Rockwell’s death was a devastating blow to the escadrille. The fearless fighter was seemingly invincible, with all he had been through, and it was hard to accept that he was gone. When the news reached the squadron, a visibly shaken Thénault gathered his pilots and announced that, “the best and bravest of us all is no more.” James McConnell wrote about his fallen friend:
No greater blow could have befallen the escadrille. Kiffin was its soul. He was loved and looked up to … by everyone who knew him. Kiffin was imbued with the spirit of the cause for which he fought and gave his heart and soul to the performance of his duty…. The old flame of chivalry burned brightly in this boy’s fine and sensitive being.
An upset Paul Pavelka wrote to James McConnell in a September 26, 1916 letter:
God almighty! Jim I feel terribly broken up about Kiffin’s death. Today, Paul, the Captain and I went down to where he fell, and looked at that sacred piece of earth. He saw this boche bastard in our lines and attacked him at a height of about 3000 metres. Everything went fine in the fight, and it was a case of one or the other, and the boche mitrailleus [machine gunner] hit poor Kiffin in the breast, but the dirty son-of-a-bitch used an explosive ball, for the poor boy had a hole as big as your fist in his breast.
Lufbery expressed his sorrow in his own unique way: he took off alone and crossed the lines to the nearby German Flugplatz at Habsheim. There, he circled, with revenge in his heart, daring any German airman to come up and fight. Fortunately for either him or the enemy, no one responded to his challenge.
Rockwell had, on the night before his death, told Paul Pavelka that he wanted to be buried wherever he fell. Since the proximity of his crash to the frontlines made this impractical, he was buried at Luxeuil after a funeral that was, as James McConnell described it, “worthy of a general.” On the morning of September 25, 1916, hundreds of mourners—including Paul Rockwell and practically all of Luxeuil’s civilian and military population—accompanied his flower-covered coffin through the streets of Luxeuil to the town cemetery. Meanwhile, low-flying airplanes circled overhead and dropped more flowers. A few days afterward, Kiffin posthumously received an honor that had escaped him during his living years: a promotion—symbolic, though it was—to the officer rank of sous-lieutenant.
The only person missing from this elaborate event was Bert Hall. His absence would be duly noted and the repercussions from it would affect him for the rest of his life.
The Oberndorf Raid and another Empty Chair
For the next two weeks, bad weather prevailed, but Prince and Lufbery still managed to find trouble. On October 6, Prince was out on a solo patrol when he engaged enemy aircraft. In the ensuing fight, his plane was shot to pieces and he barely made it back home. On October 10, he achieved his third confirmed victory, when he downed a Fokker in the vicinity of Wittelsheim, France.
Meanwhile, on October 9, Lufbery had his closest call to date. It began with a long running battle with a Fokker manned by a German pilot of skill equal to his own—possibly the great Boelcke, himself. Each tried to outmaneuver the other but neither was able to gain an advantage. After several minutes of this aerial standoff, Lufbery detected an enemy observation plane in the distance, operating over French lines. He immediately waved to his worthy adversary and broke off the fight. He made a beeline for the impudent “big white two-seater of very substantial appearance,” as he later described it, but in his eagerness to score an easy kill over friendly territory, he rushed his approach and missed his target altogether. Even worse, he exposed himself to the German rear gunner, in much the same way that Kiffin Rockwell had during his fatal last flight. Both Lufbery and his brand new Nieuport 17 were peppered with machine gun fire. His plane was shot to pieces, and some of the bullets passed so close to his body that they pierced his flight suit and ripped open one of his boots. With a dead engine and a badly damaged plane, he glided to the nearest available field and executed a hard crash-landing that demolished what was left of his fighter. He emerged unscathed from the wreck, lucky to be alive.
Finally, on October 12, the big event that had precipitated N.124’s move back to Luxeuil came about. Participating, were more than 60 British and French bombers—Sopwiths, Breguets and Farmans—and escort fighters. Representing the Escadrille Américaine were Lieutenant de Laage, Prince, Lufbery, and Masson. The target was the Mauser arms works, located at Oberndorf, Germany. The date of the mission had been kept so secret that even Capitaine Thénault was unaware of when it would come about. Consequently, he was away on leave when the call came.
