The Unsubstantial Air Page 6

  The confusions of becoming a belligerent nation might have been inevitable, but to a young man in Brooklyn or Chicago (or Idaho or Arkansas or Boston), eager for war and impatient to be flying over the Western Front, muddle was what was happening to you, keeping you hanging around at home while in France other guys your age were fighting the air war without you. Muddle was being moved from one base to another for no reason that you could see. Muddle was hearing that your orders had been lost. Muddle was waiting: waiting to be sent to ground school. And then waiting to finish the course. And then waiting to be sent on to a flight school. And then waiting there for a plane, and an instructor, and decent flying weather. “Hurry up and wait!” the old-timers said. “That’s all the Army is, just hurry up and wait.”

  The ground schools were the easiest part of flight training to organize. Most universities already had the staff for a School of Military Education (as they were called)—someone in engineering or physics who could teach the theory of flight, and a bit of meteorology, and how aircraft engines work; an Army reserve officer from the ROTC who knew the commands for close-order drill and could lecture on Army regulations; and plenty of athletics coaches for the physical exercise part. The Army would send specialists to teach the rest. And every university had housing space for the cadets: they’d all lost a fifth or a quarter of their male students to the war already, and men’s dormitories were sitting empty. By the end of May 1917 ground schools had been established at state universities in California, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas, and at Cornell and MIT, and were ready to take in their first classes. (Princeton and Georgia were added later.) Their first classes graduated in July—on the fourteenth, Bastille Day, as it turned out.

  Colonel Bingham describes in his memoir what the cadets were taught in ground school. First, three weeks of intensive military training and instruction in military topics: how to be a soldier and an obedient one. Then five weeks of the really serious stuff: signaling with a radio buzzer, lamp, and paneled shutter and care of the radio apparatus; care of machine guns and practice clearing jams; lectures on bombs, theory of flight, cross-country flying, meteorology, and night flying; explanation of instruments and compasses; practical work in map reading; lectures on types of airplanes; classroom work in aerodynamics; practical work in rigging and repairing planes; lectures on the principles of internal combustion engines and on the care of engines and tools; practical work with various types of engines; practice in troubleshooting; lectures on the theory of aerial observation and artillery ranging; a few lectures on liaison with infantry and the latest tactics of fighting in the air.

  In their letters and diaries the young would-be pilots didn’t have much to say about what they were learning in ground school. They wrote instead about what they were enduring during those eight weeks. At the University of Illinois school John Grider, the Arkansas boy who had lied about his education to get into the Air Service, struggled to prove that he was as good as any college boy. Halfway through the course he wrote home, “This place is getting harder and harder, a boy is shipped [that is, dismissed from the program] almost every day.” There’s nothing here about the subjects he’s studying; what matters is working hard and obeying orders. And not getting shipped, which would turn you back into nobody.

  To students like Grider, ground school was a ritual test; you did it because it stood between you and the flying life and because it was tough. If you did what you were told to do (or didn’t, and got away with it), at the end you’d move on to flight school, and the presence of airplanes, where you belonged.

  If the students saw ground school as a trial inserted in their training to test their endurance and waste their time, the men who had designed the program saw practical reasons for its existence: it delayed the flow of cadets into flight training; what was time lost for the impatient students was time gained for the builders of barracks and runways and airplanes. There would be delays, and many moves, and many disappointments.

  For this problem of numbers the ground schools offered another kind of relief; they provided opportunities to “weed out those who were mentally, morally, or physically unfitted to become flying officers.” A quarter of the young men who entered the ground schools would not graduate. The cadets were very aware of the relentless weeding process. John Grider wrote to his family, “It’s going to be Hell for the next four weeks, but they can’t Cull you unless you do something and I am not going to weaken.”

  When cadets had finished ground school, they’d be scattered around the country to such flying schools as existed: to Kelly Field in Texas, to Wright Field in Ohio, to Camp Borden at Toronto. Smaller groups traveled even greater distances. Five cadets from the Princeton ground school went all the way to San Diego to learn to fly at North Island.

