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We made a sort of compact

that if war came, we should go into aviation.

That was the life.

It is certainly great up there,

and you own the world when you get up alone

and can do whatever you want.

Have you ever had your wildest dreams come true?

In the summer of 1916, two college juniors from Yale

started an air militia in preparation

for America and entering World War I.

They were there first.

They were there in the beginning and everything that follows

flows from their early efforts.

As sons of some of the wealthiest and most prominent

families in the country, their exploits

were noticed by the press who dubbed them The Millionaires

Unit.

This was a group well-educated,

affluent young men who voluntarily took up

the challenge.

They didn't have to.

The men of the Yale Flying Club

had a sense of duty, honor, country.

They felt they were privileged and had an obligation to lead.

They determined to learn

to fly when aviation was still in its infancy,

and they aimed to convince the Navy of their fortitude

and resolve.

Through their initiative, these daring young aviators

became the first to fly for the United States in World War I.

Some of them making the ultimate sacrifice.

The gates of honor

opened to us, those lucky ones of us who are over here.

We need not fear that we're not prepared to die for no matter

what we have been in the last glorious moments,

we can die not as the ordinary man,

but fighting for the ideals we hold so sacred.

We were still pretty young

as I was 18, my brother, 16.

We went to Alaska and had some very good mountain

sheep and caribou hunting.

When we went into the interior by pack train,

the world was at peace.

We met on the trail one day a prospector,

and he told us the world was at war.

He was a little mixed up about who was fighting who,

but he knew there was a war on.

When we heard about that, we decided

to cut short our trip short and go home, which we did.

It was quite a shocking experience

to have it come at you that way.

There was just peace and then war, as far as we knew.

Frederick Trubee Davison.

Most of America was as unawares as Trubee Davison

of the tensions that threw Europe

into the most cataclysmic event yet known to mankind.

Trickling across the Atlantic came

news of the horrors of the first war of the Industrial Age,

fought with new technologies.

The machine gun, the tank, the airplane.

World War I would mark the end of the Age of Empire

and the destruction of decades of peaceful productivity

and cultural exchange.

The United States would eventually

be drawn in to the great war across the ocean, spearheaded

by the new field of naval aviation.

The courage and enterprise shown by these pioneer pilots

forever changed the character of the Navy

and the ways in which wars would be fought

and peace would be won.

A small group of college students

affected a large part of that change.

They were known as the First Yale Unit.

They formed the founding squadron of the Naval Air

Reserve, and in the years that followed

they helped lead military aviation through two world

wars, the Cold War, and played major roles in America's

ascendancy as the dominant power on the world

stage in the 20th century.

The sinking of the British liner Lusitania by a German u-boat,

taking the lives of 128 Americans,

was a shocking reminder to the United States

of the war on the other side of the Atlantic.

For young Frederick Trubee Davison,

it was a harbinger of what would consume his life

for the next four years--

stopping the German u-boat.

In the summer of 1915, after his freshman year

at Yale University, he accompanied

his father, Henry P. Davison, on an eye opening trip to Europe.

H.P. Davidson was the senior partner

of JP Morgan and Company.

As the most powerful bank in America,

Morgan and Company was in the unique position

to lead the sales of securities that

helped finance the British and French war effort.

This business trip entails some high stakes bargaining

as America was officially neutral when the war started,

and President Woodrow Wilson was up for re-election.

That was, indeed, in 1916.

He ran on a platform of, with the slogan,

he kept us out of war.

And he intended to continue to keep the US out of war.

So Trubee joined his father

on one of those trips, in part to see how his father was

working and to learn the ropes.

The young man accompanied his father

on a whirlwind of meetings and dinners

with the British prime minister and other senior officials.

He couldn't help but start thinking

that there was no way that Americans

would be able to ride it out.

That they would get involved and be drawn into the war.

Trubee saw an opportunity

where a young man could help with the war effort

and gain some experience.

