The Price of Glory (35 page)

Had Immelmann’s death not intervened, the appearance of Boelcke’s ‘Flying Circus’ at Verdun would almost certainly have spelled disaster for the individualist French flyers. For when the Battle of the Somme broke out in July, Boelcke — having persuaded his seniors of his indispensability at the front — accounted for fifty-one planes with his ‘Flying Circus’, of which twenty were his own personal bag. That autumn the German Airforce reached the summit of its achievement, downing 123 Allied planes in one month over the Somme, for a loss of only twenty-seven. The fighter tactics of World War II had been born. Meanwhile, at Verdun, their true birthplace, air superiority never again left French hands. In June and July, the time when Pétain’s forces were in gravest danger of breaking, the German airforce was at its most impotent. Had it been otherwise the battle might well have had a different outcome. An outstanding victory for the French Airforce, the effort seemed however to prove too much for it. From Verdun onwards, it went into
a steady decline, with the air war becoming more and more of a straight contest between the British and the Germans.

The second German mistake in the air over Verdun, and by far the most disastrous of the two, was their failure to utilise initial superiority to cut the French supply routes to Verdun. Bombing was already an established function of airpower (as early as September 1914 German Taube aircraft had bombed Paris), and the Germans had the machines available. Why they did not use them in a manner that would almost certainly have sealed the fate of the French at Verdun seems to us almost incredible, and so indeed it seemed to contemporary German critics. Hans Ritter, writing shortly after the war, remarks:

What disruption carefully organised and constantly renewed bomb attacks would have wreaked upon this communications’ artery (i.e. the
Voie Sacrée
), crammed to the most extreme limits of its capacity, requires no details. Even after the first attacks numerous destroyed, burning vehicles would have blocked the road. Exploding munitions’ transports would have increased the confusion. Craters of heavy bombs would have cut the road in many places. A chaos that could not be disentangled must have arisen….

He goes on to point out that the Germans had standing by three squadrons of heavy ‘C-Machines’, seventy-two in number, each capable of dropping a 200-lb. bomb, which could reach their targets after half an hour’s flying. Thus twenty tons of explosives could have been rained down on the
Voie Sacrée
each day, not to mention demoralising night attacks. But for some extraordinary reason these bombers were wasted on attacking rail junctions that were already under effective artillery bombardment. In addition, for longer range bombing, there were seven Zeppelins at the call of the Crown Prince’s Army, including the LZ.95, Germany’s largest and latest, capable of climbing to 12,000 feet, beyond the effective reach of fighters. But it was not until June that important communication hubs, such as Bar-le-Duc, were seriously bombarded. Another German military critic, Hermann Wendt, points out that no concentrated attempt was ever made to destroy any of the vital Meuse bridges. During the whole battle, only one out of thirty-four was knocked out, and this on February 28th, when French demolition charges exploded by mistake.

Why these extraordinary German lapses? Perhaps the closest one can get to the truth lies in a remarkable admission made by the Chief of the
Luftwaffe
himself, General Hoeppner; that, at Verdun, ‘We did not exactly know what should be required of aviation.’

* * *

On May 18th, 1916, a German reconnaissance plane was lumbering home after a sortie in a nice quiet sector of Alsace. As it crossed its own lines, a plane suddenly dived on it out of the early morning sun. There were
tricoleur
roundels on its wings, but on the fuselage the fierce head of an Indian brave in full war feathers was an insignia that had not been seen before. The German observer stood up in his cockpit to ward off the attacker, but in a matter of seconds both he and his pilot were dead, their plane spinning groundwards.

