The Unsubstantial Air Read online

  Most of these congressmen had never flown, but they all seemed to have an idea—a romantic idea—of what a pilot should be: a solitary seeker, brave, supreme in his lonely element, self-reliant, self-commanded. Miller of Minnesota summed up this hero’s qualities. “There is being attracted to the Aviation Corps,” he said, “the brightest, nerviest, most efficient of our youth—what might be called the flower of our chivalry.”

  Congressmen worried about the implications of this idealized figure. If pilots were to be chivalric heroes, was it reasonable to draft them? If they were to be so independent and self-commanded, should they be college-educated? Wood of Indiana protested that “there are many men who have these diplomas who are not fit and can not be made fit to do the work required in the Aviation Service. Upon the other hand there are many men who have not college diplomas or high-school diplomas, but who have the intelligence, the nerve, and all the qualifications fitting them for this extraordinary service, who would make excellent aviators.” Wood had a point: if only 3 percent of young American men were in college in 1917, was it just and sensible to exclude the other 97 percent from aviation service? In the end, Congress compromised: there would be regulations, including educational requirements, but the War Department would have the authority to waive them.

  One other element from Bingham’s vision of the perfect pilot made it into the final bill. “No person,” it reads, “shall be … promoted, appointed, detailed, or attached until he shall have been found physically, mentally, and morally qualified under regulations prescribed by the Secretary of War.” He’d not only be a college man and a gentleman (with perhaps some exceptions); he’d also be a Boy Scout.

  These assumptions about flying and class would have consequences for the selection of pilots, but more than that, they would affect the way the young pilots thought about themselves and their pilot culture. From the beginning they would consider themselves an elite, separate from the rest of the military, and a bit superior. They’d be officers and gentlemen, but they would also be adventurers, explorers, sportsmen, romantic heroes. An aura of personal danger and possible sudden death would hang over them, and they’d absorb it. It would get into their letters home and into their conversations with one another. They’d fight their war in their own element, apart from the rest of the army, and that separateness would affect the way they lived, and the way they fought and died.

  TWO

  THE IVY LEAGUE AIR FORCE

  In the months from the autumn of 1915 to the summer of 1916 the war in the air changed. New and faster planes came into action on the Western Front, and both sides—the Germans first and then, belatedly, the Allies—developed fixed, forward-firing machine guns that could fire through the arc of the propeller without hitting the blades, making the plane itself a weapon that the pilot aimed simply by flying. With such a weapon, pilots became hunters of planes—chasse pilots in French, Jagdfliegern in German, pursuit pilots in English. Air fighting took tactical form and became a kind of deadly sport in which a pilot might hope to meet an enemy one against one, duel with him, and win or lose by his own skills. Those who won would accumulate scores and acquire reputations like any sports star, become celebrated, and be reported in the press.

  A search through files of any American newspaper of record for 1916 will turn up air heroes in the headlines. Most of them will be Frenchmen, like Georges Guynemer, Charles Nungesser, and Jean Navarre; diplomatically the United States was neutral in 1916, but emotionally the country favored the Allies, and especially the French:

  FRENCH AVIATOR BAGS

  HIS FIFTH ADVERSARY

  Guynemer Only 21 Years Old

  French Birdman, Battling Alone,

  Brings Down Five Hostile Aeros

  DOES MARVELS IN AIR

  Nungesser, on a Dare, Looped

  Loop Under Enemy’s Fire

  TWO FRENCH AVIATORS TIED

  FOR WEST FRONT HONORS.

  Guynemer and Navarre Each Bring

  Down Twelve Enemy Planes

  The texts of these stories stress the pilots’ youth, their daring, and their solitariness. “Guynemer flies alone,” The New York Times reports, as though that were an especially sporting thing to do.

