The Unsubstantial Air, page 23
Unfortunately, he adds, the British lost twelve bombardment airplanes in the attack, but the raid had been a success that confirmed his strategic theories: “It was the first case on record where we, with an inferior air force, were able to put the superior air force on the defensive and attack whenever we pleased, without the danger of the Germans sending great masses of pursuit aviation over to our side of the line.” You’d think he’d have been content. But his account of the raid continues for one more sentence: “What we could have done if we had had one thousand good airplanes instead of a measly two hundred and fifty!”
Major Brown and the Ninety-Sixth spoiled the good bombing news. After their first raid, pilots of the squadron flew a couple of uneventful missions, but then both the weather and their old planes turned against them. On June 22 a formation set out for Conflans but was forced by clouds and high winds to turn back. On the twenty-fifth a formation of four planes got to Conflans and dropped, but poor visibility obscured the results. On June 26, 27, and 28, Brown attempted to lead attacks on Longuyon but had to return: the cloud ceiling was impenetrable. All this action wore the already worn planes out, and more and more had to turn back before they crossed the lines.
Early July was much the same: either the weather was foul, or there weren’t enough planes; no missions were flown. Major Brown must have felt desperate; how could he and his squadron make their reputations with such weather and such planes? July 10 looked no better: cloudy and rainy, with poor visibility and only six planes available. But in the late afternoon the clouds seemed to lift, and Brown decided to take a chance and fly a raid. By the time he and the five other pilots took off, it was almost evening. As they climbed, they were immediately swallowed up in the overcast and disappeared. That was the last that was seen of them.
The squadron log for that day records what squadron members back at Amanty knew about the raid:
July 10—6 planes left our airdrome tonight at 6.05 p.m. to bomb the railroad station and yards at Conflans. Up to 11.30 p.m. no word had been received as to the whereabouts of them. Weather cloudy and rainy. Visibility poor. The formation was in command of Major Brown.
The next day’s entry is from the Germans:
July 11—Today at 4.00 p.m. the following extract from an intercepted German Communique was received by G-2, GHQ&EF (via ’phone): “Out of a squadron of six American aeroplanes which intended to attack Coblenz we captured five together with their crews.” It is believed that the 6th plane landed within the German lines farther south than the others.
If that was true, the Ninety-Sixth had lost its commanding officer, most of its flight crews, and nearly all its working aircraft in a single operation and without dropping a single bomb.
A story like that was bound to enter the Air Service rumor net, and so it did. Harvey Conover drew a pilot’s moral from the story:
This may take some of the damn foolishness out of the Americans. They have been forced to fly planes entirely unfit for this work and discarded by the French. Not a word of this has been allowed to get into the paper. If it were put in we might benefit by the experience and our countrymen might lose some of their conceit and cockiness. A grand and glorious ending for the first American bombing squadron together with their commander.
The following day The New York Times had the story, from the German source. It went like this: The flight had climbed out of Amanty into a solid overcast and had flown above it until, by the major’s reckoning, they were over Conflans. But the major hadn’t allowed for the fact that the winds above the clouds were stronger than the winds at ground level—were in fact gale-force winds out of the southwest, blowing toward their target at something like seventy miles an hour. When Brown led his formation down through the overcast to where he thought Conflans was, he found a strange city—Coblenz, a hundred miles farther east. He indicated to the others that he was lost, and they all turned, apparently each man on his own, and headed in what they hoped was the direction of their home field. Flying against that fierce headwind and still carrying their bombs, they all ran out of gas and made emergency landings in Germany. The sixth plane that the Germans couldn’t account for was Major Brown’s. He, too, was down; it just took longer to find him.
Billy Mitchell heard the story, too, and drew his own angry moral from it:
Our bombardment group was not in good condition. It was poorly commanded, the morale was weak and it would take some time to get it on its feet. This was largely due to the fact that when I was away in Château-Thierry, the 96th Squadron was left behind in the Toul area. The Major who was then in command of the 96th flew over into Germany with what ships he had available for duty. He lost his way in the fog and landed in Germany with every ship intact. Not one single ship was burned or destroyed and the Germans captured the whole outfit complete. This was the most glaring exhibition of worthlessness we had had on the front.
