High Flew The Falcons

HERBERT
MOLLOY MASON, JR.
THE FRENCH ACES OF WORLD WAR I
HIGH FLEW
THE FALCONS
THE FRENCH ACES OF WORLD WAR I
by HERBERT MOLLOY MASON, JR.

PROFUSELY ILLUSTRATED
WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
In 1914 a new breed of fighting

man came into being, whose individual
courage and style were reminiscent of
the age of chivalry. This was the aerial
duelist; his arena was the air over the
Western Front. He fought first with rifle
in hand, later with mounted machine
guns. He was fearless; only death itself
could keep him out of the air.
Consider the one-time playboy, Jean
Marie Dominique Navarre, who swooped
on his prey like a falcon .. . or Georges
Felix Madon, who was officially credited
with 41 kills but noted in his private log
that he was sure of 105 . .. or the brilliant and indomitable Georges Guynemer ... or Charles Eugene Jules Marie
Nungesser, who refused to stop flying
even though he was so badly wounded
that he had to be lifted into the cockpit
and who later rose daily from a hospital
bed to continue the fight. Several American fighter pilots also appear among the
host of heroes in this book, including the
only American egro to fly in combat
during the First World W ar, Eugene
Bullard, from Columbus, Georgia.
The author took most of the material
in High Flew the Falcons from original
French sources, primarily the vast
archives of the Annee de l'Air at Versailles. He also fl ew over the battlefields
in a helicopter and covered the W estern
Front by car and on foot.
The ace pilot slwwll on the ;acket front is
Charles N ungesser.
THE AUTHOR
Herbert Molloy Mason, Jr., was
born in Texas in 1927, the son of a
World W ar I pilot. He served in the
Marines during W orld W ar II, attended
lhe American University of Beirut in
Lebanon, and was graduated from
Trinity University in San Antonio,
Texas.
Mr. Mason began his career as a news
writer for a San Antonio radio station
and later became aviation editor for
True Magazine. He has flown at supersonic speeds with the U.S.A.F. Thunderbirds and was a crew member on one
of three war-weary B-17 Flying Fortresses during a 1961 Atlantic crossing.
H e has traveled widely and has lived in
Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, France, and
Norway, and is now living in Cocoa
Beach, Florida, with his wife and daughter.
High Flew the Falcons
The French Aces of World War I

Also:
TRACKS ACROSS THE SKY: The Story of the Pioneers of the
U.S. Air Mail
by Page Shamburger
by Herbert Molloy Mason, ]r.
THE SILKEN ANGELS: A History of Parachuting

by Martin Coidin
HERITAGE OF VALOR: The Eighth Air Force in World War II

by Budd]. Peaslee
ANVIL OF THE GODS: Modern Airplanes versus Violent Storms

by Fred McClement
THE TWINS OF SPACE: The Story of Project Gemini

by Rolph 0. Shankle
J.
B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
Philadelphia and New York
To Colonel Herbert M. Mason, Sr., USAF ( ret. )
Whose heart was always up there

with the thunder of the engines
Copyright 1965 by Herbert ~Iolloy ~Jason,
Jr.
First Edition
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 65-13698
Wfl
Foreword
Am wAR as we know it began in the skies over France fifty

years ago, and this volume looks at that war from the French
side of the lines. In telling the stories of several gallant Gallic
airmen-and of two Americans who chose to fight under the
tricolor, eschewing Woodrow Wilson's plea for neutrality-the
author pays tribute to all pioneer wartime aviators, whatever
their nationality. The cold at 20,000 feet was no respecter of
uniforms, and the vagaries of aircraft engines disgusted and
terrified pilots from both sides of the Rhine.
Wars are started by politicians of violently opposed credos,
but the men who must go out and fight them share a basic
motivation, expressed in different languages ... Pour la patrie,
For God and Country, Deutschland iiber Alles.
But there were differences.
For example, only the Service Aeronautique produced a
madman armed with a butcher knife, stalking the heavens in
hopes of coming to grips with a marauding Zeppelin. There
was courage aplenty under all flags, but only the French managed to combine elan with drollery, high courage with farce, in
what was essentially a very bitter kind of war.
The author owes much for direct help given by many wartime pilots who flew with various French escadrilles. Among
them: Eugene Jacques Bullard, George Dock, Jr., Charles
Maury Jones, Kenneth Proctor Littauer (the author's literary
w;t
HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS
agent), and Edwin Charles Parsons, sole member of the Lafayette Escadrille to stay under French colors after the U. S.
entered the struggle. These men gave generously of their time,
their files, their memories-as did David vVooster King and
Paul Ayres Rockwell, early volunteers who fought hard as
riflemen with the Legion Etrangere.
For certain background material, the author is indebted to
custodians of the Service Historique, Armee de l'Air at Versailles, to Royal D. Frey of the Air Force Museum, WrightPatterson AFB, Ohio, and to Colonel George V. Fagan of the
U.S. Air Force Academy Library.
Very special thanks are due to Martin Caidin, with whom
the author has shared some incredible flying experiences, for
expeli editorial advice and access to a truly unusual archive.
H.M.M.
Holleby, Norway
1964
Contents
Foreword
page 7
1 A Sound of Hunting
15
2 A Gun to the Enemy
22
3 Penguins
53
Verdun's Angry Sentinel
63
5 Rough Road to Glory
77
6 "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright
99
7 The Iron Viking
118
8 The Wager
137
9 Black Icarus
151
Index
169
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a
ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.
ALFRED, LoRD TENNYSON ( 1809-1892 )
'11
15
A Sound of Hunting
SERGEANT-PILOT FHANTZ, of the French Service Aeronautique, began dressing for a reconnaissance Hight on that
cool moming of October 5, 1914, he had no way of knowing
that within less than a hour he would create military historyand in so doing would make liars of a highly respected French
marshal and the German High Command as well. In the preceding seven weeks of warfare on the Westem Front, Frantz
had learned that penetrations of enemy air space were occasionally dangerous, sometimes boring-but were never epochmaking. The greatest danger to a pilot, Frantz knew, came
from the murderous machine-gunning from the ground; and at
the suicidally low altitudes at which he was forced to fly, a
hosing from post-mounted Maxim guns was never taken
lightly. There was his friend, Garaix, who had been shot from
the sky by German ground fire only twelve days after the war
began, during those frantic days of the Battle of the Marne,
and there had been others.
But Frantz was not a man obsessed by the dangers inherent
in this new war in the air; he was not so much concerned with
what the enemy might do to him as with what he might do to
the enemy. When Garaix's smashed plane was examined, the
salvage crew discovered that the French pilot had taken aloft a
Hotchkiss machine gun and 200 rounds of ammunition. Had
Garaix meant to become the first military aviator to blast a GerWHE
16
man plane from the skies? Had he meant to inaugurate strafing

of enemy infantrymen or cavalry? Nobody knew. Garaix's
intentions had died with him. But the discovery of the unorthodox weapon in the dead man's cockpit had planted in
Frantz's mind the idea that a machine gun, even one that was
not yet adapted to an aerial role, would be a lot better protection, a surer weapon of destruction, than the .30-30 Winchester
carbines that had been issued to the pilots in September. True,
the saddle gun had won immortality in the winning of the
American West, but the Western Front was not the ]ornado
del Muerto, the Germans were not Apaches, and the broadwinged, black-crossed mounts they rode, snorting with fire and
belching exhaust smoke as they raced over the earth at 80 mph,
were not cow ponies.
At first, the aircraft that buzzed over the battlefields seeking
information that would better enable corps, army and army
group commanders to dictate the movements of hundreds of
thousands of classically uniformed men were not armed at all.
French and German pilots whose paths crossed in the sky did
no more than toss a highball salute in passing. One 1914 pilot
remembers:
"We were taking photographs of a trench system . . . when
suddenly I espied a German two-seater about 100 yards away
and just below us. The German observer did not appear to be
shooting at us. There was nothing to be done. We waved a
hand to the enemy and proceeded with our task. The enemy
did likewise. At the time this did not appear to me in any way
ridiculous-there is a bond of sympathy between all men who
fly, even between enemies."
But this attitude rapidly changed. As August 1914 drew to a
close, the French-who had expected to smash the Germans in
a lightning war based on raw courage and furious bayonet
charges- were sickened to discover that less than three weeks
of rushing courageously against German machine guns had
left nearly 300,000 French soldiers killed, wounded or missing
on the battlefields. The Germans were nowhere mortally hurt,
and a line of trenches was being dug from Switzerland to the
sea. Disheartened, the French realized it would be a long war
A Sound of Hunting
17
and a bloody one. Killing would now become the occupation of

every man in Europe not too old or too young to wield a rille.
Not long before the world had blundered into this bloodiest
and probably most senseless war, the role of the airplane was
seen as nonexistent. In 1910, General Ferdinand Foch, then
Commandant of the French Staff College, dismissed the potential of air power with the following contemptuous words:
"The airplane is all right for sport, but for war it is useless."
Later, when Foch held a position similar to Eisenhower's in
World War II, and was in command of several hundred Allied
air squadrons, those words, even when well-seasoned, proved
to be terribly indigestible.
Cavalry had been virtually shot out of existence by the stuttering of the Maxim guns during the early clashes along the
frontiers, and with the nullification of that once-haughty arm
the traditional eyes of the army were blinded. But if horsepower on the ground could not prevail, horsepower with wings
could; it was the airplane and men like Sergeant Frantz that
gave the infantry and the artillery back their sight. And when
the friendly waving stopped, attempts at mutual destruction
began-at first, futilely. Pilots started firing at each other with
rilles and pistols; they threw bricks and grenades; they
dropped steel darts and 90-mm. shells-all with little effect.
Thus, on October 1, 1914, the German High Command was
prompted to state:
"As experience has shown, a true combat in the air as
described by journalists and romantics must be considered as
sheer mythology. The duty of the aviator is to observe, not to
fight, and the French aviators too easily forget that obligation."
Four days after this reminder was published, Frantz demonstrated his forgetfulness in a spectacular manner. Frantz's
plane was a Voisin, one of twelve the French had on hand
when the war began. The Voisin, a pusher biplane with a 48foot wingspan, looked exactly like an oversized baby carriage
with wings; the crew nacelle that jutted outward from between
the wings rested on four large wire-spoked wheels, and rode
four feet off the ground. The pilot sat in the rear, his back separated from the engine by a flimsy firewall; the observer
18
Wfl
perched in the front, exposed to the blast of wind that swept

past at speeds up to 65 mph; naked to the elements, he nonetheles~ had excellent vision forward, straight up, to both sides
and duectly below. Voisins rattled, shook and wheezed, and
they stank of gasoline, oil and dope, but they were stable in
calm air and provided a good platform from which to observe
troop movements and to pinpoint artillery emplacements.
They seldom worked above 4,000 feet and thus the crews
were not subject to the bone-freezing cold encountered at
higher altitudes. But as can be imagined, Voisins were drafty
and leaked at every seam in the rush of air. For this reason,
Frantz and his observer-mechanic, Quenault, dressed for their
flight as if they were headed for the polar regions; each man
put on fur-lin ed coveralls over the regulation woollen uniforms,
wrapped muffiers around their throats, jammed their hands
into silk gloves over which heavy leather flight mittens were
fitted, then pulled the stiff leather crash helmets down to their
ears, slipped the fur-rimmed isinglass goggles over their eyes,
then mounted the nacelle with the aid of a ladder and prepared to fly. Quenault lugged into the cockpit the clip-fed
Hotchkiss gun, which he attached to the crudely welded ring
on the nacelle coaming. Frantz knew from previous test flights
that the extra weight would penalize the Voisin's already low
performance characteristics, but it was a price he gladly paid.
Somebody stepped to the rear of the nacelle and pulled the
propeller through several times, then the engine caught with a
roar and a rush of smoke from the stacks. The chocks were
jerked from underneath the wheels, Frantz ruddered around
into the wind, and the plane began rolling down the grass,
blowing up bits of turf and gravel in its wake. The Voisin rose
sluggishly into the air and began climbing slowly towards the
northern sky.
The lush and rolling green fields of France-not yet turned
into a primordial, festering ooze-unwound beneath the plane,
the green here and there flecked with the gold-and-brown fire
of fall color; they flew over the sleeping villages with the red
tile roofs glinting in the sun-flying so low they could count the
chickens and the pigs that cluttered up the front yards of the
village houses. Farmers too old to bear arms, and their wives
A Sound of Hunting
Wfl
19
and wide-eyed children rushed outside to wave at the men in

the strange machine, the clattering roar of its engine frightening and reassuring at the same time. As the Voisin swooped
past the clusters of houses that hugged the narrow, winding
roads, ducks and geese were roused from their midmorning
slumber and scattered, squawking and quacking, for cover.
As they climbed higher, and moved farther across the face of
France, the country changed, became sullen and desolate; the
war had moved this way, and the houses in the villages were
roofless, blown away by shellfire, and the streets were filled
with rubble and the shattered bits of furniture and personal
belongings that once had made the homes cozy and inviting
places to enter. Quickly now, the ravages of war were more
apparent: once magnificent woods stood blackened, ripped
and desolate; villages lay smashed and ruined, covered with a
pall of smoke; the earth was scarred with the white-lipped zigzagging lines of feverishly dug trenches, where men burrowed
liked moles and lived like swine.
Then, across the gutted brown swath known as no man's
land, Frantz and Quenault made out the zigzag lines
scratched in the earth by the Germans. Quenault pulled the
low-power binoculars from their case and began scanning the
terrain beneath them-as was the practice in those early days
of trial and error. But the magnification offered by the lenses
also magnified in like amount the vibration set up by the
engine, and after a few futile sweeps of the earth, Quenault
slipped the useless glasses back into the case.
At almost that same moment, a German two-seater Aviatik
swept into his field of view; the huge black Maltese crosses
stood out sharply against the pale white wings; the observation
plane was just crossing its own front line, bound for some mission deep inside French territory, and when Quenault caught
sight of the intruder, the Germans were at 4,500 feet, just
below them. In a frenzy of excitement, the observer wheeled
around to Frantz and began jabbing his gloved finger downward. Frantz nodded, and Quenault swung around and
grabbed for the Hotchkiss.
Frantz pushed the control column forward and the Voisin
picked up speed in its shallow dive, its nose pointed directly
20
for the startled Germans. The Hotchkiss rattled off a long

burst, and the German plane slipped away, sliding underneath
the Voisin. Instinctively, Frantz hauled back on the stick, pulling his plane upward, keeping the precious advantage of altitude. The German pilot banked around, trying to reach the
safety of his own lines-but Frantz followed in a circle, banking slightly, giving his observer another chance for a shot over
the side of the nacelle. The German reversed direction, slipping
away from the stream of fire. He put the Aviatik in a tight circle, hoping to offer an impossible target while seeking a chance
to dart across his lines, where the guns dug in on the ground
would make it hot for the Frenchmen.
But Frantz coolly stayed above him, the radius of his turns
as tight as the German's. Quenault kept pumping fire downward, but the blast of air that swept over his body and against
the barrel of the gun made aiming difficult and his fire seemed
to have no effect. He ran through a clip, and while fumbling to
insert another, the German pilot desperately heaved his plane
upward, breaking its turn, and headed directly for the Voisin.
Was he going to ram? Only a month before a Russian captain
had sacrificed his life and his plane by ramming an Austrian
bomber as it glided down to unload on the Russian's field,
killing everybody concerned. The Aviatik loomed up terrifyingly, and Quenault slid home the fresh clip and clamped
down hard on the trigger while directing the muzzle of the
Hotchkiss directly ahead.
The Aviatik lurched in its flight, then fell off quickly and
slowly spiraled down to earth. Frantz circled overhead like a
bird of prey, peering over the side as the stricken German
plane whirled around faster and faster, finally to plunge into a
small wood near a pond in which floated dozens of white and
red roses. The knowledge swept over Frantz and Quenault that
they were the first men in the history of the world to have shot
down another airplane in a battle above the earth. Exultant,
Frantz noted the time on his wrist watch: it was exactly
10:05 A.M. The Germans had fallen inside the French lines,
and Frantz dropped downward to seek a landing field from
whence he could borrow a car to drive to the scene of his
victory.
A Sound of Hunting
wtt
21
Frantz and his observer arrived at the woods to find a large

crowd of excited French soldiers gathered around the smoking
ruins of the stricken Aviatik; the plane was partially burned,
both the pilot and the observer dead. The pilot had been killed
outright by a burst of machine-gun fire; his observer, "with
fine, gentlemanly hands-perhaps a Prussian officer from a
great family-" was pinned underneath the blackened engine
and had died only minutes before, under the curious gaze of
the soldiers, his long fingers scraping spasmodically in the dirt,
his eyes staring fixedly at the ring of faces above him.
Sobered, Frantz and Quenault gazed silently at the crumpled, lifeless forms. They were still standing there when a car
drove up and discharged a pair of generals. The youthful
French aviators (neither had passed his twentieth birthday)
saluted, then smiled in embarrassment as the generals overwhelmed them with ringing Gallic compliments, extolling their
bravery and audacity, while promising them the highest decorations a grateful nation could bestow. Eventually, Frantz and
Quenault freed themselves from the generals, from the throngs
who crowded around them to shake their hands, from the old
women who smiled and handed them bouquets of freshly cut
flowers, and were driven back to the field, where the Voisin was
cranked up and flown home.
Behind them, the twisted fuselage of the Aviatik pointed
toward the sky like an accusing finger. And, to those who could
see, it stood like a warning beacon of the coming storm.
22
A Gun to the Enemy
""ff
A Gun to the Enemy
IN THE BEGI INC, the slow-moving "chicken coops" circling

lazily overhead looked h armless enough, and the infantrymen
peered from the holes where they lived, fascinated. Ai1planes
were still a novelty to the world at large, and to the average
front-line soldier-pulled from hinterland farms and from
behind shop counters in obscure towns-the first flying
machines they saw were those droning in the skies over northern France. Since they had learned that most of the planes
were not even armed, what was there to fear?
But shortly after the planes buzzed off for home, the soldiers
were crouching in terror under the lash of murderously accurate bombardments from shells that rained down from the sky,
rending the air with flame and steel, ripping the earth asunder.
Infantry may well have been still queen of battles-but artillery was king, and the gunner's handmaiden, the airplane, now
inspired an unholy dread . Nothing was safe from its merciless
gaze. Newly dug trenches, carefully hidden artillery emplacements, secret ammunition dumps, troops on the move, field
kitchens, headquarters-all were carefully marked on the airmen's maps hastily flown back so the guns could begin their
work of d estruction. Commanders on both sides reached the
inescapable conclusion: To obseme is to annihilate; to attack is
to defend. The cry went up to somehow cleanse the skies of the
wtl
23
Argus-eyed machines that were pushing warfare into a new

dimension, leaving a reign of terror in their wake.
But how?
The French reconnaissance machines were hardly faster
than their German counterparts, and the pitiful armament systems that utilized carbines and revolvers had proved useless in
stopping determined enemy pilots from successfully penetrating French air space to bring back priceless information; victories such as the one gained by Sergeant Frantz were the
exception-statistical flukes, really-although it was clear that
only the high rate of fire offered by the machine gun would
prove capable of inflicting heavy casualties among marauding
aircraft. \Vhat was needed were numbers of agile, speedy aircraft that could chase and catch the intruders and then gun
them down with certainty. In short: birds of prey ... falcons.
On hand when the war began, and rapidly improved thereafter, were numbers of racy-looking, highly streamlined monoplanes built by the firm of Morane-Saulnier. The Type N, or
Monocoque Morane, was powered with either 80-h.p. Gnome
or 110-h.p. Le Rhone rotary engines that pushed the bulletlike
fighter to speeds as high as 100 mph-considerably faster than
the Albatros, Rumpler and Aviatik two-seaters the Germans
were using in early 1915. The Moranes, although cursed with a
high landing speed and inherent fore-and-aft instability, were
ideally suited for the hunter-killer role insofar as flight characteristics were concerned, but the armament problem seemed
insmmountable; \Vinchesters and Brownings were lashed to
the wing so the fire wJuld clear the arc of the propeller blade,
and some enterprising pilots even strapped on rifles pointing to
the rear. But these desperation measures were just that, and
the problem remained: how best to mount a forward-firing
machine gun that could be aimed as the pilot aimed his p~ane?
The solution was found with the help of an extraordmary
pilot who had earned his name and his fame not in his native
France but in Texas, thousands of miles away.
According to one who knew him best, the life of Roland
Garros was a perpetual struggle. In his childhood, a battle
24
against illness; as an aviator, a battle against vexations, mishaps, the elements, skeptics, hypocrites and, finally, against the
enemy.
Carras spent his childhood in the steamy dampness of IndoChina, where his father tutored young lawyers, and when he
was twelve years old his family moved to Paris. Carras, frail to
begin with, found his health running rapidly downhill in the
chilly drizzle of the capital. Doctors inaccurately diagnosed
Garros as a tubercular, and he was sent off with his mother to
the warmth of the Cote d'Azur, where other physicians prescribed perpetual rest-or a possible early death.
Nonsense! Garros thought, and went out and bought himself
a soccer ball. Alone, he went to the flat sandy stretches of
beach lapped by the blue Mediterranean and began to kick the
ball. After fifteen minutes, he fell, exhausted; but soon got up
again and kicked some more. Every day he so tortured himself
-and every day he found he could stay longer on his feet. As
the months passed, he felt himself growing stronger and longer
winded; his chest filled out, his color grew coppery and the
fever left his eyes, replaced by another fire: the fire of ambition
to excel. He created a championship bicycle racing team at the
Nice Lycee, and raced to victory when he was 18. Sheer will,
he discovered, enabled him to conquer a crippling illness;
idleness was a word he struck from the Carras lexicon.
A brilliant student, Garros was preparing for a lawyer's life
when chance took him to Issy-les-Moulineaux on the outskirts
of Paris. They Hew airplanes at Issy, and although Garros had
heard of these linen, wood and wire contraptions, he had never
seen one. Garros had barely arrived at Issy that Sunday in 1909
when he was treated to the sight of a Voisin swooping down
toward the grass for a landing. Carras's heart thrilled-then
skipped a beat-as the hig biplane bumped down on the field
and smashed head-on into a taxi driven carelessly across the
airplane's landing path. The splintering crash was followed
moments later by shrill Gallic oaths as the pilot, Leon Delagrange, waded through the wreckage of his airplane to flay the
shaken, dumbfounded taxi driver with his not-inconsiderable
vocabulary.
Garros, at twenty-one, was not conscious of the remains of
A Gun to the Enemy
Wfl
25
the Voisin; he was immune to the possibility that two men

might have died before his eyes-he saw only the last moments
of the Voisin's flight, when the plane was still master of its natural environment; when it seemed to blot out the sky in its very
magnificence. More profound was the knowledge that men
had created the airplane; that a man could control its Hight,
could conquer gravity, could free himself of earth's shackles.
Men could do these things-he had just seen it done. The accident was nothing; how many times had he fallen brutally when
speeding down the Corniche, trying to squeeze out an extra
kilometer of speed?
All thoughts of the lawyer's safe, secure and hopelessly dull
life vanished. This time, Garros fell ill with a fever he would
never conquer; a fever that devoured him; a fever he embraced
with a passion usually reserved by young men for beautiful
and unattainable daughters of wealthy bankers. Carras was
stricken with that fatal malady: the desire to fly.
But Bleriots, Voisins and Farmans cost at least $4,000, and
Garros was broke. He gave up his law studies and became an
automobile dealer in Paris. "To tell the truth," Garros said, "I
was never cut out for commercial life, but as a student I would
have never been able to save enough to buy an airplane. Penny
by penny, I accumulated money, and finally I bought an airplane of my own, a Demoiselle. These firefly-like planes cost
much less than the others, mostly because they had a poor
reputation. Most pilots believed only Santos-Dumont could fly
them."
Carras's Demoiselle spanned 15 feet only, and was made
largely of stout bamboo. The 35-h.p. engine was incredibly
light, weighing only 88 lbs-a remarkable achievement in
power-weight ratio, especially for a stationary, water-cooled
engine. The pilot sat well forward in the 24-foot-long lightweight fuselage, and so tight was the fit that he felt himself literally part of the airframe. There were no ailerons; banks were
executed by leaning hard on the control column, which
exerted pressure on the outboard trailing edges of the wings,
literally warping them in the direction of the desired bank.
Carras stood under the warm blue sky at Issy "filled with
pride and strong in my superiority over those other human
26
""ii
beings who did not have a flying machine at their disposal."

Although he had never been at the controls of an airplane, had
never had even the most rudimentary instruction in the intricacies of flight, Carros unhesitatingly mounted the Demoiselle
and strapped himself to the wicker seat. His flight uniform consisted of street clothes, a large tweed cap, and a new pair of
goggles with an elastic strap. Carros gingerly tested the controls while his mechanic stepped to the front of the Demoiselle
and began pulling the propeller through to start the engine;
Carras's dream was about to be realized.
"But after twenty minutes of futile effort [he recalled] my
mechanic was unable to start the engine. A crowd gathered
around my bird watching critically, and my dream began to
assume the aspects of a nightmare, my self-confidence
replaced by growing nervousness. Just when I reached the
point of d espair, the engine roared into life, the crowd scattered and, with head bowed, I raced down the field and took to
the air!
"Immersed in the immediate problem of how I was to control the flight of my new machine, and how, then, I was to
come to earth again, I failed to see the monstrous biplane bearing down to my right. I was at 100 feet, and climbing uncertainly; the biplane was descending directly into my path-or I
climbing into his-and suddenly my Demoiselle was cut in half
and I fell to earth miraculously unhurt. Thus terminated my
first sortie, a sad twilight of such a beautiful dawn!"
The biplane pilot, Maurice Clement, observed the crestfallen
look on Carras's face and, taking the blame on himself,
reached into his pocket and bought Carros a new Demoiselle.
Moreover, h e imparted to the neophyte some practical guidance from his own wide experience. Carros once again
undauntedly took to the air, and after a dozen flights of three
or four minutes' duration each, he set off to earn his living as an
exhibition flyer.
Carros struck up an acquaintanceship with an American
pilot named John Moisant, who had astonished Europe in
August 1910 by flying a passenger from Paris to Dover without
once crashing or without having lost his engine over the English Channel. Moisant, convinced there was a fortune to be
A Gun to the Enemy
""ii
27
made by touring America with a flying circus, engaged Carros

and three other French pilots and together they sailed for
America.
Moisant leased a special train to house pilots, planes,
mechanics, tents, fuel, food and spare parts. The novel caravan
rolled across America, stopping only long enough to reprovision before pushing on to the next city, the next town, the next
hamlet. "We were veritable bohemians," Carros said-not
without disdain-"our existence little different from that of
high-wire walkers or weight-lifters. We could not dream of dismantling our airplanes; there was never time. As soon as the
last flight in one town was completed, the mech anics hauled
our precious machines to the train intact, and the next day we
were flying them in a town perhaps 300 miles away even before
our tents had been erected. Naturally, our poor machines suffered, and b ecause there was never a chance to properly care
for our overworked engines, they failed quite often."
The Moisant Circus spent six torturous months in Texas, and
it was in that wild, arid state that Carros discovered that the
crowds who filled the fair grounds knew nothing about aviation, cared little about the wonders of flight and were totally
disinterested in the safety of the pilots. Carros knew for a certainty that the majority of the onlookers came hoping to see a
spectacular crash-with the. almost inevitable accompanying
fatality.
That death was the lure that brought out the majority of the
customers was evident in the posters that were plastered over
the towns where the Circus was scheduled to perform. Invariably, these garish displays of bad taste featured a skull-andcrossbones at each comer, and large type bordered in black
listed the names of pilots who had been killed in flying accidents throughout the world in recent years. Moisant was billed
as "The Daredevil"; Rene Simon as "Fool Flyer"; Edmond
Audemars was listed as the man who flew "the most dangerous
airplane in the world," ( the Demoiselle) and Carros, to his
disgust, found himself billed as "The Cloud Kisser."
Towards the end of the gypsy tour in Texas, the Circus
found itself playing near a cotton community whose fair
ground turned out to be a potential disaster area. Small to
begin with, the field was partially surrounded by a river, and

nearly half of its surface was so rutted that take-offs and landings were out of the question; making matters worse were the
scrub oaks and mesquite trees that surrounded the grounds,
interspersed with telephone poles strung with sagging wire.
While Carras and the others gazed with dismay at the suicidal
field, their leather coats began flapping in a wind that seemed
to blow up from nowhere. Soon, the wind began whistling
through the telephone wires that were under discussion and
moments later the wind had risen to what seemed like gale
force; the tents began popping like rille shots and the mechanics frantically pegged more line into the earth to keep the
planes anchored.
But now another and even more ominous sound arose to distract the attention of the worried Circus pilots: the crowd,
growing restless with waiting, began shouting and cursing for
the flying to begin. Flying? It would have been, Moisant knew,
more like an exhibition of manslaughter, and when this was
explained to the wildly yelling, stamping and red-faced country louts, the roar only increased. Then Moisant, in his desperation, made a mistake: he offered to refund the customers'
money.
Money? The customers did not want money; they had come
for action and possible violence. Facing the possibility of being
robbed of the vicarious thrill of seeing other men risk their
lives the men in the crowd went berserk. To the cries of
"Thi~ves! Practical jokers!" and "Let's kill 'em!" the crowd
burst from the stands and surged toward the big tents where
the airplanes were staked down. Stakes were jerked from the
earth and flung aside; horse pistols appeared and shots rang
out.
"We were forced to choose between death by the airplane,"
said Carras, "or death by revolvers of large caliber- we chose .
the airplane, of which we were much more familiar."
Carras was the first off the ground, and his puny Demoiselle
(it grossed less than 300 lbs.) was batted about in the high
winds like a moth in a gale. He dragged the field one wing low,
reversed his course and swept back over the crowd, the tip of
the low wing missing the five- and ten-gallon hats by scant feet.
A Gun to the Enemy
29
Then his engine quit. He somehow managed to set down in one

piece; his plane was immediately clutched by a score of hands
to keep it from being rolled end over end down the field. The
detonations of .44-caliber shells fired into the air indicated that
the rodeo-minded crowd wanted more.
Rene Simon struggled into the air, where he put his plane
through stress situations it was never designed to encounter.
~fter five minutes of suicidal flying he staggered back to earth,
his face pale and dripping with sweat. Although nobody had
been killed or even injured-which was a miracle-the crowd
was satisfied and dispersed with a final fusillade of gunfire. The
Cir~us pilots lost no time in folding their tents and stowing
their gear aboard the waiting train.
After six months of hectic touring in the untamed West, the
Circus was disbanded. The Frenchmen returned home richer
in purse, but poorer in spirit, for the courageous John Moisant
had paid with his life when his plane came apart in the air
while Moisant gamely tried to please still another demanding
crowd.
Carras, to whom aviation was a sacred calling, turned his
back on stunt flying and the carnival atmosphere that left such
a sour taste in his mouth. There burned within him the desire
to accept the significant challenges of flight, to probe deeper
into its mysteries. How high can a man fly? With what accuracy can he navigate across long stretches of land? Of water?
What of aviation's future in commerce? In war? To these questions, Carras set about finding the answers.
With part of the money he had earned in Texas, Carras
bought a 50-h.p. Bleriot monoplane and entered the grueling
Paris-Rome, Paris-Madrid and the European Circuit competitions. In this last, 41 pilots started, nine finished, and three
were killed the first day. Carras, flying in sunshine and in fog,
placed second. With this cross-country experience behind him,
Carras sailed for South America in January of 1912.
He spent four months in Brazil, flying across mountains, over
cities, rivers and plains. A dozen Brazilian army officers
accepted his invitation to go aloft to view their ruggedly beautiful country from the air, and they returned filled with wonder. Carras showed them the dozens of photographs he had
30
..-.c
made from the air-prints that clearly detailed terrain featmes

-and the Brazilian government set in motion the machinery
that would create the first South American air service; eight
young army officers were selected from scores of volunteers
and sent to France for training even while Garros was still on
tour.
Garros returned to France in May and began his assaults on
distance and altitude. From Dinard, Garros pushed his Bleriot
to the dizzying height of 12,500 feet. Far from satisfied, he kept
pushing the frail little craft higher and higher until, on September 6, he reached 15,600 feet. There, in the freezing heights
where the thin air burned his lungs like hot knives, he was
jolted when his engine went berserk; a connecting rod had
burned through and the resultant clatter and vibration sent a
chill of fear down Garros's spine. Mastering the first surge of
panic, Garros began the long, powerless descent.
He loosened his seat belt so as to be able to leap clear of the
Bleriot should the gathering ground fog force him to crashland atop a house or into a tree. With only the soughing of the
wind through the bracing wires to keep him company, Garros
drifted silently down through the fog that enveloped his plane
in wet opaqueness. "I truly believed," Garros said later, "that
my last hour had come. I had the conviction that my flight
would end in my total erasure upon the ground. Then, just
when my despair was at its greatest, an opening in the fog
revealed before my happy gaze a tiny open space about 200
yards ahead. How small that open field seemed to be-and with
what delight did I welcome it!" Garros set down, unharmed,
holder of a new world's altitude record.
His friends, in speaking of Garros' skill as a pilot, remarked:
"That one can land on eggs without breaking them."
Although by mid-1912, Garros was a popular French hero,
his popularity was achieved by his deeds alone and not
through any effort on his part to cultivate admirers. Summed
up a close friend: "Garros was a worker and, above all, an apostle of aviation; he was not a crowd-pleaser, and his dedication
to his life's mission coupled with a natural modesty was responsible for the invisible barrier erected between himself and
A Gun to the Enemy
..-.c
31
~rowds .that gather~d wherever there was an exhibition of flyI~g. Th1s apparent ICY reserve made Garros perhaps less well-
liked than the other heroes of the day-but no aviator was more
respected."
~aymon d Saulnier, one of France's pre-eminent aircraft
des1gners, recalled Garros's brusque dedication to business
when the fa~ous pil~t visited the Saulnier works, seeking a
record-breakmg machme to replace his discarded Bleriot from
which he had squeezed the last ounce of performance. S;ulnier
picked out a new monoplane, and Garros got in and flew two
quick circuits of the field and landed.
"How much does this machine weigh?" he asked.
"Empty, seven hundred and forty-eight pounds in the air
eleven hundred."
'
'
"How fast is it?"
"No less than seventy-five mph," Saulnier said proudly. "But
w~,uld you lik~ it to go fa~ter,~ We have other wings ...."
N~t faster, Garros sa1d, slower. And lighter. Lighten this
machme by two hundred and twenty pounds, and I'll come
back and fly with you. If fragile machines are dangerous, they
are. less so th~n heavy ones; when an engine stops, each pound
we1ghs heavily on my anns and lessens the time I have to
choose a place to land."
By Novemb.er, G~rros .was equipped with a modified 50-h.p.
Morane-Saulmer. His altitude record had recently been broken
by Georges Legagneux, who had pushed his way to an unprecedented 17,440 feet, and Carras was hell-bent to regain his
crown as the Highest Man in the World. He arrived in Marseilles, where the glacial cold and high winds of the mistral
blew ~is plans literally across the sea : Garros shipped himself
and hiS plane to Tunisia, where the warmer climate and rising
thermal~ from the desert floor would give him every advantage.
On his first attempt, he reached only 13,370 feet. Garros
blamed the failure on an imperfectly tuned engine and on his
own lack of foresight in bringing only two small sealed tubes of
oxygen with him from France; oxygen, he felt, was indispensable to any future attempt on the record. He scoured the
pharmacies of Tunis for steel tubes of oxygen compressed to
32
Wfi
130 atmospheres, but was met with negative shakes of the head
inside each acrid-smelling store. With the half-bottle of stale
oxygen remaining, Garros decided on one more attempt.
The morning of December 11 broke cool and clear over
Tunis-a perfect day for flying. Garros mounted the Morane,
settled himself into the seat and started up the newly tuned
engine. He left the earth in a swirl of yellow dust and soon was
climbing into the rich blue sky. As he passed through 10,000
feet he began to take careful sips of oxygen through the tube
clenched between his lips; he nursed his breath carefully, his
eyes darting from the altimeter and back to the chonometer; it
was a race with time, a gamble with his engine.
Garros's plane, a tiny speck in the vastness of the sky, inched
painfully upward in the thinning atmosphere. Garros's hands
were stiff with cold and his breath came in shallow gasps;
above him was nothing but the limitless pale blue sky; below,
the distant and deeper blue of the Mediterranean. He was
somewhere between Carthage and Bizerte when he gulped the
final draught of oxygen. He shot a glance at the altimeter,
smiled through chattering teeth, then began his descent to
earth. The barograph he had carried aloft confirmed the altimeter reading: Garros had reached 17,950 feet for a new
world's record.
Having thus conquered the freezing heights, Garros next
challenged the awesome stretches of the open sea. At 5:50A.M.
on September 23, 1913, Garros climbed into his Morane and set
off alone to fly the Mediterranean from St. Raphael on the
French Riviera to Bizerte on the North African coast. No pilot
had ever flown the 480-mile overwater route nonstop-but Garros was going to try. The attempt required a fantastic faith in
the nine-cylinder Gnome rotary engine that powered Garros's
Morane.
Garros left the coast of France, his nose pointed into a clear
sky; behind him blew a light wind. A quarter of an hour after
his wheels left the ground, he made out the shadowy outline of
Corsica, partially obscured by a developing fog. He quickly
climbed up to 4,500 feet, and was again in the clear. An hour
later the first rush of excitement had lapsed and he felt himself
growing sleepy. Immobilized in the cramped confines of the
A Gun to the Enemy
Wfi
33
cockpit,_ becom~ng numb with cold, Garros had to fight off the
t~mpt~hon to srmply drop his head and doze off. He kept snappmg his head upward, prodding himself back to consciousness
but the st~ady roaring of the faultlessly running engine, th~
cold em~tmess _of the featureless sky, the increasing chill that
worke~ Itself mto the marrow of his bones-all combined
se~uchvely to lull hi~ into a s_tupor and the plane began to
drift._ Garros, unknowmg, uncarmg, let his mind slip away into
a vord.
He was s~dd~nly jerked awake by a sharp blow on the head
and the reahzahon that the engine was running in a discordant
key. Startled, frightened, puzzled, Garros snapped alert. Some
small piece of the Gnome had broken off and had been flung
b~ck from the c~ntrifugal force of the whirling cylinders; that
prece, whatever It was, had pierced his helmet like a rifle shot.
Th~ en?ine ~icked up again and ran smoothly as before; but
the entire airframe was now vibrating slightly and without
cease. In between the broken cloud, Garros could see the
southern end of Corsica sliding by, and he was irresistibly
drawn to that bit of land that spelled safety. But, as the vibration did not worsen, Garros firmly pushed the nose of the
Morane back on course for Africa.
But his indecision had cost him time and precious fuel. And
n?w the wind had shifted, no longer helping him, but cutting
his speed to 60 mph from his cruising speed of 75 mph. Ahead
loomed the mountainous bulk of Sardinia. Should. he land there
and refuel? Have his engine checked? But that would rob him
of the nonstop Bight he had set out to make. Garros calculated
his remaining fuel, estimated that he stood at least a 50-50
c~ance to make it if he cruised at optimum altitude. Pushing
asid_e thoughts that the head wind might increase, that the
engme might fail, Garros hauled back on the stick and climbed
until ~e was at 7,500 feet; there he leveled off, and pointed the
~lanes nose directly at the sun. He would keep it there, followmg. the sun on its westward journey until he either reached
Afnca or until his fuel gave out and he was forced into the
water. Slowly, the solid haven of Sardinia faded behind him
and Garros was over the open sea.
'
"Where was I? What was happening? Was I advancing, or
34
Wfl
was I flying into a violent and contrary wind that was pushing
me off my course? But these disagreeable and upsetting
thoughts could not affect my flight. I forced myself into a state
of calm that I well knew bordered on the absurd," Garros said
later.
After an eternity of waiting, of agonizing, Garros saw
through a hole in the clouds three dark specks below him; they
disappeared, then came into view again. Ships! They were
Arab dhows, and Garros knew he had made it. He let down
through the clouds and in an extravagant waste of fuel, circled
the small vessels twice, before pulling up and flying straight for
the sun, now large and glowing a deep orange as it settled
lower on the horizon.
After nearly six and a half hours of uninterrupted flight,
Garros set down on the golden sands of Tunisia. Curious, he
examined his fuel tank; he had made it with five quarts to
spare.
Garros had demonstrated to the world a rare courage and an
unaccountable trust in the Gnome rotary engine. But his epic
flight across the Mediterranean was not, as some believed,
merely a dangerous stunt to earn the richly deserved Legion of
HonoP-it was a glimpse into the future, a future Garros saw
with startling clarity. He turned his vision towards another
continent, nearly 4,000 miles away.
"It is possible," he announced, "to fly the Atlantic with the
machines now at our disposal. One must go by way of Ireland
and Greenland, with reprovisioning bases established at those
places beforehand. The risk? No more and no less than three
successive crossings of the Mediterranean . . . the same
machine can leave for America with the same chances of success, divided by three.
"No machine exists today that can carry the fuel required
for a nonstop flight of thirty to thirty-five hours' duration, but
without doubt one can be built. The chief hazards the pilot will
face are weather, engine failure, and navigational errors."
Fourteen years later, Charles Lindbergh would find all that
Garros had predicted would come true; his own crossing of the
Atlantic pierced the Frenchman's time estimate dead center.
A Gun to the Enemy
Wfl
35
Carras's serious speculations about transversing that sinister

