Fig 19. The man on the right in this picture, using a device that kept a map under control in an open cockpit, is pilot James McConnell, a 1910 graduate of the University of Virginia, from where he was nearly expelled for placing a chamber pot on the head of a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Three hours after this photograph was taken, McConnell was killed in action. He had left a note to be read if he died. It said in part: “My burial is of no import. Make it as easy as possible for yourselves . . . Good luck to the rest of you. God damn Germany and vive la France.”
“The German Avion [aircraft] was a biplane and his gunner opened up on me at 200 yards as the pilot began to circle around me. I opened fire with my incendiary [tracer] bullets and headed directly for them. The German’s first few shots cut one main wing support in half and an explosive bullet hit the guiding rod of the left aileron [wing control flap] and cut open a nice hole in my left cheek. I scarcely noticed it and kept on firing until we were scarcely 25 yds apart. We passed close and . . . [I dove] down. The German didn’t follow but an anti-aircraft battery shelled me for quite awhile. At 1000 metres I stopped and circled around for 15 minutes in search of Mac and the second Boche but the clouds were thick and I saw nothing.
“I was afraid my supports would break entirely and my wound was hurting some so I headed for St. Just at a low altitude reaching there at 10:45 hoping all the way back that Mac had preceded me but when I arrived I found he had not and tho Lufbery and Lt. de Laage have been out over the region north of Ham with their SPAD to look for him (de Laage landed to ask the troops if they saw him brought down) they found nothing and the chances are Mac was either brought down by the German machine or else wounded in combat and brought down in their territory and so is a prisoner. It’s the best we can hope for—that he is at least alive.
“I feel dreadfully—my wound, tho painful, is nothing compared with my grief for poor ‘Mac’s loss. The Commandant told me, when I described the combat to him this morning, that I fought bravely. I wish I had been able to do more for McConnell.”
Thenault, accompanied by Lieutenant de Laage and two or three American pilots, drove out to where McConnell had crashed. They found his body, punctured by several bullets, lying near the wreckage of his plane in an apple orchard on the edge of a village named Detroit Bleu. The Germans had stripped off his flying outfit, also taking his boots, “dog tags”—worn for identification—and watch. A peasant woman approached and told them that she had seen the plane dueling with one German, and then another had dived in from behind and shot it down.
After the men of the Escadrille pulled together what they finally knew about their comrade’s death and his wishes, they buried him in the earth where he died. In a letter he had written to be read in the event of his death, he left his sleeping bag to Ned Parsons, and added:
“My burial is of no import. Make it as easy as possible for yourselves. I have no religion and do not care for any service. If the omission would embarrass you, I presume I could stand the performance. Good luck to the rest of you. God damn Germany and vive la France.”
When a memorial service for McConnell was held at the American Church in Paris on April 2, 1917, according to one account, “Three tearful mesdemoiselles attended, each one believing she was McConnell’s fiancée. One would later marry another Lafayette Escadrille pilot.”
Two days after that, Genet wrote this diary entry:
“975th day of the conflict. [Escadrille pilot Robert] Soubiran arrived from Paris with the great news that the United States has declared war against Germany and Paris is decorated with Old Glory everywhere . . .
“Somehow I’ve given way completely this evening. I feel sure there is something very serious going to happen to me very soon. It doesn’t seem any less than Death itself. I’ve never had such a feeling or been so saddened since coming over to battle for this glorious France. I tore into shreds a little silken American flag which I’ve carried since the beginning of my enlistment. Sometimes it seems a mockery to rejoice over the entrance of our country into the conflict with the Entente when we have been over here so long giving our all for the right while our country has been holding back. She should have been in long ago.”
He also expressed bitterness about two unnamed pilots who he felt shirked their duty:
“Neither of them seem to be very enthusiastic fighters and take every possible opportunity to remain at the camp on pretense of being sick or tired and the rest of us break our necks and even lose our lives to keep up the good service of the Escadrille.
“Those two I’m convinced will see the finish of the war, return to America, and pose as the heros [sic] of the Escadrille and be accepted as such by those who don’t know any better.”
On Sunday, April 15, Edmond made this entry in his flight logbook: “Felt almost nauseated in the air this time. Stomach was in poor shape.” The next day he felt worse. “Saw a Boche Biplane . . . He dove below the clouds when I swung around to dive on him . . . We were shelled [by antiaircraft fire] at that moment . . . One shell, the first, came very close to my tail. The motion of continually turning in all directions and levels made me feel very sick so I had to return to camp. Stomach was very upset.”
The next morning, when Edmond and a pilot named Walter Lovell returned from a patrol during which they saw nothing, Lovell commented on his “sunken features and waxlike complexion.” Genet went to bed, but asked to be wakened for the afternoon patrol. Another pilot, Willis Haviland, offered to fly in Edmond’s place, but he shook his head.
At 2:30 that afternoon, Edmond took off, following Lufbery. As they came to enemy lines, Lufbery looked back and saw three shells burst a hundred yards behind Genet. Edmond turned his plane around and headed back to their base. Lufbery also turned around and followed Edmond for what he noted as being four minutes. Seeing that Edmond was flying straight and level, Luf turned again and completed the patrol.
