THIS week we have a story from the pen of the Navy’s own Allan R. Bosworth. Bosworth wrote a couple dozen stories with Humpy & Tex over the course of ten years from 1930 through 1939, mostly in the pages of War Aces and War Birds. The stories are centered around the naval air base at Ile Tudy, France. “Humpy” Campbell, a short thickset boatswain’s mate, first class who was prone to be spitting great sopping globs of tabacco juice, was a veteran seaplane pilot who would soon rate two hashmarks—his observer, Tex Malone, boatswain’s mate, second class, was a D.O.W. man fresh from the Texas Panhandle. Everybody marveled at the fact that the latter had made one of the navy’s most difficult ratings almost overnight—but the answer lay in his ability with the omnipresent rope he constantly carried.

Humpy & Tex find themselves in the brig, busted down for their shenanigans. They volunteer to dive down and unfoul the anchor seeing it as a chance to retrieve the cognac they had dropped in the harbor the night before, but end up abandoned without air on the ocean floor—definitely not the place for two airman! “Jawbone of an Ace” by the Navy’s own Allan R. Bosworth is one of the duo’s later adventures from the pages of the January 1935 War Birds.

Humpy And Tex, Flying Fish Of The Azores, In A Mad Scramble From Ocean Floor To Sky-Top For Cognac And Krauts!

• Download “Jawbone of an Ace” (January 1935, War Birds)

THIS week we present a cover by Colcord Heurlin! Heurlin worked in the pulps primarily over a ten year period from 1923 to 1933. His work appeared on Adventure, Aces, Complete Stories, Everybody’s Combined with Romance, North-West Stories, The Popular, Short Stories, Flying Aces, Sea Stories, Top-Notch, War Stories, Western Story, and here, the cover of the October 1931 Sky Birds!

The Giant Killer

IT IS interesting to note that comparatively few Zeppelin raids were made on Paris during the war. Early in the big conflict the French brought down a big gas-bag, and the Germans decided to devote their raiding to night Gotha patrols or hurling giant shells from the security of the wood that hid Big Bertha. The main air defense of Paris in the early days was carried out by the old Maurice and Henry Farman ships. These rare old pushers, weird as they might seem today, were too much for the Zeps. Our cover this month shows a gunner in a Henry Farman “shorthorn” putting the fatal burst into a big raider on its way to bomb Paris. The airmen are wearing the famous old crash helmets that all wise flyers donned before taking the air, prior to 1915 or 16.

“The Giant Killer”
Sky Birds, October 1931 by Colcord Heurlin

THIS week we have a short story by renowned pulp author Frederick C. Davis. Davis is probably best remembered for his work on Operator 5 where he penned the first 20 stories, as well as the Moon Man series for Ten Detective Aces and several other continuing series for various Popular Publications. He also wrote a number of aviation stories that appeared in Aces, Wings and Air Stories.

This week’s story features that crack pilot for World News Reel, the greatest gelatine newspaper that ever flashed on a silver screen—Nick Royce! Davis wrote twenty stories with Nick for Wings magazine from 1928-1931.

Tip Top, one of the biggest producers in the movie field, is looking to add a news reel to their releases and want to buy up one of the present independent movie reel producers and it’s down to Compass and World News Reel. Which ever company can out perform the other and provide the best news reels will get the gig—only problem is, someone’s on the payroll of Compass at World News Reel and causing trouble. From the April 1928 Wings, it’s Frederick C. Davis’ “Winner Take All!”

Two flyers of the newsreel wage an air-feud in the clouds, and over the flame-belching tanks of the oil fields Nick Royce, sky-eater, plays his ace-in-the-hole.

• Download “Winner Take All” (April 1928, Wings)

FREQUENT visitors to this site know that we’ve been featuring Terry Gilkison’s Famous Sky Fighters feature from the pages of Sky Fighters. Gilkison had a number of these features in various pulp magazines—Clues, Thrilling Adventures, Texas Rangers, Thrilling Mystery, Thrilling Western, and Popular Western. Starting in the February 1936 issue of Lone Eagle, Gilkison started the war-air quiz feature Sky Writers. Each month there would be four questions based on the Aces and events of The Great War. If you’ve been following his Famous Sky Fighters, these questions should be a snap!

