The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War

Hynes, Samuel

ISBN 10: 1494508419 ISBN 13: 9781494508418

Publisher: Tantor Audio, 2014

Synopsis

The Unsubstantial Air is the gripping story of the Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War I. Much more than a traditional military history, it is an account of the excitement of becoming a pilot and flying in combat over the Western Front, told through the voices of the aviators themselves.
A World War II pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes revives the adventurous young men who inspired his own generation to take to the sky. The volunteer fliers were often privileged-the sorts of college athletes and Ivy League students who might appear in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Hynes follows them from the flying clubs of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to training grounds in Europe and on to the front, where they learned how to fight a war in the air.
By drawing on letters sent home, diaries kept, and memoirs published in the years that followed, Hynes brings to life the emotions, anxieties, and triumphs of the young pilots. They gasp in wonder at the world seen from a plane, struggle to keep their hands from freezing in open air cockpits, party with actresses and aristocrats, rest at Voltaire's castle, and search for their friends' bodies on the battlefield. Their romantic war becomes more than that-a harsh but often thrilling reality.

About this title

About the Author:

Samuel Hynes is the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of a celebrated memoir of serving as a marine pilot in World War II, Flights of Passage. His book on soldiers' accounts of twentieth-century wars, The Soldiers' Tale, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Samuel lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

ONE

AN OCCUPATION FOR GENTLEMEN

 

The First World War was more than half over when the United States entered it in April 1917 and well into its last year before American troops engaged enemy forces on the Western Front. By then the terrible battles of Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme had been fought, and German troops had launched their 1917 spring offensive. That belated commitment came far too late for many young American men; from the first day, August 4, 1914, they were eager to get into this war that was not theirs.

Among those eager young men were seven who joined the French cause in the first months of the war, trained with the Service Aéronautique, and were the first to join what became the Lafayette Escadrille, the first squadron of American pilots to fly for France. They came from different places and from different lives.

Their motives for joining that far-off, foreign war were various and complex. Kiffin Rockwell was the son of an old southern family and the grandson of Confederate officers who had fought in the War Between the States. He’d been a student at Virginia Military Institute and considered himself already a trained soldier who only needed the experience of battle to fulfill himself. The war in Europe was “a great opportunity,” he wrote to his mother soon after he enlisted—an opportunity, perhaps, to follow his grandfathers’ example in a great charge, like the rebel charge at Chancellorsville. To that motive he added another, in a letter from France: “If I should be killed in this war I will at least die as a man should … I think if anything will make a man of me, it is this giving as a volunteer one’s best for an ideal.” Rockwell had just turned twenty-two. At that age, manhood is not a condition but a goal, and war is a training ground, a test. And death? Death is a romantic dream.

Victor Chapman, on holiday from his art studies in Paris, joined the French Foreign Legion, as Rockwell and many of the others did, but for reasons that seem quite opposite. Rockwell wanted romantic war, a war of ideals. Chapman didn’t write about such abstractions; his letters home are about the hard life of a common legionnaire, and his aim seems to have been simply to submerge himself in that life. You can speculate about why he would want to do that—perhaps to escape from his father, John Jay Chapman, a well-known New York man of letters with a high opinion of himself and high expectations for his children—but you can’t know. What you do know from his letters is that when he was in the Foreign Legion he was happy.

James McConnell quit his job with a railroad company and headed for war. Like Rockwell, McConnell saw the war as an opportunity—the opportunity of a lifetime, he told a friend back home. “These Sand Hills,” he said, gesturing toward the North Carolina landscape he lived in, “will be here forever, but the war won’t, and so I’m going.” That explanation seemed to worry him, for he added, “And I’ll be of some use, too, not just a sight-seer looking on; that wouldn’t be fair.” But clearly his deep motive wasn’t service; it was curiosity. War would be memorable, something huge and strange—like seeing Africa or the South Pole. It would be history happening, bigger than anything that could possibly happen to you back home. And he’d be right there in it. Curiosity like that is a young man’s itch; whatever you’re doing when you’re eighteen or twenty or twenty-two, it’s bound to be less exciting than the war that other young men just like you are fighting, somewhere else. Your idea of what that war is like will be far from the reality—nobody can imagine war who hasn’t seen and heard and touched and smelled it—but that war in your head will have a powerful attraction nonetheless. And so you’ll go where it is. So McConnell went.

William Thaw and Norman Prince had both lived in France when they were children and felt a love for the country that was a motive—something like patriotism, as though they were partly French. They were also both already sportsman-pilots, and that gave them another motive. In the air above the Western Front the world’s first flying war was being fought; up there they would use their flying skills in a new kind of sport, played for the highest possible stakes. Where else would you find a challenge like that?

