The Lafayette Escadrille

A Photo History of the First American Fighter Squadron

Steven A. Ruffin

• Publisher: Casemate
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781612008523
• eBook ISBN: 9781612003511
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

"A fresh look at the 38 Americans in the Escadrille Américaine . . . a finely-researched, well-written and well-illustrated book. It is recommended highly" ( Over the Front ).
 
The Lafayette Escadrille was an all-volunteer squadron of Americans who flew for France during World War I, arguably the best-known fighter squadron ever to take to the skies. In this work, the entire history of these gallant volunteers—who named themselves after the Marquis de Lafayette, who came to America's aid during its revolution—is laid out in both text and pictorial form.
 
Along with archival photographs and documents, current snapshots of existing markers and memorials honoring the Lafayette Escadrille were taken by the author in France. In several cases, he was able to match his present-day color photos with older images of the same scene, thus creating a jaw-dropping then-and-now comparison. To add even more color, the author included artwork and aircraft profiles by recognized illustrators, along with numerous full-color photographs of artifacts relating to the squadron's men and airplanes, as they are displayed today in various museums in the United States and France.
 
The result is undoubtedly the finest photographic collection of the Lafayette Escadrille to appear in print. Along with expert text revealing air-combat experiences, as well as life at the front during the Great War, it is a never-before-seen visual history that both World War I aviation aficionados and those with a passing interest in history will appreciate.
 
"This magnificent book probably provides everything needed by someone wishing to learn about this famous fighting unit." — Cross and Cockade
 
"When it comes to describing aerial combat in all its bloody fury, [Ruffin] excels." — Air and Space Magazine

CHAPTER 1

AN ALL-AMERICAN IDEA TAKES SHAPE

“I do not feel that I am fighting for France alone, but for the cause of all humanity, the greatest of all causes… I pay my debt for Lafayette and Rochambeau.”

On August 7, 1914, two brothers from North Carolina boarded the SS St. Paul in New York, bound for Europe. Neither of the two, aged 21 and 25, had ever before left the shores of North America nor was either of them a professional soldier. Yet, they were on their way to France to fight in a war that was just beginning, and one in which they had no obligation to fight. Within three weeks they were wearing the uniform of the 2nd Regiment of the Légion étrangère française, as soldiers in the French Foreign Legion.

They were not alone. Dozens of other Americans—some already living or visiting in France and others making their way across the Atlantic in various ways—had the same idea. Rich and poor, young and old, educated and illiterate, they congregated in Paris, and on August 25, 1914, the highly diverse group of enthusiastic American volunteers marched as a unit through its streets and boulevards. Waving an American flag past throngs of cheering Parisians and completely caught up in the moment, they were on their way to fight another country’s war. For all of them, it was a life-changing decision—and for nearly half, including one of the young brothers from North Carolina, a life-ending one.

A World War Begins

History’s first “world war”—remembered now as simply the Great War or World War I—began in August 1914. It was triggered by the June 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. This murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by 19-year-old Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip precipitated a series of political ultimatums, declarations, and behind-the-scenes maneuvering throughout the highly politically charged continent. By the end of the first week in August, most of Europe was at war.

The complex political situation that led to this global conflict is well beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say, however, that the First World War was a cataclysmal event involving the mobilization of at least 70 million men and women and causing the deaths of some 18 million people. This conflagration, unlike anything ever seen before, radically altered the political and social makeup of the entire world, set the stage for yet another world war, and reconfigured the future of all humanity.

The First World War started as a strictly European conflict, involving the Central Powers of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, pitted against the Triple Entente: France, Britain, and the Russian Empire. In time, however, numerous other countries from Europe and elsewhere around the world were drawn into it. It began as a war of mobility but soon became an entrenched stalemate. The primary combat zone, known as the “Western Front,” became a mostly static line of trenches that extended southeastward from the North Sea across Belgium and France, all the way to the border of neutral Switzerland.

Another country, besides Switzerland, dedicated to maintaining its neutrality, as the great nations of Europe began systematically destroying one other, was the United States of America. President Woodrow Wilson was intent on keeping it that way. A few days after hostilities began, he expressed a “solemn word of warning” to the American people. In an August 19, 1914, address to Congress, he cautioned that “the United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men’s souls.” He further implored Americans to remain “impartial in thought as well as action” and to “put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”

A Call to Arms

Wilson’s policy of neutrality was not universally accepted. A few Americans decided, for reasons of their own, to ignore their president’s warning and take sides in the war. A case in point was one of the young North Carolinian brothers, Paul A. Rockwell, who was working as a newspaper reporter in Atlanta, Georgia. On August 3, 1914—two days before the war’s first major battle, the German assault on Liège, he wrote a letter to the French Consul in New Orleans, stating:

I desire to offer my services to the French government in case of actual warfare between France and Germany…. I am twenty-five years old, of French descent, and have had military training at the Virginia Military Institute. I am very anxious to see military service, and had rather fight under the French flag than any other, as I greatly admire your nation.