Here’s the quiz from the July 1936 issue of Lone Eagle.

If you get stumped or just want to check your answers, click here!

THIS week we have a story from the short-lived Sky Devils magazine by Anthony Field. Anthony Field was a pseudonym used by Anatole Feldman who specialized in gangland fiction—appearing primarily in Harold Hersey’s gang pulps, Gangster Stories, Racketeer Stories, and Gangland Stories. His best-known creation is Chicago gangster Big Nose Serrano. But he also wrote a number of aviation stories including four stories for Sky Devils featuring Quinn’s Black Sheep Squadron—this is the second of those four stories!

Quinn’s Black Sheep is another of those squadrons populated with other squadron’s troublemakers like Rossoff’s Hell-Cats or Keyhoe’s Jailbird Flight or any number of other examples. It seemed every author had a series with a black sheep squadron.

Captain Jack Quinn, brought in for disciplinary action, manages to convince the General that he could solve a lot of his headaches by hand-picking the problem aces out of other squadrons and forming an essentially independent squadron to take on the Boche. Thus, Quinn’s flight was a crew of hard bitten aces who had been tempered—to a man—in the cauldron of war, having unflinchingly facing Death many times before.

There are rumors of a spy on the Black Sheep ‘drome and when a mysterious woman arrives, Quinn finds himself thrown into the unfamiliar world of intrigue in an effort to find out who the woman is—and who the spy is and finds out there is a sinister plan afoot to wipe out the Allied High Command!

Once again the hell-diving Black Sheep Squadron rears through screaming, shell-torn war skies! Some member of that infamous Black Sheep Squadron was a spy who had sold their honor to hell—so theirs was a double mission of hate as they roared through flaming skies in a mad attempt to save the Allied High Command from raw annihilation!

• Download “Flaming Destiny of the Sky Damned!” (July 1938, Sky Devils)

THIS week we present one of Paul Bissell’s covers for Sky Birds! Bissell is mainly known for doing the covers of Flying Aces from 1931 through 1934 when C.B. Mayshark took over duties. He also did covers for brother magazine Sky Birds. For the September 1931 cover Bissell put us right in the action with some artillery spotters over enemy lines!

The Fighting Spotters

PROBABLY no group of fighters in the World War did as much and got so little credit as the artillery spotters pictured on this month’s cover. These men sat over the German lines and provided “eyes” for the big* guns that pounded the enemy dumps, transport, front-line redoubts and artillery bases.

The heroes of the air today are those pilots who fought in sleek, high-speed scouts, but the artillery-spotting airmen had to do their important work in slow, unwieldy, low-powered ships, and had to rely on what little protection they might expect from the high-flying scouts and fighters above.

Hundreds of budding airmen who trained and prepared themselves for action against the German circuses found themselves unceremoniously dumped into the cockpits of R.E.8s and told to go off and control a “shoot.” This meant that a pilot and observer would leave their airdrome, fly out over the battery they were to control, lower their wireless aerial and pick up the battery control dugout.

Once in contact they would fly out over the target and call for the first shot. This would be observed and the corrections made, by wireless. Shot after shot would be pounded out and corrected until the target was “hit.” All this would be carried out while the ship was flying in a broad figure-8 track. One half of the figure-8 would be over the German lines and the other over Allied territory.

Needless to state, these “shoots” were not always staged under tea-party conditions. Often the spotting ship would be attacked while completing the correcting process as in our cover, but in all cases, the spotters stuck it out until they had registered a “hit” and had sent out their command for “salvo.” Grimly they hung on, the observer handling his Lewis gun and telegraph key, fighting and dying amid a wild fanfare of machine-gun bullets and the screaming wail of the shells that were being vomited out from steel muzzles at the request of the fighting observer, who in all probability was taking a torrent of enemy fire as his fingers tapped out the all-important corrections for the gunners many miles behind the lines.