  The Navy scattered its cadets, too; the first draft of Navy cadets to reach Pensacola arrived just after the declaration of war in April 1917. They were surprised to learn that they hadn’t come there to fly. “There were more than 200 of us there,” one of the students recalled. “For a month and a half we drilled in deep sand under a hot sun. We attended aviation ground-school classes and tried to learn Navy regulations. We strove to persuade ourselves that sometime we’d fly, sometime we’d get to France.”

  At about the same time, the first wartime draft of college men arrived at the Army flying school at Mineola. The Hughes brothers, Gerard and George, came down from Harvard in that draft, expecting to begin flying at once. They found that “the men who have been here all winter are using the machines all the time to finish up as soon as possible” and the new men would have to wait. They were put to work drilling, doing guard duty, and learning wireless, semaphore, military customs and courtesies, and military law—“military junk,” George called it in a grumpy letter home. Ground school stuff.

  These local muddles were all parts of the one great muddle that creating an American flight program out of nothing was bound to produce. But the eager cadets, out there drilling in the sun, were bound to take it personally; for them, the service life must have seemed designed to keep them waiting on the ground, when all they wanted to do was fly.

  As 1917 passed from spring to summer to autumn, the tilt of the country eastward seemed to steepen, tipping more and more young men toward the East Coast and the ports of embarkation there. They came singly and in groups, converging mainly on New York, where they reported to holding camps at Mineola or Garden City or Bedloe’s Island (if they were Air Service men) or found rooms in Manhattan hotels, if they were Navy, or in Alan Nichols’s case put up at the Harvard Club.

  While they waited for a ship, they wrote to their folks, letters full of jittery exhilaration; the prospect of actually going “across” is exciting, but it’s also daunting. Most of them have never been out of the United States or on an oceangoing ship; they don’t speak any foreign language, or not well enough to say anything useful; they don’t know anything about foreigners and the lives they live. They’ve never lived the disciplined, confined life of a combat unit. They’ve never commanded other men. They’ve never been anywhere near a war. What lies ahead of them will be strange and confusing, and frightening, too. They acknowledge these feelings to the home folks—all but the fear. They admit that only to themselves.

  One young man’s diary will give you a sense of what it was like for them, waiting there in that impatient time. Josiah Rowe was a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute when the country entered the war. He enlisted in the Air Service and was sent to the School of Military Aeronautics at Princeton. Rowe began to keep a diary in October 1917, at the end of his ground school training, and continued it through his crossing to Europe.

  It begins in haste and confusion: Rowe’s Princeton unit is ordered to report to Mineola the next day. They travel through rain and cold and find that Mineola has no room for them; they spend the night in New York. The next day they return to Mineola, expecting to leave immediately, and are left to hang around and watch other units leave, and listen to rumors: t
hey’re all going to Italy; no, they’re headed for France, to the biggest flying school in the world; no, they’ll get off the ship at England and train with the RFC. Nobody knows anything. On their fourth day at Mineola they’re told to pack up and leave in fifteen minutes. They do and are trucked across Long Island and through New York to a pier, where they board the steamer Adriatic. At 3:00 p.m. they steam out from the dock—but not for England or France, not directly. Two days later they are at anchor in Halifax harbor in Nova Scotia, where they are held on board for two days. On the third day, without warning, the Adriatic lifts anchor and steams off, followed by all the other ships in its convoy.

  There’s none of the romance of a first ocean crossing in Rowe’s terse account: no ceremonial raising of the gangplank, no band playing, no waving crowd growing smaller on the dock. Only ship’s names are still romantic: the Adriatic, the Carmania, the Orduna, the Rochambeau, the Espagne—all passenger liners in peacetime. And the Leviathan, the world’s largest liner, confiscated from the Germans (who called it the Vaterland).