Allied fighters escorted the slow bombing machines as far as they could on the 100-mile flight to Oberndorf, before landing to refuel at an advance field. They would then rejoin the bombers on their return flight. German fighters and ground gunners fiercely defended their homeland by inflicting heavy casualties on the large formation and its fighter escorts. However, there were also some impressive Allied victories. Escadrille N.124, alone, accounted for three confirmed enemy fighters. Prince achieved his fourth aerial victory, while Lufbery downed his fifth, a Roland C.II. The Escadrille Américaine now, for the first time, had its own bona fide ace.
It was Didier Masson, however, who achieved the most impressive victory of the day—his first and only kill of the war. While engaging a Fokker, his engine suddenly quit dead. Whether from negligence or a punctured fuel tank, he had somehow managed to run out of fuel far over enemy territory in the midst of a dogfight. It was a very bad place to be. As he initiated a long shallow glide toward French lines, the Fokker came after him with a vengeance. The German pilot was so intent on downing the seemingly helpless Nieuport, that he became a little too bold. He apparently forgot that even with a dead engine, the top-mounted Lewis gun on Masson’s Nieuport 17 could still be lethal. As the German carelessly pulled up in front of Masson to make another pass, Masson squeezed his Lewis trigger and shot his pursuer out of the sky. He then continued his dead-stick glide just past the French trenches, where he managed to get down in one piece. It was one of the most remarkable kills of the war.
The three victories scored by Escadrille N.124 that day, though impressive, would exact a heavy price. The October sky was darkening early as the fighter escorts scrambled for places to land. Lufbery and Prince chose the advance aerodrome at Corcieux, a small field located in a valley surrounded by hills. Lufbery landed first with some difficulty, but in the increasing darkness, Prince—whose vision was none too good, anyway—failed to notice a high tension wire, inexplicably strung across the approach to the field. As he glided in low and slow, his landing gear snagged the wire and flipped his fighter violently into the ground. Prince was thrown bodily from the cockpit, during which, he sustained two broken legs, along with undetermined internal and head injuries. Still, he retained his senses, and when Lufbery ran up to him, the conscientious Prince implored him to, “hurry and light the flares so another fellow won’t come down and break himself up as I have done.”
French military personnel examining the crumpled wreck of Norman Prince’s Nieuport 17 N.1790. After escorting Capitaine Felix Happe and his bombers back from their October 12, 1916, raid to Oberndorf, Germany, Prince tried to land at the small advance field at Corceiux. In the growing darkness, the astigmatic Prince flew into a high-tension wire stretched across the approach to the landing field. In the ensuing crash, he was thrown from the cockpit and severely injured. He died early on the morning of October 15 in the hospital at Gerardmer. (Source Unknown)
Luf accompanied his injured comrade on the long and bumpy ambulance ride to the hospital at Gerardmer, holding his hand and encouraging him the entire way. At first evaluation, the doctors believed he would recover, but he soon developed a fatal complication—a cerebral embolism, or blood clot to the brain. As he lay dying, his commanders solemnly awarded him, as a parting gesture of gratitude, the Légion d’honneur and promoted him to the commissioned rank of sous-lieutenant. On the Sunday morning of October 15, 1916, Norman Prince died.
* * *
After Prince had been laid to rest, it was again time for the men of the Escadrille Américaine to move—and none too soon. For even though they had been at Luxeuil for less than a month, they were more than ready to leave. In spite of comfortable accommodations in a beautiful setting, their stay there had been a depressing one, dominated by a frustrating shortage of available aircraft and ammunition made worse by battle damage and crashes, and equal measures of bad weather and bad luck. Worst of all, they had lost two of their comrades, both strong, idealistic leaders and founding members of the squadron. The next gig for N.124 would be 225 miles to the northwest, where another historic struggle was raging.
