Blood Is Thicker than War by Martin King

Author:Martin King [King, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637583531
Publisher: Knox Press
Published: 2022-06-09T12:35:30+00:00

Ethel served as a Red Cross nurse in France, where her husband Richard Derby was a surgeon. She was actually the first member of the Roosevelt clan active in a World War I zone, but her brothers would follow.>

Two famous Roosevelt brothers died in different wars but are buried together in Normandy. Theodore died shortly after the Normandy landings of June 1944. He was commanding the Fourth Infantry Division at the time. In the little town of Chamery in France there’s a water fountain dedicated to the memory of young Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt, which was presented to the townspeople by his family. During World War I when indoor water taps weren’t a domestic feature, most of the village used the fountain to obtain clean drinking water. In July 1918 when the Allies attacked, the French village of Chamery was well behind the frontlines. At that time the Germans were dispatching reinforcements, including aviation units, to the front. The importance and significance of military aviation had evolved as the war had progressed. It was used for bombing, vital reconnaissance, and of course the iconic aerial dogfights against German aces such as the Red Baron and Hermann Göring, who (by the time he became one of Hitler’s henchmen) probably couldn’t even fit into a Fokker Triplane World War I fighter because he had gained so much weight.

These aircraft may have appeared cumbersome and fragile on the ground but a trained pilot could transpose these canvas and plywood contraptions into swift, maneuverable, and well-armed aircraft. This inevitably made some of those illustrious pilots quite famous, and for some that fame has endured. The pilots of these colorful biplanes and triplanes that clashed above the trenches or in no-mans-land were often compared to the chivalric knights of the Middle Ages and bound by a similar code based on mutual admiration and deep respect. World War I saw the advent of air traffic control when the US Army installed the first operational two-way radios in planes. In 1917, a human voice was first transmitted by radio from a plane in flight to an operator on the ground. It also gave birth to the fighter pilot. Airplanes were deployed en masse for the first time in both air-to-air combat and reconnaissance missions.

On July 14, Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt, was flying a Nieuport 28 fighter when he was tragically killed in action. From the age of four years old, Quentin had been a public figure and a darling of the American people. When his father became the president of the United States, he spent many years being raised in the White House.

At the young age of twenty, he didn’t have a great deal of experience and had only been flying in combat for nine days, which was paradoxically the life expectancy for a World War I pilot fighting over the frontlines. He had been missing since July 14, 1918, when he and four other pilots from the US Army Air Service’s Ninety-Fifth Aero Squadron were ambushed by at least seven German aircraft near the village of Chamery.

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