The Lafayette Escadrille Memorial in Paris, inaugurated in 1928, honors the courage of those Americans who flew with the French air force. Library of Congress
All You Had to Do Was Fly the Plane
It wasn’t just Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker who returned from the war a hero. So did those Americans who served the French air force in the Lafayette Corps, subsequently immortalized in celluloid in the 1928 Hollywood film The Legion of the Condemned. That was also the year the French government unveiled the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial, just outside Paris, a towering tribute to the courage of the 265 American volunteers.
For the American airmen who had fought with the British there was no such fanfare. They were largely overlooked and ignored, perhaps victims of a popular press who questioned why any American would trek north to Canada and temporarily forfeit their nationality in order to fly with the British.
The oversight was still being perpetuated forty years later when, in his 1968 work The Great Air War, American author Aaron Norman did not acknowledge that as many as three hundred American pilots served in operational squadrons British during World War I, and from that total, twenty-eight aces between them shot down 294 enemy aircraft. Some of the responsibility for the lack of recognition accorded the Americans who flew in the RFC, and later the RAF, is attributable to the British policy of not glamorizing “aces” in the same way the French and the Germans did. The British believed more in the team ethos, that the whole of a squadron was greater than its individual parts.
The Lafayette Escadrille Memorial in Paris, inaugurated in 1928, honors the courage of those Americans who flew with the French air force. Library of Congress
One of the top aces of the war, Canadian Raymond Collishaw, credited with sixty victories and who later became an Air Vice-Marshal, wrote in his memoirs: “It always struck me as peculiar and rather unfair that the Americans who flew with the Lafayette Squadron should have received such great public acclaim whereas the many hundreds of Americans who flew as members of the British air forces, mostly with the RFC and the RAF, remain completely ignored.”
The 94th Aero Squadron were known as the “Hat-in-the-Ring” boys because of the insignia painted on their aircraft’s fuselages.