Then Bach and a French sergeant-pilot named Mangeot were given a particularly dangerous assignment, to take place on September 23, 1915, before the great majority of American pilots saw action. Using their two-seater observation planes, they were to land at first light behind enemy lines, swiftly drop off two French soldiers who were wearing civilian clothes and acting as spies, and leave as quickly as they had come. The two spies, who knew the territory where they were to operate, carried explosives: Their mission was to blow up a strategic stretch of enemy-held railroad track miles from where they landed, make notes on enemy positions in that area, and attempt to get back on foot through the opposing German and French lines.
All four men knew the risks involved. If the two spies in civilian clothes were captured, they would be shot. If either Bach or Mangeot were captured and found to be connected with the spies, they too would almost certainly be executed, even though they wore French uniforms.
The two planes landed in a remote but poorly chosen field, covered with bushes and saplings. Bach and Mangeot made skillful landings; each spy clambered out of the plane in which he had been a passenger, holding his armful of explosives, and began the hike that would take him to the railroad track.
Bach took off immediately, but as he looked back he saw that Mangeot’s plane, taking off just behind him, had struck some object and was lying upside down on the rough ground. Bach turned and landed next to the wrecked plane. Mangeot was able to crawl from beneath it, dash toward him, and jump into the rear seat behind Bach. As Bach started to take off a second time, one of his wings caught on the limb of a tree, and it crashed. Both men were unhurt, and realized that the longer they could remain hidden in the thick nearby woods, giving the two spies time to get farther from them, the less chance there was that, if any of the four of them were captured, the Germans would recognize that they were all participants in the same mission.
Bach and Mangeot remained hidden all through the day. By evening they felt certain that the spies were miles from them. Then they started off in their quest to get through the opposing lines of trenches and return safely to their base. After a few hours they were captured and taken to the small city of Laon, where they were questioned by German intelligence officers. It was then that they discovered that the railroad track had indeed been blown up. Their inquisitors decided that Bach and Mangeot, who admitted that the planes were theirs but refused to answer further questions, were prime suspects in an act of espionage. Instead of receiving the routine treatment of being sent off to a camp for prisoners of war, Bach and Mangeot were put on trial.
In the first trial, the prosecutor, a German officer, was determined to have Bach receive the maximum sentence. Bach was an American, and fell into the category of being a franc-tireur—a mercenary fighting in the uniform of an enemy of Germany. Under German law, that was enough for him to be executed for the crime of espionage. Although the prosecutor treated Bach as his prize defendant, he also asked that Mangeot be shot.
Fully aware that this was truly a do-or-die situation, Bach received the court’s permission to conduct his own defense. He pleaded his and Mangeot’s case with eloquence, insisting that there was insufficient evidence to prove that he and Mangeot were guilty of espionage. The court agreed that Bach should have a second trial, ten days after the first. He would have ten days to produce favorable evidence.
This placed the two defendants in an agonizing situation. While Bach might come up with evidence helpful to his and Mangeot’s case, on any one of those ten more days the two spies who had blown up the track might be captured, and the fate of all four men would be sealed.
What happened next involved an apparent intrigue. Although behind bars, Bach somehow had access to significant funds. He received the court’s permission to hire one of Germany’s most gifted trial lawyers. The man arrived from Berlin, doubting that he could save his clients’ lives. What may have gone on behind the scenes has never emerged, but when the court reconvened the two spies were still at large, and there was no additional incriminating evidence. According to one account, “The Berlin lawyer threw himself heart and soul into the defense of his clients,” using “brilliant and impassioned oratory.”
The decisive hour came, and Jimmy Bach and Mangeot rose to learn their fate. “By the unanimous verdict of this court,” the judge-advocate told them, “the French aviators Bach and Mangeot, accused of espionage, are found not guilty. It is directed that they be held and confined as honorable prisoners of war.”
After some days of continued confinement in the prison at Laon, the two men began planning an escape. On the day they intended to make the escape, Jimmy Bach was sent to a military prison in Bavaria, much farther from French territory. It was an old castle on a mountaintop, with sheer cliffs on three sides. Despite the near-impossibility of escaping, one evening Bach succeeded. He made his way through the darkness to the house of a woman who his fellow prisoners had told him was a French sympathizer. She was from Alsace-Lorraine, and her house was one of a chain of places that had been set up early in the war to aid escaping prisoners.
The woman welcomed him in from the night and sheltered him until morning, when he planned to go on his way. But as he started to leave, a squad of German soldiers who had been keeping the house under surveillance surrounded him. Before being marched back to the hilltop prison, Bach was forced to watch the woman being shot.
By now Jimmy Bach was a marked man, and was transported under heavy guard to Germany’s most formidable prison, the central fortress at Nuremberg. He made several attempts to escape and never succeeded; nor did any other prisoner held there. Jimmy Bach was the Germans’ first American prisoner of war, and because they enjoyed inventing and bestowing titles of all kinds, by seniority he was named the Herr Direktor of the Amerikanischer-Kriegsgefangenen Club, the association of American prisoners of war.
Four
What Manner of Men?
