Controversial VC Award

William Avery Bishop VC

I have posted articles on this page about all the airmen recipients of the Victoria Cross in the Great War, on the appropriate centennial anniversary – that of the action concerned or of their death. 2nd June 2017 will be the 100th anniversary of the incident which led to the award to Canadian William Avery “Billy” Bishop. Sadly, this award is more controversial than almost any other VC award. So what do I say this time? It was very tempting to say nothing at all! There are people on this page with considerably more inside knowledge than I have, so some of the following is likely to be corrected.

From the start of my interest in the Great War aces as a boy, I understood that Billy Bishop was the highest-scoring British Empire ace of the war, with 72 victories (some accounts gave Mannock a score of one more), and that he was awarded his VC for a daring low-level solo attack on a German airfield early in the morning of 2nd June 1917. When the internet came along and greatly broadened my knowledge, I was saddened to find all this called into question.

The score of any fighter pilot can never be reckoned exactly, as there will always be debate about which of their victims actually crashed or merely went down, who fired the fatal shot, etc. If a shoot-down was witnessed from the air or the ground, and then the claim can be tied to a particular wreck, or at least to a loss documented by the enemy, then we can be more certain. Thus, Mannock and McCudden have been described by Shores and Guest as having scores of “above average verifiability”. Similarly, for a Victoria Cross to be awarded, official policy is that the action should be witnessed by at least two other officers.

When serious research into WW1 combat started in the 1950s, it was found that few if any of Bishop's victories could be verified in this way. His victory claims rarely if ever correlated to a documented German loss. It is true that the Germans did not record a loss if only the aircraft was written off and the pilot was uninjured, and this may be an explanation for a few of Bishop's claims, but not for those that he said went down in flames or breaking up. What is more, the correct procedures for the verifying the Victoria Cross award were not followed; no-one witnessed the action, and the surviving records of German aviation units in the area said nothing about a raid on their airfield by a lone Nieuport on that date.

So what is the truth? Was he a complete fraud, or someone unlucky with witnesses who is now vilified unjustly, or somewhere in between? Is it still possible to make a case supportive of Bishop? The balanced view of some researchers is that somewhere between twelve and twenty-seven of his claims have some degree of plausibility. Bishop was highly-regarded by many of his contemporaries, and it is difficult to see how he could have gained such a reputation without some basis in fact. Elliot White Springs flew under his command in 85 squadron and seems to have hero-worshipped him. In his book “War Birds”, he glosses over Bishop's bizarre claim on his last day at the Front to have shot down five Pfalzes in one action, unwitnessed, but even writing ten years later he apparently did not feel the need to question Bishop's reputation to any serious degree. Bishop's most serious contemporary critic was William Fry, who flew with Bishop in his early days with 40 squadron and felt under pressure to verify Bishop's claims after an action, when he was not sure that this was justified. Willie Fry died in 1993 aged 97, and left a very critical account of Bishop to be opened after his death. Among other things he alleged that the bullet holes found in Bishop's Nieuport on his return from the raid had powder burns around them, implying that Bishop had faked them by landing and firing his own gun from very close range.

It has been suggested that the German Unit that he attacked was an operational training unit in transit between two airfields. There is a suggestion that a balloon observer saw aerial activity from a distance of several miles that could have been Bishop's action. A more definite point is that Bishop had not planned to make his raid alone: he woke Willie Fry before dawn, but Fry had a massive hangover and told him to get lost. This implies that he did not set out with the intention of totally fabricating his report. Could it be that he only wanted to impress his mates and the whole thing escalated? There is no evidence that he set out to be awarded a VC. His combat report is actually quite laconic and unembellished. It was his squadron Commanding Officer, Alan Scott, who for whatever reason attempted to by-pass the official channels for VC awards. He packed Bishop into his car and took him on a tour of staff HQ at Brigade and Army level to lobby for the VC award. Possibly the RFC and maybe the War Office felt that a living VC would be good for morale, complementing the recent posthumous award to Albert Ball.

So it could be that we have a rather tragic story of an insecure young man finding that a little lie begets a big lie; having the burden of fame thrust upon him, and being politically way out of his depth. He may then have felt that he had a reputation to live up to for the rest of the war, hence an increasingly desperate attempt to raise his victory score. The rest of his life was an anti-climax of failed businesses and heavy drinking. During WW2 he was the figurehead for the recruiting drive of the Royal Canadian Air Force and was promoted to Air Marshal, which rank he would probably not have achieved if he had been in the RAF rather than RCAF. He died in 1956 aged only 62, probably as a result of his drinking, which may well have been an attempt to cope with living a lie, if that is indeed what it was.

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