Airco DH.2B Home Defence 1917

[RAFF-35]

RFC Squadron Leader George Dummet returned to England after a long and punishing tour on the Western Front. He had made his name in the frail little Airco DH.2, scoring four victories against the Fokkers in the grim days of the "Fokker Scourge." To him, the machine was more than just an aircraft—it was a trusted partner. When posted to a home defence squadron to counter the Zeppelin menace, Dummet insisted his new command be equipped with the familiar "pusher" scouts. The DH.2, now considered obsolete over France, was easy enough to acquire for service on the quieter home front.
But Dummet soon realised that the Zeppelin campaign was a different kind of war. Reports showed the DH.2 took a punishing twenty-four minutes to claw its way to 10,000 feet—too slow to reliably intercept an airship already cruising high over England. Determined to give his men a fighting chance, Dummet pushed for improvements. Mechanics fitted the aircraft with the uprated Gnôme Monosoupape 9N rotary, boosting top speed from 91 to 118 mph and cutting the climb to 10,000 feet down to sixteen minutes, twelve seconds.
The modifications did not stop there. Knowing that a Zeppelin's hydrogen-filled cells required fire to bring them down, Dummet ordered his aircraft armed with twin .303 Lewis guns, loaded with incendiary ammunition. Extra fuel tanks mounted ontop of the upper wing extended endurance to three and a half hours, critical for long night patrols over the English coast. Standard night-fighter equipment followed: Holt flares to aid landing, and primitive landing lamps. The once outdated "pusher" scout had been reborn as a formidable night-hunter, capable not only of bringing down airships but also of challenging the new terror of Gotha bombers.
The transformation did not go unnoticed. Dummet's squadron embraced the "new" DH.2s, and soon neighbouring units were clamouring for the same conversions. The word reached Airco itself, who formalised the design under the title DH.2b. These official conversions refined the concept further, adding a four-bladed propeller and cockpit lighting. With these improvements, the venerable little fighter, once written off as obsolete, found a second life not only as a night interceptor but also once again as a daylight fighter and ground-attack aircraft.

[RAFF-35]

Diary of Squadron Leader George Dummet

39 Home Defence Squadron, Hounslow, 1917.

When I was ordered home after my tour on the Western Front, I thought my fighting days were behind me. They gave me command of a home defence squadron—our task, to keep the Zeppelins from setting our cities alight. I had made my name in the DH.2, scoring four victories in that odd little pusher so far, and I trusted her quirks more than any other machine. So I requested my new squadron be equipped with DH.2s. The powers agreed readily enough; the type was being retired in France, and spares and airframes were plentiful.
It was only after our first few scrambles that I realised the problem. The DH.2 was too slow to meet the Zeppelins where they were already cruising at altitude. Twenty-four minutes to reach 10,000 feet! By the time we were in position, the raiders were well on their way inland, their bombs already falling. I could not sit idle and let London burn!
We began to experiment. My mechanics fitted the new Gnôme Monosoupape 9N engine. What a difference it made! She now reached 118 miles an hour, and the climb to 10,000 feet dropped to just over sixteen minutes. Still a labour, but at last within striking distance of the airships. I had the armament doubled to two Lewis guns and insisted we load them with incendiary rounds; nothing else would bring down a hydrogen bag. I pressed for a second fuel tank as well, giving us three and a half hours aloft. Enough to range far and wide to sniff the Hun out in the dark skies.
Flying at night was another matter. We needed Holt flares and landing lamps simply to find the field again. It was dicing work, groping through cloud and fog, but with these additions the DH.2 became something a bit more than the flimsy scout I had known over the trenches. She was now a true night fighter, capable even of challenging the new menace, the Gotha bombers.
My chaps loved the conversions. After our first success, they swore by the modified machines, and soon neighbouring squadrons were asking if their aircraft could be altered the same way. Word reached Airco, and before long the DH.2b was made official. They even improved on our efforts, fitting a four-bladed propeller and giving us cockpit lights.
I never expected the little DH.2, once written off as obsolete, to win back its place. But for a time it did. She carried us once more into the fight, this time over the dark skies of England, where the enemy came not from trenches, but from the stars above.