The episode would never have become more than a statistic in a communiqué, but for the nationality of the victorious pilot;
Caporal
Kiffin Rockwell of Asheville, North Carolina. Rockwell’s victory was the first to be scored by the newly formed 124 Squadron, otherwise known as the
‘Escadrille Americaine’
— until pressure from the Isolationist lobby in Washington shortly caused it to be changed to the ‘
Escadrille Lafayette’
. The Squadron had originated as the idea of a New Englander, Norman Prince, who had learned to fly in Massachusetts in 1914, and then set off to France with the intention of forming a unit for American volunteer flyers. In Paris, he enlisted the aid of an influential American physician, Dr. Edmund L. Gros, who had had a hand in the creation of the American Ambulance Field Service. He and Gros pulled every string, while canvassing for suitable volunteers from the Foreign Legion and the Field Service. But it was over a year before the enormous propaganda potential of such a formation dawned upon the reluctant French authorities. April 16th, 1916, was the official birthday of the Squadron. It began life with seven Americans, all NCOs, under two French officers — Captain Thenault and Lieutenant de Laage de Meux. Equipped with new and speedy Nieuports, the Lafayette Squadron’s initial rôle was to fly escort to a French bomber group based on Luxeuil in the Vosges.

The Americans that comprised it, then and later, were an odd mixture; rich and poor, playboys and college boys, professional flyers and soldiers-of-fortune. If there was a common denominator it was
that mystical influence that France has wielded over young Americans ever since the Marquis de Lafayette sailed to the aid of George Washington’s embattled colonists. Most of the seven founder members had already been serving in France. William Thaw, the first to get a commission, had owned a hydroplane while still at Yale, which made him acceptable as a French bomber pilot. Reputed to have been the first man to fly under a bridge, Thaw had the face, physique and drinking habits of a Hemingway; after being wounded, his arm froze — to the rough mirth of the squadron — permanently in the crooked position. Victor Chapman, a Harvard graduate, had been at the Paris Beaux Arts when the war broke out and promptly joined the Foreign Legion as a private. So did Kiffin Rockwell, the twenty-one-year-old medical student from North Carolina, both of whose grandfathers had been officers in the Confederate Army. Chapman and Rockwell spent nearly a year in the trenches, Rockwell receiving a bad thigh wound in May 1915. James McConnell, another Southerner, and Elliot Cowdin, both came from the American Ambulance Service. Bert Hall, a true Texan soldier-of-fortune, already had a colourful pre-war flying career behind him. In 1912 he had signed on with Sultan Abdul Hamid to fly his own plane ‘free-lance’ against the Bulgarians. But, wisely, he had insisted on being paid in gold, daily. The Sultan’s bounty soon ran out. Joining the Foreign Legion in 1914, and later the French Airforce, Hall became the first to capture a German plane intact, by forcing it to land behind the French lines.

Among the later additions came a namesake, James Hall, who had started off the war as a private in Kitchener’s ‘First Hundred Thousand’. It was in the Lafayette that Hall, a flyer with almost superhuman luck (he once came down intact with an unexploded AA shell sticking out of his engine), founded the literary partnership with another pilot, Charles Nordhoff, that was to produce ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’. Joining the Squadron a few days after its inception was Raoul Lufbery, who, like Bert Hall, had also been a professional flyer before the war. Born in France, his parents had emigrated to the United States, but in 1912 Lufbery had joined forces with a dare-devil French aviator called Marc Pourpe. For two years they toured the Far and Near East, giving exhibitions in an old Blériot and narrowly escaping with their lives from superstitious Chinese villagers. In 1914 Pourpe enlisted and was killed in one of the first air battles. Lufbery became obsessed by the urge to avenge his friend,
which evidently pursued him until his own death in May 1918, and he was to be the first American to earn the title of ace.

On arriving at Luxeuil amid the wild beauty of the Vosges mountains, the volunteers who had come from a year in the trenches with the Legion or from the spartan discomfort of the Ambulance Service, thought that life was almost too good to be true. They were quartered in a sumptuous villa next to the Roman baths and messed with their officers (a notable departure from French Army custom) at the best hotel in the town. James McConnell, one of the four out of the first seven who did not survive the war, wrote with foreboding:

I thought of the luxury we were enjoying; our comfortable beds, baths, and motor cars, and then I recalled the ancient custom of giving a man selected for the sacrifice a royal time of it before the appointed day.