He spent the rest of the summer driving ambulances

from the Paris train stations to the American hospital

and got a good hard look at the effects of war.

When Trubee Davidson

was returning after that summer of ambulance driving,

he was on a ship with Robert Bacon, one of the organizers

and financiers of the squadron of the aviators called

the Escadrille Lafayette.

And he discussed that effort to create an all-American Air

Force with the French.

And that implanted the idea in Trubee's mind

that maybe what he'd like to do is create his own little Air

Force in the event that the US should get into the war.

FREDERICK TRUBEE - In 1915, I

at least saw enough of the fellows over there

to know that if we ever got into the war, where I personally

wanted to be was in the air service.

That put the bug in my Bonnet.

When I was back to college in the fall,

I picked up Bob Lovett and poured it in his ear.

We made a sort of compact that if war came,

we should go into aviation.

That was the life.

Perhaps the epitome of the Yale gentleman

was Trubee's classmate, Robert Lovett.

Composed and aloof, Lovett was voted

as the most brilliant, hardest working, and most thorough

gentleman at Yale.

But while Trubee had been driving ambulances

near the front, Bob had spent the summer

driving sports cars and motorcycles in the Swiss Alps.

When I look back

and I read about my grandfather and his Yale years,

it paints a picture of a very different man than I knew.

To read that he was the head of the prom,

that he was involved in the acting program at Yale,

these were surprising to me because these would indicate

to me that my grandfather was an extrovert and charming,

lively fellow who went out for a good time,

and this was not the grandfather I knew.

After their eventful summers,

both Trubee and Bob returned to Yale for their sophomore year,

and each set about to prove they had sand, grit, and spirit that

made them popular on campus.

I think there's

a certain amount of truth to the statement

that Yale was heavily social before the First World War.

Everybody at Yale wanted to be in a club,

wanted to be in a team, wanted to be

in one kind of organization or another.

And Trubee Davidson was one of the kind of people that

thrived at a place like Yale.

While still reflecting on his experience

with the victims of trench warfare,

Trubee found it difficult to focus on school,

and his thoughts turned repeatedly to aviation.

At the beginning of the war, airplanes

were still seen as the dominion of aristocrats

and wealthy sportsmen looking for adventure.

As aerial combat evolved, there was

romance in the idea of warrior knights of the air.

Jousting one on one.

A romance completely lacking in the trenches

of mechanized warfare.

But Trubee and his generation of friends

were also motivated by a sense of duty.

The idea that of those to whom much is given, much

is expected.

If the United States was going to war, they want to take part

and they wanted to fly.

They were highfalutin.

They aimed beyond their human capacity

to fulfill as any good rule should.

And they were based a lot on ethics and religion.

What a man did and did not do.

And it formed a kind of a behavioral code,

far more than it does now.

Yale had a obligatorily chapel attendance

every day of the week except Saturday.

This is a time when what has become almost

the Yale anthem became popular.

It's called "Bright College Years."

And the final lines in that are, so

let us strive that ever we may let

these words our watch cry be.

Where 'er upon life sea we sail, for God,

for country, and for Yale.

For God, for country, and for Yale.

When the First World War broke out in Europe

in 1914, there was a tremendous amount of patriotic militarism

that swept over this campus and over much of the United States.

Trubee and Bob Lovett were also swept up.

But noble and lofty as their aerial ambitions were,

they still needed to get permission from their parents

to learn to fly.

Mr. And Mrs. Davison were both opposed

to their son's grand scheme until a family friend

with the Aero Club of America convinced them that flying

was safe if properly done.

Mrs. Davison took a ride herself and became a convert.

The Aero Club of America was developing

a plan with Rear Admiral Robert E. Perry

for a string of aerial coastal defense stations

to defend the Atlantic seaboard against possible attack

from German warships.

Trubee and Lovett were sent to meet with the admiral,

and plans were hatched for the group of Yale students,

students who had never flown before, to be the prototype

civilian squadron.

