First to Fly

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  For five months, long columns of French reinforcements and supplies had passed ceaselessly through Bar-le-Duc, on their way to support the French armies locked in combat with hundreds of thousands of Germans at the enormous Battle of Verdun. The one dirt road, the only route into the besieged city of Verdun, was just twenty feet wide, but the French Army was in the process of sending up this narrow artery a total of twenty-five thousand tons of supplies, carried by some six thousand vehicles. It was later estimated that two-thirds of the entire French Army passed up this road during the effort to save the city. For the French Army and the French public, that narrow road through Bar-le-Duc took on spiritual significance, and became known as “The Sacred Way.”

  The Battle of Verdun would become the most significant battle of the war. A total of 800,000 men, French and German, died there—more than the 650,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who died during the four years of the American Civil War. Verdun was an enormous test of wills—the Germans attacking and the French defending. The French military leadership was quoted as saying, “They shall not pass,” and this rallying cry had a seemingly hypnotic effect on the badly bloodied soldiers. An American war correspondent who saw the survivors of a French regiment coming out of the battle for a desperately needed rest said that despite their glassy-eyed expressions and staggering steps, they were eager to return to the fight.

  The ferocity of the fighting in the air above that epic struggle equaled that on the ground. When the battle began, the Germans had total command of the air above it: Their 168 planes, many of them manned by pilots who had close to two years of combat experience, constituted the greatest force of warplanes ever assembled. Among them was Richthofen, “The Red Baron.” To send a pilot like Clyde Balsley up against this array on his first combat mission was close to a death sentence, but as the battle for Verdun progressed, more and more pilots, mostly French but with increasing numbers of courageous American volunteers such as the men of the Lafayette Escadrille, made the battle in the air more nearly equal.

  In retrospect, when the Germans failed to take Verdun, that opened the possibility of ultimate French victory, but immense obstacles remained. To relieve the pressure on Verdun, a combination of French and British divisions had been sent to open an offensive in the muddy valley of the Somme River, well to the west of Verdun. This offensive, begun on July 1, 1916, involved what remains the single costliest day in the history of the British Army. That day the British and their Dominion and colonial forces suffered twenty thousand men killed and forty thousand wounded. By the time the Allied command called off the failed offensive four months later, more than one million men had been killed or wounded, and this enormous bloodletting had pushed back the Germans only eight miles. The battle for Verdun proved to be a battle of great significance, while the slaughter at the Somme accomplished nothing.

  Balsley wrote descriptions of himself. One of them began with this:

  “Five feet eleven—not a giant, but not a dwarf; and I had always been proud of my shoulders. Muscles like steel springs, veins bubbling with vigorous blood, teeth sound and white, skin ruddy, eyes clear, hair on the jump but plenty of it—not bald, at any rate—and Mont Blanc [genitalia] sprouting lustily.”

  On this day in June of 1916, after months of training, Clyde Balsley was about to fly his first combat mission. In January of 1915 he had sailed from New Orleans to Europe aboard the freighter Dunedin, working as one of thirty “muleteers,” caring for 630 mules. After Balsley reached France, he sent his mother a letter explaining why he had volunteered. He told her that he wanted to “see the war, and see it well . . . I can learn aviation, the newest game in the world, which will mean that I have learned a paying profession while on this trip . . . And, finally, I can take a man’s part in this war for humanity.”

  Balsley’s words were those of a high-hearted young man expecting a safe outcome to an interesting and profitable venture in a cause in which he believed. Even his use of the word “trip” suggested the idea of a cheerful excursion.

  When Balsley first got to his squadron for advanced training, he made a poor impression. One of the American pilots, who already had considerable combat experience, later wrote this in a letter:

  “You know we didn’t think much of Balsley. It was because he is young and inexperienced, but when he got here to the Escadrille I began to like him better every day, as I saw he had plenty of good will to work and was not afraid . . . I understand that his mother is very poor, and was dependent on him to run their bakery business, when he left and came over here, and that now the family is in very hard lines.”

  Balsley took off at dawn in his plane, on the side of which his French mechanic had painted the “Lone Star” of Texas. He was accompanied by two other American pilots and the squadron commander, Captain Georges Thenault. The mission of these four fighter planes was to protect some slow and bulky two-seater French observation planes flying above the Battle of Verdun as it raged below them.

  At eleven thousand feet, Balsley and the three other French fighter planes met a superior number of German fighters engaged in protecting their own observation planes. Balsley dove at a two-seater German observation plane, getting within two hundred feet before he fired his Lewis machine gun. The weapon fired once, and jammed. He wrote about those moments:

  “A German was at my left, two were on my right, one was underneath me, and the [plane] I had first attacked was still behind me. From the silence of my gun they would know there was nothing to fear. My fight was over. I could only try to maneuver back to Bar-le-Duc, where my escadrille was stationed.”

  Balsley hurled his plane into evasive actions. “I began to loop; I swung in every direction; I went into a cloud. Bullets followed. One scratched my machine and I slipped away from the man who fired it, and threw the belly of my plane upward.

