On the morning of 14 April 1918, German airplanes were reported near Toul, in Lorraine, and two lieutenants of the 94th Aero Squadron took off from the Gengoult aerodrome in their Nieuport 28s. Within minutes Alan Winslow and Douglas Campbell had shot down one German airplane each, close enough to the field that the squadron’s mechanics and the townspeople of Toul watched both fall. They were the first victories won by an American-trained squadron at the front. Thirteen months earlier the United States had entered the war with an air arm of 131 officers, about a thousand enlisted men and a few hundred training airplanes, not one of them fit to fight. By the armistice the Air Service had 45 squadrons at the front, and it had learned, at a cost, almost everything it would need to know.
The Army Air Forces · Chapter 2 of 9
- Dates
- The Aviation Section, Signal Corps, created 18 July 1914; the 1st Aero Squadron with the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, 15 March–15 August 1916; the United States enters the war, 6 April 1917; the Aviation Act appropriates $640 million, 24 July 1917; the Air Service created, 24 May 1918; St-Mihiel, 12–16 September 1918; Meuse-Argonne, 26 September–11 November 1918
- Where
- Columbus, New Mexico, and Chihuahua, Mexico; training fields in the United States and France, above all the Third Aviation Instruction Center at Issoudun; the Toul sector in Lorraine; the St-Mihiel salient; the Meuse-Argonne; aircraft and engine factories in Dayton, Detroit and Buffalo
- Units
- 1st Aero Squadron; the Lafayette Escadrille (French Escadrille N.124) and the Lafayette Flying Corps; Air Service, American Expeditionary Forces, with 45 squadrons at the front on 11 November 1918, among them the 1st Pursuit Group (27th, 94th, 95th and 147th Aero Squadrons)
- Leaders
- Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing; Benjamin D. Foulois; Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick, Chief of Air Service, AEF, from May 1918; Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell; John D. Ryan, Director of Air Service; Maj. Carl Spaatz at Issoudun
- People
- Capt. Edward V. Rickenbacker; 2nd Lt. Frank Luke Jr.; Maj. Raoul Lufbery; Lts. Douglas Campbell and Alan Winslow; Kiffin Rockwell and James McConnell of North Carolina; Eugene Bullard
- Outcome
- From almost nothing in April 1917, the Air Service had 740 airplanes in front-line squadrons by the armistice, about a tenth of Allied air strength, most of them French-built. It was credited with 781 enemy airplanes and 73 balloons for the loss of 289 airplanes and 48 balloons; 237 airmen were killed in action. Aviation was taken out of the Signal Corps in May 1918, and the Air Service became a combat arm of the Army by law in 1920
Why it mattered
The First World War turned American military aviation from a Signal Corps experiment into a branch of the Army with a war record, a set of heroes, and a quarrel about its future. In nineteen months the Air Service went from a few squadrons of trainers to 185 aero squadrons and nearly 200,000 officers and men, ran the largest training program the country had ever attempted, and fought in every American offensive of 1918. It also discovered how hard it was to build modern airplanes from a standing start. The great aircraft program of 1917 promised to darken the skies over Germany; it produced an excellent engine and one British airplane built under license, and four of every five airplanes the Americans flew at the front were French.
The war shaped the men who built the Army Air Forces a generation later. Billy Mitchell commanded the largest air operation of the war at St-Mihiel and came home convinced that air power would decide the next one (Chapter 3). Carl Spaatz ran the Issoudun training center and shot down three German airplanes in the last weeks of the war. Henry Arnold spent the war in Washington running training and supply and reached France only days before the armistice, too late to see combat, a fact he regretted for the rest of his life. And the war produced the first American air legends: Rickenbacker, Luke, Lufbery and the volunteers of the Lafayette Escadrille, two of whose founding members came from North Carolina.
The Aviation Section and Mexico, 1914–1916
On 18 July 1914, three weeks before war broke out in Europe, Congress replaced the Aeronautical Division with the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, authorized 60 officers and 260 enlisted men (Chapter 1). The law limited flying duty to unmarried lieutenants under thirty, and the section started with 19 officers and 101 enlisted men. In August 1914 its one tactical unit, the 1st Aero Squadron, had 12 officers, 54 enlisted men and six airplanes; by December 1915 the whole section had 44 officers, 224 enlisted men and 23 airplanes (Hennessy; Air Force Historical Support Division). Those were the numbers with which the Army watched the air war over the Western Front, where by 1915 each side was losing hundreds of airplanes a month.
