From ten thousand feet in the cloudless blue sky of November 1918, the Argonne battlefield was a crazy quilt of green fields and toy farmhouses and the dun gouged earth of no-man’s-land. Beside Lieutenant Frank Buchanan flew his wingmate and best friend, Captain Buzz McCall, who had painted death’s heads inside the red, white, and blue circles on his wings. They had transferred from the Lafayette Escadrille to the American Air Service when the United States entered the war in 1917.
Around them droned a half-dozen other planes in loose formation. They were finally flying swift stubby-winged French Spads, a plane that could outspeed and outdive the German Fokkers. For months they had been forced to fly Nieuport 28s, a tricky unforgiving plane that had killed more American pilots in training than the Germans had killed in combat. It stalled without warning and the wings had a tendency to fail in a roll or dive.
There were no American-designed planes on the western front. The inventors of the twentieth century’s miracle machine had barely advanced beyond the clumsy craft the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, while the British, the French, the Germans, the Italians, all had fighter planes that could fly over a hundred miles an hour.
A burst of machine-gun fire on his left broke through Frank’s gloomy meditation. It was Buzz McCall, telling him to wake him up. Buzz was squinting above and behind them. At first Frank could see nothing. The trick was not to focus your eyes but to let them roam the empty sky. It was one of the first things a pilot learned on the western front. A cluster of specks rapidly grew and acquired color: at least a dozen Fokker Dr 1 triplanes with black crosses on their green wings.
Down they came out of the sun, hoping for surprise. In their eagerness they forgot that their three winged planes, having very little weight and a lot of drag, dove slowly. They were violating one of the modern world’s fundamental laws, the machine must be obeyed before it will obey. The Americans had time to react.
Frank pulled back on the stick and shoved his right foot down on the rudder pedal. Up, up he soared into a loop. Just over the vertical he cut his engine and pulled the stick back sharply. There he was, slightly dazed by the gravity pounding his chest, behind the lead Fokker as the German came out of his dive. Frank’s Vickers .303 machine guns hammered and two streams of tracers tore into the German’s cockpit. The Fokker went into a writhing spin, an unmistakable death throe.
His fifth kill. He was an ace. He could hardly compare himself to Buzz McCall or Eddie Rickenbacker, who had five times that many victories. Moreover,
he might soon be a dead ace if he did not do something about another Fokker on his tail. Red tracer bullets whizzed between his wings, snapping struts as Frank took violent evasive action, essing left and right, his brain turning to terrified mush.
Behind him the German abruptly spun out of control, smoke gushing from his engine. Buzz McCall hung on his tail, pouring extra bullets into him to make sure he was not faking. It was the tenth or eleventh time Buzz had saved Frank’s life.
Around them the sky was crisscrossed by diving, rolling, spinning Fokkers and Spads. Buzz pointed below them, where two Fokkers were about to give a floundering American the coup de grace. Down they roared to pull out on the Germans’ tails. Frank had a perfect shot at the Fokker on the right. He pressed the trigger. Nothing. Cursing, he grabbed a small hammer he wore around his wrist and whacked at one of the Vickers’ outside levers, just in front of his windshield. The guns stayed jammed.
Buzz’s first burst, short and deadly as always, set the other German on fire. He spun away, gushing smoke and flames. But Frank’s German methodically blasted a stream of lead into the American’s cockpit. Frank saw the pilot, a boyish Iowan named Waller on his first mission, shudder in agony. He shoved his Spad into a dive. The German, smelling blood, followed him. A thousand feet down Waller pulled out and tried to roll to the right. The German anticipated the move and caught him with another burst, riddling the cockpit. Waller spun in, exploded and burned.
A second later the Fokker pulled up into a twisting loop called an immelman, after the German pilot who invented it. He came down on Frank’s tail. It was a maneuver the lightweight triplane was designed to perform. But Buzz McCall was waiting for him down below. He rolled over and fired a burst into the Fokker’s belly while flying upside down. The German, probably wounded, banked away and fled for home.
Frank flew in a daze, not quite sure he was alive. Six American planes were still in the sky. They had lost two of their green pilots. At least half the replacements failed to survive their first mission. Hardly surprising, when the average life of all the pilots on the western front was six weeks. Below them were four, five, burning wrecks. His stomach churning, Frank dove with the survivors to waggle his wings above the fallen. In his head he heard his mother’s voice hissing: death machine.
On the ground, Buzz threw his arm around him. “Good shootin’ up there, Wingman,” he said. “Too bad your lousy limey guns jammed and we couldn’t save Waller.”
“We’re sending those kids up without enough training. It’s murder, Buzz!”
“What’s this, what happened?”
It was their squadron commander, a lean West Pointer named Kinkaid. With him was a handsome soldier in gleaming black riding boots and a broad-brimmed campaign hat tipped at a cocky angle. He had a brigadier general’s
star on his collar. Behind him trailed a photographer and several reporters.
“We ran into the flying circus and whipped their asses, Colonel,” Buzz said. “I got two of them, Frank here got one. We lost two of the new guys—Waller and Kane.”
“Two more kills,” said the brigadier. “That means you’re only three behind Rickenbacker. I’m Billy Mitchell. I came down to pin a medal on you, Captain.”
Buzz remembered he was in the army and saluted the most popular general in the American Air Service. “Pleased to meet you, sir. This is Lieutenant Frank Buchanan. He got his fifth today. A real beauty.”
Buzz described the way they had attacked the Germans as they came out of their dive. “That’s the kind of aggressive tactics I want up there. That’s the American style,” Mitchell said.
