First to Fly

by Charles Bracelen Flood

  Eugene left home with $1.50 in his pocket at the age of twelve, and soon fell in with a band of gypsies. From them, he first heard of places across the Atlantic like France, where an African-American could expect better treatment than he or she would receive in the United States. In the next four years of his adolescence, he worked his way as a day laborer across Georgia, sometimes hitchhiking or slipping aboard freight trains. Eventually he came to Richmond, Virginia, and went on to Norfolk. By the time he was sixteen, he had filled out physically, and had developed a strong sense of financial responsibility and personal safety—although he would sleep in the barns or in the houses of those who employed him, he had a fear of being picked up as a vagrant. He kept a little ledger in which he made scores of entries showing that, rather than sleeping in public places such as a park, he often paid for a room for the night.

  On the docks at Newport News he befriended members of the German crew of the Marta Russ, a two-­thousand-ton freighter about to begin a three-week crossing of the Atlantic to the Scottish port of Aberdeen. The seamen enabled him to become a stowaway, but the captain soon learned of his presence aboard, and put him to work in the boiler room. When the vessel reached Aberdeen, Captain Westphal paid him five pounds and sent him ashore at night in a rowboat to avoid any complications Eugene might encounter with the port authorities.

  Eugene Bullard began reinventing himself. First he made his way from Aberdeen to Glasgow, and then on to Liverpool. At an amusement park he saw a sideshow at which customers paid to throw soft rubber balls at a person’s head that stuck up through a black sheet. Eugene convinced the sideshow owner that the passersby would rather throw rubber balls at the head of a black man than a white one. He was right about that and, working only on weekends, was soon making more money than he ever had doing hard labor.

  That proved to be Eugene Bullard’s introduction to show business. Within months he was doing slapstick acts in vaudeville shows; one was called “Belle Davis’s Freedman’s Pickaninnies.” In his spare time he began hanging around gymnasiums, where Aaron Lester Brown, a black American prizefighter who boxed under the name the “Dixie Kid,” decided that Eugene had what it took to become one of his stable of fighters and brought him along with them to London. Bullard won a number of welterweight fights there, and the Dixie Kid arranged for him to have a bout in Paris.

  It was in Paris that Bullard found the physical and emotional home of which the gypsies in Georgia had told him. He said of that discovery that he knew that “[I] could never be happy for the rest of my life unless I could live in France.”

  At a time when he was enjoying his new home—­winning some fights, strolling the boulevards, and getting to know the museums and savoring the cuisine—the Germans declared war. By early September of 1914, the Germans were almost at the Marne, and the French government was appealing to every able-bodied man, of whatever nationality or race, to fight for France.

  On October 9, 1914, Eugene Bullard’s nineteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion. Already an athlete in excellent condition, his fitness hardened by three months of grueling training at a Legion base in Paris, by April of 1915 he was a machine gunner fighting in repeated battles along the Somme in north-central France. Surviving a year of attacks and retreats that killed hundreds of thousands of men, he suffered three minor wounds and in February of 1916 was sent to Verdun. In all this fighting he never lost his revulsion toward killing, while realizing that his increasing skill with a machine gun was saving many of his comrades. In a later oral history interview that was transcribed in a way that emphasized his black diction, he described what it was like to mow down an advancing force of German infantrymen.

  “When you stopped to cool [the machine gun] and the other gun picked up the feu [fire], you could see ’em wriggling like worms in the bait box.

  “Yassir, I was sick, awful sick! Every time the sargent yelled ‘feu!’ I got sicker and sicker. They had wives and children hadn’t they?”

  At Verdun, Eugene saw the worst scenes yet.

  “The whole front seemed to be moving like a saw backwards and forwards . . . as earth was plowed under, men and beasts [hung] from the branches of trees where they had been blown to pieces.” On March 5, 1916, he was hit by shrapnel from an artillery shell that cut open his thigh and knocked out several of his teeth. Despite these wounds, he carried a message under fire from one officer to another—an act for which he would receive the Croix de Guerre with bronze star. He then spent three months in a military hospital outside of Paris and three months of further convalescence in a private clinic in a château in the city of Lyon, in southeastern France. When Bullard fell into conversation with the commander of the French airfield at Bron, five miles from Lyon, that officer asked him what he planned to do next. Aware that he would never be able to return to the trenches, Bullard replied that with his many hours of experience with machine guns, he could probably do a good job firing a machine gun from a plane. When Bullard subsequently learned that pilots made considerably more money than the men who fired machine guns from the backseat, a friend remarked that Bullard “knew damn well that he wanted to be a pilot rather than an aviation gunner.”

