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  For Susanne McNatt, with gratitude and affection

  Welcome, then,

  Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace:

  The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst

  Owes nothing to thy blasts.

  —King Lear

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Prologue: A Fire Beyond the Horizon

  1. An Occupation for Gentlemen

  2. The Ivy League Air Force

  3. Going

  4. Abroad I: First Impressions

  5. Driving the Machine

  6. The Pleasurable Sensation of Flying

  7. Waiting for the War

  8. How to Fight

  9. This Killing Business

  10. Abroad II: Getting Acquainted

  11. In Pursuit

  12. Looking at the War

  13. A Short History of Bombing

  14. Summer: 1918

  15. September: St. Mihiel

  16. Abroad III: End Games

  17. The Last Battle

  18. November Eleventh

  19. Afterwards

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Also by Samuel Hynes

  Praise for The Unsubstantial Air

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Lafayette Escadrille (Reprinted from Bert Hall, En l’Air! New York: New Library, 1918)

  Elliot Cowdin, Norman Prince, and William Thaw (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Bain Collection, reproduction number LC-DIG-ggbain-20673)

  First Yale Unit at Palm Beach (Reprinted from Ralph D. Paine, The First Yale Unit. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1925)

  Lance Holden in uniform (Reprinted from Over the Front 1:3 [Fall 1986]. Photo courtesy of the League of WWI Aviation Historians)

  Quentin Roosevelt (Reprinted from Quentin Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt: A Sketch with Letters. Edited by Kermit Roosevelt. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1921)

  Ham Coolidge (Reprinted from Hamilton Coolidge, Letters of an American Airman. Boston: Privately printed, 1919)

  Deullin combat drawing (Reprinted from Albert Deullin, “La chasse en monoplane,” MSS, Service Historique de l’Armée de l’Air, Division Archives, France)

  Portrait of Houston Woodward (Reprinted from Houston Woodward, A Year for France. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Publishing Association, 1919)

  Drawing of duel (Reprinted from Illustrated London News, February 9, 1919)

  Portrait of Billie Carleton (Photograph courtesy of Mander and Mitchenson / University of Bristol / ArenaPAL)

  Stuart Walcott in winter gear (Reprinted from Stuart Walcott, Above the French Lines. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1918)

  Douglas Campbell and Alan Winslow at Toul (Reprinted from Charles Woolley, The Hat in the Ring Gang: The Combat History of the 94th Aero Squadron in World War I. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 2001)

  Portrait of Fletcher Ladd McCordic (Reprinted from Wilson G. Crosby, Fletcher Ladd McCordic, 1st Lieut. 88th Aero Squadron A.E.F.: A Tribute. Chicago: Privately printed, 1921)

  Grave of Quentin Roosevelt (Reprinted from Quentin Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt: A Sketch with Letters. Edited by Kermit Roosevelt. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1921)

  Joe Eastman drawings: battlefield (Reprinted from Joseph Eastman, Diary. Joseph Houston Eastman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives)

  Lance Holden balloon painting (Reprinted from Harold Buckley, Squadron 95. Paris: Obelisk, 1933)

  Joe Eastman drawing: burning plane and grave (Reprinted from Joseph Eastman, Diary. Joseph Houston Eastman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives)

  Photo of Frank Luke (Reprinted from Percival Gates, An American Pilot in the Skies of France. Dayton, Ohio: Wright State University Press, 1992)

  Joe Eastman drawing: Armistice (Reprinted from Joseph Eastman, Diary. Joseph Houston Eastman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives)

  Alvin Callender’s grave (Reprinted from Bogart Rogers, A Yankee Ace in the RAF. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996)

  Hobey Baker crash (Reprinted from John Davies, The Legend of Hobey Baker. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966)

  “In Memoriam” (Reprinted from C. G. Barth, History of the Twentieth Aero Squadron. Winona, Minn.: Winona Labor News, n.d.)

  PROLOGUE: A FIRE BEYOND THE HORIZON

  A decade after the First World War ended, General William “Billy” Mitchell looked back on the fighting years and concluded that for the troops on the ground it had not been an interesting war. “There was no marching and maneuvering,” he wrote, “no songs, no flying colors and bands playing while going into action. It was just grovelling in dirty mud holes and being killed and maimed by giant projectiles, or permanently incapacitated by gas. The only interest and romance in this war was in the air.”

