First to Fly

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  Ten

  There Was This Man Named Bert Hall

  Some American pilots had been flying with French squadrons for months, but by the spring of 1916 the Escadrille was ready to enter combat as a unit. Thirty-eight Americans would fly in the Escadrille, every one of them entitled to be known as what the French called “un numero”—“a character.” They presented an interesting demographic picture. At a time when to be “a college man” was a rarity, thirty of them either had college degrees or had attended college. That did not mean they all came from affluent families: a later study said that “fourteen were from families of average income; four rose out of the depths of poverty.”

  Sons of the American social elite were represented: Of the first seven pilots who reported in—those who became known as the Escadrille’s “Founders”—two went to Groton and Harvard, one went to St. Paul’s and Harvard, one went to the Hill School and Yale, one had been at the University of Virginia, and another attended Washington and Lee. Those six were the sons of millionaires.

  Fig 11. Bert Hall, the Escadrille’s controversial man of mystery. He traveled throughout prewar Europe as a professional card player. During parts of 1917, he served on special missions to Romania and Russia and acted as a spy for the French in Russia. A noted womanizer, his liaisons included one with the famous spy Mata Hari.

  The seventh “Founder” was Weston Bert Hall, known as “Bert.” He was a larger-than-life figure of mystery and legend. He was a slender man, five feet, eight inches tall, with a long thin nose, and photographs show his expression as varying between confidence and suspicion. At times he claimed to be born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on November 7, 1880, making him thirty-five when the Escadrille began its official existence, but other records show him to have been born in Higginsville, Missouri, on November 7 of 1885.

  Bert left home in his early teens and soon went to work as a section hand on the Rock Island Railroad. He went on to jobs in Kansas City and Dallas. By 1911, he had gained a wealth of experience from floating around the nation doing odd jobs. Most of his time had been spent in the Southwest, but he had been out to San Francisco, and up to Alaska. Later events showed him to be a skilled gambler, and he knew how to use his fists.

  By the time he hooked up with the Escadrille, Hall had also been married and divorced twice. (His relationship with women was a story in itself. During his lifetime he is known to have had five wives, and may well have been a bigamist.) He had also competed successfully in automobile races held on the beaches of Galveston, Texas. In 1911 he was working as a chauffeur for a Galveston cotton broker named D. W. Kempner.

  In 1912, Kempner and his wife decided to go to Paris, taking their chauffeur Hall with them. Soon after they reached France, Hall quit working for the Kempners. As with many episodes in his life, one version has it that the Kempners fired him, and the other is that Bert saw Europe as a beckoning playground. He told colorful stories about his next two years. The efficiency with which he later cleaned out his fellow Escadrille pilots in card games supported his claim that he had used those two prewar years traveling throughout Europe, competing profitably in bridge tournaments and winning poker games. He became fluent in French, German, and Italian, and seduced many women.

  Among those with whom he had (or said he had) liaisons was Mata Hari, the Dutch beauty and exotic dancer who was convicted of being a German spy and executed by a French firing squad. (“Mata Hari” was her Indonesian stage name. Her Dutch name was Margaretha Zelle. When Hall learned of her death, he wrote this in his diary: “I don’t think I ever loved Maggie Zelle, nor do I believe she ever loved me, but it makes me feel all creepy when I think of her standing up before a firing squad, particularly after we had made such violent protestations of affection to each other, and had spent such wonderful times together.”)

  Bert Hall mixed with all levels of society, and could cut anyone down to size. When a socialite hostess took a condescending tone in asking him what his hobby was, he answered her with two words: “sexual intercourse.” One account of his life, covering his activities in war and peace, described him as being “half hero and half heel.” Another writer said of the difficulty in establishing the facts about Hall, “The problem for . . . the squadron’s legacy was that Hall managed to outlive the six other founding members.”

