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earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor and it served to give ample indication that now that he was an acting Major he did not intend to run the squadron from behind a desk. High over Etain he spotted two Halberstadt CL IPs on an observation mission. He was above them and in the sun, an ideal setup for a fast diving attack. He looked around to see if he could spot an escort and caught sight of five Fokker D VII's above and behind the two-seaters. Since he was alone he figured he hadn't been spotted because he was up-sun from both flights. He worked around behind the wedge of escort D VII's and entered a steep dive, planning to get the rearmost machine and escape by continuing his dive. The speed of the dive would take him away fast before the other fighters could jump on his tail. He caught the last man completely by surprise. One short burst at close range and the pilot slumped in his seat, the Fokker falling away abruptly in a spin. To Rickenbacker's surprise, the remaining Fokkers scattered instead of coming around to chase him, so he eased out of his dive and went for the two-seaters. The observers were good shots and they were ready for him, so it wasn't as easy as the first attack. As he closed behind the two-seaters, both observers opened up and gave him a good spraying. He dived below the machines and came up under one of them, but the pilot was a vieux routier like his observer and quickly kicked his rudder to swing the tail out of the way and give the observer a shot. Rickenbacker heard bullets whistling past again and broke away. He looked for the escort fighters—this was taking too long. No fighters around yet. He tried once more. Regaining his height he came in from the side, from a position diagonally ahead of the lead ship. That way the lead ship masked him from the fire of the other two-seater and Rickenbacker kept himself in a blind spot since the observer in the lead ship couldn't fire through his own wings. Rickenbacker fired a long burst into his target and fell away fast in a sideslip. The two-seater went down in flames as Rickenbacker zoomed back up into the sun. The escorting Fokkers returned to the scene finally, but he had given them the slip. The "Hat in the Ring"— 94th Aero Squadron. 182
when hellmuth von zastrow began flying an Eindecker during the Battle of Verdun he had already begun work on Palmstrom als Flieger, a burlesque on aviation derived from the works of Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914). Morgenstern created a family of personages, human and fabulous, who appear repeatedly in his verse, most of which is amiable satire cloaked deceptively in nonsense. One of his poems is about an architect who stole the spaces between the pickets of a fence and built therewith a great house. Palmstrom is one of his characters, so Palmstrom the Aviator seemed a good title to Hellmuth, since a more inept type for an aviator than Palmstrom would be hard to imagine. Der Monoplan is one of Hellmuth's parodies that expresses his own wry humor and seems a prodrome of the sense of futility that later produced such a bitter satirist as Berthold Brecht: A monoplane there was anon With landing wheels to land upon. The Monoplane An Army pilot who saw the thing, Came quickly there one evening And flew the 'plane away, but found He'd left the wheels upon the ground. The monoplane felt perfectly silly, Its wheels all knocked off willy-nilly; An unseemly sight of disarray. The Inspector-General had it hauled away. The pilot, From B.A.O. to meanwhile, had to scram B.AM. During the rainy weather of the spring and summer of 1916, Hellmuth continued his project, working on it at odd moments and while grounded by bad weather. Hellmuth flew an Eindecker as a scout and escort pilot until June 1916. On August 26 he was transferred to Jasta 2 as Oswald Boelcke's adjutant, a position he held during the late summer and fall when Boelcke successfully launched German fighter aviation and then needlessly lost his life in an accident. Hellmuth was promoted to Oberleutnant and from early 1917 to the end of the war served in the Office of the Inspector General for Air in Berlin, where further disillusionment awaited him, for his stables of graft and profiteering that war creates everywhere. job was to help clean up the Augean Hellmuth von Zastrow survived the war, but succumbed a short time after to depression and illness. 183
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*»&%gp&iiqfc THE MEN AND MACHINES
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Hanriot H-D 1 • France (here in B
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Photograph by Beverly Lebarrow
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COPYRIGHT © 1965 BY THOMAS R. FUND
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In acknowledging the help he has re
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the great war, as every schoolboy k
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perseverance have been beyond all p
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: ; o COLOGNE MAP Showing the Salie
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"A EUROPEAN WAR" "Never before the
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an American, Charles J. Biddle, of
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From 1300 metres the country is spr
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Pegoud
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In the autumn of 1913 Pegoud gave a
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In layout the new monoplane somewha
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Aviatik B I
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— — grudziadz is a town on the
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Stationed in home country near Bres
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Roland Garros *«« . •—;-*.;-
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twins jean and Pierre navarre were
