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  “It was more than flesh and blood could stand, and catching fire myself from their eagerness, I brought down my fist on the table saying, ‘That is the law, boys; but if I was young and in your shoes, by God I know mighty well what I would do!’

  “At this they set up a regular shout, each gripped me by the hand, and then they went rushing down the stairs . . . They all proceeded straight to the Rue de ­Grenelle and took service in the Foreign Legion.”

  These young Americans knew that by enlisting in the Foreign Legion they might be endangering their American citizenship, but they went ahead. In his autobiography Herrick said this:

  “I think the people of the United States owe a very special debt to these boys and to those who afterward created the Lafayette Escadrille. During three terrible, long years [between 1914 and 1917] when the sting of criticism [for not entering the war] cut into every American soul, they were showing the world how their countrymen could fight if only they were allowed the opportunity. To many of us they seemed the saviors of our national honor, giving the lie to current sneers upon the courage of our nation.

  Fig 2. This photo in the Paris Herald (later the Paris Herald Tribune) of August 26, 1914, shows the first group of American volunteers to fight for France marching through Paris to a train station from which they will go to a French Army base in Rouen.

  “Their influence upon sentiment at home was also tremendous . . . Here were Americans shedding their blood for a cause in which America’s heart was also engaged and to which later she pledged the lives . . . of her sons. I suppose that without them we would doubtless have entered the war, but the shout they sent up as they left my office was answered by millions of passionate voices urging the authorities of their government to act. Nothing is more just than that these first defenders of our country’s good name should be singled out for special love and reverence by ourselves, just as they have been by the French.”

  Herrick took the position held by many Americans, but a balanced account of the views of the American public at the time would include strong isolationist sentiments. While former president Theodore Roosevelt and other prominent figures believed that the United States should enter the war, many millions of Americans saw no reason to become involved in an increasingly bloody struggle among European powers. Tremendous numbers of descendants of German immigrants did not want to fight the land of their ancestors, and equal numbers of Irish-Americans saw England as the nation that had oppressed and exploited Ireland for centuries.

  Nonetheless, France was at war, and many young Americans felt moved to come to her aid. One who had lived in Paris and would fly with the Escadrille wrote, “We weren’t fooled into thinking that the World War was entirely a thing invented by the Boche [Germans], but there was no getting around the fact that the Boche had been looking for a chance to start something, and now that the chance came, 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.”

  As for the men in the American expatriate colony in Paris who were above military age, many of them and their wives also felt passionately attached to the French cause. They threw themselves into activities such as volunteer work at the American Hospital in the large Paris suburb of Neuilly. The hospital, built by the same expat American surgeon who played a role in the founding of the Lafayette Escadrille, cared for many American casualties before the United States entered the war.

  Two

  How the New Thing Grew

  When the Germans declared war on France in 1914, only eleven years had passed since the Wright brothers made their first flights near Kitty Hawk. The war brought about a major acceleration in the development of everything about aircraft—the materials used; the shape, design, and strength of the wings and tail; the controls; the engines. Nonetheless, initially they remained largely made of canvas and wood, held together by metal components such as metal pipes and baling wire. An Escadrille pilot wrote, “With only slight exaggeration, it seemed as if they were merely gathered-up odds and ends of wood, discarded matchsticks, and the like, which were wired together, catch-as-catch-can fashion . . . Then old handkerchiefs were sewed together to cover the wings and that part of the fuselage around the pilot’s seat. The remainder of the fuselage was left naked, which gave the plane a sort of half-finished appearance.” The fighter planes looked sleek and graceful, compared with the bombers. One flier said of a type of bomber called a Voisin, “They looked like flying baby carriages.” Fighter pilots called the bomber pilots “truck drivers.”

  As the war progressed, more and more parts of the planes were manufactured from metal, but bullets could always cut through any steel fuselage. Each wartime year, the Germans brought out an improved plane, only to have the Allies put a better one into production a few months later. One of the best Allied fighters, the SPAD, had a flipped-off-the-tongue English-sounding name, but it was the acronym for Société Pour L’Aviation et ses Dérivés (Society for Aviation and Its Derivatives), a French corporation started not by an engineer but by Armand Deperdussin, a traveling salesman and cabaret singer who first made a fortune in the silk business. The Germans received enormous help from a young Dutchman named Anthony Fokker, who not only designed first-rate aircraft and built them, but also devised the “Interrupter Mechanism,” which synchronized machine guns mounted behind a plane’s propeller so that they fired with the bullets passing between the spinning blades, rather than hitting them. Until the Interrupter Mechanism evolved, pilots of single-seat fighters had to stand up behind the controls and awkwardly bring into play a machine gun such as a Lewis gun, mounted on a pivot that swung in a limited arc either on one side of the cockpit or above it. In a two-seater plane, the man in the backseat faced to the rear, holding a machine gun that had a much larger field of fire. (The rear-facing gunner, who could fire off to either side as well, posed such a threat that the French even introduced a plane that had a dummy holding a machine gun that was placed in the rear seat.)

