The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  Experience had shown that antiaircraft fire was seldom accurate, so they proceeded on to Pont-à-Mousson, checkpoint of the first thirty-mile-long leg of the big isosceles triangle that defined their patrol sector. From thence they steered northeast toward St.-Mihiel, the second checkpoint, and from there along the valley of the Meuse, then westward to Toul and home. Whenever Rickenbacker fell behind, Lufbery would make a virage—a bank, or circle, in the air—and come up reassuringly beside him. They made the triangle four times before completing the patrol.

  When they returned, all the other pilots and mechanics gathered around waiting breathlessly to know how it was. Lufbery let Rickenbacker do the talking. He told them they had seen no other planes, friend or foe, and that the archie was simply wasting ammo.

  While the others absorbed Rickenbacker’s and also Campbell’s account, the silence was broken by a chuckle from Lufbery.

  “Sure there weren’t any other planes around, Rick?” he asked.

  “Dead sure,” Rickenbacker said.

  Lufbery then explained that there had been at least fifteen planes, both friendly and enemy, which had come within a mile of them and admonished everyone to “learn to look around.”

  As if this humiliation wasn’t enough, a grinning Lufbery led them over to their planes. On Rickenbacker’s plane Lufbery stuck his finger through shrapnel holes in both tail and wing and another a foot away from the cockpit. Rickenbacker was flabbergasted. He could have been killed! He decided then and there he had a lot to learn, and not much time to learn it, if he didn’t want to get shot out of the sky.9

  From that day on, whenever he had spare time, Rickenbacker took a plane up and practiced things that Lufbery had taught him, in particular, a kind of corkscrew maneuver Lufbery had invented to quickly look 360 degrees all around the sky—almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head. In aviation circles this became known as the Lufbery circle or Lufbery loop. The violent twists of this contorted exercise made Rickenbacker airsick, and he threw up in his cockpit more than once, he admitted, until one day the airsickness simply disappeared and never returned. Since gun jams were a major problem, Eddie also began to emulate Luf’s practice of individually polishing each of his machine-gun bullets the night before a mission. A mere speck of dirt or grime could lock the weapon tight—not a good thing in the middle of a dogfight.10

  APRIL 14, 1918, marked the 94th Aero’s first combat mission with guns and live ammo, and Rickenbacker was again chosen as part of the first three-plane patrol. The fighting on the ground was as heavy as ever and the Germans continued to send up reconnaissance planes and fighter escorts to protect them.

  There was a heavy fog but the 94th inadvisably took off anyway. The operation almost immediately became a shambles. In Rickenbacker’s flight the leader turned back because the fog was so thick, but Rickenbacker assumed it was because of engine trouble and continued on. Then he and his companion became separated and Rickenbacker flew on alone. Upon his return Rickenbacker was informed that two enemy planes, which, unbeknownst to him, had been chasing him, had mistakenly wandered over the 94th’s airfield and were brought down in flames by two other squadron members. Not bad for the first day on the job.b

  Bad weather socked them in for a week but, on April 23, responding to a report that an enemy plane had been sighted between St.-Mihiel and Pont-à-Mousson, Rickenbacker took off in pursuit. Instead of an enemy he found only a French Spad humming along at 8,000 feet. Returning empty-handed, he found himself swarmed with congratulations owing to a report that a German plane had been shot down in the sector where he’d been patrolling. Rickenbacker thought it was a pity having to tell them the truth—but he did.

  On the evening of April 23 a report came in from a French artillery battery that an enemy plane had crossed the lines. Eddie Rickenbacker had been waiting around the hangar on call, along with the Lafayette Escadrille veteran Captain James N. “Jimmy” Hall, a promising poet and all-around nice guy. The two were already wearing their flying suits and immediately took off.

  Right where the German was supposed to be headed Eddie spied an airplane, and he rose, preparing for an attack, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a French plane. Meanwhile Captain Hall was having a “delightful time” above the German lines. Amid a perfect fountain of archie flak, Hall was baiting the German gunners with a variety of loops and barrel rolls as the black puffs of smoke burst around him.

