The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  Whatever the answer, when he got into the air Rickenbacker seemed to have felt he was bulletproof. It didn’t mean he had no fear. “Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do,” he famously said. “There can’t be courage unless you’re scared.” Rickenbacker simply waited until the plane touched down on the runway and then the shaking began. That was how he dealt with it.

  SEPTEMBER 26 WAS THE BIG AMERICAN PUSH at the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, and the squadron received orders to attack the German observation balloons that were run up all along the front each day about fifteen miles apart and two miles behind the lines. The observation balloon, used by both sides, was an extremely useful tool for gathering immediate intelligence of enemy movement. They were enormous blimp-size bags filled with highly flammable hydrogen gas, winched up on cable to a height of about 1,500 feet, from which an observer with a telescope or field glasses had a remarkable and immediate view of enemy positions and activity for up to twenty miles in all directions.

  These apparatuses were vulnerable to enemy fighter planes whose every fourth bullet was an incendiary tracer, liable to ignite the hydrogen balloons. But often it took many, many bullets to bring them down in flames, perhaps because of early morning moisture. Suspended in the basket below the balloon, the observer stood or sat with a parachute strapped around his stomach, and at the first sign of trouble he leaped over the side of his gondola to the safety of the ground. If, however, an enemy pilot cut his engine and glided silently in to shoot the balloon, it could explode before the observer was able to escape.

  After four years of trial and error on the Western Front, elaborate defense arrangements had been established to protect the Drachen or gas bags. Antiaircraft cannons were dug in all around the balloon, and if the archie was ineffective at high altitudes, at 1,500 feet it was deadly. The balloons were also surrounded by machine guns, which were highly accurate at that range. Eddie had already been foiled on a balloon-hunting expedition about a month earlier. This time he was taking no chances.

  Hat in the Ring had been assigned to take out two balloons on the morning of the big American attack. Eddie summoned five of his best fliers and took off at 5:20 a.m., before daylight, timed to arrive behind the front just as the day broke and the Germans were getting their balloons in the air. As the pilots climbed there began to unfold from Rickenbacker’s perspective the entire panorama of the battle in progress. The horizon was lit up with a continuous flashing from thousands of Allied guns and the rolling barrage exploded in front of hundreds of thousands of American doughboys moving forward to attack the German positions.

  Flying over the dreadful no-man’s-land Eddie saw ahead in the just-breaking dawn several vertical streams of machine-gun tracer bullets, indicating that the enemy balloon was being attacked by his men. A moment later came a gigantic burst of flame, then another huge flare to the north as the second balloon was destroyed. Delighted at the success, Eddie was nevertheless frustrated that he’d missed the action and turned east where he knew there lay another German gas bag. No sooner had he leveled out than a sudden great conflagration ahead announced that that balloon, too, had gone up in flames.

  While Rickenbacker watched the fiery tumult light the sky and landscape and slowly fade away, he suddenly had a feeling that he was not alone. Lo and behold, when he looked to his left, there was a German Fokker flying right alongside him. Eddie turned to face him but the Fokker pilot must have seen Rickenbacker just a moment earlier, because he had already turned into Eddie and begun firing. As they headed directly toward each other the two planes seemed to be connected by “ropes of fire” as the tracers of each plane’s two guns seemed to make a solid line in the dim morning light. Before they could collide the German dived and Eddie made a renversement, coming up on the Fokker’s tail, whereupon he pressed the triggers and the Fokker spun and crashed to the earth. As he watched it falling, Eddie suddenly felt a big jerk, followed by intense vibration in the plane, and he turned back toward Allied lines. The vibration threatened to wreck the plane and Rickenbacker considered himself lucky to make it to the first aerodrome he saw, which was that of the new 27th Squadron. After he landed Eddie discovered the source of the vibration. One or more bullets from the Fokker had severed his propeller blade nearly in half. Again, he was lucky to be alive. Next morning Eddie shot down a balloon of his own.