  In the larger sense, this evolution of the airplane continued the technical competition that warfare always stimulates. Inventions and improvements: the stirrup; the crossbow; stronger steel for breastplates, helmets, and swords. Gunpowder: the rifle, producing greater distance and accuracy than the musket; the revolver, firing faster than the flintlock pistol; the revolutionary and dreadfully lethal machine gun. And now, the possibilities of what the airplane could do.

  France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch said in 1910, seven years after Kitty Hawk, “The airplane is all very well for sport, but useless for the army.” He underestimated the speed with which aeronautical and political history were moving. In Europe, as in America, what this new “flying machine”—pilots later referred to their planes as “my machine” —could do fascinated the public. Crowds numbering tens of thousands attended air shows at which barnstorming pilots performed thrilling maneuvers and aviators competed for large cash prizes in air races.

  As for the airplane being “useless for the army,” when what became known as The Great War broke out in 1914, these flimsy contraptions had advanced to the point that they were regarded as a piece of military equipment like a pair of binoculars, useful in observing and photographing enemy positions and movements. In the war’s first months, pilots of both sides would pass each other in their planes, heading out to observe the enemy on the ground like commuters going to work. Some of the opposing pilots even gave each other friendly waves.

  Soon, the ability to see the enemy on the ground from the air started to produce spectacular results. A month after the war began, two large German armies were only thirty miles from Paris, advancing swiftly toward the Marne River. On September 6, French observation planes reported seeing a gap between the two enormous phalanxes. In the most dramatic action of the war, thousands of commandeered Paris taxicabs and buses rushed reinforcements to the front, just in time to prevent the two German armies from cons
olidating their attack. In the “Miracle of the Marne,” the Allied counterattack slammed into the gap and pushed the Germans back forty miles. That saved Paris—and if the capital of France had fallen, such a strategic and psychological defeat might have led to early German victory. A total of two million French and German soldiers fought in the battle—the largest in history to that time—and more than a hundred thousand were killed or wounded.

  Although few realized it then, the early battles of the war marked out an area running from the North Sea to the mountainous Swiss border that became known as the Western Front. During the next four years, thirteen million men would be killed, wounded, captured, or become missing in the trench warfare that took place in that territory. When the Lafayette Escadrille was formed, it would eventually be stationed at nine different airfields behind those bloody lines. As for making aerial photographs of enemy positions, French observation planes soon began taking thousands of pictures a day.

  The airplane had indeed become an integral part of the immense struggle. Both sides came to recognize the effectiveness of aerial observation; fighter planes, also known as “pursuit” aircraft, began to be sent on individual missions whose purpose was to shoot down the enemy’s observation planes. These developed into missions such as the famous “dawn patrols,” in which several of a fighter squadron’s planes would go out in formation, looking for any type of enemy planes to shoot down. When they encountered similar enemy formations, the legendary “dogfights” would occur.

  Well prior to the war, the term “dogfight” signified a violent struggle, usually between two opponents. Applied to the new war in the air, it usually referred to a situation in which, when several planes from one side encountered those from the other, the combat broke up into pairs of planes fighting aerial duels.

  The war’s greatest master of the dogfight proved to be a twenty-four-year-old German pilot, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, known as the “Red Baron” because of the blood-red color of his three-winged Fokker fighter plane. Victor in eighty combats in which the pilot who was shot down was often called a “kill,” he wrote an account of one of his most famous fights. Although Richthofen did not know it, his opponent was the noted British pilot Major Lance Hawker, whose exploits had won him the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest medal for valor.

  “One day,” Richthofen wrote, “I was blithely flying . . . when I noticed three Englishmen who also had apparently gone a-hunting. I noticed that they were ogling me and as I felt much inclination to fight I did not want to disappoint them.

  Fig 3. Baron Manfred von ­Richthofen, the German fighter pilot who was the war’s leading ace, with eighty Allied planes shot down. He started the war as a cavalry officer and always referred to Captain Oswald Boelcke as his flying instructor. Finally killed six months before the war’s end, he was given a full military funeral with every honor by the British and Australian troops in whose territory he crashed.

  “I was flying at a lower altitude. Consequently I had to wait until one of my English friends tried to drop on me. After a while one of the three came sailing along and attempted to tackle me in the rear. After firing five shots he had to stop because I had swerved in a sharp curve.

  “The Englishman tried to catch me up in the rear while I tried to get behind him. So we circled round and round like madmen after one another at an altitude of about 10,000 feet.

  “First we circled twenty times to the left, and then thirty times to the right. Each tried to get behind and above the other. Soon I discovered that I was not meeting a beginner. He had not the slightest intention of breaking off the fight. He was traveling in a machine which turned beautifully. However, my own was better at rising than his, and I succeeded at last in getting above and behind my English waltzing partner.

