First to Fly

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  In trying to establish what had in fact happened, men from a squadron, pilots or intelligence officers, constantly risked their lives by going to forward trenches. Sometimes they could see the wreckage of their own or enemy aircraft, or talk with foot soldiers who’d seen the results of dogfights taking place above their heads. It became a grim sort of keeping score; for an individual pilot to shoot down five planes meant that he became an “ace.” This recognition usually brought with it medals, promotions, and cash rewards. For the intelligence officers, analysis of the performance of different Allied squadrons, or of opposing enemy squadrons, might dictate the need to change the lineup along a sector of the front.

  Destined to be pilots or not, these spirited American volunteers were good-looking, virile, and heroes of the hour. The young Frenchwomen were crazy about them. When the American recruits first went off to training camps from Paris, one of them wrote this account of what happened at the railroad station.

  “At the Gare St. Lazare our little detachment was causing a tremendous excitement. The waiting rooms, the entrance to the platforms and the platforms themselves were crowded with bon voyage parties. At least seven ladies for every member of the American Volunteer Corps had put in an appearance. Each one of them thought she was the only one. There were several unfortunate occurrences. There is a legend about what happened after the train pulled out—a legend about hair pulling and other forms of female combativeness.”

  Five

  Contrasts

  Before the pilots of the Escadrille flew from their base at Bar-le-Duc, 130 miles northeast of Paris, the “Founders,” as the first of them became known, were stationed for a month at Luxeuil, the largest and most picturesque airfield in France. It covered a flat grassy expanse two miles long, surrounded by high slopes in the foothills of the Vosges Mountains near the Swiss border. In that militarily quiet area, they received their training in formation flying.

  Luxeuil entered history as a campground for the Roman legions, whose warriors were attracted to it by the hot springs bubbling out of the ground. It eventually became an exclusive spa, a small resort favored by French royalty such as King Louis XV and his Polish queen, Marie.

  The American pilots, several of whose introductions to the war had come during the early brutal battles fought by the Foreign Legion, lived in a stone villa next to the ancient Roman baths. Each man had a room of his own, complete with a feather bed and a window offering a view of the large nearby hills. They took their meals at the Hotel Pomme d’Or, just down the street, where the linen tablecloths were loaded with such delicacies as roasted grouse and baked rabbit, which the pilots washed down with vintage Burgundy followed by “individual aluminum pots of filtered coffee.” In the handsomely appointed clubroom they shared in the villa, a phonograph played such currently popular records as “Don’t Go Away,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and the lilting “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

  Kiffin Rockwell, brother of Paul Rockwell, who had been wounded fighting in the Foreign Legion and was now an official combat correspondent, had also been wounded in action with the Foreign Legion. He had recovered from his wounds and now flew for the Escadrille. Kiffin wrote his mother this: “We all eat together at a hotel where wonderful meals are served . . . We go down each day about 100 yards from here to bathe in a bath-house that is 200 years old. The scenery around the town is wonderful . . . [we] are planning a little fishing and hunting, so you can see that it is not much like being at war.” He later added this thought: “I am sitting by my window now with a good warm sun coming in and a wonderful view of the birds singing. If it were not for looking in the glass and seeing myself in uniform I should not be able to believe that I am at war, or that there is such a thing as war.”

  That changed. Two days before the squadron was to leave for far more active missions at Bar-le-Duc, Kiffin was flying back toward Luxeuil from a patrol during which he encountered no German planes. Suddenly he saw an enemy two-seater two thousand feet below him. Diving at it, he felt his plane shake as a burst of machine gun fire struck it, but he had this reaction: “I didn’t pay any attention to that and kept going straight for him, until I got within 25 or 30 meters of him.” Opening fire and cutting away just in time to avoid a collision, he saw “black, greasy smoke” start to pour from the two-seater as it began a dive in which it took three minutes to plummet to the ground and explode in flames.