  AS THE ALLIED ATTACKS CONTINUED to push the Germans farther back, particularly in the American sector, the air war over the Meuse River and Argonne Forest became more ferocious. The Germans, desperate for timely intelligence on the American advance, were constantly sending up balloons and aerial observation planes. It was the First Pursuit Group’s job to knock these down and, as usual, the 94th’s Hat in the Ring gang was in the thick of the fighting.

  It was about this time that Rickenbacker acquired a captured Alsatian, or German shepherd dog. From whom is unclear, but probably someone in the front lines. He named him Spad, and from then on the animal became the mascot of the Hat in the Ring squadron, and Eddie Rickenbacker’s devoted follower.

  The army was increasingly concerned that the Germans were replacing their balloons as fast as the airplanes could shoot them down, so Billy Mitchell ordered the entire group out to remedy the situation. Rickenbacker devised a technique in which two pilots would attack a balloon while the rest of the squadron hovered above to protect them. On the afternoon of October 10 he selected Hamilton Coolidge and his pal Reed Chambers to attack two particularly obnoxious balloons near Aincreville.

  When they arrived the balloon wasn’t up, but Rickenbacker spotted eleven Fokkers flying in beautiful formation below and instantly sicced himself on the last in line, setting the enemy’s fuel tank on fire with incendiary tracer bullets. Circling to follow the plane as it dropped, Rickenbacker saw the German pilot bring his flaming plane level and, to Eddie’s astonishment, suddenly leaped overboard into space. Attached to the German’s seat was a “dainty parachute” and the man floated gently to earth while the amazed Rickenbacker watched from above.

  On the way home Eddie recognized his friend Jimmy Meissner being attacked by two Fokkers. He jumped into the fray and sent one of the brutes down out of control, while the other fled for his life. It would have made for a good day except the group lost two pilots killed in the action, one of them turned into a blazing inferno by archie as he attacked a balloon.

  On October 11, Rickenbacker got a Fokker and one of his two favorite balloon busters, Reed Chambers, got two. His balloon-busting partner and second ranking ace in the 94th, Captain Coolidge, who had dropped out of Harvard to join the Air Service, wasn’t so lucky. He had come to the aid of some American de Havilland bombers under attack by a squadron of Fokkers when he inadvertently flew into a barrage of archie intended for the bombers and was killed.j

  As the American bombers crossed over into Allied territory one fell behind and began to lose altitude. A Fokker with the red-painted nose of Richthofen’s Flying Circus swooped down for what the pilot must have thought would be an easy kill. Rickenbacker was on him like a hawk. Desperate, the Fokker pilot tried to loop up and over to get behind the Spad, but at the apex of his loop he stalled and his engine quit. The pilot attempted to glide back to German territory but Eddie, hoping to keep him within Allied lines and capture his plane intact, began herding him like a prized sheep, nipping at his nose with tracer bullets to head him off toward an American airstrip.

  He just about had the Fokker forced down when “an unknown idiot in a Spad” suddenly flew in and attacked it. Furious, Rickenbacker ran the Spad off but it was too late; in trying to avoid the Spad the Fokker was forced to land short of the American runway and crashed on hard terrain, demolishing the aircraft. The pilot climbed out of the wreckage and waved at Rickenbacker as an American officer mounted on horseback arrived to arrest him.

  Next morning Rickenbacker and several of Ham Coolidge’s friends drove a staff car up to the front lines to look for Coolidge’s body. An infantry lieutenant who had witnessed
the crash led them to the wreckage and provided a squad of gravediggers. Under constant shellfire, the chaplain of the infantry regiment conducted burial services as they laid the mangled corpse into the grave, over which was placed a cross and a wreath of flowers, also courtesy of the infantry regiment. Eddie, using a borrowed Kodak camera, took a photograph of the grave to send to the family.

  On October 22, Lieutenant Oscar Gude, who had been cashiered from the 94th Hat in the Ring to the 93rd Indian Head Squadron after his disgraceful performance against the German aircraft that killed Raoul Lufbery, performed his final deed of treachery. He deserted to the Germans. Not only that, he did it in the Spad XIII belonging to Major John Huffer, formerly the commanding officer of the 94th before he was forced to transfer to the 93rd following his court-martial.