  “Romance” strikes me as an odd word to come from the man who more than any other American had created the huge destructiveness of massed aerial bombing. But Mitchell was above all a pilot: he loved flying, and planes, and the fighting you could do with them. For him, it was all romantic. Once the cavalry charge with pennons flying had proved suicidal against machine guns, and cavalrymen had been dismounted and turned into infantry, aviation was the only kind of combat left in which one man, mounted on a machine now instead of a horse, could fight a personal war. If the big words of war—“glory,” and “honor,” and “chivalry,” and “romance”—applied anywhere in this vast conflict, it would be in the air.

  To young men in America who heard the news of a European war in the summer of 1914, it wasn’t flying that was romantic; it was simply war itself. Some wars are like that; they have a power that draws young men to them. Not every war, not the little interventions and police actions and civil disruptions that are always breaking out somewhere in the world, but the big wars, the urgent, consequential ones. A big war is like a great fire burning far off, beyond the horizon; you can’t see the flames, but you can see the reflection in the sky and smell the smoke when the wind is right, and if you’re young, and especially if you’re male, you want to witness that conflagration. And so you hurry off, eager to be where the danger and the excitement are and fearful that you’ll arrive too late and find the fighting over, the fire only ashes.

  In young imaginations, the First World War would be like that: it would be like stepping into history—romantic history, like the Civil War some of their grandfathers fought in, and back beyond that the brave War of Independence. One young Southerner, eager to enlist in the French army in 1914, announced, “I pay my part for Lafayette and Rochambeau,” as though the French contribution to the American Revolution were an old personal debt he owed.

  And so they went. Not to aviation, though, not at first; in the summer of 1914 there wasn’t yet an air war to go to. The first American volunteers enlisted as ambulance drivers or joined the French army and wound up in the Foreign Legion. And were disappointed. And so they moved to the French Service Aéronautique, where the war would surely have the qualities that Mitchell prescribed: interest and romance.

  There is a story to be told about those young men and the air war they fought. It’s not military history; it’s not about generals and their strategies and the movements of
armies: rather, it’s a story of the experience of becoming a pilot and then of flying in combat over the Western Front. It’s about the men, and the planes; the French earth and sky; the flying, and killing, and dying, and surviving. That experience is new and strange, and unimaginable till you’ve had it. The closest a noncombatant can come to it is through the testimonies of the young men themselves, the pilots and observers and gunners who were there. We must listen to their voices as they recorded their war lives in letters and diaries and journals at the time and in the memoirs that some wrote, often long afterwards.

  * * *

  The stories they tell are not only about the hours they spend in the air: a flier in a combat squadron (or any other flying job, for that matter) spends more time on the ground than he spends in the air. A lot of other new experiences come to them there: They discover Abroad (most of them have never been outside their own country before). Being there is as much a learning experience as flying is. They see great European cities—Paris and London—and the foreigners who live there; they discover café life; they eat foreign food and meet foreign girls. None of it is what they imagined it would be, and they write home about that, too (though they go easy on stories about the girls). They visit towns and villages near their airfields; they take walks in the country; they swim in the rivers. They go on leave and visit Deauville or the Riviera (travel seems surprisingly easy, in a country at war); they’re invited to country châteaus and meet the local gentry. It’s all strange and new.

  As they live these lives, in the air and on the ground, they are changed by it all and come to see that the lives of pilots compose a culture, a separate society defined by what they do together. They’re different from the rest of the Army: they dress more casually than officers on the ground do; they’re wilder in their behavior, with a certain unmilitary independence. A pair of wings on your chest identifies you as a different kind of soldier (the girls notice that).

  Other elements, other emotions, enter their lives that they have not felt before. They grieve for dead friends; most of them have never seen someone as young as they are die. They take those losses personally and try to write home about them and, by describing them, to endure them. As they fly their missions, and the casualty lists grow, death in the air comes to seem likely, inevitable even; they become fatalistic: next time it will be me. And go on flying.

  And yet, for all that, the romance that Mitchell found in war in the air remained. It wasn’t quite the romance they expected in the innocence of their enlistments, but it was there—in the solitude of a single plane, high over France on a fine day, or in the excitement of an attack, two or three planes diving on a trench or a gun site and the antiaircraft fire rising.

  Over time the stories of those young men and their flying war have blended into one story—a myth, you might say, of a big war that is past but remembered, like Homer’s story of Greeks and Trojans, a part of our collective memory. Two decades after their war ended, when the fires of war burned once more beyond the horizon, another generation of boys—I was one of them—would look back to those earlier pilots and see them as our ancestors, and know that when the fire came closer, we, too, would go to it, and would fight, as they did, in the unsubstantial air.

  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 ta
xi 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.