FREDERICTON — When pilots took to the air to fight in World War I, less than 15 years had passed since the Wright brothers’ famous first flight in 1903. The planes were in the development phase, made of canvas on a wooden frame and held together by something similar to a piano wire.

“They lacked power. They were quite fragile, and if you landed heavily they would sometimes get damaged,” said J. Brent Wilson, a historian who just published “War Among the Clouds: New Brunswick Airmen in the Great War.” . “.

Even the training could be deadly for pioneer pilots, he noted.

About 22,000 Canadians served in the British air services during the First World War, most from well-educated families in Ontario and Western Canada, Wilson said in a recent interview. But at least 252 came from New Brunswick, many from small farming communities.

They flew not only on the Western Front in France and Belgium, which was the main theater of operations, but also around the Mediterranean and into Italy, Russia, Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, Wilson said.

Wilson’s book draws on accounts of their service contained in letters home and other documents. He said he wanted to document the lives of the airmen who came from rural New Brunswick. “I think it’s important that we remember that they made an important contribution to the broader war effort to defend the country,” Wilson said.

Tim Cook, chief historian at the Canadian War Museum, said that while flying was relatively new and exciting at first, it evolved during the war to include large-scale dogfights involving dozens of aviators who fought for control of the air.

While the “sky knights,” as these glamorous pilots were sometimes called, captured the public’s attention, he said what was more important to the ground armies, mired in mud, were observation planes. slower. They photographed the front, providing crucial intelligence to commanders, gunners and infantry.

Wilson said one of the pilots he found most interesting was Major Albert Desbrisay Carter, a graduate of Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. He was born in Westmorland County, New Brunswick, near Nova Scotia, on July 3, 1892, and became a great war ace, Wilson said.

On October 31, 1916, Carter shot down his first two planes, east of Ypres. In his combat report, detailed in the book, he describes the engagement.

“I dove on three enemy planes and I spotted one, I dove vertically on it. I got less than 10 meters from it and I had to retreat so as not to crash,” says the report. “I fired numerous bursts at the pilot and observer seats, from 150 yards until I had to withdraw…I could not see what was happening to the enemy aircraft as we were approaching the ground; I ended up considerably below 1,000 feet.

During the war, Carter shot down 28 German planes before being taken prisoner on May 19, 1918. The book recounts the account of one of Carter’s friends from Saint John, New Brunswick, Captain Stuart Bell, who recounted a conversation between the two had. He described Carter demanding that British officers be treated better in German prison camps.

“To this the German replied: ‘I will make you understand that you are in Germany and that you will do very well what we tell you,'” the book says.

“Major Carter’s response was, ‘Yes, and that’s why the whole world is fighting you. You have no sense of honor or respect for convention.’ For this he received three days of bread, water and cells.

On May 22, 1919, Carter, 27, who had survived a Spanish flu, died during a training exercise when his plane crashed. He was buried in Old Shoreham Cemetery in England.

Another of the men detailed in the book is Lieutenant Alfred Belliveau of Fredericton. He began his pilot training in Shoreham, England, on a Maurice Farman two-seater plane. His journal notes on the plane are documented in the book, writing that they were “stable and easy to fly.” Belliveau then attended the top fighter pilot school in Turnberry, Scotland, where he practiced aerobatic flying, the book says.

“We also did a lot of hand-to-hand dogfighting, but using cameras instead of machine guns, the cameras being synchronized with the propeller blades like the machine guns were, to allow us to take photos of our adversary, through the spinning propellers, in the same way as a real fight with machine guns,” says an entry from the pilot, as recorded in the book.

Wilson said New Brunswickers were a minority among the airmen, but they made a considerable contribution.

“We had never had airplanes in wars before, so they were pioneers in this new form of warfare, and it had made very great progress. … By the end of the war, from one point from a technological point of view, aircraft and The role of air forces has progressed very significantly.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published November 9, 2024.

Hina Alam, The Canadian Press