Harold Shoemaker was one of 17th Squadron’s aces, but his luck ran out in October 1918 when he was killed in a collision with fellow pilot Glen Wicks.
Peace on the Horizon
George Vaughn’s lethal streak that had begun with 84 Squadron in late July, and culminated a month later with the award of the DFC, continued in September with 17th Aero Squadron. On September 20, the squadron had moved from Petite Synthe to Soncamp, near Doullens, sharing the aerodrome with 87 RAF Squadron in readiness for the impending offensive at Cambrai against the Hindenburg Line.
Frederick Clapp, the 17th’s adjutant, recalled that “we pitched our officers’ tents and the two marquees that were to be the Mess in a triangle of pasture.” Heavy rain and the tramp of flying boots churned the pasture into mud that was “omnipresent and deep.” Two days after the move to Soncamp Vaughn shot down two enemy aircraft, a feat he dismissed in a sentence in a letter the following day. “Yesterday, by the way, I got two more Huns, which gives me a total of seven confirmed, I think.”
Clapp later wrote a more florid account of the dogfight, recalling that “Vaughn saw fifteen Fokkers dive, as he thought, on our ‘C’ flight formation from 15,000 feet. Though outnumbered nearly five to one, he led his flight impetuously to the attack and, in the midst of furious and numerous ‘bursts’ fired by all our pilots, the results of which could not be observed because of the bewildering intensity of the engagement, he shot down one Fokker in flames and crashed another.”
But the dead pilots’ comrades were out for revenge. Vaughn recalled that seconds after shooting down the second Fokker, “a burst of bullets came through the three-ply over my knees. That sort of hurt my feelings and I stuck down my nose and twisted my machine into a spin.…[T]hat spin out of the fracas seemed endless. My machine didn’t give them a decent target, but two or three of those lads had made my acquaintance and yearned to know me better.”
The two Germans on Vaughn’s tail were Lt. Wilhelm Neuenhofen of Jasta 36 and Lt. Friederich Noltenius of Jasta 27, the latter of whom left an account of the dogfight. “Finally Neuenhofen got close enough, kept behind him and forced him down for good,” wrote Noltenius. “I kept a bit higher up because the cloth covering of the top wing had torn off and several ribs were broken in the hectic dogfight. The kill was credited to Neuenhofen.”
Harold Shoemaker was one of 17th Squadron’s aces, but his luck ran out in October 1918 when he was killed in a collision with fellow pilot Glen Wicks.
However, the two Germans had been presumptuous in imagining that their foe was dead. Vaughn had avoided a “long burst” fired by Neuenhofen, only to discover, as he shoved on the throttle, that he had no more gas. He looked for a place to land and “just as my wheels were about to rub the ground, I thought of my emergency tank. I had forgotten all about it.”
Vaughn turned on the petcock and punched the air with delight as gas flowed down to the carburetor and the motor roared its approval. “With one eye I negotiated the piles of barb wire and with the other I looked around for signs of tracer bullets. None were passing. The last square-nose was streaking it for home probably to turn in a report of the exact time and place of my crash.”
Vaughn collected a DSC for this action, the citation mentioning how “he alone attacked an enemy advance plane which was supported by seven Fokkers and shot the advance plane down in flames.”
When the great offensive began against the Hindenburg Line, 17th Aero carried out a series of bombing sorties, targeting transport and troop concentrations. There were high risk operations, wrote Vaughn, “and we were paying a heavy price for the low-level work.” No day cost more that fall than October 6 when two of the squadron’s most experienced, and popular pilots, Harold Shoemaker, an ace, and Glenn Wicks collided during a bombing “due to heavy and accurate anti-aircraft fire.”
On October 14, Vaughn shot down two more enemy aircraft in a day, taking his tally to thirteen, and then was finally put out of action—by a “wisdom tooth so far back in my mouth that the gum had begun to grow over the top of it.” He was carted off to hospital, operated on, and ordered to rest up for a week. When he returned to the squadron, he found everything in a state of flux. The 17th Aero Squadron had been ordered south, to Toul, in the American sector, where they would be equipped with French SPAD XIII fighters as part of the U.S. 4th Pursuit Group.
“We heard the news with mixed emotions,” reminisced Frederick Clapp. “We wanted naturally to have some part in the exploits of our own people in the field. But we had been very happy with the British and had learned their game and how well they played it.”
On October 30, the day before the squadron entrained south, Gen. Charles Longcroft, one of the RAF’s senior commanders in France flew over in his Camel. The enlisted men were “drawn up on three sides of a hangar and he walked down their lines asking, here and there, one or another of them, what his work had been before the war and in the Squadron.” Longcroft then removed from his tunic a letter and read it aloud to the officers and men stood before him. It was, he declared, from General Byng, commander of the Third British Army.
Shoemaker, front row, far right, with some of his fellow pilots from 74 squadron shortly before his transfer to the 17th.
“Will you please convey to the Commanders and all ranks of the 17th and 148th American Squadrons my sincere appreciation of their excellent and valuable work with the Third Army, and thank them very warmly for so cordially responding to all the calls made upon them.
“I greatly regret their departure and wish them every luck.”