  During a convalescent trip to Paris, Eugene was sitting in a Montparnasse café with a white Southerner named Jeff Dickson who was proud of this wounded and decorated black man who was doing so well in the war. Dickson said in a cautionary way, “You know there aren’t any Negroes in aviation.” Bullard replied, “Sure I do. That’s why I want to get into it.”

  On November 15, 1916, having had help from a number of French officers, Eugene Bullard received orders to report for pilot training at Tours in the Loire Valley. He and his behind-the-scenes supporters had worked hard to make this happen, and he went on to fly more than twenty combat missions. Then orders came for him to stop flying and take a desk job at the headquarters of the French 170th Infantry Regiment. Bewildered and disappointed, his friends discovered that this was the work of Dr. Edmund Gros, who had done so much to put American fliers into French skies. In screening applicants for the Lafayette Escadrille, Gros had established the requirement that they should not be of German descent, but it seemed that he also did not want an American pilot who was black.

  This marked only the first half of Eugene Bullard’s story, which would continue in Paris during the 1920s and ’30s, and ended in Manhattan in October of 1961. During all those years, the gifts and strengths and fame that brought him to the sky above the Western Front would keep a remarkable cast of characters, black and white, circulating through his life.

  Remaining in Paris after the war, Bullard acted as a bouncer and sometime manager at Bricktop’s, a fashionable 1920s nightspot owned by the famous black American dancer known as “Bricktop.” At times Bullard also owned and ran a gymnasium, and a spa. He married a French countess and they had two daughters.

  Bullard had some fights in postwar Paris that did not take place in boxing rings. To his regret, he found that most of these were started by American white men who did not like to see white women of any nationality consorting with big, strong black men, and particularly not with an American black man who was famous and popular because of his record in the war. In one memorable fracas, Bullard and his old London mentor and friend the Dixie Kid were attacked by a gang of sailors at a big dance hall in Montmartre called the Olympia. Pursued by the sailors, Bullard and the Dixie Kid dashed up a wide staircase. Turning at the top, Bullard picked up the leading sailor and threw him down the steps in such a way that the man knocked the others over like pins in a bowling alley. Then he and the Dixie Kid began a counterattack that “cleaned out the whole bunch.”

  Bullard remained one of the colorful figures in the Paris of the ’20s and ’30s, chatting with intellectuals and other celebrities, occasionally organizing jazz bands to play in concerts for worthy causes, and being friendly to anyone whose looks he liked.

  When the Germans overran France
in 1940, Eugene became a member of the French underground, eventually serving under the famous female Resistance leader Cleopatre Terrier. A good part of his effectiveness came from German racial philosophy: The Nazis could not believe that a member of what they saw as an ­Untermenschen—an inferior species—was intelligent enough to be a good Resistance fighter, nor that the French would entrust him with life-and-death missions. Bullard originally thought that Cleopatre was a Nazi collaborator, and she thought the same of him.

  Severely wounded fighting the Nazis, Eugene was spirited out of the country and settled in New York City. In 1954 he was invited to return to France as a guest of the French government to participate in a ceremony in Paris marking the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. Bullard, along with the two white French veterans of that war who flanked him, rekindled the Eternal Flame at the tomb of France’s Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe.

  Twenty-one

  The War Changes Men and Women, Some for Better, and Some for Worse

  At the front, a few men of the Escadrille began to fall apart. Ned Parsons had spoken of some amount of alcohol being “an absolute necessity” for the nerves of a combat pilot, but a number now drank more than what Parsons had in mind, night after night. The deaths of some may have been due to their hungover condition when they flew in combat, but a pilot named Laurence Rumsey created a different situation.