On 9 March 1916 Pancho Villa’s men raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing American soldiers and civilians, and President Wilson sent Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing into Mexico after him. The 1st Aero Squadron, under Capt. Benjamin Foulois, was ordered from Fort Sam Houston on 12 March and assembled at Columbus with eight Curtiss JN-3 biplanes, 11 officer pilots, 84 enlisted men and one civilian mechanic. On 16 March Capt. Townsend F. Dodd, with Foulois as observer, made the first reconnaissance flight into Mexico, the first American military airplane flight on a combat operation. On 19 March all eight airplanes set out for Pershing’s advanced base at Nueva Casas Grandes; darkness overtook them and they came down scattered across the desert, and one was wrecked (Foulois, report of 28 August 1916).
The JN-3s were training airplanes with 90-horsepower engines. They could not climb over the mountains of Chihuahua, which rise above 10,000 feet, or fly against the strong desert winds, and in the dry heat their laminated wooden propellers came unglued. The squadron flew messages and mail between Pershing’s scattered columns and made what reconnaissance it could; in early April two of its airplanes carrying dispatches to the American consul in Chihuahua City were met by hostile Mexican troops and crowds who fired at them and slashed their fabric. By 20 April only two of the eight airplanes were left, both judged unsafe, and they were condemned and destroyed when the squadron returned to Columbus on 22 April. In Foulois’s count, between 15 March and 15 August 1916 the squadron made 540 flights, flew 345 hours 43 minutes and covered 19,553 miles. It found no Villistas (Foulois report; Hennessy).
Americans in French skies: the Lafayette Escadrille
Long before the Army arrived, American volunteers were flying for France. In March 1916 the French aviation service agreed to gather its American pilots in a single squadron under French officers, and on 18 April 1916 Escadrille N.124 was formed at Luxeuil under Capt. Georges Thénault, with seven Americans: Norman Prince, William Thaw, Elliot Cowdin, Victor Chapman, James McConnell, Kiffin Rockwell and Bert Hall. Rockwell scored the squadron’s first victory on 18 May 1916, over Alsace; Chapman, killed over Verdun on 23 June, was the first American aviator to die in the war. Protests from the German embassy in still-neutral Washington against the name “Escadrille Américaine” led the French to rename it the Escadrille Lafayette in December 1916, with a Sioux warrior’s head as its insignia (French Ministry of the Armed Forces, Chemins de mémoire).
Two of the seven founders were North Carolina men. Kiffin Yates Rockwell, born in Tennessee and raised in Asheville, had joined the French Foreign Legion with his brother Paul in August 1914, been wounded as an infantryman, and transferred to aviation; after his first victory he fought through the summer over Verdun and was shot down and killed near Rodern in Alsace on 23 September 1916. James Rogers McConnell, of Carthage in Moore County, had studied at the University of North Carolina and driven an ambulance in France before joining the escadrille; he was shot down and killed on 19 March 1917, a few weeks before the United States declared war. The university put up a statue to him, “The Aviator,” which still stands in Chapel Hill. In all, 38 Americans flew with the Lafayette Escadrille during its 23 months, claiming 39 official victories; nine died in combat. Another 269 Americans, the Lafayette Flying Corps, served in other French squadrons. On 18 February 1918 the escadrille was transferred to the Air Service as the 103rd Aero Squadron (Chemins de mémoire; Mason, The Lafayette Escadrille, 1964).
The Lafayette Escadrille was an American squadron, the first American air unit in the war, and most of the Americans who flew for France flew with it.
Escadrille N.124 was a French squadron of the French Aviation Militaire, under French commanders, with French mechanics, French airplanes and French pay; its American pilots were volunteers in French service, most of them enlisted men, and the United States was neutral until April 1917. Only 38 Americans ever flew with it. The larger number, 269 by the French count, flew with other French squadrons as the Lafayette Flying Corps, a name later applied to all the American volunteers. The escadrille became American only on 18 February 1918, when it was transferred to the Air Service as the 103rd Aero Squadron; the first American-trained Air Service squadron to fight was the 94th, two months later. The Lafayette Escadrille Memorial at Marnes-la-Coquette, west of Paris, honors both the escadrille and the Lafayette Flying Corps.
