The Unsubstantial Air Page 4

  A fleet of twelve aeroplanes which is the largest that ever took flight at one time on the American continent flew from New York to Princeton Saturday. Ten of the aeroplanes left the government aviation camp at Mineola at 9 in the morning and were joined by two privately owned biplanes from the Governors Island camp as they were flying over the Narrows in regular formation … The squadron circled around the town and finally landed in a large field east of the Stadium.

  You can feel the student reporter’s excitement in that account—the largest flight ever! All the way from New York! And in regular formation! The numbers, the distance, and the military order of the planes were all new to the watching crowd on the ground.

  In fact, the flight to Princeton wasn’t quite as choreographed as the Princetonian reported; one plane had engine trouble and had to land in Flushing, another got lost and wound up in Atlantic City, and another smashed a wheel landing at Princeton. Still, for witnesses on the ground (and according to the Aero Club’s Flying, “their flight in battle formation was watched by thousands”), it was a stirring spectacle.

  For Princeton students and alumni, the most thrilling thing about the flight must have been that the lead plane was flown by H.A.H. Baker, class of 1914. Hobey Baker, Princeton’s greatest athlete, the most famous of college football players, the handsomest, blondest, straightest, and most gentlemanly of them all, had chosen the Yale game as the time and place to demonstrate his latest athletic skill. He wasn’t the only college man in the flight: the Princetonian reported that of the other eleven pilots, three were from Yale, three from Harvard, and one from Princeton. Flying had become an Ivy League sport.

  That was the fall of 1916. The following spring the United States entered the war. And Princeton University began, belatedly, to organize its own flying corps. Like the Harvard and Yale programs, this one was a private enterprise, financed by wealthy alumni. Planes were ordered (Jennies, of course) from Glenn Curtiss’s factory and paid for by Old Princetonians; a pasture south of town was leased as a flying field, hangars were built, and an instructor was hired. Stationery was printed: “Aviation Corps of Princeton University.” The planes began to arrive in crates at the university railroad station (for the benefit of Old Princetonians, the station was then at Blair Arch) and were carried by truck from there to a field on Princeton Pike, where they were put together. The preparations took the entire spring semester.

  Finally, late in May, flying began. By the end of June, most of the students had flown with an instructor and had been shown how to get a plane off the ground and back down again without breaking anything and perhaps how to make a cautious, flat turn. A few had advanced enough to be allowed to solo. Having done so, they were considered to have graduated. There wasn’t time for more than that.

  Spring semester of 1917 had been a disrupted, uncertain time for colleges. As winter turned into spring, the war came closer to America, and the need to confront it became more urgent. Military advisers appeared on campuses, and military science courses were added to class lists. Some students joined reserve units, wore their uniforms to class, and practiced marching on playing fields while they waited to be called up. In faculty meetings and committee rooms professors and administrators groped for ways of serving the nation’s war need while protecting students’ interests and maintaining a male population on their campuses.

  In the middle of that spring semester, when the United States declared war on Germany, the attentions of colleges turned further toward military matters. What had been college life—the sports, the clubs, the lectures, the exams, the grades—seemed to fade and become irrelevant. “The colleges all closed around the end of April,” one student recalled, “and gave the seniors easy examinations.” Some colleges gave no final exams at all but simply passed everyone. At Yale, one of the Yale Naval Unit seniors assured his family in April, “We did not join without ascertaining at New Haven whether or not we would be given diplomas. My record was looked up. Everything was above passing and I was guaranteed a diploma, which will be sent to me on Class Day, provided I do good work in aviation up to that time.” At Princeton the faculty voted that any senior who left college and was accepted for active service would be given his degree if his work for the previous term was complete.

  You can imagine the conversation in men’s dormitories that spring: not about books or girls or the Yale game, but about the game of war and what position one should play in it. But you don’t have to imagine it; Scott Fitzgerald wrote it down in This Side of Paradise:

  “What are you going to do, Amory?”

  “Infantry or aviation, I can’t make up my mind—I hate mechanics, but then of course aviation’s the thing for me—”

  “I feel as Amory does,” said Tom. “Infantry or aviation—aviation sounds like the romantic side of the war, of course—like cavalry used to be, you know.”

  Tom was right: by the time the United States entered the war, aviation had become the romantic choice of undergraduates. That’s not surprising; the air war had produced the best stories, the ones that got into newspapers and magazines and stirred the hearts of college men: personal stories, with heroes.

  * * *

  In January 1917, two firsthand accounts of war in the air were published in the United States: Carroll Dana Winslow’s With the French Flying Corps and James McConnell’s Flying for France. They were the first such books to be written by Americans and addressed to Americans. Both were written in a hurry; you feel that in the writing: Winslow wrote his while he was on leave back in the States, where his child was ill; McConnell wrote his while he lay in a French hospital recovering from injuries suffered in a crash. Before the books were published, both men were back in the air over France.