In truth, Rockwell’s French heritage was distant, at best, and he never attended VMI; nonetheless, he and his younger brother, Kiffin, who had written a similar letter—and who actually had briefly attended VMI, did not bother to wait for a reply. Within four days, they were on their way to Europe and, by the end of the month, marching with the French Foreign Legion—earning the exorbitant equivalent of one penny per day. One of the two would never return to North Carolina but instead remain eternally buried in the French soil he had been so eager to defend.

North Carolinians Kiffin Rockwell (sitting) and his brother Paul were among the first to volunteer to fight for France in 1914. Both were wounded while serving with the Foreign Legion. Paul was invalided out, while Kiffin escaped the ground war by transferring into aviation. Here, they are pictured during Kiffin’s convalescence leave in Paris, July 1915. (Washington and Lee University Archives)

The Rockwell brothers were just two of hundreds of Americans who had similar ideas. It was not just that they wanted to fight for a cause in which they believed: they wanted to be where the action was, to be a part of history in the making. These were men who lived large and who would stop at nothing in their quest for adventure. Most had grown up listening to their grandfathers and other veterans of the US Civil War tell of the glorious battles in which they had participated, and of how they had fought with honor and gallantry. Now, these members of this younger generation wanted their own war, so they could experience these things for themselves.

Not all of these men were partial to France. They flocked to all the warring countries, volunteering to serve the nation of their heritage or with which their family had some ties—be it France, England, or even Germany. Others chose to join the cause they felt was most just. Since France, a traditional American ally going all the way back to the Revolutionary War, was about to take the brunt of the Teutonic onslaught, many fair-minded young Americans enthusiastically took up her cause. Kiffin Rockwell explained his own decision to volunteer to serve France by stating simply, “I pay my debt for Lafayette and Rochambeau,” in reference to the two French nobleman who had come to the aid of the United States during its darkest days of the Revolutionary War. Ted Parsons, another of these young Americans who would eventually become a member of the Lafayette Escadrille, was somewhat less high-minded in his assessment of these men’s motivations. He wrote in his classic and highly entertaining 1937 book The Great Adventure that “some sought adventure, others revenge, while a pitiful few actually sacrificed themselves in the spirit of purest idealism.” Another volunteer, an ex-boxer named Eugene Bullard, enlisted in the Legion for reasons that were not nearly as clear, stating that, “it must have been more curiosity than intelligence.” Bullard eventually wangled his way into the French Air Service and, though he never served with the Lafayette Escadrille, went on to become history’s first African-American combat pilot.

Americans Serving in France

There were serious legal implications for Americans who volunteered to fight in the army of a foreign nation. The most important of these was the potential loss of citizenship. A group of these men, already in Paris, sought out US Ambassador Myron T. Herrick to get his opinion on this matter. Herrick dutifully explained the illegality of neutral Americans serving in the French Army, but then he slammed his fist down on the table and said, “That is the law boys; but if I was young and in your shoes, by God I know mighty well what I’d do!” With a “hurrah!” the young Americans ran out of his office and signed up for the Foreign Legion. At least in this branch, they were not required to swear an oath of allegiance to France, thus decreasing their likelihood of having their citizenship revoked. This highly diverse mercenary branch of the French army, made up almost exclusively of foreign nationals, was famed for its fierceness in battle and its esprit de corps, but it was also infamous as a refuge for criminals, troublemakers, and other outcasts. Now, it would add to its ranks a much different classification of fighter: the curious and idealistic young American.

Kiffin Rockwell (center) with Dennis Dowd and Charles Trinkard, serving with the 2ème Régiment étranger in the Aisne trenches near Craonnelle, France, December 1914. All three eventually transferred from the Foreign Legion to the Aéronautique Militaire (French Air Service), and all three died flying for France. (Washington and Lee University Archives)

These men could not have had even the slightest notion of the horrendous situation into which they were entering. Most claimed previous military experience to increase the likelihood that the Legion would accept them—one even proudly stating that he had served in the Salvation Army—but in fact, most were not veterans. Even had they been, they could not have fully appreciated that modern warfare, as it had evolved by 1914, bore little resemblance to that of the Civil War, or any other war ever waged. It was far less personal and more deadly, and it was almost completely devoid of glory or honor. Scores of them would pay for their idealism and quest for adventure with their lives. Kiffin Rockwell was one of these. After several months of fighting with the Legion, a serious wound provided him a way out of the mud and allowed him to enter into aviation. He was destined to become the second member of the newly formed all-American squadron to die in combat. After he had arrived in France, he related in a letter to his mother a sentiment shared by many of fellow volunteers: “If I die, I want you to know that I have died as every man ought to die, fighting for what is right. I do not feel that I am fighting for France alone, but for the cause of all humanity, the greatest of all causes.”

