Robertson's War 1914-A Jack Robertson Novel

By Gary R Reed

"Little Jack" Robertson, has accepted a posting as a flight instructor at the famous Glenn Curtiss, inventor of the Curtiss "Jenny", aerodrome, On his arrival in Canada he has fallen under the spell of local beauty Susan Leavitt. "Robertson's War" is a story of love and hate, life and death, adventure and misadventure in the turbulent years of the 1st World War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary R Reed
• Release date: Aug 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476315751

Gary R Reed

Gary R Reed resides in Lansing Michigan with his lovely wife Sandy. His six children and 18 grandchildren are scattered to the four winds. He is a former banker, broker, CFO, entrepreneur, educator, and with the publication of his novels, he has become a storyteller and a wild eyed dreamer.Gary is a professional student with degrees in philosophy, psychology, and education. His passion is American history and that has led him to write fictionalized accounts of his real-life ancestors who have fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, the American Indian Wars, World War I, and (perhaps soon) World War III.Gary is a past "Chief Inspector" of the Sherlock Holmes Society "The Greek Interpreters of East Lansing" and an active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, having received honors as a Bard and a Thrown Weapons Champion.Gary is the author of the three part "Journals of Jack Robertson" series,"Robertson's War 1914", "The Academy", "Sanctuary", "The Truth about Santa Claus", "Kirtland 1833" and "If I Ruled the World" that will soon appear in a Smashwords Edition.

Book preview

ROBERTSON’S WAR

1914

a Jack Robertson novel

by Gary R. Reed

Copyright 2012 Gary R. Reed

Smashwords Edition

This book is based on some true events, however, has been fictionalized and all persons appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter One................Flyboy

Chapter Two................The Great War

Chapter Three..............Alberta

Chapter Four................Miss Susan Leavitt

Chapter Five................The Test

Chapter Six..................The Seventh Test

Chapter Seven.............The Last Tests

Chapter Eight...............The Squadron

Chapter Nine................Scouts

Chapter Ten.................Home is the Hero

Chapter Eleven............The Great Race

Chapter Twelve............All is Well, All is Well

A Brief History of the Latter-day Saint Settlement of Alberta Canada

About the Author

Excerpt from The Journals of Jack Robertson-1865 Book One

Excerpt from Sanctuary-a Jack Robertson novel

Author's Note

Jack has been asked to tell his story so often, that it seemed to me that I ought to put it in writing. People sometimes refer to him as a hero, but there are no heroes, there are just ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances.

In order to tell the story, Jack has borrowed liberally from other sources. To those other authors, I offer my apologies for not crediting their work

Along with his narrative I have included pages from his journals and copies of selected letters that help to tell the story. I realize that there are gaps and long stretches of time that are covered with just a sentence or two, that's not to say that they were insignificant, just not important to this particular story.

Even though the title of this book is Robertson’s War the story is about Robertson's Love and the war is not the object but rather an obstacle that stood in the way of his courtship of Miss Susan Leavitt, the love of his life.

***

Chapter One

Flyboy

My father owned the first airplane in the state of Wyoming. Because of that, I've been around flying machines most of my adult life. Our airplane was a real godsend for us, in our secluded valley; we were too far away from many of the people and things we cared about.

My grandfather was the very same Jack Robertson that settled Paradise Valley back in ‘67 and he built the town of Robertson, Wyoming too. He had six wives, back in the day when a man could do such things. Some of them lived in the Valley and some of them lived in town. Having six wives is wearing enough on a man, but the constant travel back and forth made it even harder. When my grandfather saw his first airplane at the Salt Lake City air show in 1910, he was hooked.

The famous French daredevil pilot Louis Paulhan was the star of the show and his enthusiasm was contagious. Grandpa Jack could just imagine his day long tiresome journey to town each week changed into a thrilling hour of flying. Paulhan’s flyer was so fragile looking that you needed to be a daredevil to take it off the ground. If Grandpa Jack was going to spend the kind of money that they were asking for an aeroplane it would have to be more reliable than that.

Glenn Curtiss was the American master of aviation and holder of most of the world's air records. It was with Curtiss that my father struck up a correspondence and that led to the purchase of a Curtiss engine and a detailed builder’s drawing of what would become the Robertson Special an early prototype of the Curtiss JN -- the Jenny that was to be the most famous American biplane of all time.