April 1917: an air arm with no combat airplanes
When the United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, the Aviation Section had 65 regular and 66 reserve officers, most of them pilots or student pilots, and 1,087 enlisted men. Counts of its airplanes run from about 200 to 280; all of them were trainers, the best the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny,” and not one was fit for combat. Five aviation officers were in Europe. No squadron had been trained for war, and the whole American aircraft industry had built fewer than 1,000 airplanes of every kind since 1903 (Hennessy, pp. 196–197; Correll, “Over There,” Air Force Magazine, 2009).
On 24 May 1917 the French premier, Alexandre Ribot, cabled Washington asking the Americans to put 4,500 airplanes, 5,000 pilots and 50,000 mechanics at the front in 1918. The War Department turned the request into a program for 345 combat squadrons, 263 of them in France by July 1918, and Congress, swept up in the promise of an American air armada, passed the Aviation Act of 24 July 1917, appropriating $640 million, the largest sum it had ever voted for a single purpose. Newspapers spoke of darkening the skies over Germany. The program was later cut to 202 squadrons, and it never came close even to that (Correll, “Over There”; American Battle Monuments Commission).
Two decisions shaped the American production effort. The first was to build a standard engine. Meeting in the New Willard Hotel in Washington from 31 May 1917, Jesse G. Vincent of Packard and Elbert J. Hall of Hall-Scott laid out a water-cooled V-12 that Packard had running in prototype within about six weeks. The Liberty engine was built by Packard, Lincoln, Ford, Buick, Cadillac and Nordyke & Marmon; about 13,500 had been completed by the armistice, and 20,478 in all by early 1919. The second decision was to build in the United States, under license, the British de Havilland DH-4 two-seat day bomber and observation airplane, fitted with the Liberty. Dayton-Wright, Fisher Body and Standard built 4,346 American DH-4s, most of them in the last months of the war; 1,213 reached France and 696 the front (Aircraft Engine Historical Society; Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum).
From factory to front: the American DH-4, 1917–1918
Gray: ordered or planned. Red: built, shipped and at the front by the armistice of 11 November 1918. The DH-4 was the only American-built combat airplane to fly over the front.
Out of the Signal Corps: the Air Service, May 1918
By the spring of 1918 the aircraft program was a public scandal. The promised thousands of airplanes had not appeared; Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, made charges of waste and fraud that led to a Justice Department investigation by Charles Evans Hughes; and the Signal Corps, which ran both the training of airmen and the buying of airplanes, took the blame. On 20 May 1918, using the wartime powers of the Overman Act, President Wilson took aviation away from the Signal Corps and divided it between a Division of Military Aeronautics, under Maj. Gen. William L. Kenly, responsible for personnel, training and operations, and a Bureau of Aircraft Production under the copper executive John D. Ryan. The War Department recognized the two agencies together as the Air Service, United States Army, on 24 May 1918. On 27 August Ryan was made Director of Air Service and Second Assistant Secretary of War over both of them (Air Force Historical Support Division; Hennessy).
In France, the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Forces had its own troubles. After two short-lived chiefs in the summer and autumn of 1917, Pershing’s air service passed in November 1917 to Foulois, now a brigadier general, who arrived with a large staff from Washington and promptly fell out with Mitchell, who had been in France since April 1917 and had seen the air war at first hand with the French. In May 1918 Pershing settled the quarrel by putting a classmate he trusted over both of them: Brig. Gen. Mason M. Patrick, an engineer who did not fly. Patrick organized the Air Service, AEF, as an administrative machine; Mitchell got the fighting command at the front, first of the air units in the Zone of the Advance and from the summer the Air Service of the First Army; Foulois, after a spell at the front, became assistant chief of air service in the rear (Correll; Maurer, The U.S. Air Service in World War I, 1978–79).
