Great War>The War in the Air

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site you agree to accept cookies. If you enjoy this site please consider making a donation.     Site Home     Great War Home     Search     Add Stories & Photos     Library     Help & FAQs  Features     Allied Army     Day by Day     RFC & RAF     Prisoners of War     War at Sea     Training for War     The Battles     Those Who Served     Hospitals     Civilian Service     Women at War     The War Effort     Central Powers Army     Central Powers Navy     Imperial Air Service     Library     World War Two  Submissions     Add Stories & Photos     Time Capsule  Information     Help & FAQs     Glossary     Volunteering     News     Events     Contact us     Great War Books     About Advertisements World War 1 One ww1 wwII greatwar great 1914 1918 first battalion regiment

No 199 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps    No. 199 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps was a Night Bomber Training Squadron formed at RFC Rochford on 1st of June 1917. It was disbanded as 199 Squadron, Royal Air Force in June 1919 at RAF Harpswell. If you can provide any additional information, please add it here. Want to know more about No 199 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps? There are:0 items tagged No 199 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps available in our Library   These include information on officers, regimental histories, letters, diary entries, personal accounts and information about actions during the Great War. Those known to have served with No 199 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps during the Great War 1914-1918. Hopkins John Collier Frederick. F/O. All names on this list have been submitted by relatives, friends, neighbours and others who wish to remember them, if you have any names to add or any recollections or photos of those listed, please Add a Name to this List Records of No 199 Squadron, Royal Flying Corps from other sources. The Wartime Memories Project is the original WW1 and WW2 commemoration website. 1st of September 2024 marks 25 years since the launch of the Wartime Memories Project. Thanks to everyone who has supported us over this time. Want to find out more about your relative's service? Want to know what life was like during the Great War? Our Library contains many many diary entries, personal letters and other documents, most transcribed into plain text. Looking for help with Family History Research?    Please see Family History FAQ's Please note: We are unable to provide individual research. Can you help? The free to access section of The Wartime Memories Project website is run by volunteers and funded by donations from our visitors. If the information here has been helpful or you have enjoyed reaching the stories please conside making a donation, no matter how small, would be much appreciated, annually we need to raise enough funds to pay for our web hosting or this site will vanish from the web. If you enjoy this site please consider making a donation. Announcements 19th Nov 2024     Please note we currently have a massive backlog of submitted material, our volunteers are working through this as quickly as possible and all names, stories and photos will be added to the site. If you have already submitted a story to the site and your UID reference number is higher than 264989 your submission is still in the queue, please do not resubmit. Wanted: Digital copies of Group photographs, Scrapbooks, Autograph books, photo albums, newspaper clippings, letters, postcards and ephemera relating to the Great War. If you have any unwanted photographs, documents or items from the First or Second World War, please do not destroy them. The Wartime Memories Project will give them a good home and ensure that they are used for educational purposes. Please get in touch for the postal address, do not sent them to our PO Box as packages are not accepted. World War 1 One ww1 wwII greatwar great battalion regiment artillery Did you know? We also have a section on World War Two. and a Timecapsule to preserve stories from other conflicts for future generations. 225460 F/O. John Collier Frederick Hopkins 83 Sqdn. My father Jack Hopkins left school in 1916 and signed up with the Honourable Artillery Company on 30th October 1916 where he was placed in the reserve Battalion, his service number was 9287. In May 1917 Jack was commissioned into the Royal Flying Corps (RFC). His service number was 12073. The need for pilots was urgent and losses were high. Consequently training occurred hastily and involved gaining experience on different aircraft. His own record of events is almost a catalogue of the aircraft available then. He flew solo on a Maurice Farnham Shorthorn at Shoreham, trained on Avros and Sopwith Pups at Dover, obtaining his wings in July. At Wye he flew Sopwith Camels after which he served on Home Defence at Hornchurch on Sopwith 11/2 Strutters. At Dover his fighting instructor was James McCudden who became the most famous fighter pilot of the war earning the Victoria Cross in April 1918. Jack recalled that he was a brilliant pilot who enjoyed demonstrating the abilities of an aircraft by doing “hair-raising stunts round the aerodrome”. Sadly, McCudden was accidently killed over his aerodrome not long after he received his award. Ultimately Jack was to serve as a night fighter on FE2B aircraft. This machine looks strange today with its propeller behind the cockpit. A front section, the nacelle, was for the observer who usually operated the machine gun and released the bombs singly using very simple equipment although the pilot or observer often lifted a bomb over the side by hand and dropped it. The cockpit and nacelle had no cover, so the crew must have been extremely cold. Jack’s night flying training commenced with a posting to Marham in Norfolk in November 1917 followed by a posting to 83 Squadron at nearby Narborough then an overseas posting with the Squadron in March 1918 to Auchel in northern France. Most aircraft of the time could not fly long distances so could not attack from Britain. When making the change to night flying Jack was initially nervous as he tackled the business of taking off while dazzled by flares along the runway and so was unable at first to see the horizon. The latter was very important at night to enable the pilots’ sense of balance to be maintained because they relied on this to fly the machine properly. No sophisticated instruments were available to help them in those early days of flying. All they had of any real use were an air speed indicator and a rev indicator. It was also important to gain enough height before making turns because, if not correctly done, the aircraft could stall and, if too near the ground, recovery was not possible and a crash was inevitable. Landing an aircraft at night also required new skills, particularly having to judge the distance of the aircraft from the flare path in order to avoid reaching the runway too early or too late. Soon after arrival in Auchel the Squadron started bombing German structures such as aerodromes and railways. Reconnaissance was another valuable activity and photography was very important in this regard. Despite the unsophisticated cameras available at that time, RFC aerial photographs came to be regarded highly during the war. Jack discovered that much could also be learned from visual observation and remembered a mapping officer who flew out each night and made a mental picture of the ground. On returning he painted a map on large sheets of paper salvaged from the blue sugar bags they used at that time. Jack considered these maps to be surprisingly realistic and helpful in locating places they were ordered to attack. Jack’s active service in France occurred during the last German offensive in March 1918. By early May some Germans set up a base within site of the Auchel aerodrome and began to attack it with artillery fire. This led to evacuation to a safer location joining with 101 Squadron. In the ensuing confusion little attention was paid to updating the men from Auchel regarding differing procedures. Unfortunately for Jack this led to his making an error during takeoff on his first mission at the new base and, with a full load of bombs, could not gain height properly. The plane hit a haystack in an adjoining field and cartwheeled several times before coming to rest. None of the bombs exploded but Jack was severely injured and spent several months in hospital, by which time the war was over. However, once he recovered from his injuries he was posted to 199 Squadron, Harpswell where he was an instructor on FE2Bs until his discharge in May 1919. Much later, in September 1972, the Imperial War Museum made a sound recording of Jack’s recollections of his night flying experiences which can be accessed by visitors to the museum. Evadne Spickett Add to this record. Recomended Reading. Available at discounted prices.

Links Suggest a link

The free section of The Wartime Memories Project is run by volunteers. This website is paid for out of our own pockets, library subscriptions and from donations made by visitors. The popularity of the site means that it is far exceeding available resources and we currently have a huge backlog of submissions. If you are enjoying the site, please consider making a donation, however small to help with the costs of keeping the site running. Hosted by: The Wartime Memories Project Website is archived for preservation by the British Library Copyright MCMXCIX - MMXXIV - All Rights Reserved - We do not permit the use of any content from this website for the training of LLMs or for use in Generative AI, it also may not be scraped for the purpose of creating other websites.