A somewhat safer avenue for young Americans to see the war firsthand—in terms of both legality and of maintaining life and limb—was to volunteer as an ambulance driver. The war was generating unprecedented numbers of casualties, which in turn, created a great need for ambulances to transport them. Independent civilian ambulance companies, such as the American Field Service and the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, soon formed to help fulfill this need. These companies naturally required competent drivers—semi-skilled manpower that any nation at war could ill afford. Consequently, hundreds of Americans, young and old—including the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Archibald Macleish, and nearly half of the men who would eventually fill the roster of the Lafayette Escadrille—volunteered to serve as drivers in nearly all of the countries in which the war zone extended. Thus many young Americans—particularly those who could afford to pay their own way to Europe and support themselves while there—gained a front row seat to the war, sitting behind the wheel of a Ford, Fiat, or Peugeot field ambulance.

Future Lafayette Escadrille founding member James Rogers McConnell, of Carthage, North Carolina, stands next to his ambulance. Like many other American aviators in World War I, he began his wartime service as an ambulance driver. He served with section S.S.U.2 of the American Field Service for ten months and saw considerable frontline action before transferring to the French Air Service. (US Air Force)

Warfare Takes to the Skies

Thus, between the young Americans fighting with the Legion and those manning the ambulances, there was a ready pool of talent available to flow into yet another branch of the French military complex: the Aéronautique Militaire, or French Air Service.

Early in the war, there was little demand for new pilots, simply because military aviation at that time barely existed. There were as yet very few airplanes operating at the front, and since military aviation activities had not yet evolved into aerial combat, the attrition rate for the few pilots that were flying missions was relatively low. It did not take long, however, for both of these factors to change dramatically.

The usefulness of aviation became apparent soon after the outbreak of hostilities. The flimsy, unreliable toy that most military leaders of the day considered the airplane to be, proved its value beyond all expectations. In the wake of horse-mounted scouts falling before withering machine gun fire like weeds to a sickle, military pilots quickly established themselves on both sides of the lines as the new eyes of the army. In the first weeks of the war, Allied pilots flying reconnaissance aircraft discovered key movements and weaknesses in the German forces that helped prevent a major Allied defeat—and possibly an early loss of the war. Because of this, along with the newly recognized value of reconnaissance aircraft for artillery spotting, the number of frontline reconnaissance aircraft rapidly increased from a mere handful to dozens of squadrons.

The earliest military aircraft were unarmed, a situation that the realities of warfare quickly changed. Army commanders from both sides took serious exception to being spied upon from above. This prompted them to ask designers to develop fast, maneuverable, and well-armed “scouts”—or “avions de chasse,” as the French called them—to attack enemy reconnaissance aircraft and defend their own observation planes from enemy attackers. Thus, was born the concept of the fighter plane. From then on, opposing pilots in nimble machine gun-carrying aircraft would begin meeting, almost daily, all along the front in aerial combat. The skies above the Western Front had now become an aerial battlefield as deadly as the one raging below.

As a result of the new lethal nature of military aviation, the air services of all the warring armies soon became plagued by the constant drain of pilots lost in combat. Before the war ended, France alone would train a total of nearly 17,000 pilots, and the American expatriates serving in the Foreign Legion and ambulance service formed a tempting pool from which to draw new recruits. They were, by and large, young and healthy, educated—and most importantly—willing and readily available.

Many of these idealistic young men were ripe for the picking. After months of fighting in the trenches or transporting horribly maimed men in their ambulances, they had become disillusioned with war as they experienced it. Even the idealistic Kiffin Rockwell had reached his limit. He still believed in the cause but was ready to support it in a different way. As he wrote to his brother, Paul, who had already reverted back to civilian life:

If you can get me into a French regiment, get busy, for I want to get out of the Legion. This regiment is no good; the officers are no good. It is just luck I am not dead, owing to their damned ignorance and neglect…. There is no romance or anything to the infantry. It is not a question of bravery, it is a question of being a good day laborer.

American volunte...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Prologue
• 1 An All-American Idea Takes Shape
• 2 The Escadrille Américaine Is Born
• 3 First Blood
• 4 Into the Grinder
• 5 Season of Discontent
• 6 The Battle Continues
• 7 The Best and the Bravest
• 8 Misery in the Somme
• 9 Mac Goes West
• 10 The Heartbreak of Ham
• 11 Chaudun and Beyond
• 12 Hard Times at Senard
• 13 From Falcons of France to American Eagles
• 14 Aftermath
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Selected Bibliography
• Archival Sources
• Museums