A Jenny is a biplane. Bi means two. So a Jenny has two wings, set one on top of the other. The top of the wings are curved and the bottoms are flat. That means there is more surface on the top than on the bottom. Air passing over the top of the wing takes longer than air passing under the wing. This difference produces lift. Lift is what makes an airplane fly. With two wings a Jenny gets lots of lift. It needs it. The engine is so small that the propeller hardly pulls the airplane through the air fast enough to make enough lift to get it off the ground. Once it's off the ground, it is constantly trying to fall down which makes lots of lift and keeps it in the air. If the engine were to quit, gravity would beat lift and the airplane would fall. Depending on the pilot, a fall could be a good thing or a bad thing. We call it a landing. Glenn Curtiss used to say, There is a difference between a good landing and a great landing. A good landing you can walk away from, but a great landing means you can use the airplane again.

Two years before the Kaiser’s war, and four years before the first planes were delivered to the US aviation service, I was rounding up cattle in the Wyoming valleys in a Curtiss Jenny.

Little Jack, I was little Jack, even though I was 6 foot tall. My father was just plain Jack and my grandfather was Grandpa Jack. We need to know everything there is to know about flying. If we are going to fly this airplane and be safe; we need to know what we're doing.

So began my study of aviation. What a wondrous thing it is for men to be able to fly. Man has dreamed of flying since the dawn of time. To not have roads to follow or obstacles in our way seems almost heavenly. It's no wonder that people picture angels with wings; in fact an early Greek legend tells the story of Daedalus an engineer who was imprisoned by King Minos. With his son, Icarus, he made wings of feathers and wax. Daedalus flew successfully from Crete to Naples, but Icarus, tired to fly too high and flew too near to the sun. The wings of wax melted and Icarus fell to his death in the sea.

Another ancient Greek legend tells the story of Bellerophon, son of the King of Corinth, who captured Pegasus, a winged horse that carried him into battle against the three headed monster, Chimera.

King Kaj Kaoos of Persia attached eagles to his throne and flew around his kingdom.

Alexander the Great is said to have harnessed four mythical winged animals, called Griffins, to a basket to fly around his empire.

Around 400 BC, the discovery that kites could fly in the air, started humans thinking differently about flying. Kites were used by the Chinese in religious ceremonies. More sophisticated kites were used to test weather conditions. Kites were important to the invention of flight as they were the forerunners of balloons and gliders.

Leonardo da Vinci made the first real studies of flight in the 1480's. He had over 100 drawings that illustrated his theories on flight. The Ornithopter was a design that da Vinci created to show how man actually could fly.

Two brothers, Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, were the inventors of the first hot air balloon. They used the smoke from a fire to blow hot air into a silk bag. The silk bag was attached to a basket. The hot air allowed the balloon to be lighter-than-air.

In 1783, the first passengers in the colorful balloon were a sheep, a rooster and a duck. It climbed to a height of about 6,000 feet and traveled more than 1 mile. After this first success, the brothers began to send men up in balloons. The first manned flight was on November 21, 1783.

George Cayley worked to discover a way that man could fly. He designed different versions of gliders that used the movements of the body to control. Over 50 years he made improvements to the gliders. He changed the shape of the wings so that the air would flow over the wings correctly. He designed a tail for the gliders to help with the stability. He tried a biplane design to add strength to the glider. He recognized that there needed to be power if a flight was to be in the air for a long time. Cayley wrote On Ariel Navigation which shows that a fixed-wing aircraft with a power system for propulsion and a tail to assist in the control of the airplane would be the best way for man to fly.

Samuel Langley was an astronomer who realized that power was needed for man to fly. He built a model of a plane, which he called an aerodrome, that included a steam-powered engine. In 1891, his model flew for 3/4s of a mile before running out of fuel. Langley received a $50,000 grant to build a full sized aerodrome. It proved to be too heavy and it crashed.

Octave Chanute published Progress in Flying Machines in 1894. It gathered and analyzed all the technical knowledge that he could find about aviation accomplishments. It included all of the world's aviation pioneers. The Wright Brothers used this book as a basis for much of their experiments. Chanute was also in contact with the Wright Brothers and often commented on their technical progress.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were very deliberate in their quest for flight. First, they spent many years learning about all the early developments of flight. They completed detailed research of what other early inventors had done. They read all the literature that was published up to that time. Then, they began to test the early theories with balloons and kites. They learned about how the wind would help with the flight and how it could affect the surfaces once up in the air.

The next step was to test the shapes of gliders much like George Cayley did when he was testing the many different shapes that would fly. They spent much time testing and learning about how and gliders could be controlled. They designed and used a wind tunnel to test the shapes of the wings and the tails of the gliders. After they found a glider shape that consistently would fly in the tests in the North Carolina Outer Banks dunes, then they turned their attention to how to create a propulsion system that would create the lift needed to fly. Their first motor was a 12 hp gasoline engine that turned a pusher propeller on the back of their machine.