  In the spring of 1916, the French Service Aéronautique created an all-American chasse squadron. It was called, at first, the Escadrille Américaine, and then, when the still neutral American government protested, the Lafayette Escadrille. Once the escadrille reached the front, accounts of its actions began to appear among the French and German victories in newspaper headlines back home—like this one from The New York Times for May 22, 1916:

  AMERICAN AVIATORS

  WIN FRENCH HONORS

  Rockwell of Atlanta to Get the

  Military Medal for Bringing

  Down an Enemy Machine

  And this one, a few days later:

  AMERICANS BRING DOWN

  THREE GERMAN PLANES

  Thaw, Rockwell and Cowdin Account

  for One Each—Thaw

  Slightly Wounded

  These headlines aren’t just reporting, either; there’s national pride in them. Rockwell’s victory is the first by an American volunteer. The United States may still be neutral, but its pilots have entered the game of war; they have an enemy, even if their country doesn’t.

  Another headline, from the following month, reminds us of the other side of that game, the human cost:

  AMERICAN FLIER

  DIES FOR ALLIES;

  DROPS TWO FOES

  Victor Chapman, Son of a New

  York Lawyer, Killed as He

  Goes to Aid Comrades

  The essential story of Chapman’s death is clear enough, though the details differ depending on whether you read it in The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune, or in Kiffin Rockwell’s letter to Chapman’s stepmother, or in the memoir Chapman’s father wrote. Three (or there might have been four) planes of the escadrille were on patrol near Verdun when they were jumped by four (or perhaps five) Germans. Chapman was not a member of the patrol, but was flying alone nearby. He saw the attack and at once plunged into the fight. The patrol under attack, being outnumbered, prudently withdrew, but Chapman fought on alone (in one version of the story he shot down two enemy planes) until he was killed in midair (possibly by Oswald Boelcke, the German ace).

  It’s not surprising that stories of the fight differ in particulars; dogfights are wheeling, confusing melees, and none of the tellers was a witness. But the differences don’t matter; a myth is in the making, in which a hero rushes to the aid of his comrades and fights a solitary battle against the odds, killing two of the enemy before he dies at the hands of a greater hero. Only one of his comrades adds a qualifying note: Rockwell praised Chapman’s courage, but added, “He was too courageous.”

  By the time the class of 1920 entered college in the fall term of 1916, the myth of the air war was in place—a kind of lobbying for danger that would be part of their student lives. You can see the spread of that myth in the way Aero Clubs sprouted on American college campuses. In 1910 the Aero Club of America had only one college-based affiliate, Harvard’s Aeronautical Society. In 1916, the list of American Aero Clubs published in Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft included twenty colleges and universities, most of them well-off gentlemen’s schools, where you might expect to find the would-be sportsman-fliers that the air service would be pursuing a year later.

  At Cambridge, in the spring of 1916, the Harvard Flying Corps, initiated by an alumnus who had flown in France, began to take shape: a meeting room was opened, a field to fly from was rented, students were enrolled and dues collected. Everything seemed ready—on paper—though nobody flew. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president, was not pleased. In April he wrote to the Corps to say firmly that the Corps had not been sanctioned by the university and wouldn’t be. “A flying corps is certainly one of the things the Army needs,” he wrote, “and it ought to be encouraged; but I feel that the time has not yet come for it a
t Harvard.” Within a month the scheme had collapsed.

  Lowell had got rid of the Flying Corps, but he hadn’t got rid of the dream of flying at Harvard. The university’s archives are full of documents from the summer of 1916 demonstrating the relentless pressure that was being put on President Lowell by the flying lobby: by students, by alumni, and—most heavily—by the Aero Club of America down in New York. No opportunity was lost to preempt the issue by announcing that what Lowell opposed already existed. A letter to Lowell from an alumnus dated June 5 reports a new scheme for a university aero training fund as a fait accompli; it was to be financed by contributions from concerned Harvard alumni, with help from the Aero Club of America, and the funds used to subsidize the flight training of Harvard’s students “at some good school.”

  Lowell’s response was a model of Bostonian good manners:

  I submitted your generous proposal to the Corporation this morning, but they felt that it was unwise for the University to undertake instruction in the practice of flying. I think you will see the many difficulties that would present themselves in such instruction at the University and feel that the members of the Corporation realize the importance of the art while thinking it should be done elsewhere.