gray and seemingly endless expanse of hostile ocean raised
eyebrows all over Europe, but what he next forecast caused
even his friends to wonder if he had not dipped into the well of
:ancy a .little too ~eeply. "One day," Garros said thoughtfully,
men w1ll be makmg regular voyages five or six hundred miles
above the seas. Some may think me mad for predicting suchbut t~1en there were ~hose ready to cry fool! had I failed in my
crossmg of. the Mediterranean. I realize that I risk destroying
my reputation, but I say that men will eventually make those
voyages . . . such is my faith in aviation."
Garros flung himself into the vortex of war that swept across
France that summer of 1914-and gone forever was his chance
to match his skill and his luck against the mighty Atlantic. His
monklike dedication to the pure science of flight was now
tr~nsformed by war's cruel demands into a detached and
:elent!ess pursuit of an effective means of destroying the
mvadmg enemy.
~ squadron of Morane-Saulnier Parasols was frantically
bemg put together at Buc, south of Paris, and there Garros
reported for duty. After two weeks of scrambling for parts and
spares, of dredging up six large trucks-each of a different
make, finding drivers and loading everything into the ancient,
wheezing vehicles, Squadron M.S. 23 was declared ready for
operations. A slight hitch ensued when it was found impossible
to locate a single map of France to guide the drivers to their
destination, Malzeville, in the northeastern corner of the country. To be sure, there were maps aplenty of Germany-but
none of France; staff officers at the Grand Quartier General
had never dreamed the war would be fought there. Cursing
and fuming, the drivers angrily clashed gears and the trucks
bounced through Buc's white wooden gates, headed in the
general direction of the front. Garros and the other aviators
climbed into the half dozen high-wing two-seaters and flew
s~rely toward Nancy, not far from Malzeville, and too large a
City to miss from the air.
For Garros, now began bitter days of frustration.
Expecting to bring his superlative skill as a pilot into play
against the enemy's aircraft and so destroy them in the sky, he
36
found Germans scarce and, when brought to bay, maddeningly

reluctant to be shot down by his mechanic, who sat earnestly
firing and pumping shells into the Winchester carbine. A?ai.n
and again Garros corralled intruding Albatros and Avtattk
observation planes, only to see them skitter away unharmed.
When Garros learned of Frantz's exploit in gunning down a
German plane with a jury-rigg~,d machin~ gun h~s f~?~tration
erupted in an anguished cry. My God, he said, give me
arms!"
In Paris Raymond Saulnier heard the wailing. He asked
Garros to forsake the squadron only long enough to help with
experiments in developing a new weapon~ sys~em. Garr~s
needed no mging; he packed his kit and, with his mechamc,
.
Jules Hue, took the next train to Paris.
From Saulnier Garros inherited a few crude pencil sketches,
three propellers,' some odd-shaped metal fo~s, .a ~otc~kiss
machine gun, a monoplane and an enthusiastic-If bnefexplanation as to how these scanty elements were to be combined into an armament scheme that would surely wreak
havoc among the Germans. Saulnier explained that some
months before the war-on May 5, 1914, to be exact-he had
written a memorandum to the chief of the Service Aeronautique outlining a plan whereby the ~assage. of a stream. of
machine-gun bullets might be synchromzed with the rotatiOn
of the propeller so that the slugs would all pass between the
whirling blades. And now here it was November, the fourth
month of the war, and he was still waiting for an answer.
Never mind, Saulnier said, synchronization will come later; for
the moment, let us attach metal deflector plates on each blade
of the propeller so that the 10 per cent of the bullets that do
strike the blades will be deflected harmlessly out of the wayleaving the rest to zip on their way toward the Germa~s. Garros the hunter at once seized upon the idea; a machme gun
fix~d to fire alo~g the axis of flight would mean th~t i~ aiming
the plane he would be aiming the gun .. Expert ~Ilotmg c?mbined with elementary ballistics would mdeed ra1se the pitch
of aerial warfare to a higher key.
Saulnier rushed away, immersed in the manifold problems
of new aircraft design; Garros and Hue obtained leave from
A Gun to the Enemy
37
the squadron, journeyed to Villacoublay and begged comer

space in a hangar, and there set about to raise Saulnier's brainchild to maturity.
Garros's initial experience at Villacoublay was almost catastrophic. Attaching the deflector plates to one of the new Saulnier propellers, he left the ground to determine how the
assembly would behave in Hight. He flew to 6,000 feet and
indulged in several minutes' worth of acrobatics over the field.
Noticing nothing out of the way, he cut the ignition switch
and slipped quietly toward the earth. Leveling out for the
approach to the field he cut in the ignition and the rotary
engine blasted into life with a suddenly deafening roar-and
the next instant Garros believed he had struck a wall in the sky.
His airplane went berserk, threatening to shake itself to
pieces. Garros was bounced painfully up and down in his seat
in short, pistonlike strokes. The noise from the unevenly gyrating propeller rose to banshee pitch, and over the sickening
noises made by the engine, Garros heard the cracking of wood
and bamboo and the popping of bracing wires. The physical
sensation combined with the noise was like that if a man
decided to bang down the side of a rocky alp in an oversized
tin washtub. Garros somehow fought the traitorous airplan~
down to earth where the landing was a victory won by gravity,
and not by Garros's mastery of the medium. Alive but badly
frightened, Garros got out and inspected the damage. One
wing spar was broken, several fuselage formers were cracked,
the narrow part of the fuselage where it met the tail assembly
was cracked and twisted, and bracing wires hung down like
overboiled strands of spaghetti. Another few moments in the
air, and the airplane would have disintegrated.
The cause was quickly determined: one of the two deflector
plates had worked itself loose and, when Garros had cut in the
engine preparatory to landing, centrifugal force had Hung the
relatively heavy bit of metal from one blade, grossly unbalancing the propeller and creating the ruinous disequilibrium that
set up the consequent brutal vibration.
When Saulnier leamed the news, he blanched. He immediately drove to Villacoublay and explained-somewhat belatedly, it would seem-that the propellers he had turned over to
38
....,
HrcH FLEW THE FALCONS
Garros were hastily designed models intended for ground tests

only and were never meant to be utilized in flight at high rpm.
Very well, then . . . a safe test on the ground.
How this second experiment turned out is described by
mechanic Hue:
"I fashioned a new set of deflectors from thin sheet iron, and
these I bound to the propeller with a ribbon of similar substance . . . crudely made, perhaps, but of a certainty quite
strong and not likely to fly loose. I then placed the Hotchkiss
machine gun and its angle-iron mounting upon the front of the
airplane, adjusting it with great care so that the line of fire
matched the line of flight with great exactitude. When Garros
arrived, he gave the whole a superficial examination and
placed himself into the cockpit.
"I started the engine. I yelled to him some explanations. A
clip of cartridges was inserted into the breech. Garros
squeezed the trigger. A dozen blows came from the gun. Then
everything came apart. A propeller blade detached itself. The
engine fell to the ground. The fuselage cracked behind the
pilot's seat. Alors, what had happened?
"Digging through the debris, we discovered that a bullet
had struck one of the iron collars, broke it, and the deflector
flew away; whereupon all happened as before. Several officers
who had gathered to watch the demonstration suggested to
me-not daring to approach le Grande Pilate-that what we
were attempting was whimsical, that we should never succeed
in firing safely through a propeller. Discouraged a little, but
still determined, we went to work again the next day."
Discarding iron, Hue made new deflectors of tempered steel.
These were fastened with steel bands closer to the center of the
propeller and bound to the hub for greater security. Garros
then took the propeller to the testing laboratory of the Societe
des Arts et Metiers and had it mounted to a monstrous electric
motor capable of delivering twice the number of rpm that any
existing aircraft engine could do. Garros and Hue watched
while the motor slowly built up a terrifying speed; the propeller
howled in high-keyed protest, but only after several hours of
torture was the motor switched off. Examining the propeller,
they found that the deflectors had not budged a millimeter.
A Gun to the Enemy
....,
39
Elated, Garros and Hue returned to Villacoublay, certain the

problem had been solved.
. As soon as Hue worked out an improved gun mounting, this
time bolted to the fuselage from the inside, Garros requested
that an army commission be summoned to witness a demonstration flight. He ~~nt aloft . and spent a half hour buzzing
over ~he field at mm1mum altitude, letting the skeptical brass
h~ts ~sten to the almost continuous popping as he fed clip after
chp mto the stuttering Hotchkiss. Garros landed, cut the
switches, and '":as immediately surrounded by the inspectors.
Alas, another failure. The steady thudding of the slugs against
~he flat deflector plates had started an ominous-looking crack
m the center of the propeller, running outwards from the hub
... another fifty rounds, or even a dozen, and the blade would
have split asunder with fatal consequences. The members of
~e com~ission .drifted away, leaving Garros standing by his
airplane m a Silent fury of frustration and embarrassment.
Suddenly, Hue snapped his fingers and told Garros he could
obviate this latest difficulty in two days' time.
. Hue realized that although the tempered steel plates effectively halted the passage of the bullets, they did nothing to
lessen the brutal impact. He disappeared into the work shed,
where he added two steel flanges to each plate, placed at right
angles to the flat surface so that the center formed a narrow
trough. Now, when the bullets struck they would be canalized
and flung aside in the same shock-lessening movement skilled
fai alai players use when scooping up the rock-hard balls
bouncing off the frontons at murderous speed. With the newly
designed plates installed, Garros put more than a thousand
rounds through the Hotchkiss in a ground test that left the propeller unharmed. The commission was summoned once again,
and this time they went away with smiles on their faces. Saulnier's invention, brought to maturity by GaiTos and Hue, was
now ready to be tested in combat.
Garros, recently promoted to sous-lieutenant, was ordered
to.Dunkirk, where German observation planes were making life
miserable for French and British ground commanders who
were nervously awaiting an all-out German offensive designed
to take Ypres. On April 1, 1915, above Oudecapelle on the
40
Wfi
Flemish plain, Garros's wintertime labors bore spectacular

fruit.
Garros, flying alone, was headed across the lines to dump a
pair of 155-mm. shells on a rail siding. Then, six miles inside his
own territory, the angry barking of antiaircraft shells exploding
in the sky drew his attention to a German two-seater Albatros
returning northward toward home. The enemy plane was flying 1,500 feet above him, so Garros pulled back on the control
column to gain height, at the same time swinging eastward to
cut off the other's retreat. Six minutes later, over no man's land,
Carras's Parasol was slightly above the Albatros, and as the
two-seater slid by underneath, Garros dropped down in a shallow dive and pulled his nose up until the Hotchkiss was centered on the enemy fuselage. As Garros recounted it later:
"I opened fire from thirty yards and quickly ran through the
first clip. After the first few rounds, I could see the enemy plane
was in disorder. I recharged my machine gun three times in
succession, firing continuously, keeping always above the
enemy. Then, from 3,000 feet above the earth, the enemy plane
began its fall, riddled like a sieve. Quickly it took fire and
wrapped in an immense sheet of flame it fell spinning to the
ground. Twenty-five seconds later it struck in a huge burst of
smoke. The entire fight had lasted no more than ten minutes,
although it seemed much longer.
"Afterwards, I drove up to see the debris. The infantrymen
had already stripped the wreckage of objects, leaving only the
blackened skeleton of the airplane and the nude, grilled bodies
of the unfortunate German flyers-one of whom, the observer,
had been shot through the head. [Killed were Cpl. August
Spachholz, twenty-three years old, the pilot; and Lt. Walter
Grosskopf, twenty-three years old, the observer. Theirs was the
fatal distinction of being the first two airmen killed by an
opposing aviator flying alone.] It would be futile to try to
express my satisfaction at such an overwhelming success,
despite the anguish I felt at seeing those crisply burned bodies.
Having created the instrument of this success, despite the risks
and the skepticism, that, above all, was what filled me with
joy."
A Gun to the Enemy
Wfi
41
A week later, Garros got a German plane down out of control, then turned his attention to a pair of two-seaters that fled
terrified at his approach, crash-landing just inside their own
lines to escape the relentless pursuit of the now-deadly Parasol.
Word spread quickly across the way that the French had somehow discovered the magic of firing a machine gun through a
wooden propeller whirling at more than a thousand revolutions
per minute, and for a week the skies remained strangely empty
of reconnaissance machines, helpless against this unnerving
development. But, on April 14, the awesome thunder of the
guns began and hordes of helmeted troops wearing feldgrau
began advancing across the icy mud of Flanders toward Ypres.
The offensive had begun, and machines observing for the artillery had to take to the air, whether their crewmen liked it or
not.
On April 15, Garros jumped a brace of Aviatik two-seaters
and attacked them in rotation. One slipped away from the
deadly stream of machine-gun fire pouring from the nose of the
Parasol and headed for home; the other stayed to fight, but
after a few seconds of firing, Garros was rewarded by the sight
of the Aviatik spinning suddenly away to crash a mile inside
its own lines just north of Ypres.
And that was two.
Not content with decimating the enemy planes in the daylight sky, Garros struck them on the ground at night. Nightflying was in its infancy, and Carras's Parasol lacked both
flight instruments and landing lights; non etheless, he loaded
up his plane with 155-mm. shells and took off just as the sun
went down, headed for Ostend, nearly sixty miles distant. He
had little trouble finding his target, the main railroad station,
and unloaded the heavy missiles directly over the terminal
while in a shallow glide only 500 feet from the ground ... consternation below! He pulled up and swung over to the coast,
hounded by probing white fingers of light seeking to track and
hold him for the suddenly awakened antiaircraft batteries. He
flew through a soft black sky eerily lighted with flashing red
blossoms of bursting shrapnel until he reached the lines. From
there until he set down on the flare path at Dunkirk, his engine
42
wtt
-a roaring, blue-flamed blur-and the stars overhead were his

only companions. Carras's successful mission to Ostend was the
first night flight of his career.
With each successful new experiment, Carras's horizons
widened and his grasp of the full potential of the use of aircraft in war grew surer. Effective interception of enemy reconnaissance planes? He had twice shown how. Night intrude1
missions far behind the lines to hit, then run from, a strategic
target? The wreckage at Ostend was visible proof. "And now,"
mused Carras, "I have in my head an idea for a new armament
system-a small cannon for my aircraft, a cannon which can
deliver a sure blow and having, among other uses, the quality
of becoming a radical and effective arm against the Zeppelins."
Among the "other uses" Carras had in mind for his projected
37-mm. cannon firing an explosive shell at high velocity was
the disruption of German convoys moving up to the front,
attacks on vulnerable steam engines hauling strategic goods to
the firing line. ( Ganas anticipated by nearly thirty years both
the American cannon-carrying Bell P-39 and the successful
rhubarbs carried out by the World War II RAF. His role in
evolving the concept of fighter-bombers has been sadly
overlooked. )
To deny to the enemy the information he sought from the
air, to deny him supplies moving across the ground-these were
the missions Carras assigned to the role of the single-seater
pilot in that spring of 1915, when air commanders on both
sides were still groping for a firm catechism to guide those who
served the burgeoning weapon of air power.
On the morning of April 18, Carras put on his knee-length
leather coat with the huge fur collar and climbed into his
Morane. Hue swung through the propeller, the Gnome engine
roared into life and Carras left the field at Dunkirk to prowl
the skies over the dingdong battle that swayed back and forth
in front of Ypres. Just over that rapidly crumbling city he intercepted a two-seater Albatros making its way home-doubtless
loaded with film magazines revealing late shifts in Allied artillery and machine-gun emplacements. Carras worked his way
quickly above and behind the slower German plane, then
dropped out of the sun down on the tail of the black-crossed
A Gun to the Enemy
43
machine. He ripped off two clips through the Hotchkiss and

watched as the Albatros stumbled in the sky, slipped awkwardly through space and finally splashed against the earth in
a shattered wood near Langemarck. Elated, Carras went looking for more, but after another hour he turned for home and
landed with his fuel tanks nearly dry.
Three confirmed kills in eighteen days! That afternoon at
lu~ch Carras was feted in champagne at the nearby chateau at
Samt-Pol-sur-Mer, where commanders heaped praise on the
man who had revolutionized aerial warfare in a manner
undreamed of only a few short weeks before. Carras returned
to the field flushed with victory, eager to go out again while
daylight prevailed.
This time, he told Hue, he was going after a German train
... hoping to find one snaking its way from Roulers, past Pass.ch~ndaele. toward Ypres. Hue tried to dissuade his patron from
fl~g agam that day; there was something about the way the
engme sounded that he didn't like-something about the
valves,, he thought. H e had been working on the Gnome since
Ganas s return late that morning, and although it sounded better, it did not sound healthy enough to satisfy his critical ear.
But Carras, ~ho believed a Gnome could do no wrong, replied
that the engme had run perfectly only a few hours before-ask
th: Germans!-and that he was taking off at once.
To my great regret," recalled Hue, "I made Carras's
machine ready for flight; the tank was filled, the bombs put in
place, clips of ammunition stowed aboard. When all was ready,
?ar~o~ took off. He left without enthusiasm on my part-my
mtmhon made me doubt the outcome.... "
A half hour later Carras's little Morane was deep inside
enemy territory, flying above the rail line that led across the
battlefield. Over Roulers he caught a train chuffing its way
toward ~e Front. Carras cut the ignition and glided silently
down unhl he was only 200 feet above the locomotive cab-so
clos~ he coul~ make out the startled featmes of the engineer.
He Jerked twice on the release and felt the plane jolt upward
as the blue-painted projectiles tumbled away from the racks.
One struck squarely in the middle of the track ahead of the
speeding train; the other crashed down just beside the locomo-
44
'11
tive. Tipped on its side by the concussion, the loco.mo~ive

plunged into the twisted rails at an angle and fell heavily I~ a
screeching protest of sound punctuated by a roar as the bmler
exploded in a gush of hissing white steam.
Garros switched on the ignition and hauled gently back on
the stick. The Gnome caught, roared, spluttered, backfired....
Then died.
Garros flicked the useless switch back and forth, but the
engine remained cold and lifeless. Filled with sick ~pp~ehen
sion, Garros instinctively, futilely, tried to stretch his ghde as
the rolling green earth rose up to meet his silent airplane. !le
landed gently in an open field near Ingelmunster, ten miles
behind the German lines.
Carras got out of the cockpit and hastily set fire to the
Morane, his avian magique; then he ran hard for a thicket several hundred yards away. He plunged inside and, covered with
scratches, made his way to a shallow hole nearly filled with
water, there to await the coming of darkness.
A patrol from Broemme's Landsturm division found him at
twilight. Brought to bay by a dozen Mausers with bayo~ets
gleaming dully in the sun's final weak rays, Carras rose sh~y
from the damp earth to face his impassive captors. Sore m
body, sick at heart, he marched dismally back through ~he
swamp to begin thirty-four months of soul-erodmg
imprisonment.
That Carras and his "magic airplane" should drop into thei~
laps by accident was an event that exceeded th.e Germans
wildest dreams. Explained Anthony Fokker, the httle Dutchman who was designing some of Germany's better airplanes:
"A murderous French monoplane had suddenly made its
appearance in the skies. German pilots seeing this machi~e
coming directly at them believed themselves sheltered by Its
whirling propeller-imagine their astonishmen~ when the front
of the airplane began spitting fire from a machme gun! Nobody
could understand how a man could feed a stream of bullets
through his own propeller without shooting it to blazes, and
several aircraft were thus brought down. Spies were soon frantically at work inside France trying. to dis~over the s~cret and
seeking the identity of the audacious pilot. Carras s plane,
A Gun to the Enemy
'11
45
which had only partially burned, was carefully gone over and
the mystery solved. Although I found the idea ingenious-if
cmde-it was not the ultimate answer.. . ."
Fokker turned his hand to the problem, and within fortyeight hours produced a working model of a true synchronizer
-one using cams and gears driven off the engine-and once
this mechanism was put into action by the Germans the war in
the air turned bloody indeed.
The German sentry at the main gate of the maximum security military prison at Magdeburg stamped his feet in the snow
and kept glancing at his watch with impatience; it was just
past 5 P.M. on the afternoon of February 14, 1918, and it was
bitter cold. His stomach growled with hunger and he relished
the idea of relief. Suddenly he straightened up as he saw two
officers approaching from inside the compound. One was
barking gutturally and making angry gestures with his hands;
the other nodding dumbly. The sentry saluted them and got an
earful of the taller officer's tirade directed against the swinish
French who openly insulted Colonel von Brixen, the camp
commandant, and made light of the German Army as a whole,
including, he added in a rage, inspecting officers such as they.
During the tirade, the shorter officer stood silent, only nodding
his head affirmatively. Then the tall officer waved his hand
impatiently for the gates to be opened. Impressed with the
officer's choleric outburst, and certainly not wishing to have
such wrath directed his way, the sentry quickly swung open
the gate and pushed aside the outer apron of barbed wire. As
the officers stomped off in the snow, the sentry observed that,
for ranking members of the Army hierarchy, the inspectors'
uniforms certainly seemed moth-eaten and of irregular color
... but by then, 1918, nothing in Germany was as correct as it
had been when the war started. He watched without interest
as the two figures faded into the gloom beyond the camp.
Thus Garros and Lieutenant Anselme Marchal walked away
from captivity and began a nightmarish flight for freedom.
And little wonder their uniforms appeared shabby: the coats
were made from French officer's capes dyed gray with potassium permanganate; the collars bristled with fur ripped from
46
Wit
Carras's flying suit; the buttons were carved of wood and

stained a greenish bronze; the caps were cardboard covered
over with dyed pants fabric, and the sabers were wooden replicas brought to a sheen with wax. Once clear of the camp, the
fraudulent uniforms were buried in a field and the escapees
began moving across Germany in civilian clothes.
Marchal had been a prisoner since the summer of 1916,
when engine failure had forced him down following a successful propaganda leaflet run over Berlin. He spoke German with
easy fluency-but Carras, not a word. Relying on a brazen
attitude and Marchal's command of the language, the Frenchmen decided to travel by train the 250 miles that lay between
Magdeburg and the Dutch frontier. Acute hunger and winter's
cold would be their greatest enemies; without ration books
they could not buy food in stores or meals in cafes. And all
they had been able to bring with them from camp were a few
bits of chocolate and several ounces of cooked meat.
They caught a train from Magdeburg to Brunswick, where
they hid nervously in a sprawling cemetery during a night that
seemed interminable, waiting for the connecting train to
Cologne. There, they avoided the police by losing themselves
in the jam of people worshiping in the great cathedral. With
empty stomachs growling, they kept their heads bowed listening to the Latin chanting of masses, one after the other. That
night they boarded the express for Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen),
the final way station on their road to liberty. With the slender
camp rations now exhausted, visions of steaming bowls of
bouillabaisse and plates loaded with bifteck aux pommes frites
danced in front of their eyes while the train rolled its way
westward.
Pulling into Aix-la-Chapelle, the escapees lurched wearily
from the coach into the cold night air and set off on foot for the
frontier. A suspicious policeman stopped them and demanded
papers, but Marchal and Carras put on such a convincing demonstration of good-natured drunkenness that they were freed
after a stern warning not to go wandering about at night without identity. They weaved their way back toward town, but
once out of sight of the armed cop they left the road and
plunged across a field, backtracking toward the border. They
A Gun to the Enemy
Wfl
47
reached the frontier zone without challenge, and slipped down

a shallow ravine toward the demarcation line. Then the sound
of ripping cloth and a stifled cry of pain . . . muffied Gallic
oaths. Marchal had become fouled in barbed wire. After what
seemed like hours of careful struggle, Marchal worked himself
free with Carras's help, but they were too bone-tired, too famished, to go further. They turned back toward the town, nine
miles away.
Back in town, they stumbled into an all-night cabaret and
asked for food; they were served one stale cake apiece and a
cup of ersatz coffee, items not on the ration list. Still ravenous
and almost too exhausted to move, they nevertheless forced
themselves up from the table and outside into the cold. It was,
they knew, impossible to sleep out still another night-or what
was left of it-then endure a second day of anxious hiding and
still retain sufficient strength for another try at the frontier.
They trudged down a side street to a mean little hotel. The
half-asleep desk clerk accepted their money, agreeing to fill in
the police register the next morning. But after only a few hours
of restless sleep, the Frenchmen roused themselves from bed
and tiptoed downstairs past the dozing clerk and quietly left
the hotel. They crossed to the other side of town and immediately checked into a second hotel even seedier than the first.
Marchal glared at the clerk, accurately gauging his man, and
offered him a bribe if food would be brought up to their rooms
with no questions asked. A little later the two men were feasting on cabbage soup, mealy potatoes, and skinny pieces of
wurst, all liberally ballasted with gray, gritty chunks of ersatz
bread. Their hunger partially satisfied, but still giddy with
fatigue, they fell back in their beds and slept until the
afternoon.
That night they walked out of town and down the road
toward Holland. They left the road two miles from the border
and crunched through new snow in the barren fields. Clouds
scudded across the moon, and in the blessed obscurity they
slipped past the German sentries and crossed the frontier as
free men.
Carras had returned triumphant, but to a different world
48
and a different war. France, in that late winter of 1917-18, was

gray with exhaustion, bent from labor, and weak from the
relentless drain on her resources. France was, it seemed, an
aging thoroughbred being run too hard, too far, and too long.
But the tough French faces reflected a pride born of pain, and
a courage born of desperation.
Garros took only enough leave to bring his strength back to
normal-accomplished by soaking up sunshine on the Cote
d'Azur and filling himself with as much meat, milk, fruit, and
vegetables as the wartime economy allowed. Rested and fit, he
returned to the north at the height of the great German spring
offensive of 1918 that threatened to tear the Front wide open.
His visits to the combat squadrons were a shock, a revelation
and, above all, a challenge. The pilots-and how young they
seemed!-were flying brutish-looking Spads powered by 220h.p. water-cooled engines that sent them streaking through the
sky nearly half again as fast as Garros had ever flown. Peering
inside the snug cockpit, Garros was amazed at the complications. "The handles, the cranks, the dials . . . how can a man
remember them all?" he asked. But what sent his heart beating
faster was the sight of the efficient-looking brace of black Vickers guns firmly planted in front of the windscreen. No more
Winchester carbines! No more triangular plates on the propeller! A pilot explained to the fascinated Garros the hydraulic
principle of the synchronizer that allowed him to feed a thousand rounds of ammunition through the propeller blades with
-usually-complete safety. The desire to fly this superbly built,
mightily powered and heavily armed machine against the
enemy swamped Garros with an emotional intensity he had
seldom experienced.
Garros waived his immunity, as an escaped prisoner of war,
from further active service and returned to school to learn
advanced combat flying and gunnery. At twenty-nine, he was
the oldest student on the field and found himself seeking counsel from youths barely old enough to shave. It was tough going
at first, and Garros despaired of ever learning to handle the
heavy Spad with the same finesse he had developed with the
Morane. But his days were brightened and his technique
improved when Captain Rene Simon, his old friend from the
A Gun to the Enemy
49
Texas barnstorming days, appeared as one of his instructors;

together, the veteran pilots worked out the kinks in Garros's
flying and he was graduated near the top of his class.
"Garros wanted," said a contemporary, "to organize a squadron led by himself and made up of promising young graduate
pilots whom he would guide in special tactics worked out by
him based on observations and long talks with the instructors
who had seen much fighting." But, naturally, this idea was
entirely too logical for the authorities to accept, and Garros
was sent to the Front as a replacement pilot for Spad Squadron
26, one of five units that comprised the famous Storks Group.
Always the methodical workman, Garros added new lore to
his craft as a fighter pilot each time he went on patrol. He
learned that Spads could not outclimb the new Fokker D-Vlls
-but could outdive them. He learned that Spads could not
turn inside Fokkers at any altitude and were best fought at
10,000 feet and under where the Spad's thin airfoil section
worked less of a handicap. He learned that the German pilots
were good-some of them very good-but they did not fly with
the same easy Hair as the French, and he learned that Spads
could take more punishment than any airplane yet built. Having absorbed these things, and having made the Spad almost a
part of himself, Garros discarded caution and once again
began daring the fates to do their worst.
Again and again he flung himself at greatly superior numbers of the deadly Fokkers, plunging to the attack with reckless
disregard of consequences. On October 2, 1918, he jumped a
formation of seven Fokkers over the Argonne and waded in
with both guns firing. Concentrating his fire on one of the
gaudily painted biplanes, Garros hammered away until the
Fokker broke up in the air, then he dived away for home with
his wings in tatters. The Fokker kill was confirmed, and Garres's taciturnity exploded into childlike exuberance. He
laughed and joked-not, as he explained, because of the dead
German, but because he knew that he was himself again and
there could now be no limits to what he could accomplish if he
worked hard. His captain and the other pilots of the squadron
pleaded with him to take it easy, for the Germans were many
and they were mordantly active.
50
'Tm late in catching up," he replied. "I must give them double mouthfuls!"
The uncertain weather of fall offered days of wet gloom
broken by freakishly clear periods when the sky overhead was
a cold, brilliant blue marred only by traces of stratospheric
cloud. Such a day was October 5. Garros bundled himself in
worn, oil-stained leather and fur and walked stiffiy out to the
line where the Hispano-Suiza engines were crackling into life,
nursed to full-blooded power under the sensitive, caressing
hands of the mechanics ... hands blue with cold and marked
with angry red welts where they had contacted flaming hot
exhaust stacks or cylinder heads. Garros swung himself up and
lowered his body into the snug-fitting cockpit. He pulled the
ends of the wide web belting across his abdomen and snapped
shut the heavy catch. He dropped the fur-rimmed goggles over
his eyes and moved the throttle forward, immediately feeling
the powerful blast of cold air washing back across his face,
tugging at his leather helmet. He ran the engine up to full rpm,
listening critically to its unbroken snarl while watching the
fuel and oil-pressure gauges. Satisfied, he cut back the throttle
until the engine was ticking over. All around him the sounds of
engines being run up, then left to idle, rose and fell ... the
sounds of a squadron patrol abirthing. While Garros sat in the
cockpit pounding his mittened hands against his thighs to keep
his circulation going, he had a few minutes to think while waiting for Captain de Sevin's signal for take-off.
Tomorrow he would reach his thirtieth birthday; today he
stood with four credited kills beside his name. He had lost
three precious years of time in which to fly-years vanished
forever. The war was getting old, and so was he ... there was
no more time to lose.
De Sevin shot his hand in the air and swung the nose of his
Spad into the wind, firewalling the throttle. The heavy, flatwinged fighter bumped down the field, got its tail off the
ground and suddenly left the earth in a clatter of sound. Garros followed close behind, and soon the half-dozen Spads were
airborne and rushing northward over the green sprawl of the
Argonne. They climbed steadily into the icy blue and a half
hour later were seven miles inside the Ge1man lines.
A Gun to the Enemy
51
Garros saw them first: seven Fokker D-VIIs drifting in echelon toward France some 2,000 feet below. He dropped away
from the formation and fell through space toward the Germans
from out of the sun. But the Germans were not novices; they
waited until he came within firing range, then split apart, letting him streak past without giving him a good shot. The German patrol leader, keeping an eye on the five Spads sliding by
over his head, then closed up the formation as before.
De Sevin, sensing a trap, held the others above, hoping Garros would swing around and rejoin. But Garros was not to be
enticed away from the Germans; he clawed his way upward
and once again came on at the Germans, firing. De Sevin could
see the blue-white tendrils of tracer smoke from Garros's guns
as he bored in. Again, the Germans split-not so widely this
time-letting Garros pass on the flanks of the formation. German tracers arced after Garros's Spad as he turned to come on
again.
Five times de Sevin watched Garros hurl his airplane at the
Germans, and five times he waited for the Germans to commit
themselves, or for Garros to come to his senses. On the sixth
pass, de Sevin came down to join Garros, to get him away, to
do something that would halt the nerve-jangling game of Russian roulette. Now the Germans split apart to fight. Garros
picked a German and dived full throttle, with de Sevin's Spad
diving down his back. The other Spads plunged down, and
soon the sky was alive with the angry snarl of engines and the
erratic stuttering of frantically served machine guns.
De Sevin's attention was jerked away from Garros and the
vertically diving Fokker by the sudden appearance of six fresh
enemy fighters on the scene. Where had they been hiding?
With only six against thirteen, de Sevin now directed his energies toward gathering the Spads together to fight their way
home.
All made it home save one. The Storks waited until the sun
went down, but Garros'~ Spad did not return, and no word
came. He had been swallowed up in the maelstrom.
Two weeks later, the Germans announced that Roland Garros had fallen to his death inside their lines. Advancing French
infantry found his neatly marked grave near Vouziers, where
52
'""tl
his Spad had plunged to the ground. Garros had done his
utmost to earn that coveted accolade of ace for his birthday,
and in this he had failed. But it was his only failure.
What had happened? After the war, de Sevin learned from
the Germans that Garros had not been shot down; witnesses
rep01ted that Carras's propeller had seemed to disintegrate
and that the vibration coupled with the violent aerodynamic
stresses he was subjecting his plane to at the time caused the
Spad to partially break up in the air. The conclusion drawn
was that the hydraulically operated synchronizer had malfunctioned, causing Garros to shoot his own propeller to bits.
And what of Marchal, the man who had led the way out of
Germany from the camp at Magdeburg? He lived through the
war to become-perhaps not so coincidentally-the first man to
fly nonstop across the Mediterranean in a floatplane.
It was the kind of tribute Garros would have appreciated.
'""tl
53
Penguins
THE FRENCH APPROACH to training hopeful and ignorant young

men to assume the role of combat pilots was the same as the
Gallic attitude toward life itself: hardheaded and realistic.
Aspirants faced a regime utterly shorn of frills, reduced to the
crude machinery of learning by doing; from the first day until
the last there was never anybody in the rear cockpit to correct
possible fatal errors of judgment or mistakes in execution. The
curriculum, with its apparent fly-or-die attitude, was admittedly tough-but it was thorough, it was progressive and, above
all, it worked. This uniquely French system of flight instruction
turned out the most self-reliant pilots in the world.
The great camp at Buc, just south of Paris, exploded from
sleep before dawn. At about a quarter to five in the morning,
cooks-who never seemed to grow fat on army rations-were in
action, stirring up cauldrons of thick cocoa (or chicory coffee,
as the war dragged on) ready to be ladled into the thick mugs
brought in by the flying personnel later in the day. In the
wood and tar-paper shacks where slept the eleves-pilotes, the
day began with the slamming of a door, the sudden glare of
naked bulbs hanging from the rafters, and the strident voice of
a sergeant ... bare feet swung from the cots to the cold flooring; hands raised to faces to shield eyes and push sleep from
numb brains; a clumsy struggle into thick socks, pants, shirt
and sweater; fumbling with boot laces somehow always
hooked wrongly at that ungodly hour-then a confused rush

for the outside and the community wash shed where ice water
was splashed into faces and down necks; a rough drying with
coarse linen toweling, a score of deep breaths of the piercingly
cold morning air, and suddenly full consciousness, galvanized
by the pulse-quickening thought: Today, I begin to learn to fly.
Twenty minutes later, warmed by steaming liquid and fully
dressed in black leather jacket, wool puttees and the heavy,
double-tiered cork-and-leather crash helmet, the students
informally gather around an instructor, who stands in front of
an odd-looking machine. The instructor, with medals clinking
on an immaculate and expensive uniform, flings an elegant
hand behind him and says, "There, gentlemen, is an
. 1ane. . . ."
arrp
Well, almost an airplane ... the Penguin was to a BUniot
what Samson was without his hair. Powered with a puny
25-h.p. three-cylinder Anzani engine and with wings chopped
to half their usual length, the Penguin was incapable of flight,
intended only to teach students how to tame a noisy, rolling
maverick while still bound to earth. The instructor rapidly
explained how the engine and rudder bar worked in unison to
keep the Penguin rolling in a straight line down the wide,
grassy field, then ordered the students to get in and try it.
The results were comical to real pilots, discouraging to students, and caused acute distress to the staff; early attempts
resulted in erratic corkscrew patterns traced the length of the
field, with the student frantically pushing the throttle and rudder bar to their limits of travel in futile efforts to keep the
malevolent Penguin guided true. Once the end of the field was
reached, pairs of small brown men from Indochina patiently
turned the Penguins around for another wild taxiing back
down the field. It was by no means unusual for two Penguins to
start rolling from opposite ends of the field and meet head-0~
in the center, apparently drawn by a giant electromagnet until
the inevitable splintering crash rent the air, aheady turned
blue with strong Gallic oaths. There was much shouting and
waving of arms on the part of the instructors who ven~ed a
helpless rage on students with lowered heads and skm~ed
noses. The Annamites patiently loaded the shattered buds
Penguins
"'""
55
aboard flat-bed trucks and drove them away to the repair

s~eds. Through some miracle, even the most badly mangled
buds would be ready for further ordeals the following day.

