The Aviators by Winston Groom
ON APRIL 2, 1917, WOODROW WILSON asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, which was approved four days later, on April 6. Eddie got on a train for Washington with the list of racing car drivers he had recruited, including, among others, world champions Ralph DePalma, Earl Cooper, Eddie Pullen, and Ray Harroun.
As Rickenbacker enthusiastically unfolded his plan to the army brass, he noticed many of the officers looking at him askance. Eddie Rickenbacker, famous race car driver or not: what they wanted to know was whether or not he had a college degree. When he told them about the correspondence course he had taken in mechanical engineering they mocked him, and when they found out he was twenty-seven they told him he was too old, that the Air Service accepted only college graduates twenty-five years of age or under. One officer even went so far as to explain that the army didn’t want fliers who understood engines because there was always something wrong with airplane engines, and men who were accomplished mechanics would use that as an excuse not to fly missions.
Eddie was frustrated but he wasn’t crushed. He never let a setback get him down. The war was big, and he sensed he was still somehow going to be a part of it.
A few weeks later, while in Cincinnati, he received a phone call from an army major named Lewis Burgess, an old friend and racing enthusiast, who told him there was a top secret ship sailing out of New York for France and that if he wanted to go he’d better be at the dock the next morning. Major Burgess said that it involved some important people who needed drivers. The position carried the rank of staff sergeant. Still itching to fly in combat, Eddie considered that, if he accepted, being among the first U.S. soldiers in France he just might be able to circumvent the age and education restrictions for army pilots. It was one of those opportunities he felt he simply had to take, for it might not come his way again.
The secret mission turned out to be the departure of the U.S. Army commander General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, and his staff, including headquarters chief Captain George S. Patton Jr. and Pershing’s air officer Colonel T. F. Dodd, the same man whose airplane motor Eddie had fixed in the cow pasture near Los Angeles the previous year.
Next morning Rickenbacker was sworn in as a sergeant in the army and given his uniform and gear. The advance party shipped out on the White Star Line’s RMS Baltic, with Eddie consigned to a hammock in the steerage, which, he complained, was grubby and the mess hall was grubby too. Up on deck he ran into a friendly fellow sergeant and was amazed to learn that this man had been installed in a comfortable second-class cabin.
“It’s because I’m a sergeant first class,” the man told him, pointing out that Eddie was just a staff sergeant. Rickenbacker hadn’t known there were different kinds of sergeants. Immediately he sought out his old pal Colonel Dodd, who he figured owed him a favor. When Eddie said he wanted to be promoted, Dodd replied that “promotions come through meritorious service, Eddie. How do you intend to go about that?”
“I don’t know, Colonel,” Eddie told him. “That’s why I brought you along.”
Dodd burst out laughing and Rickenbacker got his promotion—as well as a bump up to second-class accommodations.
Once in France Rickenbacker began driving for the great air pioneer Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell, who took to Eddie’s homespun humor and frank honesty—and of course to his driving. Mitchell liked to go fast. The war soon convinced Mitchell, who became chief of the U.S. Air Service in France, that airplanes were warfare’s wave of the future, and he became deeply concerned that the United States was lagging behind.
One day in Paris while walking the Champs-Élysées the Rickenbacker luck struck again. He ran into an acquaintance, yet another racing enthusiast, who was a New York banker in civilian life but now the officer in charge of setting up an American school for pilots in France. He immediately offered Rickenbacker the job of chief engineer, with the rank of second lieutenant. Eddie accepted, with the provision that because he could hardly serve as engineer for a flying school unless he himself was a pilot, he must first learn to fly a plane.
He’d had to ask Billy Mitchell’s permission, of course, and Mitchell gave it, even though it would cost him his driver and his confidant. He simply looked his protégé in the eye and asked, “Eddie, do you really want to fly?” When the answer was “yessir,” Mitchell said, “I’ll see what I can do.” In fact, Mitchell pulled some rigid strings to get Eddie past regulations and into pilot training.