  “When we had got down to about 6,000 feet without achieving anything in particular, my opponent ought to have discovered that it was time for him to take his leave. The wind was favorable to me for it drove us more and more to the German position. At last we were above Bapaume, about half a mile behind the German front. The impertinent fellow was full of cheek and when we got down to about 3,000 feet he merrily waved to me as if to say, ‘Well, how do you do?’

  “The circles which we made around each other were so narrow that their diameter was probably no more than 250 or 300 feet. I had time to take a good look at my opponent. I looked down into his carriage [cockpit] and could see every movement of his head. If he had not had his cap on I would have noticed what kind of a face he was making.

  “My Englishman was a good sportsman, but by and by the flying got a little too hot for him. He had to decide whether he would land on German ground or whether he would fly back to the English lines. Of course he tried the latter, after having endeavored in vain to escape me by loopings and such like tricks. At that time his first bullets were flying around me, for hitherto neither of us had been able to do any shooting.

  “When he had come down to about 300 feet he tried to escape by flying in a zig-zag course. That was my most favorable moment. I followed him at an altitude of 250 feet to 150 feet, firing all the time. The Englishman could not help falling. But the jamming of my gun nearly robbed me of my success.

  “My opponent fell, shot through the head, 150 feet behind our line. His machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance of my dwelling.”

  Richthofen knew himself, and wrote this:

  “My father discriminates between being a sportsman and a butcher. When I have shot down an Englishman my hunting passion is satisfied for a quarter of an hour. Therefore I do not succeed in shooting down two Englishmen in succession. If one of them comes down I have the feeling of complete satisfaction. Only much, much later I have overcome my instincts and become a butcher.”

  Three

  Aspects of the Great

  New Dimension

  From the Wright brothers’ flights near Kitty Hawk in 1903 to Hiroshima in 1945, aviation redefined the known world.

  Early in those forty-two years, the First World War brought about warfare on a previously unknown scale, and assimilated into the struggle a new factor—human beings could fly.

  Kitty Hawk was the birth of aviation, and World War One can be called its violent adolescence. The Americans of the Lafayette Escadrille flew in France in French planes and wore French uniforms, but their exploits marked the first time American pilots flew together as a unit in aerial warfare.

  Aviation has been a tremendous historical development. For eons, all human activity moved in a way measured by length and breadth, with heights no greater than mountaintops and depths reaching not far below the surface of land or sea. Then it suddenly became possible for men and women to fly immensely higher and faster and farther than the birds they had always watched. Balloons and gliders created interest, but powered flight is one of the supremely important inventions: It is perhaps the most transformational engineering feat of all time, and has proven to be as important as the creation of the wheel, the invention of inoculation, and the harnessing of steam and electricity. In terms of war, this “air arm” meant that an army could put fast-moving eyes into the sky many miles from its ground forces, and drop explosives far beyond the previous range of the most powerful cannons. In effect, a new kind of front line could be established, high in the sky.

  As the war developed, many Allied fighter planes, including those of the Lafayette Escadrille, protected Allied bombers as they flew over enemy territory. A notable mission in which pilots of the Escadrille participated occurred on October 12, 1916. Allied bombs destroyed parts of the important German Mauser rifle factory at Oberndorf, which shipped twenty thousand rifles a day to the front. Air power’s potential was there for all to see.

  Early in the war, French intelligence officers began to realize that, in addition to attacking German aircraft and observing enemy movements and positions from the air, planes could be used to place spies miles be
hind enemy lines. This led to a daring aerial exploit, involving a twenty-nine-year-old American volunteer named Jules James Bach, from New Orleans. He received his education in England and France, being granted a degree in mechanical engineering from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1904 and a degree in civil engineering from the École Centrale in Paris in 1908. Bach understood the workings of the primitive gasoline engines of the day, as well as the developing science of aerodynamics.

  When the war erupted in 1914, Bach wanted to fight for France. “Jimmy,” as his comrades called him, became one of the first Americans to join the Legion, as a poilu: a foot soldier.

  During his four months in the trenches, Bach experienced what was later described by another American who endured similar danger and privation:

  “He was one of that famed band of Legionnaires who made the historic march, under full equipment, of fifty-six kilometers [thirty-four miles], from Verzenay to Fismes; the longest, most grueling march made by any soldiers in the World War. From four in the morning till eleven at night, with only a cup of bitter black coffee to sustain them, they marched without food, practically without a halt, except for the ten-minute rest period each hour.

  “It was a killing test for men fresh from civilian life. The last few hours were so sodden in misery that the men staggered on automatically in a sort of a daze. When a halt was called, they threw themselves down and slept on rock piles or anything at hand to keep them out of the mud . . . Gradually becoming immune to such hardships, Jimmy went through all the stiffest engagements and hand-to-hand fighting with hardly a scratch.”

  In December of that first year of the war, long before the Lafayette Escadrille was created, Bach was accepted into the French Army’s Service Aeronautique. After training in French aviation schools for five months, he received his brevet, the designation of being a pilot, and flew reconnaissance missions for a month at the front, wearing a French uniform indicating his rank of corporal and flying with a French squadron.