Penguins detested wind, and the slightest cross-current
would send them madly chasing their own tails in a maneuver
known to the French as le cheval de bois, after the wooden
horses seen on merry-go-rounds. Amidst the dizzying blend of
sky, earth, and hangars whirling around the horizon, few
beginners had the presence of mind to cut the ignition switch,
and the Penguins, once started, would whirl around until they
ran out of fuel or, which was most often the case, groundlooped sickeningly to wrench loose one of the stubby wings.
The landing ground was not always even, and hidden hummocks sometimes launched Penguins into the air for a brief
trajectory that jarred the student's teeth when the wheels
smashed back to earth. These shocks usually jolted loose some
part or other, requiring a search for the missing bolt, washer or
locking stud so that practice could be resumed.
By the time a student could run his Penguin up and down
the field in a straight line several times in succession, he seldom
had any further fear of any aircraft on the ground, and a man
who had mastered the eccentricities of the Penguin was almost
never known to ground-loop a plane thereafter.
Next came full-scale Bleriots, with 28-foot wings and engines
powerful enough for sustained flight, although this was strictly
forbidden in Phase Two. Bleriots, very early in the war, had
been used on active operations, and the first time a student left
the ground at the controls of one-even though he was ordered
not to get the wheels more than a few feet off the ground-he
felt that the rattle of machine guns and the smell of burnt powder could not be far away. Ah, but it was ... day after day
was spent doing no more than leaving the earth for a few exhilarating seconds before the sudden jarring lurch as the plane
bounded down again. Much of the day was lost because
Bleriots, like their dwarfish cousins, shied from the slightest
turbulence. Flying was suspended at 8 or 9 in the morning
when the air got rough, not to be picked up again until late
afternoon brought calmer atmosphere.
By stages, the student worked his way up to 100 feet, from
56
which vertiginous height he nosed straight down again to clatter against the earth in what approximated a power landing.
But engines, he was told, did not always function as one
wished. Enfin, up again to cut the switch at the apex of the
climb to try it-as he would so many times in his flying careerwith no engine at all . . . the roaring, the sudden silence, the
stomach-heaving drop, the sighing of the wind in the wires, the
rattling crash and the painful shock running up a now-tender
spine . . . and the emergency landing was done-to be done
again and again.
Then the challenge broadened . . . take off and attain 100
feet as before-but this time circle the field before landing.
Mind! use the rudder only; no warping of the wings! ( Bleriots
had no ailerons, but the fragile wings warped easily, which
achieved the same effect.) The flat turns, sloppy as they were,
enabled the student for the first time to exercise full directional
control over a machine in flight, and it was a moment forever
remembered. Only when a student had demonstrated an
awakening spatial judgment and a developing instinct for controlling flight attitude was he allowed to put on a moderate
degree of bank-thus taking the skid out of the turns-for wings
warped unwisely inevitably led to disastrous sideslips directly
into the ground.
Thus, hesitant maneuverings became accomplished flight
patterns, and the day dawned when the sometime ribbon clerk
or subway conductor realized that he had virtually taught himself to fly; his will, his brain, his hands had accomplished this
miracle, and with this feeling imbedded inside him, he thereafter walked and flew with the solid confidence shared by all
self-taught men.
But the wreathed wings of the Service Aeronautique were
not yet his; there remained the frustrating trial of proving that
he could successfully make his way cross country, connecting a
triangle whose points were 60 miles apart. Now, a daytime
flight of less than 200 miles may not seem much of a test, but
the engines on the school planes were worked to death and it
was rare that one could be kept running without letup for the
three-cornered flight, a trip that included stops at Chartres
and Evreux for signed verification that the aspirant had,
Penguins
57
~ndeed, ~ot that. far. Stude~ts started on these cross-country

JOUrneys m a bmst of enthusiasm early in the morning only to
return late that same afternoon aboard a truck. Down at
mouth: they would explain that the airplane was resting under
~ard m. a cornfield. forty miles away, the engine having lost all
~terest m further flight. Or they flew in several days later lookmg please? ~i~h themselves and scarcely able to hide it,
~toutly mamtammg that a forced landing near a large chateau
J~St south o~ Chartr~s was unavoidable and that major and
bm~-consummg re~arrs had b~en necessary before flight could
be 1esumed ... this explanation for the skeptical instructors;
tales of open-~anded generosity on the part of the lord of the
manor and his comely daughter were saved for envious hut
mate~, who carefully noted down on their maps the chateau's
location for possible future emergencies.
. Eventually, the journey was completed in a single day,
~hereup?n . the student was breveted pilote-aviateur and
I~sued his hcense from the Federation Aeronautique Internatwnale. From that moment on, things moved rapidly.
The fighter school.a~ Pau was set on a wide plain that swept
away to the south, nsmg suddenly to merge with the foothills
~at lay before the mighty ramparts of the Pyrenees. When the
arr ':as clear-which, that far south, was often-the jagged blue
outlines of the peaks, mantled in snow even in early summer,
were sharply visible and seemed almost near enough to reach
out and touch. On the other side was Spain. It was a world
away from the war, and yet at Pau the newcomer sensed he
was moving inexorably closer to battle. The air overhead
thrummed. and crackled with the roar of the powerful fighterplane engmes, and on the line were rows and rows of trim
raki~h-looking planes with just room enough for a pilot, a~
engme, and a machine gun. It was here the really serious business began.
C?mbat acrobacy, formation flying, and gunnery were all
earned out at Pau from the summer of 1915 through the latter
ha}f ,of 1917. on the Nieuport ll, known more widely as the
~ebe. The tmy, raked-back top wing spanned only 24 feet 6
mches, the bottom wing slightly less and only half as wide. The
fuselage was short, the tail surfaces broad, and with the effi-
58
""f!
ciently designed 80-h.p. Le Rhone rotary engine the Bebe could

scamper to 3,000 feet in less than five minutes. The Bebe fitted
like a glove and flew like a dream; it could turn circles around
anything built and was so sensitive on the controls. that the
pilot could instantly throw himself into breath-catchmg, nearvertical turns using the pressure exerted by three fingers on the
stick. The planes would do nearly 100 mph at sea level, landed
at only 40 mph, and could quickly be gotten out of stalls and
spins. Most pilots fell in love with them at first sight-the bond
cemented permanently after one time aloft. They were as
delightfully different to fly from Bleriots or the much heavier
Caudrons as is a thoroughbred racing car from a Renault 2CV.
Sensitive, they were and therefore tricky-yet few new pilots
up from the Bleriot schools had a fear of them. Explained one
young pilot:
"What with the engine and the pilot placed well forward, a
Bebe shows its nose-heaviness the moment the engine is
retarded for landing approach, and woe to the man who fails to
keep his tail well down! There are endless capotages [noseovers that left the pilot's head only inches from the muddy
ground] from coming in with the nose at the slightest downward angle. But I have yet to make a truly bad landing, and
the reason is because I have been in a Bleriot so much on and
near the ground that I have developed a sense or feel of it, and
almost automatically settle easily. Too, I can tell pretty closely
my flying speed because of all of the work on the Penguins ...
the ground holds for me not the slightest terror."
At Pau, leisure was unknown. "We are up at five-thirty, with
roll call at six," a pilot explained. "Take a truck to the field for
breakfast. Flying starts at seven. I stay at the field till tenthirty, making six flights lasting fifteen minutes each. Truck
back to camp. Wash for dinner. Roll call at one P .M. Back to the
field until five-thirty. Six more flights. Dinner at six-thirty and
bed at eight, dead to the world. Flying is tiring-why, I don't
know, as in a Nieuport, after you get the altitude and the
engine adjusted, you move neither hands nor feet more than an
inch at a time, and that only seldom. Still, I am completely
exhausted at the end of the day. . . ."
This bone-deep fatigue, familiar to all those who fly (except
Penguins
""f!
59
today's jet passengers who move through space in mindless

comfort and security ) comes only rarely from sheer physical
exertion; rather, it stems from the almost constant tension
engendered by a brain simmering with the knowledge that at
any moment-perhaps right now-something totally unexpected could rise up and, like a rattlesnake met suddenly in the
middle of the path, strike terror in the heart. Thoughts like
these were ever present in a pilot's mind:
What if my engine stops running up here? Can I get down
all right? Suppose the field I choose, a field that looks so inviting fmm 3,000 feet, proves to be a trap for the desperate
-a wheat field sown with tteachery in the form of green tentacles waiting to foul the propeller and snare the wheels, its
bottom unmercifully serrated with deep furrows?
OrWhat will I do if a ground mist rolls in to wrap the field in an

impenetrable white blanket-and at the same time I am caught
under a solid overcast so that I cannot even see the sun? Will I
fly into a mountain? Disappear somewhere into the sea? Fly
around in citcles until my fuel is gone, then spiral down into
the filthy wet muck and smash myself to pieces on the ground?
And not leastMy God, suppose I blow a valve on this rotary engine and
raw fuel starts streaming fmm the cylinder whirling around at
twelve hundred revolutions per minute inside the red-hot cowling? Fire . . . roaring, consuming, orange-white. Stifling
unbearable flames to keep me company while I plunge earthward, toasting alive. I'll jump . ...
Thus the mind, keyed for disaster, cannot let the body relax
-it is impossible to sit staring through a loophole all day awaiting an unknown enemy and to feel anything except the relief of
exhaustion when the ordeal is over.
No maneuver was more dreaded than the spin; novice pilots
believed that once the nose dipped downward and began
madly rotating around the axis of flight no recovery was possible, and that violent and fatal contact with the earth was the
inevitable result. Credence was given this fallacy by the occasional student who fell into a spin at low altitude quite by accident, or even higher on purpose, and then promptly forgot the
60
'""tl
recovery technique and plunged to the ground with disastrous

consequences. Hard-bitten instructors held no patience with
old wives' tales openly nursed; and on the days when intentional spins were to be done, their manner grew cold and
brusque. Slipping on helmet and goggles, the instructor would
catapult himself into a Nieuport and bark at his students to
watch carefully. Within minutes, the silvery little fighter would
be dancing under the clouds, then suddenly fall off and begin
whirling quickly down. Open-mouthed and breathless, the students would gape at the plane as it spun through space. Then,
at the last possible moment-or so it seemed-the plane would
right itself by magic and skim over the ground to land almost at
their feet. Explaining, for the tenth time, how it was done, the
instructor would whip off his helmet and say, "All right, let's
see you try it. Begin the spin at one thousand meters."
Some of them just could not do it; when they leveled off at
3,000 feet, fear took over, and the will to hurl the airplane and
their bodies into an unnatural attitude under power simply
melted away. Such men landed in disgrace, hating themselves
and their weakness. Fear rode the shoulders of them all, but ...
"I made up my mind the instant the altimeter registered one
thousand, I would do it. I was scared stiff, but when I hit one
thousand I cut my engine, pulled the stick back, jammed the
stick and my feet far over. The machine hung motionless, then
fell with a sickening sensation and started to spin with the fuselage as an axis. After what seemed an eternity and at the point
my stomach began to rebel, I put the controls in neutral and
hauled back on the stick, expecting God-only-knows-what to
happen. When I came out of it and found that I was alive and
breathing, I grinned and shouted for joy."
From spins-both left and right-the students went on to
learn Immelmann turns (known to the French as renversements), vertical banks ( virages) and wing-slipping (glissade
sur l'aile ) that saw the Nieuport tilted sharply so that the
wings lost their bite on the air and, thus robbed of support,
slipped violently through the sky to lose the greatest amount of
altitude in the shortest possible time. These maneuvers at first
outraged the sensitive inner ear, signaling to the brain that
something was terribly wrong, and these constant signals cou-
Penguins
'""tl
61
pled with unwanted doses of castor oil flung back by the engine
often left students green with nausea at the end of the day-but
the sickness was as nothing when compared with the flush of
pride that accompanied the realization that, par le bon Dieu,
they were becoming pilots!
Following Roland Carras's spectacular successes in 1915, it
became obvious that the fundamental role of the single-seater
fighter was that of a flying gun platform from which fire could
be directed against the enemy. In the Nieuport the French aircraft industry delivered into the hands of the combat squadrons a plane that admirably fulfilled its mission . . . up to a
point. The critical failure of this airplane lay in its armament;
the science of aerial gunnery lagged far behind aircraft design
in the home country and-what was far worse-far behind what
was being done in Germany. Tony Fokker's feat of converting
Garros's crude idea to its ultimate development, the synchronized machine gun, was not to be duplicated in France until the
summer of 1916, and the stopgap armament system aboard the
Nieuport was maddeningly difficult to handle.
Centered on the dorsal wing was a single .303-caliber Lewis
gun, fed by a spring-loaded revolving drum containing 47
rounds of ammunition. There were no sights; the pilot aimed
the nose of his plane at the enemy, squeezed the trigger and
hoped for the best. This method of directing fire can be compared to guess-aiming a .45-caliber pistol held over your head,
trying to hit a tea cup fifty feet away; it can be done with sufficient practice, but initially the firing will be wildly inaccurate.
Not only did the pilot have only about five seconds' continuous firing at his disposal but changing drums proved to be a
feat for a contortionist. At Pau and at Cazaux, where the final
gunnery training was carried out, the first day's firing practice
in the air was a revelation. Aiming his nose at a red-and-white
barrel tethered in the middle of the lake, the pilot clamped
down on the trigger grip and felt the Nieuport shudder slightly
from the recoil. At first ham-handed, the pilot usually fired off
the whole drum in one long burst, dismayed at the gouts of
water and spray that appeared on the lake's surface so far away
from the target. Pulling up, he leveled out and reached up for
62
Wfl
the rear of the gun to bring it down so the nose was pointing
straight up. With left hand on the stick and straining hard
against the belt, he noticed with vexation that his gloved right
hand could barely reach the empty drum, and that one hand
was not enough to extract the drum and replace it with a full
one. Both hands, then . ... Now, the stick was between his
knees, and he was half-standing in the cockpit, wrestling clumsily with the empty drum with both hands. Finally loose, it was
replaced with difficulty in the container on the outside of the
cockpit and a new one lifted upward. The loaded drum, weighing five pounds, was subjected to the terrific blast from the
propwash, and if the flat side was inadvertently turned into this
hurricane of wind, a sprained wrist was not unlikely-nor was it
uncommon to have the stubbornly resisting ammunition container torn from the most determined grasp to fly away into
space. Then, with the drum seated on the spindle, the pilot was
free to sit down again and concentrate on flying the airplane.
It was after a few such struggles that the thought suddenly
struck the pilot: But what will the Germans be doing while I
am thus engaged?
The answer was as obvious as it was disquieting.
After gunnery, there remained a brief and somewhat cursory
introduction to the demands of formation flying-50 yards
above, 50 yards behind and 50 yards to the left of the plane in
front . . . and mind the slipstream-before the student was
graduated and sent from Pau to Le Plessis-Belleville, the great
replacement pool 21 miles northeast of Paris and tantalizingly
near the Front.
Freshly outfitted in a handsomely cut uniform of his own
design, complete from the stiff, short-visored cap to the gleaming knee-length boots, the French-trained pilot arrived at
Plessis cocky, supremely confident and exuding an aura of
aggressiveness.
And why not?
He had 80 hard-earned hours in his logbook, and he was a
corporal-pilot earning 30 cents a day in the most exclusive
combat service since the day of the long bow at Agincourt.
63
As 1915 DREw to a close, commanders on both sides sat down

f~r reappt:aisals ~f tl~e war that was entering its third year with
vtctory still not m stght for either side. To the French, it had
been a year of costly frustrations; the offensives above the
~omme and across the rolling Champagne country had ended
m bloody failures, with the Germans nowhere seriously hurt.
All movement had gone out of the war, leaving millions of miserable men facing each other across the shattered muddy landscape of no man's land. Even on "quiet" days, no fewer than
5,000 men were killed or wounded by the stray artillery shells
fired ~y bored gunners, the carefully aimed sniper's bullets, the
machine guns firing at random. And the deaths accomplished
absolutely nothing.
To the Getmans, 1915 had been a more satisfactory year:
they had dealt mortal blows to the colossus of Russia their
armies had successfully withstood the fury of co~bined
assaults by the British and the French armies all along the
Western Front, and their infantry divisions were-despite the
losses ~nd incredible hardships-at the peak of fighting trim,
the artillery never stronger. However, looking ahead, the Germans reckoned with Teutonic efficiency that the Allies could
only grow stronger in men and materiel, while Germanyalrea~y feeling the pinch of the naval blockade-would grow
steadily weaker. And if the Americans came in, the scales
64
HIGH FLEW THE F ALCO:SS
would tip quickly and disastrously against them; if victory was

to come it must come in 1916-but how? It is axiomatic that to
defeat ; nation its armies must be crushed in the field. With
Russia tottering, its vast armies rotten with ine.fficiency, ~nd
with the British yet to field a substantial army, 1t was agamst
the French that the Germans must turn the full weight of their
offensive. With the French ground under, the British must give
.
in, the Russians collapse. . . .
Crop-headed, thin-lipped, blue-eyed General Ench von
Falkenhayn, a Prussian career officer whose stern manner and
ruthless intelligence caused even his superiors to take alarm,
laid out the strategy-simple, brutal and daring. "We must
draw the mass of the French army into battle," he said, "and
bleed it to death." This was attrition in its ultimate form, a
negation of the 1914 strategy that would have had German
armies sweeping across vast areas to outflank the French and
pin them up against the wall of Switzerland. Falkenh~yn
would create an abattoir twenty miles wide and five mtles
deep, and there annihilate the archenemy.
The name of the slaughterhouse was to be Verdun.
For weeks an endless stream of monstrous guns rumbled
across Germany and entered northern France. The massive carriages and long, ugly barrels were a portent of do.om to the
peasants who stood watching glumly as the gray engm~s of war
were hauled and manhandled through the streets of tmy hamlets already under German occupation. And the men! Never
had so many been seen. They passed through the silent villages
in an unbroken line from dawn to dusk, singing as they
marched. Tall, healthy-looking, superbly equipped, they represented everything the French hated ... and they looked invincible. By early February of 1916, nearly 150,000 <?~rmans
stood poised in front of the approaches to Verdun, watti~g
the thunder of their 850 guns that would signal the begmmng
of the biggest, bloodiest battle the world had ever known.
Everything depended upon secrecy; the French must not
learn what was afoot. Troops were sheltered in underground
concrete bombproofs, the big guns lined hub to hub in the thick
forests were painstakingly camouflaged. To make sure these
!or
65
dispositions remained undetected, the Germans turned to air

power, amassing nearly 200 aircraft of all types at Verdun,
their pilots charged with the task of keeping out every French
reconnaissance plane that tried to intrude. Eingang verboten!
To accomplish this miracle the Germans inaugurated a tactical
novelty optimistically named "aerial barrage." With the-as it
turned out-meager air force at their disposal, they attempted
to sweep the skies with dawn-to-dusk patrols that saw lumbering two-seaters aloft along with the speedier Fokkers, but it
was upon the Dutchman's little monoplane that the hopes of
the German High Command chiefly rested.
Throughout the latter part of 1915, Fokker was a word
French pilots muttered with fear and loathing. Although the
100-h.p. fighter could do only 90 mph at sea level and was not
blessed with a phenomenal rate of climb, it was handy in turns,
and the performance of the E-II and E-III models was more
than adequate to deal with the obsolescent French observation
planes it was designed to encounter. What earned the Fokker
mid-wing monoplane its awesome reputation was the installation of a pair of Maxim 7.92-mm. machine guns synchronized
to fire through the propeller and pour out a steady stream of
lead at a combined rate of more than a thousand rounds per
minute. Each gun was belt-fed from a band of 500 cartridges,
thus the pilot was free to concentrate on the target-never
plagued by the awful nuisance of having to wrestle with interchangeable drums. The cream of Germany's pilots flew these
scourges, and thus Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn and the rest of
his staff had every confidence that the secret of the coming
offensive would be kept.
The Fokkers and their handmaidens of rain and blinding
snow did their best to fend off repeated incursions by lonesome
French photographic planes, but the Fokkers were spread too
thin, the clouds proved fickle, and at least two French planes
managed to slip through the barrage to bring home photographs which revealed that something monumental was afoot.
But the evidence was too little, and too late... .
Early on the cold, gray morning of February 21, 1916, the
German artillery swept over the French in a tornado of steel
and fire. Woods were ripped to splinters, trench systems caved
66
in, forts battered, the earth churned to shreds, and uncounted

thousands of soldiers simply vanished forever in the gusts of
high explosive that inundated the battlefield on both sides of
the Meuse River. Late that afternoon, the Germans rose exultantly from their concrete shelters and began moving across the
battered landscape. Ylany of them were singing-and some of
them died on a high note, for the muddy poilus who survived
the onslaught of steel shoveled and pushed the debris away
from their gun pits and bent grimly forward, firing into the
mass of feldgrau moving toward them from out of the winter
gloom.
Thus began the battle that to this day has not been equaled
in fierceness, longevity or in its toll of the dead. It was in this
battle that air power came of age-a battle that witnessed the
beginning of a new breed of national idol, the Ace.
In the early stages of the battle, the Germans had it all their
own way. The French Army was largely unprepared for the
massive German assault on the ground, and, needless to say,
was disastrously outnumbered in the air. Artillery commanders
pleaded desperately for aerial reconnaissance to locate the
murderous German guns so they could be dealt with by counterbattery fire-but they asked in vain; there simply weren't
enough Caudrons or Farmans available. The few French
planes that flew in the hazardous sky over the battlefield ran
into the restlessly patrolling Fokkers and were either driven
back or shot down in flames. Infantry officers begged frantically for pursuit planes to come and drive the German Aviatiks
and L.V.G.s from the air, where they circled high above undisturbedly calling down corrections that enabled the massed
artillery to accmately distribute tons of high explosive on
French trenches, dugouts, and posts of command. But Nieuports were at a premium, and the handful of gallant interceptor
pilots who went aloft to challenge fearful odds began paying
with their lives for the months of rear-echelon neglect. With
terrifying speed the slender French air units began melting
away, and the awesome artillery bombardment continued.
With calamity threatening to engulf Verdun, Headquarters
of the Service Aeronautique began stripping the center and
eastern part of France of air power, deploying no fewer than
67
fourteen squadrons behind the beleaguered city. They selected

the finest combat units available for the task of wresting aerial
supremacy from the Germans. Plunged into the struggle was
Groupe de Combat 12, the famous Storks Group whose squadrons were filled with many of the country's outstanding pilots.
Not a Stork unit, and unknown outside of the immediate combat area, was an independent Nieuport squadron, N. 67, that
became famous at Verdun-chiefly because of the virtuosic flying skill and flaming personality of one of its pilots, Jean Marie
Dominique Navarre. This twenty-year-old, one-time playboy
was, commented a contemporary, "not only the soul of his unit,
but of French fighter aviation in general. Thanks to him, we
regained our command of the air . . . at Verdun. Navarre
showed the way."
Navarre, an angular-faced, dark-eyed collection of nervous
energy, was the son of an immensely wealthy paper manufacturer. He saw life as a personal challenge to physical courage
and looked upon rules and regulations as just so much "sauce"
that got in the way of fulfilling a man's prerogative to enjoy
himself to the hilt. He had discovered flying before the war
and had enlisted as an ordinary soldier in the Service Aeronautique in order to fly the best in military aircraft-although
he could have bought as many planes as he wanted. He trained
on Moranes at Villacoublay and astonished his instructors with
his uncanny grasp of the feel of flight-and nearly gave them
heart failure at his contempt for safety. Time and again, he
seemed to dare the ground to reach up and claim him; he
seemed to be pushing the plane to its stress limits, while taunting his own nerves to give way in the face of repeated violations of all the known laws of sagacious piloting. When the war
began, the prognostication was that Navarre would either go
far or die young-or perhaps both.
Corporal Navarre found the early months of the war singularly lacking in excitement. Day after day in the two-seater
Morane he piloted his observer over the stagnant battlefields
on routine reconnaissance missions, seeing few other airplanes
and having no chance to engage in combat. Like all the other
crews, they carried the Winchester saddle gun and a revolver,
68
but Navarre despaired of finding an opportunity of using even

these primitive weapons. Then, very early in the morning of
March 22, 1915, Navarre saw his chance to strike a spectacular
.
blow against the Germans.
It was just past 3 A.M. when the pilots of Mo.rane-~,aulmer
squadron M.S. 12 were routed from slumber by cnes of Zeppelins over Paris!" Instantly awake, Navarre rolled from the
warmth of his cot and slammed his feet on the cold floor. He
jammed on his boots, pulled on pants, heavy .sweater and
leather Hying coat over his pajamas, grabbed up his helmet and
goggles and dashed outside into the cold night air, followed by
his observer. Already mechanics were rolling out the Moran~s
and coaxing the cold engines into life. Navarre and his
observer vaulted into their cockpits, impatient for take-off.
Then Navarre's observer, a lieutenant, was startled to see
Navarre jump from the airplane and dash madly back tow~rd
the cook shack. He reappeared a few minutes later, clutchmg
something in his hand. Navarre climbed back into the airplane,
strapped himself in and waved his hand as a signal for the
chocks to be pulled . The Morane rolled down the darkened
field, its engine splitting the silence of the nighttime sky ~ith a
full-throated roar. Navarre kept back pressure on the stick at
maximum climb attitude, keeping the nose pointed south
toward Paris.
A half hour went by and there was no sign of the Zeppelins.
Had the raiders already unloaded their bombs on the capital?
Were they now moving through the sky toward h?m.e? Navarre
had a vision of his beloved Paris aflame .. . of bmldmgs gutted
... priceless treasures lying in charred ruins. Sales Bochesl
Angrily, he whipped the Morane around in a turn and be~an
streaking back to the north. He shoved his goggles up, exposmg
his naked eyes to the vicious blast of ice-cold propwash, so as to
better scan the velvet sky for the telltale blue exhaust Hames of
the Zeppelins' Maybach engines. Wher~ were they? Why
didn't they come down and fight? Navarre s heart leaped as he
made out the dark, shadowy form of a monster Zeppelin flying
high above him, its black-painted hull vaguely etched against
the pre-dawn sky. Navarre hauled the stick back so far that the
Morane shuddered and verged on a stall, but he kept the nose
69
pointed upward, precisely maintaining critical flight attitude.

Five minutes passed; ten; fifteen ... he seemed to be getting
no closer to his prey. With the engine roaring full out and the
nose at maximum climb attitude, he could not close the gap.
Navarre's observer leaned forward to shout something, but
Navarre jerked his head impatiently and bent forward over the
controls. The observer sat back incredulous. Even in the
gloomy light, there had been no mistaking the heavy-bladed
butcher knife Navarre was carrying in his lap. Now the
observer knew why Navarre had dashed back to the kitchen.
Why, the madman was going to try to fly so close to the monstrous hulk that he could slash it to ribbons! Navarre, il est fou
. . . absolument. . . .
The futile chase halted as abruptly as it had begun. In the
pale light of the coming dawn, Navarre saw what his observer
had seen a few minutes before: they were not chasing a Zeppelin at all, but a vast purple cigar-shaped cloud. Navarre turned
for home, his grim determination dissolved in uncontrollable
laughter. What a wonderful joke on them both!
Navarre's victory string began on April1, 1915. On a routine
observation patrol over Fismes, just west of Reims, he jumped a
two-seater Aviatik from altitude. Sliding d own toward his
quarry, Navarre pulled up when only thirty yards away from
the surprised German- then steadied the Morane while his
observer, Lieutenant Robert, coolly took aim with the Winchester and began pumping lead at the enemy. Robert's marksmanship coupled with Navarre's masterful handling of the airplane
brought the Aviatik down under control after only three
rounds had been fired. Two slugs had pierced the Aviatik's
radiator, the third had woun ded the pilot. Navarre followed
the German plane down to an empty field inside the French
lines, where both occupants were captured without incident.
Navarre and Robert were invited to lunch that day by General
Franchet d'Esperey, and shortly afterwards Navarre was put
up to sergeant and nominated for the Medaille Militaire;
sharp-shooting Robert was given the Legion d'Honneur.,
France's highest award for commissioned officers. But even
more satisfying was the decision that such aggressiveness
could be turned to better account by transferring both men to
70
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single-seat fighters. Navarre was posted to N. 67, a newly

formed escadrille equipped with speedy Morane "N" mid-wing
monoplanes. Less than two weeks later, on April 13, Navarre
scored again-this time gunning down a German two-seater
behind enemy lines. On the way home, a shard of sharpnel
ripped away part of his propeller, and he was forced to land at
a strange field barely inside the French reserve trenches.
The moment N. 67 reached Verdun, Navarre seemed to take
charge of the sky. Now flying a Nieuport Bebe, he began to lay
the ghost of Fokker invincibility. On February 25, he went out
alone to look at mighty Fort Douaumont, which had fallen the
day before. Circling high overhead, he peered over the side of
the cockpit for a long look at the massive concrete structure
battered almost beyond recognition. Then there floated into his
field of view a brace of Fokker E-llis-doubtless piloted by
pilots out to gloat over the conquest. Navarre quickly scanned
the sky above him and, seeing no other enemy above, fell in a
screaming dive on the unsuspecting German pilots. He pulled
the protesting Nieuport up sharply when just behind the rearmost Fokker and clamped down hard on the trigger of the
Lewis gun mounted on his top wing. He rattled off a sustained
burst and saw the Fokker stumble in the sky, then flop crazily
downward. Quickly, he slewed the nose of his plane around to
the right, where the second Fokker loomed large over the cowling. He saw the white upturned face of the startled German
pilot, who instinctively flung up an arm to ward off approaching death. Navarre squeezed the trigger, felt the Nieuport
vibrate from the pounding of the machine gun and pulled up
sharply to avert collision. He leveled out and looked around to
see where the enemy had gone. The Fokker was plunging
earthward out of control. The whole front of the plane suddenly erupted flames and the doomed craft blazed down
through the air like a meteor. Long momen ts later it exploded
against the ground near Douaumont.
Navarre circled overhead in the empty sky. All that was left
was a ragged column of ugly black smoke from the burning
Fokker. Suddenly he was sick with the realization that he had
just killed two men as young and as vitally alive as himselftheir lives snuffed out as casually as the snapping of fingers.
Wfi
71
From that moment on, the exhilaration went out of flying for
him. A bitter taste filled his mouth, and it was with difficulty
that he kept from retching.
It was war-and he loathed it.
Navarre became an ace before the month was out, but the
accolades from the nation seemed to mean as little to him as
the growing number of bronze palms he was required to wear
on the green and red ribbon of the Croix de Guerre. When
someone asked him how it felt to bring down a German he
snapped out: "I fly because I must. But this killing is not a matter a man can be proud of." He was delighted when-for the
second time-he was able to cripple an enemy machine and
force it to land intact behind French lines, there to capture the
crew.
While the battle was raging at its highest before Verdun,
Navarre swept out of the sky and fastened himself on the tail of
a solitary Aviatik directing an artillery shoot on Pepper Hill.
His first few rounds thudded into the German engine and he
watched gleefully as the propeller jerked abruptly to a stop.
With Navarre staying thirty yards behind him, the German
pilot had no choice except to land in a shell-torn field behind
the French reserve trenches. Navarre lightly sat his plane down
beside the disabled Aviatik and vaulted from the cockpit to
confront the sour-looking German pilot and observer.
In bad French, the observer asked where Navarre's machine
gunner was-surely not still in that small airplane with only one
cockpit? Navarre told him he was looking at the machine
gunner.
'What?" said the German. "You alone? Then accept my congratulations. You are an admirable shot; never would I have
believed that a man could fly an airplane and at the same time
operate a machine gun with such dash!"
It was to Navarre that the term vi1tuoso naturally applied.
His method of attack was vividly described by Jacques Mortane, Europe's pre-eminent pioneer air reporter, who knew
Navarre and his style of aerial fighting intimately. Wrote
Mortane:
"Navarre subscribed to the principle that he must first
astound the enemy prior to the knock-outer. He first wheeled
72
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all around his enemy, handling his machine with incredible

skill, impressing upon the enemy that he would finish him in a
vision of aerial beauty. Before him, the German seemed like a
rat backed in a corner by a terrier ... without resources, without energy, without hope; he could only await the coup de
grace-which Navarre always had the delicacy to deliver
quickly. Raising himself in his seat, he carefully adjusted his
machine gun. Then the rain of fire engulfed the Boche.
"When approaching a formation of the enemy, Navarre first
circled overhead like a falcon choosing its prey. Then he dived.
Usually he chose a plane in the middle of the enemy horde, as
though to challenge fate and at the same time to flaunt his skill.
Even in the heat of battle he flew with such precision and
acted with such calm that even his enemies were astounded."
Navarre quickly became the idol of the poilus at Verdun.
Not only was he showing the way to drive the hated observation machines from the sky but he often staged one-man acrob~tic shows directly over the trenches. Flinging his bright-red
N1euport across the sky in fantastic evolutions, he would thrill
the bone-weary infantrymen with maneuvers none of them
dreamed existed. But acrobacy at the Front was prohibited,
and Navarre knew why: unwanted stress was placed on the
wings and the airframe-and who knew what hidden damage
had already been done in aerial battle? Called to account by
Squadron N. 67's commander, Captain de Saint-Sauver-himself a wonderful pilot, and a famous steeplechase jockey before
the war-Navarre only shrugged, and the treetop flying continued. There was nothing Capt. de Saint-Sauver could do with
Navarre. Required by GQG (Grand Quartier General, the
French supreme headquarters) to submit accurate weekly
reports as to the exact number of hours flown, ammunition
expended, and damage sustained by the squadron, he found
Navarre's logbook nearly empty, filled in with random and
sketchy notes that were barely legible. Navarre was flying eight
and ten hours a day, but he couldn't be bothered with the
bookkeeping.
Navarre was placed under open arrest because of his
repeated and flagrant violations of rudimentary rules, but he
only fumed at the "small-minded stupidity" of clerical minds,
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73
and when back in the air became wilder than ever. He

returned to the field late one afternoon and slowly climbed
from the cockpit and painfully walked to the barrack where he
lived. A little later the captain and the doctor rushed in and
asked about the blood Navarre's mechanic had seen inside the
cockpit. Navarre smiled and said the wound was of no significance. He refused hospitalization, but allowed the surgeon to
bind up the nasty gash in his leg. He was up and across the
lines the next day.
The battle above the clouds soon became a bitter struggle
similar to that being waged on the ground, and losses in the air
rose steeply. The coming of April with its longer periods of daylight saw Navarre flying five and six patrols a day. Although he
Hew alone whenever he could, he of necessity had to accompany the regular flights that were sent aloft to patrol certain
sections of the line at times laid down by group headquarters.
Navarre would leave the field with a flight of five or six other
Nieuports, but once in sight of a German formation-and they
were flying in formation now-Navarre would drop away from
the others and wage solitary combat. No threat could force
him to maintain the integrity of the flight; he was as impervious
to attempts at discipline as he was to danger.
By the beginning of June, Navarre had raised his score to 12
-all confirmed. There was no better known pilot in all of
France. His tactics were imitated by every newcomer to the
Front-at least by those with skill and daring-but older and
wiser pilots saw that the day of the individual knight-errant
was rapidly drawing to a close; the Germans were beginning to
reorganize their fighter forces into well-drilled, tightly disciplined units whose massed firepower was beginning to weigh
heavily against the solo fighter, no matter how courageous or
how skilled he might be. Navarre did not see this-or if he did,
he paid no attention.
On the morning of June 17, 1916, Navarre walked across the
parched grass of the airfield and climbed into the cockpit of his
patched, oil-stained Nieuport. The full heat of midsummer lay
across France, and Navarre had long ago stopped wearing a
leather helmet. Instead, he pulled from his pocket a sheer silk
stocking and fitted it over his skull, wrapping the leg and toe
74
'""f!
underneath his chin. It was easy to guess where the souvenir

had come from: Navarre was even better known in Paris than
at army headquarters.
It was past sunup and Navarre was flying to the west of Verdun. The sky was a brilliant pale blue, spotted only here and
there with white clouds. Rain was, as he well knew, still possible that day, for Verdun has one of the vilest climates on
earth. But while it lasted it was a perfect day for hunting.
As Navarre approached the southern edge of the Argonne,
he made out below a mixed formation of two-seaters and escort
Fokkers. Warily circling, Navarre plotted how best to engage.
As before: a predetermined victim, a fast dive from out of the
sun, a cool head while firing, a clean break from the massed
guns. The stick went over and the red Nieuport dropped
through the air with the wind screaming in the wires. Navarre .
closed in on an Aviatdk but, before he could begin firing, his
own plane was raked with a hail of lead and he felt the sledgehammer blow of a Maxim slug as it passed through his body.
The stick was knocked from his grasp, and immediately the
Nieuport whipped into a vicious spin. The Germans, thinking
that he was killed, flew on.
Navarre came to his senses in time to pull the airplane out of
the spin. Though dizzy from shock and weak from loss of blood,
he managed an erratic flight course away from German territory. He came down to a rough landing, but the plane did not
ground loop. When Navarre was pulled from the cockpit he
managed a weak smile; his flying skill had not deserted him.
even if his luck had.
The hospital never had a worse patient. In a violent temper
because doctors insisted on a milk and toast diet-no champagne allowed-Navarre once flung his food tray clattering
halfway across the ward. When told he absolutely must remain
on his back, he struggled from bed when the nurses weren't
looking and was found staggering weakly down the hospital
corridor-headed God knows where-by orderlies who forcibly
put him back to bed.
Discharged from the hospital, Navarre spent his convalescence in Paris instead of quietly remaining on his father's
estate, where the peace and quiet would have hastened his full
'""f!
75
recovery. Navarre was on the town every night, and there was
hardly a bistro or restaurant that was not familiar with the
somewhat stooped figure carrying a cane and festooned with
medals who came in and ordered champagne by the case. Once
Navarre was arrested for driving an appropriated taxicab on
the sidewalks. The gendarmes were astonished to see that the
culprit, when brought to bay after a hectic chase, was the
famed aviator. And they were further flabbergasted when they
discovered that Navarre had pinned all his medals to the rear
of his tunic.
Then word came that Navarre's brother had been killed at
the Front. Something snapped in Navarre, and overnight he
changed from a madcap youth to an apparently vacant middleaged man. He developed a maniacal urge for wanton destruction that replaced mere playboy escapades, and he was
painfully refused admission to places that had once welcomed
him with open arms. Finally, Navarre was taken away to a
sanitarium, where he brooded darkly on the war and the death
of his brother.
Two years passed, and Navarre seemed to have emerged
from the shadows. He returned to the Front, but his superb
reflexes had been dulled from the stultifying idleness, and the
bright light of his skill was dimmed. He shot down no more
Germans, and when the war ended shortly after his arrival in
the combat zone those who respected him were glad. With the
luster of his skill tarnished, he doubtless would have been an
easy victim to German guns.
In the spring of 1919, Navarre was given a job as test pilot
for Morane-Saulnier. He flew well enough, but those who had
known him in 1914 tried very hard to keep the sadness from
their eyes as they watched the former virtuoso fighter pilot put
the Moranes through their paces at Villacoublay. All his finesse
was gone, leaving only a suicidal kind of daring.
Then, when Navarre learned that a mammoth victory parade
was to be staged on the Champs-Elysees on Bastille Day, a
spark of interest shone in his dark eyes. He would, he said in a
rare burst of enthusiasm, By a Morane through the portals of
the Arc de Triomphe! Day after day, he practiced high-speed
runs past telegraph poles, skimming just underneath the
76
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HrcH FLEW THE FALCONS
tightly stretched wires. The challenge brought new life to his

face, and some of the old skill was seeping back into his flying.
But what he was doing for practice seemed even more dangerous than what he contemplated for Bastille Day, and officers
and mechanics alike begged him not to cut his approach to the
wires so fine.
In vain.
On July 10, 1919-just four days before Navarre hoped to
astound the world-he took off for another run between the
telephone poles. He flashed past the poles at nearly 100 mph
with his wingtips spaced evenly, but he was fully two feet too
high. His wing caught in the maze of heavy wires overhead,
and the Morane was catapulted forward with the wing ripped
loose. The fuselage slammed into the earth upside down with a
grinding, tearing noise heard all across the field. By the time .
the ambulance arrived, Navarre was already dead.
77
Rough Road to Glory
GEORGES FELIX MADON loved everything that could fly. He

would lie for hours on his back on the hot yellow sand of the
Tunisian beaches near his home at Bizerte, watching the lazy
elegance of the gulls as they soared overhead white against the
hard blue North African sky. Often when he went horseback
riding into the desert with his father the elder Madon would
show his impatience at the boy's seeming indifference to the
reins; Georges' attention would be drawn upward to where vultures wheeled high against the sun in their patient circle of
death.
When he was fifteen, Georges was stricken with marsh fever.
This forced his withdrawal from school, and he spent most of
his time for the next several months poring over the aviation
journals his father ordered from Paris. When his strength
returned-as it rapidly did, for Madon was blessed with a bulllike physique-he went to work on a home-built airplane using
his bicycle as a support for wings made of a stout bamboo
framework covered over with old curtains and family handkerchiefs crudely sewn together. One observer who looked with
alarm at the hideous contraption wryly remarked: "As a device
for drying laundry, the wings offer a real advantage-but as a
method of sustaining flight the design is sheer lunacy."
Undaunted, Madon mounted the seat and pedaled furiously
down a wooden ramp and sailed off into space from the edge of
78
wrc
a low cliff. When he untangled himself from the wreckage he

found he had lost both his bicycle "and a great many
illusions."
Madan's younger sister, much intrigued by her brother's
labor, asked if she might be introduced to the mysteries of the
air. Madan took her to the schoolyard and placed her in a
swing that had unusually long ropes. 'Til get you going," he
said, "and when I say to turn loose the ropes and jump, do it
immediately." After six or eight strong thrusts against the seat,
Madan's sister was describing a truly fearful arc. At the
moment when the girl next approached the limit of her travel,
Georges yelled "Allez!" and the Madan family's only daughter
catapulted through the air to land twenty feet away in a
parched flower bed.
Next, Madan turned to formidable box kites, using as passengers unwitting stray cats who made the mistake of rubbing
up against the designer's leg. Screeching with terror, the unfortunate animals would ride out the wild swinging of the kite
until the wind dropped and they crashed to earth, or until
their anguished cries brought a gendarme to the scene of what
sounded like bloody murder. Madan concluded that as a selftaught designer he was a dismal failure-a belief his father and
the police chief of Bizerte did nothing to discourage.
In the summer of 1911, when Madan was nineteen years old,
he journeyed to Paris and signed for a course in flight instruction at the Bleriot school at Etampes. No student ever worked
harder, and at the end of a dozen lessons Madan was pronounced fit to handle airplanes on the ground and off. When he
received his civilian license, Madan spent every sou he had for
Bleriot rental, flying until darkness came each day. Broke, he
wired home for passage back to Tunisia.
In 1913, Madan was called up for military service and once
again he crossed the Mediterranean. Report~ng for d~ty ~t
Versailles, Madan confidently showed the bngade ma1or h1s
flying license and waited for what he was sure would be an
automatic assignment to the aviation branch. Instead, Soldat
Madan was sent to the cook shack where he began military life
peeling spuds. Eventually, Madan's demands for transfer fell
Rough Road to Glory
wrc
79
on the right ears and he was sent to Avord where he easily

passed the tests for his military brevet. Promoted to corporal,
and proudly wearing the large wings of cloth sewn to his
sleeve, Madan felt that at last the world was his. But his first
operational flight ended almost as disastrously as had his
launching of the bicycle.
Returning from a cross-country trip to Saintes, Madan was
caught up in one of those suddenly developed summer storms
so common in southern France. One minute he was cruising in
level Hight over the pleasant sunny countryside, the next found
him upside down in wet gloom with the wail of banshees in his
ears. I'm doomed, he thought. Madan had never practiced
inverted flight for the simple reason it was believed fatal.
Drenched with oil, Madan grabbed the sides of the cockpit and
prayed.
Seconds filled with anguish passed. Then the nose dropped
and Madan grabbed the control yoke and hauled back. The
Bl<~riot completed the bottom half of a loop and Madan leveled
out at 3,500 feet. Then the engine quit cold. Madan nosed
down again, frantically seeking a place to land. Trees, steep
hills, rocky fields everywhere. Madan exercised rare skill and
sat the plane down on a gently sloping river bank, the Bleriot
coming to rest under the arch of a viaduct.
The experience left Madan with the conviction that he
needed to learn a great deal more about piloting, and that with
his luck he could get away with anything. In this last, he was
proved wrong.
He first set out to prove to himself that he could again fly
inverted and safely recover. He did on purpose what had happened before by accident and landed none the worse. But he
was severely reprimanded for endangering government property-the airplane and his life. Next, Madan set out to conquer
height. He succeeded in getting himself and a passenger to the
then unprecedented altitude of 11,400 feet-at that time a military record. When coming down, Madan's elation overcame his
common sense and he executed a perfect loop over the field in
full view of the commanding officer. Madan landed, no doubt
expecting felicitations upon his accomplishments: few pilots
had looped; none had flown so high. Coldly, his CO broke him
80
to ordinary corporal, grounded him for five months, imposed a