Soon Rickenbacker was practicing takeoffs and landings at a flying school in Tours, conducted entirely by the French. There was a little practice plane to start with, he said, that had no wings to speak of, so it would not take off, but the students hop-skipped it over grass fields to get the hang of flying and learn the coordination of steering with both hands and feet.
His first solo, like Lindbergh’s, was a hair-raising experience. It was in an old nine-cylinder Caudron, a “pusher,” with its propeller behind the pilot. He was nearly frightened to death. First off, his six-foot-two frame barely fit in the small flying compartment. There was a crosswind; he overcompensated on the rudder and the plane left the runway and took off right for the hangar. He missed the hangar by about five feet and bumped along the grassy field until the thing finally became airborne. He did some banks and turns and then it was time to land. Again he was frightened nearly out of his wits. Eddie’s first attempt left him about fifty feet above the field, but gradually he made lower and lower passes until he worked himself to the ground.
After seventeen days of flying school he could now call himself a pilot. After putting in twenty-five hours of flying time, he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
WHEN HE REPORTED TO HIS ASSIGNMENT as engineer at the American flying school he found it was run by five officers whose names, ironically, were Spaatz, Wiedenbach, Tittel, Spiegel, and himself, Rickenbacker. Behind their backs they were known snidely as “the five German spies.”
As engineering officer, Rickenbacker was burdened with duties. There was no time for him to take ground school flying instruction, but armed with what little he had learned from the French he managed to get into the air every day after work and try out maneuvers he’d heard the flying students talking about—stalls, rolls, loops, spins, and Immelmanns. Sometimes he managed to duck into an instruction class and then try it later for himself. It was risky business, and he had to sneak an airplane out without benefit of an instructor. There was a graveyard right there on the field for those who did not learn their lessons well.
Soon Rickenbacker developed a relationship with Colonel Carl “Tooey” Spaatz that could be described as troubled. One time Eddie was flying back from a trip to Tours when he saw the Ivy League pilots in training playing a football game on the flying field below. For some reason this inspired him to perform a spin right above the field, which went awry until he was able to regain control and pull out at less than fifty feet above the ground, scattering terrified players and spectators. For this, an infuriated Spaatz grounded Rickenbacker for thirty days.
More than once his self-instruction nearly killed him, but soon Rickenbacker talked his way into a French gunnery school. Spaatz at first refused to let him go because he was needed as an engineer, but like Billy Mitchell before him, he finally relented with a smile and a handshake, declaring, “If your heart’s set on going to Cazaux, you’re no damn good to me around here, so good luck.”‡
For Rickenbacker the gunnery school at Cazaux was a trial. For one thing, classes were conducted in French, with a translator. Right off, Eddie was put in a boat in the middle of a lake where, day after day, he was supposed to shoot at targets with a .30-caliber rifle. Next he was sent up in a plane armed with machine guns to fire at a moving target—in this case a ten-foot-long, four-foot-wide sock, “towed by two Frenchmen in a beat-up old Caudron.” The first time Rickenbacker pulled the triggers he cut the tow rope in two. The Frenchmen dove straight down and landed on the airfield and Eddie followed. They came running up t
In the early spring of 1918 Rickenbacker was assigned to the first All-American air squadron to go into action on the Western Front, the 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron—the soon-to-be-famous Hat in the Ring gang.
It was commanded by Major John W.F.M. Huffer, a former Lafayette Escadrille flier who had been born in Paris and lived all of his life in France, where his father was an American tobacco executive. But its most famous member was the celebrated Ace of Aces Major Raoul Lufbery, who had brought down sixteen German planes, had won the Legion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre, and was idolized on both sides of the Atlantic.
