First to Fly: The Story of the Lafayette Escadrille, the American Heroes Who Flew for France in World War I
256
First to Fly: The Story of the Lafayette Escadrille, the American Heroes Who Flew for France in World War I
256eBook
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Overview
In First to Fly, lauded historian Charles Bracelen Flood draws on rarely seen primary sources to tell the story of the daredevil Americans of the Lafayette Escadrille, who flew in French planes, wore French uniforms, and showed the world an American brand of heroism before the United States entered the Great War.
As citizens of a neutral nation from 1914 to early 1917, Americans were prohibited from serving in a foreign army, but many brave young souls soon made their way into European battle zones. It was partly from the ranks of the French Foreign Legion, and with the sponsorship of an expat American surgeon and a Vanderbilt, that the Lafayette Escadrille was formed in 1916 as the first and only all-American squadron in the French Air Service. Flying rudimentary planes, against one-in-three odds of being killed, these fearless young men gathered reconnaissance and shot down enemy aircraft, participated in the Battle of Verdun and faced off with the Red Baron, dueling across the war-torn skies like modern knights on horseback.
“First to Fly shows us that there was something noble and honorable about the Escadrille, men who did not turn against their own country but put their lives up to fight for a cause, not because they had to but because it was the right thing to do.” —The Wall Street Journal
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802191380 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 458,491 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
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.
"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.
"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.
CHAPTER 2How 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 consolidating 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.
"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."
CHAPTER 3Aspects 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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "First to Fly"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Charles Bracelen Flood.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Two Deaths Trigger Thirty-seven Million 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,
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