  By the time Lowell wrote his dismissive letter, ten Harvard undergraduates were already at the Curtiss Flying School at Buffalo, preparing to begin flight training subsidized by the training fund, and had sent a report of their activities to the Boston American, where it appeared under the headline

  HARVARD AERO

  CAMP GETS

  BIPLANE

  A clipping of the article was sent to President Lowell. He wrote at once to the alumnus-sponsor of the training fund: “As you know, we wholly approve of the training of the air men, but do not feel that any enterprise, particularly one connected with education, not conducted by the University, ought to bear the name.” The students obediently changed the name of their tent community to Victor Chapman Camp, thus gathering to themselves the fame of Harvard’s first air hero (who had died three weeks earlier).

  Before the summer’s end, other Harvard students were training at other flying schools, some at Ithaca, others at Hempstead, Long Island. In July, an article in The New York Times on flight training at colleges (most of it information supplied by the Aero Club of America in New York) announced what had obviously become the case:

  HARVARD LEADS IN

  AIR PREPAREDNESS

  In the fall, Flying, the Aero Club’s magazine, followed up with a similar headline:

  THE HARVARD AERO CORPS A REALITY

  Lowell and his prewar sense of the Harvard military tradition had lost, and the Aero Club and modern war had won.

  In the September issue of Flying, the Club flaunted its victory by printing a photograph of that first group of Harvard fliers at the Buffalo camp. There they stand, gawky and uncertain in their new uniforms—campaign hats, baggy breeches, puttees—looking more like Boy Scouts at a jamboree than a new generation of pilots training for a new kind of war. The uniforms bear no insignia that might identify them as belonging to any particular branch of any particular army, and that’s appropriate, since at this moment in the summer of 1916 they are neither quite military nor entirely civilian but in between, promised to the Signal Corps’s Aviation Section should that service ever need them, but expecting to go back to being Harvard undergraduates in the fall (as indeed they did). The war is still a distant foreign war toward which the United States preserves a neutral posture, and these are still college boys at summer camp, and flying is a game.

  * * *

  Yale’s flying project was different from Harvard’s in two respects. First of all, it was conceived and organized entirely by one Yale undergraduate—the tireless, completely confident Trubee Davison. In June 1915, Davison, then a Yale sophomore, sailed for France, to work through the summer with the American Ambulance Field Service. He was disappointed in the job he was given. He’d gone for a taste of real war; instead, he was kept in Paris, driving an ambulance between railway stations and hospitals. The closest he got to war’s excitement was meeting French and American aviators who had fought in the air.

  Davison returned to Yale that fall intending to organize an ambulance service unit there, but like many other college students he changed his mind. By the summer of 1916, he had decided he would rather fly than drive. Perhaps he remembered the fliers he had met in Paris; perhaps he read the newspaper accounts of their battles over the front. Or maybe there is such a thing as a spirit of the time, and for young men in 1916 that spirit was becoming airborne. Whatever the motivating force, Davison set about organizing a flying group at Yale. In August, he began flying lessons at Port Washington, near his family home on Long Island.

  There was talk that summer of a need for Volunteer Aerial Coast Patrols to work with the Navy defending the American coastline: not regular Navy squadrons, but volunteer units, each with its stretch of coast to watch over and flying its own planes. Why shouldn’t Yale provide such a unit? The students who joined it wouldn’t be enlisting, exactly, and they’d pay for their own flying lessons, but later, if the country went to war, they could be sworn in and commissioned. At Yale, as at Harvard, flying would be a new undergraduate sport, and most of the men who took it up would be athletes—rowers, many of them, but also football players, baseball players, hurdlers, hockey players.

