Exactly two months after his accident, Nungesser started flying with the Americans of the Escadrille. He cut a flamboyant figure, wearing a special black uniform with a tight-fitting, high-collared tunic and brilliantly shined black riding boots. On his chest he had the Légion d’Honneur, the Médaille Militaire, and the Croix de Guerre, the latter with several palms indicating participation in different battles and campaigns. He had his mechanic paint a unique personal insignia on both sides of his plane’s fuselage: a large black heart, inside of which was a white coffin above two white candles. Below that was a skull and crossbones.
Of all his dogfights, one haunted him. Attacking a German two-seater Albatros, his bullets killed the pilot, who slumped over his control stick. As the plane started a long plunge to the ground, “. . . the observer, still alive, clung desperately to the mounting ring to which his machine gun was attached. Suddenly the mounting ring ripped loose from the fuselage, and was flung into space, taking with it the hapless crewman. He clawed frantically at the air, his body working convulsively like a man on a trapeze. I had a quick glimpse of his face before he tumbled away through the clouds . . . it was a mask of horror.”
While living and flying with the Escadrille, Nungesser shot down his tenth German plane. One pilot described him with these words: “A wonderful chap, blond and handsome, blue eyes, and rather square, clean-cut face; slightly sandy mustache; a striking feature is his smile which reveals two solid rows of gold teeth. He has lost his own teeth and wears a silver jaw; also walks with a limp—his left leg a little out of kilter.”
Nungesser’s aggressive attacking style was not lost on the Americans. They understood, appreciated, and often emulated it, and marveled at the way in which he survived frequent crashes. He served with the Escadrille twice during a combat career in which he shot down forty-five enemy planes and survived the war. In 1918, after four years of fighting, he could still keep up his dazzling, relentless attacks. On June 13 of the war’s final year, he shot down two three-seater German planes in four seconds. On August 15, before breakfast, he dove through German antiaircraft fire to destroy two enemy observation balloons, and after lunch he sent two more down in flames.
His medical record astonished those who read it:
Skull fracture, brain concussion, internal injuries (multiple), five fractures of upper jaw, two fractures of lower jaw, piece of antiaircraft shrapnel embedded in right arm, dislocation of knees (left and right), re-dislocation of left knee, bullet wound in mouth, bullet wound in ear, atrophy of tendons in left leg, atrophy of muscles in calf, dislocated clavicle, dislocated wrist, dislocated right ankle, loss of teeth, contusions too numerous to mention.
Near the end of the war, the French general Robert Nivelle asked Nungesser, “Lieutenant, can you tell me by what miracle of tactics you have managed to bring down so many of the Boche?”
Nungesser replied, “Mon general, when I am behind the adversary and believe that I have his airplane well and truly centered in front of my machine guns, I close my eyes and open fire. When I open them again, sometimes I see my opponent hurtling though space . . . and at other times I find myself in a hospital bed.”
Sixteen
A Bloody Report Card
As the pilots on both sides participated in increasing numbers of dogfights, they tried to record their thoughts about the instincts and actions that produced the most kills. The Allied airmen relied on anecdotal evidence, while the Germans tried a more analytical approach. All of them found no correlation between those instant reactions and previous formal education. In the memoirs of Lafayette Escadrille pilots, two of them went out of their way to say that in an aerial duel a lot of learning was a handicap. Bert Hall wrote: “From what I have observed in air fighting, I believe that the rapid decisive attack is the thing that won oftenest in the long run. Nungesser, [Georges] Guynemer, [René] Dorme, [Alfred] Heurtaux, [Albert] Deullin [the great French aces]—I have seen them all in action, and I am forced to admit that combating around one’s antagonist is a very dull and exasperating procedure, compared with the quick dive, fire, and pull-away method . . . it’s a victory or you go down afire. For, if you live to pull away at all, you must have pulled away with everything you had . . . Nerve and a heavy hand are what decided most air battles.”