Little honor, little glory and often the gibes of fellow flyers who were lucky enough to be flying faster and more up-to-date ships was their lot, but they accepted their Jobs and did them well. They lived and died, true examples of the old creed of the flying men: “We Are the Eyes of the Army.”

“The Fighting Spotters”
Sky Birds, September 1931 by Paul J. Bissell

FROM the pages of the December 1934 number of Sky Fighters:

Editor’s Note: We feel that this magazine has been exceedingly fortunate in securing Lt. Edward McCrae to conduct a technical department each month. It is Lt. Mcrae’s idea to tell us the underlying principles and facts concerning expressions and ideas of air-war terminology. Each month he will enlarge upon some particular statement in the stories of this magazine. Lt. MaCrae is qualified for this work, not only because he was a war pilot, but also because he is the editor of this fine magazine.

The Instrument Board

by Lt. Edward McCrae (Sky Fighters, December 1934)

ALL RIGHT, you ring-tailed gazookuses, the class will now come to attention, which is what I don’t want anything but. Mary, take that gum out of your mouth and stick it back of your ear until school is over. And Johnny, you quit dropping those fishing worms down Irene’s back. Put ’em, in your pocket until you find a fish that wants them.

So, clean out your ears and get ready to do some concentrated listening, because this time I am going to tell you some stuff that would sound awfully technical if anybody except myself were to try to explain it to you. But when I start to talk, even you dumbkopfs ought to be able to understand it.

“Where Am I At?”

The subject of the sermon, today is taken from the first book of Aviatus, second chapter and third verse. It says here, “And the aviator came unto me saying, ‘Where am I at?’ And I answered unto him thusly, saying, ‘Learn to read your instruments and thou wilst know where thou art at’.”

And so we plungeth inneth.

Now whether you knot-heads know it or not, there is a difference between an airplane and an automobile. The point is that a car buzzes along on a highway and if something goes wrong you can pull over to the side of the road and find out what it is and maybe get towed in. And if you get lost on the road you can ask where the right road is and get on it.

When Things Go Wrong

Well, sir, believe it or not, you can’t do that in an airplane. If you are in the air over the German lines and something goes wrong with the ship you don’t want to pull over to some German camp and get them to fix you up so you can go on your way. And if you happen to get lost, you don’t want to stop some Heinie and ask him where you can find the Hamfstengle Air Circus which you were sent out to bomb.

All of which means that since we couldn’t stop to make repairs and ask questions we had to carry our information along with us when we went out sniping Heinies. We carried that information on the instrument board, in the form of dials with needles and other kinds of indicators.

Times Have Changed

It wasn’t like it is now. In these days you can look at the instrument board of a good ship and see a record of what your Aunt Mehitabell had for breakfast and how it is affecting her indigestion. Today they have turn and bank indicators that register the angle of the bank before your eyes. During the war that was registered on the seat of our pants. If we were slipping down to the left we felt it by sliding in the seat and so on.

But we had instruments. And they fall into two groups, according to their purpose. One group is for the purpose of knowing how the motor is doing at all times so we wouldn’t have to stop and get a Boche to do a repair job for us. And the other group was for the purpose of telling us where we were or ought to be so we wouldn’t have to ask a German to direct us on our way.

A Handful of Gadgets

For the engine we had a switch to turn it on and off, a tachometer to record the number of revolutions of the motor, fuel and oil gauges, etc.

And for getting around places and knowing where we were, we had an air speed indicator, an altimeter, a compass and a clock.

By the side of a list of present day instruments you would get the impression that this little handful of gadgets wouldn’t be enough to successfully navigate a kiddie-kar. But we got there, folks. Ask ’em if we didn’t!

Pretty Bare, Eh?

Take a look at Figure 1 and you will get some kind of an idea what the board of one of the old crates looked like. Looks pretty bare, doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t the face of the instruments that did the work, it was the insides of them that performed the job. And if you want to know something about the problems of the birds that had the task of devising ways for us to know what was going on in the ship, just take a look inside one or two of those instruments. It was those tiny little hairsprings and needles that won the war.