I don’t know why Elliot Cowdin, a well-off young man of no visible employment, chose to go to war: he seems to have left no records, and there are gaps in his story. And then there was Bert Hall, a Paris taxi driver. In En l’Air!, the book he wrote toward the end of the war, he said he enlisted two days after the war began, because “if a country is good enough to live in it is good enough to fight for.” But everyone who knew Hall agreed that you couldn’t believe anything he said (for example, he didn’t enlist on August sixth but on the twenty-first). Would an American drifter who happened to be driving a taxi in Paris love France enough to fight for it? If he had been driving a taxi in Berlin, would he have fought for the Germans? Maybe the French army looked like a better job than taxi driving—not as well-paying (a common soldier in the French army got a penny a day in 1914), but more interesting and more exciting. Give it a try.

Here they are, all seven of them, with their two French officers. The date of the photograph is May 1916; by now they’re all trained pilots and are wearing the uniform of the Service Aéronautique. Most of them didn’t set out to be fliers. Only Prince enlisted directly in the French air service; Thaw tried to, but was turned down. Four—Chapman, Rockwell, Hall, and Thaw—first joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in the trenches; two—Cowdin and McConnell—first served as drivers in the American Ambulance Field Service.

It may seem strange that six of the first seven Lafayette Escadrille pilots should have begun their war on the ground. There are practical explanations. The French flight-training program was crowded in those early days, and there were more would-be pilots than there were training planes. For foreigners, the only sure and immediate routes into the war were the Foreign Legion and the ambulance service. The Legion had always welcomed les étrangers, no questions asked; criminals, fugitives, and vagabonds could submerge their old selves in the anonymity of the Legion—all you had to do was remember the alias you made up. To some young men—romantic ones like Rockwell—the regiments of the Legion must have seemed to offer what they wanted, pure war, where the real soldiers were and the real battles were being fought, right now.

The American Ambulance Field Service was almost the opposite: it was staffed and financed by Americans and recruited its drivers mainly on American college campuses, and its mission was not killing but saving lives. You can see how appealing that would be to some young men: you could be a sightseer at the war, as McConnell put it, while also being useful. You wouldn’t hurt anybody, and you might even persuade your mother that in an ambulance you wouldn’t get hurt. College students could sign up to drive during their summer vacation and be home again in time for the fall semester. It would be sort of like summer camp or a guided tour of the Continent.

There was another explanation for the earthbound choices those future pilots made in 1914 and early 1915: in the first months of the war combat flying hadn’t yet become romantic. The planes that flew above the Western Front weren’t there to fight, because they couldn’t: they weren’t armed. They were observation planes—a superior means of looking around, nothing more. The heroic myth of the air war, in which single pilots fought each other as though they were chivalric knights, would come later.

One more thing remains to be said about those seven pilots. I can say it best in the form of a table:

One of the seven is missing from that table—Bert Hall. We’ll come back to him.

Those six young men were all from well-off families, the kind that can afford to educate their sons in expensive schools and colleges. They were “college men”—a phrase of the time that identified not only an educational level but a small elite class; if America had an aristocracy, they’d be in it.

It’s not surprising that men of that class and background were drawn to military flying; even before the war, flying, for such young men, was a dashing, dangerous sport, like ocean sailing, motor racing, and polo. The men they knew who flew were sportsmen, who did what they did for its own sake, and for the competitiveness of it, and for the danger. If you were a sportsman-flier you entered air races and air meets, or you tried to set records—altitude records, speed records, distance records, endurance records (which would then be broken by some other gentleman sportsman)—or you flew from somewhere to somewhere else—Philadelphia to New York, Boston to Albany, New York to Washington, it didn’t much matter where—and dreamed of flying coast-to-coast or even across the Atlantic.

This kind of sportsman flying was expensive; you’d have to be wealthy to afford it. Two of the first seven Lafayette fliers were rich men’s sons. Norman Prince was the son of a Boston financier who expected his son to be a lawyer. Norman dutifully went to Harvard (class of 1908) and Harvard Law School (1911), passed the bar exam, and joined a Chicago law firm. It must have seemed to his father that that was that: his son was settled in what would be a prosperous upper-class career. But Norman was less interested in torts and injunctions than he was in a sportsman’s life. In 1912 he began to take flying lessons (he had to do it under a pseudonym to conceal his defection from his father), and in 1913 he quit the law altogether.

William Thaw had a more indulgent rich man for a father—a Pittsburgh banker who didn’t seem to mind at all when his son dropped out of Yale after his sophomore year (it was 1913) to take up flying. He even bought him a plane of his own, a Curtiss flying boat that young Thaw kept moored at the family’s Newport home and used to take friends cruising over Narragansett Bay, as though a plane were simply a new kind of yacht.