30-day jail sentence and ordered him back to the training center at Avord. Such was the discipline in the French Army.
When the war broke out, Madon-marked down on his record book as a "trouble maker"-was posted to Belfort, far from
the Front, where he was relegated to the role of a stretcher
bearer. A week passed, then Madon seized the chance to fly his
first reconnaissance patrol when a squadron mate broke a leg in
a bad crash landing. Madon brought back badly needed information to the army commander, and was cited the following
day. Elevated to sergeant, Madon was assigned to BL. 30, a
two-seater Bleriot squadron operating near Soissons.
Day after monotonous day he pushed the little ship back
and forth across the lines, seeing little of interest on the ground
and nothing of challenge in the air. Bored, Madon began worki~g at nights, going over to toss 90-mm. shells on German positions he had marked on his map during the day. Coming home
from one of these missions, Madon had an experience that
pushed his luck to the limit.
While still two miles from his own lines, a 77-mm. antiaircraft shell struck his engine squarely, the impact ripping away
seven of its nine cylinders. Immediately the damaged plane
spun and slipped toward the earth 4,000 feet below. Madon
fought the controls and brought the unbalanced craft out of
its sickening gyrations directly over the German trenches. Rille
and machine-gun fire reached up for him and several times he
felt the little shocks as bullets slammed through the wings and
~uselage. The plane skimmed over no man's land and plunged
mto the French barbed wire, flipping over violently on its back.
Unhurt, Madon and his observer dropped to the mud and
began crawling through the wire followed by the angry zipping
and cracking of German rifle bullets. They dropped into a
French trench muddy from head to foot, gasping for breath,
and bleeding from cuts sustained during the painful crawl.
Later, well fortified with issue rum, they made their way to the
rear and back to their squadron.
A few days later, BL. 30 was withdrawn from the Front and
sent back to Le Bourget to refit with Maurice Fa1man pusher
Rough Road to Glory
wtt
81
biplanes. With the cloud of disgrace now forever lifted from his
head-or so he believed-Madon was put in for promotion to
Adfudant (equivalent to warrant officer ) and written up for
the Medaille Militaire. Promotions! Medals! A new airplane!
Life was certainly looking up for the one-time potato peeler.
Madon ordered a new uniform in Paris and on April 5 1915
picked up the new Farman at Le Bourget and took off fo~ Toul:
where the squadron was to begin a life of directing fire for
long-range artillery. With much greater range now at his disposal, M_adon'~ spirits began to soar at the thought of the deep
penetratwn raids he could now carry out against the enemy.
So intent was Madon upon planning for the future that he
?e~l~cted the immediate present. A fog had begun to creep
ms1d10usly across the countryside and, when his attention was
drawn to this lamentable fact, Madon found that he was lost.
A quick glance at his watch told him that he should be near
Toul, or a little past. But had he been fighting a head wind
since he left Paris? Or had he been pushed along by a tail
wind? And where was the wind coming from now? With the
ground covered over by the impenetrable fog, he had no way
of telling. He cursed the inattention that had led him into this,
and realized he would have to land and ask directions. Now, he
would arrive late at Toul and face the displeasure of the CO.
Madon eased the stick over, cut back the throttle, pushed a little on the rudder bar and began letting down in a gradual
spiral.
A few minutes later the Farman was swallowed up in the
wetness of the fog. Madon kept spiraling downward, trusting
to luck, and after a few minutes broke into the clear almost
over a small village. Definitely not Toul. He picked out a
cleared field and slid the big Farman down to a faultless landing. Killing the engine, Madon hauled himself out of the bathtub-like crew nacelle and dropped to the ground.
Madon quickly found out where he was when a squad of
infantrymen wearing strangely shaped helmets appeared and
made him prisoner. He had landed beside the town of Porrentruy in Switzerland-fully one hundred miles southeast of Toul.
The Farman was confiscated, and Madon was marched off to
internment camp.
82
Madan was taken to St. Gall where he was confined to one

room in a disused customs building. Six weeks later he managed to slip out of a window and disappear into the night. He
reached the Italian frontier, only to be recognized by a Swiss
guard recently transferred from St. Gall. Arrested, he was
taken to Zurich and placed in a cell on the third floor of a large,
well-lighted and heavily patrolled caserne. As the dismal weeks
passed, Madon devoted every waking hour to devising plans
for escape; in the end, he realized flight from the caserne was
impossible. Somehow, another way must be found.
As an internee-in sharp contrast to prisoners of war-Madon
was allowed out of the caserne and into the town of Zurich for
a few hours each day, always under armed escort. \%ile in one
of the better restaurants, he struck up a conversation with an
attractive girl from Lausanne. Seeing his French uniform and
the suspicious guard eying them from his chair near the door,
she took in the situation at once. As she rose to go she said
softly, "You will be hearing from me again."
Not long afterward, Madan received a fox terrier from the
girl, who wrote in an accompanying note that the little animal
would be good company for him during his enforced stay in
Switzerland. As it was now winter, Madon made a little green
coat for the terrier, whose short fur was no barrier to Alpine
cold. As an afterthought, Madan added a pocket to the dog's
new wool coat, not realizing at the time that the pocket would
provide the key to his successful escape.
Madan, the little terrier, and the guard became familiar
sights to the citizens of Zurich. Madon took advantage of his
few hours of freedom each day to go into town, regardless of
the weather, where people greeted him with a cheery "Bon
;our!" and many of them bent down to pat the terrier and offer
her a tidbit. One day a young man who walked with a limp
stopped the trio on their rounds, bent down and spoke in
French to the dog while patting her on the flank. Madon
noticed that the man slipped something into the pocket of the
terrier's jacket, closing the flap with a firm pat. He straightened
up, winked at Madon, and walked on.
Back in the caserne, Madan removed the paper from the
pocket and read, I am a count1yman, invalided out of the war.
Rough Road to Glory
83
Do you wish to escape? I can help you. Elated, Madon hugged

the little terrier and shared half of his dinner with his tailwagging friend.
Through the weeks that followed, Madon and the other
Frenchman kept up a lively correspondence with the mute
help of "Follette," as Madon had named the dog. The guard
never once became suspicious. Late in December, Madon's
plans for escape had been meticulously worked out. There
remained only putting the bold scheme into action.
Two days after Christmas, Madon and the guard started on
their afternoon stroll through the slush and the new white
snow that covered Zurich's streets. Madon carried Follette in
his arms. They walked briskly in the clear, cold air until they
reached the Ludo bridge. A black automobile was parked near
the bridge, the driver sitting behind the wheel studying a map.
As they passed the car, the driver quietly stepped out and
clapped a chloroform-soaked handkerchief over the guard's
nose and mouth while at the same instant Madon dropped the
dog and pinioned the man's arms. In one swift motion the
guard was shoved into the back seat of the automobile, Madan
jumped in beside him and the door was slammed shut. The
driver slid behind the wheel, started the powerful eingine, and
pulled away from the bridge, heading down a street that led
out of town.
Suddenly, Madon cried out, "Mon Dieu! Stop! I have forgotten Follette!"
The driver laughed and jerked his head to the right, where
the little terrier sat on the seat beside him, her eyes wide and
her paws fighting for traction on the leather seat.
Madon propped the guard up in a corner and then reached
down to the floor where the driver had piled an outfit of civilian clothes. Madon strugged into the garments, and when he
was finished no longer looked like a dashing French aviator,
but rather like a hefty tourist out for an afternoon drive
through the winh'y countryside.
"The whole affair," Madon said later, "was like a cinema."
Since the alarm would not go out for several hours-till the
time Madan and the guard were due back at the caserne-they
drove at a reasonable pace from Zurich, through Bern and
84
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thence to Fribourg, where the guard emerged from the depths

of unconsciousness. He took in Madon wearing civilian clothes,
then realized they were moving. "But where am I? What are
we doing in an automobile? Where are we going?"
Madon, whose every free minute during the previous six
months had been shared with the anguished fellow next to him,
greatly enjoyed this moment. "Hal" he said. "My friend, I'll
tell you where we are going-to France!"
"To France? But you are mad! You are my prisoner. Here,
stop the car!"
"Only when we reach Lake Leman-and then we shall enjoy
a ferry ride to Evian."
The guard, now fully cognizant of the seriousness of his
position and mistaking Madon's soaring spirits for a gentleness
of nature, became authoritative; he bellowed that Madon was
under arrest and demanded that the car be turned around and
headed for Zurich. He reached for his pistol, but the scabbard
was empty, the pistol had been flung into the snow many miles
back. The car sped on. Madon smiled grimly.
"If you don't stop, I'll throw myself from the door," threatened the guard.
"So much the worse for you," Madon replied. "We have no
time to slow down."
The guard wilted. "But what will I do? What will my superiors say? What will happen to me?"
"Listen," Madon rapped out. "You would be wise to come
with me across the lake to France. If you refuse, I'll have to
chloroform you again and dispose of you in the woods. When
you wake up-if you wake up-I will already be home. And you
will face rigorous punishment at the hands of your own federal
authorities. . . ."
The guard hesitated, then leaned forward as though to Bing
himself from the car. Madon grabbed his arm, shoved him
roughly back into the corner and reached for the evil-looking
black flask reeking of chloroform. The guard-who was only
nineteen-paled and visibly collapsed in defeat. He sat forlorn
and dejected in the corner, and his future looked very bleak.
"I took pity on the poor fellow," explained Madon, "and
talked to him as a father. I asked what his job had been before
Rough Road to Glory
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85
the war, and h.e told me he was a carpenter earning four francs
a day. I told him that in France I could guarantee him ten and
at that he brightened. And, resigned, he became himselF a
n
escaper. "
The .car rolled into Lausanne at eight-thirty that night, and a
few mmutes later found them at the ferry landing. Madon had
a bad moment when a Swiss customs official approached them
but saved the situation by yelling to the driver that he should
return to the "chateau" and tell "Madame" that he and his
friend had decided to visit friends at Lausanne and that h
the chauffeur, should return for them at the landing at eleve~
that night. Convinced that Madon and the guard, whom
Madon had outfitted with a cap and a civilian overcoat, were
wea~thy adventurers out for a night on the town, the customs
official watched the car drive away and then continued on his
way. Madon and the Swiss waited until he had faded into the
fog, then quickly hopped aboard the ferry. Forty-five minutes
later, Georges Madon was once again on French soil.
Once more, the future shone brightly for Madon. Not only
"":ould the ?romised Medaille Militaire be coming through but
hi~ promo~wn to adjudant as well. And who knew what praise
might b~ m store now that he had executed a difficult escape
from a life of ease in order to again offer himself up to the gods
of war? Flushed with success, elated at the unlimited prospects
that surely loomed before him, Madon put in a request for
transfer to a fighter squadron.
He was instead awarded sixty days in jail.
The reason? For ". . . having strayed from his route and
landed on neutral territory." The implication was as clear as it
was absurd: that Madon had deliberately sought to evade
combat by absenting himself in Switzerland, that he had
la~ded th~re on purpose. Madon, cut to the quick, realized that
~mds wh1ch could draw such a conclusion would be totally
~ncapable of grasping the logical argument against it. He realIzed that he was fighting two wars-one against the Germans,
the other against his own rear echelon-in which rashness
would earn him only defeat. He went off, unprotesting, to serve
out his time.
Madon returned to the air war on the day the great German
86
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offensive began at Verdun. Piloting a Farman, he witnessed

seven planes just like his own shot out of the sky in one day.
Disregarding the weight penalty involved, Madon had fitted
two machine guns for the use of his observer, who sat in the
front of the nacelle. There was no protection from the rear;
their return from each hazardous mission in the Fokkerinfested sky would depend largely upon luck and Madan's
own skill at the controls. Madon spent three awesome months
piloting Farmans over Verdun, returning again and again with
his "chicken coop" so riddled from shrapnel and machine-gun
fire that his mechanics believed him a man under the special
protection of St. Francis. His commanding officer found his
Hying faultless, his courage sublime and his fire-correction
data precise beyond belief. In June of 1916, Georges Madon at
last was granted his request to transfer to fighters.
Was he-now a pilot with hundreds of hours in his logbook,
much of it in combat-posted to an operational squadron at
once? No, indeed ... the authorities somehow decided that
Sgt. Madon should learn to fly; he was sent to the Bleriot school
to start from the beginning. His feelings as he climbed into a
Penguin for a roll down the field can be imagined. He went
through the whole course, astonishing the instructors with his
skill at acrobatics and gunnery. One of them remarked:
"Madon, I predict a brilliant future for you at the Front."
"Yes," Madon replied sourly, "unless I am sent to jail first."
But this time there would be no jail-on September 1, 1916,
Madon signed his name to the duty roster of N. 38 and got
down to the business of winning his two-front war. He spent
one day supervising the rigging of his Nieuport Behe and
checking with meticulous care the mounting of the Lewis gun.
A second day was given over to Hight testing and familiarizing
himself with the terrain. 0~ the third day he sought combat.
Madon went out alone over the blasted country of the
Champagne and nursed his plane up to nearly 14,000 feet. At
that altitude the cold was intense, and soon his hands were like
lumps of ice; he had to constantly Hex his fingers to keep them
from stiffening permanently into clawlike positions. But the
cold was forgotten as he saw two German artillery-spotting
planes drift by 5,000 feet below. Madon lunged to the attack.
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87
One of the two-seaters broke away and dived for safety, but
the other stayed to fight. As Madon bored in he saw tracers
Hashing past his wings. He leveled out, came straight at the
German's tail, and opened fire from only 50 yards. He held the
trigger down until the drum had been emptied, then banked
away to reload. Quickly he wrestled a fresh drum into place
and came on again, firing. This time the German plane was hit
squarely. It plunged straight down with the engine running
full out. Madon followed the plane down and saw it rise drunkenly, then nose over again and continue diving vertically until
it tore itself to pieces on the ground north of Sommepy. The
kill was never confirmed, however.
On September 28, Madan's luck was better. He jumped a
Fokker busily engaged in shooting up a Caudron returning
from a bombing raid, and sent it spinning down to crash near
Pomacle in sight of hundreds of excited French poilus. It was
his first official victory. The second came a month later when he
attacked two Fokkers, knocking one from the sky with fifteen
rounds. Awarded the Medaille Militaire and handsomely cited
in the Orders of the Army, Madon now knew that his worst
enemy-headquarters-had been vanquished; from now on he
could give his full energies to battling the Germans.
He got one German plane down in Hames, but it could not be
confirmed. Then another enemy plane broke up in the air,
catapulting the luckless pilot through space, kicking like a man
demented, and that one went in the book as official. On December 1, Madon shot a two-seater down out of control. Nine days
later he Hamed another over Sainte-Menehould, and that made
four official kills. Madon received the news of his promotion to
warrant officer happily, but told his CO he would be happier
still to bag his fifth Boche and elevate himself to the rank of the
ace.
The year ended in some of the foulest weather on record,
and Hying came to a halt along almost all the Front. Madan's
frustration was relieved somewhat when the squadron was
re-equipped with Spads-powerful, chunky fighters with 150h.p. Hispano-Suiza engines and armed with a Vickers machine
gun synchronized to fire through the propeller. Here was a
machine to answer Madan's prayers. He could dive it full out,
88
Wfl
knowing the wings would stay on, and it would absorb an

en01mous amount of punishment from enemy fire and still hold
together. Madan, unlike Jean Navarre, did not dance around in
the air-he flew like an express train-and the fast, ox-strong
Spad was greatly to his liking. In a new Spad VII he shot down
his fifth German plane, and shortly afterwards proved for all
time that it was the strongest airplane yet built.
Once, Madan's creed of "Fly down their backs and give them
all you have" nearly led him into disaster. He was aloft at
18,500 feet searching for prey when only 500 feet below a twoseater Albatros materialized from nowhere. There was no time
to plan an attack, no time for thought; Madan shoved the
stick forward and opened fire. The next instant the Albabos
blotted out the sky and the controls were wrenched from his
grasp as the hurtling Spad rammed into the other airplane.
Then, locked together in mortal embrace, they began whirling
downward to the earth three miles below.
The right upper wing of the Spad had sliced into the Albatros' fuselage just forward of the tail assembly, nearly severing
it from tl1e body of the plane, and now the tail was flapping
violently from side to side in the rush of wind. The mangled
planes stayed together in the spin for a 2,000-foot fall through
empty space; then, with a second ripping and screeching
sound, the tail of the Albatros fell away and the Spad lurched
free. In the split second that his airplane stayed level, Madan
had a fleeting glance of the tailless German craft diving
straight down through a cloud . . . if the two Germans were
doomed men, so also was he, for his own right wing was gone
from about three feet past the center section. Once again the
Spad fell off in a sickening, uncontrollable spin. Madan fought
the controls, waiting for the inevitable end.
Madan jammed the stick and rudder over as far as they
would go, gritting his teeth with the effort. The mad fall continued. Then, at 6,000 feet, the Spad came slowly out of its
spin and headed for the ground in a shallow dive. As the altimeter rapidly unwound, Madan gingerly brought back pressure
to bear on the control column, but the Spad responded with
agonizing reluctance. The earth was rushing up at him with
terrifying speed, but Madan did not dare follow the urge to
Rough Road to Glory
wtC
89
haul the stick back into his stomach for fear the hurtling airplane would disintegrate.
Barely 50 feet away from total disaster the Spad jerkily leveled out and Madan heaved on the stick. The Spad floundered,
then smashed against the earth belly down, bounced, struck
again and then flipped over in a long, grinding tail slide that
ripped away what remained of the wings. In the unearthly
silence that followed, Madan realized he was still alive. He
unfastened the safety belt and fell heavily headfirst to the
ground. Crawling from the wreckage he stood up to inspect the
damage to himself: a swollen lip, a broken finger; otherwise,
not a mark.
As the war dragged on, Madan showed a contempt for danger that awed his friends and impressed his enemies; no odds
were too great, no challenge too fearsome, no risk too great for
him to pit his strength, his skill and-above all-his incredible
luck against.
Early on the morning of April 23 he was prowling among the
clouds above Sainte-Genevieve-en-Champagne and got the
jump on a varicolored Albatros piloted by Lothar von Richthofen, brother of the German national hero and a ranking air
fighter in his own right. Madan waded in and his first burst
ripped through the cockpit. Von Richthofen was struck in the
back and knocked giddy by a slug that creased his head near
the right eye. He spun down out of control and crash-landed
behind his own lines, put out of action for months.
The following morning found Madan once again over SainteGenevieve. Judging from the look of things, Lothar von Richthofen's squadron ached for revenge, for, below him, Madan
saw seven Albatros fighters winging toward France in a flawless vee fmmation. Down hurtled the Spad. Madan fastened
his sights on the rearmost plane and triggered his Vickers gun.
The Albatros went down in a ball of flame. The second plane
in line saw Madan coming, took a burst from his machine gun,
dived and broke apart in the air. Madan flattened out and
bored in on the two enemy fighters remaining on the left side of
the vee. His Vickers hammered out a long burst and a third
German headed earthward on fire. With only a pause in the
strident barking of his gun, Madan sent the fourth Albatros
90
....,.
HIGH FLEW THE FALOONS
following the others down, wrapped in flames. He quickly

banked around, expecting to find the three other German
planes jockeying for position on his tail, but, almost unbelievably, they were calmly flying on, oblivious of the sudden death
that had overtaken four of their comrades within a space of
thirty seconds. Madon let them go, and dived for home, eager
to report his quadruple. But not one witness could be found to
substantiate his claims and the spectacular performance went
unrewarded.
After lunch, Madon climbed back into his Spad and took off
alone. Just over the German first line he jumped a two-seater
and shot it down. While returning home he trapped a second
two-seater over the French reserve trenches and sent it crashing
to earth with only five shots. This last alone-of the six he had
shot out of the sky that day-was confirmed . . . only a born
martyr would not have wondered at the unfairness of it all.
Madon was no respecter of names. Learning that a new German squadron had moved in across the way, Madon flew over
one evening just at dusk and dropped a message tied to a long
tricolored streamer onto the enemy airdrome. The brief note
was addressed to Leutnant Hartmuth Baldamus, who was
credited with no fewer than eighteen kills. Read the message:
If you desire a meeting with me, come every day at 0900

hours and at 15,000 feet vertically above Main-de-Massiges, over the lines.
Georges Madon
For two days, Madon stalked the sky over Main, but the area
was empty of airplanes. On the third day he saw, off in the distance, a biplane with huge black crosses on the wings. Madon
pushed the stick down and hurtled after his prey. But as he
drew nearer, he saw that it was not Baldamus at all, but a twoseater photographic plane bent on some mission inside the
French lines. Madon chased it back toward Germany, then got
on its tail to open fire. His gun jammed. Swearing, he pulled
away to clear the stoppage. The German turned back toward
France. Madon got his gun working and herded the two-seater
back to the north. lie crept up to within fifteen yards of the
enemy plane and saw, to his astonishment, the Germans throw
Rough Road to Glory
....,.
91
up their hands. They were surrendering! The German pilot

grabbed the controls and banked around again toward France,
Madon sitting on his tail like a truant officer. He saw the German observer drop down in his cockpit, only to emerge with a
hunting rifle raised to his shoulder. He had time for only two
shots before Madon's fusillade tore into the two-seater. It shuddered, then rolled over on its back and dropped through the air
with the wheels pointing toward the sky. The observer, evidently having forgotten to fasten his belt when he reached into
the fuselage for the rifle, tumbled out of the airplane and plummeted through space, finally crashing to earth at the foot of a
tree near Suippes. This time, with the wreckage of the plane
and the bodies of the crew having fallen inside the French
lines, Madon received confirmation of the kill.
In battle, Madon was like a bulldog: once his teeth were in
the enemy, he never let go-not even if his tenacity meant putting his own neck in a noose. One brilliant morning, over
Cornillet, he surprised a pair of German corps artillery planes
just beginning to direct a shoot on the French rear areas.
Madon dived cleanly down from 18,000 feet and prepared to
open fire on the rearmost enemy. But the artillery pilots were
old hands at the game, too. One spilt away from Madon's gun
and pointed for home, while the other skidded to the right,
giving his observer a crack at the Spad with his Parabellum .. As
Madon skirted away from the accurate fire, the German pilot
slipped underneath and dived after the first plane. When
Madon swung back into position, both two-seaters were far
below and diving all out for home. Madon pushed the nose ~f
the Spad over and went after them. The usually faultle~s H~s
pano-Suiza engine stuttered slightly, as though cleanng. Its
throat, and with German territory only a minute away a Wiser
man would have heeded the warning and h1rned for sanctuary
... but wisdom and tenacity seldom walk hand in hand, and
Madon continued the reckless pursuit.
One of the enemy planes was faster than the other, . ~nd
Madon slowly closed the gap between himself and the trailmg
two-seater. He was well within the German lines when he
moved up into firing position and let loose fifteen rounds. The
enemy biplane wobbled, slewed in its flight, then nosed down
92
"""
soon to splash against the earth where it burst into flames.

Madan was scarcely a thousand feet high when he eased back
on the stick to start the climb for home. His consternation can
be imagined when he discovered that the Spad would not rise.
The tachometer dropped sickeningly until the engine was
developing little more than idling rpm. The lines were five
miles distant-too far for even the most optimistic gliding.
There was nothing for it except to set down and see if he could
put the balky Risso engine to rights. He staggered on deeper
into German territory, uneasily seeking an undisturbed corner
where he could tinker unmolested. He finally landed gently in
a vast, empty field between two small villages; not a breath of
wind stirred the air, not a soul was in sight; only the idling of
his engine broke the midmorning quiet.
Madon felt horribly conspicuous. His Spad's color scheme
did not lend itself to camouflage; the wings were painted a
bright blue, the fuselage a glaring white and the tail assembly
gleamed cherry red.
Experimentally, Madon pushed the throttle forward and the
engine seemed to catch hold with a promise of power; the sagging tachometer needle struggled upward and the temperature
gauge climbed 20 degress. While his hands were on the engine
controls his eyes scanned the horizon. His heart jumped at the
sight of a solitary figure standing on top of a railway embankment 200 yards away. French peasant or German soldier? He
couldn't tell. The figure disappeared.
Madon, despite the urgency of his situation manipulated the
throttle and the spark conbol with all the finesse of a surgeon
preparing for a major brain operation; too much or too little
fuel pumped into the carburetor in conjunction with a faulty
spark could instantly kill the engine-and there was surely no
one in the immediate vicinity who would help him start it
again. The engine still revved up hearteningly, the temperature
gauge registering encouragement. Madon shot a glance back
to the railway embankment. Ah, mon dieu! The one figure, like
a malevolent amoeba, had become thirty. They were all men
wearing feldgrau and coming on the run while carrying rifles.
Madar. hastily shoved the throttle forward and his stomach
churned as the cylinders began cutting out again. Desperately
Rough Road to Glory
.....
93
he wondered if he should get out and run, but if he did he

would have to set fire to the airplane-and he suddenly remembered that he had no matches.
The German soldiers were so close now that he could see
their faces, white and serious, underneath the bobbing coalscuttle helmets. The engine backfired loudly and several of the
Germans flung themselves to the ground, then shamefacedly
got up again and came on; a few seconds more and Madon
would definitely be hors de combat. Almost without hope he
moved the throttle forward for the last time and the engine
exploded into life. As the tachometer needle moved over to the
right the Spad began to roll down the field, followed by the
cracking of Mausers as the Germans knelt to fire.
Now the Spad was bounding down the field with Madon
hunched in the cockpit. When the tail lifted from the ground
he hauled back on the stick and the beefy fighter howled into
the air, the wheels barely clearing the tops of the trees at the
end of the pasture. The relief that flooded through Madon was
transmuted into cold anger at the anonymous figures below
who were still loosing off rifle balls in his direction. He turned,
dropped the nose of the plane, and began savagely raking the
field with machine-gun fire. Several of the gray figures crumpled, and Madon, his momentary anger satisfied, climbed away
from the place and flew home.
Although he was warmly congratulated on his narrow
escape, official confirmation for the two-seater he had shot
down was denied to him.
Again and again Madon returned from patrol with the certain knowledge that he had destroyed one or more enemy
planes, only to have his claims refused. This frustration was
common to all pilots of the Service Aeronautique : it was not
enough to have seen the victim explode in the air or smash
against the earth in hopeless wreckage-to count as a victory
the demise of the plane in question had to have been witnessed
by observers on the French side of the lines; usually these were
men in balloons or officers manning forward artillery observation posts at the front line. Many pilots, hating to be cheated
out of just rewards, borrowed the squadron car and motored up
to the Front to track down witnesses to their kills, but more
94
often than not Madon could not be bothered. Each time that
one of his successes was registered, however, he felt that he
had somehow "put one over" on the authorities.
On September 5, 1917, Madon again challenged overwhelming odds. While at 18,000 feet he saw below a patro~ of ni~e
Albatros D-V fighters, streamlined machines mountmg twm
Maxim machine guns and-in this instance-piloted by the
crack pilots of the von Richthofen Hying circus. Seve~ of the
fighters were in vee formation 2,000 feet below Madon s Spad,
while two others Hew above the main formation, apparently as
top protection. Madon, with the sun and altitude in his favor,
peeled off and went after the two topmost Albatros.
He picked the one farthest away first, and sent it down in a
vertical dive. The second turned to meet the Spad head-on, but
Madan kept his altitude advantage, rolled over on his back
and riddled the brightly painted enemy plane from less than
fifty feet away. The Albatros broke apart in the air and went
down in a loose-winged Hop. The downing of neither plane was
confirmed, but after the war Madon learned that one of the
Albatros had been piloted by Kurt Wolff, credited with
.
thirty-three kills.
Despite the seeming impossibility of gaining confirmatwns,
by the beginning of 1918, Madan's official score stood. at
twenty. It crept upward to twenty-five, then followed a penod
frustrating beyond belief: in the eleven weeks between March 9
and May 26, Georges Madon shot down thirteen Germa~ aircraft, not one of which he was able to have confirmed by higher
authority.
But, on May 27, his luck began to improve. He downed a
pair of single-seaters before lunch, then in the afternoon he
bagged a two-seater near Fismes and a fighter over Craonne
. . . four down, two confirmed .
On June 1, a torrid day, Madon went aloft with another
N. 38 pilot, Jean Casale, and they delivered a simultane~us
attack upon a fat black German observation balloon Hoatmg
serenely in the warm summer sky. When they ~ulled away
under a hail of machine-gun bullets and explodmg 77-mm.
shells the balloon was a mushrooming ball of oily smoke and
saffron Hames.
Rough Road to Glory
95
After lunch Madon went up by himself and over the lines at