  When the Germans had just about expended their ammunition, Hall suddenly wiggled his wings and headed west to Pont-à-Mousson, where a lone enemy plane was rising and coming straight toward them. It was a new Pfalz fighter, and Hall and Eddie put themselves between it and the sun and began their climb. When Hall peeled off toward the German, Eddie reasoned that if the Pfalz saw them he would dive back into Germany, and he maneuvered into a position so as to cut him off.

  Sure enough, the German pilot spotted Eddie but, instead of diving, he began to climb to get above him. But he had not seen Hall, who was coming down behind him hell for leather.

  Hall gave the Pfalz a burst and the startled German pilot banked and dived back for home just as Eddie predicted he would. Rickenbacker put his Nieuport on the tail of the Pfalz and swooped down with full throttle open. With every passing second Eddie gained on the German, who must have been terrified at that point, seeing an enemy fighter closing directly on him.

  Eddie kept the cockpit of the Pfalz dead center in his gun sights and at 150 yards he let off a burst. With every fourth bullet a tracer, there was a living stream of fire coming from the barrels of his guns right into the tail of the enemy plane. When Rickenbacker raised the nose of his plane ever so slightly it was like lifting a fiery stream of water from a hose. He could actually see the stream of his bullets climbing up the German’s fuselage and into the pilot’s seat.

  The Pfalz settled into a long spiraling curve, like a wounded dove. It did not simply fall out of the sky but, as Eddie pulled out of his dive, curled on its wide, graceful, dead-man’s glide until it crashed near the German lines several thousand feet below.

  When Hall and Rickenbacker returned to the aerodrome pilots, mechanics, clerks, cooks, and bottle washers poured out of living quarters, hangars, mess halls, and lounges and swarmed across the field to greet them. Word of the kill had preceded them by telephone from a French outpost in the front lines.

  Word of Eddie’s first kill quickly spread and because of his celebrity it was carried by the papers and radio as big news, prompting a flood of congratulatory telegrams and letters. This first hard brush with life and death might have shaken or at least been sobering for many men, but Rickenbacker had already adopted a stoic warrior ethos. “I had no regrets about killing a fellow human being,” he said later, in response to a newspaperman’s question. “I do not believe that at that moment I even considered the matter. I never thought about killing an individual, but of shooting down an enemy plane.… The best way to shoot down a plane was to put a burst of bullets in the pilot’s back, [but] there was never, at least in my mind, any personal animosity. I would have been delighted to learn that the pilot of the Pfalz or any other pilot I shot down had escaped with his life.”

  THE WEATHER CLOSED IN intermittently all spring and what else was there to do but explore the countryside. They found the villages as dismal as the weather. That corner of northeast France is coal and mining country, not as picturesque as elsewhere in the tourist books, and marred by unsightly quarries and slag heaps. By this time Eddie had started smoking cigarettes again, and drinking, too, like most of the others, to help cope with the eternal strain of knowing that almost any moment a call could come to joust with death. Most men don’t have to face that in a lifetime, but in France, in the spring of 1918, the twenty-something-year-olds of the 94th Aero faced it every day it didn’t rain, even if they weren’t in the mood.

  On the first of May, for example, Lufbery suddenly put down the phone in the hangar and began pulling on his flying suit. Eddie asked him what w
as up. A German plane was reported near St.-Mihiel, he said. Eddie asked if he could come along.

  “Come ahead,” said Lufbery.

  The air was misty, thick, and layered, and the visibility terrible; they searched for an hour but saw nothing but empty sky. Lufbery signaled to head for home and as they passed over Pont-à-Mousson at about 2,000 feet Rickenbacker saw Luf suddenly dive down. Eddie pushed his stick forward and followed, thinking the major was attacking, but he quickly saw that his friend was in terrible trouble. Luf’s propeller had stopped and Eddie, helpless, could see him looking frantically below for a place to land. They were less than three miles from enemy lines.

  Following behind, Eddie watched as Lufbery glided down onto a plowed field south of Pont-à-Mousson. He made a perfectly smooth landing before the mud caught the Nieuport’s landing gear and tipped its nose into the mud, so that the tail pointed skyward like a phone pole. Then, to Rickenbacker’s astonishment, as he passed about a hundred feet overhead, the tail continued its roll until Lufbery was turned completely upside down—a condition known to French pilots as a panne.