French soldiers at the front reported what happened next. Less than three minutes after Edmond’s plane crossed back over friendly lines at four thousand feet, flying at full speed, it went into a violent spin. A wing fell off and the plane dropped like a rock, smashing into the ground three hundred yards from where his friend Jim McConnell had been killed.
No one ever knew whether Edmond had been too sick to control his plane, or whether the antiaircraft fire had wounded him in some way that rendered him unconscious. Willis Haviland, who had offered to fly in his place, drove out to the crash site “to get his body,” accompanied by Ned Parsons. Parsons said of Edmond’s remains, “Every bone in his body was broken and his features were completely gone.”
Edmond Genet, aged twenty, was buried in a little cemetery at the air base at Ham, eighty miles north of Paris. A light snow fell as the coffin was lowered into the grave. He had left an earlier undated note that said, “If I die, wrap me in the French flag, but place the two colors upon my grave to show that I died for two countries.” In accordance with his instructions, his body was wrapped in the French flag and placed in the coffin. Then an American flag and a French flag were wrapped around the coffin, and a slender plain wooden cross placed on top of it.
Invoking the biblical Benjamin, Captain Thenault said this as he stood in the snow beside Edmond’s coffin:
“He was young, and he seemed even younger. He was our Benjamin, and we cherished him as in a family one prefers the youngest, the weakest. But his heart was not weak, as on many occasions he caused us to see.”
As Thenault finished his tribute, a shaft of sunlight cut through the falling snow.
When Edmond died, his mother wrote to Josephus Daniels, the United States secretary of the Navy, giving him all the facts, including that Edmond had been posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre with two palms. Daniels had the record of desertion expunged and wrote her this:
“Edmond Charles Genet, having honorably terminated an enlistment with an ally, since he died on the field of ba
ttle . . . I am myself honored in having the privilege of deciding that the record of Edmond Genet, ordinary seaman, United States Navy, shall be considered in every respect an honorable one.”
Twenty-four
The United States Enters
the War
While Bert Hall was on his secret trip, combat units of the United States Army began arriving at French ports in late June. On the Fourth of July, 1917, they were to march through Paris in their first appearance before the French public. Another Escadrille pilot named Hall, James Norman Hall, destined for future fame as the co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty, stood quietly on a sidewalk, wearing his French uniform, and wrote this in a letter home:
“At 8 a.m. about two thousand of the American Troops began their parade. I awaited them at the Place de la Concorde. What a sight! I felt like crying. Marching to music they went on up the Rue de Rivoli to the Hotel de Ville [City Hall]. The streets were packed with people. The ranks were broken up by the crowds. I never saw such a demonstration. Everywhere were American flags. Everybody was yelling, jumping, shouting, all through the three hours’ parade. French poilus burst into the lines and took our boys by the arms, marching and singing with them. Women did the same, and all the women were weeping.
“Then they came to the Hotel de Ville and the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played. Every Frenchman, Englishman, Belgian, and American bared his head and silently stood at attention. The music stopped and for a few moments there was silence; then the crowds burst again into a tremendous cheer, and the parade went on to the tomb of Lafayette. Paris was wild, frantic. I never saw anything like it. They are crazy over the Americans. “Vive l’Amerique!” seems still to be buzzing in my ears. I can’t begin to describe the wonderful effect our declaration of war has on the French. It has given them new courage. We came in at the psychological moment. France weeps for happiness; cheers for joy; rekindles her spirit and cries, “Vive l’Amerique!”
“I left the parade at the Hotel de Ville. I was too weak, trembling, and too full of emotion to go any farther. My last impression was the picture of General Pershing [John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force], riding through the frantic mob, with his hand at a constant salute. I don’t think he took his hand down once through the whole three hours’ procession except when he spoke and the flag was dedicated.”
The United States entered the war at a time when the exhausted French Army was experiencing mass desertions. In contrast, the morale and efficiency of the Escadrille was steadily improving. As the American Expeditionary Force began arriving in France in mid-1917, the United States Army Air Service had little strength to contribute. The Air Service existed largely on paper: In the entire United States it had only two operational flying fields, and fifty-five planes. General Pershing said of those aircraft, “. . . 51 were obsolete, and the other four were obsolescent.”
Fig 20. This picture of Escadrille pilot James Norman Hall, who would gain future fame as coauthor of Mutiny on the Bounty, was taken by one of his German captors shortly after he was shot down behind enemy lines. Hall, who at the time sported a large handlebar moustache, is pictured above in a German staff car, waiting for the next steps in his captivity. His broken nose has been bandaged, and both his ankles were severely sprained in the crash. The calm-looking dachshund in his lap presumably belongs to one of the Germans. Hall finished the war behind bars at Landshut Castle in Bavaria.