  If you were lucky, you’d board one of the luxury liners and find that the luxury was still there, in spite of the war, and that you were entitled to share it. Rowe describes what it was like for the hundred student aviators aboard the Adriatic:

  The Adriatic is a wonderful ship—a perfect monster of wood and steel—about ten years old but quite modern in every respect. We have first-class passage, and the accommodations are magnificent—every possible comfort and convenience—elevators, Turkish bath, swimming pool, gymnasium, spacious lounge and saloon, and a peach of a bar and smoking room. The bar is an unhoped for luxury, and everyone patronizes it liberally. Oh! What a joy to sit in your stateroom and have the steward bring down the most delicious drinks!

  And, he adds, “there are four pianos on board and about every other person plays, so we have an abundance of music.” And an abundance of drinking (the bars were always open). And of gambling: poker, craps, even bridge at half a cent a point (these were college men, remember).

  On some crossings there were women aboard: nurses, or Red Cross workers, or, on one memorable voyage, a female musical group. On the Leviathan three bands played, one after the other, and there was dancing all afternoon and into the evening. Percival Gates, a Baptist preacher’s son who neither drank nor gambled, met a Red Cross nurse from Wisconsin named Bernadine and danced with her every night until the lights went out. Aboard the Espagne, Dick Blodgett, on his way to join an ambulance unit in the spring of 1917, had a romantic adventure on his crossing and reported it in a letter to his little sister, and because he was proud of his linguistic skills, or maybe because he thought French was the appropriate language for romance, he wrote in French:

  Dear Ruthie:

  … The first day I was sick, three times. Now je me porte bien. Pas plus de mal de mer. Hier et aujourd’hui il fait très beau. Hier nuit la pleine lune sur l’eau était magnifique. J’étais assis sur le pons avec une très jolie femme. Elle est la plus belle femme qui soit sur le bateau, et tous les garcons essayaient à lui faire connaissance, mai c’était moi qui avait diné avec lui, et après cela qui avait regardé la lune. Elle s’appelle B. Nous serons dans la même bateau de vie (life boat). Je l’ai puit sur moi-meme de la protégée en case de danger. Mais n’aie pas de peur. Elle est mariée. Elle n’a que vingt-deux ans. Son mari est malade. Probablement je le verrai beaucoup à Paris.

  And then, just to be sure Ruthie got the point, he said it again in English at the end of the letter: “Don’t worry. There’s no cause for it. I am assigned to the best lifeboat on board, with the prettiest girl. How could I be safer?” It all sounds like one more college house party—like Alan Nichols’s cross-country train journey or the First Yale Unit’s days in Miami.

  That’s if you were lucky. If you weren’t, you were hustled aboard a troopship or a former liner that had been converted to maximum payload: stacked-up bunks in the third-class cabins, partitions removed from the first-class staterooms to crowd more men in. On such ships you might be treated as roughly as the enlisted men were, crammed into the lower decks, and fed two meals a day. The newly formed 104th Squadron crossed on such a ship in the fall of 1917. Here’s the first day aboard, as recorded by Jack Coffin, one of the 104th’s pilots:

  Thursday, October 18, 1917: On board the U.S.S. Covington—an interned German liner—We came on at 1:00 p.m. Assigned to bunks and kept below until the ship sailed. Hell of a hole. Steerage. Waited two hours for mess.

  And his entry for the last day of the voyage:

  Sat., Nov. 3: Still on board. Our Colonel apologized for our treatment during the voyage. He might well do so!

  The inequalities were more apparent when men who had been close companions at Harvard or Dartmouth or St. Paul’s found themselves separated on shipboard, like gentlefolk from immigrants. If anyone belonged with the gentlefolk it was Hamilton Coolidge. Ham was the son of an old New England family that claimed descent from Thomas Jefferson; he’d been at school at Groton and then Harvard. Yet when he sailed on the Orduna in July 1917, he was assigned to a berth in steerage. In a last letter to his mother before he went on board he wrote, “Q. [Quentin Roosevelt, his friend at Harvard] sails on the same boat, and he is a first Lieutenant! [and presumably in a first-class cabin]. I travel steerage (because the old commission hasn’t arrived) with the contingents from the six Government schools: Tech., Cornell, Ohio, Berkeley, Cal., Texas and Illinois.”