  As the war began, Bert Hall was a taxi driver in Paris. Of the seven “Founders,” five were dead by the time the United States entered the war in 1917. Bert Hall, however, went on and on, displaying his mental agility from the start. Enlisting immediately, he first fought in the Foreign Legion. When he took his French Army physical to become a flier, he knew that the man in line beside him, Bill Thaw, with whom he had been serving in ground combat with the Foreign Legion, had poor eyesight despite having logged many hours of successful flight before the war. He also knew that Thaw had been in France for more than two years and could read French very well. Hall gave this description of how things went when they appeared before the French eye doctor: “When he produced a French newspaper and held it up for us to read, Bill Thaw almost died . . . I went first so as to have time to think up something. When Bill’s time came I told the doctor that Bill had not been in France very long and couldn’t read a newspaper; therefore, a fair test couldn’t be made with a French newspaper. ‘Well,’ said the doctor, ‘are his eyes all right?’ ‘Surely,’ I said, ‘best eyes in the French Army!’”

  Thaw was accepted for French military aviation. As for Bert Hall’s mental capacities, in 1918, the last year of the war, a New York publisher brought out a book Hall had written titled “En L’air!”—every indication is that he wrote this book himself, based in good part on his diary entries. One study of his life calls it “his one true autobiography.”

  There is, however, another version of his experiences. In Paris, Hall met a Kentuckian named John Jacob Niles who was also a pilot. An accomplished musician, Niles was collecting some of the wartime songs. They reached an agreement that Hall would share his wartime diary with Niles, so that Niles could, as one account put it, “beef up” the diary entries and come up with something longer than the 152-page “En l’Air!” The result, published in 1929, was the 353-page One Man’s War, billed as a collaboration between them and containing any number of episodes not found in Hall’s first book. Intentionally or not, Bert Hall left a tangled factual legacy.

  In Bert Hall’s One Man’s War, he described some of his training as an aviator, but it was left to another man, David Wooster King, a Harvard graduate from Providence, Rhode Island, who had served in the Foreign Legion with Hall, to recount Hall’s debut in French aviation. Hall had been telling stories of his prewar exploits as a flier. At the French Army’s flying school at Buc, outside of Paris, “Bert climbed into the machine, had the controls explained to him, and started off . . . Full speed ahead, up, and then down with a crash. After they had extricated him from the debris the officer in charge questioned him.

  “‘What went wrong?’

  “‘I don’t know.’

  “‘You don’t know! Haven’t you ever been in a plane before?’

  “‘No.’

  “‘What in God’s holy name do you mean—starting off like that?’

  “‘Well, I thought I might be able to fly.’”

  King concluded: “They decided he had enough nerve to be worth training.” Nonetheless, knowing of his checkered past and thinking they might have another spy in their midst, during his early training the French authorities kept two agents pretending to be student pilots literally beside him, one sleeping on either side of his bunk.

  Bert’s learning curve as a pilot rose swiftly after his initial weeks in the cockpit. Before the next step, that of receiving advanced training to become a fighter pilot, he went to the Western Front as the pilot of an observation plane, which carried in the seat behind him an observer who tapped out radio messages in Morse code to French heavy artillery batteries on
the ground. Hall described one of his earliest scouting missions.

  “A volunteer was called for. I stepped forward, and with Lieutenant Manigal, who volunteered as my observer, hopped off.

  “The weather was very cloudy and the ceiling was low. We crossed the lines so low that they shot at us with everything they had. Our wings were punctured in a dozen places. Under cover of the fog and the low clouds the Germans were bringing up some reinforcements. Headquarters had been advised of this through the Intelligence Department. Finally, after almost giving up our search we discovered that the report was well founded. At a point about thirteen kilometers east of Sommepy [140 miles northeast of Paris], the roads were jammed with all kinds of equipment, but mostly marching columns. This was our meat.