Learning to fly the war: Issoudun and the training program
Training was the Air Service’s largest success. Men chosen as flying cadets took ground school at universities, primary flying at new fields in the United States — Kelly Field at San Antonio grew into the largest — and advanced and combat training in France, Britain or Italy. About 10,000 American pilots were trained during the war, and 28 schools in the United States graduated 14,176 enlisted mechanics by the armistice (Correll). The largest school in France was the Third Aviation Instruction Center at Issoudun, about 125 miles south of Paris, a complex of numbered fields where pilots fresh from primary training learned to fly French Nieuports and to fight in them. Its commander for much of 1918 was Maj. Carl Spaatz, who in the last weeks of the war wangled himself a spell at the front and shot down three German airplanes.
Training killed men too. Pilots died in collisions, spins and engine failures at every field in France and America; Correll gives 654 Air Service deaths from accident and illness in all, more than the number of airmen killed or wounded in combat. Many of the famous names of 1918 learned at Issoudun, including Quentin Roosevelt, the former president’s youngest son, who joined the 95th Aero Squadron and was shot down and killed near Chamery on 14 July 1918. By the armistice the Air Service at home and abroad had 19,189 officers and 178,149 enlisted men, and 185 aero squadrons, 86 balloon companies and hundreds of construction, supply and spruce-production squadrons behind them (Air Force Historical Support Division).
The 94th and the Hat in the Ring
The first American pursuit squadrons reached the front in the quiet Toul sector of Lorraine in the spring of 1918. The 94th Aero Squadron, organized at Kelly Field on 20 August 1917 and trained in France on Nieuports at Issoudun, moved to the Gengoult aerodrome near Toul in early April 1918, the first trained, organized American pursuit squadron at the front. Its pilots had been led over the lines on their first patrols, in unarmed airplanes, by Maj. Raoul Lufbery, the Lafayette Escadrille’s leading ace, now a major in the Air Service. On 14 April Lts. Douglas Campbell and Alan Winslow won the first two victories, and on 31 May Campbell became the first American-trained ace. Lufbery himself was killed on 19 May 1918, jumping or falling from his burning Nieuport near Toul. With the 27th, 95th and 147th Aero Squadrons, the 94th formed the 1st Pursuit Group (National Museum of the USAF; Maurer, The U.S. Air Service in World War I).
The 94th’s most famous pilot had come to France as a driver. Edward V. Rickenbacker, a well-known racing driver before the war, enlisted in May 1917, went to France with Pershing’s headquarters, talked his way into flight training and then into the 94th, and scored his first victory on 29 April 1918. Ear trouble kept him out of the air for much of the summer, but in the last seven weeks of the war he shot down German airplanes and balloons at a rate no other American matched. He took command of the 94th on 25 September 1918; the same day, near Billy, he attacked seven German airplanes alone and shot down two of them, the action for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1930. His total of 26 victories made him the leading American ace of the war (National Museum of the USAF).
St-Mihiel: Mitchell’s air armada, September 1918
The first American offensive of the war was the attack on the St-Mihiel salient, a German bulge into the French lines south of Verdun, 14 miles deep and about 24 miles wide at its base. Pershing’s First Army, 16 American divisions with a French corps, attacked at 5:00 a.m. on 12 September 1918. For it, Mitchell assembled the largest concentration of air power of the war: 1,481 airplanes, 609 of them American, the rest French, British and Italian, with the British Independent Force bombing German railways and airfields in support. Mitchell divided his air force into a mass that would fight for control of the air over the battlefield, and observation and bombing units that would support the infantry and attack German communications. Bad weather on the first day limited flying, but over four days American airmen flew about 3,300 sorties over the lines, and about a third of the effort went to direct support of the ground troops (Correll, “Over There”; Maurer).
The Germans were already pulling out of the salient when the attack came, and it was over in four days. Mitchell drew lessons from it that went beyond the battle: that air superiority had to be won by massed, offensive action rather than by spreading airplanes along the front; that bombers could strike far behind the lines; and that air units fought best under a single airman’s command. In the Meuse-Argonne offensive that began on 26 September, with about 842 airplanes under his control, he massed bombers and pursuit in large formations, and on 9 October about 200 Allied bombers, with escort, struck German troop concentrations ahead of the American lines. By the armistice he was a brigadier general commanding the air service of the Group of Armies, and he was planning, for 1919, to drop part of the 1st Division by parachute behind the German lines at Metz (Correll; Maurer; Mitchell biography, U.S. Air Force).