  Coolidge doesn’t seem much troubled by the inequality of the assignments. But then, he wasn’t really stuck in steerage; he moved into a second-class cabin with another old Harvard friend, Doug Campbell.

  Rowe, ever the careful diarist, remarks on the frivolous goings-on of his shipmates in the first-class bars and lounges:

  The attitude of the men and officers on board certainly presents an interesting study in psychology. With few exceptions, they seem to look upon this expedition as a frolic—more of a sight-seeing tour than, as it really is, a fight to the death with the Germans. Some appear to think more of matters of dress and plans for joy parties in Paris than they do of the more grim aspects of war.

  The grim aspects were present, though; out there beneath the surface of the sea German U-boats hunted. The cadets stood submarine watches, and at night all external lights were extinguished, and the darkness on deck was absolute. Seven days out of Halifax, Rowe described the ship’s two moods:

  It is funny to observe the contrast between the inside and outside of the ship—the lounge and smoker are ablaze with light; pianos, guitars and ukes are making merry music; the smoker is crowded with men drinking, smoking, and gambling, and having the best of fun, apparently oblivious to the dangers of the present and those of the immediate future. One could easily imagine himself in a club or hotel in New York. Then, just step outside on deck, and there isn’t a gleam of light nor a sound except the blowing of the wind and the splashing of the waves.

  The gaiety in the lounge may seem strange, Rowe thinks, but he decides it’s all right: “There isn’t any use putting on a long face and bemoaning the fact that a torpedo may strike at any moment, blasting away the side of the ship—all the worry in the world will not prevent it.”

  Still, at the bar and the poker tables much of the talk is of subs and torpedoes. What are the odds of being attacked? Houston Woodward, crossing in March 1917 to drive an ambulance, estimates they are one in fifteen, though he adds that others started out figuring one in fifty or a hundred but lowered them to one in ten, even one in five. If they’re attacked, what are the chances of surviving? Of even managing to reach the deck before the ship goes down? They speculate and scare one another.

  They trade rumors. A sub has just hit a transport returning from New York; somewhere in the Atlantic the Glendavid has been sunk; the radio operator says New York papers have reported that the ship they’re on has been torpedoed. In the letters the young men write to the folks at home—journals, really, to be mailed when they reach port—th
ey repeat the rumors, along with day-by-day accounts of the ship’s gunnery practice, and lifeboat drills, and mysterious lights seen on the horizon, and trails of foam along the surface of the sea that could mean periscopes. It all makes real the presence of possible death in their lives where none was before.

  * * *

  A week out of New York and four days from Liverpool, Rowe noticed a change in his shipmates: “Fellows are getting the flying fever again—the events of the voyage made us forget aeroplanes for a while but the spell is gripping us stronger than ever as we near the place where we are to begin work.”

  They were surely close to their war in the air now.

  FOUR

  ABROAD I: FIRST IMPRESSIONS

  Although the young men who sailed on those passenger liners turned troopships were college men from well-off families, the grand tour of Europe was not a part of their culture, and for most of them their possible destinations—England, France, Italy, London, Paris, Rome—were only words on a map. When they stepped ashore—at Liverpool, or Le Havre, or Bordeaux—they looked around with innocent American eyes and judged what they saw by American values: back home, big was good; so was modern, and clean; so was progress and comfort. This Old World they’d landed in seemed the opposite of all that.

  Because it is so different, they write home about it and offer first impressions that are like snapshots a tourist might take. Josiah Rowe, on his way to flight training in Italy, lands in Liverpool and snaps its picture: “The principal streets of the town were quite clean and orderly, but the side streets were narrow, dirty and crowded just like the ideas you get from Dickens’ stories. The houses were all of brick about a thousand years old and two stories high and practically all just alike.”