When Hall led the four Escadrille planes to the point where they were to meet and escort the British bombers, he realized that the Royal Navy flight leader had made a terrible mistake. His instructions had been to head for the smoke from the factories and railway facilities at the German city of Mulhouse, but “they were lost, and were about to bomb Basle [Basel], Switzerland, instead of Mulhouse, Germany . . . If those Britishers couldn’t be stopped before they dropped their bombs . . . [the] Lafayette Escadrille would be in disgrace and the Royal Naval Air Force would be court-martialed from hell to breakfast . . . As soon as I caught up with the British bombers, the leader of the flight waved to me and was very pleased, but he kept right on going. Basle, Switzerland, in ten minutes! I fired my guns and did acrobatics to gain their attention. They wiggled their wings and waved at me . . . I wanted to strangle every one of them.
“At one time I really considered the possibility of diving at the leader and colliding with him, or shooting him down before I should allow the unnecessary slaughter of innocent Swiss civilians. But finally something snapped . . . The flight leader fired a Very pistol signal [a flare]. The bombers turned around as one man and flew back to Luxeuil as fast as they could.
“. . . When we got back to the field, I landed first and waited for the Limeys, to see what sort of story they would put up. Finally they came, Sopwiths, Farmans, and all. Still I waited. Do you-all know those Limeys weren’t even going to mention what happened? When I broached the subject, one of them said: ‘Oh, yes, old man, thanks awfully for putting us wise. It would have been goddamned awful to crash in those poor Switzers. They would have been writing diplomatic notes two years from now.’”
Fifteen
Aces
The greatest of the Americans to fly for the Escadrille arrived quietly. A fellow pilot described Raoul Lufbery: “Broad forehead, deep-set eyes, squat, chunky figure just a trifle over five feet six and muscles of steel. He rarely ever talked, but when he did, it was with a strange accent that had traces of every nationality with which he had been in contact.” Born in France in 1885, at the age of twenty-three in 1908 Lufbery had begun years of prewar travel that took him successively to Wallingford, Connecticut; Cuba; New Orleans; San Francisco; and innumerable other places. Still a French citizen, he eventually enlisted in the United States Army and served in the Philippines, thus becoming a naturalized American citizen. In an indication of what was to come, during his Army service he was the best rifle shot in his regiment of a thousand men, at a time when the Regular Army prided itself on its marksmanship.
After further travels to Japan and China, when Lufbery was in India in 1912 he met Marc Pourpe, the famous French flier whose acrobatic maneuvers thrilled crowds at early air shows. Lufbery became Pourpe’s mechanic and close friend; together they toured Egypt, where Pourpe made a famous pioneering 1,250-mile trip from Cairo to Khartoum.
Bert Hall, who became a good friend of Lufbery’s when they served together in the Escadrille, said that Pourpe had described Lufbery in these terms:
“He was a walking encyclopedia. He could tell you about any city that amounted to a damn anywhere in the civilized or uncivilized world. He could tell you how to spell the name of the city, where it was located, when the train left, what the jails were like, how the police treated gang fighters, if the food was any good; in fact, he could supply any information needed by a soldier of fortune, and that’s what Luf was.”
Pourpe and Lufbery were in Paris in the summer of 1914 so that Pourpe could pick up a new plane to perform in additional air shows in the Far East, but, with the start of the war in August, Pourpe became a French military pilot, and Lufbery served as his mechanic. In December Pourpe was killed coming in for a night landing in a fog. The Germans had nothing to do with the accident, but Lufbery swore vengeance upon them. He found his way to the Lafayette Escadrille, where his friends called him “Luf.” Another Escadrille pilot said of the inscrutable future ace: “I only know one certain thing about him: Raoul Lufbery flew, fought, and died for revenge.”
Fig 12. Raoul Lufbery was the squadron’s leading ace, with seventeen enemy planes shot down. Born in France, this adventurer gained naturalized American citizenship by serving in the United States Army in the Philippines. His future fame in the air was foreshadowed by his being the best marksman in his infantry regiment of a thousand men.