The balloon buster: Frank Luke
Observation balloons were among the most valuable targets on the Western Front and among the most dangerous to attack. Each was a hydrogen-filled bag tethered on a cable from a motor winch, with observers in a basket a thousand meters or more up who could see and telephone the fall of artillery shells miles behind the lines; each was ringed with anti-aircraft guns and machine guns, and the winch could haul it down in minutes. Second Lt. Frank Luke Jr., a 21-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, of the 27th Aero Squadron, made them his specialty. Between 12 and 29 September 1918, in ten sorties over eight days, he was credited with 14 balloons and four airplanes, 18 victories in all, often flying with his friend Lt. Joseph Wehner, who covered him from above until Wehner was killed on 18 September (National Museum of the USAF; Victoria Cross Online, citing the Air Service record).
Luke was a difficult subordinate, often absent without leave, and was on the edge of arrest when he took off alone late on 29 September, dropping a note to an American balloon company to watch three German balloons near Dun-sur-Meuse. All three went down in flames. Luke, wounded by fire from the ground or from German fighters, came down near the village of Murvaux, behind the German lines, and died there. The Germans buried him in the village cemetery on 30 September. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, the first airman to receive it, and it was presented to his father in Phoenix in May 1919. His body lies today in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery at Romagne (National Museum of the USAF; Victoria Cross Online).
Wounded and surrounded at Murvaux, Frank Luke refused to surrender and died fighting it out with his pistol against a squad of German soldiers, after killing six of them from the air.
That is what his Medal of Honor citation says, and it is what the Air Service believed in 1919. But the citation was written from affidavits taken from the villagers of Murvaux after the war, months later, by an officer sent to find out what had happened; no American saw Luke die, and no German record that has been published confirms a pistol fight or six dead soldiers. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force is careful to call it the residents’ account. Later researchers who have gone back to the French witnesses and to German accounts have suggested that Luke, badly wounded, landed, walked toward a stream and died of his wound, perhaps after drawing his pistol when the Germans approached. What is certain is that he shot down three balloons that evening, was mortally wounded, landed behind the German lines and died near Murvaux; what he did in the last minutes rests on recollection, and the record does not settle it.
Armistice: the record of the Air Service
When the guns stopped on 11 November 1918, the Air Service, AEF, had 45 squadrons at the front, with 740 airplanes, about a tenth of Allied air strength, up from 10 squadrons in June and about 5 percent of Allied strength in August. Four out of five of its airplanes were French-built. It had flown 150 bombing raids, dropping about 138 tons of bombs, and taken more than 18,000 photographs of German positions; 71 or 72 of its pilots, depending on the count, had become aces (Correll; National Museum of the USAF). Its claims of enemy airplanes and balloons, like those of every air force, were higher than the enemy’s recorded losses, and the Air Service’s own figures disagree with each other.
| Measure | National Museum of the USAF / Correll | Air Force Historical Support Division |
|---|---|---|
| Squadrons at the front, 11 Nov 1918 | 45 | 45 (from 10 in June) |
| Airplanes at the front, 11 Nov 1918 | 740 | 740, about 10 percent of Allied strength |
| Bombing raids | 150 | 150 (about 138 tons dropped) |
| Enemy airplanes credited | 781 | 756 |
| Enemy balloons credited | 73 | 76 |
| Air Service airplanes lost in combat | 289 (57 of them flown by Americans attached to Allied units) | 289 |
| Balloons lost | 48 | 48 |
| Airmen killed in action | 237 (279 wounded) | — |
| Aces | 71–72 | — |
| Total Air Service strength | — | 19,189 officers and 178,149 enlisted men |
Sources: National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, “Combat Record”; John T. Correll, “Over There,” Air Force Magazine, September 2009; Air Force Historical Support Division, “The Birth of the United States Air Force.” Victory credits are wartime credits, not losses confirmed from German records; the differences between the two tallies reflect different counting rules (for example, whether shared victories and victories won by Americans in Allied units are included).
