Thenault thanked him, and asked why he had not activated the timer. His prisoner replied, “Mon Capitaine, it is a new invention and I’m no fool. I’ve seen these new inventions go off at the wrong time before now. I’d like to destroy my ship, but I have no faith in new inventions.”
Twelve
Shadows of War in the
“City of Light”
For Parisians, the war unfolded in phases. First came the crisis in September of 1914, during which Paris taxis and buses rushed reinforcements to the dramatic defense at the Marne, which saved the city. Then a surreal calm descended upon its beautiful tree-lined boulevards and great stone monuments. By the spring of 1915, black armbands on the sleeves of older men marked those who had lost a son or grandson killed in bloody trenches fifty miles away, and the streets were filled with bereaved women wearing black. One account of that time said, “For a woman to dress brightly in the latest fashion was to invite the scornful glances of passersby who well knew the price in blood that France had paid each day to keep the city free.”
The Germans occasionally attempted a night air raid on Paris. During one of these, a zeppelin attack, pilot Alfred Holt Stanley, from Elmira, New York, dashed into a darkened doorway to avoid falling bombs. He ran headlong into the arms of Laura Melvin, an American girl working for the Young Women’s Christian Association as an interpreter and ambulance driver. A few months later they married, in Paris.
Only with the beginning of the horrendous Battle of Verdun in the spring of 1916 did the sights of war become common on the capital’s streets. In a letter back to the United States, Alice Weeks wrote this:
“There will be no end of artificial legs needed. You see sometimes five or six men walking together, all with one leg apiece . . . Somehow you don’t see as many armless. This is not so bad, it is only when one sees part of a face gone, that is terrible.
“As I write a regiment is passing going to the front with the band playing the Marseillaise. Poor fellows, but I am glad to see they are not boys. There are also horses with rapid firing [machine] guns strapped to their backs, ending up with a string of ambulances.”
In a later letter, she said:
“Paris is beautiful now, for summer has come at last and today is almost too warm. I walked to the Bois and sat there for an hour . . . I met a young man and woman, dressed in light clothing and thought as they came toward me how well they looked, until I saw he was blind. She looked so happy to have him, even without his eyes, but what a long future before them.”
In addition to benefiting from the decorous hospitality offered by Alice Weeks, many Americans had spectacular weekend leaves in Paris. Once the French patrons of a bar, restaurant, or bordello realized that a group of young men in French uniform, no matter how low their rank, were Americans fighting for France, every subsequent drink or meal or other entertainment was on the house. When such a group appeared at the theater, the entire audience would rise to cheer them. One of the Americans noted in his diary that he had been taken to the Folies Bergère to see its famous chorus line perform a dance that was the talk of Paris, called “La Ceinture Chaussée”—“The Dance of the Chastity Belts.” Others simply noted in their diaries that they had horrible hangovers after drinking in the upstairs bar at the Chatham Hotel, or at the New York Bar, the latter destined to become the first of the many bars around the world called Harry’s Bar.
A number of young pilots lost their virginity at what became known as “the Lafayette whorehouse” at 22 Rue de Berri, near the Arc de Triomphe. Henry Jones of the Escadrille, a pilot known for his resourceful substitute for hard liquor when it was not available—“bay rum, olive oil, and vinegar”—said of a fledgling pilot he took to 22 Rue de Berri for his first sexual experience, “I encouraged him, and he took to it very well.”
Sadly, some of the initiates did not take to it well. A few contracted venereal diseases, which caused them to be dropped from the French Air Service, and one young man who could not face his condition committed suicide.
Thirteen
Things Are Different
Up There, and Then on
the Ground
As the Escadrille’s pilots logged additional hours of aerial combat, its pilots began to experience more of the strange sorts of things that happened fighting in the skies. After all his training, one pilot got into a dogfight in which planes of both sides were whipping past him in every direction, firing the bursts of machine gun fire that marked these lightning encounters. He finally got behind a German fighter plane, opened fire with his Lewis gun—which was capable of firing ninety-seven bullets a minute—and had it jam on him after it had fired only four. To his astonishment and relief, those four bullets killed the German pilot and brought down his plane.
Another pilot saw a French plane catch on fire, with the German pilot who had rendered it helpless watching it about to fall to earth. The French pilot deliberately turned and crashed into his opponent, sending them both to their deaths.
The Escadrille’s pilots became used to the bursts of black smoke caused by enemy antiaircraft fire, but Ned Parsons was startled when, as he described it, “Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, first on one side, then the other, I caught a glimpse, not twenty feet from either wing-tip, of two elongated, bottle-shaped objects hurtling through the air and going in the same direction, passing me so all that I had was just a flash and they disappeared.”
What he saw was a pair of artillery shells that had been fired from cannons on the ground, on their way to distant targets on the ground. “[They] must have been nearly at the top of their trajectory and at the point of inertia or I wouldn’t have seen them at all.” He was shocked “when I realized what these objects were and what would have happened to me had I been a few feet on one side or the other.”