  A front-line French observation post immediately telephoned in a confirmation of Kiffin’s “victory.” By the time he landed at Luxeuil, he found his squadron mates standing out on the grassy airstrip, waiting to lift him out of his plane and carry him into squadron headquarters on their shoulders to be debriefed. His friend Jim McConnell said, “All Luxeuil smiled upon him—particularly the girls.” Another pilot recalled that “Kiffin was a popular hero—the girls gave him bunches of flowers and the hotel-keepers sent him bottles of champagne.” Although individual members of the Escadrille had made kills while flying with French squadrons, this was the first enemy plane shot down by the Lafayette Escadrille after it was officially organized. That news was telephoned to Paris, where it produced “a tremendous wave of excitement.”

  To bring the Lafayette Escadrille into being required both money and influence. Later it appeared that early in the war a number of individuals had started to think about having at least one French aviation unit consist exclusively of American pilots, but credit for making the first moves to accomplish that belonged in good part to the American surgeon Dr. Edmund Gros. He had moved to Paris from San Francisco before the war, and was one of the prominent members of the expatriate community, many of whom became his patients. With the help of rich American residents of Paris such as Mr. and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, he had built the American Hospital, and with the start of the war he was one of those who established the American Ambulance Service, soon renamed the American Field Service.

  As that organization began to move under its own management, Dr. Gros felt free to begin pushing for a specific American role in the rapidly developing air war. He called on his friends the Vanderbilts in their mansion, told them about his hope to create an all-American squadron, and added that he thought it would require some money to make it a reality.

  According to Dr. Gros, as soon as he finished speaking, Mrs. Vanderbilt, whose maiden name was Harriman and who had her own fortune from that family’s railroad empire, “walked to her desk and wrote out a check for five thousand dollars.” Then she looked at her husband and said, “Now, ‘K,’ what will you do?” He wrote out a check for fifteen thousand dollars, and followed that with other large sums throughout the war. Among other things, the money was used to augment the American fliers’ very low French Army pay and to give pilots cash prizes for successful missions.

  Encouraged by the Vanderbilts’ support, Dr. Gros turned to other allies. One of the first to come to his side was twenty-nine-year-old Bill Thaw. In these first years of the war, no other American pilot displayed such a combination of flying skill and leadership ability. His prewar interest in flying had brought him into contact with the American inventors, designers, and manufacturers who quickly became attracted to aviation. A rich young man and a cousin of Harry Thaw, who shot the famous architect Stanford White in one of the most sensational jealousy murders of the early twentieth century, Bill Thaw was the son of a prominent manufacturing family in Pittsburgh. He was a sophomore in good standing at Yale, but his interest in flying consumed him to the point that his father agreed that he should withdraw from the university and take lessons at a flying school at Hammondsport, New York, run by Glenn Curtiss, a leader in the creation of the American aviation industry.

  Young Bill Thaw excelled at Curtiss’s flying school, and his father bought him one of the Model E Hydro two-seater flying boats that Curtiss was building. Thaw’s own flying career took off. At an air race in Manhattan, he saved time by flying his seaplane under the four bridges then leading ou
t of the city, something never done before, and later took a paying passenger on a flight in which he circled the Statue of Liberty twice, closely passing the metal torch at a distance of two hundred feet. He also made one of the first shore-to-ship deliveries when he dropped a bundle of local newspapers onto the deck of the German ship Imperator as she steamed into New York harbor.

  Fig 6. William Thaw, from a prominent family in Pittsburgh, holding the squadron’s lion mascot “Whiskey” when he was a cub. A natural leader who was the de facto American commander of the Escadrille, Thaw was an accomplished prewar flier in the United States. During an air race, he flew under the four bridges leading out of New York City, an unprecedented feat.

  Two years before the war, Bill Thaw moved to France. When war broke out in August of 1914, he was taking paying passengers for flights in a seaplane along the red cliffs and brilliant beaches of the French Riviera. Thaw gave his plane to the French government and enlisted in the Foreign Legion. An American friend described him as “a burly brute with a splendid physique, thick black hair, snapping black eyes, and a pair of flowing mustachios that were the pride of his heart. When they were waxed, Bill looked every inch the dapper officer, but when, as more often happened, they drooped, Bill had the benign air of a venerable walrus.”

  On a day in October of 1914 when Thaw and some other Americans were in a trench near Verzenay, a small town a hundred miles northeast of Paris near Rheims, he saw a German plane overhead and told his comrades, “One day, a squadron of Americans will be flying for France.” Eager to get back in the air, Thaw received permission to hike twenty miles to a French airfield to see if he could arrange to join the squadron based there. He failed in that attempt, but made a favorable impression, and a month later made the hike again. This time an officer in that squadron told him that he would soon be transferred, and on Christmas Eve of 1914 Thaw became a member of a squadron known as Escadrille D. 6. He began as a backseat machine gunner. As he met more French pilots, he asked them to see if some of the Americans who had fought beside him in the Legion could enter a French squadron as he had.

  Fig 7. Norman Prince, known to his comrades as “Nimmie,” was a rich Harvard graduate, another Founder and a man who helped to convince the French that an all-American squadron would be effective and help to mobilize American opinion in favor of entering the war. He died returning from a mission escorting Allied bombers whose destruction of the German Mauser rifle factory at Oberndorf showed the potential of air power.

  Paralleling the efforts being made by Dr. Gros and Thaw were those of twenty-eight-year-old Norman Prince, whose father, Frederick H. Prince, was one of the richest men in New England. Like Thaw, young Prince had learned to fly in the United States before the war. During his childhood Norman had spent summers on his family’s estate at Pau, in southern France, and he spoke French fluently. In January of 1915 he set off for France, despite his father’s opposition, and set himself up in a suite at the fashionable Hotel Palais d’Orsay in Paris.

  From that base, close to French government buildings, this able and well-connected young man, a lawyer who graduated from Harvard College in 1908, began to besiege French officialdom in his quest to bring an America squadron into being. He found an influential ally named Jarousse de Sillac, a Frenchman his own age who held a prominent post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. De Sillac wrote this to a well-placed colonel in the French Ministry of War:

  “It appears to me that there might be great advantages in creating an American squadron. The United States would be proud of the fact that certain of her young men, acting as did Lafayette, have come to fight for France and for civilization. The resulting sentiment of enthusiasm could have but one effect: to turn the Americans in the direction of the Allies.”

  These ad hoc American lobbyists—Dr. Gros, Bill Thaw, and Norman Prince, joined by twenty-nine-year-old Elliot Cowdin, a polo player from Long Island—initially encountered considerable resistance. They did not know that the French high command was, with reason, fearful that foreign pilots might be spies. Among other situations that had arisen, a German who spoke perfect French and had a forged American passport had actually flown with a French squadron, been discovered to be a spy, and been executed. Another case had been that of F. C. Hild, an American who had joined the French Air Service early in the war. He soon deserted and returned to the United States, where he was suspected of selling French military information to the German Embassy. When Gros discovered these German connections and sympathies, it may have influenced his thinking about one of the requirements he set down for joining what became the Lafayette Escadrille: “You must be . . . not of German extraction on father’s or mother’s side.”

  At the same time that Thaw, Prince, and Cowdin went to work, Dr. Gros formed the Franco-American Committee, made up of prominent older men including Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, Jr.

  Working separately, the two groups, one composed primarily of young enthusiasts and the other of seasoned businessmen, began to win over the French military authorities. In February of 1915 the Ministry of War agreed that Americans could enlist in the French Army’s aviation service, and at the end of March, six Americans, including Thaw, Prince, and Cowdin, were assigned to begin pilot training. On July 8, 1915, General Auguste Edouard Hirschauer, chief of French Military Aeronautics, decided to have the French Army organize what would initially be called the Escadrille Americaine. Nonetheless, the bureaucracy continued to move slowly in making the transition from paperwork to an operational unit.