The cost was also counted. Correll gives 569 airmen killed or wounded in action and 654 dead from accidents and illness, which means that more American airmen died in training and in hospital than in combat. The influenza epidemic of the autumn of 1918 killed many of them; so did the Jenny trainers of the American fields and the worn Nieuports of Issoudun. After the armistice the Air Service shrank as fast as it had grown: from 19,189 officers on 11 November 1918 to 1,168 on 30 June 1920, and from 178,149 enlisted men to 8,428 (Air Force Historical Support Division). The National Defense Act of 1920 made the Air Service a combatant arm of the Army, equal in status to the infantry and artillery, and in the same years Pope Field at Camp Bragg, North Carolina, opened in 1919, became one of its small permanent fields (Chapter 5).
He drew his automatic pistol and defended himself gallantly until he fell dead from a wound in the chest.
The Aviation Section and the Air Service, 1914–1920
- Congress creates the Aviation Section, Signal Corps, with 60 officers and 260 enlisted men authorized.
- Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico.
- Dodd and Foulois make the 1st Aero Squadron’s first reconnaissance flight into Mexico.
- Escadrille N.124, later the Lafayette Escadrille, formed under Capt. Georges Thénault.
- Kiffin Rockwell scores the escadrille’s first victory.
- Victor Chapman killed over Verdun, the first American airman to die in the war.
- Congress appropriates $13 million for military aeronautics.
- Kiffin Rockwell of Asheville killed over Alsace.
- James McConnell of Carthage, N.C., killed.
- The United States declares war on Germany; the Aviation Section has 131 officers and 1,087 enlisted men.
- The Ribot cable asks for 4,500 airplanes, 5,000 pilots and 50,000 mechanics.
- Vincent and Hall begin the Liberty engine design in Washington.
- The Aviation Act appropriates $640 million.
- The Lafayette Escadrille becomes the 103rd Aero Squadron.
- Campbell and Winslow of the 94th Aero Squadron score the first victories by an American-trained squadron.
- The Air Service, U.S. Army, is created; aviation leaves the Signal Corps.
- Brig. Gen. Mason M. Patrick becomes Chief of Air Service, AEF.
- Quentin Roosevelt killed.
- First combat mission by an American-built DH-4.
- St-Mihiel: Mitchell commands 1,481 Allied airplanes.
- Rickenbacker takes command of the 94th and wins the Medal of Honor near Billy.
- The Meuse-Argonne offensive begins.
- Frank Luke shoots down three balloons and is killed near Murvaux.
- Armistice: 45 American squadrons and 740 airplanes at the front.
- The National Defense Act makes the Air Service a combatant arm of the Army.
Questions readers ask
Did American pilots fly American airplanes in the war?
Mostly not. About four of every five airplanes in American service at the front were French, chiefly SPAD XIII and Nieuport 28 fighters and Salmson and Breguet observation and bombing airplanes. The only American-built airplane to fly in combat was the DH-4, a British design with the American Liberty engine; 696 reached the front.
Who was the first American airman killed in the war?
Victor Chapman of the Lafayette Escadrille, killed over Verdun on 23 June 1916, while the United States was still neutral. He was a volunteer in French service.
What happened to the $640 million?
Much of it went into training fields, the Liberty engine, the DH-4 and the spruce industry of the Pacific Northwest. Charges of waste and fraud led to investigations in 1918, including one by Charles Evans Hughes; Hughes found waste and inefficiency and recommended action against a few officials, but no widespread criminal conspiracy.
How many Medals of Honor did American airmen win in the First World War?
Four: Frank Luke Jr. (posthumous), Eddie Rickenbacker (awarded in 1930), and the observation crew of Lts. Harold Goettler and Erwin Bleckley of the 50th Aero Squadron, killed on 6 October 1918 trying to drop supplies to the “Lost Battalion” in the Argonne.
Were there North Carolinians in the air war?
Yes. Two of the seven founding pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, Kiffin Rockwell of Asheville and James McConnell of Carthage, were North Carolinians, and both were killed. Many more North Carolinians served in the Air Service as pilots, observers and mechanics.
How it connects
This chapter follows Chapter 1, on the Aeronautical Division and the Army’s first airplane. The men of the Air Service came home with a war record and an argument. Billy Mitchell turned the lessons of St-Mihiel into a public campaign for an independent air force, sank battleships off the Virginia capes and Cape Hatteras to prove his point, and was court-martialed for his methods: that is Chapter 3. The Air Service’s refusal to accept Eugene Bullard foreshadowed the long fight of the Tuskegee Airmen (Chapter 7), and the 94th and 1st Aero Squadrons fought again in the Second World War.
