WAR

"He went off to the side and down in a steep dive. I thought I had gotten
him, but didn't care much. We kept on going and in
a minute he was back trying
to get under our tail. We immediately went into a spiral so that we could watch
him. Pop Seymour, my observer, had his rear guns trained on him and kept asking
me through the telephones. 'Must I shoot him must I shoot him' It had
. . .
occurred to me that this might be an instance of an Allied plane being flown by
an enemy, of which we had heard stories which we later came to believe were
entirely mythical.
"We wanted to be sure, so I said, 'Wait, let's see what he does.' Finally
he seemed to recognize our cockade insignia painted on the wings. By this time I
had stalled the ship and we fell off in a spin. When I pulled up the pursuit plane
was gone. We gained our altitude and finished the mission. When we landed we
reported the encounter. Suppositions were at first that some German was flying
in a captured Nieuport. However, Major decided to find out, so taking me with
him he went over to the pursuit field to investigate.
"When we got there we found that it was Reed Chambers, an old friend
from Memphis, my home town. He had reported the incident as a combat with
an enemy machine. It came out later in Army reports as such. He must have
been surprised and nervous when he saw a machine coming out of the sun and
didn't stop to investigate. He was some shot at that, having me cold in the air.
'If he ever meets a Boche in the air he will have to do better or he will never
get one,' I wrote in my diary.
"The same pilot later became one of the greatest American pursuit pilots
on the Front, winning recognition for a string of Boche victories, and later
succeeded to the command of Rickenbacker's squadron."
In June 1918 Captain Charles J. Biddle was appointed commanding officer
of the 13th Aero Squadron, U.S. Air Service.
On August 16 he became an Ace when he brought down his fifth machine,
a Rumpler, near Nancy. After jockeying for position he came up under the
two-seater and with a short burst mortally wounded the rear gunner. The German
pilot had no choice but to surrender and Biddle escorted the aeroplane down to
an open meadow where both machines landed.
A crowd from the city quickly gathered around the American and his prize
and a French General demanded that a photograph be taken as a souvenir of the
occasion. A little girl gave Biddle a tiny bouquet of flowers she had picked and he
accepted it, thanking her in French. As the photograph was about to be taken,
Biddle started to hide the flowers behind his back, but he saw the little girl
watching him. Afraid that he might hurt her feelings by hiding the flowers, he
self-consciously posed with them in his hand, "feeling like a June bride," he said.
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