19,000 feet took up station above a French artillery plane.
Madon expected company, and he was not disappointed:
seven Albatros fighters in line-astern formation dropped out of
the sun to start work on the all-but-defenseless Caudron below.
Madan's Spad-a new model with a 220-h.p. engine and two
Vickers guns-was much the faster in a dive, and before the
Albatros were within range of the Caudron he had attached
himself to the rear of the German formation. What followed
can be compared to Wild Bill Hickok passing a few idle seconds in a shooting gallery.
The last Albatros in line jumped crazily in the air and dived
away wrapped in Hames; the fifth man in this deadly game of
follow-the-l eader seemed to grow suddenly tired of the chase
and he too, trailing smoke, disappeared from the sky; a third
multihued biplane caught fire as suddenly as the first and spun
away in a shower of sparks. Madon intended to make a clean
sweep of the board, but the rapid massacre of three of their
companions had caught the attention of the survivors, and the
next two pilots in the line-up Hung themselves away from the
onrushing Spad and dived pell-mell for home. The German
Hight leader and the man behind him broke off the attack on
the French artillery plane and turned to deal with Madon.
The Frenchman met them head on, both guns blazing. The
German leader pulled up out of the line of fire and Hashed over
Madan's head: the second German slid underneath the hurtling Spad and turned to get on Madan's tail . . . but Madon
was quicker in the same maneuver, and once again the opposing fighters shot past each other, firing wildly. Madon was n~w
on the leader's tail, but the German slid around the sky with
such adroitness that Madon couldn't hold the Albatros in his
sights.
Tracers Hashed past his wings, forcing Madon to turn away
from the second German who was sitting fifty yards behind his
tail. Something cracked with an ominous sound in Madan's
right ear; a Maxim slug had shot away a main interplane bracing wire. Although he badly wanted a fourth kill, the fight was
carrying him deeper inside the German lines and the chance of
losing a wing in violent acrobatic combat was great. He turned
96
'""tl
for home, followed only by ineffectual volleys fired at long

range by his enemies, who were doubtless relieved to see him
go.
The three planes shot down by Madan fell inside the French
lines, thus his kills were quickly confirmed. His epic feat was
drav:n to the attention of the general commanding the I Army
Corps, who cited him in the army orders for his "brilliance and
audacity," adding that Lieutenant Madan had now accounted
for thirty enemy aircraft. Not a man to rest on his laurels,
Madan was up at five the following morning, and by six-thirty
had shot down two more.
The fighting in the air during the summer of 1918 reached
new heights of ferocity-matching the titanic slaughter on the
ground as the Germans lashed out in their last great offensive
of the war. It was a dangerous time for Allied pilots, for an
unexpected renaissance in German aviation filled the skies
with awesome numbers of improved fighters-notably the 185h.p. B.M.W.-powered Fokker D-VIIs that climbed like rockets,
Hew like swallows and fought at all altitudes. Fokker triplanes,
obsolescent but still formidable in the hands of skilled pilots,
were in evidence as well. Madan took them on impartiallysometimes with spectacular results.
On July 17 Madan, his duties as commanding officer of N. 38
having ended with the squadron's final patrol of the day, left
the field alone and went prowling over the hills near Epernay.
Flying toward him out of the late-afternoon sun were three
single-seaters in a triangle formation, each spaced 200 yards
from the other. Perhaps the Germans were green, or perhaps
they were confused by the Spad that bored steadily on in the
face of superior odds, but whatever the cause their actions
resulted in one of the war's most bizarre incidents.
Madan held on until it seemed a collision was imminent,
then veered off to the left and closed the range still further, his
finger caressing the trigger. The German pilot off to the right
turned sharply to the west to cut off Madan's approach ... and
Hew straight into the side of the ailplane he was trying to protect. Aghast, Madan watched as one of the smashed planes
burst into Hames and the other disintegrated into large pieces
Rough Road to Glory
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97
that fluttered away in the sky. Madan Hew through the debris
and wheeled around to deal with the remaining fighter, a
Pfalz. The German pilot, doubtless shocked beyond the ability
to react intelligently, immediately put the nose of the Pfalz
down and tried to outdive the oncoming Spad. Before Madan
had a chance to fire, the weaker Pfalz lost a lower wing, then
another, then the top wing ripped loose and the naked fuselage
plummeted vertically earthward with the engine howling like a
banshee and with the pilot sitting alive but helpless in the cockpit. Madan's score: three down, and not one shot fired.
A few days later Madan bounced seven Fokkers from altitude, diving through the middle of the threatening formation.
As his guns hammered out a long burst, he saw one of the Fokkers lurch in the air, felt drops of rain, a shock against his plane
-and he was through the enemy gaggle and diving like hell
for home. The brief splatter of rain puzzled him until he
landed and inspected his airplane: vaporized blood had
sprayed across his top wing. And wrapped firmly around a
bracing wire on the starboard side clung a pair of fur-lined
German goggles, a macabre souvenir Madan cherished for the
rest of his life.
The victories continued to mount: a triplane in Hames over
Nogent-l'Abbesse, a Fokker D-VII near Breuil, a two-seater
south of Dizy-le-Gros ....
When the last shot had been fired Madan stood fourth on the
list of great French aces with 41 credited kills; but in his private
log he had noted 105 that he was sure had gone down to
destruction. And not once throughout the whole fantastic business had he been harmed by enemy fire. His was the kind of
luck an Irishman could envy.
Six years after the war the French government finally got
around to recognizing the contribution Roland Carras had
made to aviation, and planned a simple memorial to that pioneer to be unveiled at Bizerte. Fittingly enough, the ceremony
was to be held on November 11, 1924. Georges Madon volunteered to fly past the monument, low over the crowd, in a warweary biplane. Although the engine of his chosen plane was
98
"'"ff
cantankerous, Madon shrugged off suggestions that he would

be wise to cancel his aerial tribute; after all, he pointed out, it
would be such a very short Hight.
A few minutes before 11 A.M. he slipped his worn leather
helmet on his head, settled the frayed goggles over his eyes
and took off over the sea. The engine spluttered several times,
but h e nursed it back to power with vigorous throttling and as
he dropped down over the coastline to make his run over the
unveiling ceremony the engine roared sweetly.
Then, when he was 200 yards from the crowd gathered
around the Garros monument, the engine stopped cold. Madon
perhaps could have set down in the small clearing just past the
monument itself, but the risk of plunging into a bleacher filled
with dignitaries was great. He swung away from the crowd,
lost vital altitude, and his airplane plummeted into the roof of
a low, white stone building.
At the age of thirty-two the incredible luck of Georges
Madon had finally run out.
wtl
99
"Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright..."
AT THE OUTBREAK of the First World War, few men would have
seemed less likely to earn eternal glory than Georges Marie
Ludovic Jules Guynemer. He was nineteen years old-but
looked fifteen-and when seen approaching from a distance
was often mistaken for a girl. He was thin to the point of frailty;
his narrow shoulders sloped alarmingly, and his chest seemed
caved in as if from a blow. White, nearly translucent skin covered his fine-boned hands, and his elegantly tapered fingers
were after the mold of a violinist. His long, pitifully thin legs
seemed incapable of supporting even so slight a figure .. . at
any moment, it seemed, they would collapse under him and he
would toss forward onto the pavement and possibly shatter like
glass.
Above his collar, however, Georges Guynemer was something else again: the face, long and chiseled in hard angles; the
nose, straight and Haring at the nostrils; the mouth, firm over a
chin that projected with a determined thrust. But above all, the
eyes bespoke his heritage-th ey burned from their deep sockets
with a kind of black liquescence that caused one pilot later in
the war to remark: "When preparing for Hight, the glances
from Guynemer's eyes are like the strokes of a hammer."
But recruiting sergeants on the eve of conflagration seldom
peer into the window of a man's soul to see what may be lurking there; instead, bodies are poked and prodded to see if their
100
"""tt
owners can march thirty kilometers with a hundred pounds

strapped on their backs. A casual glance at Guynemer's pallid
reediness was enough to persuade even the most desperate
recruiter that not only was such a feat out of the question but
that the poor fellow probably had only a short time to live
under the most favorable of circumstances! Five times Guynemer marched before the army examiners, and five times he was
sent away as unfit to serve. In his deep despair, he probably
wondered if his ancestors were not stirring uneasily in Valhalla.
Five hundred and fifty years before, in 1365, a Guynemer
had been one of thirty knights to sign the Treaty of Guerande;
another had died at Trafalgar; one had won the Legion d'Honneur while serving Bonaparte in Spain; Georges Guynemer's
own grandfather had been a Prefect of the Empire under
Napoleon III, and his father was an honor graduate of St. Cyr
now too infirm to take to the field. Georges, an only son and the
last of his line, faced the unendurable prospect of remaining at
home with his two sisters while the rest of French manhood
went forth to battle. Guynemer packed a small bag and got on
a train for Pau.
The commandant of the military air training center was not
impressed with the physique of the pale young man who stood
before him pleading to be accepted into the Service Aeronautique, but he was awed by his eloquence and sure knowledge
of internal combustion engines as Guynemer rattled off the
technical courses he had passed with high honors at three
schools, and explained that he spent much of his spare time
putting together complicated electrical toys for his younger sisters. Guynemer was accepted as an eleve 1'1Wchanicien, equivalent to apprentice buck private; his uniform was a pair of filthy
coveralls, and his only wounds were angry red scars left by
contact with hot cylinders and exhaust stacks, but he moved
about the field at Pau with all the pride of a field marshal.
The pilots there remembered him vividly; the "... girl with
hands dripping oil, the ripped clothes, the wispy figure. He
seemed to be not a man among warriors, but a child among
men. When we landed after a circuit of the field, he pounced
upon us with a thousand questions, his eyes brimming with
curiosity and an eagerness to learn that was-as it seemed then
"Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright . . ."
"""tt
101
-almost pitiable. For a few pointers on the art of Bight, he

would have run to the other end of the field to fetch a few
drops of gasoline for our cigarette lighters."
Guynemer's pleas-pleas that somehow seemed like demands
-that he be enlisted for pilot training were granted five months
later. The commandant sent him to flight school with reluctance, not because pilots were not needed, but because he
hated to lose the finest mechanic at Pau.
"Even as a student," recalled one pilot later, "you could see
in him the fierce will to conquer; to master first his airplane,
then the atmosphere, then the weather. He took foul weather as
a personal affront and bitterly resented the least interruption in
training schedules ... his ardor and enthusiasm put the rest of
us to shame."
When Guynemer graduated and was sent to the replacement
pool at Le Plessis-Belleville, he had 90 hours and 5 minutes of
Bight time in his logbook-more than any one else in his class.
On June 9, 1915, Guynemer was posted to M.S. 3 under the
iron command of Captain Felix Brocard, a man who had
chosen Guynemer and one other to replace two pilots lost in
combat. To veteran pilot Jules Vedrines, Capt. Brocard entrusted the task of breaking in Guynemer to the squadron.
"This kid, Guynemer," Brocard said, ''has spirit; let's see if he
has belly, as well."
"The kid," remembered Vedrines, "tall, thin, elegant,
reported wearing an English Sam Browne belt, the latest rage
in Paris, but an item of apparel that struck me as in bad taste
for French aviators. I suggested that he get rid of the ridiculous
leather harness. Although, in deference to my rank and experience, he agreed, he gave me a stiff blow with his eyes. This
shocking glance contrasted strongly with his college-boy's
build. Behind this 'hard eye' of his one perceived a will of iron,
a willingness to accept any challenge, a determination nothing
could overcome." And as it turned out, Guynemer needed all
those qualities just to remain with the squadron.
He smashed two new Moranes in atrociously overcontrolled
landings the first week at M.S. 3. After the second hard-toreplace aircraft had been reduced to a tangle of linen and
kindling, the irascible Brocard advanced cholerically upon the
102
mortified Guynemer and shouted that he wanted no more of

him.
Guynemer sought out Vedrines. He looked "pale and lamentable, but did not have the air of a beggar, was not defeated
and was possessed with that eternal Satanic glare of his."
"You don't know me," Guynemer said to Vedrines, "but if
you knew how badly I want to succeed! Look, the captain will
listen to you ... demand that I be given another chance."
The older pilot interceded on Guynemer's behalf and gained
for "the poor little fellow" a two-week reprieve. To force the
high-strung youngster to unwind, Vedrines grounded him for
a week, forcing Guynemer to sit on the sidelines and watch the
endless taking off and landing of the Parasols as they went out
and returned from patrol; Guynemer sensed that only gentleness with the conh'ols enabled the M.S. 3 pilots to set down
with such deceptive ease-that relaxation was the key to his
problem. After eight days of idleness, Vedrines began Hying
with Guynemer, taking him on long flights over the lines, helping him to develop his "air eyes," showing him the landmarks
on the battered landscape which would help him find his "Way
home again. When the two weeks were up, Vedrines reported
to Brocard that there would be no more trouble with Guynemer; the nervousness was still there, but it was controlled,
hammered into his will. But the question in Brocard's mind
still remained: Did the infant have guts?
Guynemer soon proved that he had.
On his first operational mission he circled so low and so
many times over a hostile battery while gathering fire-control
data that his observer Guerder "thought him mad." The air
was filled with the unnerving metallic thunder of antiaircraft
shells and the Parasol rocked to and fro in the sea of concussion. The ugly black puffs of smoke intrigued Guynemer, who
reached inside his Hying suit and drew out a small folding
camera which he handed to Guerder. "Here," he shouted;
"make photographs of the shelling." Only when the roll of film
had been used up did Guynemer pull away from the murderous barrage and head for home, his plane sieved with shrapnel
holes. After that, Guynemer was no longer called an infant;
Brocard "embraced him into the bosom of the escadrille."
103
On July 19, 1915, Guynemer and Guerder attacked a twoseater Albatros over Soissons. Guynemer coolly placed the
Parasol fifty yards above and to the left of the enemy plane
and Guerder opened fire. The Lewis gun jammed, but Guynemer stuck to the German's tail, feeling the sharp little jolts
as slugs from a carbine fired by the German observer ripped
into the Parasol. Guerder cleared the stoppage, got off a full
drum into the Albatros, and Guynemer saw the German's rille
fall over the side, the pilot slump forward, and the plane drop
sharply downward. It crashed in Hames in no man's land.
When they landed, Guynemer poked a finger through a hole in
Guerder's stiff leather crash helmet; a half inch lower and
Guerder would not have been alive to receive the Medaille
Militaire he and Guynemer were awarded a few days later.
Squadron M.S. 3 was not a fighter squadron and the opportunities for engaging German aircraft in aerial combat were
rare; however, due to the growing reputation of his pilots,
Brocard was entrusted with special missions-for many of
which Guynemer volunteered.
On October 1, he took off carrying a passenger who was
wearing civilian clothes and cradling a heavy box under his
arm. Their destination was an empty field eighteen miles inside
the German lines. On the way to the target Guynemer's Hight
was aided by a terrific tail wind that pushed them to the northwest so fast that Guynemer had difficulty in controlling the airplane. They reached the designated field unmolested and
Guynemer spiraled down to land. Just in time he saw that the
smooth, apparently unobstructed field was a trap for the
unwary: the Germans had laced it with tightly strung barbed
wire that crisscrossed the landing area from corner to corner;
Guynemer put on full throttle and zoomed away to land on a
rocky, stump-sh'ewn nightmare of a landing ground a half mile
away. He sat down with difficulty and discharged his passenger, who scurried away into a nearby patch of woods carrying
his box of dynamite and fuses with which to blow up German
goods trains. Guynemer dodged among the rocks and stumps
and managed to get the Morane into the air, where the real
struggle began.
The wind was blowing hard and steadily, and below him the
104
'""!I
earth barely crawled past his wings. His plane shook this way
and that under the constant buffeting it was subjected to, and
frequent glances at his watch and his map convinced him th~t
the odds were against his reaching friendly ground before hrs
fuel was exhausted. Two hours later, with his plane's engine
gasping at the dregs of remaining gasoline, Guynemer reach~d
home. word came that the saboteur had indeed blown a tram,
but had been captured immediately afterward, stood up
against a farmhouse wall and shot. Five days later, Guy~e~er
ferried a second disreputable-looking individual deep msrde
enemy territory; again returning unharmed.
Although cited for these missions-and others equally as hazardous-Guynemer brooded over the fact that he had so little
chance to come to grips with the enemy. It wasn't until ea~ly
November that the opportunity came again-an opportumty
seized, lost . . . nearly fatal.
It was while he was flying at 10,000 feet over Chaulnes that
Guynemer saw the pretty L.V.G. two-seater on its way home.
The Germans saw him at the same time, and the alert gunner
swung his swivel-mounted 7.92-mm; Parabellum machine .gun
upward, waiting for the Frenchman s attack. Guynemer wrsely
avoided diving at the L.V.G.'s rear; instead he rolled over and
came down in a long slanting dive in front of the two-seater,
intending to spray the pilot and the engine with his wingmounted Lewis machine gun. But as he came within range and
pressed the release the Lewis failed to fire. As he shot past the
L.V.G. tracers reached for him, and he knew the Germans were
aggressively inclined; worse, they were flying a faster airplane.
Guynemer searched all around him, but the nearest clouds
were miles away. There was no hiding place in the sky .. or
was there? Yes, one: Guynemer swung the Morane steeply
around and climbed back up and took up station six feet
directly underneath the bigger German plane. He recalled
later:
"I regulated my speed to theirs and from afar we resembled
one gigantic airplane. Et alors! I had not even a revolver-else
the Boche would have been at my mercy. They had not missed
a single move on my part, and were now not. so bellige:ent ..
fearing that a wrong move would enmesh theu plane wrth mme
'""!I
105
and we should fall together. Thus we flew . .. if they had been

equipped with a trapdoor in the bottom of their fuselage, either
one could have given me a stout kick in the head with their
boots.
"In attempting to reach for the Lewis gun and so clear the
jam, I let loose the controls-and this was the wrong thing to
do; almost immediately I felt myself rising upward toward
inevitable and disastrous collision. I quickly grabbed the control column and shoved violently to the right. My Morane
swung brutally over and I turned sick inside when I heard my
left wing scraping against the lower right plane of the enemy:
it was a moment of anxiety, you understand! But fortunately I
had not broken either ribs or spar; only a bit of linen fluttering
in the wind indicated the closeness of catastrophe. Like Siamese twins who have been parted, we quickly lost interest in
each other. The Boche flew away home as fast as they could go
-and so did I."
It was Guynemer's last flight on Morane two-seaters. The
squadron was re-equipped with Nieuports and became N. 3,
one of the first French escadrilles designated as a pure fighter
squadron. With the speedy little biplanes armed with a Lewis
gun on the dorsal wing, Brocard's "Storks," as they now called
themselves, began to pick up the pace of the war. No pilot's
star began to rise more quickly than did Guynemer's.
Above the forest of d'Ourscamp he bounced an Aviatik and
poured a full drum of ammunition into its vitals. The German
plane lurched violently, and Guynemer saw the hapless
observer flung into the empty sky to hurtle 5,000 feet to his
death. The Aviatik never stopped spinning, and crashed to
earth behind the German lines. Three days later, on December
8, Guynemer stalked "a huge and superb enemy" for more than
an hour before he reached the L.V.G.'s altitude. He swung
above the big airplane and came down, firing. From sixty feet,
Guynemer blasted the L.V.G. with 47 rounds and watched in
fascination as the plane blossomed with flame. And again, as
the stricken craft shuddered in the sky, the observer was seen
to tumble from his seat and go spinning away through space.
Guynemer followed the blazing wreck as it fell through the sky,
and at 4,000 feet was treated to the depressing spectacle of the
106
wtt
roasted German pilot being catapulted from his seat, his safety
belt eaten away by the gasoline-fed inferno. The L.V.G.
plunged to earth a hundred yards behind the German first
line, its bomb load going up with a thunderous roar and showering the trenches with flaming debris. The charred remains of
the German crewmen were found inside the French lines, lying
in the mud three miles apart.
On Christmas Eve, 1915-it was his 21st birthday-Guynemer was awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor, his country's highest award. The accompanying citation, read off by a
general, was so extravagant in its praise that Guynemer lowered his long-lashed eyes and blushed furiously.
When the Storks were sent to the beleaguered skies over
Verdun in March, Guynemer's score stood at eight-eclipsed
only by the flamboyant Jean Navarre, who had been working in
that sector since the battle had begun a month before. Guynemer's spasmodic aerial combats of the preceding weeks were
but a foretaste of the aerial war that raged above the contested
ground on both banks of the Meuse.
The morning of March 13, 1916, dawned clear and cold.
Sharp gusts of wind blew puffs of powdered snow across the
rutted field. A few miles to the north the ceaseless rumble of
the guns heralded the new day, but as Guynemer struggled
into heavy sweater, fur-lined combination, and boots his optimism found voice in a calm statement to Brocard that today,
the 13th, he would get two Boche just to start things rolling for
the squadron.
Over the Mort Homme he put to flight a group of reconnaissance machines which didn't stay around to test his mettle.
A few minutes later he cornered a brace of two-seaters coming
from out of the sun. Swinging around to begin his attack from
the rear, Guynemer believed he would have his double in time
to fly back to the field for breakfast. He bored in on the rearmost target, fired seven rounds and saw the plane sideslip violently and begin to spin earthward. The German observer in
the second plane vented his spleen with a long burst of fire that
sent tracers skittering over Guynemer's head like speeded-up
fireflies. Seeking to avoid this deadly sheam, Guynemer dived
underneath the two-seater, intending to pull up and machine-
wtt
107
gun the craft in the belly. But he had sadly misjudged his
speed, and before he could correct it his Nieuport shot from
underneath the blind spot and emerged in front of and slightly
below the German plane. The enemy pilot reacted swiftly. He
dropped his plane's nose and opened fire.
The windscreen exploded in Guynemer's face. The cowling
rang dully with the strikes. A ricochet ripped into his cheek
and blood momentarily blotted out his vision. Two hammer
blows crashed against his left arm. Something slammed against
his jaw. Quickly he shoved the stick forward and dived away
from the terrible assault. A thousand feet lower, he pulled up
and wiped away the blood from his eyes and his goggles. Was
the deadly two-seater still after him? No; to his relief the German pilot, believing him dead, was nowhere in sight. With his
left arm dangling numb and useless at his side, Guynemer
fought the Nieuport down with one hand to a landing inside
his own lines, near Brocourt. He was lifted, pale and bloody,
from the cockpit and placed on a stretcher for the rough ride to
the field hospital at Vadelaincourt. As the crudely sprung,
hard-tired ambulance bounded over the front-line roads, away
from the war, Guynemer's only thought was that he had failed
the squadron at a time when he was needed most.
The facial wounds proved superficial, only faint scars and a
small piece of metal forever imbedded in his jaw muscles
remained to remind him of those hellish few seconds over Verdun. And the Maxim slugs that had slammed through his arm
had missed the bone. But the shock to so frail a body was great,
and he lay for weeks in the hospital looking drawn and helpless. He dutifully rested and ate much of the hospital diet, and
slowly the strength flowed back into his system. With strength
came restlessness, and his black eyes burned with impatience
to be away from the reek of ether and formaldehyde and back
to the pungent odor of castor oil, cordite, and gasoline, back to
the squadron fighting so hard at Verdun. The doctors were
alarmed; this extraordinary man clothed in the body of a child
needed twice the convalescence period of most and-worse still
-they feared that Guynemer was afi:I.icted with tuberculosis.
They appealed to the elder Guynemer, and the old man visited
Georges at the hospital and pleaded with him to spend some
108
time at home. Guynemer looked into the stern face of his

father, now softened by worry and paternal concern, and-as a
fantastic scheme flew into his head-he smiled and said, "Yes,
Papa, of course I will come to Compiegne and finish my convalescence." Years seemed to fly away from the old man's face
... but had he known what his son had in mind in the way of
convalescence, he probably would have collapsed.
For Georges Guynemer had suddenly conceived a plan to
remove himself from the horns of the dilemma of not wanting
to cause his parents further pain on the one hand and yet, on the
other hand, not being able to face the prospect of lying inert in
a feather bed at home, surrounded by every comfort, while his
comrades were being wounded or killed in the bitter struggle
over Verdun. Guynemer was first a soldier; second a dutiful son;
ranking third was his status as a patient.
He secured his release from the hospital, promising the doctors he would take things easy until he was completely recovered. Next, he telephoned a friend at Air Service Headquarters
and asked that a Nieuport be put at his disposal during the
length of his recuperation, explaining that he wanted to keep
his piloting skill intact ... nothing strenuous, you understand,
a few hops over the pleasant countryside south of Compiegne.
It happened that there was a small emergency field at Vaucinnes, not far from the Guynemer estate, and to there the
Nieuport was ferried, awaiting the great pilot's pleasure.
This done, Guynemer went home, where he made his older
sister a partner in his conspiracy: her secret assignment was to
scan the skies each morning at sunup and report if the weather
was suitable for hunting. When it was, Guynemer leaped
lightly out of bed, dressed hastily and-carrying his elegant
boots in his hands- tiptoed silently down the stairs and out of
the house. He drove like the wind to the airfield in his white
roadster, parking it out of sight behind a hangar. Helmet, goggles and combination were pulled from their hiding place in
the large tool box, and a few minutes later he was sitting in the
cockpit of the Bebe while it was rolled out to the tarmac for a
dawn take-off. Two hours later he was back home in time for
breakfast with his family, managing to wink at his sister across
the table. When his mother asked him where he had been so
"Tiger, Tiger, Burning B1ight . . ."
109
early in the morning he truthfully replied that he had been out

for a breath of fresh air.
It wasn't long, of course, before his parents discovered the
schoolboy deception being worked on them, and the mornings
when the sky was fair were made hideous with anxiety from the
moment they heard the powerful engine being fired up in the
garage until the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway outside
sent them flying to the window to see him step jauntily from
the car, safe and unharmed. But not once during the agonizing
weeks that followed did they betray their knowledge or give
voice to their fears. While Guynemer's health and spirits visibly
improved, his parents began to look drawn and aged ... they
were paying the price for their son's desire to serve France
while at the same time trying to save them pain.
When Guynemer returned to the Storks he was dismayed at
the number of new faces present at the mess table; casualties
in the Groupe had been severe, especially in his own squadron.
The few veteran N. 3 pilots that still survived looked haggard
and worn, aged beyond their years by the heavy fighting that
had ushered in a new era in the air war. He was told that the
old days when a lone Nieuport pilot could expect to encounter
one, two or, at most, three German aircraft were a thing of the
past; the Boches were flying in squadron strength now, and solo
patrols were tantamount to suicide. Guynemer grew thoughtful, and he wondered if his wounds had leaked more than
blood . . . perhaps a reserve of his fighting fluid had seeped
away as well. This thought gnawed at him, and he determined
to find out where he stood after his long layoff from combat.
He chose deliberately to make his first sortie alone, over the
vigorous protests of Brocard. He left the ground early that June
morning determined to find out if he were the same man inside
that he had been before he was shot down. Fortunately, for
what he had in mind, the first German airplane he encountered
was an unescorted two-seater. Guynemer flipped his Nieuport
over in a dive and hurtled head-on at the German machine.
He held the pilot in his sights for a long instant, then banked
screaming away without firing. The enemy observer took a long
crack at him and Guynemer felt the familiar thuds as the Parabellum slugs struck home. Now he swung around and got on
110
Wfl
"Tige:, Tiger, Burning Bright . . ."
the two-seater's tail, watching tracers flash past as he inched

forward and placed himself in perfect firing position-but
again his machine gun remained silent. Again and again he
came at the two-seater, absorbing its punishment but dealing
out none in return. After twenty minutes of the bizarre combat
Guynemer turned away from the doubtlessly flabbergasted
Germans and pointed his plane for home, satisfied that his
courage had not deserted him. Now began a second and even
more spectacular phase of a career that would enshrine him
forever in the hearts of Frenchmen everywhere.
On June 22, he spent nearly nine hours in the air and bagged
an L.V.G. over Rosieres-en-Santerre. That made nine. On July
6, he tangled with a single-seater Albatros flown by a deadly
marksman who riddled his right wing, cutting two cables, and
forcing Guynemer to land. A week later he got his tenth kill in
company with rising young Alfred Heurtaux. In the last week
of July he raised his score to eleven in a hard-fought struggle
with eight Albatros, losing his propeller in the process. During
August he gunned down two more, using a total of five rounds
of ammunition-and was himself shot down when a hail of
lead swept the forward part of his plane, smashing the engine
and ammunition feed box. At the same time a nearly spent
slug ripped into his flying glove, bruising his left index finger
so badly that he was out of action for a week.
This affront was avenged on September 4 with the erasure of
a high-flying Rumpler at 16,000 feet over Saint-Ouen; and on
September 15 he blasted another two-seater to raise his score to
sixteen. But it was on the forenoon of September 23 that his
name sparkled above all others: he jumped three artillery
planes over Eterpigny and in ten furious minutes of slashing
attack sent two of them down in flames and the third staggering drunkenly homeward with its supporting surfaces shot to
ribbons. Unfortunately, an overzealous French antiaircraft battery chose this moment to fill the air with shrapnel, and a 75mm. shell exploded directly underneath Guynemer's plane,
hurling it sideways through the air.
The controls sagged limply in his hands, the engine fired
erratically, the fuselage creaked ominously from several split
longerons, and large pieces of linen ripped away in the wind.
Wfl
111
The plane was siev~d, but Guynemer miraculously was no':here to~~hed. Mra1d every moment that his airplane would
s1mply d1smtegrate around him, he began to nurse it downward, fighting ~ontrols that seemed to be supported in syrup.
He got the loose-jointed wreck down behind his own lines and
ski~ed across a shell-torn field, only to catch the wheels in
the lip of a shell crater. The control-less fighter flipped over and
shot forward tailfirst in a shower of mud. Guynemer crawled
from underneath the shambles and limped away covered with
bruises. Afterward, he laughed and wondered what happened
t~ the gunners who might have had the temerity to claim an
a1rcra~t ~estroyed over Fescamps that day. Considering Guynemer s Immense popularity, a lynching might have been not
unlikely.
Th~ wi?t~r of. that year of 1916 began early. The cold was
numbmg m Its bitterness and days fit for flying grew fewer and
fe~er.' But Guynemer was always up before dawn, nervously
drm~g coffee and smoking cigarettes, waiting for a possible
break m the heavy gray clouds that blanketed France from
Switzerland to the sea. Guynemer flew in weather that was
ma~gi~al. for geese, pressing his luck, his aircraft, his body to
therr hmrts. By the end of the year, his score stood at twentyfive and there wasn't a school child in France who was not
familiar. with his photograph-so often seen in the daily newspapers, m weekly magazines and in newsreels. He was the idol
of women of all ages, the envy of less able men, and to the gray
veterans of the bitter defeat of 1870, he was vengeance incarnate. His every victory was minutely chronicled by the press, a
popular song sprung up celebrating his deeds, and his fan mail
grew to monumental proportions.
Thus it is not surprising that when, in early January, his
name vanished from the communiques, something like a minor
panic struck the populace. What has become of our beloved
Guynemer? they asked in the cafes. Rumor had it that he had
been killed in some desperate combat and that the government
-perhaps fearing national collapse-was keeping the news
from the people. But no! Guynemer had not died at the hands
of les sales Boches; he had been killed by a jealous husband
who had blundered into a tryst in Pigalle; the murderer's name
112
Wfi
was being kept secret lest an outraged Paris track him down
and tear him to bits. The mystery deepened with each passing
day that saw the hero's name still missing from public print.
Oblivious to all this, Guynemer was busy at the Spad factory
seeing to the installation of a 37-mm. cannon inside a specially
constructed Spad VII built to accommodate the outsize weapon between the cylinders of its V-8 Hispano-Suiza engine. He
was warned that reloading the single-shot cannon would be
hard work while in the air and that the cockpit would be filled
with acrid fumes after each shot, but Guynemer waved aside
all opposition. When he returned to the Storks later that month
he blew apart an Albatros in the air with one well-placed shot.
His Spad, le Vieux Charles ("Old Charlie"), became famous on
both sides of the lines. In fact, there were several "Charlies"
at Guynemer's disposal; he sometimes flew in the Spad
equipped with the cannon and sometimes in a 150-h.p. model
mounting a single Vickers gun. As more powerful models came
out, the factory sent up the first of each production batch for
his personal use. He drove his planes as unmercifully as he
drove himself, and while he was flying one plane, the others
were being re-rigged and tuned up by his worshipful
mechanics.
When guns failed him-as they often did when fighting in
the subzero temperatures found at 15,000 feet and aboveGuynemer relied on audacious bluff. On January 26, a freezing
day and threatening snow, Guynemer went aloft alone and
bounced an Albatros two-seater at 12,000 feet. His Vickers
feebly loosed off ten rounds, then froze solid. Guynemer hammered at the feed block and worked the charging handle, but
to no avail. The brightly painted Albatros seemed suddenly an
object of overwhelming desire, and Guynemer detennined that
it should be his, jammed gun or no. He swooped down on the
German plane's tail and sawed his rudder menacingly back
and forth as if to say, You're mine ... a false move and you
are dead. He was so close that the German observer could
clearly see the grim white face beneath the goggles; the silent
Vickers gun, black and ominous, was only yards away, and
they were flying toward the French lines with the wind behind
them .... What to do? Although Guynemer's gun remained
Wfi
113
silent, the German pilot could reach up and poke his fingers
through the holes made in his top wing by the Frenchman's
first ten rounds. Not wanting to risk another dose of the same
telling marksmanship, the Albatros pilot started letting down,
straight for France.
The captured German craft came to earth between Montdidier and Compiegne, and Guynemer had his thirtieth.
As the winter gave way to spring, it seemed that Guynemer
was running a race with death; there were never enough hours
in the day, enough days in the week, or weeks in the month to
satisfy his burning compulsion for flight into the deadly area
three miles above the earth. Now twenty-two years old, he
looked thirty-five, and when on the ground he spent much of
his time resting his frail body for the morrow. Seeing him
slumped listless and exhausted, no one would have believed
him to be the greatest fighting pilot the war had produced.
Rather, it appeared he was a fit case for a rest home-as indeed
he was-but repeated requests from headquarters that he give
up combat flying received only a wan smile for an answer.
Dragging himself out to "Old Charlie" at dawn, he was a man
struggling with himself ... but once seated in the cockpit with
the engine roaring for take-off, he became in command of his
every faculty; sheer will hammered down fatigue and he
became, for those precious two hours of flight that lay ahead,
the Germans' greatest nemesis.
The following communique, issued by Grand Quartier
General in the spring of 1917, indicates the pace:
In the period from 17 to 31 May, Captain Guynemer has destroyed five enemy aircraft, of which four were brought down in the
same day. Two of these machines were accounted for in a oneminute interval, perhaps for the first time in this war. These five
new victories raise to 43 the number of German machines destroyed
to date by this valiant officer.
On July 7, Guynemer returned to his field after a hardfought, seemingly never-ending day that had seen the sky
swirling with enemy fighters at all altitudes; he had dueled just
under stratus clouds where it was so cold that his hands
numbed and his guns chugged sluggishly, and he had
114
scrapped right down to the ground where German rifle fire

reached for his Spad. When all was over, he had added another
double kill to his list which, added to the confirmed Albatros
of the day before (blown apart with the 37-mm. cannon, with
one shot ), brought his total victories to 48. When he climbed
from the cockpit of "Old Charlie" his legs almost gave way, and
he had to be helped to his quarters. Worn down with bonedeep fatigue and stricken with the three-day virus then making the rounds of the Front, Guynemer was taken to the hospital once again. But he was out within less than a week,
although he had never looked worse in his life: thinner, paler
and more fragile-looking than ever.
It was at this point that a well-meaning but utterly ignorant
government official made a ridiculous request to the ace of
aces: Would he be the flag-bearer, representing all French
aviation, in the monstrous Fourteenth of July parade down the
Champs-Elysees? As anyone who has ever carried a flag ~o~s,
marching for miles grasping the heavy, stubborn, .uny~eldmg
wooden staff with a wildly flapping flag at the top Is a JOb for
iron arms attached to bull shoulders-not for a 125-lb. convalescent only two days out of the hospital.
But that was not the reason Guynemer indignantly rejected
the request. "Why," he asked, "should I be thus defiled? Behind
me would follow men from all the regiments of France-men
who have performed prodigies of valor, each one of whom
should be venerated for daily enduring the agonies of the
damned. It would be odious for me to place myself at their
head, carrying a flag and thus spotlighted so that people could
cry, It's him! It's him! By this process, those gallants of the
infantry would become to loathe aviators."
.
.
He sickened at the adulation that lapped at hts feet on his
rare visits to Paris, finding much of it little more than cheap
sham. "One sees without cease," he pointed out, "those who
neglected you earlier-but who suddenly discover ~hat a
charming fellow you are ... their motive is to be seen With you,
to lead you into their world . . . when others look at you, your
newly-found admirers imagine that it is they themselves wh.o
are being remarked upon. And the women! They roll therr
"Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright ..."
wtt
115
tender eyes in your direction; you follow their glance, supposing it is your face that has attracted such sweet and compelling
observation ... not at all! They are merely counting the number of palms attached to the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre.
What sauce!"
Guynemer returned to the Front, and within ten days felled
two more German fighters to raise his official tally to the halfhundred mark. This magic figure, added to the fact that Guynemer had never looked worse in his life, triggered anew a
campaign to retire him from the arena ... perhaps to be sent
back to command the fighter school. "Never speak to me of the
rear!" he feverishly snapped out. "To quit the Front would be
an act of desertion." He went on flying and, on August 20,
bagged a D.F.W. over Poperinghe to bring the record to 53.
If GQG could not remove this latter-day Joan of Arc from
the lists, it thought to at least cut down his time in the air:
Guynemer, at twenty-three, was promoted to command of
SPA. 3. Things began to go wrong at once: he found himself
immersed in the trivia of paperwork that piled up on his worn
desk and thus the beckoning cockpit remained empty; when he
did have time to take to the air, the uncertain FlandeJ:S
weather made hunting next to impossible; and, to cap it all, his
favorite cannon Spad had to go into the shop for an overhaul.
Guynemer built up a dangerous head of steam inside, and on
the morning of September 11, he summoned one of the Stork
pilots, Lieutenant Bozon-Verduraz, and told him they were
going up on patrol ... just to find trouble. Guynemer climb.ed
into one of his spare machines, a much-used Spad XIII with
twin Vickers guns that were forever giving him trouble, and
with Bozon-Verduraz trailing him, left the ground at 8:25A.M.
Not many minutes later, over the shattered Belgian town of
Poelcapelle, Bozon-Verduraz saw Guynemer slide away and
down, hurtling after a German two-seater seen briefly through
a break in the clouds. Then the clouds closed together, and
"Old Charlie" was swallowed up in the cotton wool. BozonVerduraz went after Guynemer, but became lost in the clammy
oppressiveness of the clouds. When he finally broke out into
the clear there was no sign of the Spad or of the enemy plane.
The Bleriot tandem two-seater, powered by 50- and 80-h.p. Gnome

engines, was one of the best airplanes of its day. Bleriots were
fragile in looks only. Even brutal student handling was tolerated by
landing gear that had plenty of give . ( Lackland AFB Museum )
Bleriots w ere used at the Front in 1914, but later were relegated to
a training role. To be breveted on Bleriots was considered a mark
of esteem. (USAF)
Dual instruction in the French Service Aeronautique was given on
the two-seater Nieuport ( left ) and twin-engined Caudron ( right) .
Few French pilots were sent into combat with less tlwn eighty
hours in the air-far more time than pilots of the British R.F.C. had.
( Paul Ayres Rockwell )
Front view of Nieuport shows gleaming steel cylinders of 110-h.p.

Clerget rotary engine. Seated in cockpit is American pilot Robert
Soubiran, one of many volunteers who scorned Wilson's neutrality
plea. (Paul Ayres Rockwell)
Precisely aligned, later model Nieuport 17s await students. These

lightweight machines w ere not very forgiving of students' mistakes
-but they quickly made pilots of those with a light touch on the
controls. (The National Archives )
Mid-field collisions were common but seldom fatal. One pilot, dazed
and morose, sits on wing awaiting Gallic tongue-lashing from instructor. ( Robert Soubiran )
First solo in firefly -like Nieuport was long-remembered thrill. ( Martin Caidin Archives)
Sturdy Caudron G. Ill was much used as an advanced trainer as

well as a front-line reconnaissance aircraft. Note the substantial
four-wheeled gear. ( Lackland AFB Museum)
Rudiments of aerial gunnery w ere taught indoors, using mock-up

fuselage, wooden models and silhouettes of commonly encountered
German aircraft. Rear-cockpit gunners wrought hav oc among attacking fighters on both sides. ( Lackland AFB Museum)
Roland Garros terrified-and

mystified-German pilots when
his fury-rigged deflector enabled
his machine gun to fire through
whirling propeller blades. Garros, who had his eye on the future of aircraft, was a visionary
born before his time. Death put
an end to a dedication to aviation seldom matched in the history of flight .
First French aerial victory was scored by Frantz and Qwinault

flying a Voisin two-seater pusher biplane like this one. The Voisin
could barely attain 60 mph and required twenty minutes to reach
6,000 feet. Note external fuel tanks under top wing. (Thomas G.
Miller, Jr.)
Late1', Voisins we1'e a1'med with quick-fi1'ing 37-mm. cannons intended for knocking out machine-gun nests and a1'tillery emplacements. Note eady employment of shock struts and heavy-duty tires.
(Thomas G. Miller, Jr.)
Tethered to earth, French observation balloon resembles fat cow

grazing in pasture ... docile, harmless, posing threat to no one .. .
. . . but, once aloft, balloons became obfects of fear and hatred to

enemy entrenched miles away. Armed with binoculars, maps and a
hand telephone, observers were able to call down hellish bombardments with great accuracy. Balloons were inviting targets for
enemy planes ...
)
('
'
... but were dangerous to attack because they were surrounded

with machine guns served by vigilant ground crews. Here, a postmounted Hotchkiss. ( George Dock, Jr. )
Appropriately named "nurse balloons" were kept near by to replenish the highly flammable gas of the larger "sausages." (George
Dock, Jr. )
French pilot Mamice Boyau was armed with Vickers gun synchronized to fire through the propeller as well as a wing-mounted
Lewis gun. Early Nieuports, however, were fitted with Lewis guns
only. To change drums in midst of combat was an event ludicmus
in appearance and dangerous in execution. (Air Force Museum,
Wright-Patterson AFB)
Pilot revs up to full rpm while the Nieuport is held in check by

chocks and a rigger. Brakes were an undream ed-of luxury in 1916.
(Author's collection.)
... -. . ":.. ..
... :
Rakish M orane-Saulnier was one of few high-wing monoplane designs to see combat in World War I. Downward visibility was
unexcelled and plane responded eagerly to controls-but pilots
were afraid of them. Said one pilot: "You have to fly the machine
every minute ... or else!" (Martin Caidin Archives)
Winter flyin g was cruel to men and machines. This chilly scene was
taken near Cachy Wood, along the Somme. Cracked blocks on
water-cooled Hispano-Suiza engines were not uncommon, and the
engines were always preheated before patrol. Upstairs, frostbite
was every man's enemy. (Edwin C. Parsons )
Crumpled remains of German observation machine shows how

wounded pilot sideslipped onto snowy ground, forcing wings to
absorb mafor force of impact. (Col. H . M. Mason, Sr.)
The Farman "Shorthorn" was slow (65 mph) and unwieldy in flight,
easy prey for German fighters-but it performed yeoman service as
a photographic mconnaissance plane untill917. (Robert Soubiran )
Fitted with bomb racks and four .303-caliber machine guns, the
Salmson was effective infantry-support aircraft. Here, the pilot runs
up the engine to check synchronization of forward guns. (The
National Archives )
Popular with the French- and, later, the Americans-was the

Breguet 14, a rock-solid airplane that ranged over the Front carrying bombs or cameras at speeds up to 115 mph. Engine was 300-h.p.
Renault. ( Martin Caidin Archives)
Air-to-air rocketry was practiced as early as 1916. Here, a Farman

is seen carrying ten Le Prieur rockets which could be fired electrically from the cockpit. Although wildly inaccurate, they occasionally flamed balloons. (Thomas G. Miller, Jr. )
Headed for altitude, fast-climbing two-seater Albatros moves

through cumulus clouds, bound on long-range reconnaissance mission. (Edwin C. Parsons)
Roland D-II clears tops of primitive canvas hangars, sheds, with

scant feet to spare. German squadron faciliti es w ere highly mobile,
could be packed up and moved within hours. (Peter M. Bowers)
This Albatros cracked up shortly after take-off. Lower wings,

whiclf featured single-spar construction, buckled under low G-loads.
(Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB)
A captured Albatros displayed as a trophy of war at the Invalides

in Paris. (Col. H. M. Mason, Sr.)
This Albatros D-Ill, one of most widely used German fighters,

was brought down intact inside French lines. Baron Manfred von
Richthofen was among the first to fly this fighter into combat when
it appeared in 1917. A capable performer in some respects, D-Ill
could be easily outdived by stronger Spacls. (Author's collection. )
This pure-white Fokker D-VII was flown by Hermann Goring. At

war's end, Oberleutnant Goring had scored 22 victories. (Air Force
Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB)
The wild Jean Navarre, eccentric

hero of V erdun, once carried a
butcher knife aloft to carve a
giant Zeppelin droning through the
darkened heavens. (H. Hugh
Wynne)
To poilus like these, Navarre's hair-mising acrobatics and constant

appearances over the tTenches in his vemtilion Nieuport w ere heartening. To the "hairy ones" crouched in the mud below the bright
blue sky, men like Na varTe weTe objects of wonder and admiration.
( George Dock, Jr. )
Along this narrow road, le Voie Sacree, supplies moved up to feed

and arm a half-million men. Fighter pilots like Navarre form ed a
defense against German marauders that could have ripped the
road to pieces with bombs, thus crippling the entire army. ( David
W. King )
At war's end, Georges Madan was

top-heavy with medals awarded by
a grateful nation. His early experiences had been discouraging;
Madan was never sure whether his
exploits would earn him praise or
another stretch in jail. ( Sciencefilm,
Paris)
Rare air-to-air photograph shows Nieuport 17 on combat patrol.

Aces like Navarre, Nungesser, Guynemer gained early kills flying
these avions de chasse, despite frailty of narrow-chord lower wing.
(Martin Caidin Archives)
Close-up views of friendly aircraft were a rarity to infantrymen,

who gathered around these new machines of war at every opportunity. Here, poilus spend precious time watching Nieuport being
readied for P?trol. (Robert Soubiran)
The immortal Spad. This one, flown by Guynemer, is emblazoned

with the famous stork insignia of the crack Groupe des Cigognes.
(USAF)
Muddy fields; high touch-down speed, made landing Spads a difficult business: This one slew ed off the strip, smashed into barrack .
( Robert Soubiran )
I nfured pilot is hauled off to infirmary by waiting brancardiers.

(Robert Soubiran )
"You can lead a horse to water . ..." This Nieuport, its back broken,
stopped fust short of irrigation ditch after crash landing. (Edwin
C. Parsons)
Here, a massive aerial camera encased in wood is hoisted aboard

a Farman "bathtub" nacelle. Telephoto lens had 43-inch focal
length, gave sharp results on sheet film measuring 7 by 9!12 inches.
(Paul Ayres Rockwell )
French-built Salmson 2-A.2 featured unique 260-h.p. water-cooled

radial engine. Camera mounted on Scarff ring was extrem ely flexible. (The National Archives)
French winters often saw man's oldest war steed towing the newest. Many German aces began careers on Albatros G-Ill. (Peter
M. Bowers )
T echnically advanced Germany provided pilots with oxygen systems to enable them to fly and fight at high altitudes for long
periods of time. This Fokker D-VII pilot demonstrates mouthbreathing tube, metal nose-clip. Oxygen cylinder is on outside of
cockpit. (The National Archives)
Front gunner in German twin-engine Gotha is equipped with

oxygen system for high-altitude missions deep inside French territory. (The National Archives)
In late 1918, while French, British and American fiiers were roasting in fiame-wrapped airplanes, German pilots were saving their
lives by fumping with parachutes. It is one of war's mafor mysteries
why Allied airmen were denied this salvation. (The National
Archives)
Georges Guynemer, once given up

as a hopeless invalid, and a rotten
aviator, became German nemesis
and most revered French hero
since Jeanne d'Arc. ( Musee de
l'Armee)
On his twenty-first birthday, Guynemer was awarded Cross of Legion d'Honneur to add to his
Medaille Militaire and Croix de
Guerre with numerous palms. He
had 600 aerial encounters with
enemy planes in two years. (H.
Hugh Wynne)
"Old Charlie" was Guynemer's favorite mount. He made his Spad

an extension of his physical self, flew with effortless ease that was
result of unrelenting work and dedication to his craft. (Air Force
Museum, Wright-Patterson AFB )
Hanging today from ceiling of

the Invalides, one of Guynemer's
Spads is preserved for posterity.
Nose points toward courtyard
where cannon captured by N apoleon are arrayed . ( Author's
collection )
Tactical use of aerial photography during war is shown here in

sharp look at German trench systems near C ernay. Picture was
made from 9,000 feet. Note antiaircraft burst at bottom right.
( M usee de I'Armee)
Camera eye reveals artillery destruction of Vacherauville as seen

from 1,000 feet. Zigzag trenches cover approach to the town.
(USAF)
Sopwith l'h strutter was British multipurpose design used by F1ench

in reconnaissance role. Note air brake set inboard on trailing edge
of wing. (Paul Ayres Rockwell )
Fokker DR-1 triplanes achieved fam e in late 1917 when flown by

such masters as Voss and von Richthofen. The "Tripe" had short
turning radius, could outclimb many opponents, but structural
w eakness and slow speed at combat altitudes forced its retirement.
(Martin Caidin Archives)
The Fokker D-VII was the greatest German fighter of the war and
inspired healthy respect from F1'ench aces. Its appearance in the
summer of 1918 marked the beginning of ha1'd fighting all along
the W estern Front. Thick airfoil section and 185-h.p. engine enabled the D-VII to wage effective combat at altitudes above 20,000
feet . (The National Archives)
Aboard two-seater Roland Walfisch, German gunners wielded

drum-fed Parabellum guns that dealt destruction to attacking fighters. Nieuport and Spad pilots attacked these hornets only from
blind spot-from the rear, at angle below tail. (The National
Archives)
Charles Eugene Jules Marie Nungesser. Top-heavy with honors, this

fantastic pilot survived severe
crashes and crippling wounds to
gun down 45 German aircraft. (H.
Hugh Wynne)
During the battle of V erclun, Nungesser ( center) spent much time

with the Escadrille Americaine. Here he is seen with Escadrille
stalwart Bill Thaw (left ) and two unidentified companions. Nungesser bagged his tenth German plane while flying with the Americans, at a time when doctors said he should have been in a hospital
bed-not in the cockpit of Nieuport. (Paul Ayres Rockwell)
The "Iron Viking" sported cigarette holder, macabre insignia on

aircraft, gold teeth. He was favorite with everybody except Germans. (Paul Ayres Rockwell )
More than two hundred Americans served with the French before
the United States finally declared war. Most began as ambulance
drivers or as riflemen in the Foreign Legion. Here, an American
ambulance awaits cargo of wounded from offensive in Champagne.
( George Dock, Jr. )
~ -
Germans were no respecters of hospitals. American drivers peer

anxiously into sky at sound of unsynchronized engines. Americans
like Ted Parsons switched from Fiats and Fords to Nieuports and
Spads, later took revenge on tormentors. (George Dock, Jr.)
Frank Baylies (left) and Ted Parsons were two of three Americans
to fly with Guynemer's squadron. Both became aces, but only one
survived the war. Parsons, form er Lafayette Escadrille pilot, retired from U. S. Navy after World War II with rank of rear admiral. He was awarded French L egion of Honor in 1962 for outstanding combat record in 1918! ( Edwin C. Parsons)
Flamboyant Rene Fonck accepted bizarre bet with Parsons and

Baylies. In winning, he set a new record in the aerial war. Fonck
shot down 75 enemy planes but was little more popular with
French than he was with the Germans. He died in Paris in 1953.
( Thomas G. Miller, Jr. )
Eugene Jacques Bullard forty-five years after his first combat patrol
with SPA. 93. The poor boy from Georgia fought his way through
the world with fists, bayonets, and
wings. He was world's first Negro
military pilot and won honors for
gallantry at Verdun while serving
as rifleman with French Foreign
Legion. (Author's collection)
Paths of glory. Cost of war was high. This military cemetery near
Fere-en-T ardenois is but one of scores found today scattered
throughout the length of the old Western Front. (Robert Soubiran )
After the Armistice, many hundreds of serviceable aircraft were

thrown on the funk heap and put to the torch. (USAF)
116
Wfl
He swept back and forth over the blasted terrain, which even
then was empting under the pounding of British artillery, but
he had the sky to himself. He turned and Hew for home, to wait.
As the long, anxious minutes dragged by, the Storks put
forth various explanations to account for Guynemer's failure to
return on the heels of Bozon-Verduraz: the most popular being
that he had stayed out by himself on one of the solo patrols he
loved so well. After two hours had passed-and with it, the
limit of the Spad's ability to stay aloft-this was rejected in
favor of the explanation that Guynemer had landed on another
field, perhaps with engine trouble. However, a call to every
field in the vicinity turned up nothing. Had he, then, been
wounded and taken to a hospital? Again, the telephone offered
no balm; Guynemer was nowhere to be found. Shot down and
lying wounded in a German field hospital? Days passed, and
there was no word. Silence absolu.
Not only his friends but the nation as a whole was plunged
ihto gloom. It passed belief that their skilled lionhearted idol
could have fallen. Indeed, some among the younger worshipers
created the wonderful legend that Guynemer had simply flown
so high that he could not come down again: he was one among
the gods.
The truth-as supplied by the Germans-emerged in bits and
pieces. Three weeks after Guynemer's disappearance, the Germans reported that Guynemer's Spad had fallen beside the
cemetery at Poelcapelle. Three German infantrymen had
dashed out under heavy artillery fire to examine the wreckage.
They found Guynemer's body still strapped inside the crumpled remains of "Old Charlie," a bullet through his head, one
leg broken and bent at an awkward angle. They found his
identity card on the body and then hurriedly got away from
the cemetery as the thunderous barrage rolled onward. Shortly
afterward, the infantrymen said, the wreckage of the Spad was
pulverized by the shelling. Afterward, no trace of the airplane
or the body was ever found.
But how had it happened? Nearly a year passed before a
satisfactory explanation was given, this time by a German pilot
shot down and captured on July 25, 1918. The pilot, Lieutenant Karl Menchkoff (with 39 credited kills ) told his captors
"'"ff
117
that Guynemer had been killed by a twenty-four-year-old flying officer named Kurt Wisseman, who had been bounced by
Guynemer from fifty yards only to have his guns jam when
Wisseman believed his last moments had come. Wisseman
had then turned on Guynemer and fired the fatal burst. Elated,
he wrote his mother, "Now I need have no further fear in this
war." Eighteen days later, he lay dead in the Flanders mud.
118
The Iron Viking
Wit
The Iron Viking
FoR THE BULK of humanity, life is a difficult proposition that

must scmehow be gotten through ; but to Charles Eugene Jules
Marie Nungesser, life was a continuing series of exciting challenges that were to be met with ardor, enthusiasm and a consuming will-all fed from a well of vitality that seemed to have
no bottom. Before he was twenty, he had formulated his
approach to living in a credo that was enviably simple and
refreshing in its wholemindedness:
To desite something with one's whole being and, above all,
to know how to desire ... that is everything in life.
In 1909, when he was sixteen years old, Nungesser already
had the build of a cultivated athlete: he stood five-feet-nine
and weighed 150 lbs.-weight distributed and hardened by a
childhood devoted to cycling, boxing, swimming, weight lifting and long-distance running. His large Norman head was
topped with thick blond hair, which he kept parted in the middle and brushed back in a pompadour; his eyes, deep set and
brigh,t blue, looked out over a strong straight-ridged nose. The
lips were firm, the jaw square and outthrust, dimpled in the
middle. The face as a whole had a strong Scandinavian cast,
heritage from Northern ancestors of nine centuries past ... and
from them he had inherited the wanderlust. With a high-school
degree in mechanics, a burning desire to conquer the world
and very little money, Charles Nungesser left his native France
-..;t
119
f~r South America, .there to seek out an uncle who might put
h1m on the road to nches in the New World.
But when th~ youthful Nungesser offloaded in Rio carrying
one battered smtcase, h e found no trace of the relative. And he
was utterly friendless in that huge, strange city. He went on to
Buenos Aires, for there he believed his relation had moved. But
again no trace. Nearly broke, he could go no farther, so he set
about to find a job. He took a bus to an airfield, looking for
mechanic's work, but found instead a fellow Frenchman who
had just landed in a Bleriot. "Can I learn to fly that?" he asked.
Seeing his youth, his rumpled clothes, his obvious poverty, the
pilot only laughed and waved his hand away as though to
brush off a nettlesome insect. Nungesser's anger flared. He
climbed into the cockpit and began rolling erratically down
the field. The Bleriot staggered into the air and Nungesser
found himself alone in the sky with a tiger by the tail. Lightning reflexes coupled with a frantic desire to live enabled him
to somehow reach the earth again in something approximating
a landing attitude, and after several spine-jarring bounces the
Bleriot stayed glued to the grass and with nothing shattered.
Flight! This was surely meant for him. He spent the last of his
money on a Hying lesson given by an itinerant German, who
departed owing Nungesser several more hours in the air. So
there he was in Argentina without a peso.
His degree obtained him a job as an assembler in an automotive p lant, and he lived frugally, saving his money in order to
learn to fly. When he was seventeen, the company tried him
out as an assistant racing driver, and his skill was so great that
he was made first driver and began winning prizes in the big
competition races held every Sunday in Buenos Aires. His free
time was given over to keeping in shape and in going to the
prize fights.
One night, when the main attraction was a scheduled
twelve-rounder between a favorite Argentine light-heavyweight and a challenger from France, Nungesser demonstrated that slurs on the national honor were not to be
tolerated. The French boxer was knocked silly in the first
round, and the sneering Argentine, with his glove raised in victory, apologized to the crowd for such a poor contest. "But as
120
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HIGH F LEW THE FALCONS
the world knows," he yelled, "Frenchmen are sheep who don't

like to fight in the first place." At this, there was a commotion in
the aisles; Nungesser was moving for the ring, peeling off his
coat as he came. By the time he had pushed past the ringsiders,
his shirt and tie lay on the floor, and he stepped nimbly
through the ropes bare-chested. He stood facing the taller,
heavier (by 30 lbs.) Argentine and said, "All right, let's see
you try this sheep." The crowd howled for the slaughter to
begin. The referee gave Nungesser the gloves worn by his stillunconscious countryman, who was dragged from the ring.
Nungesser jammed his fists inside the sweaty mitts, the bell
clanged, and the fighters came at each other like runaway
express trains.
A pile-driving right came out of nowhere and Nungesser
bounced on the canvas. Now really mad, he shook his head
and got back to his feet and fired a vicious left to the South
American's midsection that spun him halfway around. Then
they stood toe to toe, hammering at each other like two men
trying to demolish a brick wall standing between them. Nungesser's face was soon bloody; he was far outreached. The murderous right connected again, and Nungesser crashed down to
the canvas. He looked up at the towering Argentine and realized two things: that another such blow and he would be
finished, and that the bigger man looked overconfident. Nungesser roused himself "with the fury of desperation," and came
at the leering light-heavy, who cocked his right for the final
shot of the evening. But Nungesser's left was already started on
its brief, brutal trajectory. It slipped past the other man's open
guard and thudded solidly into the relaxed solar plexus of
". . . the mastodon, who fell to the deck rolling in pain until
the final count." National honor had been avenged.
When the drums of war began beating on the other side of
the world, Nungesser packed his old suitcase and took the first
boat to France. He enlisted as a private in the 2nd Hussars,
and when he kissed his mother good-bye to leave for the Front
he said, "I don't know if I shall be coming back, but you will be
proud of me." Thirteen days later, she was.
On September 3, 1914, Nungesser, a Hussar lieutenant, and
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121
two infantrymen were on a road somewhere between Laon and

Couey. The Front was a shambles of retreating armies, advancing Germans, wandering cavalry, unattached artillery and
bone-weary poilus plodding through the dust clouds headed
... where? The sun burned like a furnace, sending waves of
heat beating across the parched French countryside. The air
boomed and thudded with artillery fire and everywhere was
heard the dry cracking of rifle fire. Nungesser's unit was hopelessly lost, probably surrounded and certainly doomed unless a
way out was found. So these four men-two dressed in fur
shakos and high boots, the others in hot red woollen pants and
blue overcoats-staggered down the road in the crushing heat
looking for a way through the packets of uhlans that were
spreading across the countryside in an unstoppable flow. A
shell screamed through the air and exploded twenty yards
away. Nungesser and the infantrymen got up, choking on the
acrid fumes, but the lieutenant was rolling on the ground,
holding his leg and giving forth uncontrollable little cries of
pain. Spotting an abandoned car down the road, Nungesser
picked up his lieutenant and carried him across his shoulders
like a sack of wheat, to deposit the bloody form in the back
seat. Nungesser jumped behind the wheel, the infantrymen
sprawled on the fenders, and they started down the road. Shots
rang out. Nungesser looked across the field and saw a dismounted German bicycle patrol standing in the wheat firing at
them with rifles. He jammed the accelerator down and the car
leaped ahead; then coughed to a stop as a chance bullet found
its way to the engine. Ordering the two infantrymen into the
ditch, Nungesser hefted the lieutenant to his shoulders once
again and started off across the field opposite from where the
firing had come from. In the near distance, he saw a horse
grazing unconcernedly, its bridle hanging unattended. Nungesser trotted heavily over to the beast and slung the wounded
officer belly down behind the saddle. Mounting, he trotted for
a patch of woods a quarter of a mile away, and there secreted
the lieutenant after first rebandaging the deep gash in his leg.
Now, Nungesser was free to proceed with the reconnaissance
mission.
He rode back to the ditch and found the two poilus. Leaving
122
the horse behind, they walked south along the road for perhaps
twenty minutes, then once again Bopped by the side of the
road at the sound of an approaching motor. Nungesser peered
over the lip of the ditch and saw a large, black Mors open sedan
barreling down the road toward them. Black-and-white pennants flapped from the fenders-a German staff car. Up ahead
was a gate across the road, now open. Nungesser crouched and
ran down the ditch and slammed the gate shut, then dashed
back to the others and waited. The car slowed, then stopped.
Inside was a colonel of the Imperial Guards, a captain of
Cuirassiers and two lieutenants of infantry. Big game, indeed!
One of the lieutenants got out of the car to open the gate, and
at that moment Nungesser opened fire with his carbine and the
poilus with their long-barreled Lebels. The lieutenant fell to
the ground at once, and the captain rose from the back of the
car and toppled forward. The colonel and the surviving lieutenant drew their revolvers and started shooting, but Nungesser coolly dispatched the two of them with his carbine. The
shooting was over in perhaps five seconds, and all four Germans lay dead.
Nungesser barked out orders to strip the Germans of their
tunics and trousers and dispatch cases. This done, the booty
was Bung inside the car, the bodies were quickly rolled into the
ditch, and Nungesser got behind the wheel with the poilus sitting in back. He started the powerful engine, and shot through
the gate and down the road toward Couey. They soon came to
a French rear guard and he slowed the car, shouting that he
was en route to headquarters with important papers for the
general. He let out the clutch and roared ahead. The French
soldiers didn't know whether to believe him or not, and after a
few seconds of heated arm-waving, turned and fired at the
back of the speeding Mors. In the confusion of that great
retreat, they passed alternately Germans and Frenchmen, and
were fired on impartially. After a hair-raising two hours, they
came to the French main line and were admitted to the presence of the general commanding the 53rd Division. Nungesser
and his companions were at once arrested as spies. But when
the general took a good look at the captured papers, some of
which were marked with arrows showing the direction of the
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123
German advance toward Paris, Nungesser was quickly released

and asked to lunch with the divisional staff. At the table the
bearded old general kept repeating, "Ha! Bravo! You are a
motorized Hussar ... a Mors Hussar. Hal Bravo!" He was so
delighted he gave Nungesser the bullet-ptmctured staff car
and decorated h~ with the Medaille Militaire, France's highest award for enhsted men for valor in the field. Then Nungesser ~as. grante? a blessing more precious than wine or gold:
permission to Simply lie down and sleep for twenty-four hours.
Flushed with food and honors and utterly fatigued, Nungesser
did just that.
When the German advance ground to a halt almost within
view of the spires of the cathedrals of Paris, both sides went
underground from Switzerland to the English Channel, and
the war of movement came to an end. Machine guns and
barbed wire having written finis to the once-proud cavalry,
Nungesser quickly transferred to the "Fifth Arm," and by the
first week of April 1915 he was piloting a bomber with Voisin
Squadron 106.
The crew of a Voisin sat tandem (the pilot in the rear) in
w~at looked like a canvas bathtub supported by four large
Wire-spoked wheels. The tail surfaces were supported by outrigger booms running aft from the wings which spanned a
generous 48 feet. The 140-h.p. pusher engine enabled a Voisin
to sometimes reach the dizzying speed of 65 mph, provided
there wasn't a head wind, and when all cylinders were working
in unison the pilot could occasionally coax the unwieldy looking craft up to 6,000 feet in under half an hour. Although not
an airplane to inspire terror among German airmen, Voisins
were stable and could carry a lot of bombs.
Nungesser painted a huge black skull and crossbones on the
front of the nacelle, armed his mechanic Pauchon with a freefiring Lewis machine gun, and set about making war on the
enemy. He ranged deep inside German territory, striking most
often at the long-range coastal guns that rained shells on Dunkirk; he bombed the submarine pens at Ostend and Zeebrugge,
and he hurled destruction at German supply dumps and railheads. The Voisin returned to the field at Saint Pol-sur-Mer
always tattered from shrapnel and rifle fire, and Nungesser
124
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HIGH FLEW THE FALCON~
once had the toe of his boot shot clean away ... but always he
returned. Within three months he had completed fifty-three
day- and night-bombardment missions, and on July 31, he and
Pauchon bagged the squadron's first German aircraft.
On this occasion they were at 5,000 feet above the field, trying out a Voisin fresh from the depot, when Nungesser made
out a formation of five enemy two-seater bombers flying high
against the early morning sun. They were too high to reach, so
Nungesser turned toward the Moselle, hoping to catch them
when they returned. Over Beaumont, one of the Germans
peeled off and went after a French observation balloon tethered to the earth near a patch of woods. Nungesser pushed the
control column and the Voisin responded with a creaking of
wood and a sigh of bracing wires as it slanted downward. The
German plane, busy with attacking the balloon, failed to discover the lunging Voisin until it was less than sixty feet away.
Pauchon got off a long burst, and the German plane dived
abruptly for the earth. Nungesser followed it down to 1.'000
feet and watched it crash. He Hew home through a hail of
shrapnel and machine-gun fire and reported the kill, only to
learn that a French antiaircraft battery was trying to steal the
victory. Nungesser jumped in an automobile and drov~ up to
the balloon lines and there talked to an observer who signed a
.
statement giving the Voisin all the credit.
Now his appetite for the chase was whetted; day bombmg
was all very well, but. ...
Nungesser asked for transfer to fighters, and after less tha~ .a
week's training in the rear, where he mastered the eccentnclties of the Morane Parasol, be was issued a new Nieuport and
reassigned to N. 65. The skittish little Nieuport was ~ superb
machine in the hands of a skilled pilot, and Nungesser s enthusiasm at escaping from Voisins overcame his good sense: on his
first pass at the field where N. 65 was based he indulged in
hair-raising acrobatics scarcely a hundred feet off the g~ou~d.
Again and again he put the fighter through its p~ces, thmkmg
to dazzle his new commanding officer. He d1d: when he
landed, the CO stormed over and told him that if he wished to
impress somebody with his flying skill he should arrange to
frighten the enemy and not other Frenchmen. Nungesser
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125
flung up a salute and climbed back into the still-warm cockpit.

He gunned the plane into the air and made straight for an
enemy airdrome some distance across the lines. Once again he
nosed over and sought treetop altitude. He raked the German
airfield and pulled up at the far end in a steep climbing turn;
then rolled over and swept past the hangars upside down.
Germans poured out of barracks and tents to watch the madman; they were evidently too impressed-or too stunned-to
take counteraction, for no shots were fired and no planes rolled
out for take-off. After a dazzling fifteen minutes of barrel rolls,
loops, chandelles and screaming vertical turns Nungesser
banked away and headed for home.
When he landed he snapped off a salute and reported, "It is
done, my captain!"
"Eight days simple arrest!" barked the CO, who stalked off
in a rage.
Forbidden to go to Paris, or even to the nearby village, but
not forbidden to fly, Nungesser went aloft two days later to
practice gunnery on the group's ground targets ... but as it
turned out he practiced on the Germans instead.
As he cleared the field and climbed for altitude, he made out
the shadowy forms of a pair of Albatros observation planes
sneaking across the lines at Nomeny. Nungesser began climbing, and got above the enemy machines with the sun at his
back. From 8,000 feet, he peeled off and hurled his Nieuport at
the brace of planes; one immediately dived away for home, the
other stayed to fight. Nungesser made four passes at the solitary German two-seater, trading bursts with the observer at the
long range of 100 yards. He fired away three of his four drums
of ammunition, but still the Albatros Hew steadily on, the
observer crouched behind his gun and eager for battle. Nungesser decided it would have to be close-in or nothing, so h.e
wrestled the last ammunition drum into place atop the Lew1s
gun, slammed it down on the wing rack, dropped back in his
seat, fastened his belt, then bored in for the kill.
He Hew through the tracer stream loosed by the German
gunner until only thirty feet separated the nose of his Nieuport
from the tail of the Albatros; then he clamped down on the
trigger and the Lewis gun rattled off a long burst. His own
126
tracers streaked into the dirty gray fuselage and he saw the
pilot throw up his hands and fall lifeless against the control
column. As the plane nosed sharply over, "... the observer, still
alive, clung desperately to the mounting ring to which his
machine gun was attached. Suddenly the mounting ripped
loose from the fuselage and was flung into space, taking with it
the helpless crewman. He clawed frantically at the air, his bo.dy
working convulsively like a man on a trapeze. I had a qmck
glimpse of his face before he tumbled away through the clouds
... it was a mask of horror."
The vision haunted Nungesser for days; he stayed away
from the mess table, and he dreaded the coming of the night
and the ordeal of attempted sleep: every time he closed his
eyes he saw the flailing arms of the German gunner, the white
terror-stricken features, the mouth opened wide in a soundless
scream. Before the war ended Nungesser would kill upward of
a hundred men to become the third-ranking ace in the French
galaxy of great aerial hunters, but never again would he react
as he did on that day over Nomeny when he had a macrophotographic view of fate's ugly capriciousness.
Nungesser's victory bore fruit in the award of the scarlet
ribbon of the Legion of Honor-he was first taken off arrest
status-and in a question put to him by the group comm~nde~:
Would Adfuclant Nungesser care to test fly a new Ponmer btplane fighter just arrived from the factory? The answer was
foregone, for Nungesser had never refused a ch~llenge. He
strapped himself in the rakish little fighter, the engme fired up
with a roar, the chocks were pulled and Nungesser thundered
off the field in the beginnings of one of his famous climbing
turns. Then, disaster. The Pannier, woefully unstable, dropped
heavily out of the turn and spun viciously into the. ground.
They extricated Nungesser from the wreckage looking more
dead than alive and loaded him into an ambulance for a fullthrottle ride to the hospital. He was stripped of his flight suit,
and when the doctors completed assessing the damage, they
shook their heads. Both legs were broken, his jaw was smashed
and hanging unhinged, most of his teeth had been knocked out
and his palate was punctured from having had the top of ~he
control column shoved into his mouth. His breath was commg
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127
in short, agonized gasps and blood ran darkly from his nostrils
and from the corners of his mouth ... God only knew what the
internal injuries were. The doctors said it would be a miracle
if he lasted through the night.
That was on January 29, 1916. Three days later, Nungesser
was hobbling around his room on crutches; two weeks later he
left the hospital and began driving his car from Paris to Le
Bourget airport almost daily to watch the coming and going of
airplanes. Less than a month after his supposedly fatal crash he
arrived at the field and eased himself from the car fully dressed
for flight. He shuffied across the tarmac on crutches. His head
was swathed from chin to cranium with heavy bandages. His
speech was little more than a rasping mumble, for his jaw was
wired together and his gums were still raw and painful from
extensive dental surgery. He thumped over to a group of
shocked mechanics and made it known he wanted a Nieuport
readied for flight. "But you are mad!" they told him.
"Shut up," he gurgled, "and help me in the cockpit." A Nieuport was rolled out and three men hoisted him into ~e airplane. When they were finished, what could be seen of his face
was deathly white and beaded with sweat. He got off ~e
ground quickly and climbed to 500 feet-and k~pt the was~1sh
little fighter at that altitude while he wrung 1t out: vertical
turns, loops, rolls, Immelmanns ... everything in the book. He
touched down flawlessly a quarter of an hour later and cut the
switches, motioning for somebody to come and help him out
of the airplane. One of his friends, the aviation correspondent
Jacques Mortane, rushed over and heard Nungesser say, "Tha,~
wasn't too bad. In two weeks I'll be back with the squadron.
"But why," asked Mortane, "do you insist on suicide?"
Nungesser smiled crookedly and replied, "Mon vieux, I .m ust
get back up there and start knoc.king the~ down. My fnends
will have Croix de Guerres hangmg to therr stomachs; I have
no time to lose."
Eight weeks to the day after the smashup of the Ponnie~,
Nungesser returned to N. 65. He climbed out of the cockp1t
unassisted but was forced to hobble across the field with the
aid of a c~ne. He was nattily outfitted in a new black uniform
that seemed to set off the fresh scar tissue that ridged his face,
128
and when he smiled his mouth gleamed fantastically with two

rows of solid gold teeth. His speech come out as a strained muttering, but there was no mistaking the fire of anticipation that
snapped from his ice-blue eyes. He quickly demonstrated that
he had lost neither his skill nor his nerve.
Three days after his return he flamed a balloon near Septarges, and the following morning he shot an L.V.G. from the
sky. On April 4, he jumped a German twin-engine monster
carrying four crewmen, all protected by armor. The huge plane
seemed to bristle with machine guns firing in all directions.
Nungesser warily circled this flying fortress, firing snap shots at
it and feeling like a terrier about to charge a rhinoceros. Then
he waded in through a whistling, cracking torrent of machinegun fire and managed to put a burst into the pilot. The leviathan flopped ponderously to earth near Hauts-Fourneaux.
Nungesser flew home with his plane riddled; one hole through
the center of his windscreen, and a bloody ear lobe from a
passing Parabellum slug.
The month closed out in a blaze of combat that saw him, on
the 25th, engage three German two-seaters, one of which he
sent plunging down to explode inside a French trench. Two
days later, he had one of the worst fights of his life. Over the
forest of Spincourt he stalked a flight of no fewer than six German airplanes: three were two-seater observation planes which
were protected by a trio of Fokker E-III monoplanes carrying
twin Maxim guns synchronized to fire a total of 1,000 rounds
per minute through the propeller. Nungesser prudently waited
until one of the observation planes lagged behind, then he
dived into the hornet's nest.
His first burst sent the two-seater down in flames, but the
other five German planes immediately formed a wide circle
and Nungesser found himself the target of ten angry machine
guns. He felt his plane tremble from the slugs that ripped
through it; although at the time he did not notice the ominous
plucking at his clothes. With no way out of the murd.e~ous box,
Nungesser boldly skidded across the sky . . . and JOmed the
circling Germans! Now none of them dared fire for fear of hitting one another. The mad circling and howling of engines
continued, but the guns fell silent. Eventually, the Germans
The Iron Viking
129
gave it up and broke the circle, and Nungesser dived away for
home.
The controls were sickly and the engine stuttered badly,
threatening to quit altogether. He skimmed across the trenches,
pursued by ground fire, and staggered back to his home field
with only five cylinders firing. Small wonder: his plane had
been struck twenty-eight times-seven slugs were pried from
the engine assembly alone. Fuel was leaking out from the
holed tank which, by some miracle, had not ignited. There was
a hole in his helmet, another in his flying boot, and incredulous
N. 65 pilots counted five more tears in Nungesser's fur-lined
flying suit-but nowhere was he scratched himself. It seemed
that Charles Nungesser was blessed with all the luck in the
world a combat pilot could have.
Well, yes and no. . . .
In the early summer, over Verdun, Nungesser tangled with
two Fokkers flown by experts. Back and forth the battle raged,
the air filled with the snarl of rotary engines and the steady
crackle of machine guns. Something slammed into Nungesser's
mouth and he began swallowing blood; a Maxim slug had
caught his mouth at an angle, almost tearing away his upper
lip. He stuffed his silk scarf inside his mouth, clamped down on
it with his gold teeth and kept flying. Most aerial duels were
decided within minutes, but this one roared across the sky for
nearly an hour. In the end, maddened with pain, Nungesser
shot down both Germans and limped home. Some time later,
when he was released from the hospital with orders to take a
one-month convalescence leave, Nungesser returned to Verdun
and attached himself to the already famous Escadrille Americaine (later renamed the Escadrille Lafayette ) and, on July
21, bagged his tenth German plane.
In the autumn, over the Somme, Nungesser brought down
two aircraft and one balloon on the same day ... but shortly
afterward crashed on take-off and suffered the agony of
resmashing his aheady fractured jaw. Back in the hospital
again, the surgeons decided to undo all the work that had been
done on Nungesser before: they rebroke his badly set leg and
attempted to set it straight. Then they went to work on his face.
The new break in the lower jaw was open and suppurating ...
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130
Wf!
Wf!
131
infected. Treatment involved cauterizing, irrigation, placing in

traction for fifteen days. In order to speed the work and to ease
the surgeons' task, Nungesser refused anesthesia and endured
the agony of fire and steel while completely conscious. In a
special report on Nungesser, the doctors remarked on his
incredible ability to withstand pain.
As 1916 ended, Nungesser's score stood at 21; his greatest
days still lay ahead, despite the fact that he alternated his time
between the hospital for postsurgical care and at the Front. He
worked out a bizarre arrangement with the doctors: henceforth, he would be treated at the hospital at Dunkirk, having
his own private room where all his flying gear was stowed.
Then he arranged for a free-lance commission from the Service
Aeronautique; thus he was unattached to any squadron. He
flew in the mornings from the field at nearby Saint-Pol-sur-Mer,
returning to the hospital in the afternoons for therapy and rest.
This crazy system ran counter to every medical and military
procedure in the book but produced fantastic results: within
an eleven-day period, Nungesser shot down six German airplanes, and was such a model patient (when out of the cockpit
and in a hospital bed) that his recovery rate astonished the
doctors. Although he was far from a well man, it couldn't be
proved by the enemy.
As his victories mounted, so did the injuries. He jumped six
Germans over the water and shot down two. Coming in for a
landing, he lost his engine and crashed into a British trench.
They pulled him from the airplane with a dislocated knee.
Although repositioned and swathed in heavy elastic bandages,
the knee was so painful that walking became impossible, and
once again Nungesser had to be carried out to his airplane and
hoisted into the cockpit by willing hands. But the injuries
meant nothing in the air: over the splintered remains of Hauthhulst Forest, Nungesser looked down on a formation of deadly
Fokker triplanes, flying southward in a perfect vee formation.
How to attack such a formidable array? Nungesser howled
down at full throttle and flattened out a little above and
directly behind the formation. Then he squeezed the trigger
and began sawing his rudder back and forth, skidding his fire
left and right. He straightened out and dived for the earth,
confident that the slower (and structurally weak) triplanes

wouldn't follow. He came out 2,000 feet below, and when he
looked back over his shoulder he saw two of the gaudily
painted German planes plunging to the ground with dead men
at the controls.
Suddenly the war and the multiple injuries and the strain of
flying six and eight hours a day and the almost constant pain
he lived with caught up with him. He landed at Saint-Pol-surMer, cut the switches, and sat limp and exhausted in the cockpit. He could not move, and three men had to carry him off.
Nungesser spent the balance of June and all of July doing
nothing but nursing his abused nervous system back to normal.
He hobbled around Paris in the glory of the summer sunshine,
feasting his eyes on all the young women whose eyes sparkled
like jewels, whose voices bubbled like champagne, whose invitations were freely bestowed. He sat in the noisy and convivial
atmosphere at Harry's and at the Chatham with flying men
from three nations. Raoul Lufbery, Bill Thaw, the wild-looking
Navarre ... they were all there at one time or another. As Nungesser's strength flowed back into his body, Paris began to pall,
and he returned to the Front in the first week of August.
He was flying Spads now, better armed, stronger and faster
machines. Nungesser's Spad stood out: on each side of the
fuselage was painted a large black heart, inside of which, glaring starkly white, was outlined a death's head flanked by two
candles and, above, a sinister-looking white coffin. His wing
tops were afire with wide red, white and blue stripes running
diagonally; these markings were Nungesser's own, his invitation to combat. It was in a Spad, on August 16, that he intercepted a homeward bound Gotha, a two-engined. narrowwinged monster, returning from a night raid far behind the
French lines. He caught the big bomber just at dawn, over the
happy hunting ground above Houthhulst Forest, and sent it
down with all its crew. And that made 30 for Nungesser.
Since the early days of the war, Nungesser had held on to
two faithful servants: the Mors staff car, and his original
mechanic, Pauchon. He was now destined to lose both. It was a
cold and very dark night in October when Nungesser decided
132
Wft
on the spur of the moment to drive into Paris; the Front was
closed down by the usual foul French autumn weather, and
there was little enough to do in the little Flanders towns. The
two men climbed into the car; Pauchon behind the wheel,
Nungesser in the back seat. They were speedin? along. the
highway leading to the capital when Pauchon, stncken With a
heart attack, gasped and fell unconscious against the wheel.
Out of control, the car bounded across the road, bounced from
the bottom of a shallow ditch and smashed head-on into a solid
tree trunk. Pauchon died instantly, his neck broken, and when
Nungesser came to and felt his face, sli~p~ry with bl~od,. he
knew that, once again, he had broken his 1aw . . . This time
Nungesser didn't return to the Front until New Year's E~e,
which he celebrated by staging a one-man trench-strafing mission on the German front lines.
For Nungesser, 1918 was like all the other years: a day-in,
day-out kaleidoscope of whirling propellers, the roar of
engines, the chatterirlg of machine guns-plus the usual forced
landings, outright crashes, and fresh wounds ... and,. always,
the throbbing pain that would never go away. Certam days,
however, stood out:
-June 13, when he shot down two three-seaters in the space
of four seconds.
-August 14, when he performed the dangerous and unprecedented feat of burning four balloons: two before breakfast,
two after lunch.
- The day when he stood before the massed ran~s of a full
battalion of French infantry and was decorated With the rosette of the class of Officer of the Legion d'l:Ionneur.
General Robert Nivelle fixed his eye on Nungesser's battered
face and asked, "Lieutenant, can you tell me by what miracle
of tactics you have managed to bring down so many of the
Boche?"
.
.
"
Nungesser's answer was as candid as It was revea~mg: Man
general, when I am behind the adversary an~ believe that I
have his airplane well and truly centered m front of my
machine guns, I close my eyes and open fire. "'_hen I open
them again, sometimes I see my oppon~nt hurtl~g thr~~gh
space ... and at other times I find myself m a hospital bed.
The Iron Viking
Wft
133
When the war ended, Nungesser's score stood at 45. But