  “We signaled our batteries, and the long-range gunners, who knew to a meter the location of every square foot of that country, opened up. The slaughter was something awful. Whole columns of Boche disappeared and wagon trains were splintered into mere heaps of tangled twisted junk. By flying back and forth, we gave the batteries closer ranges and they regulated their shots with amazing precision. The road I am telling you about runs perfectly straight after it gets out of Sommepy—perfectly straight for a long, long way. It was easy for the gunners, once they had the location right and left, to raise or lower the trajectory of their shots and sweep the road for miles each way.

  “The ground rocked beneath us . . . We wanted to stay and see the end, but our gas was getting low, so we skimmed under the edge of the clouds, and dodging the fire from the ground, made our way back to camp.

  “This story will give the civilian reader an idea of how important airplanes have quickly become in modern warfare. One airplane (and not a very good one at that), one pilot (more or less a green one) and an observer, with the cooperation of the artillery, breaking up the most carefully laid plan of the enemy; perhaps, saving the lives of hundreds of our own men and costing the enemy great losses in both manpower and equipment.”

  Before the war Bert Hall had been living in a small apartment in the Passy district of Paris, near the Bois de Boulogne. All was confusion as the war began.

  “I never will forget the concierge who took care of the building. She came to me on Sunday morning (mobilization having been announced the afternoon before, and all the railways going east and north having been taken over by the Government) and said:

  “‘Monsieur Hall will be very patient with an old lady after this.’

  “‘Why, yes, Mother Pivot, surely I’ll be patient with an old lady. Haven’t I always been? Has something happened? Have I been pas gentil [unkind]?’

  “‘It is only the war.’ Referring to her son, she added, ‘Philip has joined his regiment. I must attend to the building alone now. Monsieur Hall will be very patient.’

  “She seemed to be looking far off over the excitement and bustle of the terrified city—far off to a marching column of blue-clad figures. Her son Philip was in the column—Philip, who wanted to be an architect. He had been attending the Beaux Arts. The concierge had known war before. Her father was a veteran of [the Franco-Prussian War of] 1870. I tried to be impersonal about the situation, but I’m sure I was not. The old lady looked like a painting—she was wearing the usual little white starched collar that marked her Sunday costume from the things she wore on week days.

  “‘Yes, Mother Pivot, I’ll be patient, and if I can do anything any time for you or Philip—’

  “It was an old worn-out phrase, but to save my life I couldn’t think of another thing. She bowed her little formal bow and went away. Later I looked into her little room where she sat beside the downstairs doorway. A small red candle was burning beside a picture of Christ. Not far away was a picture of Philip. It had been taken when he entered the Beaux Arts. As I went way downtown, I thought of what Mother Pivot had said, ‘C’est la guerre.’ It was the first time I had ever heard the phrase used.”

  Within two weeks, Bert Hall had enlisted in the Foreign Legion at a French Army office in Les Invalides, the former military hospital that housed Napoleon’s tomb.

  “Following the trip to the Invalides, there were several hours of frenzied packing. Mamma Pivot did everything she could to help, telling me about her Philip all the while. Philip had been in several engagements—rear guard actions, they called them, because by that time, the French Army was retreating.

  “When at last my meager traveling kit was assembled and Mamma Pivot came to tell me au revoir, she kissed me very gently and told me to be a good boy and some other things I didn’t understand. There was an exhilarating sense of youth about that old lady—her body had grown old, but her attitude towards life had remained young. Since the very first day of the war she had been rolling back the calendar until by the 25th of August, she was quite as active as any sixteen-year-old girl, even in such matters as kissing soldiers good-bye.”

  Eleven

  New Commanders for a

  New Form of Combat

  The men of the Escadrille—American pilots and the French mechanics and other ground personnel—knew that there was a hierarchy that ordered their squadron to move from one part of the Western Front to another, but on the unit level their lives were in the hands of Captain Georges Thenault of the French Army.

