The unsubstantial air, p.12
The Unsubstantial Air, page 12
As they come nearer to the day when they’ll be sent into combat over the front, the brash confidence with which they began their training seems to fade a bit; they see how little they’ve learned of the important combat skills, and a note of reluctance slips into their letters. Alan Nichols, near to finishing his training at Tours, writes that after one more class he’ll be brevetted, but adds, “Really I’m in no hurry at that. I’m not wild to rush this air fighting any more than is necessary”; and Stuart Walcott, after a week at the front with SPA 84, confesses that the wily Hun “need not worry about my bothering him if he doesn’t keep fooling around under my nose till I’m ashamed not to go after him. I’m not blood-thirsty a bit, especially till I learn to fly, and the lack of combats isn’t going to keep me awake nights for a while yet.”
On the other side of the lines were pilots who had been fighting air battles for a year, two years, even three years. The young Americans, with their seventy or eighty hours, must have been aware of the experience of those German veterans. By the end of 1917, Boelcke and Max Immelmann were dead, but Manfred von Richthofen was still flying his red Fokker. How many hours did he have?
Still, Colonel Edgar Gorrell, who was in command of flight training in France, was confident that a pilot with ninety hours was “fit for the front.” The young pilots might be less certain, but they were still eager to join a fighting squadron, to be part of the real thing, to have a crack at the Huns. “Everyone’s idea of heaven on earth,” Holden wrote in his journal, “is to get some Boches and a few decorations, maybe a wound, and get back home.” Often that goal is put more simply: it’s to get just one Boche, “my Boche”; such phrases turn up in many letters and journals. When Sidney Drew writes to his actor-father, expressing his happiness at the old man’s success in a new play, he adds,
But I must confess that I will be nearly as happy if I can get a Boche. As much for your sake as for mine and above all because I want to be worthy of your belief in me and your pride.
So far, I have done nothing that the merest fool could not have done, but if I can make my mark I will feel that I have, at least, confirmed your conviction in my ability “to come across.”
For young pilots like Drew, that first victory will be the final test, the coming-of-age ritual they’ve trained for. When they’ve done it, when they’ve got their Boche, they’ll be different: they’ll be men (there’s a lot about manhood and doing a man’s work in their letters).
It will be more than that, though; it will be the chivalric contest they’ve dreamed about all through their training—two men fighting, one against one, like knights in a tournament. Stuart Walcott, one week short of joining an escadrille at the front, writes, “I’m beginning to hear that it’s nothing but a lot of routine work, few combats and pretty soon a frightful bore: I refuse to believe it and hang on to romance for all I’m worth.”
To fly that romantic war, they’ll have to become chasse pilots, in a chasse squadron. The very term chasse explains why: in French it means the hunt, the chase—the traditional act of pursuing some wild animal in order to kill it. The German word for a fighting pilot means much the same thing: Jagd, the hunt, Jagdflieger, a flier who hunts. The English at first called their little planes “scouts,” because, like cavalry scouts, they went looking for the enemy, and that term continued in some pilots’ vocabularies, but more and more they became “pursuit” planes, hunters like the others. In whatever language you use, one special kind of flier has appeared, whose job (perhaps one should say vocation) is to hunt enemy planes and destroy them—individually. A biplace observation plane with a pilot and a gunner in it might get the odd Boche (Frederick Libby, a cowboy from California who first flew as an RFC gunner in an FE2b, shot down five Germans and was an ace before he moved on to flight training and eventually got nine more as a pilot), but it wasn’t the same: a gunner wasn’t a hunter; he was simply defending himself. The real hunters were the chasse pilots.
The young men who came to flight school knew from the beginning that there were two classes of military pilots: the chasse pilots, and all the rest, who flew the observation, bombing, and artillery-spotting planes. Sidney Drew explained it all early in his training at Avord, in a letter to his father:
There are two schools or courses here. One is called Caudron which develops flyers for observation machines, used for the purpose of taking photographs while flying low over the enemy’s lines and for directing artillery fire.
Caudron pilots also fly the big bombing machines. This work is terrifically important and very useful, but a brevetted Caudron pilot … does not rank as a flyer and as a splendid fellow with the pilot turned out by the Bleriot school.
The Bleriot school is the training given to men who ultimately drive Avion de Chasse, that is fighting planes.
The men who graduate from the Bleriot are supposed to be the cream of the flyers.
Of course Drew wants to fly chasse planes and be one of the “splendid fellows”; almost all the students he’s with do. But most of them will be disappointed. According to Percival Gates, “Only about 20% of the men who come here to this school [Issoudun] finish up as Chasse men.” “Chasse men” will be a small, select group; being chosen will be like making the first team in college or being elected to the best fraternity—you’ll be one of the elite.
Those who are promoted to chasse training write home about the fast new planes they now fly in words of praise that might seem more appropriate to a new girlfriend: Nieuports are “delightful … so quick to act,” “so fast and sensitive,” “delicate on the controls … I was not used to being so gentle,” “small and graceful as a maiden—and, like a maiden, dangerous to her enemies and treacherous to her friends.” (That last quotation is from little Jack Wright. I wonder how much he knew about maidens when he wrote it—nineteen years old and not long out of Andover.) And always, the new chasse pilots compare their planes with the clumsier aircraft that less fortunate pilots fly: a Nieuport makes a Curtiss Jenny seem “lumbering,” a Caudron “like a freighter.”