The Flyer lifted from level ground to the north of Big Kill Devil Hill, at 10:35 a.m., on December 17, 1903. Orville piloted the plane which weighed six hundred and five pounds. The first heavier-than-air flight traveled one hundred twenty feet in twelve seconds. The two brothers took turns during the test flights. It was Orville's turn to test the plane, so he is the brother that is credited with the first flight.

Humankind was now able to fly! During the next decade, many new airplanes and engines were developed to help transport people, cargo, military personnel and weapons. All of these advances were based on this first flight at Kitty Hawk by the American Brothers from Ohio.

***

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Chapter Two

The Great War

My mother was born in England and two of my grandmothers were from the Old Country. So when war broke out in Europe, my family was emotionally involved. We followed the war news as best we could and prayed for our extended family in harm’s way.

Mother, what’s the matter?

It looks like it’s going to be war. My mother was holding a 3 day old newspaper that was reporting news 3 days older from Europe.

I'm sure that King George V wishes that Queen Victoria was still around so that she could just speak a word to Cousin Willie and put an end to all this foolishness. It's too bad she's not. Kaiser Wilhelm seems more interested in listening to Chancellor Bismarck than he is to his cousin, the King of England.

There’s a reason they call him the Iron Chancellor. I don’t think Benjamin Disraeli had that much of the Queen’s ear when he was Prime Minister. My mother was from England. Folkstone, in the County of Kent was her childhood home. If there was a war it would be her uncles, cousins, and friends that would be fighting and dying.

The Robertson’s were Highland Scots and as a rule we didn’t mind so much that the English were fighting and dying. We were generally glad to be rid of the Lowlanders, but my family knew that if there was a battle somewhere, it wouldn’t be long before the Scots would find a way to be in the thick of it.

Having been born a Jew, I don’t think Disraeli would have anybody’s ear, just now. He would be the wrong man to lead us into war.

Why Mother, do I hear some prejudice against Jews?

You certainly do not. I thank the Jews every time I open my scriptures. Both the Book of Mormon and the Bible were written by Jews. Unfortunately, there are not too many Englishmen that feel the same way. The Jews are much like the Mormons.

What do you mean? I asked.

We are both very misunderstood. We both want nothing more than to be able to live in peace and practice our faith according to the dictates of our own conscience.

Do you think King George V wants peace?

I'm sure he wants it more than anybody. England is ill prepared for war.

Why, mother?

The Empire is crumbling around his ears. They have been at war, somewhere in the world, as long as I can remember. In the last 100 years, since the end of Napoleon and the French, we've had the Crimean war with the Russians, the Opium wars with the Chinese, the Mutiny in India, the Boer war in South Africa, and had it not been for war with Germany it would have been the Irish Troubles.

What can we do about it, Mother?

We can pray for England, my darling. We can pray that God will protect them and we can pray that he will touch the heart of President Wilson, so that he will see that England must not be asked to stand alone to defend the freedoms of the whole world.

It wasn't enough for me. I couldn't bear the thought of doing nothing while people I cared about suffered. I had heard about the Lafayette Escadrille. An American millionaire was sponsoring an air wing to help the French and English fight the Germans. I was an experienced pilot and I figured I would be a natural fit for that outfit. I read everything that I could find about the war in the air.

"On the eve of the World War I, no country was prepared for using aircraft or admitted they would make an effective weapon of war. Several had experimented with dropping bombs from aircraft, firing guns, and taking off and landing from aircraft carriers, but no country had designed or built aircraft specifically for war. Limited bombing operations had been carried out before 1914, but most thought that aircraft use was limited to reconnaissance or scouting missions. An October 1910 editorial in Scientific American, a respected publication said: Outside of scouting duties, we are inclined to think that the field of usefulness of the aeroplane will be rather limited. Because of its small carrying capacity, and the necessity for its operating at great altitude, if it is to escape hostile fire, the amount of damage it will do by dropping explosives upon cities, forts, hostile camps, or bodies of troops in the field to say nothing of battleships at sea, will be so limited as to have no material effects on the issues of a campaign....

But some effort was made to use aircraft for military purposes. In April 1909, the Italian aviation club, Club Aviatori, brought Wilbur Wright to Italy to demonstrate his Military Flyer. Before leaving Rome, Wilbur trained the naval officer who would become Italy’s first pilot, Lieutenant Mario Calderara. In 1910, Italy set up its first military flying school at Centocelle.

During the next few years, Italy’s military use of aviation increased. At the start of the Turko-Italian War in 1911, Italy mobilized its Italian Aviation Battalion and aircraft under the command of Captain Carlo Piazza, a well-known racing pilot, and sent them by steamship to Tripoli in Libya, then part of the Ottoman Empire.