  The role of Trubee Davison in organizing this unit was central. When someone had to get the university’s approval, it was Trubee who called on the dean. When negotiations with the Navy were necessary, it was Trubee who traveled to Washington armed with a letter of introduction from the Aero Club and went straight to the Secretary of the Navy. To show the Yale community how easy flying was, he flew his own plane from his home across Long Island Sound to attend morning chapel and got to his classes on time. The energy and social poise of this twenty-year-old undergraduate were extraordinary; the First Yale Unit came together and learned to fly because he was determined that it should and that he would go to his war among the friends he chose to fly with.

  A difference between Yale’s flying program and Harvard’s was the amount of money involved. From the beginning, Yale’s program was lavishly financed. At Harvard the subsidizing money came in modest private checks from many alumni supporters; at Yale it came in dramatically large sums from a few very rich patrons. In the matter of fund-raising the managerial Trubee had one special advantage: his father was a partner of J. P. Morgan. Over the period of the group’s training, the elder Davison provided his son and his son’s friends with a hundred thousand dollars of his own money (roughly a million and a half in 2014 dollars), plus another hundred thousand from his firm. He also gave them free use of both his yachts. Later he bought the unit a cedar-hulled flying boat. (His brother-in-law trumped that grand gift with a grander one—a new flying boat with a hull of solid mahogany.)

  Other rich men added their contributions: the father of Bill Rockefeller, one of the Yale pilots, gave the unit another plane; a vice president of the National City Bank gave yet another; Harry Payne Whitney lent them his luxurious cruising houseboat. The atmosphere of conspicuous affluence extended to the places where the Yale unit flew: Rodman Wanamaker offered his waterfront properties on Long Island Sound and at Palm Beach for use as training bases—Long Island for the summer months, Palm Beach for the winter. Their lodgings while they trained were the homes of the wealthy and the kinds of resort hotels where the wealthy stayed; the parties they went to were society events. If the Harvard flight program was like a Boy Scout camp, the Yale locations were like rich people’s house parties. The New York Tribune called them “the ‘millionaire unit.’”

  In that good-time atmosphere, it’s not surprising that the First Yale Unit didn’t live a very military existence: after all, they weren’t yet formally the Navy, had no ranks, wore no uniforms, and drew no pay. They didn’t salute senior officers when they turned up, they didn’t fall in for muster, they didn’t drill. They we
re flying college men, still civilians at heart.

  You can see that relaxed unmilitary spirit in the photographs that survive from the unit’s training days. Collectively, their clothing doesn’t represent any possible military organization. They’re simply a number of young men on a beach having their picture taken. The pilots in the unit would remain like that right through the war—part naval officers, and part college men on a long party. The distinct, independent culture of pilots that made them different from military officers on the ground and on ships at sea took form, in part, in groups like the First Yale Unit.

  As the war came nearer, the unit moved toward a more complete and formal connection with the Navy, but even as the pilots acquired naval rank and uniforms, their costs continued to be paid by their wealthy sponsors. Those sponsors must have felt a good deal of patriotic satisfaction with what they had accomplished. They had provided the money, and they had used their considerable influence to move the government to action. You’ll get a sense of where the power was in this operation if you consider the chain of command by which the unit’s move from the student world of New Haven into full-time active duty was accomplished. First, Trubee Davison polled the members of the unit: Did they really want to be full-time Navy pilots? When he had their positive vote, he asked his father for his permission. Mr. Davison approved and notified the president of the Aero Club of America, who advised the Secretary of the Navy of the decision.

  Once the transfer of the unit to the Navy had been arranged, the group’s supporters, being businessmen, began to think about compensation for their expenses. Letters were written to the Secretary of the Navy and to Rear Admiral Robert Peary (who was in charge of naval aviation)—including a very stern one from Trubee. Various sums of money were mentioned: $100,000 for planes and equipment, $10,000 for four engines, $200,000 for their “total disbursement.” The Navy Department responded with a check—for $1.

  * * *

  Flying didn’t come to Princeton until after it had become a part of student life at Harvard and Yale, but when it did, it arrived in style. The occasion was the Yale-Princeton football game, November 18, 1916. The Yale game is always a big event on the Princeton campus, but this one was made bigger by what else happened. Here is the account from The Daily Princetonian, the university’s student newspaper: