Things were as bad at Ham, thirty-five miles to the east, to which the squadron moved on April 7. Willis described it as a “pretty dismal world . . . The Germans had blown up all railroads and all crossroads. They had cut down all the fruit trees and poisoned all the wells.”
Despite the terrible conditions on the ground and in the air, Willis settled in well, and he and Edward Hinkle, another architect and at forty-one the oldest man in the Escadrille, designed the squadron’s Indian Head insignia. What emerged was the profile of a ferocious Sioux brave wearing his red-white-and-blue feathered bonnet, which was painted on the fuselage of all the Escadrille’s planes.
While he was getting acquainted with the overall sector of operations, Willis made himself useful to the unit by dropping in at different towns well behind the lines that were known for the good wines grown in their areas. He would pick up a dozen or more bottles of a good vintage, and bring them back to brighten up an evening in the squadron mess.
Willis also furthered his own architectural interests. Ned Parsons remembered a day when Willis was overdue for more than an hour after his squadron mates returned from a mission in the skies over Compiègne. There was a growing feeling that something bad had befallen him. Just then Willis showed up, making an uneventful landing. Asked about his delay in getting back, as one pilot recalled it, Willis answered that he had decided “to fly to Chartres—nearly a hundred miles to the south—to get an aerial view of the cathedral there. He walked across the field to the barracks to warm up, still expounding on the glories of Gothic architecture.”
Then Willis made himself more militarily useful.
“I tried photographic work with a [single-seater] SPAD. The French were very interested in it because I could go deep into the [enemy] lines very quickly. I took stereoscopic pictures by flying at a given altitude and a given speed and taking pictures by a stop watch.”
Captain Thenault was impressed by what Willis could do.
“With his trained and intelligent brain he always brought back from trips information that was greatly prized by the High Command. It is very hard to take good observations from a single-seater. Willis had made a specialty of it and thanks to the speed of his machine, he was able to go to places here the slower two-seaters could not have ventured without being brought down.”
While Willis was flying a dawn patrol mission behind German lines at Verdun on August 18, 1916, his engine was destroyed by machine gun fire from a German fighter pilot. As Willis glided down over German territory, looking for a place to land, he experienced this: “The German pilot shot up my windshield and he finally shot my glasses [goggles] off, which was close enough. When Willis landed, “This German who shot me down landed right behind me, which was good luck, because a group of German soldiers came running up, and he was able to protect me. Sometimes [captured] pilots were badly treated by soldiers on both sides . . . This pilot who shot me down proved to be completely correct and considerate. We waited around and pretty soon some other officers came up in a car and we all went down to the German pilot’s own field and had breakfast together.” At breakfast, when Willis struggled out of his one-piece flying suit, his German hosts were startled to find that he was wearing only a pair of green striped pajama trousers and two oil-stained sweaters.
Back at their home base, Ned Parsons, alert as always, used this to Willis’s advantage. Packing up some of Willis’s possessions he intended to drop behind enemy lines in the hope they would ultimately reach Willis, he realized that, because Willis had not flown that day wearing his uniform tunic, which would have identified him as being a sergeant, he could address the package to “Lieutenant Harold Willis”—“thus assuring him better treatment as an officer.” (Willis had also identified himself as being an officer, and the deception lasted for months.)
Later on the day he was shot down, Willis was taken to what he described as “an old medieval prison with a lot of French officers.” A man posing as a fellow prisoner, wearing “a dirty French Officer’s uniform,” tried “to become very friendly and asked a great many questions concerning the disposition of Allied forces.” Willis correctly deduced that he was a German intelligence officer “and no information was given.” He was there for the better part of a month, before being moved on to what proved to be a succession of prison camps, and recalled his frame of mind:
“I wasn’t very proud of being a prisoner. In prison one has the feeling that perhaps if he had put up a better fight he wouldn’t have been taken. The only way to clear one’s self of that feeling was to damned well escape. I did, eventually, quite a long time afterwards.”
What Willis did not mention in that brief account was that he made several attempts to escape. In his efforts to do so, he and some accomplices received no help from the West Pointers who were imprisoned with them. In his first attempt, made in mid-March of 1918, he reached the outer barbed wire of a prisoner-of-war camp at Lübeck, a German port city on the Baltic Sea thirty-six miles northeast of Hamburg. He was recaptured trying to get through the wire, and sent to the first of two camps deeper into Germany. In the second camp, Villingen in the Black Forest region near the Swiss border, Willis lived in the worst conditions he had experienced since his capture eleven months before. The camp consisted of a “pen of huts” with a virtually complete lack of sanitary facilities. Willis said of the place, “The whole place is alive with fleas and vermin of all sorts.”
The vile camp had two redeeming features. Perhaps because of its proximity to the Swiss border, Red Cross packages of food arrived there with some regularity, keeping Willis and his fellow prisoners from starving.
The second thing was the presence of Lieutenant Victor M. Isaacs of the United States Navy, whose ship had been sunk by a German submarine off the French coast. Isaacs was the only American naval officer captured by the Germans during the war. He and Willis escaped together, finally crossing into neutral Switzerland by swimming across the freezing-cold Rhine River at night and getting back to Paris shortly before the war ended.
Willis returned to Boston and his successful career as an architect, but he and France had another war ahead of them. In 1940, then aged fifty, Willis was once again wearing the uniform of the American Field Service, and driving an ambulance as he had at the beginning of the First World War. When France fell, Willis escaped into Spain just ahead of the Germans, and ended up in the United States Army Air Force, serving in North Africa on the staff of General Carl A. “Tooey” Spaatz’s Twelfth Air Force as chief tactical officer holding the rank of colonel. After World War Two he again resumed his practice as an architect, joining the firm Allen & Collens of Boston. Among the buildings they designed are the Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, and several at Mount Holyoke College.
Nineteen
Convenient Emergencies
Paris was the greatly preferred destination for any flier given even a short leave, but the members of the Escadrille came to realize that there was another way of getting a night or two away from the squadron. Engines had a way of sometimes sputtering or ceasing to function altogether. From high in the air a pilot would try to glide down and make a forced landing inside his own lines, and as he did that he would look for a handsome château surrounded by flat grassy pastures.
As the air war began, a stranded pilot would send a message back to his airfield, sometimes by telephone, saying where he was, and asking that the squadron send a staff car and a couple of mechanics to repair his plane so that he could fly it back. Often this required a stay of two or three days, and the pilot would return with a big smile and a report of splendid hospitality at the home of the Baron This or the Countess That. The host might have had an exceptional chef, the château might possess marvelous baths and soft beds, and some families had charming daughters who were happy to spend evenings with that novelty, an American who dropped from the sky.
It was not long before the Escadrille’s commander,
Captain Thenault, began to understand that some of these mechanical breakdowns were not always what they seemed. On the other hand, they appeared to be good for the men’s morale, and as long as a pilot did not report this kind of emergency too often, another man would fly in his place the next day, knowing that the favor would be returned.
One day Ned Parsons found himself in a genuine emergency, in which his electrical system “just cut out for good and all.” He glided down into “the park of a château,” overshot the flat area, “and went into the underbrush and trees on the other side in a grand crash.” He found himself “hanging head down about seven or eight feet off the ground, and all my weight was on my safety belt.” A peasant came around under the upside-down plane, looked up, and asked in French if he could help. Using his limited French vocabulary, Parsons explained to the man how he could help by pushing him up until his weight was off the belt’s clasp so that he could release it.
“He pushed up all right, but as soon as I cracked the belt he hastily ducked from under and let me drop squarely on the back of my neck. It . . . knocked me out for fifteen minutes.
“I awoke with my head in the lap of a charming and very beautiful English girl, whose husband, a French officer at the front, owned the château.
“I was there for several days till the wrecking crew came. Then they had two wrecks to take care of. I was the other.”
Bert Hall found a different way to spend some time away from the squadron. Writing an account of his activities, he said:
“That was a great gag I worked on the French authorities, and it lengthened out my leave five days. Originally, I was supposed to have only one day, but Lufbery put me onto a good one and I worked it to a standstill. You see, the French Intelligence Department knows that I have traveled all over the world and have spent a lot of time in Germany, so when I called one of their operators on the telephone and told him that I had just seen a German officer dressed up like a middle-aged French business man, they took the bait, hook, line and sinker.
“They proposed that they supply me with a shadowing expert and let both of us get on with the job, but I discouraged the idea. All I needed was time and a little cash. The Headquarters supplied both of these commodities and for six days, I did all the cafes and restaurants in Paris looking for my fugitive.”
Hall’s friends in the squadron also thought that his caper in Paris, suggested by Lufbery, was “a great gag,” but some of the newer pilots felt with some reason that Hall’s absence from the flying roster increased their own chances of being killed or wounded. In time, that resentment would grow.
Twenty
Unique Volunteers
Two Americans who took to the French skies in 1916 could not have come from more different backgrounds. The first was Kenneth Marr of Oakland, California. In 1908, then eighteen, he went to Nome, Alaska. By 1914 he and a partner named Scotty Allen were in the business of raising huskies and training and performing with a team of those sled dogs.
When the war began, Marr’s enterprising partner contracted with the French government to supply three hundred huskies for dog sled teams to evacuate wounded French Chasseurs Alpins [mountain troops] from the often snow-covered Vosges Mountains on the Swiss end of the Western Front. Marr, accompanied by two Alaskan dog-handling Indians, delivered the sled dogs to France. Finding himself on the edge of a rapidly expanding conflict, Marr entered the American Field Service as an ambulance driver, was gassed at Verdun, and spent a brief period in the Foreign Legion. In late July of 1916 he transferred to the French Air Service, and began a long period of training that ended with his being assigned to the Lafayette Escadrille in early January of 1917, three months before the United States entered the war. His squadron mates nicknamed him “Si” because of his association with the two Alaskan tribesmen, sometimes known as Siwash Indians.