Who were these young Americans who began flying above the bloody battlefields of France? Their photographs tell the story. Sharp clear eyes look out of healthy faces. The expressions are confident. Many of these men played football, hockey, polo—sports that required courage, endurance, and superior reflexes. A few were race car drivers. Others were gifted in fields as varied as architecture, music, painting, electronics, and writing. Many proved themselves capable of putting forth remarkable mental and physical energy.
These young warriors were indeed individualistic, but even before the war, Americans of every sort sensed that with the airplane, something tremendously forceful and challenging had come to them. An immensely vigorous young nation, seeking its identity, consumed by its industrialization and just coming onto the world stage, saw an expansion of its destiny in the skies. Less than ten years after Kitty Hawk, America had become aware of an enormous event on the horizon, an impending European war certain to eclipse all previous military struggles.
This prospect of a huge looming conflict, offering battle in a new dimension, presented challenges to different instincts. For many high-spirited, energetic young Americans, an inner voice said, “I need to meet what is coming. I need to equal, defend against, and if necessary defeat those who can use this new force against me and mine.”
Were these instincts clothed in idealism? How to view these pilots of the Escadrille? Were they adventurers, or patriots scouting out this new territory? Were they scientists of a sort, participating in a huge experiment? Their sincerely stated beliefs and purpose could have been one thing, but the force driving them might well have been a form of collective survival instinct.
The thirty-eight pilots who originally composed the Lafayette Escadrille represented all of this. They were actors in an epic drama—a mere handful of men, most of them crossing an ocean to fight for a foreign land in an unprecedented venture. History offers few such examples. Theirs is the encompassing story; theirs is a revealing drama of that era. They experienced it all—valor, te
rror, cowardice, instinctive skill, love of comrades, colorful appeal to women, fatal decisions made when split-second actions determined whether a pilot lived or died.
The war killed many of them. Some of the survivors went on to be richly rewarded pioneers in peacetime aviation. Others became leaders in the armies of the air that clashed in the skies and destroyed cities in the larger war that came twenty years later. Just as this first air war made some of them formidable men, it broke others. There were suicides, then and later, and those who hollowed themselves out with alcohol and other drugs.
Every form of these behaviors, every result, was to be found in the Lafayette Escadrille, and in their reactions to the far-better-organized, better-trained, greatly experienced German pilots they opposed. Pilot after pilot became the Everyman of the skies. They wrote letters, they kept diaries, they wrote books, they had mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, loving women who grieved over their deaths. Some wounded men met French nurses in frontline hospitals. After the war four brave French nurses married their patients. Three of the surviving fliers went on to marry movie stars.
At their flying fields behind the trenches these young men—their average age was twenty-four—kept pets, mostly dogs. In time the menagerie grew to include two fast-growing lion cubs, an Irish terrier that accompanied its master on low-flying missions, and a skunk that had been altered so it could not spray its scent. To immerse oneself in the Lafayette experience is to enter a huge human story that can be viewed through one blood-spattered window.
In all, 269 American pilots flew with various French squadrons before the United States entered the war. They were listed as being in the Lafayette Flying Corps, but the Lafayette Escadrille was the only squadron that, with the exception of its French commander Captain Georges Thenault and two attached French lieutenants, was composed entirely of Americans. Of those thirty-eight young volunteers, men from twelve states, eleven were destined to die. Among the total of 269 American pilots who flew for the French, including those in the Escadrille, forty-two were killed in action or received fatal wounds, twenty-one died in accidents, four died of illness, and two committed suicide. This meant that of those who volunteered, one out of four died; and more than that sustained nonlethal wounds.
They flew in flimsy contraptions with faulty engines and machine guns that frequently jammed and stopped firing. It took a special kind of bravery to face, on every takeoff, a known, serious risk of early death. Perhaps it involved an almost unperceived awareness of life’s ironies, and a touch of bravado that concealed a very mortal, ultimate need for, above all else, some love. Pilot Ned Parsons, a handsome twenty-four-year-old from Springfield, Massachusetts, described a throwback to knights in armor going into battle with their ladies’ scarves or long gloves tied around their arms. In this case the amulet was a woman’s stocking, worn under a soft leather flying helmet.
“The top fitted over the skull, while the leg and foot went under the chin and was tucked up on the other side. It was useful in keeping our heads warm as well as being a strong charm. Not any silk stocking would do. It had to be a stocking from some girl you loved or vice versa, and had to be well worn. If anything happened to you while wearing it, it was a sure sign the girl didn’t love you any more or never had. The personality that the stocking assumed through having been worn was held sufficient to keep you out of trouble.”
This idea of amulets extended into different forms of superstition. Ned Parsons said, “War aviators individually and collectively were the most superstitious beings in the world,” and offered some examples from his own experience. Many pilots began to collect small metal objects, including religious medals, that they strung around their wrists like charm bracelets. Parsons observed, “Usually a man’s length of service could be approximated by the number of medals he had jangling on his wrist. Some of the old-timers had to wear chains on each wrist to hold them.”