The social class that Prince and Thaw belonged to would provide many of the American volunteers who first flew for the French and became the Lafayette Escadrille (including all but one of the seven in the photograph). But what about the seventh, the odd man out? Bert Hall was the son of a Missouri dirt farmer. Uneducated and poor, Bert had worked as a farmhand, a section hand on a railway, a chauffeur, a circus performer (he was the “Human Cannonball”), and a seaman before he reached Paris and took up taxi driving.

Many men like Hall—wanderers, jacks-of-all-trades, free spirits—became pilots in the European war. Some flew with the Lafayette Escadrille: the great Raoul Lufbery was one; Eddie Rickenbacker was another. (Lufbery had been an aviation mechanic before he became a pilot; Rickenbacker had been a racing driver.) The use of such men as pilots didn’t bother other Allied air forces (or for that matter the Germans); they’d probably serve as enlisted men, while the gentlemen pilots became commissioned officers, but they’d fly. For the Americans, however, the social class to which military pilots would belong, and from which they should be drawn, was a question to be debated.

*   *   *

By early 1915, Kiffin Rockwell had spent enough time—some four months—in the trenches to know what war in the Foreign Legion was like. It was, he had found, a small-scale, anonymous business in which the dying was grotesque and random and without glory and the space between battles was filled with mud, lice, bad food, shell fire, and blistered feet. In a letter to his brother Paul, who had been invalided out of the trenches and sent back to Paris, he wrote, “The reason I keep writing you not to come back here is because I know that you are not able to stand it, and then there is no romance or anything to the infantry. It is not a question of bravery, it is a question of being a good day laborer. So if you don’t want to leave the service, get into something that requires education and not brute strength.” Kiffin will stay in the Legion for another eight months, fight in some fierce battles, and be badly wounded, but he has served without belief in the war he is fighting; as he says in that February letter, he has rejected two of the big words of war: “romance” and “bravery.” Reality has revised his dream.

But to Rockwell one big word remains: “gentleman.” To realize that word, he will turn to aviation. That move will be more than a change in the work he does; it will be a change of class. To switch from infantry to flying, he wrote to his mother, was to “jump from the lowest branch of the military service to the highest. It is the most interesting thing I have ever done, and is the life of a gentleman, and I am surrounded by gentlemen.” The move meant, among other things, comfort: clean clothes on your back, clean sheets on your bed, a bath when you need one, a little money in your pocket. With all those comforts, you are a gentleman. And you are treated like one. Rockwell had been a day laborer at war long enough.

Victor Chapman felt differently about the Legion; he had found a kind of contentment in the ordinary life of a machine gunner. “We, the Mitraille, are joyous,” he wrote to his father, “good chiefs, fair treatment, and sure fighting before us.” But his father wanted more for his son than that; he wanted a war that would reflect glory on himself. That spring John Jay Chapman was in Paris pulling strings to transfer his son to the Service Aéronautique. “It is perfectly obvious,” Victor wrote to his stepmother, “that I am not wanted [in the Air Service] and have been foisted on them by Uncle Willy and Papa.” (Uncle Willy was his mother’s brother, who lived in Paris and had connections.) But his father insisted, and so Victor left the Legion and became a pilot.

At the same time, Americans in the ambulance service were also beginning to look toward aviation as a better route to war. James McConnell, who had come to France as an ambulance driver, reflected in 1916 on his fellow drivers’ motives for transferring to aviation: “There seems to be a fascination to aviation, particularly when it is coupled with fighting. Perhaps it’s because the game is new, but more probably because nobody knows anything about it. Whatever the reason, adventurous young Americans were attracted by it in rapidly increasing numbers.” The young drivers had come to France expecting excitement, adventure, danger, and the company of other young idealists, and some of them had been disappointed. They had imagined steering their ambulances full of wounded men to safety through exploding shells and whistling bullets; instead, they often found themselves driving supply trucks or simply hanging around, waiting. Even if they reached the front and drove an ambulance there, they often didn’t feel altogether in the war. McConnell explained that feeling: “All along I had been convinced that the United States ought to aid in the struggle against Germany. With that conviction, it was plainly up to me to do more than drive an ambulance. The more I saw the splendour of the fight the French were fighting, the more I felt like an embusqué—what the British called a ‘shirker.’ So I made up my mind to go into aviation.”

In December 1915 three of the Americans who were flying with French squadrons—Elliot Cowdin, Norman Prince, and William Thaw—returned to the United States. Ostensibly, they were simply home on leave, but in fact they were there to demonstr...

About this edition

• Publisher: Tantor Audio
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1494508419
• ISBN 13: 9781494508418
• Binding: Audio CD