  Gude was flying Huffer’s plane on patrol in the rain when he suddenly vanished from the back of a pack of eight American fighter planes. His fellow pilots could not account for him, and he was carried as “missing in action.”

  According to the official history of the 93rd16: “Gude landed on the German airfield at Metz [Mars la Tour] after circling the field twice, taxied up to the line and got out smiling, rather weakly, and said, ‘Fini la Guerre.’ ” The history shows a photograph of German pilots surrounding Huffer’s perfectly intact Spad. In prison camp, Gude told the story of having shot down two German planes before running out of gas, but upon making this assertion he was attacked and severely beaten by a British pilot who had seen the entire sorry episode.k

  October 30 was a big day over the Argonne. The Germans were convulsed in a death spasm and throwing everything they had into the air. That afternoon Rickenbacker jumped two Fokkers, both red nosers from the Richthofen bunch, who were stalking a Spad, hoping to ambush it. Instead Eddie sent one down in flames while the other ingloriously fled for home. He didn’t know it then but this, his twenty-sixth victory, would also be his last.

  The next day it began to rain and Eddie received a pass to Paris, which he described as a changed city from the careworn place he’d last visited. Turkey had just surrendered and Austria-Hungary was that day expected to do the same. Everyone knew the end was near. Eddie bought up several stacks of English-language newspapers and, next day, took off for the front lines where he passed out copies to the infantrymen in their trenches.

  In the pilot’s mess the evening of November 10, Eddie answered the phone and was informed that an order to cease firing would be invoked at eleven o’clock next morning. He put down the phone and said, “The war is over!”

  At first there was silence in the room, and then pandemonium erupted. Men began to shout and whoop and rushed to their rooms to get pistols to shoot off in celebration. As word quickly spread, archie up and down the lines began firing promiscuously. Outside, mortars sent up star shells and flares and rockets were also fired. Somebody took out all the liquor from the whiskey locker and emptied it into a large tub, from which orderlies served it, without ice, in coffee cups, themselves included. Rickenbacker caught a group of pilots rolling out tanks of gasoline from the hangar. Instead of stopping them, he joined them, striking the match that set it off and dancing around the bonfire like everybody else, slapping one another on the back.

  Some men jumped into mud holes and rolled around like swine. Others broke up furniture and dishes. One pilot, an ace, swooped up to Eddie flapping his arms and shouted incredulously, We won’t be shot at anymore!

  Next morning broke muggy and foggy. Even though the orders said for pilots to stay on the ground, Rickenbacker got in his plane about ten a.m. and took off for the front, where for four years millions of men had been trying to kill each other along a five-hundred-mile line (and millions had succeeded). Flying low—around 500 feet—he arrived over Verdun where he saw both Germans and Americans hunkering in their trenches. At exactly the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, men on both sides began clambering out of their trenches and into no-man’s-land, casting away their guns, flinging their helmets into the air. In other parts of the line it was more subdued, and men gingerly poked their heads up and looked around, amazed that they were not shot at. In some places, field larks wheeled in the sky. French, British, and American regimental bands played their country’s national anthem. At last the storms were over. Away from the front, the archie and mortars again began their triumphal celebrations and Rickenbacker figured he’d best get back on the ground before somebody accidently blew him away.

  * Billiken dolls, quite popular in their time, were plump Buddha-like creatures with elfin ears and a mischievous smile, the 1908 creation of a Missouri art teacher who said the image came to her in a dream.

  † Upwards of $1 million in today’s dollars.

  ‡ During World War II Spaatz would take command of the renowned Eighth Air Force, based in England, and later air operations in the European theater. Afterward, he served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force.

  § Whiskey, a male lion, so named because he once drank a saucer of it, and Soda, a female, were originally acquired as cubs for mascots by some Escadrille fliers, but Lufbery raised them, and as they grew large they followed him everywhere around the aerodrome. When the Lafayette Escadrille was broken up the lions were sent to the Paris zoo.