  Surprisingly, the biggest breakthrough came that autumn, when Thaw, Prince, and Cowdin applied for the annual eight-day leave given to all members of the French Army. The standard arrangement was, for example, that a poilu might be given a paid two-day trip home from the Western Front to his home in Marseilles, eight days of paid leave at home, and a paid two-day trip back to his unit. When confronted by three Americans whose homes were in the United States, the French Army unhesitatingly bought them round trips by transatlantic steamer to and from the port of New York.

  As a result, on December 23, 1915, when the SS Rotterdam docked in New York, among the passengers disembarking were Thaw, Prince, and Cowdin. All three wore chesterfield topcoats with velvet collars, and Thaw sported a black derby of the type worn by lawyers and businessmen who worked in nearby Wall Street offices. Tipped off about their arrival, a crowd of newsmen peppered them with questions. The three fliers minimized their roles—at that time none of them had shot down an enemy plane—but the press swiftly built them up to be heroic figures.

  Fig 8. Elliot Cowdin, Norman Prince, and William Thaw in civilian dress

  Most of the American public responded to these stories with interest and enthusiasm, but a combination of pacifists and German sympathizers seized the opportunity to point out that these men, now being lionized, were members of the French Army, fighting in a war in which American citizens were not supposed to be armed combatants. The editors of two pro-German newspapers sent Secretary of State Robert Lansing carefully worded protests, and one account had it that within days German secret service agents began following the three men. But a quietly dramatic and symbolic coincidence occurred even sooner.

  The morning after he landed in Manhattan, Thaw came into the barbershop of the exclusive Ritz-Carlton Hotel for a shave. The man getting a haircut in the chair next to him was Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the United States. They had met before the war at parties whose guest lists included diplomats and members of prominent American families. The fifty-three-year-old von Bernstorff began gently scolding Thaw, who was twenty-four years younger, telling him that he and his two fellow fliers were breaking their own country’s law prohibiting them from fighting in a conflict in which the United States was remaining neutral. Thaw kept politely silent as his barber continued shaving him. Then von Bernstorff took a sterner tone, adding that Thaw and his friends should voluntarily intern themselves,
and spare both the United States and Germany an international incident.

  By this time, with Thaw’s shave completed, he rose, and the barber helped him on with his topcoat. Putting on his derby, he nodded to von Bernstorff. Using General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous phrase, he said, “Excellency, war is hell,” and strolled out.

  Von Bernstorff next made a formal demand that Thaw, Prince, and Cowdin be interned. Some accounts of what happened immediately thereafter implied that the three men were hastily shipped back to France on the next liner heading for Le Havre, but there is no question of the impact their days in the United States had in Paris. A pilot who had remained in France said of his comrades, “They had created a tremendous enthusiasm and a real sympathy for France in their brief appearance.” In addition to the publicity favorable to the French cause that the interviews with the three Americans had created, the ferocity of the German attacks on Verdun that began soon after the men’s return convinced both the French and the British of the need to bring the United States into the war as soon as possible, or the Allies might lose.

  Six

  The Odds Are Never Good: Clyde Balsley

  On Sunday, June 18, 1916, two years after the First World War began, a mustachioed twenty-two-year-old Texas fighter pilot named Clyde Balsley walked toward his plane through the predawn mists of a big grassy airfield outside of Bar-le-Duc, France. Balsley climbed into the cockpit of his plane, a small single-wing one-seater French fighter called a Nieuport 17 C-1, with a top speed of 110 miles an hour. The United States would not enter the First World War for another ten months, but Clyde Balsley was the ninth pilot to join this new squadron composed exclusively of American volunteers. It would soon be renamed the Lafayette Escadrille, in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette, the young French nobleman who crossed the Atlantic to fight beside George Washington during the American Revolution.