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First to Fly
First to Fly Read online
Also by Charles Bracelen Flood
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Grant’s Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant’s
Heroic Last Year
The Story of the Lafayette Escadrille,
the American Heroes
Who Flew for France in World War I
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2015 by Charles Bracelen Flood
Jacket design by Marc Cohen/mjcdesign
Jacket photograph: Nieuport 28s of the 95th, 1918,
courtesy of the U.S. federal government
Author photograph by Jean-Claude Lemaire
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2365-7
eISBN 978-0-8021-9138-0
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew—
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
—High Flight by pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr.,
killed at age nineteen
“We Americans who had enjoyed the hospitality of France, and had learned to love the country and the people, simply had to fight. Our consciences demanded it.”
—An American volunteer pilot, about his
determination to fight for France
Dramatis Personae
JULES JAMES “JIMMY” BACH, aerodynamics expert from New Orleans who became one of the first Americans to join the French Foreign Legion
CLYDE BALSLEY, American fighter pilot from Texas
OSWALD BOELCKE, Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s mentor and tutor
ARISTIDE BRIAND, prime minister of France
EUGENE BULLARD, first black fighter pilot
VICTOR CHAPMAN, beloved fighter pilot from New York
“CHER AMI,” heroic messenger pigeon that saved the remnants of the “Lost Battalion”
ELLIOT COWDIN, polo player from Long Island who lobbied the French government for the creation of an American squadron
YVONNE DACREE, young Frenchwoman and Bert Hall’s love interest
EDMOND GENET, youngest Escadrille pilot; deserter from the United States Navy; brave, gifted, and in effect an American spy within the French Air Service
HERMANN GOERING, German ace, future number two Nazi and reichsmarschall in command of the Luftwaffe in World War Two
DR. EDMUND GROS, originally from San Francisco, prominent expatriate who helped raise funds to create the Lafayette Escadrille
JAMES NORMAN HALL, future author of Mutiny on the Bounty
WESTON “BERT” HALL, the Escadrille’s controversial man of mystery
MATA HARI, Dutch exotic dancer and German spy; executed by the French
MYRON T. HERRICK, American ambassador to France
RAOUL LUFBERY, Escadrille’s leading ace
KENNETH MARR, gifted pilot and adventurer from California
CHARLES NUNGESSER, most colorful of the great French aces, twice attached to fly with the Escadrille
EDWIN “NED” PARSONS, future ace and author of Escadrille memoirs, from Holyoke, Massachusetts
PAUL PAVELKA, adventurer and repeated volunteer who fought around the world
GENERAL JOHN J. PERSHING, commander of the American Expeditionary Force
NORMAN PRINCE, rich, bilingual, well-connected young pilot from Massachusetts, instrumental in creating the Escadrille
BARON MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN, “The Red Baron,” commander of the “Flying Circus” and the war’s leading ace, with eighty Allied planes shot down
EDDIE RICKENBACKER, leading ace of the United States Army pilots after America came into the war
KIFFIN AND PAUL ROCKWELL, brothers from North Carolina who enlisted in the French Foreign Legion before the Escadrille
BILL THAW, the Escadrille’s de facto American leader
GEORGES THENAULT, French commander of the Lafayette Escadrille
ERNST UDET, famous German ace
ALICE WEEKS, rich American who devoted herself to taking care of American military men in Paris, including Escadrille pilots
HAROLD WILLIS, ex-Harvard football player and valuable Escadrille pilot from Boston
WHISKEY AND SODA, Escadrille’s lion cub mascots
Chronology
The First World War,
Interspersed with Important
Lafayette Escadrille–Related Dates
1914
August 2. Germany invades France.
August 4. United Kingdom declares war on Germany.
**August 21. Paul and Kiffin Rockwell from North Carolina join the French Foreign Legion in Paris. Kiffin goes on to be an Escadrille pilot.
September 5. First Battle of the Marne begins.
October 19. Battle of Ypres begins.
1915
February 19. Dardanelles Campaign begins.
April 22. Second Battle of Ypres begins.
April 25. The Battle of Gallipoli begins.
**September 23. Pilot Jimmy Bach flies spy mission, is captured, and becomes the Germans’ first American prisoner of war.