  ‖ Lieutenant James Meissner, after such a dive, was horrified to find that he had lost almost the entire fabric covering his upper wing. He bumped home on the bottom wing, but if that, too, had lost its fabric his plane would have assumed the aerodynamic characteristics of a stone.

  a Because of the type of powder used, German antiaircraft fire burst with black puffs; French burst with white puffs.

  b The German pilots of both planes escaped serious injury.

  c Controversy over the type of German plane will probably never be resolved. Rickenbacker thought it was an Albatros but didn’t actually see it. Junkers armored some of its planes to protect crew but did not make a biplane. Gotha, which also armored for crew, did make a biplane, but it was a bomber, not an observation machine. Others insist that it was a Rumpler, but that company did not make a twin-engine plane. The only thing most parties agree on is that the German machine was large and crew served.

  d It was speculated that part or all of Lufbery’s mishap was due to his flying a plane with which he was not completely familiar. Ironically, Lieutenant Davis, whose plane Lufbery had borrowed, was killed less than two weeks later, flying Lufbery’s plane.

  e Lieutenant Culbert was killed next day while mapping enemy positions, in the crash of an observation plane piloted by Lieutenant Walter Barneby, near Toul.

  f A photograph exists of a sour-looking, bare-headed Hall glaring out of a German staff car with a handkerchief tied at the back of his head as a bandage for his nose. After the war, Hall located in Tahiti and went on to cowrite the novel Mutiny on the Bounty, from which several motion pictures were made.

  g Specifically, Johnson accused Huffer of appearing at a party in public with a “notorious prostitute.” At the court-martial Billy Mitchell testified that Huffer had come to the American service “from the French” where, he implied, sexual mores were somewhat more relaxed, and therefore Huffer didn’t know any better. In the end the prosecution was apparently unable to disprove the virtue—or lack of—of the lady in question, and Huffer was acquitted.

  h Harvard conferred a bachelor of arts degree on Quentin Roosevelt posthumously.

  i Went into a steep dive.

  j “Ham” Coolidge was the great-great-great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson and the best friend of Quentin Roosevelt, who had been killed three months earlier. Like Roosevelt, Coolidge received his degree with the Harvard Class of 1919 posthumously.

  k Upon his release after the war, Gude was not court-martialed, apparently for lack of evidence—or lack of interest—and he went on to distinguish himself (and become fabulously wealthy) as a pioneer in the electrical sign business, especially in the lighting up of Broadway, for which he is said to have coined the phrase “
the Great White Way.”

  CHAPTER 6

  NEW YORK TO PARIS

  No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.

  —ORVILLE WRIGHT

  CHARLES LINDBERGH TOOK SURPRISINGLY WELL to the U.S. Army’s stern regimentation. In March of 1924, age twenty-two, he reported along with 104 other cadets to the U.S. Army Flying School at Brooks Field, near San Antonio, Texas. When the courses of instruction and the weeding-out process were over a year later, only nineteen of these would be left to graduate as officers, and Lindbergh would stand at the top of the class.

  With the lessons of World War I firmly entrenched in its curriculum, the school was perhaps the finest of its type in the world. The first half year of instruction included twenty-five courses, among them aerodynamics, field service regulations, engines, mapmaking, ratio theory, aerial photography, and military law. This was on top of ground school and actual flying.

  The flying was done in the morning because there was less wind. The instructors were war-hardened veterans, and the training plane was the Curtiss Jenny, such as Lindbergh had once owned but with a more powerful Hispano-Suiza 150-horsepower engine and a top speed of 125 miles per hour, compared with his Jenny’s 90 miles per hour.* Other courses were conducted in observation, meteorology, gunnery, navigation, formation flying, bombing, combat attack and pursuit—this last was the most difficult and dangerous and the branch Lindbergh aspired to.

  When he first arrived, though, Lindbergh seemed to slip into his old sloppy studying habits, and his first grades were low C’s—barely passing, when two failing marks constituted a washout. This time, he took stock and realized that this was something he really wanted to do and that there would be no second chances. It was an epiphany of sorts, and a good one. He studied until taps and then often made his way to the latrine to study under the lights till midnight. For once in his life he was scared of failure.