Manfred von Richthofen, fourth from left, chats to pilots from Jasta 10 a month before his death.
Dogfighting Days
By the end of April 1918 the great German offensive of the previous month had been stemmed by the Allies, but at a considerable cost. More than 300,000 Allied soldiers had been killed or wounded (German casualties were put at 350,000) and the British, in particular, were at the end of their tether. As American “doughboys” were rushed to the front to replace the shattered remnants of the British army, a similar manpower problem was affecting the RAF. When the German offensive began on March 21, the RAF had 1,232 aircraft on the Western Front; six weeks later, all but 200 had been destroyed or damaged beyond repair.
Casualties were high because the war in the air, as on the ground, had evolved. The static trench warfare of the previous three years had given way to fluid fighting, the Germans penetrating as far as forty miles in some sectors of the Western Front. There hadn’t been territorial advances like it since 1914, yet despite all their gains the Germans failed to make the decisive breakthrough.
The role of the RAF in the spring offensive had been significant. On April 11, 1918, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, had issued his famous communique that passed into legend as his “Backs to the Wall” order:
Three weeks ago to-day the enemy began his terrific attacks against us on a fifty-mile front. His objects are to separate us from the French, to take the Channel Ports and destroy the British Army.…There is no other course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.
Manfred von Richthofen, fourth from left, chats to pilots from Jasta 10 a month before his death.
While the British army dug in to defend their positions, the RAF went on the offensive. Throughout April 12 they bombed, strafed, and photographed the enemy, their contribution recognized subsequently by the Official History, which stated: “The advancing German divisions were subjected to relentless attacks by the British air squadrons.…[E]very squadron was used unsparingly from dawn to dusk.”
The official historian neglected to mention the damage inflicted on the German air force. On April 12, forty-nine enemy aircraft were shot down, with a further twenty-five driven down “out of control.” Nine days later von Richthofen was killed. The German air force had lost its greatest star, but not its fighting spirit, and by May 1918 the ranks of the RAF had thinned to an alarming degree.
Fresh blood was needed out in France, so the RAF turned to the cadets who had arrived in Oxford the previous fall. The understanding had always been that these young men would be trained by the British to fly in American squadrons, but, by May 1918, the American air force was not yet equipped to deploy to the front. So the U.S. Aviation Section of the Signal Corps agreed that its cadets could gain valuable experience by serving in the RAF until such a time as American squadrons began operations on the Western Front.
George Vaughn graduated from the School of Aerial Fighting at Ayr on May 2. The next day he traveled by train to London to take up an appointment that for many airmen was the last link in the chain before a posting to a combat squadron. “I am now what is called a ‘Ferry Pilot’,” he wrote to his family on May 3. “Which means I travel all around England flying machines from one airdrome to another, and then taking them over to France. When you get to France and deliver your machine you either fly another one back, or come back on boat. Then you repeat the process.”
Allied soldiers swarm over a downed German two-seater.
First Lieutenant Donald Poler was a month in advance of Vaughn, having started ferrying aircraft at the beginning of April. At the end of the month he “was assigned to the RAF pilots’ pool in France…inland from Boulogne near Arras or St. Omer.” Poler didn’t remain long in the pilots’ pool and in the first half of May he was posted to 40 Squadron. The squadron was one of the best in France, its renown built on the exploits of Mick Mannock and George McElroy. Neither ace was with the squadron when Poler arrived—Mannock had been appointed C.O. of 74 Squadron, and McElroy was recovering from a crash. Another of its luminaries, Maj. Leonard Tilney, had been shot down and killed in March.
Poler wasn’t the only American posted to 40 Squadron to fill its depleted ranks. Mike Davis, a regular U.S. Army major, was there, as was Reed Landis. The British had learned from the mistakes of the previous two years when new pilots, untested in combat, were thrown into action almost immediately; having a new pilot come and go in the space of eleven days, as was the average life-expectancy twelve months earlier, served no purpose other than to demoralize the squadron. Now tyros were nurtured. “In the first two weeks at the No. 40 squadron we were conducted on what they called ‘Cook’s Tours,’” recalled Poler. “Up and down the front lines, getting used to the area, and being shown what to do and what not to do.”21
First Lieutenant Bennett “Bim” Oliver was being handled in a similarly judicious manner. One of the fifty-two cadets who had sailed on the Aurania the previous summer, the Pittsburgh native was posted from the pilots’ pool to 84 Squadron in May 1918, along with Alex Matthews, Morton Newhall, and Sam Eckert. Squadron commander was William Sholto Douglas, a man Oliver found “kept pretty much to himself.” Nonetheless, Douglas had a high regard for the fighting qualities of American aviators having seen the damage inflicted on the enemy by Lt. Jens Frederick Larson. Inevitably nicknamed “Swede” in the squadron mess, the twenty-six-year-old Larson in fact hailed from Waltham, Massachusetts.