Aerial Coast Patrol Unit Number One, or as they became

known, The First Yale Unit.

Trubee now leapt into gear, spending a sleepless night

composing a telegram which he sent to 11 of his friends

asking them to join him at Peacock Point, his family's

estate on the North Shore of Long Island for the summer

to learn to fly.

Have for several days

been making very careful investigation of merits

of organizing First Unit of Aero Coast Defense.

Regard matter of such importance that have no hesitation urging

you coming to see me at once.

Training will be at my place and will take all summer.

F. Trubee Davison.

John Vorys, a member of the football and debate

teams, recalled receiving a telegram

and a phone call from Trubee as he

was recovering from pneumonia and a tonsillectomy

in Columbus, Ohio.

Trubee telephoned to my home

and explained the idea of which I remember only that we were

not to fly very high, and that because we flew over water,

we wouldn't get hurt if we did fall occasionally.

It was an awful job

to make the thing clear.

Di Gates came and said he didn't come to join the outfit,

but to be convinced.

Artemus Di Gates, all his friends called him Di,

was a big man.

He was darker skin, black hair, so much so

that some people nicknamed him the Indian.

Maybe a little bit derogatorily.

Di gates was a shy man and a modest man.

Even though he was very quiet, there

was a forceful personality to him

that you knew that he was in the room

even if he was not speaking.

He became a celebrity by becoming part of the football

team, and later went on to be its captain in 1917.

Along with Bob Lovett, Trubee

corralled his younger brother, Harry, football players John

Vorys and Di Gates, crew heeler Alphie Ames, hockey player Erl

Gould, track and fielder John Farwell,

and recent Yale grads Al Sturtevant and Charles Wiman.

Welles Brown and Al Ditman, junior associates

at Morgan and Company, completed the roster

of the 12 aspiring aviators.

Fortunately, there was a flying school

nearby at Port Washington with an experienced and diligent

instructor named Dave McCulloch, and a small, single engine

Curtiss Flying Boat named the Mary Ann.

This was a group of young men learning

to fly just 13 years after the Wright brothers had flown.

They knew they were off on to something great and something

dangerous too, but they believed that nothing worth achieving

is without risk.

The group of young adventurers

expected recognition from the Navy imminently.

In the meantime, they would organize as a private militia.

In every war prior to World War I,

much of the US Army and Navy have

been composed of privately funded and raised militia

forces.

Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders were a private militia

that was enlisted into the regular army as a unit.

And the notion that wealthy people

would use their resources to provide funds

to raise a militia was very much in keeping

with national traditions up to that point.

H.P. Davison initially spearheaded their fund raising

and JP Morgan and Company provided

the first donation, $100,000.

The dozen college kids spend an invigorating summer living

at the large Davison estate.

They rolled up their sleeves and dug

into the mechanics of the airplane,

learning how to break down and rebuild the Mary Ann.

Flying progress was slow.

There was only one plane, few spare parts,

and the wind was often too strong for the delicate Mary

Ann.

But they countered the drawbacks with youthful enthusiasm.

We went into this thing

with a sort of missionary spirit.

We had one machine, we had this old floating hangar that

wouldn't float, and no runway.

We had some kind of jumpers.

Bob Lovett bought them.

They were terrible looking and they were light lavender.

We bought a lot of airplane books

and got into the swing of it.

The big thing

that they were having to deal with was

an under-powered airplane.

That planes were heavy, they were made of wood.

The engines were not powerful.

And it's difficult to fly an airplane that is

under-powered and overweight.

July 31, 1916.

Dear mother, I've just taken my first lesson.

I was in the air 33 minutes and made every mistake aviators

have made in 10 years, theoretically

breaking my neck 1,072 times.

I handed the rudder fairly well, but keeping her level

with the ailerons were absolutely beyond me.

And if I'd gone where I aimed with the elevator,

I'd have looped the loop.

When you're learning, you haven't

time to think of danger or anything

but what a boob you are.