Marr had what could be called either good luck or bad. On a morning soon after joining the Escadrille, he was scheduled to take off on an early patrol with four more experienced pilots. Those four had problems with their planes that stopped them from taking off. Marr got into the air, and quickly found his engine sputtering and cutting out. Circling back to the field to land, as he came in to touch down he hit some twisted railroad tracks at the end of a grassy airstrip. His plane flipped on its back and slid down an embankment, ending up as a shattered skeleton. Marr emerged with nothing more than bruises, and began to show some of the determination and courage that characterized the sled dogs he had worked with for years.
In Marr’s next brush with fate, after shooting down a German Albatros scout plane, a week later he found himself, now flying a SPAD, being attacked by two enemy fighters. He disabled one of them, but the other German stayed right on his tail, firing his machine guns until the bullets cut through the cables that controlled Marr’s ability to use the flaps on his wings to climb or descend. Even after one of his squadron mates drove off this second German, Marr was flying at an altitude of six thousand feet without being able to use any of the usual controls. Ingeniously, he used his throttle, speeding up and slowing down, working his plane the vertical distance of more than a mile down to the ground in a safe landing among a grove of trees in the Hesse Forest. Then he leapt from his plane and jumped into a staff car whose occupants had been waiting to see if he would come down alive. Thinking quickly, he had the driver cut through the woods to his home field, where he picked up a mechanic and a length of cable. Returning to his shot-up plane, he replaced everything that had been severed by German bullets, and got his SPAD back in the air. He flew it back to his field, refueled, and set off on another patrol.
In his next memorable encounter, some weeks later, Marr single-handedly managed to hold off six German fighters that were attacking an Allied photo plane, maneuvering and firing to protect it until it reached friendly lines. He then turned and went back into enemy territory. Spotting a German two-seater, he dove at it from behind, coming out of the sun and getting within fifty yards of its tail before firing twenty rounds at it. This killed the pilot, but the backward-facing observer stood up behind his twin machine guns and blasted right back at Marr, who had this reaction:
“I certainly felt sorry for the helpless beggar. There he was dashing to a certain death but to the last gamely trying to give me a fight.” The enemy plane “dived steeply, turning sideways, and banged into the ground about three miles inside Germany.”
When the United States came into the war, Marr was one of the pilots who elected to fly with an American squadron. He ended up as a captain commanding the famous 94th “Hat in the Ring” Pursuit Squadron, later to be led by Eddie Rickenbacker, who emerged from the war as the leading American ace. Rickenbacker, a lieutenant already serving with the unit, wrote an account of what could have been the last minutes of Marr’s life. Not seeing each other, Marr and a Lieutenant Thorne Taylor landed at opposite ends of a long grass airstrip at Toul, then ran into each other, getting their wings tangled up while their engines continued to roar, and, as Rickenbacker described it, spinning “around and around . . . like a top.”
That was dangerous enough, but the collision had knocked loose Marr’s machine gun in a way that started it firing as the plane continued to spin, sending 650 bullets a minute across the field like “a gigantic pin wheel shooting out living sparks in every direction.” Military personnel of every sort dove for cover; miraculously, no one was hurt.
Evidently the incident was not held against either pilot. In due course Marr was promoted to major, decorated by both the French and American armies, and with the Armistice returned to the United States. He finished his military service in 1919 as the commander of an aerial gunnery school near San Diego. This brought him back at the age of twenty-nine to his native California, which he had left to go to Alaska eleven action-packed years before.
Marr went on to lead one of the most interesting and productive postwar lives of any Escadrille pilot. Hollywood was just emerging
as the nation’s movie capital. Hiring on at Paramount Pictures, he became an assistant to the legendary director John Ford, who was starting a career that would bring him six Oscars. It was there that Marr met the silent screen actress Alice Ward, and they married in 1928.
Soon after that, Kenneth Marr switched his talents and energy to an entirely different kind of business. He started the Marr and Janeway Company, which began drilling successfully for oil in areas where old oil leases had expired. Creating something of a conglomerate, he took a substantial amount of his oil profits and began buying timberland and other real estate, including a five-thousnd-acre sheep ranch in Humboldt County, California. After several years of comfortable retirement in Phoenix, Arizona, he died in Palo Alto, California, in 1963 at the age of seventy-eight. He had lived a uniquely American success story—a boy who went into the world and became a decorated fighter pilot, a Hollywood figure, an oilman, and a rancher, married to a movie star.
The second one-of-a-kind American flier to take to the skies of France in 1916 was Eugene Bullard, who would become the first black American fighter pilot. Born in 1895 in Columbus, Georgia, as a boy Eugene experienced hardship as well as incidents of violent racial prejudice, mixed with kindness from white families. His father, William, was a big, exceptionally strong man, part Creek Indian, who lived by a code that Eugene could still recite when he was sixty-six years old:
“I want you all to be good children. Always show respect to everyone, white and black, and make them respect you. Go to school as long as you can. Never look for a fight. I mean never. But if you are attacked, or your honor is attacked unjust [sic], fight, fight, keep on fighting even if you die for your rights. It will be a glorious death.”
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