Ned Parsons was even more specific. “It seemed to us on the front, where only the fittest or the luckiest survived, that a . . . man capable of handling a ship well and shooting straight, was worth ten mediocre fliers with college degrees . . . Ability, courage, and a cool head appeared to be the best qualifications. Oft-times too much knowledge was filled with danger and defeated its own ends, for it led to too much imagination, the ruination of many a splendid young war bird.”
A British pilot weighed in with this: “Like dueling, air fighting required a set, steely courage, drained of all emotion, fined down to a tense and deadly effort of will. The Angel of Death is less callous, aloof, and implacable than a fighting pilot when he dives.”
In a sense, the Germans attempted to start their analysis before the war began. In the years before 1914, the Germans made many plans for the aerial side of a potential war. The German General Staff, all stern Prussians, foresaw that victorious pilots would become national heroes. They went to great lengths to identify and develop the men they thought would be aces. As the war continued, the High Command kept meticulous records of how their pilots performed, and their accounts of what they did and felt.
Ironically, the first of their best pilots was not a Prussian like von Richthofen or Richthofen’s mentor, Oswald Boelcke, but a cheerful, gentle Bavarian, an eighteen-year-old from Munich who was initially rejected because he was only five-foot-three, an inch below the physical requirement that German pilots be at least five-four. This was Ernst Udet, a lad who had always been crazy about airplanes. He tried to enlist on August 2, 1914, the day after Germany began the four-year bloodbath by declaring war on Russia. After several more attempts to join up, Ernst discovered that if he could get a civilian pilot’s license, he would immediately be accepted as a pilot in the German Army Air Service, no matter how short he was. He received private tutoring through a family friend who owned an aircraft factory—flying lessons that cost a total of 2,000 marks, worth about 420 American dollars at the time.
His early months as a pilot showed no sign of brilliance, although he and an observer managed to improvise a landing of a two-seater after a shackle on the cable that held a wing to the plane broke off in mid-flight. Next, flying a two-seater loaded with too much fuel and too many bombs, he stalled out and had a crash landing in which his astonishing luck first demonstrated itself: Neither the fuel nor the bombs exploded. He was court-martialed for negligence for not realizing that the plane could not fly effectively while carrying so much weight, and spent seven days in the guardhouse.
Udet’s career then took turns for the better and worse. Flying another two-seater from which his observer threw a small bomb that became stuck in the landing gear, he managed to perform some acrobatic maneuvers that shook the bomb loose. That feat earned him a transfer to a squadron of new single-seater Fokker fighter planes. In his first opportunity to shoot down an enemy plane, he slipped in behind a French Caudron, lined it up in his sights, and found he “could not bring himself to pull the trigger.” As a result, the French pilot swung around and riddled Udet’s plane with machine gun fire. One bullet sliced open his cheek and shattered his goggles, but he was still able to land his plane.
That encounter changed Ernst Udet. In his next combat mission, while on standby, he was ordered to “scramble” his aircraft, take off swiftly, and intercept what were reported to be two British planes headed toward his squadron’s base. Instead, as he reached altitude he found more than twenty enemy aircraft, bombers with fighters protecting them. Attacking a Farman two-seat bomber, as he pulled away he saw the plane catch fire and the observer fall out of the rear seat. He described the moment: “The f
uselage of the Farman dives down past me like a giant torch . . . A man, his arms and legs spread out like a frog’s, falls past—the observer. At the moment, I don’t think of them as human beings. I only feel one thing—victory, triumph, victory!”
In the next few months Ernst brought down five more planes, becoming an ace, and then was assigned to elite fighter squadrons, in which he shot down nine more planes. At the age of twenty-one he became a squadron commander, evaluated this way in a biography of him published eighty-nine years later: “Despite his seemingly frivolous nature, drinking late into the night and womanizing, he proved an excellent squadron commander. He spent many hours coaching neophyte fighter pilots, with an emphasis on marksmanship as being essential for success.”