  The two men had almost identical service records—up to a point. Both joined the American Ambulance Field Service in 1915; both transferred to the French air service in October of that year; both completed their preliminary training and were brevetted (in the States you’d say they “got their wings”) early in 1916. But then their careers diverged. Winslow was sent to the front to fly Maurice Farmans—the slow, cumbersome pusher planes that were used for observation work. It was a disappointment to him, as it would have been for almost any new pilot; by then, Nieuport fighter planes (avions de chasse, the French called them) were what the young pilots wanted. After two months in Farmans he talked his way back into training in Nieuports, but before he’d finished, his daughter’s illness (it was diphtheria) called him home.

  When Winslow returned to France a year later, he hoped to join a chasse squadron, and eventually he did. But he didn’t write that story. The story he did write is nearly all training. It wasn’t his fault—a father goes to his sick child—but it left his book unfinished, all preparation and no climactic action, like Henry the Fifth without Agincourt.

  In With the French Flying Corps, Winslow recalls a visit he made in the spring of 1916 to the American Escadrille at Bar-le-Duc. He was invited to stay for dinner. It was a meal, he wrote, that he would never forget. As a visiting pilot he was seated beside the squadron commander, Captain Georges Thenault. On the other side of the table were Victor Chapman, Norman Prince, and Kiffin Rockwell, and at the end were Elliot Cowdin and Jim McConnell. There they all sat—the first American flying heroes. And on this side sat Winslow, unknown and unheroic, a mere observation pilot, a stranger in their brave world.

  By the time Winslow wrote his book, three of those heroes had been killed. Reflecting on that dinner with the dead, Winslow thinks, “The places of the three pilots killed have since been taken by other volunteers, but in the minds and memories of the Americans dining at the camp that night their places can never be filled. We know that they did not die in vain, and that what they did will live in history.” A trite way of putting it, perhaps; “in vain” was a tired, empty phrase even then. But sometimes trite is true. Winslow knew that night that he was in the presence of heroes and that he would never achieve what they had achieved; he had come too late
to the table.

  McConnell was luckier than Winslow, in one way. He trained in France in Nieuports, and he was sent straight to the front to join the new Escadrille Américaine and to fly into combat and a place in the air-war myth. Unlike Winslow’s book, McConnell’s is full of action—the flying, the fighting, and, inevitably, the dying. Where Winslow simply notes that some of the men at the table will be killed, McConnell describes their deaths as a witnessing pilot would—how in a fight a Nieuport’s wings buckled and tore away, fluttering to the ground like falling leaves, how the broken plane dropped like a stone, the sound of the crash—“I know of no sound more horrible than that made by an airplane crashing to earth.” He knew about crashes; it was while he was convalescing from one that he wrote his book.

  As McConnell moves to the heart of his story, his plain style gathers emotion, and description becomes eulogy. He remembers his dead friends: Rockwell, “the best and bravest of us all,” in whom “the old flame of chivalry burned brightly”; Prince, who didn’t mind dying, so long as he did his part before he was killed; Chapman, “too brave if anything.” Naming those dead comrades, he mythologized them and the squadron they flew with. By the time Flying for France was published, McConnell would be one of them—the mythical dead.

  These two books, so hasty and so convincing, must have been popular reading in college dormitories where students like Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine talked together and tried to decide between war on the ground and war in the air. Here were two young men much like themselves, both college men (Winslow had been at Yale, McConnell at the University of Virginia) who had actually flown over France. Their stories would have changed the dormitory conversations, made the aviation option seem less vaguely romantic and more actual, and so made the choice of flying imaginable.

  We have one testimony that that did happen. Stuart Walcott, a Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald’s, was thinking about going to the war after he graduated in the spring but couldn’t decide between ambulance driving and flying. Early in January 1917, his parents sent him a copy of Winslow’s book. Two days later he responded:

  Many, many thanks for sending me the book on the French Flying Corps by Winslow. I read half of it the night that it came and stayed up late last night to finish it. He gives a very straight, interesting and apparently not exaggerated account of the work over there, which has made it somewhat clearer to me, just what it is that I want to get into. Now I am even more anxious than I was before to join the service over there. The more that I think about it and the more that I hear of it, the more desirous I am of getting into the Flying Corps. If a man like Winslow with a wife and daughter dependent on him is willing to take the risk involved, I see no reason why I should not.

  Walcott’s letter is dated January 26, 1917. On that date the United States was not at war, and Walcott was not threatened with military conscription; he was simply a Princeton senior one term short of his degree. Yet he writes as though his commitment to the war were fixed and irrevocable; he must go, and he must go as a pilot. By then many college men like Walcott had committed themselves to one flying service or another. These young men would enter the Army’s air service, or the Navy’s or the Royal Flying Corps, or the Service Aéronautique, confident that wherever they served they would find young men like themselves, men from a common background of sufficient money and good schools and universities. Some of those young men would surely be old friends from back home. They’d meet at airfields, or in the Crillon Bar or the University Club in Paris, and would report their meetings in letters home: I saw X from Groton, or Y from the Hill School, or Z who played hockey with me at Harvard. It must have seemed certain to them (and to their parents, too) that in the air, at least, this would be a college man’s war and that they were the gentlemen who would fight it. There’d have been a certain security in that.