It's fascinating, though, and you hate to stop.

Love to pop, John.

I think that the big issue

is a pilot was just making sure that you

didn't stall the plane.

A plane will tell you when it's about to stall.

It shudders.

And you have to react very, very quickly in order

to get your air speed back up and, and be able to stay,

stay aloft.

Otherwise, you just fall out of the sky like a rock.

The young men also found time

to record some of the local North Shore girls.

As part of the preparedness movement,

the Red Cross was training young women as nurses.

Trubee's sister, Alice, was a student,

as was Robert Lovett's neighbor, the regal beauty, Adele Brown.

Di Gates was seen walking on the beach with Alice,

and Lovett was known to have long talks

in the evening with Adele.

While the unit was still taking shape,

the enterprising captain decided to approach

the Navy for support.

Trubee took a trip to Washington.

But being the son of one of the most powerful men

in the world, went in to see the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus

Daniels.

And the boys went in to see him in his august office

and they'd said, we'd like to create a Navy air reserve out

of our small group of fledgling pilots.

They hadn't all even soloed at this point.

And Josephus Daniels said, well, you boys are great.

I love your patriotism and your idealism,

but we don't need you.

As Trubee later recalled of his meeting,

the government was asleep at the switch.

But if he was bothered, he was also undaunted.

If the Navy couldn't yet see their value,

the unit would simply have to work harder and prove

their worth.

Trubee recalled their first summer's progress

learning to fly.

Bob Lovett learned very quickly.

Di Gates was very earnest, but slower to get the hang of it.

Finally, Bob and I soloed, along in August.

I think we had about 600 minutes or 10 hours in the air.

We began to feel worried because it

looked as though the others were not going to solo before we

went back to college.

Dave McCullough told us to keep our shirts on.

He'd seen this sort of thing happen before

and he knew what he was doing.

Di finally did his solo before he

had to report at New Haven for football practice.

So that made only three of us to qualify as flyers during summer

at Port Washington.

The eager aviators got the Navy's attention

in early September when the Aerial Coast Patrol Unit Number

One was invited to join in training exercises

with the local Naval Reserve volunteers.

Flying the Mary Ann, unit members

searched for dummy mines in New York's Lower Bay off Sandy Hook

and spotted them easily.

The stunt was ballyhooed by the Aero Club of America

and in the aviation press.

The Navy was also impressed, and Trubee

decided to increase the unit's roster with an additional 18

members, including the youngest member, Dave Ingalls,

an aggressive hockey player just turned 18

and would soon gain a reputation in the air as the Baby

Daredevil.

Then suddenly, all of Trubee's activity

seemed quite prescient.

In the winter of 1917,

the German government and the German Navy

implemented a program that was to change things dramatically.

The war in Europe had reached a bloody stalemate

by the fall of 1916.

Neither side could really move the other out

of its trench system.

The only weapon that seemed available to Germany

to defeat the allies was by basically sinking

any ship going to Britain.

On February 1st, Germany

resumed unrestricted warfare with their submarines.

And in February and then in March of 1917,

a large number of American ships began to go down.

The previous August, President Wilson

signed a Naval Appropriations Bill providing for a Naval

Reserve Flying Corps.

The Navy and Congress finally came to grips with the fact

that they needed pilots, and pilots

who already knew how to fly.

In World War I, there was a call to arms.

There were no cadres of regular Navy aviators.

And so the Navy was smart enough to find the people

with the talents, and the capabilities,

and the experience wherever they were.

Whether they were Annapolis graduates or, or not.

Late that winter, Trubee Davison

was again maneuvering to get the Yale Unit placed with the Navy.

He meant one of the Navy's original flyers, now

the head of Naval aviation, Lieutenant John Towers.

Towers was so impressed with the college junior's enthusiasm,

he arranged through the Assistant Secretary

of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt, for the unit

to enlist in New London, Connecticut.

Trubee rushed a telegram to Bob Lovett at Yale, we're off!

