BOXART STORY
#8485
Sudden attack
Another day in the trenches, another day
among barbed wire, where death lurks
around every corner. Suddenly, the guns fall
silent, the rain stops, and the timid trills of
birds can be heard from no-man’s land. It is
as if, for a brief moment, the horrors of war
subsided. The sun, nearing sunset, breaks
through the smoke screen left by the artillery shells explosions to the soaked and exhausted men in the trenches. They turn their
faces to it, absorb its energy and thank God
that they have survived another day in hell.
But then two shadows flash past over the
trenches. The calmness is broken by the roar
of engines, the staccato of machine guns and
several explosions around and inside the
trenches. After a while the screams of angry German soldiers firing their small arms
at the retreating invaders are replaced by the
cries of the wounded...
All of this could be found in the scene captured by Adam Tooby in his boxart for the latest edition of the Sopwith Camel B.R.1 engine
version kit. The brightly colored aircraft in the
foreground is the Camel of Walter George
Raymond Hinchliffe, whom his fellow pilots
called simply “Hinch”. He shot down six enemy machines during the war and this Camel
serial number B7190 served him to achieve
his second and third victories. He also flown
at least two bombing missions with it according to the records.
Hinchliffe was a native of Munich, where he
was born to British parents in 1893. The family returned home later, allowing young
Walter to be educated at the University of
Liverpool. There he joined the Officer Trai-
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INFO Eduard
ning Corps program, but first of all he studied medicine. More to it he also spoke four
languages, was an avid reader, a talented
artist, a good sportsman and proved himself
to be also a skilled mechanic. A renaissance
man, one might say, but nevertheless he joined the army on March 20, 1912, with the rank
of second lieutenant. He became a member
of the logistical British Army Service Corps
and shortly after his promotion to lieutenant
the move to the artillery followed. There he
served until 1916 when the path of his career took a different direction. He underwent
pilot training, obtained his pilot’s license
No. 3595 and served as an instructor at
Cranwell with the rank of Second Lieutenant
of the Royal Navy until the nd of 1917. Then,
he finally joined a combat unit, No. 10 Squadron RNAS. It was in January 1918 and as
early as February 3 he scored his first victory when he shot down a German Albatros
D.V near Rumbeke, Belgium. After this first
success he flew the Camel B7190 for a time
and shot down two observation aircraft. The
first on March 10 near Roulers and the second
on April 3 in the same area. By this time the
unit had already been redesignated No. 210
Squadron RAF following the merger of the
RNAS and RFC which took place on April 1,
1918. Hinch’s Camel was quite a colorful aircraft with blue and white stripes on the nose,
which was the marking of the “C” Flight, and
a blue fuselage top. The wheel discs were
also blue, with a drawing of the devil on them.
Behind the cockpit on the sides was the inscription DONNERWETTER (Hinch was fluent
in German) and on the fuselage ridge there
Text: Richard Plos
Illustration: Adam Tooby
was a symbol that appeared to represent
a stylized combination of the letters W and H.
Hinch scored three more kills in May, becoming an ace, however, on the night of June
23, he was seriously injured in a crash that
was not fully cleared up. According to some
sources, it occurred while he was trying
to return a Camel from an emergency landing site at night, but he himself spoke of
a night fight with Gothas in which he was hit
in the forehead and subsequently crashed.
He suffered multiple head injuries and lost
his left eye. This ended his fighting career, but
not his flying one. After the war, he took up
a career as a commercial pilot. He flew mainly for KLM and Imperial Airways and pioneered many new flight routes. Then, in 1927, he
received an offer from Elsie Mackay, daughter of the Earl of Inchcape, who wanted
to become the first woman to fly across the
Atlantic. She bought a Stinson Detroiter,
which she named Endeavour, and offered
Hinchliffe a staggering £10,000 fee for taking part in the flight as a pilot. On March 13,
1928, at 08.35, Endeavour took off from RAF
Cranwell. Five hours later, the Hizen Head
lighthouse at the southernmost tip of Ireland reported the overfly of a monoplane
heading over the ocean. A little later, a French
steamer announced its position at sea. The
daring pair planned to land at Mitchel Field
on Long Island, USA, where five thousand
people were waiting for them. But they never
landed. Eight months later, a piece of landing
gear, identified as part of the Endeavour, was
washed up in northwest Ireland...
August 2022