He spoke of his own particularly special experience:
“But the most prized of all talismans for me was my black cat. Black cats are popularly supposed to be anathema, but mine must have been a different breed of cat.
“For five months, I fought Huns all over the sky . . . But I could never get one to fall. Then I had the good fortune to meet a beautiful Parisienne named Renee de Ranville . . . Renee bought me one of those big, life-sized velvet cats with arched back, tail standing up, and a look of almost human intelligence on the whiskered face.”
Parsons had his mechanic Henriot wire the cat statue to the center strut of his right wing. “From then on, it rode with me from the Channel to the Vosges. Whiskers streaming back in the slipstream, he or she (I never could decide) kept an eye on everything. It always gave me a lot of courage in a tight place to see the very placid expression on her or his face. If the cat wasn’t worried, why should I be?”
Parsons’ luck changed, and he brought down his first enemy plane. The critical moment came, however, when he managed to maneuver out of a desperate situation in which three German fighters surrounded him, with many bullets striking his plane. “I was plenty scared with my narrow escape and . . . hurried back to the field . . . just in time! My whole tail assembly was torn to pieces, and two of the wires controlling my elevator were hanging by just one strand. Here and there was a hole in the wings or fuselage, but I discovered no other damage until I happened to look at the cat. Sawdust was dripping out of a ragged hole in her side. Somewhere deep in the black cat’s vitals was a German slug with my name engraved on it! Since it didn’t go through, the bullet must have been nearly spent when it hit, but in lining it up from the direction it entered I found that, if the cat hadn’t been there, it would in all probability have punctured my eardrum. We performed a surgical operation with needle and thread.” Parsons said of the cat, “It flew with me as long as I was with the Lafayette Escadrille . . . and continued to exercise a benign influence to the end of the war.”
Other than superstitions, this new war in the air developed its own culture, its own courtesies and customs. One pilot wrote that these included things such as “a salute or wave of the hand to some adversary when the duel had been called a draw [when both pilots were out of ammunition or fuel]; or letters passed back and forth, dropped over the lines, inquiring about the fate of a comrade or expressing regret for the death of some gallant enemy pilot, which rarely failed to bring an answer; or a wreath dropped during the funeral ceremonies of some well-known ace.”
When the Germans shot down an Allied plane, if the pilot’s physical condition permitted it he was taken to the officers’ mess hall of the squadron whose prisoner he had become. There he received its hospitality, including an elaborate meal and a standing toast to his valor, before being sent off in a staff car to a prisoner-of-war camp. German pilots who fell into Allied hands received the same treatment.
Soon after the first Escadrille pilots reached the front, they became part of another tradition, begun by Paul Rockwell from North Carolina, who with his younger brother Kiffin had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in August of 1914. Three months later Paul was severely wounded when a German shell exploded next to where he stood outside a trench, flinging him into the trench and shattering his collarbone. The doctors determined that he would never fully regain his strength or range of motion, and he received an honorable discharge. He then started working in Paris as an official civilian combat correspondent with the Section d’Information of the French Ministry of Public Information, operating out of French Army headquarters in Paris. He also gathered stories about the war for the Chicago Daily News.
Paul’s brother Kiffin was able to transfer into French aviation, and when he shot down the first of the Escadrille’s “kills,” Paul hurried from Paris to Luxeuil, an airfield near the Swiss border where the Escadrille was stationed, carrying “a rare and precious bottle of very old bourbon.” Kiffin opened the bottle, intending that everyone should have a drink. Then the suggestion was made that Kiffin
should take a pull from it, after which the bottle should be corked and not opened again until another pilot should make a kill and have a pull, and from then on “every man who brings down a German is entitled to one good slug.”
Figs 4 and 5. Kiffin Yates Rockwell was one of the “Founders,” the term by which the first seven pilots who joined the Lafayette Escadrille were known. Rockwell was from Asheville, North Carolina, and studied for a time at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. In the picture on the left, he is the man to the left of the tree, fighting as an infantryman in the French Foreign Legion before becoming a pilot in the Escadrille, the uniform of which he is wearing in the picture on the right. Wounded both in ground fighting and in the air, Rockwell was killed in action in a “dogfight” three days after his twenty-fourth birthday. A fellow pilot described him as “brave to the core, never flinching.”
Twenty-one years later, Ned Parsons wrote this:
“When the ceremony was started, no one had any idea that the bottle would outlive the Escadrille, but such was the startling success of that intrepid band that the contents were soon exhausted. It was never replaced, but the empty bottle was faithfully guarded by Billy Thaw, our [unofficial American] commanding officer, and only came to light again when he died recently. It became known in Escadrille lore as ‘The Bottle of Death.’”
One practice, in a sense symbolized by that bottle, was the serious business of confirming a kill. Many aerial duels ended with a damaged plane disappearing behind enemy lines. The squadrons on both sides wanted to know whether the enemy plane had been shot down by one of their pilots, or by antiaircraft fire, or had experienced engine failure. The rule became that for it to be considered a kill, at least two qualified men, either in the air or on the ground, had to see the plane hit the ground, or, for example, see it go down in flames behind trees, followed by an immediate explosion.
First to Fly Page 3