Like Fred Libby, Larson had worked his way into the war via Canada, enlisting in the 1st Canadian Overseas Contingent in February 1915, and serving in France as an artillery officer. It was a job that allowed him plenty of time to observe the air war, and the more Larson saw of it, the more he wanted to be part of this martial innovation. In October 1916 he successfully applied for a transfer to the RFC, and he was soon at Oxford, undergoing the same instruction that Oliver, Springs, and Grider would receive twelve months later.
Larson arrived at 84 Squadron in September 1917, and two months later shot down his first enemy aircraft. Bad weather in December curtailed his opportunities for further victims, but three days into the new year Larson claimed his second enemy aircraft. Two more followed in February, and on March 15 he achieved ace status when he downed a Pfalz D.III. A sixth victim fell to Larson’s guns on March 18 and three days later, the same day that the Germans launched their massive ground offensive, the American departed for two weeks’ leave in London.
William Sholto Douglas (right), C.O. of 84 Squadron, held his American pilots in high regard.
Introduced in January 1917, the D.III was an agile aircraft whose lower wing was reduced to allow greater downward visibility for the pilot—in this photo, the Red Baron himself.
Ten days into his furlough, a telegram arrived at his hotel ordering his return to France. Larson slipped back into the old routine almost at once, destroying two German aircraft on April 3 during a dogfight with “two formations of Pfalz and [Albatros D.III] V-strutters in the clouds at 7,000 ft.” Larson, now a flight leader, led his four S.E.5s by example, diving through the clouds to ambush the enemy. “I got well on the tail of one at close range, firing with both guns,” he wrote in his combat report. “The EA [enemy aircraft] turned under me; but I again got on his tail and fired both guns. The EA went down vertically, pulled out, stalled and started to spin.” Larson then latched on to the tail of another V-strutter, “firing long bursts from both guns into him. The [EA] fell into a spin and I saw him crash into the ground about one mile east of Rosières.”
On April 6, Larson claimed his ninth victim and then received orders to return to England to take up a post as an instructor. A little under a fortnight after Larson departed 84 Squadron, Oliver arrived at their base in Bertangles, a large airfield that they shared with Squadrons 23, 24, 48, 54, and 209.
When Oliver entered the mess on the evening of Sunday April 21, he found everyone “pretty well plastered. Someone thrust a glass into his hand and told him to join the party. Hadn’t he heard? “We just buried Richthofen today.”22
Oliver was mistaken in his belief that William Sholto Douglas was an aloof man; he was simply standing apart from the new recruits, observing them, scrutinizing their character, and—for his own curiosity as much as for the benefit of the squadron—discovering which Americans had volunteered to fight for the British from “a hot-headed zest for adventure” and which ones from “matters of stern principle.” Not that it bothered him overly. Sholto Douglas found it “touching” that so many Americans had come to Britain’s aid, and he reflected that “we of the Royal Air Force will always be grateful.”
For several days Oliver and his fellow Americans practiced combat maneuvers over their own lines with their senior pilots. Then, when Douglas deemed them ready for combat, they went out on patrol. “On the first trip over the lines we crossed north of Amiens and very shortly met up with a flock of Albatros [and] a dogfight erupted,” remembered Oliver.
Now was the time for Oliver to put into practice all that he’d been taught. For months he and his fellow American aviators had read the handbook distributed to them by the RFC entitled On Aerial Combat over and over again. In it were listed the four principles of air attack:
1. Open fire at the closest possible range.
2. Open fire under the most favorable conditions.
3. Open fire before the enemy does; if within reasonable range.
4. Give him no rest until you have downed him.
In addition, trainee aviators were advised to “reserve your fire until the last possible moment unless the enemy sees you and prepares to fire or actually fires.” They should never engage the enemy with a half-finished drum of ammunition, and in attacking frontally, “always open fire at 200 yards because you will then be together before you have fired your drum.” Finally, if one should find an enemy aircraft on one’s tail, “do not lose height if you can help it and do not do S turns.” It was recommended that the pilot should perform an upward spiral, “at least until you have collected your thoughts.”