But nobody voiced such thoughts; the atmosphere was predominantly gay. Life between sorties was so organised that there was little opportunity to think. Pilots played poker and bridge endlessly and with a furious concentration, while in the background a gramophone wheezed out over and over again a well-worn recording of
Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle?
and the Squadron’s mascot, a young lion cub called Whiskey, prowled amiably about the mess. When there was a party, it often ended in the complete sacking of the local hotel; which simultaneously shocked and impressed the more orderly French pilots.

On the day after Kiffin Rockwell chalked up the Lafayette’s first victory, orders were received transferring the Squadron to the Verdun front. Verdun was to be its first big test. In bitter scrapping over Douaumont on May 24th, Thaw shot down a Fokker and then went back in the evening for more, but was cornered by three enemy planes. His plane was riddled with bullets, and one cut an artery in his arm, but he managed to land safely in the French lines. For his day’s exploits, he became the first American in the war to be awarded the
Légion d’Honneur.
That day also, Bert Hall shot down a plane and was wounded. Casualties began to spiral. On June 17th, the day before Immelmann died, Chapman ran into the great Boelcke and was badly shot up. His right aileron control was severed and he himself was wounded in the head, but Chapman somehow made a remarkable landing, holding the severed end of the aileron wire.
The next day, a new member, Clyde Balsley, received a hideous wound in the thigh from an explosive bullet, fragments of which perforated his intestines in a dozen places. Rescued from his plane by French first-line troops, he was found by Chapman in a squalid French hospital, burning with fever and suffering from an appalling thirst. He murmured that he was desperate for an orange to suck, as rare a commodity in 1916 France as it was in Britain during World War II. Hearing that Balsley was not expected to live, Chapman literally scoured France for oranges. By June 23rd he had found some, and took off to fly the bag to Balsley in his hospital. On the way he was set upon by five German planes.

With the death of Victor Chapman, the first of the Lafayette to fall and perhaps its most beloved member, a new mood came over the Squadron. Pilots spent longer and longer in the air, searching bitterly and recklessly for a quarry. The inevitable happened. Rockwell wrote to his brother: ‘Prince and I are going to fly ten hours tomorrow, and we’ll do our best to kill one or two Germans for Victor.’ Each fulfilled his promise that day, but on the morrow Rockwell was shot down. A few days after that Norman Prince, the founder of the Lafayette, flying long and late in an attempt to avenge Rockwell, hit a high-tension cable as he came in to land in the dark.

Long after the United States entered the war in 1917, the Lafayette Squadron continued to fly under French colours. When it was finally wound up in February 1918, every single one of its survivors, by a cruel irony, was found medically unfit to join the new American Air Corps! Yet by then it had gained the distinction — shared only with Guynemer’s squadron of the
Cigognes
— of being entitled to wear the shoulder lanyard of a twice cited unit. Of the thirty-eight Americans who served in the Lafayette, nine had been killed (including four of the original seven) and many wounded. During the first six months of its existence it recorded 156 combats and seventeen confirmed victories; most of these at Verdun, where it fought intermittently from May to September. Though still only partially fledged, the Lafayette’s direct contribution to the Battle of Verdun had been significant; but this was nothing to what, indirectly, its presence there did for the French cause. From the moment of its entry into action as the first all-American unit involved in the war, the Lafayette Squadron became the object of immense publicity throughout the United States. Its activities, perhaps naturally enough,
received press coverage out of all proportion to the rest of the war. Letters from its members were widely passed around, and often ended in the columns of the local newspaper. For the first time since the war began, Americans at home began to feel a personal link with one of the great land battles of the Western Front. Through the Lafayette — and perhaps more particularly through the heroism of Victor Chapman at Verdun — there began to develop in the United States an appreciation and sympathy for the
poilus
themselves such as had never been provoked by any other battle. Verdun seized American imaginations as did the Battle of Britain in 1940; compared to it the titanic clash on the Somme was to arouse little interest. Beyond the immediate challenge of German U-Boat warfare, France’s resolute defence of Verdun probably did as much as anything to pave the way, emotionally, to the United States’ entry into the war in April 1917.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE CROWN PRINCE

Anything is better than retreat.