Lufbery was a French expatriate who had immigrated to America when he was seventeen, but he retained the eccentricities of his native land, including an addiction to Gauloises cigarettes and a taste for fine wines. He returned to France, of course, when war broke out and joined the Lafayette Escadrille, where he was acknowledged as the most proficient pilot of them all. When he wasn’t flying or raising hell, “he was, incongruously, picking mushrooms, for which he had an inordinate passion.”6 To the airmen in France, Lufbery was a character larger than life. He was short and stocky, with a bull neck, square jaw, aquiline nose, and soulful Gallic eyes. He had a wide, toothy smile and little or no use for picayune army regulations, which endeared him to his American-raised comrades once they got past his heavy French accent. He was also brave as the lions he once owned when he flew with the Escadrille.§
THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE, organized in France before the United States entered the war, was composed of American volunteers and some Frenchmen. It now provided the backbone of the U.S. air effort, with many of its pilots joining the ranks of the new American pursuit squadrons, where their combat experience was invaluable. They brought with them also a certain joie de vivre that was not always appreciated by the high command.
For example, following the Battle of Verdun, when the Escadrille returned to its base in Luxeuil, according to information obtained by the author Quentin Reynolds: “They took over the Hotel Lion d’Or and tossed a party during the course of which every dish, cup, saucer and bit of furniture was hilariously broken. At the height of the party, shots were heard outside. A dozen pilots rushed to investigate, only to find they had been fired by a former Canadian Mountie.”
The Mountie, it seemed, had gotten into a discussion with Lufbery about shooting, and Lufbery proposed that they stage a target practice. He was holding a book of British drill instructions at arm’s length, and from thirty paces the Canadian was riddling it splendidly. Lufbery was forced to admit it was the best shooting he had ever seen in view of the fact that it was nighttime and, because he’d been drinking wine all day, he presented an extremely unsteady target to aim at.
In Paris they would take over such haunts as Harry’s New York Bar, where someone of their number would play the piano and they would drink and sing:
The trip was long, the boys arrived
They ripped off shirts and collars.
The pretty maid who welcomed them
Made thirty thousand dollars.
Until they became drunk and, upon those frequent occasions, would further sing (to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”):
The young aviator went stunting,
And as ’neath the wreckage he lay,
To the mechanics assembled around him
These last parting words did he say.
Take the cylinders out of my kidneys
The connecting rod out of my brain
From the small of my back take the crankshaft
And assemble the engine again.
The song continues in the same vein, with ever more vulgar verses, which accompanied the Escadrille volunteers to the 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron, and pervaded it still when Eddie Rickenbacker and his fellow death-defying flying school graduates came aboard.
Lufbery was older—an old man, actually—at thirty-three, and with his experience he was named operations officer. Rickenbacker was also older, and more or less an odd man out among these Ivy League pilots. The two men naturally gravitated toward each other.
Despite a strong appetite for levity among the men of the 94th Aero, when the workday began before sunrise, and the pilots pulled on their flying suits and filed in for the day’s briefing, while outside the armorers were loading machine-gun belts into the planes that the mechanics had worked on all night and were now warming up in the grass on the side of the runway—in the chill of the dawn and the unceasing roar of the big rotary engines—the business got very serious indeed.
It had taken the squadron a few days to get organized, giving the pilots time to personalize and decorate their planes. The most immediate task became finding a name and insignia to give the 94th. Major Huffer suggested a stovepipe hat like the one Uncle Sam wore, with a hatband of stars and stripes. The squadron surgeon recommended putting a ring around the hat, after the old frontier custom by pugilists of throwing their hat in a ring, signifying they were ready to fight. Everyone was delighted and the squadron artist got to work. Forever after they were known as the Hat in the Ring gang, the most decorated air corps squadron in France.7
ON MARCH 21, 1918, Rickenbacker had the honor of being chosen by Major Lufbery—who was disgusted because the squadron’s machine guns hadn’t arrived—as one of two new pilots to fly the 94th Aero’s first combat patrol, only he had to do it without weapons.
