WAR

On March 29, James Norman Hall arrived at the 94th. Hall was another of
those rare birds, a fighter pilot who was a college graduate, having taken his
Ph.B. at Grinnell College in 1910. When the war broke out he was on a bicycle
trip through England and he promptly enlisted in the 9th Battalion of the Royal
Fusiliers. He spent most of 1915 in the trenches at Loos, Messines, and "Plugstreet"
Wood, where he served so creditably that he was selected for officer's
training. He was suddenly given an honorable discharge, however, and returned
home to find that friends of the family had arranged the discharge because his
father was seriously ill. When his father recovered, Hall returned to Europe in
the summer of 1916 and on October 11 enlisted in the French air service. He
trained at
Buc, Avord, and Le Plessis-Belleville and was assigned to the Escadrille
Lafayette on June 16, 1917. He was wounded and brought down ten days later
during a fight against heavy odds and spent the summer in hospital. On October
3, 1917, he returned to the Lafayette and stayed with the outfit during the period
of transition, in early 1918, when it was absorbed into the U. S. Air Service as
the 103rd Aero Squadron. Hall was commissioned a Captain on February 7, 1918,
and as an experienced pilot was brought into the 94th as a flight commander. In
May, with his score standing at six confirmed victories, be became one of the
victims of the Nieuport weakness. While diving on an enemy machine near Ponta-Mousson,
the fabric on the upper wing tore off and he fell a considerable distance
out of control. He had just succeeded in regaining his equilibrium when he
was hit by ground fire and crashed near Pagny-sur-Moselle. Hall spent the rest
of the war as a prisoner. Repatriated after the Armistice he settled in Tahiti
where, in collaboration with Charles Nordhoff, he later wrote the Bounty Trilogy.
By the time Hall joined the 94th as a flight commander the squadron had
already made its first flight over the lines. On March 19. Major Lufbery took
Lieutenants Campbell and Rickenbacker across for a look. Eagerly questioned by
their squadron mates on their return, Rickenbacker and Campbell said it was
pretty interesting but there had been no German planes. Lufbery smiled and
said he'd seen half a dozen.
Gervais Raoul Lufbery was the classic soldier of fortune. A bit old to be a
fighter pilot, he was 30 when he was accepted for flying training. He was born in
1885 in France, in Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the ancient province of
Auvergne. It is said he must have inherited the moody disposition of the people
of those mountains, if not from his parents, who did not raise him, then from
relatives who did. His father had adopted American citizenship before the boy
was born and gone to America to try his fortunes when the boy was six. Lufbery's
mother had died when he was one, and so he was left with relatives when
his father sailed for America. At 19,
set off for the U. S.
Lufbery decided he would see the world and
by way of the Balkans, Turkey and North Africa. He arrived
in New York on the same day that his father sailed to Europe on business and
they never met again. Lufbery banged around the U. S. and Cuba, and on the
strength of his father's citizenship joined the army for a two-year hitch in the
Philippines, 1908-1910.
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