**December 23. Pilots William Thaw, Norman Prince, and Eliot Cowdin arrive in Manhattan for a Christmas leave that proves to be a propaganda victory for the French cause.
February 21. Battle of Verdun begins.
**April 20. First members of the Escadrille Americaine (American Squadron) arrive at the airfield at Luxueil-les-Bains. They are commanded by Captain Georges Thenault of the French Army.
**May 18. Kiffin Rockwell becomes first volunteer American pilot to shoot down a German plane.
**May 20. Squadron leaves for Bar-le-Duc, to support the Battle of Verdun.
**June 18. Pilot Clyde Balsley is shot down and critically wounded. He will be in French hospitals for nineteen months.
**June 23. Pilot Victor Chapman is shot down and killed. Thus in one week the Escadrille suffers its first wounding and death.
July 2. Battle of the Somme begins.
**September 23. Kiffin Rockwell is killed in action.
**October 12. Squadron participates in historic Allied bombing raid on the arms factory at Oberndorf, Germany, which was sending ten thousand rifles a day to the Western Front. Some record this as the birth of strategic bombing. Pilot Norman Prince is mortally injured in a landing accident returning from the raid, and dies three days later.
**December 6. Squadron is officially renamed the Lafayette Escadrille.
**mid-December. Pilot Weston “Bert” Hall leaves the Escadrille to begin special missions in Romania and Russia.
1917
April 8. United States enters the war.
**April 16. Pilot Edmond Genet is killed in action.
June 26. First U.S. Army troops arrive in France.
July 31. Battle of Passchendaele begins.
**August 18. Pilot Harold Willis is shot down and captured. He will escape from a prison camp and reach Paris at the end of the war.
September 4. First U.S. Army troops are killed in action.
November 7. Bolsheviks seize power in Russia.
**November 11. Pilot Paul Pavelka is killed in freak horseback accident at Salonika.
December 17. New Russian government signs armistice with Germany and its allies.
1918
**February 18. Lafayette Escadrille is officially dissolved. Most of its pilots transfer to the United States Army Air Service.
March 21. Germany begins Spring Offensive.
**April 21. Germany’s Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, the war’s greatest ace, is shot down and killed.
May 18. First U.S. Army offensive—Battle of Cantigny.
**May 19. Escadrille ace pilot Raoul Lufbery is killed in action.
August 6. American troops begin Battle of Chateau-Thierry and the Aisne-Marne operation.
September 12. U.S. Army begins Meuse-Argonne offensive, including the Battle of St. Mihiel.
November 9. German Kaiser Wilhelm abdicates and flees to Holland.
November 11. First World War ends.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Two Deaths Trigger Thirty-sevenMillion More
One: By God I Know Mighty Well What I Would Do!
Two: How the New Thing Grew
Three: Aspects of the Great New Dimension
Four: What Manner of Men?
Five: Contrasts
Six: The Odds Are Never Good: Clyde Balsley
Seven: The Oddsmaker Is Impersonal:Victor Chapman
Eight: Women at War: Alice Weeks
Nine: More American Eagles Take to the Sky
Ten: There Was This Man Named Bert Hall
Eleven: New Commanders for a New Form of Combat
Twelve: Shadows of War in the “City of Light”
Thirteen: Things Are Different up There, and Then on the Ground
Fourteen: Bert Hall Takes Life by the Horns
Fifteen: Aces
Sixteen: A Bloody Report Card
Seventeen: Bert Hall as Thinker, Bartender, and Raconteur
Eighteen: Bad Things Happen to Good New Men
Nineteen: Convenient Emergencies
Twenty: Unique Volunteers
Twenty-one: The War Changes Men and Women, Some for Better, and Some for Worse
Twenty-two: Colorful Men Arrive on the Eastern Front
Twenty-three: A Letter from Home, to a Young Man with a Secret
Twenty-four: The United States Enters the War
Twenty-five: A Lion in the Air Passes the Torch, and the Escadrille Bids Its Own Lions Farewell
Twenty-six: Yvonne!
Twenty-seven: Good-Bye, Luf. And Thank You.
Twenty-eight: Different American Wings in French Skies
Twenty-nine: The End of a Long Four Years
Thirty: L’Envoi—Farewell
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Introduction
Two Deaths Trigger
Thirty-seven Million More
On Sunday, June 28, 1914, an inconspicuous nineteen-year-old Serbian terrorist named Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie, during their state visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.