The men of Escadrille N.124, looking somber after the funeral of Norman Prince. Front row: Bert Hall, Lieutenant de Laage, Capitaine Thénault, William Thaw, the padre, and Chouteau Johnson. Back row: Laurence Rumsey, Paul Pavelka, Emil Marshall, Didier Masson, Dudley Hill, and Robert Rockwell. Thénault’s inseparable dog Fram sits in the foreground. Marshall was an American volunteer mistakenly assigned to N.124 without any flight training. He remained with the squadron for several months, performing ground duties, before returning to the infantry. Raoul Lufbery was the only actively assigned squadron member absent from this photo. (Willis B. Haviland Collection)
* From a WWI pilots’ song made famous by the movie The Dawn Patrol. It was an adaptation of the Bartholomew Dowling poem, “The Revel.”
CHAPTER 8
MISERY IN THE SOMME
“We had … come to believe that we would wage only a deluxe war, and were unprepared for any other sort of campaign.”
On the morning of October 18, 1916, three Nieuport 17 fighters lifted off from the aerodrome at Luxeuil and turned to a northwesterly heading. These three aircraft, the only ones in Escadrille N.124 still airworthy, were piloted by Masson, Lufbery, and Capitaine Thénault. After a little more than two hours’ flying time, the three arrived at their new base of operations. The large open field, bordered on one side by a dense wood, was located just north of the village of Cachy and 10 miles east of the larger city of Amiens. More importantly, it was only two miles from the banks of the River Somme.
The Somme Offensive, named after the river, had begun on July 1, 1916. In terms of sheer brutality and body count, this bloody battle was of a magnitude similar to Verdun. On the first day alone, the British army suffered some 57,000 casualties, a third of those killed outright. By battle’s end in mid-November, British, French, and German combined casualties would total more than a million men.
The remaining pilots assigned to N.124, still grounded due to a lack of available airplanes, were compelled to make the trip from Luxeuil by rail—and as usual, via Paris. The rest of the escadrille’s support personnel made their way cross-country in trucks packed with gear, tools, equipment, and supplies. This was a lengthy process, so it took until the end of the month for the squadron to become operational. In this new theatre of operations, N.124 was to be teamed with escadrilles de chase N.65, N.67, and N.112 to form Groupe de Combat 13, commanded by Capitaine (later Commandant) Philippe Féquant.
Another Prince of a Pilot
The Escadrille Américaine had taken some hard hits over the previous four months. Chapman, Rockwell, and Prince were dead; Cowdin had left the squadron; and the wounded Balsley would never return. Thaw had finally recovered from his elbow wound, but McConnell would not be back until November. As a consequence of this rapid attrition, the squadron was now down to only nine American pilots, two of which—as the next few days would prove—would also soon be leaving. Therefore, as the pilots passed through Paris on their way to Cachy, they picked up three new replacements—all officially assigned as of October 22, 1916.
16. CAPORAL WILLIS BRADLEY HAVILAND was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 10, 1890, to Dr. Willis H. and Grace Haviland. In the autumn of 1915, he arrived in France and joined the American Field Service. In addition to having served a four-year stint in the US Navy and three years in the Illinois National Guard, he had completed two years of electrical engineering training at Iowa State College. Near the end of January 1915, he left the ambulance service and entered into aviation. After completing flight training, he reported to Escadrille N.124, which was just arriving at Cachy.
17. SERGENT FREDERICK HENRY PRINCE JR. was the older brother of Norman Prince, who had died only seven days prior to Fred’s assignment to N.124. He was born on April 10, 1885, in Boston, and like Norman, attended Groton before becoming a member of the Harvard College Class of 1908. Fred came to France at Norman’s urging and joined the Foreign Legion in January 1916. Unlike Norman, however, he did not enter directly into aviation. After serving for several weeks in a French Dragoon regiment, his request for aviation was finally approved. Not long after he completed flight training, he received word of Norman’s death and was immediately accepted into Escadrille N.124 as his replacement.
