The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (20 page)

F
OUR DAYS AFTER
C
HAPMAN 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 leader, 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.

Watching this irresolute show with mounting disgust, Lufbery jumped on a motorcycle parked in front of his barracks and sped to the hangars, where he found that his own plane was down for maintenance. However, another Nieuport, belonging to Lieutenant Phillip W. Davis, was lined up on the runway, armed and fit to go. With no further ado, Lufbery climbed into the machine and took off.

When he caught up with the German he immediately closed and attacked, but then he quickly broke off, evidently because of a gun jam. When he had cleared the jam Lufbery renewed his assault, firing short bursts, but as he dived closer to the German he suddenly veered off sharply. Flames were shooting from his machine, which seemed almost to hover on its tail for a moment before spiraling straight down.

Somewhere about 1,500 feet above the village of Maron, Lufbery rose up out of the cockpit toward the tail and leaped away from the flaming inferno that now engulfed most of his aircraft. When he landed he was violently impaled on a picket fence in the backyard rose garden of a peasant woman. One of her daughters heard a noise and went out to see and recognized Luf from newspaper photos. He had become a colossal hero to the French. Inconsolable, and having nothing else, she quickly strewed his crumpled body with rose petals and other blossoms to cover the sad heap.

Lufbery’s plane landed less than a quarter mile away in a field across the Moselle River, a charred, smoldering wreckage.
^d
Soon other villagers arrived and they carried his remains to a bier in the ancient town hall, where as was the custom they shrouded his broken, still-warm corpse in the flowers of the French countryside in May. Even as Rickenbacker was being told the first details of the incident at the field, the telephone in the hangar rang with news from a French officer as to the exact spot where Lufbery had fallen. Eddie, Huffer, Campbell, and other of Luf’s friends jumped into a car and arrived at the cottage less than thirty minutes after the mishap occurred, only to find, as Eddie remembered later, that “loving hands had removed his body.”

The pilots asked the French authorities to send the body to the American hospital near their aerodrome and sadly made their way back home. There they were met by a Captain DeRode, a French Escadrille flier, who informed them that his leading ace had witnessed the Lufbery affair and immediately pursued the German plane but was shot dead through the heart, crashing only a mile from where Lufbery had gone down. Another French pilot, however, at last downed the miserable thing within French lines, and soldiers made prisoners of its crew. Nothing, though, could offset the black grief that hovered like a pall over the 94th Aero Squadron. Somebody once asked Lufbery what he planned to do after the war, and he laughed and replied, “There won’t be any after the war for a fighter pilot.” Luf had been their mentor, inspiration, guiding spirit, and friend.

Lufbery’s funeral was conducted next afternoon. The fliers of the 94th Aero Squadron spent the morning in spit-and-polish, because they wanted to look their very best. Among the hundreds of mourners would be the generals Gerard, Liggett, Edwards, and of course Billy Mitchell—Lufbery had been one of his favorites. A grave had been prepared in a small corner of a cemetery near the base hospital. Known as the Aviators Cemetery, it already contained the remains of half a dozen fliers of the First Pursuit Group. Flowers surrounded the grave, as well as a large pyramid of floral wreaths sent by a number of military commands.

The mourners gathered on the airfield, and as the procession carrying the casket made its way up a hill to the graveside Lieutenant Kenneth P. Culbert, a marine detached to the army as an aerial observer and mapmaker, described the scene in a letter to his former history professor at Harvard. “As we marched to the grave the sun was sinking behind the mountain that rises so abruptly in front of Toul. The sky was faultless blue and the air heavy with the scent of blossoms. An American and a French general led the procession, followed by a band which played the funeral march and ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ so beautifully that I for one could hardly keep my eyes dry. We passed before crowds of American nurses in their clean white uniforms and a throng of patients and French civilians. He was given a full military burial with the salutes of the firing squad and the repetition of taps, one echoing the other from the west. I have never heard ‘Taps’ blown as beautifully as on that afternoon. Even some of the officers joined the women at dabbing at their eyes with white handkerchiefs. My only prayer is that somehow, by some means, I may do as much as he for my country before I too go west [get killed]—if in that direction I am to travel.”
^e

At a precisely synchronized moment during the service, Eddie Rickenbacker and four other pilots of 1-Flight throttled down their engines and glided quietly above the funeral cortege, which had gathered around with hats off as Luf was being lowered into his grave. Each pilot cast out sprays of flower petals that floated down like snow upon the mourners, then they flew back to the 94th Aero field, which was starkly empty. U.S. Army Major Gervais Raoul Lufbery had been the first American Ace of Aces, credited with shooting down eighteen German planes. Afterward, someone wrote of him, “Luf belonged to the balladiers and the boulevards—he was out of another age, and he would face death as he faced life.”
¹⁴

W
ITH THE DEATH OF
L
UFBERY
, Rickenbacker’s war became personal. No longer did he see it, as others did, as some kind of game of medieval-style jousting, or a competition to see whose skills were greater in stunts and maneuvers. He captured it well, and darkly, by saying, “Fighting in the air is not sport, it is scientific murder.”

The squadron had arrived at Toul aerodrome barely six weeks earlier, but by now the grind of war was taking its toll on Rickenbacker and the other pilots. Day after day they played cat and mouse with the crafty Germans who, except for their observation planes and their escorts, rarely crossed the front into Allied lines. Instead they were content to set traps behind German lines for the American pilots—who by now had become wary of them—and when confronted the Germans would usually retreat unless they were flying in large groups. Rickenbacker considered this “pure yellowness.”