Raymond Collishaw. Canada
Collishaw was a seaman from British Columbia, serving as a first officer and naturally applied to join the Royal Navy, in 1914 the world’s premier sea service. When he was not accepted he applied to the Royal Naval Air Service. Like the German Ernst Udet, he paid for his own flight training in order to enhance his credentials for his application. By January 1916 he was a pilot and he spent most of that year in defense patrols of the English coastline. In August he went to France to join the RNAS 3rd Wing. The Wing flew Sopwith Strutters both as bombers and configured as fighter aircraft. The fighters would often escort the bombers to their targets, a precursor for much larger bombing raids later in the century.
Collishaw usually flew in a fighter configuration, and he scored his first victory in October. His next two were witnessed by thousands of French troops, and earned him the Croix de Guerre. Almost immediately a rivalry developed between the Naval flyers and the members of the Royal Flying Corps, who used their superior access to the press to divert attention to themselves rather than on the sailors. The RNAS rapidly developed a healthy respect from their German opponents and were quite possibly better known for their exploits in Germany than in England.
The German Fokker Triplane made famous by Richthofen wasn’t the only three winged aircraft of World War One. Sopwith built one too, and the RNAS deployed it in France with the flight now commanded by Collishaw painting their aircraft all-black. They were also all manned by Canadian pilots. In their first two months of action Collishaw’s Black Flight destroyed more than eighty German opponents.
By January 1918 Collishaw was in command of the RNAS Number 3 Squadron, equipped with the iconic Sopwith Camel. In April of that year the RNAS was merged into the Royal Flying Corps and Collishaw found himself with the rank of major in the RFC. He later went to England to oversee the formation of the Royal Canadian Air Force and was there when the armistice ended the fighting on November 11, 1918. During the war he had scored 60 victories and had been awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC).
Collishaw remained in the RFC and later the Royal Air Force (RAF) following the war, served in Russia during the Russian Civil War, and later in Abyssinia. He was in North Africa when the Second World War erupted and directed operations against the Italians, where he initiated a program of subterfuge to convince the Italians that he had more aircraft than he actually had available. He died in 1976. Some historians support evidence that he actually had more than eighty kills during World War I, which would make him the leading ace of the war.