  THREE

  GOING

  None of the martial bustle on American campuses that spring was really urgent: the country was not at war, Congress had not yet passed selective service legislation, students were still civilians. But if it wasn’t wartime, it wasn’t exactly peacetime, either; “War is practically inevitable,” one Princeton student wrote to his parents in March 1917. There’s fatalism in that sentence, but there’s eagerness, too. War is coming; it will reach him and his classmates eventually, and when it does, they’ll go.

  For some of them, eventually wasn’t soon enough; in those months before the United States entered the war, students began to leave their campuses, singly or in groups, to join one service or another—the Army, the Navy, the French Foreign Legion, the ambulances, some air service (French or English or Canadian, it didn’t seem to matter)—whoever would take them. The volunteers didn’t only come from East Coast campuses, where the war excitement was the greatest; they came from Illinois and Texas and Idaho and California, too. It was as though the continent had tilted, tipping its young males eastward toward the Atlantic coast, and the broad ocean, and the European war beyond.

  In February 1917, a contingent of Stanford University undergraduates sets out to join the American Ambulance Field Service. They are the first university group to join the service as a complete unit, and their send-off is a celebration: The Daily Palo Alto Times headlines their departure, and a crowd gathers at the San Francisco train station to see them off. A camera crew films the scene, and the film is shown in San Francisco and in Paris.

  One of the Stanford boys, Alan Nichols, is a dutiful son who writes letters home all along the way, so we know a good deal about what that long journey toward the war is like: it is a traveling fraternity-house party. The Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads have provided the group with their own Pullman car, and they are free to do what they like there. Someone has brought along his banjo, and others play harmonicas; they serenade one another and the folks in the dining car. Somebody has a typewriter, and on it they compose a newspaper, “The Ambulance Tattler.” In it they tease the leader of the group, a student named Joe Eastman; they say he wears three suits of long underwear to protect his delicate constitution from the high-mountain cold. (Eastman is a nervous, anxious young man, the kind who anticipates problems and shrinks from new experiences. He will keep a diary of his war that will tell a less exuberant story.)

  The mood of the journey as Nichols tells it, so playful and careless, reminds us of how young they are: college kids, eighteen or nineteen or maybe twenty, away from their parents and adult supervision for the first time in their lives. For most of them this must be their first journey across their own country, and they look with astonishment at the scenes as they pass.

  In all this two-week telling of their journey from San Francisco to New York, there is scarcely a word about the war they’re going to. The journey itself is the reality: mountains are real, and plains, and towns, but the war isn’t real—not yet. Nor is there anything in Nichols’s letters about their motives for going to war: no patriotism (of course not, it’s not their country’s war), but also no expressions of sympathy for France, or poor little Belgium, and no hostility toward the Germans. These boys are not moved by a cause, or at least not by any they can articulate; they’re going to war for the excitement of it, for the adventure.

  Nor is there anything about the greatest adventure—flying. Yet by the end of that year four of them, including Nichols and the nervous Eastman, will have left the ambulance corps to become pilots—too eager for a total immersion in the game of war to settle for mere driving.

  All that winter and early spring the war pulled young Americans toward France, and they responded, eagerly but uncertainly. At Princeton, Stuart Walcott applied to American representatives of the Lafayette Flying Corps in January, was accepted in February, chose the U.S. Army in April instead, resigned from the Army in May to take private flying lessons, and sailed for France later that month to join the Service Aéronautique. At Harvard, Briggs Adams, a student who had driven an ambulance in France the summer before, was back in Cambridge for his senior yea
r. When he graduated in June, he didn’t go back to ambulance service but chose aviation instead; when he found that U.S. Air Service training would take too long, he hurried to Toronto and joined the Royal Flying Corps. At Yale, George Moseley joined the New York Naval Militia when war was declared in April, got himself discharged from the Navy in June, and signed up instead with the French air service. At Princeton, Zenos Miller, a freshman, joined the National Guard in the fall of 1916. He was called to active duty in the spring and was set to guarding German prisoners in Trenton. But what kind of a war was that? He quit the Guard, joined the U.S. Army Air Service, and was sent to Toronto to train with the Canadians.

  This kind of service jumping had gone on from the war’s beginning, but in the months just before and just after the American entry into the war it seemed to increase, as more and more young Americans succumbed to the eager need to be there and joined whatever service was open to them; any uniform was better than no uniform, and you could always change your mind later. In the confusion of the time, it was sometimes difficult to get into a service, but it was apparently easy to get out again and try another. Every service, it seemed, had a revolving door.

  Once in, the volunteers looked around for what they really wanted, and more and more often their choice was aviation. Even after the United States became a belligerent, American volunteers continued to head for the British and French flying services rather than their own (all the eager young men whose impatient moves I just described joined either the British or the French flying service after the American declaration of war). If you were eager to fly in combat, those forces were already doing it and had been for more than two years. Their flight schools were well established and were turning out pilots in substantial numbers.