During a combat mission a pilot named Andrew Courtney Campbell, a bagpipe-playing young man from Illinois whom another Escadrille pilot described as a prankster “to whom trouble seemed to gravitate as naturally as iron filings to a magnet,” managed to get the fixed-in-place wheels of his plane jammed through the canvas fabric of the upper wing of the biplane being flown by one of his squadron mates. There they were, stuck together and flying in the same direction. In a desperate attempt to extricate both of them from the crisis he had created, Campbell managed to use full power to soar away, tearing his plane’s wheels out of the canvas wing below him. The pilot in the lower plane managed to make a crash landing from which he walked off unharmed. Campbell landed shortly afterward, treating the whole thing as a joke. Twelve days later, he was shot down and killed.
In the heat of combat, some men became capable of astonishing acts. A German antiaircraft shell passed through a French two-seater piloted by an American. The antiaircraft shell exploded, beyond the plane “but did not put the plane out of order, although it took the pilots’ foot entirely off. He reached down and took up the foot and threw it back to the observer behind him, saying, ‘Throw that at the damned Boches,’ and brought the airplane down safely. He is now back again with a wooden foot, flying.”
Occasionally situations occurred that left men on both sides bemused. During the spectacular loops and turns that occurred in a dogfight above an airfield the Escadrille was using, a German pilot lost a fine fur-lined flying glove, and it came floating down near a hangar. One of the American pilots picked it up—at that time in the Escadrille such a glove was “an unheard-of luxury”—and thought how nice it would be to have another glove as good as that. The next day the German pilot came zooming out of the sky at the risk of his life and dropped the other glove. Inside it was a To Whom It May Concern letter written in good English that said having only one glove was doing the German pilot no good, and expressed the hope that whoever now had both of them would fly safely and have good luck. The American pilot “was delighted to accept his gift, dropping a note of sincere thanks to the donor.”
As more time passed, the hou
rs in the air proved to be increasingly far from glamorous. Ned Parsons wrote this vivid description:
“Take a ship up to fifteen thousand feet, sit there for two hours immovable, and mere words are difficult to describe the pure agony of mind and body. The sub-zero temperature penetrated the very marrow of your bones. Despite three or four pairs of gloves, fingers coiled around the stick [control column] would be paralyzed in five minutes. Then they would have to be forced open and pushed away from the stick with the other hand and the paralyzed hand beaten against the side of the fuselage to restore circulation. A few minutes later the process would have to be reversed.”
It was not much better on the ground. The cold of some bases was so intense that when a plane landed, the engine had to be kept running the whole time it was there or it wouldn’t restart.
There was the problem of breathing. At fifteen thousand feet an additional supply of oxygen was imperative. In Bert Hall’s book “En l’Air!” he described how pilots coped with this:
“We also carry oxygen tubes . . . Your heart will stop working without oxygen. We have rubber tubes and when we get to feeling a little giddy, we stick this tube in our mouth and blow ourselves up. One charge of oxygen will last about fifteen minutes.”
Parsons described other elements of discomfort, bordering on torture:
“Feet were twin lumps of ice, rigid and unfeeling; shooting pains throughout the entire body, eyeballs and teeth smarting and burning, icy scalp contracting till it felt as if the skull must burst through and explode in a shower of bones, heart pumping half-congealed ice water instead of warm blood—thus it can easily be understood why liquor was a necessity. Without it, a man might easily come to earth a frozen corpse.”
There it was. Liquor. Parsons emphasized, “When I say necessity, I mean necessity without qualification.” He carried a half-pint aluminum flask filled with brandy in the breast pocket of his flying suit. “With judicial nipping, [the brandy] would just about hold out for a two-hour patrol.”
After the Escadrille had been fully operational for two months, certain physiological and psychological problems common to all fighter pilots became evident. Simply flying at freezing high altitudes in cramped, open, unheated cockpits without plentiful oxygen placed their bodies under the great stress that Ned Parsons described. A German pilot wrote that sleep is “the food of the nerves,” and many pilots found themselves sleeping ten and twelve hours a day.
When it came to relieving psychological stress, Parsons viewed alcohol as a friend on the ground as well as in the air. He said that he had never seen a pilot so hungover that he could not perform his duties, but he believed in alcohol as a sedative. “Few people,” he wrote, “realized how necessary alcoholic relaxation was for nerve-strained aviators.” After the first flight in which he heard strings of German bullets snap past his head, “I set my wheels down on the home tarmac and attempted to hop nonchalantly out of my ship. My knees absolutely refused to support me. They gave way like two pieces of string, and I had to wrap a shaking arm around a strut and hang on for dear life for over a minute. My sympathetic head mechanic, Felix Henriot, thought I had been shot through the body at least a dozen times. My face was greenish yellow, and my wildly staring eyes strained through two smudged circles that resembled holes in a blanket.”
In the months that followed, when many Escadrille pilots had to spend two or three two-hour patrols in the air every day, Parsons found that “I wasn’t sleeping nights. Flocks of planes chased themselves around in my tired brain all the time. I should have been thoroughly relaxed. Motors roared and machine-guns snarled. I pictured on a vivid background the combats I had fought during the previous day, the mistakes I had made, and visualized what I should try to do in the next fight to get more Huns. Frequently I got up for [dawn] patrols with the wambling twitters, and I was quite likely to burst into tears if anyone spoke harshly to me, or do a backflip if anyone dropped a shoe. A couple of shots of light stimulus and the wibble-wabbles quieted, and they didn’t make a Hun too tough for me.”
These haunting moments followed many pilots after the war. Captain Elliott White Springs of the Lafayette Flying Corps, a man who shot down eleven enemy planes and later became the postwar president of the Springs Mills textile giant, said this of himself: “Sober, I’m a nervous, serious-minded, conscientious, cold-blooded wreck, who lives in the past with my mind amid the triumphs and thrills and noises of the front, still feeling the fears and anxieties . . . But give me liquor, Ah . . . and I become a cheerful, optimistic little fellow . . . I get almost human.”
All these strains inevitably affected morale. When these able, intelligent young men encountered realities like flying without parachutes and seeing men being burned to death as a fighter plane spun its way thousands of feet to the ground, it produced such reflections as this, written by Ned Parsons:
“None of us had any real idea of what we were getting into. We had hold of the bear’s tail and no one to help us let go. With few exceptions, I believe most of us would have welcomed the opportunity to bow out gracefully . . . We were merely very wild but very frightened youngsters, fighting with unfamiliar weapons in a new element, leaping to fame, and being made heroes overnight by newspaper publicity . . . Our sole claim to heroism was in being half-scared to death and doing our best in spite of it!”
Surrounded by every kind of fatal violence, Charles Dolan, the son of a Boston politician and the one man in the Escadrille who did not drink, said, “There was no one in the Escadrille who expected to survive the air war. It was not a question of would you die, it was just when!”
Ned Parsons saw it a bit differently. Speaking of the German fliers, he said, “Our adversaries in the air never represented personalities to us . . . our aerial battles were just like a game, with the personal element entirely lacking. But it was a game played for high stakes, and the penalty was death.”
Fourteen
Bert Hall Takes Life
by the Horns
After finishing his advanced training to become a fully qualified fighter pilot, on Bert Hall’s first combat mission in the northeast of France he saw a two-seater German observation plane called an Albatros, a craft differently configured from the single-seat Albatros fighter. He attacked the enemy plane, hitting it with machine gun fire, and maneuvered it into a position very close to the ground. With the observer wounded and sprawled unconscious in the backseat, the enemy pilot was ready to surrender. Hall explained what happened then.
“When we passed over the village of Suippes, I indicated a field south of the railway near the main road. The German apparently understood and proceeded to make a very fair landing. Through watching the enemy plane, I didn’t take very good notice of the ground and was forced to make another tour of the field before making my landing.
“When I finally jumped out and ran over to the German plane, I saw the pilot was about to apply a lighted match to the underside of the fuselage, the portion just below the engine. The fabric at this point is always oil-soaked and will burn very easily. About twenty meters away lay the observer; he seemed to be breathing his last.
“It was a time for quick action. The thought of that beautiful German Albatros going up in smoke was particularly distressing. Our squadron hadn’t brought home so perfect a prize, and now it was about to be burned by a fellow who I might have bounced off in the air.
“The German saw me coming. He did his best to hurry up the fire, but I swung a terrific right and landed my fist on the point of his chin. There was no bonfire that day. Some French ambulance men took care of the wounded observer and when the pilot regained consciousness, a detachment of French soldiers made him their prisoner. And was that pilot sore! He raved like a wild man! The idea of a German officer being struck in the face! The idea of carrying on warfare with one’s fists! It was inconceivable!
“I was merely amused . . . I did explain to him, however, that I had used my fist inst
ead of my automatic [pistol]. I might have finished him off in the air, or from a safe distance on the ground. But the German idea of a sporting chance didn’t seem to involve a fistfight.
“When I landed the [captured] Albatros on our field at La Cheppe, there was what the French call a crisis of excitement . . . Best of all, Marshal [Joseph] Joffre had witnessed the entire procedure and was pleased no little bit—it was the first [aerial] combat he had seen up close—not that it was much of a combat, but that it turned out so successfully for the French.”
On his way to a record that included shooting down four German planes and assisting his Escadrille comrades in several of their victories, Bert Hall became involved in a bizarre situation that might have become the worst international incident of the war. He and three other pilots “were given orders to convoy a group of bombing planes over to a German railway center where some troop movements were reported.” The bombers were from Britain’s Royal Naval Air Force, which had been created by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. They were stationed on the other side of the large grass airfield at Luxeuil, to which the Escadrille had been returned for further duty.
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