Robert Soubiran dressed in cold weather gear beside his Nieuport 17 N.1977 at Cachy, winter 1916-1917. Soubiran joined Escadrille N.124 on October 22, 1916, with Willis Haviland and Fred Prince Jr. The French-born Soubiran would become a well-liked and long-standing member of the squadron. Note the recently applied Seminole warrior insignia and Soubiran’s personal marking, a dark vertical band. Like Haviland, he accumulated a large number of excellent Lafayette Escadrille photos, which can still be viewed in the archives of the National Air and Space Museum. (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum)
18. SERGENT ROBERT SOUBIRAN was born on March 16, 1886, in Avallon, France, to Theodore and Clementine Soubiran. He thus joined Lufbery and Masson as a French-born American citizen serving in Escadrille N.124. Soubiran’s mother died when he was very young, after which, his father moved his family to the United States. Robert grew up hustling on the streets of New York City as a newspaper boy before eventually landing a job as a mechanic for champion Italian-American racecar driver Raffaele “Ralph” De Palma. When his native country went to war, Soubiran joined the Rockwell brothers, Bert Hall, William Thaw, and the other American volunteers who marched through Paris to join the Foreign Legion on August 25, 1914. After serving more than a year in the trenches, he took advantage of a fortuitous knee wound to apply to aviation. He completed flight training just in time to join Willis Haviland and Fred Prince on their way to Cachy and Escadrille N.124.
The End of the ‘Deluxe War’
The Somme offensive began with French and British domination of the skies over the battlefield. Allied leaders fully recognized the need for aerial reconnaissance and fighter protection, so they had committed the necessary resources to insure air superiority. However, by late October, when the Escadrille Américaine arrived at Cachy, the situation had changed. The German Air Service had responded with significantly greater numbers of aircraft, which they massed together into a large air fighting unit called a “Jadgstaffel,” or “Jasta,” for short. This meant that the day of lone wolf fighter patrols had come to an end for pilots on both sides of the lines. Surviving in the air now depended on teamwork, as well as individual skill.
Another change in the balance of air power that the pilots of N.124 were about to discover was that the Germans were developing improved aircraft to counter the excellent British and French fighting machines. The now-outdated Fokker Eindecker was being replaced by faster and more maneuverable machines, such as the new Albatros D-series of fighters. Their sturdy monocoque plywood fuselage construction—whose strength came from their outer wooden shell rather than internal bracing—and powerful Mercedes engines gave them much-improved performance. More importantly, this outstanding engine allowed them to carry two forward-firing, synchronized machine guns. As a consequence, the men of the Escadrille Américaine would meet with very stiff resistance in the skies above the Somme.
Captured German Albatros D.II 910/16. The Albatros D-series fighters were a vast improvement over the Fokker Eindecker and rivaled the best Allied counterparts of 1916 and 1917. Their success was primarily due to the outstanding Me
rcedes engine, which provided sufficient power for these fighters to carry two belt-fed, synchronized machine guns. This OAW-built example, flown by Leutnant Max Boehme of Jagdstaffel (Jasta) 5, was forced down and captured on March 4, 1917. The French later repainted it and used it for testing. (Greg VanWyngarden)
Life at Cachy was far more difficult for the men of N.124 in another way. Gone were the comfortable villas, hotels, and the excellent food they had enjoyed at Luxeuil and Behonne. Instead, they were quartered in cold, drafty, and leaky portable shacks located in a wind-swept environment James McConnell called “a sea of mud”—with a miserably cold and wet winter just about to begin. Moreover, because the squadron had, in the past, had such excellent accommodations, it arrived at Cachy without any stoves or other cooking and household utensils. As a consequence, the pilots had to impose on neighboring French squadrons for subsistence until they could get their own mess established. Lacking even such basic necessities as furniture and blankets, the pilots initially had to sleep on the floors of their huts in their flying gear. As James McConnell put it, “We had … come to believe that we would wage only a deluxe war, and were unprepared for any other sort of campaign.” The good life that he and his colleagues had taken for granted had come to an end.
They immediately went to work, caulking cracks, papering walls, installing electrical lights and stoves, and making their living space as comfortable as possible. Some of the more artistically inclined even decorated the bleak walls with drawings of air combat scenes and other images of interest to men at war. Meanwhile, Thaw and the squadron “chef de popote” (mess officer), Didier Masson, took a truck to Paris, and after obtaining funds from the Franco-American Flying Corps Committee via Dr. Gros, purchased stoves and other necessary equipment to haul back to Cachy. Before long, N.124’s austere living arrangements began to seem more like home.
The Lafayette Escadrille: A Photo History of the First American Fighter Squadron Page 11
