the French observer had aimed his guns and was riddling the belly of the red Fokker with lead. The Boche ship hung for a moment in the sky, almost motionless—then it began to fall in a series of crazy side-slips, pilot fighting the controls.

But the blue Fokker was fast on the Spad’s tail now, raking the crippled ship with burst after burst. The Yank felt the tiny shocks of slugs smash up the camel-back toward the fuselage. Grimly he turned to face the final burst. As he did so the Salmson whipped around in a vertical bank not fifty yards away. Again twin Lewises flamed; feathery tracers impaled the blue Fokker’s cockpit. The Boche pilot slumped forward. His ship plunged down, guns still yammering, a dead hand clutching the trips.

Breathing a sigh of heartfelt relief, the Yank eased the stick and sought a place to set down. There wasn’t much time to choose. Two miles inside the German lines, with 500 feet altitude and a dead stick, it was pretty much of a hit and miss proposition.

A clearing showed ahead. He landed in it, jumped out and touched a match to the ship just as a squad of Germans rushed into the open, waving their rifles. But before they could reach him the Salmson came hurtling over the trees, Vickers snarling. The Boches faltered and broke, running for cover. The Salmson banked, bouncing past the Yank, who ran after it. Bullets pinged around his head but he flung himself on the wing.

A few minutes later on the tarmac of his own drome, he gripped the French pilot’s hand in a gesture that expressed his thanks more eloquently than words.

“The Yellow Comet: The Story Behind The Cover” by Eliot Todd (April 1934)

Check back again. We will be presenting more Stories behind the Covers.

Back with another of Eugene Frandzen’s “Lives of the Aces in Pictures” from the pages of Flying Aces Magazine. The series ran for almost four years with a different Ace featured each month. This time around we have the July 1935 installment featuring the illustrated biography of the most decorated Canadian Ace—Lt. Col. William Barker, V.C., D.S.O. M.C.!

William George “Billy” Barker was a fighter pilot credited with 53 aerial victories during WWI, but is mostly remembered for the epic, single-handed combat on October 27th 1918 against some 60 German aircraft that won him the Victoria Cross.

After the war he joined Canada’s other Ace named Billy—William Bishop in an ill-conceived commercial aviation venture in Toronto, but in June 1922 he accepted a commission in the Canadian Air Force and was briefly the acting director of the RCAF.

Barker was fatally injured when his new two-seater Fairchild aircraft he was demonstrating crashed at Rockcliffe air station, Ottawa. He was 35.

• Download “Lives of the Aces in Pictures – Part 37: Lt. Col. Barker (July 1935, Flying Aces)

As a bonus—here is the feature on Lt. Col. William Barker from Clayton Knight’s newspaper feature Hall of Fame of the Air which ran Sundays from 1935 to 1940. This strip is courtesy of Stephen Sherman’s acepilots.com which has a large collection of HFA strips that his father had clipped and saved at the time.

Great stuff!

Frederick Blakeslee painted all the covers for the entire run of Dare-Devil Aces. And each of those covers had a story behind it. . . .

THE cover this month shows an S.E.5 diving on the tail of a Fokker which is on the tail of another S.E. A split second later—

Early in 1918 there appeared at a British squadron a group of replacements, among them a youngster whom we shall call Jones. After several practice flights near the lines, Jones eventually took his place in a formation that was out for real trouble. As they crossed the Front, archie was particularly active and very accurate. Shells burst close to the formation, too close for comfort, and Jones proceeded to zigzag madly. The patrol leader turned about to pick him up, but Jones was headed for home at full speed.

When the patrol returned an hour later, the leader proceeded to read the riot act to Jones. He was told that it was a pilot’s duty to keep formation, not only for his own sake, but for the sake of the rest of the flight. If the patrol got into a scrap, one machine missing would be serious— perhaps fatal. He was also told what became of stragglers, who were the Boche’s favorite dish. He was threatened with all manner of unpleasant things if he broke formation again. The lad promised to do his best.

That same day he was again a member of the flight. He kept formation despite archie—which was not as severe as earlier—and completed the patrol.

The next day, however, when archie plastered the sky a little more vigorously, Jones again broke formation and sped for home. This time the lack of one ship missing had serious consequences for the flight. They ran into seven Boches and the battle raged for half an hour. When the flight drew off for home, one of their number had gone to the happy hunting ground.

The straffing Jones received from the entire squadron is history. After long deliberation, the youngster was given one last chance to save himself from disgrace.

The flight left the field with Jones the next day. He had been moved in position to give him confidence and he stayed in place during the usual archie. Some half hour later the flight leader saw several Pfalz scouts 8,000 feet below. After a look around he gave the signal and down they went, Jones with them. During the fight two of the Germans were shot down, one in flames.

Them from above dove three Fokkers. One of these got on the tail of the flight leader, and before he realized what had happened he received a burst of Boche lead that put his Vickers out of action. He put his plane through every maneuver he could think of—and some he didn’t think of—but one of the Fokkers always clung to his tail.

There was nothing he could do but spin down and try to hedge hop home.

Down he went in a spin. At fifty feet he flattened out and with throttle wide open, streaked for home. But he was not alone. The Fokker still rode his tail, pumping steel into his S.E.

Nothing, apparently, could save the Yank. His Vickers were out of action and his Lewis drum was empty. Gas was getting low, also. As he turned, a burst went through the fairing back of his head just missing his shoulder. In desperation he swung in a steep right turn. Just as the Fokker turned to follow, out of the sky hurtled an S.E. The flight leader recognized the number—Jones . . . .

—the S.E. crashed into the Fokker; the wreckage dove deep into the ground. And so Jones died, that a comrade might live.

“Hell On Wings: The Story Behind The Cover” by Frederick M. Blakeslee (March 1934)

Check back again. We will be presenting more of Blakeslee’s Stories behind his cover illustrations.