The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (19 page)

It could climb faster than any German fighter and turn and bank more tightly, though these characteristics had grown somewhat obsolete: by late 1918 there were so many planes available that pilots had figured out there was safety in numbers, mitigating the need for the complicated maneuvers practiced by Richthofen, Oswald Boelcke, Billy Bishop, Lufbery, and other aces.

One unfortunate characteristic of the Nieuport was the tendency of its engine to catch fire in combat because of the way the copper fuel tubes were attached. Fire was an aviator’s most dreaded fear, and “crash and burn” stories preoccupied many a pilot’s mind.

So far as fire safety went the typical World War I plane was little more than a flying matchstick—the frames were made of wood covered by fabric stretched by applying highly flammable glue, or “dope,” and the tiniest fire could quickly become an inferno. Another unhappy feature was that in some cases cheap or shoddy glue had been used to stretch the fabric on the Nieuport’s wings, which resulted in its sometimes tearing away on fast, steep dives—a frightening prospect.
^‖

There were lengthy discussions among aviators about whether to jump out or to try and ride a burning plane down. Both were problematic because the American air forces were not supplied with parachutes at that time. Lufbery’s advice was to stay with the plane and sideslip in order to fan the flames away from oneself. Some suggested it might be possible to jump at the last moment into water or the soft mud of no-man’s-land, but the consensus was against it. In any case the Nieuport 28—like the de Havilland, another biplane whose rear fuel tank earned its reputation as the “flaming coffin”—had its detractors.

T
HE MORNING THAT
M
AJOR
L
UFBERY
, Rickenbacker, and Lieutenant Douglas Campbell took off—unarmed—on the 94th’s first patrol coincided precisely with the great German offensive of 1918. The Allies had been expecting a major offensive since the advent of the Russian Revolution when subsequent communist capitulation the year before took Russia out of the war and resulted in freeing a million German soldiers to relocate to the Western Front.

For Germany it was a desperate move. After four years of war, with its population at home starving because of the British blockade and Americans entering the war against them by the millions, the German army was terribly jaded. The German commander Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff hoped to catch the Allies off guard, including the newly arrived First U.S. Army, under Major General Hunter Liggett. He did.

To the rumble of thousands of pieces of artillery, a quarter million Germans swarmed out of their trenches toward Allied lines in the St. Mihiel–Pont-à-Mousson sector on the French–German border, as Major Lufbery and his little dawn patrol went up for a look-see. Lufbery had told them to stay close to him and, if there was any trouble, to do what he did.

They flew east picking up the Moselle River valley and were tooling along toward the Rhine when they were assailed by huge black bursts of enemy antiaircraft fire, commonly known as flak but then called archie.
^a
Eighteen-pound artillery shells jerked and buffeted their fragile cloth-covered aircraft so violently that it felt as if the planes would be thrown out of the sky.

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

A
PRIL 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.”

T
HE 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 was 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.