Have I Told You About WWI? The Lafayette Escadrille.
The United States didn’t join World War I until April 1917, almost three years after the war’s beginning. The first troops in American uniforms didn’t arrive in the front line trenches until October of that year. But Americans were serving the war effort, even on the front lines, long before that. One of the most famous American groups, an ancestor of our modern U.S. Air Force, was the Lafayette Escadrille.
The Lafayette Escadrille, first known as the American Escadrille, was a group of American pilots under the direction of French officers in the French army. Norman Prince and William Thaw, two of the founding members, were trained as pilots and envisioned the important role that aviation would come to play in warfare — a vision not shared by many military leaders during the First World War. They petitioned the French army to allow American pilots to form an escadrille of their own, under French officers, to fly in combat missions for the Allies. When their petition was granted, the ranks of the escadrille swelled with other longtime American pilots who believed in the Allied cause, and with American infantrymen who had been serving in the French Foreign Legion but were eager to leave the mud and anonymity of the ground battle behind. Bert Hall, one of those infantrymen, was so confident in his assurance of his abilities that the officers of the escadrille didn’t realize he had never flown a plane until he had climbed into one, tried to take off, and promptly crashed. But thanks to his enthusiasm, they trained him and allowed him to join anyway.
After training, the escadrille flew in the battle of Verdun, crucible of the French army, from mid-May to mid-September 1916. They were avions de chasse, or fighter pilots, rather than bombers or observation pilots. They flew French Nieuport airplanes, which, when engaging the enemy, required the pilot to fire his machine gun with one hand and operate the controls of the aircraft with his other hand and often, his feet. To distinguish their airplanes from the other Nieuports, members of the American Escadrille painted the head of a Sioux Indian on the side of each, along with the pilot’s insignia. (Bert Hall painted B E R T on one side of his plane and T R E B on the other.)
After Verdun, and before their next assignment along the Somme, the escadrille had a week of leave in Paris. They made the most of it. A couple of them found an advertisement for a lion cub for sale, and convinced the others to pool their money to purchase the pet. They named him Whiskey, and he became their mascot. (After much searching, they eventually found him a “wife”, whom they named Soda.) Between bar hopping and training their cub, the pilots found plenty of time to talk with American reporters, who recounted their exploits to an adoring public back home. It was this publicity that caused the escadrille to have to change their name; the German ambassador to the U.S. was outraged that there was an American Escadrille in the French army, when the Americans were still supposed to be neutral. The pilots then chose to name their escadrille after the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman who was instrumental in helping the Americans win the Revolutionary War.
When the U.S. joined the war in 1917, its military aviation was barely in its infancy. The battle experience of veterans of the Lafayette Escadrille was indispensable when the U.S. Air Service began trying to establish itself as a fighting force on the Western Front, and the Lafayette pilots were given leadership roles as captains in the new service. The escadrille’s spirit lives on in its posterity, the U.S. Air Force.