They adjourned to the officers’ mess, where champagne bottles popped and glasses were raised in a silent toast to the dead, then flung into the fireplace. Outside, the ground crews and pilots lined up in a semblance of military formation and Mitchell pinned a Distinguished Service Cross on Buzz McCall.
He added to the commendation a speech full of fiery prophecy. Fliers like Buzz McCall were demonstrating what Americans could do in the air against German veterans. “If this war lasts another six months, we’ll wipe the Germans out of the sky. Then we’ll show General Pershing and that circle of dunderheads he’s got around him what air power can do for their infantry.”
Flashbulbs popped, the reporters took notes. General Mitchell was already semi-famous for his running battle with Pershing’s staff, who scoffed at the importance of air power. Mitchell told them he was assembling a force of de Havilland bombers that would demolish enemy airfields and supply dumps and arms factories if the Germans rejected the Allies’ armistice terms and kept fighting.
Two hours later, led by General Mitchell driving a black sedan at ninety miles an hour, the squadron headed for the nearby city of Toul to celebrate Buzz’s medal. They started with dinner at the Three Hussars, the best restaurant in town. Fueled by more champagne, Mitchell talked about air power in future wars with visionary fervor. The plane would soon make the infantry and the warship superfluous.
“The bombers of tomorrow will make this war’s attacks on London and Paris look like acts of tender mercy,” roared the general. “They’ll be no need to send millions of men to die in the trenches. The war will be over the moment one side achieves air superiority.”
“Let’s drink to that!” Buzz shouted. “Air superiority!”
Frank Buchanan lurched to his feet with the rest of his by now ossified squadron mates. “General,” he said. “I hope you’re not saying Americans—would bomb cities—kill women and children—the way the Germans—”
“The British are doing it right now in the Rhineland,” Mitchell roared. “They dropped some bombs in a fucking schoolyard last week and killed about
sixty kinder. Those things’ll happen till we get better bombsights. Then—plunk—we’ll be able to put a thousand-pounder down a goddamn factory chimney!”
After dinner, the squadron and General Mitchell adjourned next door to Madame Undine’s, the best brothel in the city. It was stocked with enough champagne to drown an infantry division and enough mademoiselles from Armentieres and elsewhere to make Valhalla look like a Methodist camp meeting.
At midnight Frank found himself in bed with two dimpled whores named Cheri and Marguerite. They were sisters. Marguerite was going around the world, licking him from the back of his neck to the soles of his feet, while Cheri was rolling her tongue around and around his aching joystick. He was Craig again, happy, proud, indifferent to death. He passed out as he came in Cheri’s mouth.
The party raged around him and in the blank darkness Frank dreamt of a plane with a fuselage as round and smooth as a gun barrel, a plane that swallowed its wheels after takeoff and had only one wing, unsupported by struts. He leaped out of bed and stumbled over male and female bodies in various stages of undress to find a pen and paper and sketch it.
His mother hissed death machine but he defied her. This was a creature of speed and beauty, as vibrant with life as the Elgin marbles he had seen in the British Museum. It would make American pilots supreme in the air. That meant peace, not war.
“What the hell is that?”
It was Buzz McCall, glowering over his shoulder at the sketch.
“A plane we ought to build.”
“You’d never get me to fly a fucking monoplane.”
Louis Bleriot had flown the English Channel in a monoplane. But he soon gave the design a bad name because his wings frequently fell off. Frank began explaining that the problem was not the single wing but its shape and its position on Bleriot’s monoplanes.
“Let’s go,” Buzz said. “We’ve got the dawn patrol.”
In a flash, as if the champagne fumes in his head had exploded, Frank was back in the dogfight. The motors roared, the machine guns chattered, the planes blazed and spun down to doom.
He could not go up again. He was not Craig, he was Frank, the younger brother with these beautiful creatures of the sky in his head. He had no confidence in either his luck or his skill as a pursuit pilot.
“I can’t do it, Buzz. I don’t want to die until I see this plane—other planes—in the air—”
“What the fuck is this?”
Buzz stepped back as if he wanted to get a better look at his contemptible wingman. “Why should I die?” he mocked. “Do you think you’re better than the rest of us, because you can draw pretty paper airplanes?”
Yes, Frank wanted to shout. He wanted to denounce everything, the war, the drunken parties at Madame Undine’s, the dying. The endless dying. Before
he could speak, Buzz hit him with a right cross that sent him hurtling across the room to crash into the opposite wall.
The next thing Frank knew he was on the floor and Buzz was shoving a foot his chest. “Are you comin’?”
Frank lurched to his feet. He was a head taller than Buzz but there was no thought of hitting him back. Buzz was Craig, curing another outbreak of momma’s boyitis. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Nobody’s gonna shoot you down as long as I’m up there with you,” Buzz said. “We went into this fuckin’ war together and we’re comin’ out together.”
Buzz rounded up the rest of the patrol and they wobbled into the semi-dark street. Toward them panted Madame Undine, the fat blond-ringleted mistress of their revels. Her eyes bulged, tears streaked the layer of powder on her dumpling face. “C’est fini!” she cried. “La guerre, c’est fini!”
Frank threw his arms around Madame Undine and gave her a kiss. He was going to live. He was going to build the beautiful planes that flew in his head.
“Son of a bitch!” Buzz said. Peace meant he would never pass Eddie Rickenbacker and become the top American ace.
Behind him, General Mitchell looked even more disappointed. “What the hell am I going to do with all those beautiful bombers?” he said.