Observation balloons were not quite as easy a kill as many novice pilots imagined because of the numerous ground AA batteries nearby
There I Lived a Life
Elliott Springs returned from his Paris hospital to the 148th Aero Squadron on October 29. They, too, had been ordered south to Toul, but amid all the upheaval of the move, Springs found the time to hear an account of the previous day’s action from Larry Callahan. All three flights had gone out on an offensive patrol, in layers, with Callahan’s B Flight (he had taken over command from Springs) on top, C in the middle, and A flying at the lowest altitude of 10,000 feet. Once inside enemy territory a flight of seven Fokkers was spotted away to the east. A trap was laid, A Flight the bait. It took a few minutes for the enemy to spring the trap; the German pilots also knew the war was practically over. They too were thinking ahead to the future, not wishing to take unnecessary risks at this late stage. Only when the German flight commander was confident it was no trap did the Fokkers attack. As they dove down on A Flight, the other two flights came down from above. None of the Germans escaped.
One of the seven was shot down by Callahan, his fifth victory. At last! he told Springs. An ace. He also received the DFC for his part in the ambush, the citation noting that his B Flight had accounted for all of the downed Fokkers. It added: “This officer has accounted for four EA crashed and one driven down out of control; he has proven himself an exceptionally fine patrol leader and has at all times displayed gallantry, initiative and devotion to duty of the highest order.”
Callahan was delighted to welcome back Springs to the squadron but it was clear he wasn’t the same man, the same Musketeer. He was tired, embittered, querulous, no longer the charming company he once had been. While Callahan, Ralston, and the rest of the 148th boarded a cattle train on November 1 for the journey to Toul, Springs rode in a Cadillac with the squadron commander, Mort Newhall, along with Henry Clay and Field Kindley.
They arrived at Toul to find the squadron “very fed up” and Springs was similarly exasperated when no news was forthcoming about his promotion to squadron commander. Major Fowler had promised him and Clay their own squadrons, and Springs had already inked in Callahan and Bim Oliver for flight commanders, but now everything was on hold. “Jesus Christ what a place! What an Army!” Springs seethed to his diary on November 7. “Chills and fever, am sick as a dog.”
Springs spent the next day in bed with his fever. By November 9, he felt strong enough to write his stepmother, but it was more a diatribe than a letter. Every sentence bristled with hostility, against people back home, against the American military, against his father, against her. He told his stepmother to stop sending any more editions of the Charlotte Observer. “I’m infernally sick of reading in each issue where ‘Mrs. Walter Lambeth and little daughter Mary Wisdom’ are…and the location of Mrs. Gordon Finger’s relatives.” Didn’t these people realize there was a war on? That over in Europe hundreds of American boys were dying each day?
As well as 17th and 148th Aero Squadrons, Toul was also home to the 25th Aero Squadron. They had arrived on October 24, minus any aircraft, and it wasn’t until the first week of November that they began to take delivery of their S.E.5 fighters. Commanding the 25th was Reed Landis, one of the original fifty-two cadets who sailed to England in August 1917 aboard RMS Aurania. He had made quite a name for himself flying with 40 RAF Squadron, shooting down twelve enemy aircraft and earning the DFC and DSC. On August 8, he had accounted for two German machines and a kite balloon, characteristic of a man who “on all occasions engaged the enemy with marked skill and an entire disregard of personal danger.”
Landis was anxious to get his squadron in the air before the armistice was signed. He, like everyone, knew it was imminent. On November 9, Germany proclaimed itself a republic and the Kaiser announced his abdication. If the 25th didn’t carry out an offensive patrol before peace came, the squadron wouldn’t qualify as an aerial pursuit unit operating on the front. On November 10, Landis led the 25th over the lines toward Metz in search of the enemy. No enemy aircraft were seen but the squadron was now active.
Observation balloons were not quite as easy a kill as many novice pilots imagined because of the numerous ground AA batteries nearby
At 5:00 a.m. Paris time on November 11, an armistice was agreed between Germany and the Allied powers, to come into effect six hours later, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. At 10:55 a.m. Landis set out on another patrol toward Metz, so he could say that the 25th were “operational” when the guns fell silent for the final time. He invited along three of his friends from the 148th: Orville Ralston, Bim Oliver, and Larry Callahan. “[We] take up the four new S.E.5s of 25 squadron and do a last war patrol,” wrote Ralston in his diary. “We see nothing and have a line flip as the machines are wonderful and run fine. We ‘high tone’ the other squadrons down here by taking off in formation.”
