WAR

The same day two other men from the squadron were killed at Hartmannswillerkopf
when their aeroplane crashed, possibly as a result of the same defect.
"Emil" Udet and "Franz" Justinus were awarded the Iron Cross, Second and
First Class respectively, for having saved their machine. They were satisfied to
have saved their necks.
Before he managed to secure a transfer to single-seaters Udet survived two
accidental crashes. Not surprisingly, he almost despaired of making it.
By late 1915, however, he made it, and was flying with a single-seater section
at Habsheim, in
what the German soldiers in Flanders and Champagne called "the
sleeping army of the Vosges"—a pun in German deriving from the similarity
between the words for "sleeping" and "battling."
The weather was clear and bright and cold, and at any altitude it was
freezing. The pilots bundled themselves up till they looked like bears and greased
their faces as protection against the bitter wind.
Udet came off second best the first
time he met a French machine on patrol.
It was a lumbering Caudron and Udet, flying a Fokker E I, should not have had
any trouble sending it
down—he was more experienced than most rookie fighterpilots—but
horror, fear,
and a jumble of conflicting emotions deprived him of the
ability to act or decide on any clear course of action. He sat in his machine,
paralyzed, and stared at the two miniature human beings in the French birdcage.
Why kill them Why even shoot at them They were total strangers. The French
gunner suffered no such inhibitions. He loosed one accurate burst that peppered
Udet's aeroplane and splintered his goggles, but miraculously did not either kill
or blind him.
Udet came out of his
trance and dived away, badly shaken and unwilling to
try again for the Caudron. He called it quits for the day and was glad to get home.
He had to get a grip on himself and make up his mind that he was really in the
war now and playing for keeps.
He succeeded in creating in himself a will to fight. It was not so much fear
he had to overcome—he was by nature a dare-devil—as
simple reluctance to kill.
He was an easy-going youth, and for any 19-year-old playing in man's oldest game
the rules are hard.
His first victory came in March 1916, over a French Farman, one of a
squadron of aeroplanes staging one of the first large-scale bombing raids of the
war on Mulhouse. Udet dived steeply at the enemy formation, closing to about
100 feet before opening fire. He heard bullets from the French gunners hitting
his machine as he opened fire on an aeroplane in the middle of the squadron.
A cloud of white smoke suddenly poured from one of its engines, then he was
through, continuing his dive to put distance between himself and the gunners in
the French machines. He leveled out a thousand feet below them. The Farman
he had hit, flaming now, tumbled toward the earth, one of its passengers falling
free, turning over, arms outstretched.
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