  “I was then about twelve thousand feet up. It was while I was standing completely on my head, the belly of my machine skyward, that something struck me. It felt like a kick of a mule. With the sensation of losing a leg, I put my hand down to feel if it was still there . . . But as my [right] foot went back with the shock of the bullet, my left foot sprang forward . . . I fell into a spinning nose dive . . . My gun was still useless, my entire right side was paralyzed, and I was bleeding like a pig.”

  The “bullet” that hit Balsley was an explosive bullet like a small artillery shell and a particularly lethal form of ammunition that had been outlawed in various disarmament treaties. It had struck his right thigh, and pieces of the bullet and fragments of his own shattered bones had sliced into his intestines, kidneys, and lungs. Balsley fought against losing consciousness, and somehow managed a crash landing just inside the forward French trench line.

  The moment he landed, being thrown several yards from his demolished plane, German artillery began firing close to him as he lay near the twisted wreckage. Balsley tried to crawl away, but found that the best he could do was to pull himself on his stomach by grabbing at handfuls of high grass. Four French poilus, foot soldiers of the type drawn from France’s farm families, some of whom may have been manual laborers before the war, slid through some nearby barbed wire, and braving the shrapnel flying just above their heads, they brought him to safety. Balsley described those moments:

  “Two took me by the shoulders, two by the feet. Then like a beast unleashed, my pain broke from its long stupor. Almost crawling to escape the enemy’s eye, the four dragged me like a sack of grain. Through the long grass, over and under and across the barbed wire, my bleeding body sagged, and sometimes bumped the ground. The pain had now become such torture that I almost fainted. Oh, if only some enemy would see us, would shoot and end my hell!”

  Carried out of an ambulance and into an overcrowded French evacuation hospital ten miles from Verdun, Balsley was rushed straight to the operating table because he was an American volunteer. As he lay in a hospital bed hours later, he saw the daylight around hi
m fading swiftly, even though it was still afternoon. He knew that the wounded French officer in the bed next to him was named Jacques.

  “Jacques,” he gasped, “—quick! I’m dying. When I go to sleep, wake me!”

  Each time Clyde Balsley’s eyes closed, Jacques cried out, “Réveillez-vous! Réveillez-vous!”—“Wake up! Wake up!”

  This continued for four hours. Then Balsley said, “It’s all right, Jacques. I’m not going to die.”

  Slipping in and out of consciousness, he suffered from great thirst because the doctors would not allow him to drink water due to the wounds in his stomach.

  “My cry for water was so intense that it absorbed every other sense. I wanted to hear water, see water, to feel it trickling through my fingers. So violent was this one longing that I was actually blinded. I did not at first see the man standing beside my bed. Then came to me one by one—the heavy, black hair, the great arms, and the sincerest eyes in the world. When I put them all together, I gave a groan of joy. It was Victor Chapman, flown over from Bar-le-Duc.”

  Seven

  The Oddsmaker Is Impersonal: Victor Chapman

  Chapman came from a rich family in New York City. Educated in both Europe and the United States, this great-great-great-grandson of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, had graduated from Harvard in 1913. A physically powerful outdoorsman with strong spiritual feelings and a deep aesthetic sense, Chapman was living aimlessly in England when Germany declared war on France in August of 1914.

  By the end of September of 1914 Chapman was a foot soldier in the Legion, fighting in the trenches. In December he suffered his first wound, from a rifle bullet in the right arm. He continued his life in the trenches until August of 1915, when he learned that he was being transferred to the French Army’s aviation service. He had not applied for this; it happened through the influence of his father, John Jay Chapman, and his stepmother’s two rich brothers, then living in Paris, William Astor Chanler and Robert Chanler. The three men knew Victor better than he knew himself. He was soon flying as a backseat machine gunner and bombardier, enjoying it far more than ground combat, and in the autumn he began his training to become a pilot.

  A comrade, one of the first seven men to join what became the Lafayette Escadrille when the French regulations changed and that all-American unit was organized in the spring of 1916 (they were known as “The Founders”), said this of Chapman: “Everyone considered him a remarkable pilot. He was absolutely fearless, and always willing and able to fly more than was ever required of him. His machine [plane] was a sieve of patched-up bullet holes.” As a man, he had the reputation of being quiet, kind, and considerate. Balsley later spoke of him as a friend “whom everyone in our squad[ron] loved deeply,” and another man called him “a lover of art and of life,” adding that in combat with enemy pilots Chapman “attacked them, no matter how many there were or what the conditions.” A pilot who roomed with him said, “There is no question but that he had more nerve than all of us put together.”

  The news that Balsley was alive and in a hospital had reached the Escadrille at Bar-le-Duc, and Chapman had flown over with Balsley’s toothbrush. Then, as Balsley told it, they had this exchange.

  “‘Anything I can get you, old man?’ said he, meeting my thirsty eyes.

  “‘You bet,’ I said. ‘They won’t let me have any water.’ The way I kept moistening my lips finished my appeal . . .

  Fig 9. Victor Chapman, of New York City, another Escadrille Founder. As the unit slowly increased in size, all its pilots came to love and admire him for his generous spirit and valor. In this photograph his head is bandaged because of an enemy bullet that creased his scalp. Refusing to take time to recover, he set off on a patrol three days later and was mortally wounded—the first of the Escadrille to die in action.