  Eddie banked and circled back to see Luf crawling out from beneath the wreckage covered in mud from head to toe. He waved to indicate he was unhurt as Eddie hurried home to get help.11

  That was the way it was, day in and day out. In this case the mishap turned out all right. Lufbery had blown a cylinder and had just enough altitude to glide toward a usable landing field. If he’d been any lower the accident might have turned tragic.

  Tragedy did, inevitably, strike the 94th Aero Squadron. Since their first combat patrol April 14 the pilots had enjoyed a string of five aerial victories over the Germans with no losses to themselves. But on May 8 Captain David Peterson returned from a flight and, with everyone gathered around his plane, told how, after sending an enemy Pfalz down in flames, one of the Nieuports in his command “pass[ed] swiftly by him, ablaze from stem to stern.” Other pilots later filled in the details. The burning plane belonged to Second Lieutenant Charles W. Chapman, of Waterloo, Iowa, one of the squadron’s most popular pilots. It was sobering news. Everyone knew they couldn’t go through the war without some being killed, but this understanding did not help. Old soldiers say the first casualty is usually the most difficult, but it’s not necessarily so.

  FOUR DAYS AFTER CHAPMAN WAS KILLED word came from a frontline outpost that four Pfalz fighting machines had taken off from a German aerodrome and crossed into Allied lines. Led by Jimmy Hall, Rickenbacker and Edward Green went up to intercept them.

  The German archie suddenly fired well before they crossed the line—and then an observation plane appeared, almost a sitting duck. Eddie’s first impulse was to go after the two-seater but then he recalled Luf’s continued remonstrations against falling into enemy traps, a German specialty. Sure enough, four Pfalzs materialized below, in formation, climbing for altitude and cutting off escape to the west. The decoy two-seater fled behind enemy lines. They were already three or four miles into Germany, and now the serious fighting would begin.

  Rickenbacker wiggled his wings to signal the danger and Hall responded by diving to attack while the Germans were still below them. Eddie nosed over toward the Pfalz formation and let the throttle out but noticed that Hall had suddenly wandered off farther behind the lines. He turned back to his target, which was the rearmost enemy fighter, and pressed the gun triggers at two hundred yards. He kept pressing to fifty yards as the German pilot rolled over and began a fatal spin to the ground. Zooming straight up until his tail was vertical, Rickenbacker looked around and to his relief there was no enemy after him, but off to his right, at less than a hundred yards, was an American plane diving sharply, and diving right behind him was a Pfalz, which was pouring streams of tracer bullets into the Nieuport’s fuselage and cockpit.

  Rickenbacker was horrified. It had to be either Hall or Green, but whoever it was suddenly turned the tables by looping over and exiting the loop right behind his antagonist. Now the Nieuport let off a long burst that caused the twisting Pfalz to drop from the sky like a shot goose. And to Eddie’s astonishment, when he drew up to the Nieuport, he saw it was Green—not Jimmy Hall—in the pilot seat. But where was Hall? They were deep behind German lines and had already overstayed their welcome; Eddie gave the signal to head for home. When they landed, Eddie ran over to Green’s plane to find out if he knew anything about Hall.

  “Went down in a tailspin with his upper wing gone!” Green hollered even before Eddie could reach him. Hall had dived on a German, Green said, but the next time he saw him he was in a spin with a Pfalz on top firing into his cockpit, and he went down in the woods.

  Rickenbacker’s head hung low at this horrible news that could not be mitigated even in the least by the fact they’d shot down two enemy planes. Jimmy Hall had been one of Eddie’s mentors and friends. A native of Iowa, a Harvard man, and an accomplished poet, Hall had been a social worker in Boston before he posed as a Canadian to get into the British army when the war broke out, and he had distinguished himself with the Lafayette Escadrille before coming to the 94th.

  The news spread quickly around the aerodrome and presently Lufbery appeared in a murderous frame of mind, with his jaw set and wearing his flying suit. He got into his plane. Hall had been one of Luf’s closest friends, and woe betide the first German to meet him in the air.