To be sent to a squadron that flew reconnaissance, artillery-ranging, or bombing missions would be a judgment of failure in a crucial test. “If a man is training in the Bleriot school,” Drew explains to his father, “and he is found wanting, he is radiated to the Caudron. If he fails in the Caudron he is radiated to civilian life.” As they work through the training program, students worry about whether they’ll fail, though they assure themselves that if they do, they won’t really mind. Percival Gates writes in his diary, “I will probably get sent to bombing before I get through here. But I would not mind if I did as that is an awfully good way to start regular line work.” And in a letter to his mother: “There is a chance that I will flunk the exams, of course, in which case I will go bombing, or something like that.” They understand, they say, that such work is important and necessary, and even interesting, but they make it sound menial.
Students who suspected that they might pass the tests and still not “make chasse” felt angry and betrayed; Alan Nichols, at Tours in the fall of 1917, saw Farman bombing planes (the old-fashioned pusher type, with the engine behind the pilot and the propeller facing backward) arriving at the field and wondered if the authorities might make him fly one of those clunkers into the war. “I’ll bomb the place myself if they do!” he exclaimed in a letter. “I came here to fly a fighting plane, and dropping bombs on people is not to my taste.” And Dick Blodgett worried that because he knew something about wireless telegraphy he’d be sent to an observation squadron. “I want to fly a fighting plane,” he said, “and not some slow, heavy mudscow.”
Morale problems worsened as they waited, and their anger overflowed into other problems, other injustices: the honor students had been promised commissions as first lieutenants when they graduated, and now they were offered second lieutenancies while the guys who’d been left behind back home, the less-than-honor students, were arriving in France as first lieutenants, who had to be saluted! You might think the rank wouldn’t matter, so long as you were commissioned and flying, but injustice does matter when you’re twenty-one and in search of your manhood. Add to that the pay problem: some students were being paid only thirty dollars a month, while others got a hundred dollars. To be a student and broke, when you should be an officer with money in your pockets, was hard to bear. They wouldn’t put up with it! They’d apply for discharges from the U.S. Army; they’d fly for the French or the RFC—the U.S. Army was hopeless.
Some did change air services. Some vented their frustrations by staging demonstrations (like the near riot at Tours in November over delayed commissions), by confronting their officers with demands for justice, by getting someone with influence to intervene with the Higher Ups (Quentin Roosevelt, for example), or by writing letters to generals and telegrams back to the States—behaving more like outraged taxpayers than like cadets training for a war. But most of them did what idle, discontented soldiers do: they hung around their quarters, they drank, they played poker, they shot craps, and they bitched.
As 1917 ran toward its end, the delays and confusions multiplied; new students arrived at French training fields in ever greater numbers, and were taught to fly, and added to the pileup of pilots at the end of the production line, like factory-made widgets that nobody wanted—“awaiting assignment,” the Air Service told them. Quentin Roosevelt, stuck that fall in an administrative job at Issoudun, witnessed the muddle at close range:
Some lunatic got the idea that there was a crying need for pilots over here, that we were ready for six hundred students a month … so they started shipping over untrained cadets by the hundred to France. Of course we have no earthly means of coping with them, and never wanted them in the first place … Consequently, we have now about six hundred non-flying cadets here with nothing in the world for them to do, and apparently no chance of their flying in the next couple of months.
Student discontent was so great by the end of 1917 that the Air Service ordered Colonel Bingham to France to investigate: not, apparently, to correct the problems, but to discover who was responsible for them. His account of what he found, as set down in his postwar memoir, is a sad catalog of military muddle: there was the Army’s red tape—the need for certificates of typhoid inoculations, and the clumsy way service records were shipped; there was the weather, too, which prevented the Air Service both from building airfields and from flying from them when they were built; and the failure to keep General George Squier informed back in Washington (there just weren’t enough transatlantic cables, Bingham explained); and the complete breakdown of the French plan for training the Americans once they reached France; and the Army’s promotion system.
Bingham was sympathetic to the students’ loss of morale and to the sense of injustice they felt at their government’s failure to keep its promises. It had all been a “terrific disappointment,” he wrote, a “hideous mistake.” But when he came to draw the conclusion from his investigation, he could find no one to blame. “So far as I could learn then,” he wrote in his memoir, “no one person, but rather a series of events, was at the bottom of the trouble.” He had found the classic Army explanation: in a war, stuff happens.
You have to feel some sympathy for the high brass of the Air Service training program. They had started out, back when the United States entered the war in April, with nothing: no program and practically no facilities, only Congress’s airy promise to its allies that America would provide five thousand pilots by the middle of the next year. They had found fields for their student pilots (most of them in other countries); they had moved those students around from one field to another, and they had managed to get some of them trained—or partly trained—not as many as Congress had promised, but some. It was a kind of miracle that they’d accomplished as much as they had, considering the natural lethargy of institutions and the inherent confusion of war.