  “‘How about oranges?’ said he, and turned to my doctor, just at that moment come in.”

  The doctor said oranges would be fine, but that none were available within miles. Chapman responded that he would get Clyde Balsley some oranges, even if he had to fly to Paris to buy them.

  Balsley recalled what happened after that.

  “The next morning I woke from my hot, drugged sleep, to find my captain bending over me.

  “‘Well, mon petit,’ said he, ‘I have a present for you.’ Could it be the oranges at last? I looked up expectantly. Something in the expression of my officer’s face drew my attention to the whole room. There was a deep hush, and through it I felt the eye of every man upon me. Then I saw for the first time that my captain was not alone. The major and colonel were with him.

  “Suddenly the colonel stepped forward.

  “‘In the name of the Republic,’ began he—he took from his pocket a large box—‘I confer upon you le Médaille Militaire and la Croix de Guerre.’

  “‘For me?’ I asked. ‘What for?’

  “The figure in its horizon blue gathered as if about to spring.

  “‘Pourquoi?’ His light, racing syllables slowed solemnly. ‘You are the first American aviator to be seriously wounded—for France. Suffering greatly as you must have suffered, you flew far over German ground to bring your machine back safe—to France. There is sometimes a braver thing than overcoming an enemy. It is overcoming yourself. You, my son, have done this—for a country not your own.’

  “He bent down and kissed me on both cheeks. Then, as I wore no shirt, he laid the medals on the pillow beside me . . . In the solemn hush a cork popped. Madame, chief of the nurses, had produced some champagne, and was pouring a little in the glass of every man in the ward.

  “‘Vive le petit Americain!’ she proposed, her eyes, as mellow and lively as the wine, smiling at me over the bottle.

  “‘Vive le petit Americain!’ came back the cheers, some almost a bark of pain, some already feeble with death, as those specters raised themselves on their pillows.

  “Now I knew what it all meant—those people grouped about me like the picture of some famous death bed. Yesterday I had seen two men decorated. Both had died within an hour. So my time had come!

  “‘Merci,’ I responded at last in a scared voice. Then, to my own surprise, I heard my own voice adding firmly, ‘But I’m not going to die.’”

  The next day Chapman came back with a bag of oranges, and promised to bring more the following day. Chapman now had a big bandage around the top half of his head, for in the meantime he had flown a mission during which a German bullet cut through the very top of his soft leather pilot’s helmet, leaving a deep gash four inches long across his scalp. The doctor at Chapman’s base of Bar-le-Duc urged him to rest for some days before he flew again, but Chapman replied that with the battle for Verdun bleeding both the French and German armies, every man should give his all. As for Balsley, once he had consumed two or three oranges, he limped and lurched around the hospital ward as he handed out the rest of them to the other suffering patients.

  One of the interesting facts about the war as it developed was that a good many parents of the more prosperous American volunteers, men and women who had been used to crossing the Atlantic for pleasure in prewar days, would come over to visit their sons who were now at war. As it happened, Chapman’s father, John Jay Chapman, was in Paris on such a visit when Victor was wounded. Told of that, he said, “If Victor is killed in battle, I am resigned. I am proud that he joined the French Army, and I think that every American boy ought to do the same.”

  For the next several days, Victor Chapman kept coming back, each time with a bag of oranges and cheerful messages from his fellow pilots. On June 23, 1916, a week after Balsley was wounded, instead of Chapman returning with more oranges, another pilot brought him a bag of them. When Balsley asked after Chapman, the man told him that Chapman’s plane had broken down.

  A day later Clyde Balsley learned the truth. His friend, the wounded French captain Jacques, read him the story from a Pa
ris newspaper. Chapman had been in his plane on the ground at Bar-le-Duc with two bags of oranges, ready to fly over to Balsley’s hospital, when he saw three of the Escadrille’s best pilots taxiing out to fly above Verdun.

  The guns of the unit’s planes were always loaded before any flight that took place near the front. Chapman decided to take off behind his comrades and join their mission before going on to visit Balsley. He soared into the clouds and could not find them. The three who had taken off ahead of him had no idea that he was trying to support their efforts. When Chapman finally caught sight of them, they were engaging several German fighter planes. He dove down through the battle, trying to distract the Germans and give his friends an advantage. Even then they did not see him. Outnumbered, they decided to break off and head home. With Chapman alone, three of the German fighter planes pounced on him, fatally shooting him down three and a half miles inside the German lines.

  Thus, in a week’s time, Clyde Balsley had become the first American aviator to be critically wounded in World War One, and Victor Chapman the first to be killed. When Chapman’s father, who had returned to New York, was told of his son’s death, the elder Chapman said, “My son’s life was given in a good cause.” Chapman’s body was not found until years after the war, but two weeks after his death the Fourth of July ceremonies at the American Church in Paris included a memorial service for him. Ranking French military officers and other dignitaries crowded the church, and the congregation included prominent members of the American expatriate community in Paris.