  Rumsey was yet one more man from a wealthy background, a Harvard graduate from Buffalo, New York, who played professional polo before the war. Assigned to the Escadrille, when he was given his own plane he too-­prophetically had a large white RUM painted on its fuselage as his personal identification.

  One morning, despite his fellow pilots urging him not to fly while still befuddled by drink, Rumsey took off on a mission in which they were to take their planes to a new base. Becoming disoriented and separated from the formation in which he was supposed to fly, he finally landed at an Allied airfield he did not know. In his stupefied state he became convinced that it was a German base, and followed the instructions for what to do in that eventuality. He set his plane on fire, destroying it so that it would not fall into enemy hands.

  That made him the subject of concern, but the squadron kept him on. One evening in November of 1916, when Rumsey was in the unit’s little bar at Cachy in the muddy, blood-soaked Somme Valley, drinking too much brandy as usual, the squadron’s mascot lion Whiskey began to play with Rumsey’s braided uniform cap, holding it between his paws and chewing on it. Rumsey shouted at him to stop, and Whiskey growled as he continued to mangle the cap. Rumsey grabbed up a cane and started beating Whiskey all over the head. Whiskey dropped the cap and tottered over to a table where other pilots were playing poker. Stopping their game to look at Whiskey’s battered head, they found that Rumsey had injured their mascot in his right eye. Bill Thaw took Whiskey to Paris for an examination by an eye doctor, who confirmed that Whiskey would never see out of that eye again.

  The episode left Rumsey unstrung: Coupled with the fact that during his five months’ service with the Escadrille he had seen three fellow pilots killed and three wounded, the episode sent him into a complete physical and mental decline. Within days he was lying in a hospital, covered with boils. After seven months’ hospitalization, he was sent back to the United States, which by then was in the war. To his credit, despite his medical discharge he enlisted in the United States Army as a private—though he was never sent overseas again—and he ended his military service in January of 1919 as a first lieutenant. After the war he resumed his polo playing with considerable success, living in upstate New York on his inherited money. He never married, and never initiated contact with surviving members of the Escadrille. In 1967, at the age of eighty, he died in his apartment in Buffalo in a room filled with prizes won in polo matches.

  Escadrille pilot Charles Dolan, an observant young man, recorded two matters found nowhere else in the printed story of the Escadrille. First, he noted an overall change in sexual behavior as the war ground on.

  “You couldn’t walk a block in Paris without fifty girls coming up to you and saying, ‘I sleep with you tonight, yes?’ Everybody, anybody. The woods were full of them. We were at the Countess of Bethune’s one weekend. She was having a party for the Escadrille. I asked her, why all this lack of morality. She said, ‘You don’t realize. See that girl over there, and this applies to most of the girls in this room.’ There were about ten of them she had invited to entertain us. ‘She’s one of fifty in her family, and there’s only four men left. Their husbands, their fathers, their brothers are all dead.’”

  Dolan’s second unique account involved an Escadrille pilot who was done in by his cowardice. Dolan never revealed the man’s name, but said this in an interview for an oral history program conducted by the United States Air Force in 1968:

  “There was one incident where this fellow would be in a patrol, and he’d fly until they crossed the [enemy] line, and then he’d drop out with engine trouble or something and come home. The next day he’d drop out because the sun had blinded him or something. At any rate he would fly along the lines. And when the squadron had come back, over the lines, he’d drop in place. This got so bad that at the end of about a month the fellows shot him down—his own men shot him down. They did not want any Frenchmen to think that they had these kinds of Americans. So he’s among the missing, and his record is unnamed in the history of the Escadrille.”

  Strong as the ties of comradeship were among most of the Escadrille pilots, a rivalry sprang up. Sadly, it involved two of the best men in the squadron, “Founders” Norman Prince, who had helped get French approval for the Escadrille’s formation, and Paul Rockwell’s younger brother Kiffin. The younger Rockwell became convinced that Captain Thenault had been favoring Prince. This came to a head when Thenault credited Prince with what Rockwell thought was a questionable kill, and recommended him for the highly regarded Médaille Militaire. In a letter to Paul in Paris, Kiffin burst out with this: “No one thinks that X [Prince] got a German, in fact everyone is sure that he didn’t; yet the Captain proposed him for a citation, wanted to propose him for the Médaille, but everyone said that if he did they would quit. I am going to have to call him [Prince] out when he gets back from Paris, as he talked awfully big about us behind my back while I was away. We have all agreed to try to run him out of the squadron.”