Miracle or not, it wasn’t enough for some Americans in flight training in France. When officials at the French school at Tours announced at roll call one morning in November 1917 that the school had been taken over by the U.S. Army and would from that day be run by the Air Service, the students responded with a chorus of groans and catcalls. “Some change in the patriotic enthusiasm that brought us over here to fight for the U.S.!” Walter Avery wrote in his journal. “Most of the fellows would join the French army if they could today, and so hate to see the French management leave.” Their reasoning was simple: the French system worked.
By the end of 1917 the Air Service had a growing stockpile of new pilots, with some coming along every day. What was to be done with them? There were no American combat squadrons at the front to assign them to—no squadrons, no seasoned pilots to command them, no planes, not even machine guns to arm the planes if they had them. Some pilots were offered whatever flying jobs there were behind the lines: ferrying planes, flight-testing, instructing, or some administrative job at one of the training fields.
American pilots stuck in England might find themselves ferrying planes across the English Channel to France. Frank Dixon, who was in London waiting for his American commission to arrive, remembered what ferrying was like there. He was sent to the Sopwith factory in Lincoln, in the middle of the country; it was his first ferry assignment. A little WAC at the desk handed him a logbook. “Take this plane to Marquise,” she said.
“Where’s Marquise?”
“France.”
He said he’d never been to France.
“Oh, as you go south from here, there are two railroads, one with green engines and the other with black engines. Stay between them. The first river you see with boats in it is the Thames, the large city is London.”
He said he knew the south coast. He’d trained there, partly.
She said, “Then you go to Folkestone and land at Lympne, where they inspect the plane to see that it meets the King’s Regulations for overseas. At Folkestone a pier juts out with a crook at the end. Set your compass on the crook and the first thing you see that looks like an airfield is Marquise.”
With those instructions, he nevertheless found Marquise and delivered the plane. Given the choice of flying back to England or taking a boat, he decided to fly, and picked a plane with dihedral wings and a stationary engine (clearly he’d never seen such a plane before). Over the Channel, he looked out at the wings and saw one of them vibrating more than he liked. The next time he took the boat. On another ferrying flight his Camel “chewed up its engine,” and he had to make a forced landing in a farmer’s field. While he was away from the plane seeking help, a cow started licking the castor oil that had overflowed the engine and put her foot through a wing. All in a day’s work, if you were a ferry pilot. The accidents weren’t all comical; six ferry pilots flying out of Orly were killed before the war ended.
Testing was another way of waiting around. You might be sent to Orly to test planes because your commission hadn’t arrived, and without it you couldn’t join a squadron, or you might be ordered there because there was nothing else to do with you.
None of the pilots liked test-flying much: “It’s as dangerous as going to the front,” Richardson wrote, “and not near as interesting.” But the point wasn’t that test-flying was dangerous; it’s that it was the wrong danger. “I came here to get a squint at some planes with black crosses on them and not to be a tester,” Holden wrote in his diary, “so if they don’t kick me out of this job I shall drop it of my own accord.”
It took him two months to get transferred to the only alternative, a French “Defense of Paris” squadron. That sounds like a better, altogether more belligerent line of work; you’d be assigned to a French escadrille somewhere between Paris and the front, where you’d be responsible for protecting the capital from enemy air attacks. In the spring of 1918 there were ten such escadrilles in place: seven flying large “night battle” planes (mostly French Voisins), the other three flying Spads or Nieuports.
German attacks usually came at night, so the defenders’ job would be first to find the Gotha bombers in the dark and then to destroy them. When you consider the night-flying equipment they had, both in the planes and on the ground, it sounds like a scary way to fight a war. They had minimal cockpit instruments—an altimeter, a compass, a tachometer, maybe a clock (and in earlier models of the planes they wouldn’t have been illuminated)—and no permanent landing lights on the ground. Airfields would light up the runway when a plane approached using flares (a bucket with half a gallon of gasoline in it), or bonfires, or the headlights of trucks. Some night-flying planes carried wing flares, which would light up the surface of the ground if you were low enough, and bombers might have a parachute flare aboard, to be dropped from higher up (though that was intended to light a bombing target). There were, of course, no radio ranges and no rotating beacons to home in on, and no warning lights on obstacles on the ground—water towers, or power lines like the one that Norman Prince flew into in the dark, back in 1916. There were many groping emergency landings and many crashes. Still, to eager new pilots in the waiting pool at Issoudun, a Defense of Paris squadron would at least be a move in the right direction, toward action. Surely they would be excited to get such an assignment.
In fact, they weren’t. Two of those waiting pilots kept journals that are almost day-to-day accounts of what Defense of Paris duty was like. Walter Avery and Lance Holden were Ivy Leaguers—Avery from Harvard, Holden from Princeton—who met at their port of embarkation, traveled to France together, and became close friends. They were assigned to the same Defense of Paris squadron at Le Bourget and flew together. And wrote about it. Here is Avery on the new assignment:
April 7, 1918: Came out to Le Bourget field to join one of the French Escadrilles in the defense of Paris … We are to have Nieuports and Spads and would be all to the merry if it were not for the disappointment of getting sidetracked from the real war work.