The senior American Air Service officers wanted to take over all the American pilots flying for France. The plan was to keep them low in rank so that, with few exceptions, they would be outranked by most of the Air Service pilots, none of whom had ever flown in combat. As for being sticklers for regulations, the newly arrived American commanders started off by requiring that these veteran airmen start wearing cavalry spurs on their military boots—something guaranteed to tear apart the delicate interior of a fighter plane’s cockpit. Additionally, they wanted all these pilots who had served with the French to take the rigorous American pilot physical exam.
All of this produced a lot of resistance, and Ned Parsons, now an ace, wrote a withering critique in which he stated that many of the pilots who had excelled in combat during the first three years of the war could not possibly pass that test.
In any event, some of the American pilots stayed with the French, but most were soon flying in American squadrons that used French planes. The performance and past records of those who had flown with the French began to convince the senior officers of the United States Army Air Service that they deserved promotions. Bill Thaw ended the war as a squadron commander with the rank of major, having received American decorations that included the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest medal for valor.
In line with Ned Parsons’ comment that many of the successful Escadrille pilots could not pass the American physical, the authorities began to grant medical waivers. The most interesting of these was given to Dudley Hill, who could see out of only one eye. Dated November 17, 1917, and signed by General Pershing, it read in part, “On account of three years flying with the French army it is thought he would make a very useful officer in spite of marked vision defect.” Hill justified the decision, going on to be a captain and the commander of an American Army fighter squadron.
All of the Allied commanders were slow to grasp the difference between tactics—how a squadron handled an enemy met on its patrols and the result of those meetings—and the bigger strategic picture. Gradually they began to realize that while sound tactics that produced kills and saved Allied planes were important, it was of equal importance to record where the kills took place and where groups of enemy and Allied planes were assigned.
Just by putting a superior number of fighter planes into a given area, the Allies reduced the enemy’s chances of conducting successful reconnaissance or bombing missions there, and possibly forced enemy commanders to move more of their squadrons into areas to which they had wanted to assign a lower priority.
On the other hand, by assigning too few planes to a particular area, the Allies risked losing an inordinate number of their own planes. For example, in initially assigning American squadrons their areas of operation the French failed to put into practice what they had learned about the importance of keeping sufficient numbers of planes in strongly contested sectors. The pilots in some of the American squadrons proved themselves to be well trained and skillful, but during what turned out to be the German buildup to their offensive at Château-Thierry, fifty miles east-northeast of Paris, the French assigned only one flight of six to ten American planes to patrol a ten-mile stretch of the front. They assigned only one more American flight of six to ten men to each of two more ten-mile spans, one on each side of the central area. This left, at most, only thirty American planes to patrol a hotly contested thirty-mile front.
That resulted in the most desperate fighting the United States Army fliers engaged in during their time at the front. As many as twenty-four German fighters would pounce on a single formation of as few as six American planes, with predictably merciless results. When this enormous disparity was corrected, the reinforced American squadrons went on to play a successful part in one of the hardest-fought and most important victories of the war—that at Château-Thierry.
Twenty-five
A Lion in the Air Passes the Torch, and the Escadrille Bids Its Own Lions Farewell
After bringing Ernst Udet out of the mud in Flanders by inviting him to join his “Flying Circus,” the “Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen soon gave him command of Jasta 11, the legendary German squadron he had led himself before becoming a group commander. Udet wrote of Richthofen vividly and insightfully, describing his strong Teutonic features and arresting blue eyes. Being privy to Richthofen’s combination of aerial tactics and strategic thinking, he observed that Richthofen initiated the practice of establishing a forward base, placing his squadrons so near the front lines that his pilots could
fly five missions a day, compared with the three missions averaged by the British and French units that had to fly farther just to reach the area where dogfights occurred. Udet said of his leader, “He was the least complicated man I ever knew. Entirely Prussian and the greatest of soldiers.”
Uncomplicated or not, Richthofen had developed a tactic that Allied airmen never fully understood. He would open fire from behind an enemy plane at a distance of several hundred yards. The chances of doing significant damage from that range were slim, but when the pilot realized that a hostile plane was firing at him from behind he would begin zigzagging, to present a more difficult target. Every second he spent swerving from side to side was a second that Richthofen used to fly straight ahead, shortening the distance until he was close enough to execute one of his scores of kills.
Again, for a simple man, Richthofen had a penetrating view of the mind-set of the fliers of different nationalities. Writing in his diary in February of 1917, he said of his and his group’s quest for victories, “Everything depends on whether we have for opponents those French tricksters or those daring rascals, the English. I prefer the English. Frequently their daring can only be described as stupidity. In their eyes it may be pluck and daring.”
Richthofen offered up his own German ethnic characterization:
“In my opinion the aggressive spirit is everything and that spirit is very strong in us Germans. Hence we shall always retain the domination of the air.
“The French have a different character. They like to put traps and to attack their opponents unaware. That cannot easily be done in the air. Only a beginner can be caught and one cannot set traps because an airplane cannot hide itself. The invisible airplane has not yet been discovered. Sometimes, however, the Gallic blood asserts itself. The Frenchmen will then attack. But the French attacking spirit is like bottled lemonade. It lacks tenacity.
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