¹ Alan Clark, Aces High

² Ralph Barker, The Royal Flying Corps in France

³ John H. Morrow and Earl Rogers, eds., A Yankee Ace in the RAF

⁴ Ironically, the Atlanta-born Anderson became a fascist during her time living in Spain in the 1920s. During World War II, she broadcast Nazi propaganda on the radio from Germany under the nom de guerre “the Georgia Peach.” Anderson was arrested after the war and charged with treason, but the indictment was dropped, primarily because in 1934 she had become a Spanish citizen through marriage.

⁵ Alan Sullivan, Aviation in Canada, 1917–1918

⁶ The article was eventually published on October 7, 1917, and when it finally reached Springs in England he commented in a letter home, “’Twas rather good.”

⁷ Sydney Taber, Arthur Richmond Taber

⁸ All three cadets were subsequently killed flying.

⁹ Frederick Libby, Horses Don’t Fly

¹⁰ There is some confusion as to the exact date Libby actually volunteered as his enlistment papers are dated January 1915.

¹¹ Arch Whitehouse, The Fledging

¹² According to Fred Libby, he required one hundred hours of flying time to qualify for the half wing.

¹³ Now the site of Heathrow International airport

¹⁴ Beginning his flying career as an instructor at the Wright Brothers Flying School in Dayton, Rinehart subsequently became an aviation explorer, innovator, and manufacturer.

¹⁵ Jagdgeschwader I, also known as the “Flying Circus,” comprised Jastas 4, 6, 10, and 11.

¹⁶ It wasn’t uncommon for pilots to modify their aircraft. Reed Landis installed a half-inch-thick steel plate to the underside of his seat as protection against antiaircraft fire, while Frank Dixon recalled that on his Sopwith Camel the “guns and sights were at eye-level and a distinct hazard in a forced landing so I rigged up a plexiglas windshield and cut away the cowling to meet it.”

¹⁷ Ambrose Tomlinson founded the Church of God in Tennessee in 1903 and his children were similarly devout.

¹⁸ The Syracuse Herald, August 3, 1919

¹⁹ The San Antonio Light, October 2, 1926

²⁰ The Times (London), December 14, 1918

²¹ Thomas Cook was a famous British travel agent of the nineteenth century whose company offered customers inclusive independent tours of all regions of the world.

²² Richthofen was actually buried a few days later, the RAF according him full military honors, with a four-bladed propeller in the shape of a cross as his headstone. His coffin was carried by six pilot officers of 3 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, and the service was conducted by Rev. George Marshall. A month later, Oliver visited the grave and found it “pretty well desecrated…[T]he name plate and aluminum tips were gone and the cross had been chipped so that it looked like a skeleton.” Richthofen’s body was later exhumed and reburied in the family cemetery at Wiesbaden.

²³ In his correspondence, Springs misspelled the name as “MacGregor.”

²⁴ British A.A. fire produced white bursts. In the handbook issued to new pilots, On Aerial Combat, students were left in no doubt as to the threat posed by German ground fire. “The Germans put up barrages at different levels and often wait to catch our machines when they are maneuvering prior to attacking enemy formations.”

²⁵ Some sources spell Thomson’s surname with a p.

²⁶ John H. Morrow and Earl Rogers, eds., A Yankee Ace in the RAF

²⁷ John H. Morrow and Earl Rogers, eds., A Yankee Ace in the RAF

²⁸ Records indicate that Taber was misinformed. At the time of his letter only Grider of the Carmania contingent had been killed and there had been no such collision involving three Americans.

²⁹ After the war Gilbert made a name for himself as an aerial explorer, mapping large swaths of the Arctic coastline.

³⁰ Germany had started issuing parachutes—known as Heinecke Fallschirme, or Heinecke parachutes—to its aircraft pilots in early 1918. Approximately twenty-one inches in diameter, the conical parachutes were made from silk, and static-line operated. The first pilot to use a parachute in combat was a member of Jasta 56 who, on April 1, 1918, leapt clear of his flaming Albatros.

³¹ Klingman survived the war, returned to his insurance company, and died of a heart attack in 1941 at the age of forty-five.

³² “Flaming onions” was what British pilots christened the 37mm shells fired by the German five-barrel revolving antiaircraft gun. The shells could reach altitudes of 5,000 feet.

³³ Of the first sixteen aviators to join the 17th Aero Squadron, seven were killed in the war and two became aces.

³⁴ The 148th’s emblem was a white triangle.

³⁵ Frederick Mortimer Clapp, A History of the 17th Aero Squadron

³⁶ At the end of the war, a German report on the raid revealed that fourteen of their aircraft had been destroyed in the raid and “over one hundred and twenty soldier mechanics and about thirty pilots killed.”

³⁷ Billie Carleton died of a drug overdose on November 28, 1918, the day after celebrating the end of the war at the Victory Ball in London’s Albert Hall. The subsequent inquest, full of salacious accounts of the actress’s drug habit and sexual promiscuity, gripped Britain and led to the tightening of anti-drugs legislation.

³⁸ A British A.A. battery crew later told 148th Aero they had counted fifty-three Fokkers in the ten-minute dogfight.

³⁹ On the morning of September 12, Flynn’s mother received two items of mail at her home in Waterloo, Ontario. One was a cheery letter from her son, dated August 13; the other a telegram from the Secretary of War reporting him missing.

⁴⁰ Tillinghast was nothing if not resilient. In 1933 he was one of seven survivors from a plane crash in Denver that killed five fellow passengers. He eventually rose to become president of the United Aircraft Service Corporation and died in 1982, aged eighty-eight. Anderson became a successful Hawaiian composer whose songs included “Lovely Hula Hands” and “Mele Kalikimaka.”