That’s a big statement, but I can prove it. There’s no use in going into detail as to that, so I’ll get on with the lesson and show you how they did it.

How They Worked

There are some of the instruments that could be adapted from automobile and other uses. Things like thermometers and the compass and the tachometer. But in case you didn’t happen to look into the matter the last time you were playing around an instrument factory I’ll tell you how they worked.

A tachometer, or “tack” or a “/*!!&* tack” as it was called when it wasn’t working properly was a simple device adopted from the speedometer of an automobile or any other machine that had to record the number of revolutions a wheel or anything made. You merely had a flexible shaft with one end attached to or in contact with the crankshaft of the engine. The other end had a governor on it. The faster the engine turned the more the governor spread out. Then the amount of spread was recorded on the dial which is marked off in thousands of revolutions a minute. The tach didn’t tell you how fast you were going, but only how fast the engine was turning. You knew in advance how many revs it should turn for this and that, for climbing, for gliding, straight flight, and so forth. (Figure 2, if you’re interested.)

And while we’re on the simple things, we might clean up the thermometer. That little gadget ordinarily operates by having a tube with some kind of liquid like mercury or sulphur dioxide or methyl chloride in it. All these liquids expand under heat. As they expand they naturally rise up in the tube and the readings are marked on the tube.

The Distant Type

But an engine thermometer had to be read back in the cockpit, so they made a variation of this principle which comes under the head of “distant type thermometers.” If you will take your eyes off that circus parade that’s passing and look at Figure 3 you’ll see what one looks like.

What happened when it was supposed to register the temperature of the oil and the water and those things that were not supposed to get too hot if you wanted to stay in the air was this:

The part called the bulb contained methyl chloride which makes a vapor when it gets hot. The juice creates the vapor which then fills the tube running to the dial (the capillary tube) and that then exerts pressure on the Bourdon Tube which is that curled part with the needle attached. The needle then registers the temperature as indicated by the amount of pressure in the Bourdon Tube.

I’ve got to hurry through this lesson because I’ve got a date with a blonde who is “just crazy about flyers” so I’ll first tell you that the air speed indicator also works by pressure, and then explain how the pressure gauge system works so you will never forget it.

Air Speed Indicator

Now, to get the recording of the amount of speed with which you are passing through the air you have an air speed indicator. It is a combination of a Bourdon Tube and what is called a Pitot tube.

The Pitot tube is hollow and usually runs out a wing, up a strut, and ends by sticking out forward from the strut. You’d think it was a piece of gas line that was broken off. But here’s what you’ve got. When the ship is flying forward there is naturally head resistance. That open-ended tube sticking straight forward into the wind has the increased wind pressure entering the hole in it. Naturally the pressure is greater than if the ship was standing still. The ship registers no miles per hour when it is still, but as it increases speed, the air pressure increases and that in turn increases the pressure inside the Bourdon Tube and makes the dial tell you how fast you are going through the air, not from point to point on the ground.

Stay Awake

Now there are other gauges that work by pressure. They all usually use the Bourdon Tube system, or a diaphram system. So, wake up long enough to look at Figure 4, and try to stay awake long enough for me to explain it to you, and then you will know how they work.

You see that thing like a question mark? That’s the Bourdon Tube. It is hollow and made out of bronze or brass. The pressure from the thermometer or Pitot Tube, or hot oil or hot water or what have you comes in through the tube connection and enters the Bourdon Tube.

The pressure tries to straighten out the question mark and make an exclamation point out of it, like what goes after the word damn.

Speaking of Throttles

But was that air pressure or vapor pressure’s face red? The end of the tube was tied to a little gear apparatus and that was geared to a dial. So as the pressure huffs and puffs and tries to blow the house down it really succeeds only in straightening out the question mark a little bit, and in doing that, it makes the needle turn around in front of the dial and the needle says to the flyer, ‘‘watch out, your water’s getting too hot. Better throttle down.”

And in speaking of throttles, you buzzards beat it before my date shows up or I’ll throttle the whole bunch of you.

Scram!