All four aircraft returned safely. Landis, Callahan, Ralston, and Oliver climbed out of their cockpits, shook each other’s hands, and retired to the mess. The war was over; time for champagne.
Peace! Was it really true? Men wrestled with a welter of emotions. For Donald Poler, one of the original Warbirds, the armistice was a nuisance. He’d served with 40 RAF Squadron throughout the summer, shot down two balloons and an aircraft, and was now one of the 25th Aero Squadron’s flight commanders. He felt “let down” by the end of the war. “I was ready to go still farther,” he recalled. “Most of us were disappointed that the Armistice was signed. Most of us felt as though we hadn’t done anything yet.”
George Vaughn had done plenty. There was “quite a bit of rejoicing,” he told his parents in a letter the next day, written with a slightly thick head. In the afternoon he and some of the boys of the 17th Aero Squadron took a ride into Toul. “I have never seen anything like the changed general atmosphere about the place,” wrote Vaughn. “Everyone was wearing a broad ‘won’t come off’ smile, and big ribbons or flags of their national colors. Flags were everywhere, in every conceivable place, and every motor car or truck carried large flags down the streets. In the square an American band was giving a concert, and a good one, too, assisted by someone who had evidently been a professional comedian in civil life.”
Bogart Rogers didn’t know how he felt now that the war had ended. There was soaring relief that he had come through unscathed. “I surely thank God it is [over] and that I’m here to see the finish,” he wrote his fiancée, shortly after the Armistice had come into effect. But the silence unnerved him. No distance rumble of guns, no engine being run up on the aerodrome, no telephone ringing with fresh orders for a patrol. Just quiet. “Somehow or other it didn’t seem possible it was all over,” he wrote, “that we were thru with crossing the line and worrying about Huns and archie and seeing good fellows getting bumped off.”
Good fellows like Alvin Callender. “Poor old Callender, as square and decent a man as ever lived,” he told Isabelle, “going only a week or so ago.” It wasn’t fair. He cursed the war, and the politicians and everyone else who prattled on “about war being the salvation of nations, the one thing that can keep them from decay.” It was a lie, declared Rogers. “I know that it will never be worth the sacrifice. It’s all wrong.”
Peace left Elliott Springs bereft. “No more can I laugh at conventions, colonels and cocktails, no more can I speak of shoes and ships and sealing wax with equal objectivity,” he wrote. Soon he would have to return to civilian life, and its accompanying squalidness and pettiness, where money was considered by many—including his father—to be more important than integrity. “There is no longer that place where every man is known by his merit,” he wrote mournfully, “where a grim though sure justice prevails, and where is always a haven of rest for those whom the world treats ill.”
Together with Landis, Bim Oliver, and Larry Callahan, Orville Ralston flew a final patrol with 148th Squadron at 10:55 on November 11, 1918.
The 94th, otherwise known as the Hat-in-the-Ring squadron, received greater recognition back in the United States because it was never under British control.
Springs followed Vaughn into Toul, watched the French dancing and the band playing, but he could “find no enthusiasm.” He quailed at the future before him, bleak meaningless years, probably following his father into the cotton business. Springs thought of John McGavock Grider and all his other friends and comrades who had “gone west,” and he knew that “no matter where I go or what I do, the best part of me will always remain between Zeebrugge and Armentières, and in front of Cambrai. There I lived a life, a long lifetime, there lie my companions, and many adversaries and there also lies the biggest part of myself.”
Arthur Taber was at Ford Junction aerodrome in Sussex, England, when news came through of the Armistice. He wrote his mother an hour after peace descended across Europe, posing the question on the lips of most American service personnel. “When are we going home?” Soon, he hoped, and once back in the States he would ponder his future. The law? Business? Or perhaps remain in the military. “I’m convinced that aviation is ‘here to stay’,” Taber told his mother, “and its development will be lightning-like and colossal, and that it will continue to progress under government supervision; therefore it will be of advantage to be in the army, if one expects to continue to be associated with aviation.”
The letter finished, Taber headed to London where for a few precious hours he surrendered to the unrestrained joy of the occasion. “It was an amazing sight to see London gone mad,” he wrote his father a few days later. “People dancing in the street, parades everywhere, soldiers shooting off pistols, guns, etc., in the streets, a huge bonfire in Trafalgar Square of the captured Hun guns on exhibition in the Mall, a taxi-cab burning up in Piccadilly Circus, Roman candles and sky-rockets set off from the tops of busses and falling upon the human sea which thronged the streets beneath.…[T]he deliverance of these people from the four years’ war-cloud is stirring to behold; I’ve never been so emotionally stirred.”