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One day on a reconnaissance flight
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Pilot and observer/gunner in Halber
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in February of 1915 Roland Garros r
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so became enthusiastic about flying
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them disappeared in the direction o
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one of navarre's closest friends wa
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— CO. condemning the ship the men
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iefed their mechanics and packed th
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although Kriegszeitung stated expli
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ehind the British lines near Arras
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Boelckc returned to Douai in Decemb
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artillery-spotting that they didn't
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an American ace who flew in British
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The same day two other men from the
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observer seized his Parabellum and
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"THE INEVITABLE RESULT" "As I have
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21, 1916, the German Fifth Army beg
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— — * * * since the Germans hel
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among the flying personnel assemble
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on june 17, 1916, Navarre, Pivolo,
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— hnmelmann On June 18, 1916, obs
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en route to verdun the end of Febru
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5- 3 a*i& rT& A striking demonstrat
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late in 1915 the Halberstadt Aeropl
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Seven such units were initially pro
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the quality of disinterestedness wi
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The results were uniformly nil, but
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11,000 and about 7 p.m. saw a hosti
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British machines reached their obje
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y January 1917 von Richthofen had a
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During the summer of 1916, two Nieu
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Ball was awarded the M.C. for his e
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from the beginning of 1917 a warnin
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. The aeroplane he had destroyed wa
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Bristol F.2 "Brisfit." 99
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On this day he had just taken off w
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The Sopwith Triplane appeared in sm
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Naval Ten was formed in February 19
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It would appear that the raid was a
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1 "Collishaw led a (second) offensi
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fast as the three machines spun aro
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— Hermann becker was born in Treb
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gilbert sardier of Clermont-Ferrand
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— the storks— Groupe de Combat
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no. 20 squadron rfc was a two-seate
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122
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on the last day of July 1917, the T
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the last instant he would tilt his
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a powerful one, but that hardly mat
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in august 1917 Naval Ten switched f
Page 152 and 153: I "The Germans kept shooting at me
Page 154 and 155: mm me Caudion G.3. ktN erwe
Page 156 and 157: Commandant Brocard. 136
Page 158 and 159: Fonck was the best shot at the Fron
Page 161 and 162: "THE SUPREMACY OF THE AIR" "Despite
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Page 165 and 166: albert deullin was born in Epernay,
Page 167 and 168: tion, full motor and diving slightl
Page 169 and 170: Pfalz D III In the summer and autum
Page 171 and 172: was of the semi-monocoque method, i
Page 173 and 174: Nodding, von Richthofen turned to g
Page 175 and 176: when the battle of cambrai opened,
Page 177 and 178: Cerisy, a hamlet on the left bank o
Page 179 and 180: As the two machines ahead of him zi
Page 181 and 182: "Balloon strafing became highly dev
Page 183 and 184: eed Mckinley chambers was born at O
Page 185 and 186: On March 29, James Norman Hall arri
Page 187 and 188: Lufbery. Assuming command of the 94
Page 189 and 190: IN February 1918 Oberleutnant Adolf
Page 191 and 192: y the end of May both Douglas Campb
Page 193 and 194: — Brigadier General Everett R. Co
Page 195 and 196: Biddle.
Page 197 and 198: 177
Page 199 and 200: of the 95 Congressional Medals of H
Page 201: Rickenbackei eddie rickenbacker's o
Page 205 and 206: In August 1917 Theobald was posted
Page 207 and 208: — On October 1, 1917, at five o'c
Page 209 and 210: Sam, over two feet tall and acquire
Page 211: — climb all the way to ceiling go
Page 214: A dispatch from the Wolff Telegraph
Page 217 and 218: Gibbons, Floyd, The Red Knight of G
Page 219 and 220: 43,53, : : : Frantz: ix, 13, 15,26
Page 222 and 223: Spad 13 • France (here in Italian
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