Such advice was easy to absorb in the sanctuary of the classroom, but harder to apply when caught up in the first dogfight. Oliver later admitted he “didn’t know at the time whether it was Piccadilly or Thursday night,” so he disengaged and climbed above the fracas. “This may have been a bit on the saffron side but I’m still here and the C.O. [Douglas] seemed to think that I had done the right thing,” he recalled.
Also at Bertangles aerodrome in May 1918 was 1st Lt. Frank Dixon, a graduate of the Princeton Flying School, who had come to England on board the Carmania. He was posted to 209 Squadron—Oliver LeBoutillier’s squadron—arriving as a replacement for Captain Brown who had been “given leave for the Richthofen victory.”
There was also a new squadron commander, Maj. John Andrews, the successor to Maj. Charles Butler, who had left 209 in the first week of May. Andrews was something of a legend within the RAF by this stage of the war, a highly-decorated ace who had dueled with Max Immelmann and the Red Baron, and who had survived more than three years in the air. Andrews showed Dixon to his Sopwith Camel and told him to take up the aircraft and fire at some ground targets. Dixon recalled that Andrews was “a bit dissatisfied with my trials so he took the plane up and dived almost vertical before firing the guns.”
Changing a 47-round drum from a Lewis gun was never easy for either pilot or observer.
Andrews climbed out of the Camel’s cockpit and told Dixon with avuncular concern, “That’s how I want you to do it. Don’t level off so soon but watch the ground.” However, Andrews couldn’t always be there to nursemaid his charges; sometimes the novices had to learn on the job. “Another time I flew up to 18,000 ft with no oxygen,” recalled Dixon, who said he began to descend when he felt giddy. “As I dived lower the plane suddenly hit dense air, snapped past the vertical and I found myself out of the seat belt and over the guns.…[T]he plane righted itself and I scrambled back to safety, though scared.” It was another lesson learned by Dixon, who said the “rapid but thorough British training instilled confidence” in the new pilots.
While Dixon was still undergoing his initiation as a fighter pilot, another of the Carmania class had already claimed his first kill. Lloyd Hamilton, the son of a Methodist minister from Troy, and a former student at the Harvard Business School, had proved an outstanding pupil in England. Commissioned on March 2, 1918, Hamilton was posted to 3 Squadron under the command of Maj. Richard Raymond-Barker a fortnight later, at the same time as a South African pilot called Douglas Bell arrived from 27 Squadron. Bell had scored three victories with 27 Squadron, a feat in itself considering they had been equipped with the cumbersome Martinsyde biplanes, described by one RFC pilot, Cecil Lewis, as “so clumsy and un-manoeuvrable…they were sitting ducks.”
Now let loose in a Sopwith Camel, Bell claimed twelve victories (including two observation balloons) in the space of a month, all the while bringing on Hamilton, until, on April 11, he took the American out on his first combat patrol. Hamilton swooped on an LVG between Courcelles and Ervillers but, despite firing 150 rounds, the German two-seater fled and the contact was marked “indecisive.”
Such a glaring miss wasn’t uncommon for new pilots. It took time to get one’s eye in, for the brain and the trigger finger to harmonize; Hamilton required only a further twenty-four hours. On April 12, he shot down an Albatros, as did Bell, who then added a second to round off a good day’s hunting. Eight days later, Saturday April 20, Hamilton and 3 Squadron encountered a patrol of Richthofen’s Jagdstaffel 11. The two squadron commanders engaged, the Red Baron against Major Raymond-Barker, and the German triumphed, sending the British ace crashing into the forest of Hamel in flames. As Richthofen then turned his attention to the young Rhodesian pilot, Tommy Lewis, Hamilton picked out a blue Fokker triplane and opened fire. The German went into a spin and then flattened out, escaping the clutches of Hamilton who returned to a somber aerodrome. Their commanding officer was dead and Tommy Lewis a prisoner, both victims of the Red Baron.
Major John Andrews, commander of 209 Squadron, was a leading British ace who had duelled with both Max Immelmann and the Red Baron and lived to tell the tale.