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Fig 17. In a little-known picture, von Richthofen lines up his “Flying Circus” to be presented to the Kaiser. The photograph is illustrative of the German discipline that made their squadrons so effective in the air. No group of Allied airmen ever turned out with such a parade-ground appearance.
A supreme accolade awaited him. On a day of torrential rain in Flanders, he was struggling to pitch a tent in the mud when a staff car drove up, splashing through deep puddles. Out stepped Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the most famous of the German aces. At the age of twenty-five he commanded a fighter group of four squadrons (forty-eight planes) and had the authority to invite any German pilot to join his “Flying Circus.” He told Udet that he knew of his twenty kills, and said, “You would actually seem ripe for us. Would you like to?” Standing there in the mud, twenty-one-year-old Ernst Udet accepted the invitation to join the Flying Circus on the spot.
When the American pilots of the newly organized Escadrille encountered men like Richthofen, Boelcke, and Udet, it was a near-miracle that any of them survived. To start flying against these German aces during the furious Battle of Verdun could only be seen as a stupendous mismatch. After two years of aerial warfare the Germans were on their way to an overall wartime record of having more than three hundred pilots who became aces.
The German fighter pilots received better training from the start. Compared with the three-month advanced training the French gave their own fighter pilots and the Americans who flew for them, the Germans were tutored for twice that time by some of the best German pilots. When one adds the French statistic that the average life expectancy of a fighter pilot in combat was fifteen hours in the air, the only explanation for the Escadrille’s survival rate appears to be the innate skill and courage of its pilots.
Seventeen
Bert Hall as Thinker, Bartender, and Raconteur
While being an ultimate man of action, Bert Hall also did some thinking. He sensed and recorded the dehumanizing effects of months of combat, and wrote:
“Saw two French pilots buried yesterday. They decorated the graves with the remains of the smashed airplane. Personally, I think this business of displaying the remains of airplanes on the graves of dead pilots is very bad. It’s bad for the troops. Half burned or otherwise demolished remains of airplanes belong on the junk heap, and if I had my way, that’s where they would land.”
Hall, who in one dogfight had a German bullet enter the right side of his mouth, knock out several of his teeth, and leave through the left side of his neck, had another experience that few pilots had. During a dogfight he poured machine gun fire into a new type of German fighter plane called a Pfalz, and saw it land on a British base. He followed it down and landed near it “to see if any of the nice new Pfalz was fit to take back for examination.”
Once out of his plane, he saw that the enemy pilot was badly wounded. “They had him sitting on the ground beside the remains of a smashed-up building. I’ve only seen a few of my victims, and I’m sorry I saw this one. He had an awful look on his face. It was more like a female animal going through an abortive birth than anything I ever saw in my life. He couldn’t talk but the Intelligence Officers were examining his papers and finding out everything they could. But the death look on that Boche’s face was enough to take the swank out of me.”
Living amid pilots who drank a lot, Bert drank little, but provided some alcoholic sustenance for his friends. At the time, a cocktail known as a Manhattan was a great favorite among relatively sophisticated drinkers. It was made of whiskey, vermouth, and often a dash of bitters. Among those who preferred it were Bill Thaw and Lufbery. Using a metal pail, Bert would mix up a good quantity of the drink, then watch his friends go to work on it.
Especially with Thaw, this seemed to seal an already strong friendship. Thaw saw Bert Hall as a man who told some tall tales, but Bert always believed that Thaw had saved his life in one of the Escadrille’s early battles. As he remembered it, a German fighter plane was coming right at him from the side, about to open fire, when Thaw, coming out of nowhere, appeared between them and took a burst from the German’s machine guns that Bert thought would have killed him. Thaw was badly wounded in his shoulder and right elbow, with the result that he could never stretch his right arm to its full length again, but he went on to become a fine leader. Interestingly, among several wounds that Hall received during the war, one he suffered on June 26, 1917, was similar to the one Thaw sustained. Writing in 1918, he said, “With me the great trouble is that my right arm doesn’t work the way it used to, but it is getting into fair shape again. The doctors have built up the part from the shoulder to the elbow so that it looks like an arm again.”
