by J. Michael Waller
Serviam, March-April 2008
With war raging on the other side of the world,
Charlie Meyers left his home in Brooklyn and headed for Canada. Not to
avoid a military draft, but to go and fight. The United States had not
yet entered World War I, and Meyers (pictured), a young flier during the dawn of
military aviation, wanted to battle the enemy. So he offered his flying
and mechanical skills to Canada, which was already deeply in combat as
part of the British Empire, and was promptly assigned to the Royal
Flying Corps in England.
“Charles W. Meyers was not a tall man. He was, in
fact, rather short. One comes to realize this only in retrospect,
because you would never notice it in his presence,” Joe Christy and
Leroy Cook wrote in American Aviation: An Illustrated History
(McGraw-Hill, 1994). “There was something about Charlie—an indefinable
something that caused the world to stand aside while he passed. He was
a man of courage and talent; he was a man of the sky."
Meyers had designed and flown his own gliders as a
teenager and worked for a small aircraft manufacturer. In 1916, at age
20, with about 12 hours of flying time under his belt, he volunteered
for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which had a 40-plane fleet. The army
didn’t need him. So Meyers went to Canada. His 12 hours in the air were
more than almost anyone alive had at the time, and the Royal Flying
Corps commissioned him as an officer after he flew another 105 minutes.
Meyers spent the rest of the war in England as an instructor for
British and American pilots.
Other Americans volunteered to help France. They
were American pilots and crew who flew for foreign militaries in time
of war, but few people ever called them “mercenaries.” Though far more
served with the British, it is the American volunteers in France who
have become better known in history.
American volunteer pilots served in the French Air
Service from the beginning of World War I in 1914. In April 1916, two
Americans, Edmund Gros and Norman Prince, persuaded Paris to recruit
American volunteers into a single unit, the Escadrille Américaine.
Gros, a physician from Princeton, headed a
nongovernmental organization (NGO) called the American Ambulance
Service, which ferried wounded French soldiers and civilians from
battlefields. As Jon Guttman wrote in SPA124 Lafayette Escadrille: American Volunteer Airmen in World War I (Osprey,
2004), Prince was from a wealthy industrialist family with an estate in
France, and the young man developed a strong attachment to the country.
He had already learned to fly and when the war broke out in 1914,
Prince and a friend thought of setting up an all-volunteer American
aviator force to fight for France. Early in 1915, he sailed across the
Atlantic, brought his idea to a skeptical French War Department, and
joined the Foreign Legion.
One of Prince’s aviator friends, Frazier Curtis,
was wounded and ultimately discharged from the French Army.He
introduced the American escadrille concept to Gros, who helped persuade
the French military to accept the idea. Other American fliers had
thought along similar lines. Part of the purpose of an American
escadrille, Gros and Prince reasoned, was to generate publicity and
inspire Americans to persuade President Woodrow Wilson and Congress to
abandon neutrality and aid the French and other allies.
The name Escadrille Américaine, however,
posed a problem for the United States, which was not in the war at the
time. Germany had filed a diplomatic protest with Washington. So the
flyers took the name of the French general who had been so valuable to
the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, and they became
famous as the Lafayette Escadrille.
Prince and others recruited young, new volunteers
as well as a few seasoned American aviators already flying for France
to join the Lafayette Escadrille. The commander, ground crew, Nieuport
aircraft, and even some pilots were French. The Americans wore French
military uniforms. Deployed in time for the Battle of Verdun, where
they were both admired and criticized for a “cowboy” mentality, the
small squadron’s core group of 38 pilots shot down 41 enemy planes
during the war and lost nine of their own men.
A total of 265 Americans served in a larger
Lafayette Flying Corps, which supported the Lafayette Escadrille and
prepared the volunteers to join other French units. Overall, 63
volunteers in the Lafayette Flying Corps reportedly died during World
War I.
In the big picture, the Lafayette Escadrille’s
military contribution was modest. After the U.S. joined the war, the
Lafayette Escadrille was placed under American command as the 103rd
Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Service, with its French
Nieuports and crew transferring out to American aircraft and mechanics.
Credit for the Lafayette Escadrille’s fame in
popular culture goes to veteran William A. Wellman of Brookline,
Massachusetts. His father, he said, “didn’t have enough money for me to
become a flier in the regular way, through private lessons.” So in
1915, at age 19, Wellman joined the French Foreign Legion to become an
aviator.
Wounded in France, Wellman returned to
Massachusetts, where he campaigned for citizens to enlist in the war
effort and to support the American Red Cross. He wowed a group of
freshly minted U.S. Navy aviators taking courses at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, prompting one, Ensign Roland W. Waller (a
cousin of Charlie Meyers, serving in England), to lament in a letter to
his sweetheart that the military couldn’t speed him more quickly to
fight in France.
Wellman moved to California, and in early 1918 the
U.S. Army Air Corps recruited him to train new pilots in combat air
tactics. Wellman went on to become a successful movie director and
producer, developing the military genre with such huge productions as
“Wings” (Paramount, 1928), about World War I fighter pilots, and giving
future superstar Gary Cooper one of his first movie roles. “Wings” was
the first film to win an Oscar for Best Film.
Wellman’s last film, aptly titled “Lafayette
Escadrille” (Warner Bros., 1958), was about his old unit. The movie
featured a new actor who would go on to make many successful military
pictures, Clint Eastwood. Nearly a half-century later, the movie
“Flyboys” (Twentieth Century Fox, 2006) would take inspiration from
Wellman.
The American volunteer pilots’ combat experience
proved invaluable to the United States once Congress declared war in
1917. The United States had no seasoned combat pilots as it went into
World War I. David Putnam of Massachusetts, a descendant of
Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam, had joined the French Air
Service at age 18 and was already an ace by the time he flew for Uncle
Sam. Flying with the U.S. 139th Aero Squadron in September 1918, Putnam
met his end at the hands of German ace Georg von Hantelmann.
Meyers, who had been working as a mechanic for the
British Royal Flying Corps, transferred to the U.S. military in 1917 as
a seasoned technician to keep American warplanes flying.
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From the March/April 2008 issue of Serviam. J. Michael Waller wrote under the pen name Ann Jocelyn in the original version of this article.