Y
OU SHOULD LIVE GLORIOUSLY, GENEROUSLY,
D
ANGEROUSLY
. S
AFETY
LAST . . . WE WHO FLY DO
SO FOR THE LOVE OF FLYING.
W
E ARE ALIVE IN THE
AIR WITH THIS MIRACLE THAT LIES IN OUR HANDS . . .
YOU CAN’T GET THAT FEELING IN ANYTHING ELSE
.

—CECIL LEWIS,
SAGITTARIUS RISING

AUTHOR’S NOTE

LORDS OF THE SKY
is about the fighter pilot.

There is no way to study him without knowing something of the great conflicts that created him. Each of these subjects could be the work of a lifetime, and this is certainly true for some scholars. There is simply no way to mention everyone who deserves recognition in the past century of aircraft and weapons development, tactical innovation, and war. Nor is this the format to describe the immense dedication and sacrifices by all those who put aviators in the air to fight—you have my thanks and my hope that some author does your service justice as well. My intent in this book is to provide snapshots into key people, important technological innovations, and the places in which these aviators fought in order to better understand the impact that this past century has had upon us all.

The book begins with the Great War, as World War I was originally known, and in particular the Western Front. This is no reflection on the other vast battlefields of this war; I chose this as a starting point simply because the sky over the trenches was the birthplace of the fighter pilot. There were many fine pilots in other theaters who fought brilliantly, but the main event was here. Also, the development of fighter aircraft and the combat pilot was more closely tied to ground actions during the Great War than was the case in subsequent conflicts. Aviation services were a fledging military branch and closely attached to their parent armies. So the ground situation is explained in some detail to give the reader an explanation of
why
fighter development occurred as it did. The immense scale and relatively independent air campaigns of the future were just that—in the future. Everything that came later will reveal the debt we owe to a very few pilots, the Lords of the Sky, who shaped history and largely gave us the world we live in today.

PART ONE

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS:
1914–1918

L
O
! T
HY DREAD
E
MPIRE
, C
HAOS
!
IS RESTOR’D
;

L
IGHT DIES BEFORE THY UNCREATING WORD
;

T
HY HAND, GREAT
A
NARCH
!
LETS THE CURTAIN FALL
;

A
ND UNIVERSAL
D
ARKNESS BURIES
A
LL
. . .

—
ALEXANDER POPE

CHAPTER 1

“FROM FLIGHT TO FIGHT”

A
PRIL
1, 1915

D
IXMUDE,
B
ELGIUM

COLD.

It was cold. And wet.

The French pilot shivered in his sodden leather flying jacket, his shoulders hunched against the damp, chill air. Wriggling his icy toes against the rudder bar to restore a little blood flow, he decided the goggles were nearly useless. They were fogged over on the inside and fuzzy with rain on the outside, so he shoved them up and squinted through the wet air.

He opened the narrow throttle lever, and the 80-horsepower Gnome rotary engine roared. As he eased the stick back, the big tail surfaces bit into the thick air and the aircraft’s nose came up. Wiping his streaming face, the pilot tugged the goggles down and stared through the spinning propeller, willing the clouds to disappear. Gray tendrils slipped over the wings as the little monoplane slowly climbed, motor straining to push it through the opaque clouds.

Roland Garros muttered, blinking against the blowing rain. Normally the French aviator could hunch down behind the windscreen and at least have a dry face, but not today. Smiling a bit, he reached up and touched the wooden grip of the machine gun bolted in front of him.

No rifle or pistol today. And no flare gun . . .
that
had been funny. Imagine, shooting at another flying machine with a flare pistol. He’d even heard that another pilot had trailed a grapnel behind an aircraft, trying to snag a German. Last week two of the
boche
had taunted Garros, and he was still infuriated; the observer had actually stood up in the backseat and grabbed his crotch before they’d flown away laughing.

But not today.

Teeth gleaming against his dark, wet skin, the pilot smiled. Today he had a surprise for them. He patted the weapon again, then tucked his hand back inside to keep warm. The Hotchkiss model 1907 was a French infantry machine gun, heavy and short-barreled, but he’d managed to fasten it on his machine in such a way that the Germans would never suspect a thing. He hoped.

As his Morane-Saulnier passed 1,500 meters, Garros broke into the brilliant April sunlight over Belgium. Off to the west, he could see darker gray patches of water through breaks in the clouds. He’d flown over the English Channel before the war, and the Mediterranean also. He shivered and hunched down deeper into the leather coat.
Why not fight in a warm place?
This war had been going on for eight months now and showed no sign of ending soon. Christmas, they’d said; it would be finished by Christmas. Here it was April already, freezing and wet . . . and the food! Absolute shit. Not a decent cup of coffee since New Year’s Eve.

Leveling off at 2,000 meters, he leaned out the fuel-oil mixture, shoved the goggles up once more, and felt cold rain seep in under his collar. Nudging the stick left, he pushed against the left rudder bar, and his boot slipped on the metal. The aircraft lurched to the left. Glancing at his watch, Garros did the math in his head and figured on another forty-five minutes of flying. He’d been working on a gauge that would show how many liters of fuel remained. It was a needle on a round dial, like a clock face, attached to a float in the fuel tank, but he couldn’t get it to work right. Yet.

Squinting against the wind, Garros checked the machine gun. His mechanic had fashioned several metal straps and bolted them on the fuselage perpendicular to the cockpit. Then he’d welded two horseshoe-shaped brackets to the straps and mounted the gun. The gas-operated Hotchkiss fired twenty-four rounds from a metal strip inserted in the breech, and Garros had four such strips shoved into his boot tops, two in each leg. He’d have to load, aim, fly, and shoot, but he knew this would work. The attack would be unexpected, and this time he’d be the one laughing.

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