Max Immelmann was an early German ace whose theories of combat flying were to influence the likes of the Red Baron.
George Vaughn spent much of May in the hospital with influenza, one of the first victims of the pandemic that would kill tens of millions of people before the end of 1919. On May 23, the day after the Three Musketeers had arrived in France with 85 Squadron, Vaughn wrote his family from the American Expeditionary Headquarters: “I am out of hospital now, well and healthy again, and ready once more to go up to the front. The hospital provided a most comfortable place to be, with splendid quarters, food, and attention, but one cannot expect to spend the duration of the war in a hospital with the grippe.”
Vaughn, who had celebrated his twenty-first birthday in the hospital, didn’t have long to wait until he received his first posting. On May 25, he was assigned to 84 Squadron, another Yank to join Lts. Oliver, Matthews, Newhall, and Eckert. Vaughn was posted to B Flight under the command of a South African captain called Hugh Saunders. Straight away he knew he’d landed on his feet. “Sanders was a genial 230 pound veteran and was called ‘dingbat’,” recalled Vaughn. “He had a fine sense of humor and always found an amusing side to even dangerous situations.”
Major Sholto Douglas also met with Vaughn’s approval. Not at all the standoffish Englishman of Oliver’s estimation, Sholto Douglas took an instant shine to his latest American, and together the pair formed the squadron band, the C.O. “playing on a set of traps made from old petrol tins while I played the piano in the officers’ mess.”
Vaughn was “indoctrinated into the ways of combat flying” under the careful tutelage of Saunders, but for the first ten days of his posting to 84 Squadron he was left on the ground whenever his fellow pilots went out on patrol. There were usually two patrols a day, one in the early morning, the other in the late afternoon. The strength of patrols varied. Sometimes two flights, with five aircraft per flight, went out; on other occasions Sholto Douglas ordered all three flights into the air.
The procedure was always the same, as Vaughn recalled: “After leaving Bertangles we would head straight west toward the Channel to gain altitude. When we finally could see the Channel, we would test our guns, and then turn toward the lines. We would cross the lines between 16,000 and 18,000 feet, with the leading flight usually from 1,000 to 2,000 feet lower than the second. The reason for this was that if the leading flight got into trouble, the second flight would come in with the superior altitude.”
On June 2, Vaughn, still waiting for his first combat patrol, wrote home to tell his parents he had “been very fortunate in being posted to a good squadron where there are a very good bunch of fellows.” Though he couldn’t name names, he explained that “several of them I already knew when I arrived, having met them in England, so it made it very nice for me.”
South African Hugh Saunders of 84 Squadron, known to George Vaughn as “dingbat.”
Two days later, Vaughn went on his first patrol, and on June 16, the squadron was ordered to provide an escort to a flight of bombers on a raid against German positions at Foucaucourt. On their return to Bertangles they were ambushed by two German fighters. One pilot quickly singled out Vaughn as a novice and “got a long burst into my tail before I knew he was even in the sky.” Vaughn’s luck was in. The German was no ace and his burst missed the target. Vaughn turned to his right and came out on the tail of his enemy. The German tried to shake off his pursuer but Vaughn clung to his quarry, following him for several miles east until eventually he poured a torrent of Vickers fire into the German. Smoke began billowing from the engine and “after falling some 500 feet it burst into flames.”
Vaughn’s first kill was confirmed by Alex Matthews and Roy Manzer, a Canadian from Victoria, but there was no jubilation when he landed at Bertangles. Waiting for him on the ground was Hugh Saunders, his giant frame quivering with rage. “Captain Saunders really read me off,” remembered Vaughn. “He did not relish being pulled that far behind the lines just to watch over me.”
Saunders had softened by the time dinner was served in the mess. A lesson had been learned, both by Vaughn and Saunders, who admired the pugnacity of his new officer. The next day Vaughn described his first kill in a letter to his family, an account that was sparse and lacking in glory. “It was not a large fight by any means,” he said, “but large enough for a starter, as it is the first fight I have been in.” Vaughn’s excuse for not writing more was that it was tea-time and “even out here in France the English stick to their afternoon tea.”
“Honestly,” he added, “I am so used to it now that I don’t know how I will do without it when I go to the American army. The Americans, by the way are doing some fine work over here, and get some very good ‘write ups’ in the papers.”