39 (Home Defence) Squadron, Hounslow
17th September, 1917
The telephone rang just after midnight. Another Zeppelin reported crossing the coast. At Hounslow the field was already alive, the mechanics rolling my DH.2b into position. Fresh Holt flares fitted, fuel tanks topped up, drums of incendiary ammunition fitted to the flanks of my machine. I strapped in with a heaviness in my chest, knowing well how unforgiving these hunts could be.
The Gnôme choked to life and I lifted into the night. The climb was long and cold, sixteen minutes to ten thousand feet, my breath freezing on my goggles. For an hour I strained to search the gloom, engine droning steadily in the dark, until at last I saw it. A massive black silhouette gliding silently over the Thames valley, blotting out the stars.
I turned wide to gain height, then dived in from above. As my tracers ripped into her back, the Zeppelin came alive. Gun flashes winked along her flanks, gunners firing wildly into the night sky. I felt the snap of bullets whipping past, the shudder of rounds striking my struts. For a moment I thought the DH.2 would come apart around me. I pulled away, changed drum, and attacked from underneath.
The airship was trying to escape, nose pitching upward, engines roaring, dragging her bulk higher into the night. But the little DH.2b managed to stay with her. I began raking lengthwise across the leviathan's belly. Another storm of tracer fire came down from her turrets, one shot punching through my port wing, another splintering the cockpit coaming. I pressed on until the Lewis jammed hot in my hands, then cleared it and loosed another burst.
At first, nothing. Then, a faint orange glow where my rounds had struck. It spread swiftly, racing along her gas cells. The whole airship flared, a torch in the sky. She tried to climb still higher, but her frame sagged under the flames, and within seconds she was falling—a cathedral in fire, breaking apart as it tumbled. I watched her men leaping from the inferno, tiny figures swallowed in the blaze. The Thames below mirrored the destruction, a river of burning light.
When I landed at Hounslow the men cheered, but I could not. The image was burned into me. The fire, the falling bodies. Still, the Wing Commander told me later the confirmation had come through: the Zeppelin was LZ 93, destroyed over our soil. One less monster to terrorise London.
They called me a hero that night. I told myself only that I had done my duty.


14th March, 1918.
My days of chasing giants in the night sky are finished. The Zeppelin menace has waned, and the Gothas, too, are met now by faster machines than my dear DH.2b. Command has seen fit to send me back to France, where the war is grinding ever harder.
It feels strange to leave England after these months of darkness and fire. Strange, too, to leave behind the men I trained and led. We built something together in those lonely night watches, circling above silent fields, waiting for the droning of engines. We took the old pusher scout, cast off and forgotten, and turned her into a weapon again. Two Zeppelins and two Gothas fell to my guns, bringing my total so far in this dratted war to eight kills. That makes me an ace, they say, but the word feels hollow. An "ace" is a man counted by his victories, but what of the faces of those I could not save below? The fires in the streets of London still burn in my dreams.
Now they want me back over the trenches, back into the frying-pan I thought I had escaped. Yet I will not leave the DH.2b behind. She has been refitted once more, this time for ground attack. The extra fuel tanks are gone. Replaced with armour plate beneath the cockpit tub, and instead of Holt flares, racks for bombs hang beneath her wings. My Lewis guns remain, hungry for their work. She is slower than the new scouts, vulnerable to every Fokker and Albatros, but the generals believe she has a role to play, strafing trenches and columns, harassing the enemy's rear.
I confess to a heavy heart. Night fighting was a lonely business, yes, but it was a duel between hunter and hunted in the high, silent dark. I imagine this new task is different from the norm. Diving into mud and wire, scattering men like ants, and hoping to climb away before the archie or machine-guns find you. It can't have any romance in it. Only slaughter, on both sides.
Still, I cannot refuse. The machine and I have come this far together, and perhaps she has one more fight left to give. If I must battle again over France, I would rather see combat in the cockpit I know best, with the sound of the Gnôme engine roaring at my back.
So tomorrow I leave for the front once more. I pray I do not leave my life there.


France, 6th April 1918.
Back in France at last, and already I wonder whether I was a fool to come. The war here is nothing like the war I left. The Bosch are pushing hard with their Spring Offensive; the lines seem fluid, broken, and the air is alive with enemy scouts. The sky is no longer ours.
They have given my flight a new task: low-level attacks, harassing the enemy's infantry and guns. The DH.2b is ill-suited, some say, but I know her strengths. She is steady in a dive, her wide tail-boom giving me control even at speed, and she will take punishment if handled gently. We are fitted with small bombs now—twenty-pounders, hardly more than hand grenades with fins. We drop them on columns, on gun batteries, on trains, on any movement we can find behind the lines. Afterwards we rake the survivors with Lewis fire until every single .303 round is spent.
Yesterday I made my first such patrol. We flew low, barely 500 feet above the shell-torn earth. The smell of powder and carrion rose even into the cockpit. I found a column of grey-clad infantry moving along a sunken road. I loosed my bombs, saw the explosions scatter them, then pressed the triggers. The tracers danced across the ditch, cutting men down like wheat. For a moment I felt the old thrill—then the archie burst behind me and bullets clattered on the struts. I shoved the stick forward, hugging the earth, and somehow clawed my way back across our own lines. My hands were shaking so violently on landing that I could not unbuckle my straps.
The second patrol was worse. We attacked a battery of field guns hidden in an orchard. My bombs fell true, but the enemy had machine-guns sited to guard them. Three of my lads went down, one in flames, another breaking apart in the branches. I made it home with holes in my wings and blood on my goggles—not mine, but from my wingman, Gerald in the next machine, who was hit beside me before spiralling into the dirt. Too low to do anything to escape his fate.
I have fought Zeppelins in the night sky, seen giants burn like falling suns, but nothing has unsettled me like this. To see men scatter in panic, to watch the earth erupt beneath them, and to know I was the hand that brought it. Each day feels less like war and more like butchery.
Still, we are told we are needed here more than ever. The enemy presses hard, and our work slows them. That must be enough. The little DH.2b and I will carry on until she breaks, or until I do.

[Wardukw]

Great build Raff mate   ,,for a small moment before common sense head butted me into the RW i was looking at getting a 32nd scale model of that bird ,the Wingnuts Wings model of it ,
When i get back from dinner i'm gonna read all that   

[PR19_Kit]

A cracking model, and a BRILLIANT back story!

I love it that the latter's written in the first person and it reads just as if it was written in the 1910s too! Superb job. 

[zenrat]

 

[NARSES2]

Cracking build and an even better backstory 

[NARSES2]

Great build Raff mate   ,,for a small moment before common sense head butted me into the RW i was looking at getting a 32nd scale model of that bird ,the Wingnuts Wings model of it ,
When i get back from dinner i'm gonna read all that   

Average price here in the UK is £250. Wingnut wings kits are now treated as collectors items since they went out of business    Almost semi-religious icons. I've a couple in the stash, not the DH-2, and am sometimes tempted to sell, but there again I may make them one day 

[Old Wombat]

 

[RAFF-35]

Great build Raff mate   ,,for a small moment before common sense head butted me into the RW i was looking at getting a 32nd scale model of that bird ,the Wingnuts Wings model of it ,
When i get back from dinner i'm gonna read all that   

Thanking you very much! Jeez! I didn't realise Wingnut were that expensive!
Maybe 1:48 would be a more suitable scale for you instead?   
I hope you enjoy the read 

[RAFF-35]

A cracking model, and a BRILLIANT back story!

I love it that the latter's written in the first person and it reads just as if it was written in the 1910s too! Superb job. 

That means  a lot, thanks Kit! I'm glad you found the writing style authentic   

[Rheged]

That is a backstory I would be proud to have written!!  Superb, well done!

[Rick Lowe]

A cracking model, and a BRILLIANT back story!

I love it that the latter's written in the first person and it reads just as if it was written in the 1910s too! Superb job. 

Agree 100%. 

[RAFF-35]

That is a backstory I would be proud to have written!!  Superb, well done!

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the read 

[zenrat]

I was always tempted by the Wingnut Brisfit.  No chance i'll ever get one now.

The 1/72 Roden will have to do. 

[PR19_Kit]

I was always tempted by the Wingnut Brisfit.  No chance i'll ever get one now.

The 1/72 Roden will have to do. 

Somewhere in The Loft I still have a Renwall Aeroskin F2B. Goodness knows why as I only ever built one rigged model in my life. But the finish on those Aeroskin kits was so amazing I just had to get it. And it's quite a large model too