The plane that Rickenbacker flew was the Nieuport 28, a sleek French-built single-seat biplane fighter with twin Vickers machine guns and a 160-horsepower, Gnome nine-cylinder rotary engine—“rotary” meaning that the entire engine spun with the speed of the propeller around the stationary crankshaft, which produced a “gyroscopic effect that permitted the plane to turn on a dime.”8 There were twenty-five of these in the squadron.
The reason they were flying French-made planes was, to the great annoyance of Billy Mitchell as well as General Pershing, that the U.S. Army had no American planes. A large appropriation had been made by Congress but so far nothing had come off the U.S. assembly lines and arrangements had to be made to buy combat aircraft from the French, of which Pershing had purchased five thousand. But that was a tall order to fill, and before these could be built American aviators were obliged to fly whatever the French had left over for them.
Even though the Nieuport was secondhand, it probably wasn’t so bad as a fighting craft. Aviation had undergone a terrific evolution since the start of the war, and by this time, after nearly four years of fighting, both planes and tactics had become comparatively sophisticated. The best plane that the French produced was the Spad XIII, but the Nieuport 28 wasn’t far behind it, and in most cases it was superior to what the Germans had on this part of the Western Front, which made every difference.
It could climb faster than any German fighter and turn and bank more tightly, though these characteristics had grown somewhat obsolete: by late 1918 there were so many planes available that pilots had figured out there was safety in numbers, mitigating the need for the complicated maneuvers practiced by Richthofen, Oswald Boelcke, Billy Bishop, Lufbery, and other aces.
One unfortunate characteristic of the Nieuport was the tendency of its engine to catch fire in combat because of the way the copper fuel tubes were attached. Fire was an aviator’s most dreaded fear, and “crash and burn” stories preoccupied many a pilot’s mind.
So far as fire safety went the typical World War I plane was little more than a flying matchstick—the frames were made of wood covered by fabric stretched by applying highly flammable glue, or “dope,” and the tiniest fire could quickly become an inferno. Another unhappy feature was that in some cases cheap or shoddy glue had been used to stretch the fabric on the Nieuport’s wings, which resulted in its sometimes tearing away on fast, steep dives—a frightening pros
There were lengthy discussions among aviators about whether to jump out or to try and ride a burning plane down. Both were problematic because the American air forces were not supplied with parachutes at that time. Lufbery’s advice was to stay with the plane and sideslip in order to fan the flames away from oneself. Some suggested it might be possible to jump at the last moment into water or the soft mud of no-man’s-land, but the consensus was against it. In any case the Nieuport 28—like the de Havilland, another biplane whose rear fuel tank earned its reputation as the “flaming coffin”—had its detractors.
THE MORNING THAT MAJOR LUFBERY, Rickenbacker, and Lieutenant Douglas Campbell took off—unarmed—on the 94th’s first patrol coincided precisely with the great German offensive of 1918. The Allies had been expecting a major offensive since the advent of the Russian Revolution when subsequent communist capitulation the year before took Russia out of the war and resulted in freeing a million German soldiers to relocate to the Western Front.
For Germany it was a desperate move. After four years of war, with its population at home starving because of the British blockade and Americans entering the war against them by the millions, the German army was terribly jaded. The German commander Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff hoped to catch the Allies off guard, including the newly arrived First U.S. Army, under Major General Hunter Liggett. He did.
To the rumble of thousands of pieces of artillery, a quarter million Germans swarmed out of their trenches toward Allied lines in the St. Mihiel–Pont-à-Mousson sector on the French–German border, as Major Lufbery and his little dawn patrol went up for a look-see. Lufbery had told them to stay close to him and, if there was any trouble, to do what he did.
They flew east picking up the Moselle River valley and were tooling along toward the Rhine when they were assailed by huge black bursts of enemy antiaircraft fire, commonly known as flak but then called archie.a Eighteen-pound artillery shells jerked and buffeted their fragile cloth-covered aircraft so violently that it felt as if the planes would be thrown out of the sky.