  Thenault was born in 1888, the son of a schoolteacher and his wife in the rural province of Poitou. A good student, he entered Saint-Cyr, the French Army’s West Point, graduating in 1909. One of the few army officers who were interested in aviation, Thenault became a pilot in 1913, the year before the war. By mid-1915 he was the commander of the squadron designated “C. 42.” One of his fighter pilots was Bill Thaw, who had finished his service in the Foreign Legion and was now a sergeant-pilot, and they became friends. By that time Thaw had become involved in the effort to create an American squadron, which was on its way to being approved. Thaw suggested to Thenault, who spoke good English, that he ought to apply to become the new unit’s commander. With Thaw’s help, Thenault got the job.

  Thenault would never say that he regretted his decision to lead the Escadrille, but he could not have anticipated some of what he encountered. Evidently wishing these American volunteers to be handled gently, his superiors severely restricted his disciplinary powers. In his official statements, Thenault praised his pilots, but in a private conversation he said that they saw themselves this way:

  “We are here, we are daredevils, and we don’t need French discipline!”

  A Canadian pilot who had done some drinking with the Escadrille gave a detailed description of what Thenault faced:

  “From the point of view of discipline, the situation was practically impossible for the French. Imagine a body of financially well-off Americans—basking in the knowledge that they were volunteers from a neutral country, who habitually played no-limit poker, who imported unlimited booze and food and who composed a body of men far superior educationally and possessed a far greater knowledge of the world than their French companions in arms—a French commander would have experienced great difficulty controlling such a body of men [even] if they had been French citizens and fully subject to French Army regulations . . . [Thenault] seemed hapless to cope with such independent, high-spirited men.”

  In writing of their experiences, two of the Escadrille credited Thenault with tact and patience in dealing with them, but all of the men, including some French pilots who occasionally lived and fought beside the Americans, complained of the way he played the piano in their succession of little squadron clubrooms. One account pictured it this way: “Thenault would invariably take command of the ivories and churn out such a horrendous racket that even his faithful dog Fram would howl in protest to stop.”

  Despite criticism of Thenault, the captain had a gift for identifying the combination of reflexes, courage, and judgment needed in a fighter pilot. Rather than simply accepting the American volunteers arbitrarily assigned to him, he periodically went
to the replacement station at Le Plessis-Belleville thirty miles north of Paris, where newly trained pilots awaited their orders, and interviewed them. He made a surprising choice when he picked Dudley Hill, of Peekskill, New York. Hill was blind in one eye, but memorized the physical exam eye chart, and was accepted for pilot training. His French instructors soon discovered his handicap, but they liked him, and came to believe he displayed such good reflexes and instincts—what one leading French pilot called the balance between “discipline and audacity”—that he could do as well with one eye as many other pilots could with two.

  Thenault passed over several seemingly far better prospects to take Hill on. As one later account put it, Thenault had chosen, “in spite of his handicaps, a courageous, durable, unusually proficient flyer who logged more time (on the line ready to fly, or on patrol) than any other member of the Escadrille.”

  In addition to breaking in his novice pilots by leading them through the skies on their early patrols, Thenault took them for rides in a staff car through areas behind the front lines, pointing out flat open areas where they could land if they could not make it back to their home field. This would lead to some uses of these areas and those like them that Thenault did not anticipate.

  One American pilot offered a picture of Thenault found nowhere else. Writing in his college reunion yearbook twenty-one years after he served in the Escadrille, he said this of conditions the squadron faced while serving at an airfield right on “the North Sea Front with the British. Life in mouldy, wet tents on the beach. Our Captain sets up his headquarters in a bawdy house, the only warm place always open.”

  As commander, Thenault had some encounters he could not have imagined. A German single-seater fighter plane had an engine failure and landed at a base the Escadrille was using. The pilot got out of his plane, came into the squadron headquarters, and asked to speak to the commanding officer as soon as possible. When Thenault appeared, the enemy pilot saluted and formally surrendered. In good French, he told Thenault that his plane had an explosive device attached beneath its fuselage that would blow up the plane fifteen seconds after a timer was turned on. That would give the pilot time to run some distance away, but prevent a captor from making further use of the plane. He had not started the timer, and wanted the squadron’s ordnance men to know that they were dealing with something dangerous.