To Mitchell, the worst part of the history was the enemies’ impudent response to the incident: “The Germans sent back a humorous message which was dropped on one of our airdromes. It said, ‘We thank you for the fine airplanes and equipment which you have sent us, but what shall we do with the Major?’”
Mitchell did not respond, and the six crews spent the rest of the war as prisoners of the Germans. As for Major Brown, Mitchell wrote bitterly, “he was better off in Germany at that time than he would have been with us.” As Mitchell saw the case, Brown’s incompetence had humiliated his commander and effectively grounded the Air Service’s first bombing squadron. With only two pilots and two planes left, the Ninety-Sixth would fly no more missions until replacements arrived. And Mitchell would have to start over building the strategic bombing force that he wanted so much.
FOURTEEN
SUMMER: 1918
On the first day of spring 1918 only one American squadron was at the front and operating. That was the old Lafayette Escadrille, which had been transferred from the Service Aéronautique to the U.S. Air Service in February and was now the 103rd Pursuit, flying patrols from a field near Reims. Two other pursuit squadrons—the Ninety-Fourth and the Ninety-Fifth—had made it to the front, but neither got there equipped to fight: the Ninety-Fifth had no guns, and its pilots had not been trained in gunnery (they were promptly sent back to Cazaux to learn how to shoot); the Ninety-Fourth first had no planes and then had no guns to go in them. There were no other American squadrons on the lines—no observation, no bombing squadrons. The Air Service war in the air simply hadn’t begun.
On the first day of summer, twelve squadrons were present and operating: five pursuit, six observation, and one bombing (the unfortunate Ninety-Sixth). Not a large number, when you consider how many French and British squadrons were strung along the front and fighting, and certainly not the tidal wave of pilots and planes that Congress had so optimistically promised a year before. Still, the flow had begun.
All that spring Americans moved up. In June two very restless embusqués finally escaped their jobs at Issoudun and joined the First Pursuit Group at Toul: Ham Coolidge went to the Ninety-Fourth Squadron, and his friend Quentin Roosevelt to the Ninety-Fifth.
Two other flying friends went up together in July. Walter Avery and Lance Holden had been in the same Defense of Paris squadron at Le Bourget field since April. In their months of waiting around, they’d heard stories of what squadrons at the front were doing and knew the reputations that some of those squadrons had gained. When their defense squadron was disbanded in July, the American pilots in it were offered a choice of assignments. “I faced a big decision yesterday,” Holden wrote in a letter home, “I had the opportunity to go where I liked—To stay behind the lines—to go to the front with the French—or to get into the very thick of it with my friends in the best American Squadron—Gale, Willard, Avery and I looked at each other and sort of smiled—then they left it up to me, where we should we go. You are such a good sport that you will understand my choice.” He chose the First Pursuit Group (composed of the Ninety-Fourth and the Ninety-Fifth Squadrons): “It is the crowd you have read so much about—Campbell—Rickenbacker—and all my friends—Their esprit de corps is marvelous—the wildest bunch on the front … I never was so happy.”
Esprit de corps—of course: that’s a virtue in any military unit. But wildness? That must mean extreme behavior beyond ordinary rules, both in the air and on the ground: chance taking over the lines, hard drinking after hours, furniture-breaking parties—the legends of fighting squadrons you hear before you ever see one in action.
* * *
Before 1918, the war on the Western Front had been mostly a static, entrenched confrontation; attacks might be launched, and troops would advance and withdraw, but the front remained essentially stationary, a meandering scar across France shaped like an arm with the elbow bent, the shoulder at the Channel, the upper arm running south to around Amiens and the forearm reaching east from there to the German border beyond Toul and Nancy.