Luf also had a passion for mushrooms. Bert Hall said, “Lufbery is a mushroom hound. Every time it rains he goes out and gathers some mushrooms. The French say he is going on a reconnaissance des champignons.”
During his time working and traveling with Pourpe, Luf had become a skilled mechanic, and brought all his practical knowledge to the Escadrille. Ned Parsons remembered this: “He spent hours at the butts [firing range], firing and regulating his [machine] guns, so that there would be no jams. He had his cartridges triple calibrated, thus eliminating to the greatest possible extent the chances of an oversized shell sticking in the breech-block.”
The less experienced pilots found themselves in desperate situations from which they were saved by those more gifted than they. A pilot praised Lufbery’s ability to rescue his comrades:
“He had a happy faculty of being on the spot at the right moment to rescue some unhappy buzzard who had gotten himself into a jam . . . Oft-times sacrificing a sure kill of his own, with his uncanny faculty for watching everything that happened in a dogfight, he’d sweep through the lead-filled sky to some isolated spot where a desperate youngster was waging a losing fight. Making a lightning decision as to his best method of attack, he would dart here, there, and everywhere, till it seemed as if the whole sector were full of Lufbery-piloted planes. Twisting and turning in a succession of amazing acrobatics, firing a short burst at one, then another, he bewildered and confounded the enemy hornets. No odds were too great in an emergency.”
At times it seemed as if the odds were too great. When Lufbery came back from a draw in a dogfight with Oswald Boelcke, a leading German ace whom Richthofen considered to have been his mentor, his plane was “so thoroughly shot up that it was junked as being beyond repairs.” As for Lufbery himself, it was found that “two bullets went through Luf’s flying suit and one through his fur-lined boot.”
On another occasion he landed at Luxeuil with “four neat bullet holes in his instrument panel, two on each side of his body, so perfectly in alignment that a deflection of a fraction of an inch either way would have put them squarely into his brave heart. Luf always said that he was glad he didn’t take a deep breath at the wrong time. In addition, there were twenty-two more neat holes stitched in his wings and fuselage.”
Fig 13. Captain Oswald Boelcke, von Richthofen’s instructor and mentor. Himself the victor in forty “kills,” he died two years before von Richthofen when he and his wingman crashed into each other while chasing a British plane. Ironically, Boelcke had developed the doctrine that two planes should never converge on a single enemy.
As for how he had become what he was, a squadron mate offered this: “His air work was incomparable. It didn’t come easily, for he wasn’t a natural-born flier. He gradually and literally ‘pulled himself [up] by his bootstraps’ till he became the master craftsman. Then his plane became a part of himself, a thing that can be said of but few airmen. He flew as the bird flies, without any thought of how it was done.”
Captain Thenault felt that Lufbery was made of some special material. He wrote, “To fly high is very fatiguing, as the sudden changes of altitude tire the heart. But never have I met a pilot with more endurance than Lufbery. When the sky was clear he would go up to eighteen thousand feet just for his own pleasure . . . Never was he at all ill from it. He was a superman.” Utilizing Luf’s combination of fortitude, skill, and intuition, Thenault repeatedly sent him to higher altitudes, above where the other pilots were patrolling, to “dominate the situation.”
Thenault saw Lufbery as a man always poised and calm, but
on one occasion he received a telegram from Lufbery saying in sketchy French, SUIS RETENU DANS UN DISCIPLINAIRE PLACE DE CHARTRES—“I am held in a jail in Chartres.” Lufbery had been standing on the first-class platform of the station in that cathedral city when a ticket collector, doing his job, asked him for his identity papers and his ticket. In doing so he brushed against the seemingly unflappable Lufbery, whose nerves snapped. He attacked the man, punching him to the ground as he knocked out six of his teeth. Thenault wired the military authorities at Chartres, asking them to release a man who had done worse than that to a number of German pilots.
Other than an evident dislike of being touched unexpectedly, one great fear haunted Lufbery. Bert Hall described a postflight talk he had with Lufbery, in which Hall told him about attacking a German photographic plane above Verdun. The enemy observer had put some bursts of machine gun bullets through the top wing of Hall’s biplane, but, as Bert wrote of what happened to the enemy pilot, “When flames burst from his forward cockpit, I knew it was all over.”