even more impressive was the wound-and-injury list compiled
by French medical men, who were astounded at the fact that
one man could absorb such brutal punishment and still survive
as an operational pilot. Nungesser's medical dossier reads like a
coroner's report following a bad railway accident:
Skull fracture, brain concussion, internal injuries (multiple),
five fractures of upper jaw, two fractures of lower jaw, piece of
antiaircraft shrapnel imbedded in right arm, dislocation of
knees (left and right), re-dislocation of left knee, bullet wound
in mouth, bullet wound in ear, atrophy of tendons in left leg,
atrophy of muscles in calf, dislocated clavicle, dislocated wrist,
dislocated right ankle, loss of teeth, contusions too numerous to
mention.
Further comment seems superfluous.
May 8,1927:
It is before dawn at Le Bourget airfield, and floodlights shine
across the darkened field that still gleams wetly from the winddriven rains that had swept over the city the night before. A
hangar door screeches open and a great white airplane is rolled
out. A dozen men strain to wheel the shining craft around and
start it trundling toward the far end of the field. They push the
heavy, creaking machine to the very limit of the runway, and
when they swing it around, the tail is almost butting up against
the fence. These ground crewmen know that the airplane will
need every available foot of the field if it is to leave the earthand there are those who doubt that it can. It is a special plane,
to be flown by special men. Oiseau Blanc, she is called, and at
stmrise she will be summoned to hurdle the vast gray stretches
of the Atlantic.
White Bird has been well-designed for her mission: the
wings are long and broad; the fuselage is like a boat hull, fitted
aft with watertight compartments, cramped amidships where
the crew will sit, and forward there is jammed a solid wall of
tanks to accommodate 1,000 gallons of fuel. A purist might
scowl at the undercarriage, which looks crudely made and even
flimsy, but it is meant for one take-off only and is to be shed in
flight. It is not needed for the water landing in New York Har-
134
wtt
The Iron Viking
bor 3,700 miles away. Bolted atop the dorsal wing is anchored
the hope of France: an eight-cylinder, in-line, water-cooled
450-h.p. Lorraine-Dietrich engine that is so new the blue-gray
paint on the exhaust manifolds has not had time to be scorched
away. The designer of this airplane, Levasseur, has consulted
his slide rule more than once, and each time the tiny etched
black figures tell him that the Oiseau Blanc has more than
enough range to arc the Atlantic ... especially today, when the
meteorologist confirms that there is a strong tail wind which
will help push the airplane 1,500 miles along its trajectory.
Thus there seems nothing to stand in the way of success; the
least of the worries is the crew.
At thirty-five years of age, Charles Nungesser would be hard
to top as an experienced flyer, a man blessed with that mixture
of daring and phenomenal luck in the air. To him the signing
of the Armistice had not been a signal to retire, but a spur to
bring aviation to the people. The flying school at Orly that
Nungesser opened in 1919-and closed that same year-and
the frantic barnstorming that carried him the breadth of the
United States had, he said, been far from wasted enterprises;
he had learned refinements in the art of piloting, and he had
stirred countless thousands of younger men with the challenge
of the upper reaches. Every hour in the air had been a milestone on the road to today, when he would literally rise to
accept the greatest challenge he had yet imposed upon himself.
And his navigator, Captain Raymond Coli-there was none
better. Coli had lost one eye in the war, but with the other he
could find his way around the world using the crudest of
instruments. Coli had proved himself by navigating Henri
Roget in a double crossing of the Mediterranean on January
26, 1919; four months later he and Roget had set a distance
record in a nonstop flight of 1,320 miles from Paris to Kenitra
in Morocco. Few would deny that Coli had no peer as a navigator anywhere in Europe.
The only question in the minds of those at Le Bourget is
whether or not Levasseur's bird can get off the ground, loaded
as she is with so much fuel. To eliminate every excess ounce,
Nungesser and Coli empty their pockets of everything; they
carry with them not even a scrap of change. Should they arrive
135
in New Yo~k safel~, they _will not even be able to buy a cup of
co~ee. Coli, standmg beside the fuselage, grins and says: "Oh
we 11 muddle through somehow down there."
'
. At exactly 5 A.M., Nungesser and Coli squeeze themselves
mto the narrow fuselage. Sitting side by side, there "isn't
enough room to force a cigarette paper between their elbows."
Nung~sser flicks on the ignition switch and cracks the throttle.
The big wooden prop is pulled through and then the Lorraine
explodes into life. Nungesser slowly moves the throttle forward
listening with his ears to the song of power overhead, while hi~
eyes dart around the instrument panel:"The tachometer needle
swings ov~r to 1,650 and hangs there, steady; the oil pressure
gauge registers normal; fuel gauges read "Full." The sun is now
a huge arc of red, magnified by the ground haze that covers
the field. But up there, a mile above the earth, the sun is
~lread_Y shining brightly in a clear, blue sky. Nungesser is
Impatient to get rolling, but he waits until 5: 17 before signaling
for the chocks to be pulled, waiting to be sure the Lorraine is
ready for its ultimate test.
With the blocks jerked away and the throttle bent all the
way to the fire wall, the White Bird begins to gather momentum as it plunges forward down the field lined with thousands
of cheering Frenchmen whose enthusiasm cannot be dampened by the bits of muddy turf that are flung at them in the
wake of the propwash.
One hundred .. . two hundred . .. three hundred ... four
hundred yards and the gleaming white craft is still glued to the
earth, although the tail is already elevated due to the floatplane design. At the six-hundred-yard marker, Nungesser tentatively applies back pressure to the stick, but this only drops
the tail without getting the wheels off the ground. The stick is
quickly moved forward again. With the throttle as far forward
as it can go, there is nothing Nungesser can do except pray that
Levasseur's slide rule will not let them down.
Seven hundred ... eight hundred-and the wheels begin to
ease from the earth. At the end of nine hundred yards, Nungesser feels that the plane is ready for flight and he eases the
stick back. The wheels shake off the mud and Oiseau Blanc is
airborne. Below, the throngs cheer themselves hoarse; hats are
136
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HIGH
F LEW THE FALCONS
thrown deliriously into the air and total strangers are seen kissing one another. The thousands stand in the open field until
the distant drone of the Lorraine can no longer be heard. Then
they drift away, and the sprawling Le Bourget somehow seems
forlorn, like a ghost town in the American West.
At 6:48, coastwatchers at Le Havre see the Oiseau Blanc
pass overhead, clearly outlined against the bright blue sky, and
flying straight to westward. They, too, wave and cheer until the
airplane disappears over the horizon. Then they, with all of
France-and indeed the world-go home to await the news.
It comes in Paris at 7 the following evening-but it is cruelly
false: Nungesser and Coli are in New York! Paris goes mad; it
is Armistice night all over again. Then the retraction: Nungesser and Coli are nowhere to be found. The beautiful White
Bird, in fact, has not been seen since it cleared the coast of
France. Nor is it ever seen again.
Did they-as some believe-reach Newfoundland only to
land in the wilderness and there perish for lack of sustenance?
With Coli navigating, this seems not likely. Did some terrible
turbulence reach out and crush them? Was there a sudden,
horrifying fire in mid-Atlantic that consumed the plane and
the men inside? Or did the Lorraine betray them in the dead
of night so that they landed badly on the angry sea to be battered to pieces by mountainous waves until all were sent to the
bottom?
Nobody will ever know. The ocean keeps its secrets.
'11
137
The Wager
THE MORNING OF May 9, 1918, began for American Ted Parsons

like almost all of the other mornings during the past sixteen
months when he had been slated for the early morning patrol.
Sleep was irrevocably peeled away from his inert form by a
flashlight thrust in his face and a gentle shaking of his cot .. .
then the words, seeming to come from far away: "C'est fheure,
monsieur, c'est l'heure ... il fait beau temps ... beau temps."
Not fully awake, but going through the motions like a welldrilled zombie, Parsons swung his legs from underneath the
comforting blankets and dropped his stockinged feet to the
Boor. Yawning and rubbing his eyes, he fished his toes down
inside his fur-lined flying boots and stood up, shivering slightly
in the predawn chill. He quickly pulled on a shirt and heavy
turtle-necked sweater, then slipped off his boots and worked
his legs into thick wool trousers that flared at the sides and
laced tightly against the leg from the knees to the ankles; then
the boots were pulled on again and grabbing up his combination suit, scarf, helmet and goggles, he shuffied out of the hut
and walked down the duckboards that floated on a thin gruel
of springtime mud to the mess shack where great pots of coffee
stood bubbling on the cast-iron range.
A year before, Parsons had been standing in a shack very
much like this one-rough deal tables, collapsible chairs (that
138
...
collapsed too easily), flapping canvas sides, bare wooden

Boors, the heady aroma of the thick, strong French army coffee
-everything was the same; except that a year earlier the shack
had been filled with Americans of the Escadrille Lafayette.
Well, the old Escadrille was gone now, retired from French
service after twenty-two months of combat that had ranged
from one end of the Front to the other, leaving a depressing
number of its pilots either buried in shallow graves, locked up
in German prison camps, or enduring agonies in military
hospitals.
When the final dissolution came, Edwin C. Parsons, twentyfive, was in Holyoke, Massachusetts, finishing a thirty-day
leave. He had returned to France to find the squadron hopelessly fouled up, receiving orders from both the French and the
U. S. Air Service, and the pilots not knowing from one day to
the next when the promised American commissions were coming through. And, worse, some of the veteran combat pilots
found themselves betrayed when promises of squadron command were forgotten, with the result that such men who had
received their long-overdue commissions were, in many cases,
sent far from the fighting to ride herd on the stacks of papers so
beloved by GHQ. The capper for Parsons was finding Lufbery
sitting behind a roll-top desk at the training school at Issoudun, looking bewildered, pained, utterly useless. Parsons took
all this in, then politely declined a silver bar from the U. S.
Army. He still owed, he said, a great deal to the French, who
had spent money on his training, who had fed him for more
than two years, who had supplied him with the best they had
in fighting equipment. In return for all this, Parsons reminded
himself, he had a thick logbook, but only one confirmed kill. Of
course, he had got other Runs-but try and get them confirmed! So it was, in April 1918, that Parsons made it known
that he wanted to stay with the Service Aeronautique. The
French were delighted, and offered him the choice of escadrilles. Now among all the escadrilles de chasse, one was more
famous than any other, contained a greater proportion of aces,
consistently bagged more Germans. That was SPA. 3, the original "Storks" squadron, immortalized by Guynemer and the
The Wager
...
139
goal of every French flyer fresh from training. Parsons wanted

the best, and in SPA. 3, that is exactly what he got.
From humble beginning as MS. 3 (when the squadron was
flying Morane-Saulnier monoplanes) in 1915, the Storks, by
1918, had grown to a full group of five squadrons: 3, 26, 73, 103
and 167-all using 220-h.p., twin-gunned Spads and, for the
most part, manned by the brightest pilots in the French galaxy
of aces, many of whom had twenty and more German aircraft
officially confirmed.
When Parsons checked in with SPA. 3 on April 24, 1918,
there was already one American pilot in the squadron, a softspoken, bushy-eyebrowed youth of twenty-two named Frank
L. Baylies, of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Baylies had been
in the war since early in 1916; at first driving ambulances in
Salonika and, later, on the Western Front. He had then joined
the Service Aeronautique and come to the Front in the winter
of 1917. He was a tireless stalker and a relentless hunter; once
he had got his teeth into the enemy he never let go until the
issue had been decided. On one occasion, after a raging combat with a German fighter had carried them both well inside
German lines, Baylies had followed the smoking enemy plane
right down to the ground to be sure it was done for. Only after
the stricken craft had exploded on the ground did Baylies bank
away for home. But his insistence on witnessing the enemy's
absolute destruction had cost him all his altitude and he found
himself hotfooting it back to France with only a few hundred
feet separating his Spad from the searching German machine
guns that blazed up at him all along the route. The slugs soon
found his engine, and the Hispano-Suiza coughed roughly and
quit. Baylies skimmed past the German barbed wire and crashlanded on the far side of no man's land. He undid his seat belt,
dropped to the ground, fired a Hare inside the cockpit of the
Spad-which blazed up like a bonfire-then crouched and
started running for the French trenches across the way.
Two German infantrymen rose from a shell hole and tried to
stop him, but Baylies sidestepped them both like an expert
broken field runner and plunged on across the lunar landscape.
Bullets ploughed up mud at his heels and his ears rang with the
140
Wfl
angry cracking of Mauser slugs as they ripped through the air

over his head. Through some miracle he reached the French
wire without being hit, and two poilus slithered from their
trench and came out to guide him safely through the tangle.
Baylies said afterward that he was sorry he lost his Spad-but
that he would do it all over again if it meant getting a confirmed kill. He was a born Hun-getter, and by the middle of
April, six German aircraft had fallen before his guns.
Baylies now joined Parsons in the mess shack and together
they gulped down steaming mugs of coffee before walking outside to the flight line, where mechanics were already warming
up the engines. They took off just as the sun cut thinly over the
horizon, its deep red edge blurred by a yellowish haze that
clung everywhere. They flew a monotonous patrol over the
Somme, seeing no Germans, and at the end of the two-hour
beat flew back to Hetromesnil to thaw out.
Clumping into the bar, they found visitors. Sitting at one of
the tables was Walter Duranty, of the New York Times, and
Paul Ayres Rockwell, of the Chicago Daily News. Rockwell, a
tall, lantern-jawed Southerner with a flowing mustache, had
been a familiar figure along the Front since 1914, when he and
his brother, Kiffin, had fought together as privates in the Foreign Legion before Craonelle. Paul, invalided out, had stayed
on in France as a war correspondent; Kiffin had transferred to
aviation and become one of the original pilots of the Lafayette
Escadrille, only to lose his life in combat late in 1916.
"Like all newspaper hounds," recalled Parsons, "they were
excellent, two-fisted drinkers. And, like the good newsmen they
were, they were eager to get some striking feature yam to cable
back to the States. Frank and I, for some reason, were unusually cocky that morning, and we began laying it on pretty
thick; I suppose we gave the impression that we were winning
the war single-handed. While it was true that Frank had
bagged his sixth in April, and that I had gotten my second only
three days before, nothing exceptional had taken place since
then. Just as an awkward silence began to develop, in walked
Fonck the Great . . ."
The Wager
Wfl
141
Rene Fonck, at twenty-four, was at the same time the greatest living ace in the French Service Aeronautique and its most
disliked star. His conceit was unbearable, his ego unpuncturable, and his lust for confirmations unquenchable. Fonck, short
and swarthy, strutted around as if he were ten feet fall, and his
words-no matter where uttered or to whom-were touched
either with piousness ( when he talked about himself, which
was often) or with contempt (when he spoke of others, which
was rare). But no matter how much Fonck got on the nerves of
those around him, there was no denying the fact that he was
one of the deadliest pilots on the Western Front: from May 3,
1917, when Fonck had first joined SPA. 103 of the Storks
Group, to April12, 1918, he had shot down thirty-five German
planes that were confirmed-but he had claimed half again as
many that were not. In combat, Fonck was as coldly detached
as a surgeon preparing to attack some diseased portion of a
strange body; no motion was wasted, no excess ammunition
expended, unnecessary maneuvers were never indulged in.
There was no warmth in his soul; only a fierce dedication to
efficiency burned in his compact body, which he babied like an
athlete.
"One must be in constant training," Fonck once told an
inquiring reporter. "Always fit, always sure of oneself, always
in perfect health. Muscles must be in good condition, nerves in
perfect equilibrium, all the organs exercising naturally. Alcohol
becomes an enemy-even wine. All abuses must be avoided. It
is indispensable that one goes to a combat without fatigue,
without any disquietude, either physical or moral.
"It must be remembered that combats take place at altitudes
as high as twenty to twenty-five thousand feet. High altitudes
are trying on one's organisms. This indeed, at bottom, is the
reason that keeps me from flying too continuously. And I never
fly except when in perfect condition; I am careful to abstain
when I am not exactly fit. Constantly I watch myself.
"It is necessary," Fonck concluded, "to train as severely for
air combats as for any other athletic contest, so difficult is the
prize of victory. Yet, if one finds oneself in prime condition, all
the rest is play."
142
Wfl
.How different from the sentiments expressed by that rambling wreck, Charles Nungesser! "One reads in the papers,"
N.ungesse~ on~e rema:ked, "precepts on the art of the fighter
pilot: don t dnnk, don t smoke, get up early, go to bed early, no
excesses, lead a peaceful existence. Hol As for me . . . a good
roasted pheasant-with truHles, if possible-a bottle of champagne, a Romeo and Juliet cigar. Afterwards, if I have an
engine turning over to its heart's content and a machine gun
that won't jam, I feel ready to attack!"
And how different from Georges Guynemer, who was never
truly fit a day in his life, who forced himself to fly in combat
day after day when he should have been in a sanitarium
instead!
With a carburetor where his heart should have been it is little wonder that Rene Fonck was not taken in warm .embrace by
the French nation, to whom soul is everything and dazzling
victories only admirable appendages.
When Fonck strolled into the bar, Rockwell and Duranty
him to sit down and have a glass of champagne.
Although Fonck very seldom drank," remembered Parsons, "it
was not in him to refuse anything free ... he had some sort of
throat afHiction that kept him, ever, from asking others if they
wanted something.
"We got to arguing about who were the better flyers, Frenchmen or Americans. It started off innocently enough-such razzing usually does- but that ever-present edge of arrogance of
Fonck's soon got Baylies and me riled. The air around the table
grew heated, almost acrimonious, and Baylies and I wound up
betting that between us we could get a Hun that afternoon
before Fonck did. Fonck wanted to make tl1e stakes cash but
w_e insisted on a bottle of good champagne. Fonck, toying 'with
his glass, shrugged and accepted the bet . . . warning us that
we were simply throwing our money away. That didn't set well,
so we bet him a second bottle of champagne that not only
would we score first, but by the time the sun went down we
would have more confirmations than he. Fonck shrugged and
smiled that tight little smile of his, then got up from the table
and walked away."
~vited
The Wager
Wfl
143
The morning fo? clung tenaciously to the earth through most

of the day, and smce the group meteorologist said it was no
better upstairs, no flying was done until late that afternoon
Baylies and Parsons were the first off. They left Hetromesnii
and headed for Amiens.
" "T~ere w~s a rotten yellow haze up there," said Parsons,
and It wasn t long before Baylies and I got separated. I flew on
~lone, and about twenty minutes later I spotted a flock of Huns
wa~ up there at about nineteen or twenty thousand feet. I
decided t? try to work around them, get above, make one firing
pass, hopmg to knock one off, then dive like hell for home.... 1
didn't think they would be able to see me through the haze
until it was too late.
"I got up to 17,500 feet, but they were still much higher. I
could have pushed upward a little more, but Spads, with their
nearly flat airfoil section, went mushy if you got much above
18,000; bank a Spad at that altitude and you would lose 300
feet every .tim~. Since the Germans were still climbing, I said
the hell With It and went looking for others.
"After a little bit I spotted a two-seater Halberstadt floating
along 500 feet beneath my lower left wing; the observer was
fooling with a camera, both his guns swung downwards,
untended. Cold meat! Just as I pushed my nose over and
r~ached for the higger, I heard a roaring and a crackling
drrectly overhead: it was Baylies, quartering on the Halbersta?t and shooting like hell. I opened up with my own guns a
spht-second later, and saw the observer drop out of sight in the
cockpit. The German pilot put his nose down and started a run
for it, but he lost his top wing. It ripped loose and fluttered
away in the wind. The Halberstadt whipped around in a violent spin, and after a few turns the lower wings tore loose and
the naked fuselage streaked earthward with the engine running
full throttle. It banged into the ground a long time afterwards
and simply disintegrated.
"Together, Frank and I flew back to Hetromesnil. We scrambled out of the Spads and walked arm in arm over to where
Fonck's outfit was based, hardly able to contain ourselves. Sure
enough, the Halberstadt was confirmed at Group HQ, and we
relished the thought of seeing Fonck's face when we forced him
144
'11
to dig into his pinch-purse and ante up for the bottle of Piper
Heidsieck we intended to order. Oh, how we chortled and beat
each other on the back! But where was Fonck, anyway? He
had taken off shortly after we had, and-unless he had been
shot down, which wasn't likely-should have been back about
the same time. Just at the point when we were getting a bit
uneasy, when our brows were beginning to wrinkle and the
coals on our cigarettes were glowing unnaturally hard, we
heard the unmistakable, incoming roar of a Hispano-Suiza.
"It was Fonck. He came in low over the field, opening and
closing his throttle. Ruumph! Ruumphl Ruumphl The victory
signal ... at this, our concern for Fonck's safety changed to
worry about the outcome of the bet, and our elation at our own
kill had some of the edge rubbed off. Then, incredibly, he beat
back across the field twice more, each time goosing the throttle
for all it was worth. Three? Three in the same afternoon?"
It was all too true. Fonck had left the field at Hetromesnil
with two other SPA. 103 pilots, Battle and Fontaine, and he led
them straight for the lines. After a restless hunt, Fonck spotted
a two-seater observation plane protected by a pair of fighters
cruising some distance below. With altitude and surprise in his
favor, Fonck immediately dived. Not a man to overlook utilizing the totally unexpected to throw the enemy off balance,
Fonck flattened out in front of the three German planes and
went for the leader head-on. At a closure rate of 250 mph the
planes rushed for each other, and it was Fonck who fired first.
His guns chattered briefly, so briefly in fact the others may
have thought they had jammed. But the two-seater flopped
crazily out of formation and went spinning for the earth. Fonck
whipped his Spad around in a screaming vertical turn and
bored in on the two fighters. Again the Vickers guns chugged,
and the nearest German plane lurched in the air and fell away
through the clouds. The remaining Geiman pilot, no doubt
shocked to the point of numbness, put the nose of his plane
down and tried to dive for home. Fonck had only to shift his
controls slightly to line up his sights; the guns barked a few
times, the German plane broke up in the air. It had all happened so fast-in less than sixty seconds-that neither Battle
nor Fontaine had had time to bring his guns to bear; they were
The Wager
Wfi
145
dumbfounded spectators at an incredible demonstration of flying skill and aerial gunnery. When Fonck landed, Parsons and
Baylies walked over to his Spad and were astonished to discover that he had scored his triple kill using an economical
fifty rounds of ammunition. The shattered hulks of the three
German airplanes were found near Grivesnes, and the longest
line connecting the three points of impact was less than four
hundred yards.
"F?nck slyly, suggested," continued Parsons, "that although
the timekeepers records showed that we Americans had gotten
our Hun first, he shouldn't have to pay ... at least not until the
flying for the day was over. In our stunned state, this sounded
fair-especially since Rockwell and Duranty eagerly brought
out their wallets and bought a bottle for all of us to share. They
were, as can be imagined, delighted with the way things were
going, and the day was far from over.
"Frank and I had our ships refueled and rearmed and at
about five-thirty we took off again, determined somehow to salvage what was left of our pride ... not only were our personal
reputations at stake, but our national honor as well. All would
be saved if only we could work it so that tightwad would have
to buy us a bottle of bubbly!
"We beat the skies at high altitude and low; we roamed
northward as far as Peronne, and southward as far as Soissons;
we scoured the length of the Front as far as our range would
allow, but nowhere did we find any Germans. We stayed out
until our engines were gasping for fuel, and both of us made
back to the field with so little left in the tanks there wasn't
enough left to taxi up to the hangars.
"We stood glumly around waiting for Fonck's return; I had
never felt so degonfle in my life. Just as the sun began to sink
over the tops of the poplar trees at the far end of the field, we
heard the familiar Risso roar, and we looked up in the sky and
saw three dark specks approaching fast ... Fonck and his wingmen, Brugere and Thouzelier. Once again, Fonck peeled away
and came in first. Would he drag the field again, his throttle
blatantly announcing still another victory? We might have
guessed the answer to that one. Fonck dropped his Spad down
just over the treetops and skimmed across the field; from the
146
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The Wager
attitude of the plane, I knew this first pass wasn't a landing

approach. Sure enough: Ruumph! Ruumph! Ruumph! He
banked around at the other end and came by again. Ruumph!
Ruumph! Ruumph! Two more! Now he'll come in for a landing
and really crow . . . but, no, he wasn't going to land; he was
going to turn for still another victory pass! Ruumph! Ruumph!
Ruumph Three more? Good God almighty! Six in one afternoon? Frank and I couldn't believe it."
But it was true, and confirmed by 8 P.M. At twenty minutes
past 6, Fonck had come upon a two-seater, seen briefly through
a break in the cloud cover over Montdidier. He had unhesitatingly dropped down into the cloud and came out directly
underneath the enemy plane, whose pilot was serenely ignorant of his approach. Fonck's guns rattled, and the two-seater
immediately plunged downward out of control; its crew never
knowing who or what had hit them.
Moments later, Fonck saw a formation of nine German single-seat fighters-four Fokkers and five Albatros-sliding by
underneath. Fonck's whole personality rebelled against any
form of recklessness, foolhardiness went against his carefully
rubbed grain ... and yet"The desire to complete my performance overcame my prudence and I chose to risk combat."
Fonck jammed the throttle forward, shoved the stick down
and dived headlong at the rearmost Fokker in the lead flight.
His first burst killed the unwitting German pilot, whose plane
flipped crazily out of the formation and went spinning down.
Fonck dived right on past the other three Fokkers and kept
going-but this time there were five Albatros pelting after him.
Fonck, Hying a Spad, could have simply dived away from the
slower, less sturdy Albatros fighters, but again he chose to
attack. He hauled back on the stick, came out of the dive, and
entered into a steep climbing turn that put him on a collision
course with the plunging German formation. Before any of
them had time to break away, Fonck coolly laid his sights on
the flight leader and opened fire. He watched the foremost
Albatros burst into flames ... and then shot upward past the
rest of the enemy planes without breaking the arc of his trajectory. He leveled out at the top of the zoom and flew on back to
wtt
147
Hetromesnil, followed by his two squadron mates, neither of

whom had had time to engage.
Typical of Fonck bombast was his summary of that incredible day: "My sextuple victory stupefied my contemporaries.
The enemy, terror stricken, did not for several days recover his
self-possession and, on our side, enthusiasm overflowed...."
More than enthusiasm overflowed that night. A Group celebration-organized by Fonck, but paid for by the Americanswas held in the Storks' bar, attended by nearly a hundred
pilots. "We had plenty of champagne," concluded Parsons, in
speaking of that day; "but it somehow failed to have either the
taste or the kick it should have. It hit me at about the middle
of the evening that the real price of that champagne-the lives
of nearly a dozen brave men-was exorbitant. All at once, in
the midst of the elation, the wine went fiat and the taste in my
mouth became exceedingly sour."
Following that eventful day when death held the stakes in
a never-to-be-repeated wager, the combat careers of all three
bettors took a sharp upward swing. When Lufbery was killed
later that month, Baylies became America's ace of aces. He
quickly ran his victory string to 12 before his last combat on
the afternoon of June 17. That afternoon Baylies led two Stork
pilots, Macari and Dubonnet, six miles inside the German lines,
where they watched the approach from upsun of four triplanes
-which Baylies at first mistook for Sopwiths belonging to a
Royal Naval Air Service squadron based in the area. Too late,
he realized his error: the planes were Fokkers flown by determined men, and after a raging fifteen minutes Baylies' Spad
was seen falling earthward wrapped in Hames. Macari and
Dubonnet beat their way out of the trap and returned to Hetromesnil with the gloomy news. Baylies' body was later found in
the charred wreckage of his Spad and given a decent burial by
the Germans.
Not so decent was the treatment accorded to the pilot's
mother, Mrs. Charles S. Baylies, by the United States government twelve years later. In the summer of 1930, the government sponsored an all-expense-paid, round-trip journey from
New York to France for the Gold Star Mothers of America
148
'11
whose sons were buried on French battlefields. The Baylies

family had been in New England for many generations, and
Frank had been about as American as it is possible to be. His
widowed mother, far from a well-to-do woman, applied to be
put on the list of those going to Europe at Federal expense. She
had last seen her son in the summer of 1916, when he was
twenty; afterwards he had demonstrated the same selB.ess courage that had helped his forebears win a continent, and in so
doing had brought nothing but honor to both his name and
his American heritage. If there was any Gold Star Mother who
was prouder, she has yet to be found; if there was any mother
who greater deserved to be aboard the government transport,
her name has yet to turn up.
But Mrs. Baylies' request was turned down. Why? Because
her son, Frank, wasn't wearing an American uniform when he
burned alive in combat with America's enemies, the Germans.
Mrs. Baylies appealed to Congressman Charles L. Gifford, who
in turn appealed to Acting Secretary of War F. Trubee
Davison. Instead of consulting common sense-or even common decency-Davison consulted the law books, and once
again Mrs. Baylies was refused. So much for Washington's big,
understanding heart.
Quickly, then, the director of the French Line got in touch
with Mrs. Baylies in New Bedford and invited her to sail to
Europe to visit her son's grave and return to America, with her
first class passage and all expenses to be paid by the steamship
line. So much for the mercenary qualities of the French.
Rene Fonck roared on, and by the time the last round was
fired over the Western Front, he stood at the top of the Allied
list of aces with 75 confirmed kills. This record-and it remains
to this day a striking testimony to a man's almost matchless
skill and marksmanship-was, alas, not enough for the redoubtable bantam. Dismissing the entire concept of the Service
Aeronautique confirmation system, Fonck claimed 127 victims,
and he stuck with this figure until his death, at fifty-nine in
Paris in the summer of 1953. Fonck was, without a doubt, the
most efficient fighter pilot his country produced during the
entire war, and the damage he inflicted upon France's enemies
The Wager
'11
149
was worthy of a full battalion of infantry. Why, then, was he

not idolized like Guynemer and cheered like Nungesser? At
bottom, it was because people not only demand that their
heroes be magnificent in battle, but modest afterwards. Unfortunately, the chromosomes that nurture the first trait do not
always coalesce to provide the second. However, coyness can
sometimes be learned, but courage never.
Ted Parsons survived another six months of day-in, day-out
combat in the air and ran his score to eight official-about half
of the actual number he knew for sure had gone down with
dead men at the controls. The French rewarded him with a
lieutenancy, the Medaille Militaire, the Croix de Guerre with
a string of palms and-forty years later-the Legion d'Honneur. Although the Parsons family had settled in America
nearly a hundred years before the Revolutionary War, he
returned to his homeland to find the government had seen fit
to lift his citizenship. Why? Because he had, so one myopic
judge believed, forfeited his rights by serving under a foreign
flag-and never mind why, or what was accomplished for the
United States in so doing. Fortunately, this lunacy was soon
reversed.
Parsons went to work as a special agent for the FBI, and
while conducting investigations out of the Los Angeles office
became involved with technical direction of the now legendary
motion-picture production, Wings. He stayed on in Hollywood
after that, helping bring authenticity to a crop of films re-creating the days of epic combats in the sky.
When, in 1941, it became evident to Parsons that he and
men like him had somehow failed to make the world safe for
democracy twenty-three years earlier, he offere.d his services to
Washington and was granted a commission in the U. S. Navy.
Tiring of his training duties at Pensacola-shades of the Bleriot
school at Buc!-he sought a combat command and was transferred to the South Pacific, where he herded flotillas of LCis
from one smoking atoll to the other. As soon as Fat Man had
truly put an end to the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,
Parsons left the service. He kept his citizenship intact after that
war, and brought home a Bronze Star and the retired rank of
150
Ooifl
rear admiral; no former Lafayette Escadrille pilot ever rose any

higher.
He lives today on the western coast of Florida, and can be
found most mornings at 7 A.M. swimming powedully through
the warm, clear blue waters near Casey Key. Like his old
rival, Rene Fonck, Ted Parsons believes that fighter pilots owe
it to themselves, always, to be in trim. A look into his steady
blue eyes-now snapping with fire, now twinkling with ironic
amusement- is enough to convince one that he would still b e a
very dangerous man behind a pair of Vickers guns.
Old soldiers-real old soldiers-don't even fade away.
Wfl
151
Black Icarus
ON AucusT 3, 1914, Woodrow Wilson issued an anticipatory

warning to the nation whose people watched giddily while the
other half of the world prepared for self-immolation. The President, in his very best school-principal's manner, sternly commanded that no American "shall take part, directly or
indirectly, in the war, but shall maintain a strict and impartial
neutrality." As though that would quell the emotions which
deep-rooted feelings had brought to a boil!
Even before the ink had begun to dry on this proclamation
Americans were streaming into Paris to volunteer for combat
against the Germans. These Americans, for the most part, were
young men in their early twenties, although one ambitious
recruit who came a little later was 65. ( He was 0. L. McLellan,
a former Louisiana state senator. This fiery graybeard gave his
age as forty, was readily accepted into the Foreign Legion as a
rifleman. ) These willing warriors truly represented a vertical
cross section of corporate American malehood. There were
Harvard and Yale graduates, lawyers, students, poets, authors,
painters, clerks, surgeons, seamen, aviators, butchers, scholars,
chauffeurs, chicken farmers, banjo players, jockeys, mechanics,
actors, boxers, cartoonists, mining engineers, explorers, biggame hunters, prospectors, one-time soldiers, philosophers,
architects, and footloose wanderers. Some of these men had
more money than they could spend in a lifetime, others were
152
Wfl
stone-broke. Many of them were endowed with razor-edged

minds kept honed by deep and voracious reading of literature
in three or four languages, but not a few were illiterate. Some
had lived in France for varying lengths of time, others had
never left a narrow radius surrounding the Yankee hamlets
where they were born. Despite their overwhelming differences,
these men shared common emotions: outrage that grew from
the conviction that a great injustice was being done against
France and of course there was that really irresistible lust for
adventure.
From this heterogeneous collection, the French trained and
fielded a remarkably able volunteer corps within the various
regiments of the L egion Etrangere, and from that cosmopolitan body of organized killing power carne a nucleus of men to
form the Lafayette Escadrille, which, in turn, expanded into a
larger unit known as the Lafayette Flying Corps. It was this
latter unit, financed largely by American millionaire William
K. Vanderbilt, that channeled American men into French
pilot-training centers where they learned combat skills that
enabled them to be fed into French squadrons along the Western Front. By the war's end, nearly two hundred U. S. citizens
had flown with ninety-three French squadrons of the line.
Here is the story of one of those men. He was neither the best
nor the worst among them, but he was unique: Eugene Jacques
Bullard, son of an illiterate Georgia laborer, became this
planet's first pure-black aviator and the only American Negro
to fly in combat during the First World War.
It is late on a hot summer afternoon in 1902. Gene Bullard,
eight years old, sits on the bare floor of the ramshackle house
that, like all the others in Columbus's shantytown, seems ready
to collapse in a heap of tarpaper and weather-stained boards
with the first passing wind. Twelve people live in this shack,
ten of them children, but on this afternoon the deadly silence
that fills the room is as oppressive as the heat. Gene sits with
his back against the wall, his knees drawn up, his eyes wide
and staring at the tensed figure of his father, who stands like a
piece of heroic sculpture by the window frame, peering down
the dirt road, waiting for the lynch mob.
Black Icarus
W7t
153
. The elder ~ullard, whom everybody calls Big Chief Ox,

nses 6 feet 4 mches from the ground, and down at the scales
on .the loading dock where he works he balances the counterweights at nearly 250 lbs., almost all of it turned into muscle
from a lifetime of back-and-shoulders labor. But now Big Chief
Ox ~eels .very small and totally helpless and not the least of his
feeli,ngs I~ naked fear. If they com e and kill me, he asks himself,
who s gomg to look after my wife [a Creek Indian squaw]
an~ children? They got no shoes, hardly any clothes and none
of em ever seen the inside of a schoolhouse . ...
Big Chief Ox had, until three days ago, worked as a warehouse stevedore in downtown Columbus. He got along with
eve,rybody except the white overseer, who hated the big Negro s strength and his stoic indifference to the man-killing loads
he toted. No matter how hard the overseer drove Big Chief Ox,
how much he cursed him, how often he taunted him for not
being able to sign his name to the payroll, he could never get
t~e Negro to show a .flash of anger that would justify having
~IO: fir;d. When he did manage to evoke fire in the big Negro,
It didn t quite turn out the way he had planned; struck over the
head with a baling hook, Big Chief Ox responded by picking
up the overseer as if he were a sack of wheat and hurling him
down a flight of stairs. When Big Chief Ox looked down at his
tormentor and saw that he wasn't going to get up, might never
get up--:he took off for home. Having nowhere else to go, he
stayed nght there, maintaining vigil at the window.
The white man didn't die, and the mob failed to come. However, the warehouse owner carne, and told Big Chief Ox it
would be safer for him if he left the county ... at night. Then
the owner gave him ten dollars (a fortune ) and walked away
from the shack that smelled strongly of fear and of despair.
As the borrowed wagon pulled by a three-dollar mule
creaked down the red, back-country road leading away from
C~lurnbus, Gene Bullard burst into tears and began beating
his black fists on the hard wooden seat. "Daddy," he screamed,
"I hates white men! I hates 'em all!" Big Chief Ox, from the
wisdom of an uncomplicated mind, shook his head and replied
that goodness and badness were to be found everywhere,
underneath black skins and white. Then he began telling about
154
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Black Icarus
a faraway land called France, where, he said, people paid no

mind to the color of a man's hide, and a good black man, really
a good man inside, might even become president. But to a~
eight-year-old boy to whom even Alabama was beyond his
everyday world he might as well have been talking about the
moon.
We move ahead to the night of November 28, 1913. In the
center of the ring at Paris's Elysee Montmartre, two welterweights are exchanging a furious battery of jabs and hooks,
each trying desperately for a clean knockout before the bell
that will signal the end of the tenth and fi?al r~un~. But the
bell catches them both still on their feet, still swmgmg. When
the judges' scorecards are gone over, the referee walks over
and raises a muscular black arm into the air, and Gene Bull~rd
grins hugely: he has won on points over ~e heavy favonte,
George Forrest. And he is a hundred dollars ncher.
Bullard's road had been long and uncertain. He had left
home before he was ten and had taken up with a band of gypsies moving through the South. They taught him how ~~ care
for horses, which they let him ride as a reward for diligent,
careful currying. The kid had a way with even th~ most h~:d
mouthed critter, and one day a white man saw htm cantenn_g
down the road, the reins held as if they were fragile_ flowers, his
body moving in perfect harmony with the motions of the
speeding animal. This white man holle~e~ to B~~lard, who
pulled up short and asked: "I done somethm wrong?
"No, boy, you seem to do everything right. ~uppose you
would like to ride one of my bays this next Satiddy over to
Atlanta? You'll get silks and all the fried chicke? and yams y~u
can eat-after the race, that is-and if you brmg that bay m
winner, you'll get some cash money to boot." Well, there was
1
an offer!
.
Bullard ablaze in green and yellow satin, vigorous Y
thumped 'the bay around the track with his bare heels, and
they finished a length and a half ah~ad of_ the rest of _the h~rses .
That afternoon, filled to bursting wtth pnde-and With chicken
and with yams and with ice cream-Bullard wa~ed back to ~e
gypsy camp. Pinned tightly to the inside of hiS faded derum
""ft
155
shirt were three new one-dollar bills, wadded together until