In the spring and summer of 1918 that changed, and the war became a war of movement that remained in motion until the Armistice. Squadrons that had been flying from the same familiar field had to move up, in order to keep within the reach of the shifting lines, and then move again—forward as the enemy withdrew, or sometimes laterally, as fighting flared up on another part of the front. Moving became so customary that Ham Coolidge complained, “I feel like a travelling salesman going from place to place with all kinds of disreputable looking baggage.” Squadron members—not only pilots, but mechanics and quartermasters and clerks and cooks—became skilled at packing up everything it takes to run a squadron, hauling it off to somewhere else, and unpacking it in time for the next morning’s patrols.
Pilots’ letters of that time are full of names of new airfields that are hard to find on maps: Épiez, Ourches, St. Pol, Amanty, Touquin, Flin, Francheville, Saints, La Ferté, Ferme des Greves, Lisle-en-Barrois, Vaucouleurs, Delouze, Coincy, Rembercourt, Érize-la-Petite, Bicquelay. A few of these fields are in the British sector, where some Americans are still flying with the RAF, but most are in the neighborhood of Château-Thierry, where American squadrons first enter the war in significant numbers, and later farther east, in the Toul sector.
Sometimes the new field a squadron moved up to would be an established, comfortable airfield: the landing spaces would be flat and smoothed out and long and wide enough to get down on without any trouble, and there’d be permanent hangars for the planes. Toul was like that—at least in memory. Harold Buckley looked back on it as “like the promised land with its fine airdrome, splendid quarters, and hot and cold showers.” That sounds ideal, but there’s more: memory adds the two cities nearby (Toul and Nancy), “of sufficient size to promise occasional opportunities to indulge the lighter sides of our natures.” Hot showers and two towns to party in—what more could a pilot want?
Other fields would be new, might not even be airfields yet, but simply the biggest open space around—like the patch that the Ninety-Sixth Squadron flew into in May. Charles Codman remembered that flight:
The map was being scanned for Neufchâteau when without warning the leading plane banked to the left and slowly spiraled earthward. Motor trouble perhaps. Directly beneath, the terrain was thickly wooded. No visible landing place, unless you counted the small open space hemmed in on three sides by the woods and sloping sharply off on the fourth into a tiny village. It could be made in a pinch all right, but one would hardly choose it for an atterissage [landing field]. Two more planes nosed down. The formation scattered, circled, and one by one in a somewhat gingerly manner slid over the tree tops. A slight bump and we were on a stubby patch of what had been a wheat field, abandoned apparently, and liberally strewn with rocks. Across the middle of it a small white country road, originating presumably in the now invisible village, wandered off into the forest. No sign of human habitation. Where were we, and what now?
They were at Amanty. The airfield there would become an important base in the last stage of the war, but first the squadron would have to build it. That shouldn’t have surprised the squadron members; Americans had been building the fields they flew from since the first student pilots arrived at Issoudun.
New airfields meant new quarters—all kinds of quarters. “This is the queerest life you ever saw,” Ham Coolidge wrote to his family at home. “One week we live in a château, the next we are billeted in dingy farmhouses. Sometimes we eat like kings, again we almost starve because of all being broke.” At Toul, in June, they were housed in a stone barracks with good food and hot and cold shower baths, and then, at Touquin, southwest of Château-Thierry, in a real château with flowers and vegetables in its gardens and fish in its lake. In September they lived in a tent, which Coolidge found far preferable to a billet.
Quentin Roosevelt found a room in a charming French house—“one of those white, plaster houses with tile roofs that sag in between the rafters”—with a little old lady and her dog. Initially, both regarded him with suspicion, but he won them over—first the old lady, by speaking French to her, and then the dog, who barked and growled but before the first evening was over was wagging his tail and putting his head on Roosevelt’s knee. Roosevelt was an irresistibly charming young man.