As a raconteur, Hall had a talent for describing raucous situations. At one point, when the Escadrille had again been stationed on one side of the Luxeuil airfield and British bombers of the Royal Naval Air Force were stationed on the other, the Escadrille was grounded because the pilots had flown there, but their mechanics, traveling by land, had not caught up to them.
“One afternoon an English officer came to us and said: ‘Say, you bloomin’ Yanks, let’s call the war off and celebrate.’ So we invited them to dinner down at the Hotel Lion d’Or. Everything went on beautifully until the ‘binge’ began, and then there was a tendency to throw plates—just playful like—now a plate and now a saucer. The management of the Lion d’Or got worried, but it was no use. No amount of worrying could have saved the dishes. Before the party ended all the moveable equipment was a washout.
“Next morning as soon as we were all together we decided to do a good job on the Britishers’ equipment at the very next opportunity. We didn’t have to wait long . . . By noontime, a message came from the British C.O., inviting us to their mess that evening. ‘Ah, ha,’ said Lufbery. ‘Now we get even with the Limeys.’
“I couldn’t begin to tell you the things that happened at that celebration. We called off the war and went at it. At first, the British Commanding Officer proposed toasts to the King and to President Poincaré and to President Wilson and a lot of folks. And then he made a short speech. Captain Thenault responded in very good English and that ended the civilities . . . The Britishers knew we were going to do wrong by them but they didn’t know when or how.
“When the time came I never knew who gave the signal, but the carnage was terrible. The chairs, the tables, the dishes, the bottles, everything went before the energy of our attack . . . When we started, the [British] barracks was divided up by many little partitions. When we finished it was all one big room. God, it was wonderful!—the ripping and crashing of the lumber and the complete devastation of the cots and the other equipment. The Britishers didn’t mind at all; as a matter of fact, I once saw the British Major and Captain Thenault laughing as if they would explode and drinking each other’s health over and over again.
“Just before the celebration was said to be over, we heard some shots outside. We looked out and there to our astonishment was a tall Canadian from Vancouver shooting at a book. The book was being held at arm’s length by none other than Raoul Lufbery. The Canadian had been a member of the Northwestern Mounted Police. He could shoot too, because he was hitting the book eve
ry time, in spite of Lufbery’s unsteady target.
“The British Major stopped the target practice. Inside, we examined the book. It was a thin volume of British drill regulations. The Canadian sharpshooter gave us each a page from the book as a souvenir of the evening. The pages were perforated with five jagged holes.
“When at last we started home . . . the Royal Naval Air Force declared in a body that we were the best gang of Yanks they had ever encountered. ‘We didn’t expect you blighters would be ’arf so sociable, you know,’ one of the pilots said. ‘Not ’arf.’”
Eighteen
Bad Things Happen to
Good New Men
Good men kept coming into the Escadrille. One of the later arrivals was Harold Willis of Boston, born in 1890, who had played on Harvard’s championship football team. In 1914 he gave up his practice as a promising young architect and sailed for France to serve in one of the ambulance units run by the American Field Service. He received the French Croix de Guerre with silver star for going far beyond his duties as an ambulance driver when he crawled out on a battlefield to drag wounded men to safety. Willis described his time as a driver on the Western Front: “Two of the best years of my life with that magnificent creature, the rank-and-file Frenchman during his most heroic moments.”
By 1916 Willis felt he should take an even more active role in the war, and in effect deserted from his ambulance unit, and went to Paris. He enlisted in the Foreign Legion on June 1 of 1916 and within a month transferred to the French Air Service. After months of training, on March 1 of 1917 he arrived at Ravenel, ninety-five miles north of Paris, where the Escadrille was spending the winter in a place where the mud was often so thick and frozen that the planes could not take off.
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