they form ed a packet not much larger than his thumbnail.
Now grubstaked, Bullard told the gypsies good-bye and
hopped a freight out of Atlanta, riding the rods all the way to
Jamestown, Virginia. Standing in the middle of the main street,
he stopped a passing Negro and asked, "Say, mister, whichaway is it to France?" When the man realized the kid was serious, he exploded with such roars of laughter Bullard thought
he had the misfortune to be dealing with a lunatic. Finally
the cascade of mirth slowed to amused chuckles and the man
told Bullard that France was eastward, thataway, and far
across the ocean. Ocean? Ocean? This was the first anybody
had told him of an ocean....
Three days out of Norfolk the freighter captain, a German,
discovered that he had a stowaway on board. Instead of simply
throwing him into the sea-nobody would have known the
difference-he gave Bullard a job in the galley. When the
freighter pulled into Aberdeen, Scotland, Bullard sneaked
ashore with the guttural good wishes of the crew in his heartand twenty-five dollars stuffed in the bottom of his right shoe.
From Aberdeen, where he danced in the streets for pennies
and acted as paid lookout for riverfront gamblers, Bullard
moved to Liverpool. There, he struck up a friendship with
another American Negro named Aaron Lester Brown ... most
people remembered him as the Dixie Kid, who had held the
world's welterweight title in 1904. Brown got Bullard a job in a
gym-running errands, washing workout suits, carrying water
buckets. Gym owner Chris Baldwin, who admired Bullard's
catlike grace and rippling muscles, began teaching him how to
box. Within a year Bullard was fighting as a lightweight and
winning most of his bouts. When he got his weight up to welter,
Aaron Brown arranged the match in the Elysee Montmartrenot so much because he thought Bullard would win, but
because he felt Bullard would "bust wide open" if he didn't get
to France.
A financial and social success in a color-blind nation, Eugene
Bullard reached a pinnacle of self-assurance that provided a
constant state of ebullient well-being; to say that he swaggered
through the streets of Paris looking all men in the eye as equals
156
-and some as inferiors-is only to reflect the attitude of a man

who has put himself to the test and found himself not wanting.
Then, from that other world of hatred and oppression-the
world he thought he had left behind-came news that knotted
his insides. His hands shook as he read the words scrawled
across the lined tablet paper ... the letter was about his older
brother, Hector, back in Georgia.
Hector had killed a white man in a fight-probably they both
were drunk. He had fled into the swamp, where he had
promptly been tracked down by a lynch mob with dogs. There
had been quite a battle when Hector was brought to bay, and
two more white men had been killed. Then, after suffering horrible mistreatment, Hector had been hanged from a convenient
tree.
The words struck at him like blows from a stiletto. He
clenched his big fists and swore revenge. Against the white
race ... against the world.
Now it was midsummer of 1916. Lying in the shallow hole
cradling the Hotchkiss machine gun in his arms, Bullard's
mind can think only of what is to come when the bombardment
lifts; revenge has been swept from his mind-the first shelling
and the first assault against the Germans those long months ago
had reduced his thinking to means of survival, to doing the job
at hand. After five months the Germans are still hammering at
Verdun, the crisis is at hand-but to the exhausted French
infantryman, every day is a crisis, made worse by the broiling
heat of June, the lack of water, the lack of rations, the lack of
ammunition, the lack of reserves. All that remains is sheer will
and the admonition from above: They shall not pass! The earth
heaves and roars, the sky overhead is split by the express-train
roar of incoming German shells.
Then the bombardment stops. Bullard rises to a crouch,
brushes the dirt away from the gun. His loader appears from
nowhere and slides home a clip of ammunition. Bullard pe~rs
across the torn-up battlefield and sees the waves of field gray
men moving toward him. His section leader, an excitable sergeant, begins dancing up and down. Pointing at the hordes of
Germans, he shouts wildly, "Fire! Fire! Fire!"
Black Icarus
157
"Aw, hell, sergeant, they're too far away." Bullard calls out.
This is echoed up and down the line, and the sergeant calms,
Hops down beside Bullard, and waits.
When the first German formation is 200 yards distant, the
French machine guns begin crackling and the Lebel rifles start
blamming away with that awful roar they make.
"They were coming on by fours," Bullard remembers. "Always fours. You'd mow 'em down like grass, only the grass grew
up as fast as you'd cut it. We'd cut 'em down again, and four
more would be in their places. You'd look again, and a couple
of 'em would be way forward. I'd slew the gun around and get
'em, then back again where four more would be-if you hadn't
seen the dead where you piled 'em, you'd of got plumb
discouraged.
"When I stopped the gun to let 'er cool, the other gun would
pick up the fire. You could see the Boches out there wigglin'
like worms in a bait box. I got sicker and sicker-they had wives
and kids, hadn't they?"
The fighting raged throughout the afternoon. At sundown,
Bullard's section-what was left of it-was ordered to pull back
to prepared positions 500 yards to the rear. Bullard smashed
the breech of the Hotchkiss, then rose from the hole where he
had lain all afternoon and began dogtrotting away from the
scene of carnage. He dodged from shell hole to shell hole, and
finally stumbled into a partially filled mine crater. He unslung
the carbine from his shoulder and lay there, gasping for breath.
A German, huge, pale, hung with grenades, loomed up at ~e
top of the crater and jumped in feet first. Bullard shot ~
twice in the chest. He remembered the look of hurt surpnse
that froze on the German's face as he toppled forward and fell
dead at the bottom of the hole. Bullard scrambled up the side
of the crater and stumbled on.
He and a handful of survivors reached a shattered farmhouse and threw themselves on the floor. Uncaring, Bullard
pulled a mattress over his body and immediately fell into th_e
sleep of the unutterably weary. He was awakened by the ternfying crash of a high-explosive shell that burst on the roof of
the shelter. When he crawled from the debris, he counted four
men dead, eleven badly wounded. His mouth burned like fire
158
HIGH FLEW THE F ALCC>NS
and there was a sweet taste of brine: a piece of sharpnel having

slashed through the mattress, had split his lip and carried away
several front teeth. Clapping a filthy handkerchief to his face,
Bullard looked around for the lieutenant; he was nowhere in
sight. The shelling grew in intensity. It was only a matter of
time until another shell would crash down on the ruined farmhouse, killing the wounded. Bullard ran outside and began
jogging through the inferno of exploding shells toward the
command post, 200 yards to the rear.
Timing the arrival of the shells fired by methodical German
crews, Bullard dropped to the earth every five seconds. When
the concussion wave of one burst had swept over him, he
would rise and stumble on. In this way he reached within ten
yards of the entrance to the dugout that housed the company
CP. Then he heard an incoming scream that seemed to say:
Ge-ene, Ge-ene, Ge-ene! The shell burst in the mud almost at
his heels and he was catapulted through the dugout entrance.
The company commander and an aide were sitting at a
battered table inside the dugout. On the table stood a wine
bottle holding a candle that burned feebly in the foul air. Bullard's passage across the table swept awaY. the flame. Bullard
thudded against the wall, stunned. The captain jumped to his
feet, cracking his head on an overhead timber. "Name of God!"
he shouted. "What was that?"
Bullard got to his feet-and in the pitch blackness of the dugout's interior, snapped out a salute. "C'est moi, mon capitaine
. . . caporal Bullard!"
Shortly afterwards, stretcher bearers were on their way to
the farmhouse to haul away the wounded. And that night, Bullard, his mouth crudely bandaged, took a squad and began
scrounging the area for food, water and ammunition so that
they might be able to withstand the attack that they all knew
would come with the dawn. They never heard the shell that
got them. There was a blinding flash, then a roaring silence.
Bullard came to in the field dressing station. The surgeon's
apron was wet and red as he bent over with a gleaming scalpel.
There was a hole in Bullard's inner right thigh as big as a
baby's fist.
Black Icarus
159
In the hospital Bullard was visited by Will Irwin, correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. Impressed, Irwin set
down his feelings about the man in Bed 10, Row 2, Ward 4.
"He was, to begin with, a great young black Hercules, a
monument of trained muscle. A year and a half of war had
made a strange creature of Private [sic] Gene. He wasn't at all
the Negro we knew at home. War and heroism had given him
that air of authority common to all soldiers of the line. He
looked you in the eye and answered you straight with replies
that carried their own conviction of truth. The democracy of
the French Army had brushed off onto him; he had grown
accustomed to looking on white men as equals. His race, they
say, has a talent for spoken languages. Already there was a
trace of French accent in his rich Southern Negro speech; and
when he grew excited he would fall into French phrases.
"He had fought at Arras; he had been in the charges for
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette; he had been wounded in the blasted
terrain of Champagne. But all memories of those glorious and
horrible old actions seemed to have been dimmed by the terrific fighting at Verdun, and especially by that day when his
company held off a charge until man could hold no more, until
he knew the red r~ge and the hot sickness of butchery. He
described that day in detail ... then paused at the end as
though trying to sum it all up. 'You wouldn't 'a' believed it,'
he said at length, 'if you'd seen it in a cinema showl' "
Discharged from the hospital, Bullard hobbled from one cafe
to another, wearing a cane and the Croix de Guerre. He struck
up an acquaintance with a Mississippian named Jeff Dickson,
and with an American painter named Gilbert White. They
were sitting at a table at a sidewalk cafe in Paris, sipping at
vermouth cassis, when Dickson asked Bullard what he planned
to do now that his thigh wound had made him unfit for the
infantry. "Well, I tell you, Mr. Dickson-! plans on becomin' a
military aviator," Bullard drawled. Dickson snorted, said Negroes would never fly airplanes.
"Mr. Dickson," said Bullard, his anger rising, "you'll eat
them words one day."
Dickson flared up, bet Bullard $2,000 he would never make a
160
pilot. While Dickson was using the pissoir, Gilbert White told
Bullard he would cover the bet for him, to go ahead and try.
Bullard thanked White, then stormed from the table.
South of Paris sprawled Camp d'Avord, the largest flight
instruction center on the continent of Europe. Here, aspirants
were introduced to the mysteries of the upper air. Men lived
crudely in unpainted barracks, sleeping on cots, eating simple
army fare, drinking deep only of the heady wine that was the
knowledge that they were learning to fly, to free themselves of
earth's confining shackles.
"There is a fine crew in this school," wrote one American
birdman, "men from all colleges and men who don't know the
name of a college. We have a couple of ex-all-American football stars, a colored boxer, an Australian-American, a Vanderbilt Cup racing driver, men sticky with money in the same
barracks with others who worked their way over on ships. This
democracy is a fine thing in the army and makes better men of
all hands.
"For instance, the corporal in our room is an American, as
black as the ace of spades, but a mighty white fellow at that.
The next two bunks to his are occupied by Princeton men of
old Southern families; they talk more like a darky than he does
and are the best of friends to him. This black brother has been
in the Foreign Legion, wounded four times, covered with
medals for bravery in the trenches, and now uses his experience
and knowledge of French for the benefit of our room. Result:
the inspecting lieutenant said we have the best-looking room
in the barrack. ..."
One of the American students, lean, angular George Dock,
Jr., of St. Louis, shouts to Bullard asking: "Gene, what made
you get into all this, anyhow?"
"I don't rightly know, George-but I can tell you it was more
curiosity than common sense."
Once graduated from Avord and from the school of aerial
gunnery at Cazaux, Bullard uniformed himself spectacularly.
James Norman Hall, in from the Front for a short leave from
the Lafayette Escadrille, encountered Bullard in Paris:
"His jolly black face shone with a grin of greeting and justifiable vanity. He wore a pair of tan aviator's boots which
gleamed with a mirrorlike luster, and above them his breeches
Black Icarus
161
smote the eye with a dash of vivid scarlet. His black tunic
excellently cut and set off by a fine figure, was decorated with
a pil~t's badge, a ~roix de Guerre, the fourragere of the Foreign
Leg10n, and a parr of enormous wings, which left no possible
doubt, even at a distance of fifty feet, as to which arm of the
Service he adorned. The eleves-pilotes gasped, the eyes of the
neophytes stood out from their heads, and I repressed a strong
desire to stand at attention."
Bullard, thus attired, reported for duty with Spad Squadron
93 on August 17, 1917. Besides his vanity, he brought with him
to the Front one other thing: a small black monkey purchased
from a Parisienne, a streetwalker, the day before he left the
city. Major Minard, commanding officer of Groupe de Combat
15, accepted the new replacement and his pet monkey with
aplomb. "Bullard," he said, "you are warmly welcome to this
Group. And ... so is your son!"
After the routine familiarization flights over the sector of the
Groupe's responsibility-it was over Verdun-Bullard's name
went down for operational patrol on the morning of September
8. "When I saw my name on that bulletin board for the 8 to
10 A.M. outing," he recalled, "I knew I was heading for heaven,
hell or glory. I talked with God for awhile ... then I was ready
for anything." Or so he believed.
There was so much to keep an eye on! The man in front,
whose plane bobbed up and down; the planes to the left and to
the right, which slid back and forth in formation; and, way in
front, Major Minard's Spad, from whence hand signals might
be expected to issue any second; the sky overhead, to the rear,
to the sides, where German fighters might suddenly materialize; the altimeter, fuel gauge, oil-pressure gauge ... everything
had to be seen at once. Bullard wished for an extra pair of eyes.
Then there were Major Minard's instructions, shouted to him
over the roar of the revving engines: Remember! Follow
instructions. If there is a fight, go home immediately. No time
for us to look after you. Don't want Jimmy orphaned so soon.
. . . But Jimmy was buttoned inside his fur-collared flying suit;
he could feel him clutching at his chest, riding out his first
patrol.
Suddenly, Bullard found himself alone in the sky; the planes
all around him had vanished as if by magic. Panicky, Bullard
162
Wf!
jerked his head in little arcs as he looked all around the horizon. The formation had gone mad, planes were slipping this
way and that, zooming up in the distance, then Hashing by
overhead. Above the roar of his own engine, he heard the tactac-tac of machine guns. A fight! The Germans were upon
them! "Oh, sweet Jesus!" Bullard yelled, his words swallowed
up in the slipstream. He hauled back on the stick, closed his
eyes and clamped down on the trigger grip on the stick with a
paralytic clutch. The Vickers gun rattled off a long burst into
the empty sky above. The sudden sound jarred Bullard back to
his senses. He opened his eyes and leveled out. The attack,
apparently, had ceased. There was no more sound of firing. He
looked over the side of the cockpit and saw, a thousand feet
below, the formation of Spads droning along in a perfect vee.
He cautiously edged downward and took up his place in the
formation. The pilot in front of him turned his head around,
waved his arm and smiled broadly. "What was that son of a
bitch laughing at?" Bullard asked himself. "Hell, we could've
been hurt." Then the anger drained away, replaced by the sick
knowledge that he had disregarded orders, hadn't cut for home
when the shooting started. Discipline in the French army was
severe-the Foreign Legion owed its success to it-and Bullard
finished the patrol in misery, believing himself past redemption. He would be kicked out of the squadron even before he
had a chance.
They let Bullard suffer awhile in the emptiness of the living
hut, where he had gone with Jimmy the moment his plane had
rolled to a stop on the field. Then the pilots burst in laughing
and shouting like schoolboys. "Oh, Bullard," said one, "You
were formidable!" They pounded him on the back, explaining
that the battle was a sham; there had been no Germans; it was
a testing procedure every new man went through who joined
the Groupe. Minard upbraided him for not following ordersbut said he showed fighting spirit, and that counted for a great
deal.
In October 1917, Headquarters of the U. S. Air Service at
Chaumont convened a special medical board for the purpose
of examining those Americans in the Lafayette Flying Corps
who wanted to transfer to their own army with commissions
ranging from lieutenancy to major. To Bullard, the opportunity
Black I carus
"'"!!
163
to pilot an airplane while wearing an American officer's uniform was a dazzling prospect, indeed. He filled out his application and in due course was examined by an American
medical team. They waived his Hat feet and his wounded
thigh, told him that he was physically qualified for a commission. Bullard waited. Nothing happened. And still nothing
happened.
Bullard never received confirmation for a German plane
downed in combat, but early in November he came close. His
squadron tangled with a group of triplanes, and Bullard found
himself whirling around the sky with a mordant Fokker fastened to his tail. Lead drummed into his tail surfaces, and
when it seemed as though he might not come out of this one
alive, the German overshot and appeared in front of Bullard's
cowling. He opened fire and saw his tracers streaking into the
enemy fuselage. The triplane slipped off, spun, pulled out and
w0bbled across the German lines and disappeared. Then Bullard's engine cut out. He banked around and glided just across
his own barbed wire before banging against the earth and wiping out his undercarriage just inside the French reserve line.
While waiting for transportation back to the field, he counted
the bullet holes in his Spad. "There were thirty-seven of them,"
he said, "and I was sure glad they were in the plane's tail and
not mine."
Twenty-four-hour leaves were frequently given, never
refused. Paris was seldom more than two hours away from any
part of the Front, and the delights that city offered to aviators
need no elaboration. It was while returning from one of the
leaves that Eugene Bullard's career took a sharp downward
turn. He was standing in a steady drizzle by the side of a road
leading back to his sector. It was ten o'clock at night and pitch
black. Eventually a truck skidded to a stop, and Bullard hurried forward to climb over the tailgate. Somebody reached
down and roughly shoved him back. Bullard tried to board the
truck a second time, was greeted with expletives and the information that the truck was full ... there was no room, in any
event, for the likes of him. Bullard's great weakness was a propensity to lash out first, ask questions later: He reached inside
the truck, grabbed a handful of uniform front and hauled the
protesting figure outside. Then, he landed a whistling right
164
......
Hrcn
FLEW THE FALCONS
cross that sent the offender reeling backward into the ditch.
Everybody piled out of the truck. A flashlight was turned on
and the beam sought out the inert figure. Lying there sprawled
in the mud was more than the bleeding and unconscious lieutenant of French infantry-there, too, lay Corporal Bullard's
dreams of a commission and the ghost of his life as a pilot.
On November 11, 1917, Bullard was dismissed from the
Service Aeronautique and transferred to a service battalion of
the 170th Infantry Regiment. And there, doing odd jobs, he
sat out the rest of the war.
Adrift in postwar Paris, Bullard turned to his fists for a living. But four years and four wounds had drained his skill. He
became a bap drummer with the jazz band at Joe Zelli's ZigZag Bar, and became acquainted with the famous and the infamous of the Roaring Twenties ... the Prince of Wales, Ernest
Hemingway, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Legs Diamond, Mistinguette, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Rudolph Valentino.
Later he opened his own bar, Le Grand Due, in Montmartre,
and enjoyed the same clientele. Bullard married and fathered
two handsome daughters. The bar prospered, so he opened a
gym as well. The busy years rolled happily by ....
June 1940: The phony war has abruptly ended with the rolling of the panzers across the face of France. Paris empties,
traffic is halted along the wide boulevards . . . the city lies
silent in the warm summer air. Le Grand Due and the gym are
closed, the daughters safe in a Catholic school far to the south.
Bullard, wearing a 1917 Foreign Legion kepi and his miniature medals strung on his double-breasted suit coat strides
along the highway leading to Epinal: there, he hears, the 170th
Infantry Regiment is making a stand. On his back jogs a rucksack filled with his necessaries: cheese, bread, sardines, a canteen filled with water and the 2-volume History of the Lafayette Flying Corps, by Nordhoff and Hall. At Scissons he learns
the 170th is no longer an effective fighting force. He backtracks
through Paris, then hits the road choked with refugees that
leads to Orleans. Stukas scream overhead and bombs make a
hash of the road. He slogs on ....
Standing in the main square of Orleans, Bullard looks among
the faces of the civilians and poilus, seeking somebody in
Black Icarus
......
165
authority to whom he can report. First-and at this he is really

astonished-he sees the round, black countenance of Bob Scanlon ... fellow American, fellow Negro, fellow Legionaire from
the First World War. They have time only for shouts of
recognition before a shell from a German 88 shrieks down to
explode near the monument to the 1914-1918 dead. Bullard is
Hung to the earth, and when he rises he feels blood running
over his face from a cut in his head. Scanlon has disappeared.
Bullard staggers to his feet, then collides with a harriedlooking major of the 51st Infantry.
"Major Bader!"
"Bullard!"
Bader was a lieutenant of the 170th in 1916; the two men
had first met at Verdun under similar circumstances-waiting
for the next round of German artillery. After futile resistance
to the German armor, the 51st pulls back. Bader now gives Bullard some advice-advice that sounds very much like field
orders:
"Bullard, you have done quite enough for France. Get outfor the moment we are finished. Nothing but defeat lies ahead.
I'm a Jew, but I'm in uniform; the Germans will probably leave
me alone. But you-you are a Negro, a foreigner and are not
a member of the army; if the Bache catches up with you, you'll
be shot. Here; take this safe-conduct pass-for what it may be
worth-and get out of France... ."
After almost incredible difficulties, Bullard reached the
frontier and crossed the International Bridge to Spain on the
morning of July 2. He sailed aboard the S.S. Manhattan that
same month for the United States. Twenty-nine years earlier
he had left his native land with a fifty-cent piece in the bottom
of his shoe; now, when he stepped off the gangplank in New
York, he had a five-dollar bill sewed in the lining of a blue
beret. With this money as a start, Bullard started building a
fund to get his daughters out of Vichy France. Stevedore's
wages, plus contributions from surviving Lafayette pilots, enabled Bullard to bring both his daughters to America in early
1941.
In the last years of his life, Eugene Bullard lived in a ramshackle building in Harlem's East 116th Street, just off Third
166
.-1ft
Avenue. It was there I met him one winter day in 1960. We

were four for lunch : Leland LaSalle Rounds, banker and former Spad pilot; Count Edward de Pianelli, author and former
company commander of the Maquis; Bullard, our host; and
myself. The outside of the building was discouraging, the hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and fifty years of neglect-but
Bullard's apartment smelled of broiled chicken and industry.
Apartment? It was a museum. The walls were covered with
neatly framed photographs-one hundred of them-citations,
plaques, paintings, French post cards (landscapes! ), and mirrors. The floor was given over to bookcases, potted plants, a
radio trunks tables chairs. The windows were filled with more
'
'
'
plants. The ceiling dripped model airplanes. And atop the
gleaming refrigerator, dominating everything, stood a colored
pasteboard cutout of Marshal Matt Dillon, four feet high.
An hour ... two hours passed, but talk never flagged. Then,
at four o'clock, the erratic squawk of the door buzzer sent
Bullard rocketing from his chair: the guest of honor had
arrived. The door was Hung open and in walked a man Bullard
hadn't seen for twenty years- Major Roger Bader, whom the
Germans hadn't killed, after all. It was Bader's first visit to the
United States. He had time for only one day in New York City.
That he elected to spend half that day with Bullard spoke a
great deal, I think, for both men. When I left, they were bent
over a map ... discussing in rapid-fire French the advance of
the Brandenburgers before Fort Douaumont in February 1916.
Now it was spring and I was rushing from one corner of
Washington Square Park to the other looking for him. Hell, I
thought, we'll be late. It was 9:30A.M., and cool, and the park
was not filled. How can I miss him? I stopped every passerby
and even before I asked the question I began laughing- !
mean, with so many nuts running loose in that city, who could
take such a question seriously? Pardon me, I would begin, perhaps you can help me . . . have you-er-seen a middle-aged
Negro wearing a Foreign Legion uniform and carrying a really
huge French Hag? Nobody had- not that the sight would have
been surprising there in the middle of Greenwich Village-and
it wasn't until a quarter of an hour later that he and I collided
Black Icarus
.-1ft
167
near the fotmtain. Then he remembered ... the ceremony was

supposed to be held not in Washington Square but in Union
Square, ten or twelve blocks away. We grabbed a cab and
hurtled up Fifth Avenue, then across Fourteenth Street. Bullard made it just in time.
About a hundred French aviation cadets, representatives of
the U. S. Air Force and the State Department, plus several
officers of the Armee de l'Air were already in ranks before the
green pigeon-spattered bronze monument to Lafayette. Bullard unfurled the Tricolor, stuck the bottom end of the great
staff into the leather cup and took his place beside the U.S.A.F.
Hag-bearers. The speeches were read, the wreath laid at the
foot of the monument, salutes were snapped out, and it was all
over.
He went home on the subway. I accompanied him part of
the way. Even in case-hardened Manhattan, Gene Bullard,
spiffily attired in the khaki of the L egion Etrangere, proudly
grasping the furled Tricoleur in his huge black fist, was an
object of wide-eyed curiosity.
I saw him last in the hospital. Dressed in lemon yellow silk
pajamas, he greeted me from this, his last redoubt-an iron
bed, two pillows propped up behind his ramrod-straight back.
His sense of humor had not fled. "Man, if I had as many
needles stickin' out of me as I've had stuck in me, I'd look like
a porcupine." He opened his pajama top and displayed the
latest wound-a twelve-inch scar running along the center of
his chest. Through my sudden sickening knowledge of what
that scar meant, there came awe of a physique that belonged
not to a 67-year-old man dying of stomach cancer but to a
prizefighter at the apex of his career.
He subjected his tortured body to the greater pain of radical
new drugs, but he was doomed. And he knew he was doomed.
But until the end, which came on the afternoon of October 12,
1961, he never uttered a word of despair, never gave a cry of
pain.
He died as he had lived-just game as hell.
169
Index
Aberdeen, 155
Aircraft, see individual entries
Air Service Headquarters, 108
Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), 46
Albatros, 23, 36, 40, 42, 43, 88, 89,
94, 95, 103, 110, 112, 113, 114,
125, 146
Amiens, 143
Arbuckle, Fatty, 164
Argonne, 49,50, 74
Armee d l'Air, 167
Arras, 159
Atlanta, Ca., 154, 155
Audemars, Edmond, 27
Aviatik, 19, 20, 21, 23, 36, 41, 66, 69,
71, 74,105
Bader, Maj. Roger, 165, 166
Baldamus, Lt. Hartmuth, 90
Baldwin, Chris, 155
Battle (pilot), 144
Baylies, Mrs. Charles S., 147, 148
Baylies, FrankL., 139, 140, 142-148
Beaumont, 124
Belfort, 80
Bell P-39, 42
Berlin, 46
Berne, 83
Bizerte, 32, 77, 78, 97
Bleriot, 25, 29, 30, 31, 54, 55, 56, 58,
78, 79,80,86, 119,149
B.M.W. engine, 96
Bozon-Verduraz, Lt., 115, 116
Brazil, 29
Breuil, 97
Brixen, Col. von, 45
Brocard, Capt. Felix, 101, 102, 103,
106, 109
Brocourt, 107
Bronze Star, 149
Brown, Aaron Lester, 155
Browning rifle, 23
Brugere (wingman), 145
Brunswick, 46
Buc, 35, 53, 149
Buenos Aires, 11.9
Bullard ("Big Chief Ox"), 152, 153
Bullard, Eugene Jacques, 152-167
boyhood of, 152-155
wounded in action, 158
as pilot, 160-164
postwar career of, 164-167
Bullard, Hector, 156
Casale, Jean, 94
Cauldron, 58, 66, 87, 95
Cazaux,61, 160
Champagne, 86, 159
Chaplin, Charlie, 164
Chartres, 56, 57
Chaulnes, 104
Chaumont, 162
Chicago Daily News, 140
Clement, Maurice, 26
Coli, Capt. Raymond, 134, 136
Cologne, 46
Columbus, Ca., 152, 153
Compiegne, 108, 113
170
Comillet, 91
Corsica, 32, 33
Cote d'Azur, 24, 48
Couey, 121, 122
Craonelle, 140
Craonne, 94
Croix de Guerre, 71, 115, 127, 149,
159, 161
Davison, F. Trubee, 148
d'Avord, Camp, 79, 80, 160
Delagrange, Leon, 24
Demoiselle, 25, 26, 28
D'Esperey, Gen. Franchet, 69
D.F.W., 115
Diamond, Legs, 164
Dickson, Jeff, 159, 160
Dinard, 30
Dizy-le-Gros, 97
Dock, George, Jr., 160
Douaumoht, Fort, 70, 166
D'Ourscamp, forest of, 105
Dover, 26
Dubonnet (pilot), 147
Dunkirk, 39, 41, 42, 123, 130
Duranty, Walter, 140, 142, 145
Edward, Prince of Wales, 164
Eleve-mechanicien, 100
Eleve-pilote, 53-57, 161
Epernay, 96
Epinal, 164
Escadrille Americaine, see Lafayette
Escadrille
Etampes, 78
Eterpigny, 110
European Circuit Competition, 29
Evian, 84
Evreux, 56
Falkenhayn, Gen. Erich von, 64, 65
Farman aircraft, 25, 66, 80, 81, 86
F.B.I., 149
Federation Aeronautique International, 57
Fescamps, 111
Fismes, 69, 94
Flanders, 41
Foch, Gen. Ferdinand, 17
Fokker aircraft, 49, 51, 65, 66, 70, 74,
86, 87, 97, 128, 129, 130, 146,
147, 163
Fokker, Anthony, 44, 45, 61
Fonck, Rene, 140-146, 148
Fontaine ( pilot), 144
Foreign Legion (Legion Etrangere),

140, 151, 152, 160, 161, 162, 164,
167
Forrest, George, 154
Frantz, Sgt.-Pilot, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20,
21,23,36
French Army, 96, 120, 122, 164, 165
French Line, 148
French Riviera, 32
Fribourg, 84
Garaix (pilot), 15, 16
Garros, Roland, 61-97
early flights of, 24-26
in America, 27-29
as war pilot, 35-44, 48-51
escape from prison, 45-47
death of, 51, 52
Greenland, 34
Guerande, Treaty of, 100
Guerder (observer), 102, 103
German High Command, 15, 17,65
Gifford, Congressman Charles L., 148
Gnome rotary engine, 23, 32, 33, 34,
43,44
Gold Star Mothers of America, 147,
148
Gotha, 131
Grand Qtwrtier General, 35, 113
Grivesnes, 145
Grosskopf, Lt. Walter, 40
Groupe de Combat, 12, 67
Guynemer, Georges Marie Ludovic
Jules, 99-117, 138, 142, 149
as eleve-mechanicien, 100, 101
as war pilot, 101-116
wounded, 107
wins Legion d'Honneur, 106
death of, 115, 116
Halberstadt, 143
Hauts, Fourneaux, 128
Hemingway, Ernest, 164
Hetromesnil, 140, 143, 144, 147
Heurtaux, Alfred, 110
Hispano-Suiza engine, 50, 87, 91, 92,
112, 139, 144, 145
Holyoke, Mass., 138
Hotchkiss machine gun, 15, 18, 19, 20,
39,40,43, 156, 157
Houthhulst Forest, 130, 131
Hue, Jules, 36, 38, 39, 43
Indochina, 24, 54
Ingelmunster, 44
Ireland, 34
Index
Irwin, Will, 159
Issoudun training school, 138
lssy-les-Moulineaux, 24, 25
Jamestown, Va., 155
Kenitra, 134
Lafayette Escadrille (Escadrille Americaine), 129, 138, 140, 150, 152,
160, 165
Lafayette Flying Corps, 152
Langemarck, 43
Laon, 121
Lausanne, 82, 85
Lebel rifle, 122, 157
Le Bourget, 80, 81, 127, 133, 136
Legagneux, Georges, 31
L~gion d'Honneur, 34, 69, 100, 106,
126, 132, 149
Leman, Lake, 84
Le Plessis-Belleville, 62, 101
Le Rhone rotary engine, 23, 58
Levasseur (aircraft designer) , 134
Lewis machine gun, 61, 70, 86, 103,
104, 105, 123, 125
Liverpool, 155
Lorraine-Dietrich engine, 134, 136
Lufbery, Raoul, 131, 138, 147
L.V.G.,66, 104, 105, 106,110,128
Macari ( pilot) , 147
Madon, Georges Felix, 77- 98
childhood of, 77, 78
early flying experiences, 78, 79
internment, 81, 82, 83
as war pilot, 80, 81, 85-97
death of, 98
Magdeburg Military Prison, 45, 46
Mistinguette, 164
Malzeville, 35
Marchal, Lt. Anselmc 45-47 52
Marne, Battle of the, l5
'
Marseilles, 31
Mauser machine gun, 44, 93, 140
Maybach engine, 68
Maxim machine gun, 15, 17, 65, 74,
94,95, 107, 128, 129
~ lcLell on , 0. L., 151
Medaille Militaire, 69, 81, 85, 87, 103,
123, 149
Menchkoff, Lt. Karl, 116
Meuse River, 66, 106
Minard, Major, 161, 162
Moisant, John, 26, 27, 28, 29
Monocoque (Type N) , 23
Wit
171
Montdidier, 113, 146

Morane-Saulnier aircraft 23 31 32
33, 42, 43, 44, 48, 67,
m}, 10:
75, 76, 101, 103, 104, 105, 139
Morane-Saulnier squadrons, 35 68
101-103, 139
,
'
Mors automobile, 122, 131
Mortane, Jacques, 71
Moselle River, 124
6B,
ancy,35
avarre, Jean Marie Dominique, 6776,88,106
and Zeppelin, 68-69
wins Croix de Guerre, 71
fighting style of, 71, 72
wounded, 74
test pilot, 75
death of, 76
ew Bedford, Mass., 139
ew York Times, 140
Nice, 24
Nieuport aircraft: 58, 60 70 72 73
74, 86, 105, 107,
,124:
125, 127
Nieuport squadrons, 67, 70, 72, 86,
94, 96, 105, 124, 127, 129
Nivelle, Gen. Robert, 132
ogent-l'Abesse, 97
omeny, 125, 126
Norfolk, Va., 155
Notrc-Dame-de-Lorette, 159
Nungesser, Charles Eugene Jules
Marie, 118-136, 142, 149
in Argentina, 119--120
wins Medaille Militaire, 122
bomber pilot, 123
fighter pilot, 124-133
Officer of Legion d'Honneur, 132
trans-Atlantic Right, 133-136
lOs, i09,
Orleans, 164
Oiseau Blanc (White Bird ), 133, 134,
135, 136
Orly flying school, 134
Ostend, 41, 42, 123
Oudecapelle, 39
Parabellum machine gun, 91, 104, 109,
128
Parasol, 35, 40, 41, 102, 103, 124
Paris, 26, 35, 36, 68, 74, 78, 81, 114,
131, 132, 136, 154, 155, 159, 160,
164
Parsons, Ted, 138-140, 142-147, 149
Passchendaele, 43
172
Pau fighter school, 57-62, 100

Pauchon (mechanic), 123, 124, 131,
132
Penguin, 54,55, 58,86
Pensacola, Fla., 149
Pepper Hill, 71
Peronne, 145
Pfalz, 97
Pianelli, Count Edward de, 166
Pilote-aviateur, 57-62
Poelcapelle, ll5, 116
Ponnier, 126, 127
Poperinghe, 115
Porrentruy, 81
Quenault (observer-mechanic),
19, 20, 21
18,
Reims, 69
Richthofen, Lothar von, 89
Richthofen flying circus, 94
Robert, Lieut., 69
Rockwell, Kiffin, 140
Rockwell, Paul Ayres, 140, 142, 145
Roget, Henri, 134
Rosieres-en-Santerre, 110
Roulers, 43
Rounds, Leland LaSalle, 166
Royal Air Force, 42
Royal Naval Air Service, 147
Rumpler, 23, 110
St. Cyr military school, 100
Sainte-Genevieve-en-Champagne, 89
Sainte-Menehould, 87
Saintes, 79
St. Gall, 82
Saint-Ouen, 110
Saint Pol-sur-Mer, 43, 123, 130, 131
St. Raphael, 32
Saint-Sauver, Captain de, 72
Salonika, 139
Sardinia, 33
Saulnier, Raymond, 31, 36, 37. See
also Morane-Saulnier aircraft
Scanlon, Bob, 165
Sevin, Captain de, 50, 51
Service A eronautique, 15, 36, 56, 66,
67, 93, 100, 130, 138, 139, 141,
148, 164
Simon, Rene, 27, 29, 48
Societe des Arts et Metiers, 38
Soissons, 80, 103, 145, 164
Somme River, 129, 140
Sommepy, 87
Sopwith, 147
Spad aircraft, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 87,

88,89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97,
112, 114, 115, 116, 131, 139, 140,
143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 161, 162,
163, 166
Spad squadrons, 49, 115, 138, 139,
141, 161
Spachholz, Cpl. August, 40
Spain, 57
Spincourt, forest of, 128
Storks Group, 49, 51, 67, 105, 109,
115, 116, 138, 139, 141, 144, 147
Suippes, 91
Texas, 27, 29, 49
Thaw, Bill, 131
Thouzelier (wingman ) , 145
Toul, 81
Tunis, 31, 32
Tunisia, 31, 34, 77, 78
U.S. Air Force, 167
U. S. Air Service, 138, 162
U. S. Navy, 149
U. S. State Department, 167
Vadelaincourt, 107
Vanderbilt, William K., 152
Vedrines, Jules, 101, 102
Verdun, 64, 66, 70, 74, 86, 106, 107,
129, 156, 159, 161, 165
Versailles, 78
Vichy France, 165
Vickers machine gun, 48, 87, 89, 95,
112, 115, 144, 150, 162
Villacoublay, 37, 39, 67, 75
Voisin aircraft, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25,
123, 124
Voisin Squadron, 106, 123
Vouziers, 51
Walker, Mayor James J., 164
White, Gilbert, 159, 160
Winchester rifle, 16, 23, 36, 48, 67,
69
Wings ( motion picture), 149
Wilson, Woodrow, 151
Wisseman, Kurt, 117
Ypres, 39, 41, 42, 43
Zeebrugge, 123
Zeppelin,42, 68,69
Zurich, 82, 83, 84
Clayton Knight
DAWN MISSION TAKES OFF
French Spads take off on a da wn mission from a

chill, min-drenched aerodrom e. Other airmen slosh up
to the squadron office for orders, past the familiar
receptacle with its sign reading, "Pilots Empty Your
Pockets"-a warning to all to carry no papers that
might be of value to the enemy in case they were f01:ced
down behind his lines.
J.
B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
Good Books Since 17.92
Philadelphia and New York

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HERBERT

MOLLOY MASON, JR.

THE FRENCH ACES OF WORLD WAR I

by HERBERT MOLLOY MASON, JR.

In 1914 a new breed of fighting

High Flew the Falcons

The French Aces of World War I

by Herbert Molloy Mason, ]r.

THE SILKEN ANGELS: A History of Parachuting

HERITAGE OF VALOR: The Eighth Air Force in World War II

ANVIL OF THE GODS: Modern Airplanes versus Violent Storms

THE TWINS OF SPACE: The Story of Project Gemini

Philadelphia and New York

To Colonel Herbert M. Mason, Sr., USAF ( ret. )

Whose heart was always up there

Copyright 1965 by Herbert ~Iolloy ~Jason,

Am wAR as we know it began in the skies over France fifty

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

2 A Gun to the Enemy

Verdun's Angry Sentinel

5 Rough Road to Glory

6 "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

7 The Iron Viking

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

man plane from the skies? Had he meant to inaugurate strafing

and a bloody one. Killing would now become the occupation of

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

perched in the front, exposed to the blast of wind that swept

and wide-eyed children rushed outside to wave at the men in

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

for the startled Germans. The Hotchkiss rattled off a long

Frantz and his observer arrived at the woods to find a large

A Gun to the Enemy

A Gun to the Enemy

IN THE BEGI INC, the slow-moving "chicken coops" circling

Argus-eyed machines that were pushing warfare into a new

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

A Gun to the Enemy

the Voisin; he was immune to the possibility that two men

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

beings who did not have a flying machine at their disposal."

A Gun to the Enemy

made by touring America with a flying circus, engaged Carros

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

begin with, the field was partially surrounded by a river, and

A Gun to the Enemy

Then his engine quit. He somehow managed to set down in one

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

made from the air-prints that clearly detailed terrain featmes

A Gun to the Enemy

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

A Gun to the Enemy

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

A Gun to the Enemy

Carras's serious speculations about transversing that sinister

HIGH FLEW THE FALCONS

found Germans scarce and, when brought to bay, maddeningly

A Gun to the Enemy

the squadron, journeyed to Villacoublay and begged comer

HrcH FLEW THE FALCONS

Garros were hastily designed models intended for ground tests

A Gun to the Enemy

Elated, Garros and Hue returned to Villacoublay, certain the