  As for Thenault, who went right on with his recommendation of the Médaille Militaire for Prince, Kiffin had this to say: “We are very unlucky in having a captain who is a nice fellow and brave, but doesn’t know how to look after his men, and doesn’t try to. I have been fighting with him . . . mainly about the fact that I have no machine, he having given mine to Prince and not managing right about getting me a new one. I think in a few weeks I will be getting pretty sick with the outfit.”

  In “a few weeks” Kiffin Rockwell was dead, shot down during a patrol. Two days later there was a large funeral held in his honor, and he was posthumously made a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, a more coveted decoration than the Médaille Militaire.

  Fig 18. The members of the Escadrille who attended Norman Prince’s funeral in October of 1916. The officer seated third from the left was French Army Captain Georges Thenault, who was the official French commander of the squadron.

  Three weeks after that Norman Prince was also dead, mortally wounded while escorting Allied bombers during the famous 1916 bombing raid against the German Mauser rifle works at Oberndorf, which shipped twenty thousand rifles a day to the front. He also received the Légion d’Honneur. In a classic example of vindictive behavior, the families of both men eventually quarreled about which of them should be interred in the crypt of the beautiful marble Lafayette Escadrille Memorial Monument erected by the French government on the outskirts of Paris after the war. Norman Prince’s father attempted to turn the entire monument into a shrine that principally honored his son. When he
failed in that, he had his son’s body removed from the crypt, and eventually had it buried in the National Cathedral in Washington. Kiffin Rockwell remained buried in the cemetery at Luxeuil, near the Escadrille’s first airfield, until Prince’s body went to Washington, and then Rockwell’s family had his body disinterred and buried in the Memorial.

  Twenty-two

  Colorful Men Arrive on

  the Eastern Front

  In December of 1916 the French aviation high command sent a request to all the French squadrons flying on the Western Front, asking for volunteers to fly in the Army of the Orient. This army consisted of an Allied force that had already been defeated at Gallipoli in an effort to support the Russians on the Eastern Front, but remained capable of maintaining a presence in the part of Greece known as Macedonia. A volunteer from the Lafayette Escadrille named Paul Pavelka ended up flying with this force, and once again Bert Hall played an unusual role, this time involving a different part of the Eastern Front.

  Paul Pavelka was the son of a couple who emigrated from Hungary, eventually settling on a farm in Madison, Connecticut. Soon after his mother died at the age of thirty-six as a result of a farm accident involving a pitchfork, his father married Barbara Balogh, described as “a beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman from New York City.” Paul, then sixteen, was much nearer this beauty’s age than his father was. Infatuated with her, he left home in a state of adolescent turmoil and began a wandering life that included working as a lumberjack in Canada and as a cowboy in Montana. He was in the Panama Canal Zone in 1910, and then went south to participate in a mountain-climbing expedition in the Andes that ended with the deaths of his companions.

  When Paul was twenty he spent some years as a sailor, first as a seaman on freighters and then, after joining the United States Navy, on the battleship Maryland. Discharged and ending up in Europe in 1914, he joined the Foreign Legion, where his fellow Americans, including Kiffin Rockwell and Alice Weeks’s son Kenneth, learned of his seafaring experience and began calling him “Skipper,” or “Skip.” He was soon caught up in violent fighting. The worst of it came in an attack made in September of 1915 on a German-held woods known as the Bois Sabot in the Champagne region of northeastern France. He and an American named Frank Musgrave were the only two survivors of the forty-man section that entered the fight. Describing the hand-to-hand fighting in another attack, Pavelka said that in lunging back and forth in a bayonet duel with a German, “It was lucky for me he hadn’t a longer reach, or he may have done some real damage. As it was he only stuck it in my left leg . . . he won’t stick anyone else on this earth with a bayonette or anything else.” When Pavelka started flying with the Lafayette Escadrille, Bert Hall said this of him: