Warriors by Max Hastings

Author:Max Hastings [Max Hastings ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007344109
Publisher: HarperCollins

Not much knight-of-the-air spirit is discernible there. On Rickenbacker’s appointment to command, he summoned a meeting of his nineteen fliers at which he told them that henceforward he cared nothing about whether they saluted each other or observed other military formalities, but that they would abstain from alcohol every night before they were to operate, and must work much harder at nursing their engines. Failures were provoking a crippling unserviceability rate. The average American machine required a major overhaul for every fourteen hours airborne, while Rickenbacker was achieving a hundred hours for his own Spad. He concluded with a shamelessly patriotic appeal, of a kind that in some units would have evoked a cynical response: ‘give your best for America, for the Allied cause and for the greatest squadron ever to take wing, the 94th’. He wrote in his diary that night: ‘lust been promoted to command…1 shall never ask a pilot to go on any mission I won’t go on. I must work now harder than I did before.’ He underlined the last sentence, in the spirit of a student facing exams. Beneath Rickenbacker’s superficial bonhomie, there was steely self-discipline.

Even as a squadron commander, Rickenbacker persisted with solo missions, often spending six or seven hours a day in the air. It was personal performance that overwhelmingly preoccupied him. The morning after his appointment, before breakfast he shot down a Fokker guarding two reconnaissance planes, and then one of the latter, an LVG. Back on the ground, he drove to the forward area to gain written confirmation from the local French commander of his ‘victories’, a day’s work for which he was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Next morning, 25 September, while his squadron was balloon-busting he destroyed another Fokker, although his own plane was almost shot to pieces in the process. The following day, a ground machine-gunner riddled the airframe around his cockpit, while leaving him unscathed. At such moments, luck was the sole factor in determining that Rickenbacker survived while so many others died. The evidence suggests that whatever physical toll combat flying imposed upon him, he bore the mental strain with little difficulty. He shared Bishop’s view: ‘To me, it was not a business or profession but just a wonderful game. To bring down a machine did not seem to me like killing a man but more as if I was just destroying a mechanical target with no human being in it at all.’

One of Rickenbacker’s kills in those days, a Hanover bomber, glided down to a perfect landing two miles inside the Allied lines with a dead pilot at the controls. Rickenbacker had the aircraft hauled back to the 94th’s field, a spectacular example of the mania for trophy-gathering among fighter pilots. Some would hang a dead German’s boot on the mess wall if nothing larger and less pitiful was available. In the same dogfight, Rickenbacker shot down a Fokker and a third German aircraft which fell so far behind enemy lines that it was never confirmed, to the American’s fury.

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