Across the month of July, the assassination embroiled the chancelleries of Europe in an escalating series of misperceptions and miscalculations. Austria-Hungary asked Germany if it would support their desire to punish Serbia for the murders. The Germans promptly said they would, even if Russia backed the Serbians. When Moscow warned against invading Serbia, France was drawn into the rising hostilities by her treaty with Russia. Last came the British, who had a treaty with France. By August, thousands of men were dying on a dozen battlefields.
That militaristic belief had fostered a German expansionist policy that caused other European nations to form defensive alliances that the Germans denounced as “encirclement.” The Allied armies, rapidly mobilizing amid the diplomatic turmoil, were those of the British Empire, France, Italy, and Russia.
Germany invaded France on August 2, 1914, and declared war on France a day later. The Germans had already declared war on Russia on August 1, and declared war on Belgium on August 4. The swift German advances brought England and the British Empire, including the forces of Canada and Australia, into the war on August 4. By the end of August, Germany was engaged in an all-out, two-front war, fighting the French, Belgian, and British armies on the Western Front, and a large principally Russian force on the Eastern Front. Both sides believed that they would win the war by Christmas.
The United States remained neutral, and would not become officially involved for close to three years, but scores of American men and women soon made their way into European battle zones. Their motivations combined idealism and a thirst for adventure, and their stories were of courage and newly discovered skills.
Of all the personal experiences that occurred during the enormous four-year struggle that became known as the Great War, the most spectacular involved aerial warfare, with pilots on both sides using new weapons in a new dimension. Their duels in the sky evoked centuries-old images of knights on horseback engaging in tournaments.
At the war’s outset, Americans who wished to serve the French cause had to confront the American policy that, as citizens of a neutral nation, it was illegal for them to serve in a foreign army. The French also had their restrictions on foreign volunteers. Foreigners could become ambulance drivers, something considered to be a noncombatant occupation, or they could enlist in the French Foreign Legion, whose members took an oath of allegiance to the Legion, and not to France.
Fig 1. The Indian Head squadron insignia that was painted on the fuselages of all the Escadrille planes
When French military aviation eventually began to accept American pilots, those men initially flew as individuals with French squadrons, but in time an all-American squadron known as the Lafayette Escadrille—French for “squadron”—came into being. They wore French uniforms and were part of the French
Army, and the dramatic part they played brought them instant fame. Men on both sides who shot down five or more enemy planes were known as “aces,” and invariably received decorations for valor.
This book is the Escadrille’s story, an account of what one of its surviving American volunteer pilots later called “the startling success of that intrepid band.” It is not a history of the First World War, nor a comprehensive account of that war’s aerial battles. It is not a linear history that records events in the order they occurred. This is more of a mosaic, an emotional portrait, a testament to human courage and ingenuity.
One
By God I Know Mighty Well What I Would Do!
In the summer of 1914 numbers of young American men were in Paris, or doing such things as hiking in the Alps. When the news came that Germany had declared war on France, on August 3rd other young Americans boarded ships in East Coast ports and headed across the Atlantic. Two days after the war began a group of those already in Paris who wanted to fight for France went to the American Embassy and requested a meeting with Ambassador Myron T. Herrick. They knew that under President Woodrow Wilson the United States had adopted an official position of neutrality, and they needed to discuss their status.
Herrick was sixty years old, a farmer’s son from Ohio who, at the age of nineteen, had taught in a one-room schoolhouse earning money to go to Oberlin College and serve as the Governor of Ohio before accepting the Ambassadorship to France. Years later he recorded what happened at that meeting.
“They filed into my office . . . They wanted to enlist in the French Army. There were no protestations, no speeches; they merely wanted to fight, and they asked me if they had a right to do so, if it was legal.
“That moment remains impressed in my memory as though it had happened yesterday; it was one of the most trying in my whole official experience. I wanted to take those boys to my heart and cry, ‘God bless you! Go!’ But I was held back from doing so by the fact that I was an ambassador. But I loved them, every one, as though they were my own.
“I got out the law on the duties of neutrals; I read it to them and explained its passages. I really tried not to do more, but it was no use. Those young eyes were searching mine, seeking, I am sure, the encouragement they had come in hope of getting.