Lufbery asked, “Afire, Bertie?”
“Yes, Luf, right over Fort Douaumont.”
Lufbery’s response to that was, “God, it’s awful to burn up in the air. I’ll never do it. I’ll jump first.”
Luf became involved in a unique situation. At different times, pilots of the Escadrille would be sent to Paris to pick up new planes. On one occasion the men who had just arrived in the city included Bert Hall and Lufbery. Hall said this happened:
“We hadn’t been in Paris two hours until one of our boys came running, stuttering and all out of breath. He had cut an advertisement from the newspaper.
“‘Look, fellows, look, great stuff! Woman wants to sell a lion cub. Let’s buy it for the Escadrille. Mascot, good luck, lion cub, doctor’s wife.’
“‘Christamighty,’ said Lufbery, ‘don’t be a damned fool! What would we do with a bloody lion cub! Why, grow up, don’t be a continual ass!’
“‘No, Luf. A lion is lucky, and we can get this one cheap!’
“No form of argument would prevent him from dragging us out to the far side of northern Paris to visit the doctor’s wife. The lion cub had been born on the Mediterranean Sea . . . [and was] en route to a zoo in western France. The moment we saw the baby lion, we fell for him. He was a him, with blue eyes, and the most adorable manner. He cost us 125 francs. [The equivalent of thirty dollars.] We named him on the spot, ‘Whiskey.’”
Ned Parsons described Whiskey, and his first days with his new owners:
“He was a cute, bright-eyed baby who tried to roar in a most ferocious manner, but who was blissfully content the moment one gave him a finger to suck . . . Whiskey got a splendid view of Paris during the first days he was there, for someone in the crowd was always borrowing him to take him some place. When it was suggested that he would eventually have to be caged, Jim McConnell, the eloquent pilot from Chicago who wrote the book titled Flying for France, popped up with the classic remark:
“‘Why put him behind bars? He’ll see all the bars he needs, traveling with this crowd.’
“So, during all the existence of the Escadrille, Whiskey was rarely confined, but roamed at large and romped with the pilots just like a big dog. Dogs for a long time were his constant companions, and Luf used to say that was one reason why Whiskey was so gentle—‘Because he didn’t know he was a lion and thought he was just another dog.’
“. . . When Whiskey was a year old, we figured that it was only proper that he should have a wife, so after diligent search we found a little female, who quite naturally was promptly named Soda. Whiskey was tickled as a kid with a new fire engine when he was introduced, and they got along famously, but Soda was never the pal with us that Whiskey was. She tried to imitate him in everything he did, except his friendly attitude. She had a mean disposition, always spitting, clawing, and scratching, and never wanted to be fondled like Whiskey, who adored petting.”
The fame of the mascots grew swiftly; referring to the Western Front, one of the pilots soon said, “They are known from one end of the line to the other.”
Fig 14. Lufbery playing with the squadron mascot Whiskey. The two became inseparable.
Whiskey developed a great affection for Lufbery, and as he grew to full size Luf trained him to do some unconventional things. Bert Hall described that:
“One trick the two performed together was for Lufbery to plant Whiskey in ambush against some unsuspecting poilu who had been visiting the squadron for the purpose of viewing the mascots. On Lufbery’s command, the lion would bound from his hiding place and pounce on the terrified visitor, usually driving the unfortunate soldier to the ground, whereupon Whiskey would put his head back and open his mouth wide, showing all his yellowed fangs in a silent laugh.”
On July 14, 1915, France’s great holiday of Bastille Day, the men of the Escadrille Americaine, yet to be renamed the Lafayette Escadrille, had a wild party at Bar-le-Duc. Their guest of honor, a twenty-two-year-old French pilot equal to any amount of celebrating, was Sous-Lieutenant Charles Nungesser. Of France’s several great aces, he was the most colorful.
Fig 15. Whiskey and his later-acquired partner “Soda.”
