World-famous in the Collett family

In the lead-up to Anzac Day, Nelson Mail journalists are sharing their family war stories. Today, Geoff Collett writes about a World War I flying ace.
My great, great uncle Clive killed Germans in the war. He lined them up in his sights and shot them, mostly using a couple of Vickers machineguns attached to his Sopwith Camel biplane, high above the hellholes of the European battlefields of the Great War.
Sometimes, they nearly killed him. A couple of times he nearly killed himself. And once – that's all it takes, of course – he did, accidentally but inexplicably.
I've never been one for family history and always been ambivalent about war stories. I was vaguely aware of the various feats which had made Captain Clive Collett world-famous in the Collett family, but when I started reading through my father's Clive Collett file, I have to say awe was the over-riding feeling. His was a war fought at the very edges of technology and risk.
He was a flying ace, downing 12 German aircraft in combat within the space of about six weeks – three of them in one 45-minute burst. He had the dash, the daring and the big balls that made the fly boys of that war the stuff of so much legend.
His story is filled with scrapes and near things, various accounts of his flimsy biplane coming to one form of grief or another – perhaps shredded and crippled by Hun shells, or blowing a valve after he overdid an attacking dive on enemy aircraft, usually forcing him to nurse it back to safety and an emergency landing.
One of his combat reports tells of how he and his foe were so close that they nearly collided as he emptied his Vickers into its fuselage. Another recounts following a stricken German plane until it landed; Clive finished it off with a long burst until it exploded into flames. Then he fled home with a badly injured hand, keeping to 30 feet above the trees of Houtholst Forest to prevent the other pursuing Germans getting a fix on him with their guns.
Sometimes he didn't quite make it. He smashed his face up badly in one crash, removing him from combat duties for most of a year. Instead, he did experimental stuff including becoming the first man under British command to jump from a plane with a parachute.
The story of that tells how he drolly noted the presence of ambulance and fire tender on the airfield below just before he jumped, pointing out what a fat lot of use they would be if things didn't work out.
He got a medal – the Military Cross, and then its Bar. His citation talked of gallantry, devotion and dash, and his habit of single-handedly taking on large formations of enemy aircraft.
In a weird way it seems almost inevitable that he died pointlessly, miles from the nearest enemy gun.
He was flying a captured German Albatros off the coast of Scotland a few days before Christmas 1917 when for no known reason the plane crashed into the water.
Some speculate a part broke lose and hit him, knocking him out or worse. He was 31.
He left, apparently, a young widow (although the record is contradictory as to whether they had ever married) and a baby daughter.
I've never known anything of his offspring. We're a big and widely-scattered family. My great uncle, also a Clive, accumulated plenty of material on him, however, and made sure the legend lived on in our branch of the family tree.
Clive Franklyn Collett's grave is somewhere in Edinburgh; a memorial plaque stood for some time in his hometown of Tauranga. He has a section devoted to him in the website on Collett genealogy.
Someone has given him a Wikipedia page. My brother, also a military man, advises that the RNZAF museum holds material on him. I read somewhere that Peter Jackson, the film-maker, modelled his replica Sopwith Camel on Clive's.
Such are the ways we remember our war dead.