  Just before dark Lufbery returned. Having flown deep into German territory without seeing any enemy in the air he was about out of gas when, north of St.-Mihiel, there appeared three German machines that he attacked with such ferocity two pilots fled for their lives while the third failed to escape and was shot to rags in his cockpit. Even this vengeance did little to assuage the loss of Jimmy Hall.12

  A FEW DAYS AFTERWARD ON A “DUD” (rainy) day, Billy Mitchell arrived at the aerodrome and invited Rickenbacker, Huffer, and a few other pilots to an afternoon tea with a French countess. It was at her magnificent estate called Château Sirur, which had not—or not yet—been touched by the war. The place included many thousands of acres of woods and lawns kept beautifully manicured, with a babbling stream crossed by old stone bridges, fish ponds, and forests stocked with wild game such as boar and pheasant. The home itself was enormous, parts of it dating to the time of the Romans.

  Even after the height of his celebrity in America Eddie had never seen such opulence and the incongruity of it all—tucked away here so close to the horrid fighting lines—was staggering.

  On May 15, General Paul Gerard, commander of the Eighth French Army Corps, arrived with three companies of infantry and a band of musicians to decorate Rickenbacker, Jimmy Meissner, and David Peterson with the Croix de Guerre for their feats. The medal would also be presented posthumously to Charles Chapman and to Jimmy Hall, listed as “missing.” Prior to the ceremony there was much teasing within the ranks of the 94th Aero about the French custom of kissing the cheeks of the honoree after pinning the medal on him. The recipients were said to have shaved their faces carefully and powdered their cheeks with talc in anticipation of this practice, but General Gerard was short, and Rickenbacker intended to stand on his tiptoes to avoid the kiss. However, to everyone’s surprise, Gerard presented the medals with a handshake and a proper salute.13

  By this time the international press had begun to immortalize Allied pilots throughout the world, doubtless to the detriment of the many brave infantry officers and others in the combat arms who endured almost unbelievably frightful conditions on the front lines. But the pilots were novel—“knights of the air” was an expression often used to describe them. Besides, they were available for interviews and photographs in relatively comfortable quarters, in contrast to the grimy infantrymen, who lived day and night at the very dangerous front.

  The day after Hall’s disappearance, Eddie was named to replace him as commander of Number 1 Flight, a position for which he felt completely inadequate but knew he’d somehow have to measure up.

  On May 19 Rickenbacker, in his role as flight lead
er, was instructing a new man, Lieutenant Walter Smythe of New York. They made a full patrol along the front lines and, finding no action, crossed over into Germany. Near Verdun Rickenbacker spotted a German Albatros below and pounced, but he missed his shots and the two-seater fled.

  Fuming at himself, Rickenbacker made for home, but just as they crossed the front lines the Albatros appeared again, headed into Allied territory to take pictures. Incensed by the German’s insolence, Rickenbacker prepared to cut him off, but the German pilot was alerted and began his escape for a second time. When Rickenbacker looked around for Smythe he was nowhere to be found. Aghast that he might have lost his young charge, Rickenbacker glumly headed for home, where he would receive perhaps the hardest blow of his entire experience in the war. Much of the squadron was standing outside the hangar, talking in low tones, as he came in to land.

  Raoul Lufbery had just been killed.

  Smythe, it turned out, was safe and sound after an emergency landing at an aerodrome not far away, having developed engine problems while Rickenbacker was chasing the Albatros. But earlier that morning, not long after Eddie and Smythe had taken off, a large enemy observation aircraft appeared over the field from the direction of St.-Mihiel.

  The plane, which was said to have been armored, and with multiple machine guns, was possibly a Gotha twin-engine bomber.c The only 94th Aero Squadron aviators available as the enemy plane lumbered brazenly over the airfield were Major Huffer, the commander, and a pilot named Oscar J. Gude, a wealthy New York–born, Viennese-trained pianist, widely thought to be a coward. Huffer and Gude took off in pursuit of the German, but Huffer was forced to return with engine trouble. Gude rose to the German’s altitude of approximately 2,000 feet and attacked but, much to the dismay of the spectators below, he shied so far away from the enemy machine as to be ineffective, at the same time expending all of his ammunition. The enemy pilot then began a long, wide turn and started a shambling retreat back toward Germany.