* * *
Wherever they lodged, the pilots’ work they did would be essentially what earlier pilots had done: the same patrolling, protecting bombers and artillery spotters and photo planes, the same fighting, scouting, and strafing, the same low work through the same artillery barrages. The same, but with a difference: in July the war heated up, and the Battle of Château-Thierry was fought. The pilots were aware of the change; Lance Holden wrote, at the end of the month, “We are in a sector where there is more aerial fighting than there has been in the history of the war and undoubtedly the battle between Soisson and Rheims is one of the most terrific in history.”
In that most terrific battle the fighting—on the ground and in the air—will grow more and more intense; there will be more troops below and more planes above. More planes will mean changes in tactics; pursuit planes will fly in larger formations, and dogfights will be congested and scary. Sumner Sewall, a pilot in the Ninety-Fifth, described a fight he got into that month in a letter to his mother:
We were patrolling about over the lines in a big formation of ten planes when we sighted a formation of six Boche machines about five kilometers inside their lines. Well we dived on them and attacked. I wish you could have seen the mess that followed. Sixteen planes just rushing around upside down and on their ear some climbing and others diving. Black crosses would go swirling around. Really it was the darndest stew I have ever seen.
Fifteen years later, Alan Winslow remembers such congested battles: “These massed aerial combats are not adequately described by the expression ‘dog fights,’” he wrote; “they were violent mob riots of the air.”
There will be more bombers in the air, too—flotillas of them (Billy Mitchell’s “measly two hundred and fifty” plane raid was flown during the Château-Thierry operations), with more pursuit planes stacked above at different altitudes to protect them. Observation squadrons will be drawn into the mass attacks; George Hughes remembered that in the drive on Hill 204 “there must have been fully 150 Allied planes in the air at one time. It was like running a taxi on 5th Avenue; it was all you could do to keep from colliding.”
With all those planes in the air, and the antiaircraft fire heavier from below, there will be more casualties: more wounds, more crashes, more accidents, more planes that just disappear, more dead. As more new men come to the front, live through their first weeks there, and join in the ordinary business of combat flying, the dark events of war will become a steady presence in their minds, and they will search for a way of writing about them. Walter Avery, at Saints with the Ninety-Fifth, recorded the squadron’s daily losses in his journal. Here are entries for a few days in early August:
Saturday. Had my second Boche today … Holden, Bailey and Gill failed to return. At supper we learned by phone that Holden and Bailey had been driven down just inside our lines … Gill has not been heard from.
Sunday. Gill got back, wounded in the leg … We found “Rabbit” Curry’s machine near Azy. He had fallen about 50 ft. in a nose dive and died before they got him out of the plane … Russel is missing … Curry is buried near Azy where he fell.
Monday. Russel was seen to go down in yesterday’s fight. Buried near Bazoches Hospital.
Tuesday. Milhau, a transfer pilot, leaving our field in a Type 28 [Nieuport] went into a vrille at 100M and couldn’t get out of it. He was killed instantly. He and the plane were a bad mess.
The tone of the writing is flat and reportorial—ordinary words for ordinary dying, the tone they’ve used for death since their training days. Avery provides the details that pilots always want to know—what happened, and where and how. And nothing more.
When the plane shot down is his own, a pilot will write about it in his letters or journal—if he does—in the same cool tone. When Lance Holden is shot down that August, he mentions the incident in a single paragraph, almost parenthetically:
Aug. 5–19, 1918. The 10th we were attacked by 7 while protecting a French biplace Spad. Buckley and Avery each got one. Gill was wounded. Bailey and I were shot down. He with an explosive bullet in his tank. I with a bullet through my intake manifold and cylinder—besides others. That was an entirely successful fight. The biplace returned with all its pictures.
Doug Campbell is wounded in the fight with a German biplace that ends his combat career:
I heard a loud crashing sound and felt myself hit in the back; it appears that a bullet struck a wire just behind me, and one of the fragments lodged in the flesh of my lumbar regions.
Fortunately, it didn’t disable me for flying, and I made a bee-line for home, landing safely. Inside of half an hour the bullet had been located by X-ray … The wound is perfectly clean, and they sewed it up tight … I am sleeping and eating well, and am as comfortable as could be expected with a hole in my back.