Nungesser’s story was the stuff of legend. As his name, gold forelock, glittering blue eyes, and fair complexion indicated, this handsome French youth was the descendant of Viking warriors. At sixteen, he was a well-built, ferociously competitive young athlete who stood five-nine and weighed 150 pounds. His adventurous spirit led him to set off in 1908 for South America, where he soon found himself penniless in Buenos Aires. Hoping that his trade school training as a mechanic might produce a job, he went to an airfield and asked a French pilot he found there who had just landed in a Blériot monoplane, “Can I fly that?” The man replied with the French equivalent of “Get lost, kid” and walked off without looking back. Nungesser climbed into the plane, somehow got it to take off, and then made a nearly fatal landing. In those moments he fell in love with being up in the sky, and soon prevailed on a German pilot to give him flying lessons.
Fig 16. Charles Nungesser, the most colorful of the great French aces. A handsome, party-loving man who shot down forty-five enemy planes, twice during the war he flew for a time as a pilot attached to the Escadrille.
His medical record was astonishing. He was wounded more than twenty times. When a French general asked him how he had managed to bring down so many enemy planes and survive, he replied that when he was behind an opponent and opened fire, he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, sometimes he saw the German going down in flames, “and at other times I find myself in a hospital bed.”
When Nungesser found a job in an automobile assembly plant, the company tried him out as a race car driver, and he was soon winning cash prizes in races held in Buenos Aires on Sundays. In his spare time he engaged in strenuous workouts and attended prizefights.
At one of these fights, when a French boxer was knocked out in the first round, the winner, a popular Argentine, made an impromptu speech to the crowd in which he said, “But as we know, Frenchmen are sheep who don’t like to fight in the first place.” Before anyone realized what was happening, Nungesser had stripped to the waist and was in the ring, getting the startled referee’s permission to take off the gloves of the loser, who was still prone on the canvas, and lace them on his own fists. He faced off against the Argentine, who was thirty pounds heavier and had a far longer reach, and said, “All right, let’s see you try this sheep.” After being knocked flat twice, Nungesser put all of his 150 pounds into a short, lethal left that hit the bigger man in the solar plexus and leveled “the mastodon, who fell to the deck rolling in pain until the final count.”
When France went to war in 1914, Charles Nungesser took a ship back to France and entered the fighting as a foot soldier in a fluid situation in a sector of the Western Front where trenches had not yet been dug. In one two-hour period, he fought
in a skirmish during which he carried a wounded officer to safety. Then he encountered a German staff car that had become lost in the confusing wooded landscape. He drew a pistol and killed its occupants: a German colonel, a German lieutenant, and two German enlisted men. Nungesser leapt behind the wheel and delivered the car and its dead occupants to a division headquarters, where it was discovered that some papers in the car contained important military intelligence information.
Nungesser transferred to French aviation. First serving as a bomber pilot, he quickly received authorization to fly by himself wherever he pleased, night or day. Stationed on the coast, he flew fifty-three missions, bombing U-boat pens at Ostend and Zeebrugge as well as fuel and ammunition dumps and railroad yards. He returned from one mission with his plane badly damaged by enemy fire. Stepping out of the cockpit, he discovered that the toe of one of his flying boots had been shot off, but had left his foot unharmed. Even in his slow-moving bomber, on two occasions he sneaked up on swift and maneuverable German fighters and shot them down.
Sent to a fighter squadron, he shot down seven enemy planes before being asked if he would become the test pilot at the front for a new type of pursuit plane called a Ponnier. It crashed immediately upon takeoff. At the hospital the doctors found that both of his legs were broken, his jaw was smashed in such a way that it was hanging open, and most of his teeth had been knocked out. He had fragments of bullets in his lips, and blood from internal injuries oozed from his mouth.
Three days later, Charles Nungesser started making his way around the hospital on crutches, and less than a month after that he hobbled out to the flight line to try to fly again. The assembled mechanics looked at what they could see of his deathly pale face in the gaps between bandages and saw the way his jaws, now wired up but with gold teeth, glittered when he smiled. They thought he was crazy to attempt to fly in his present condition, and told him so. He replied, “Shut up and lift me into the cockpit.”
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