Across the site, the World War II hub leads to the collections in which the Air Service’s descendants fought, among them the air war over North Africa at Kasserine Pass and the Battle of the Atlantic, and to the Special Units hub. The Liberty engine’s descendants and the training system built in 1917–1918 were the foundations on which the Army Air Forces expanded in 1940–1942 (Chapter 5).
Remembering it today
The National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton covers the period in its Early Years Gallery, with airplanes of the war, a Liberty engine and exhibits on Rickenbacker, Luke, Bullard and the Lafayette Escadrille. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum displays an original SPAD XIII of the 22nd Aero Squadron, “Smith IV,” and a DH-4. In France, the American Battle Monuments Commission maintains the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial at Marnes-la-Coquette, west of Paris, where many of the escadrille’s pilots lie, and the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery at Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, the largest American military cemetery in Europe, where Frank Luke is buried.
In New Mexico, Pancho Villa State Park at Columbus preserves Camp Furlong, the 1916 base of the expedition and of the 1st Aero Squadron. In North Carolina, James McConnell’s statue “The Aviator” stands on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Kiffin Rockwell, buried in Luxeuil, is remembered in Asheville. Eugene Bullard is buried in the French war veterans’ plot of Flushing Cemetery in Queens, New York; Rickenbacker in Green Lawn Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio.
Sources
- Maurer Maurer, ed., The U.S. Air Service in World War I, 4 vols. (Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1978–1979), including the Final Report of the Chief of Air Service, AEF.
- Juliette A. Hennessy, The United States Army Air Arm, April 1861 to April 1917 (Air University, 1958; Office of Air Force History, 1985).
- Capt. Benjamin D. Foulois, “Report of the Operations of the First Aero Squadron, Signal Corps, with the Mexican Punitive Expedition, for Period March 15 to August 15, 1916,” 28 August 1916, transcribed at earlyaviators.com.
- John T. Correll, “Over There,” Air Force Magazine, September 2009, airandspaceforces.com.
- Air Force Historical Support Division, “The Birth of the United States Air Force,” af.mil.
- National Museum of the U.S. Air Force fact sheets: “Combat Record,” “Capt. Edward V. Rickenbacker,” “Lt. Frank Luke Jr.,” “Lts. Alan Winslow and Douglas Campbell,” “Eugene Jacques Bullard,” nationalmuseum.af.mil.
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, “De Havilland DH-4,” airandspace.si.edu.
- Aircraft Engine Historical Society, “Notes on the Liberty Aircraft Engine,” enginehistory.org.
- Ministry of the Armed Forces (France), “The Lafayette Escadrille,” Chemins de mémoire, cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr.
- Herbert Molloy Mason Jr., The Lafayette Escadrille (New York: Random House, 1964).
- W. David Lewis, Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
- James J. Cooke, The U.S. Air Service in the Great War, 1917–1919 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996).
- American Battle Monuments Commission, “Remembering World War I: Ramping Up American Military Aviation at the Start of the War,” abmc.gov.
- “Frank Luke Jnr MOH,” Victoria Cross Online, with the text of the citation, victoriacrossonline.co.uk; “The Black Swallow of Death,” MilitaryHistoryNow, 18 February 2014, militaryhistorynow.com.
- Wikipedia, “94th Aero Squadron” and “Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps,” used as guides to Gorrell’s History, Maurer and AFHRA lineage data, en.wikipedia.org.
Photographs: U.S. Army Signal Corps and Air Service photographs from the National Archives and from Gorrell’s History of the American Expeditionary Forces Air Service; a War Department photograph of the Dayton-Wright plant (National Archives); a National Photo Company portrait of Mitchell (Library of Congress); a French photograph of Escadrille N.124; a U.S. Air Force photograph of Eugene Bullard; and a Royal Air Force official photograph held by the University of British Columbia Library (no known copyright restrictions); all public domain or free of known restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons. Where the date or place in an original caption is doubtful, the caption here says so. The unit insignia are illustrations drawn for this collection, not official emblems.
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