Lovett cleared the unit members to leave school

while Trubee arranged to move to an air station

in Palm Beach, Florida.

On March 24, 1917 in New London, the First Yale Unit

enlisted as a body into the Naval Reserve Flying Corps.

All 29 members.

After all his hard work, Trubee Davison's mission

to enlist the First Yale Unit in the Navy

had finally succeeded, and not a moment too soon.

Four days after enlistment the First Yale Unit

left the New England winter for Palm Beach.

14 days later, on April 6th, the United States was at war.

Entering the World War was a defining moment

for the Yale underclassman and the United States,

both coming of age in a modern and unprecedented world.

Two million American troops and millions

of tons of war materiel would eventually

cross the Atlantic Ocean in the next year and a half.

But when America entered the war to help turn the tide,

the United States Navy had only 54 obsolete planes and some 40

qualified pilots, and the Navy was suddenly

very interested in the First Yale Unit.

By the time the spring came around, they

were ensigns in the Navy.

And they packed up the Mary Ann and they

packed up all the rest of their gear

and took a special train down to Palm Beach.

They were put up in the Breakers for a while

and lived a pretty high life.

March 30, 1917.

Dear Mrs. Davison, we arrived here safely this morning

and found the weather perfect.

Ideal flying conditions.

Trubee has taken entire charge and is doing wonderfully.

Everybody has absolute confidence in his leadership.

Sincerely, Di Gates.

And of course, the weather

was beautiful.

They were flying an open cockpit aircraft.

They flew hard and they played hard, and it was just a hoot.

They couldn't have had a better time.

And there they did some more advanced training,

and they started to understand a little bit about what it would

be like to be in the Navy.

Even though they were now Navy men,

Yale still held out the prospect of acceptance

to one of Yale's senior secret societies.

Skull and Bones, Wolf's Head, or Scroll and Key.

Clubs that met in windowless tombs

and engaged in secretive initiation

rites that kept its members bound together for life.

At the time of the First World War,

the secret societies were extremely important,

marking success at Yale.

If you were tapped to Bones,

I mean, you were just ascended to heaven.

It was very serious stuff back then.

The method of getting

into these senior societies of Yale

was to have someone slap you on the shoulder

and ask you if you accept.

Tap day, as the ritual was called,

occurred in the spring and was the big moment

for which underclassman had been waiting for three years.

On April 19, all of the eligible juniors of the First Yale Unit

were tapped, except one.

Kenneth MacLeish was an earnest and passionate boy

from a wealthy Chicago family.

His best friend and fellow Midwesterner, Di Gates,

brought him into the unit and he took to flying right away.

Kenny's older brother, Archibald MacLeish,

had been the golden boy at Yale two years earlier.

Footballer, captain of the water polo team,

voted most brilliant, the class poet, and a member

of Skull and Bones.

Kenny strove mightily to follow in Archie's footsteps,

but he was of a different metal.

One who had anticipated his tap,

longed for a tap, and perhaps felt

deserved a tap was Kenneth MacLeish, and it didn't come.

But he wasn't tapped, and he was crushed.

Said he went off and cried about it.

As MacLeish confided in a letter--

You'll never know how terribly disappointed

I was in not making a senior society.

I know why I didn't, and it almost kills me.

I want to get to France and forget the whole thing

and start over again.

At that point, something happened in him.

Something that almost amounted to a rebirth

of a new and more serious Kenney MacLeish.

Basically, the kind of light hearted person

that he had been seemed to have taken flight

and there was somebody there who came in and basically

was intent on making something of his life.

By the end of May, most of the unit members

had soloed and began to find their place

in the hierarchy of the group.

Young Dave Ingalls was muscling his way

to the front of the pack.

Dear dad, as soon as I got out alone,

I went up high.

About 3,500 feet, as I never went before.

Always been practicing landings.

It is certainly great up there, and your

own the world when you get up alone

and can do whatever you want.

I never enjoyed anything as much as going up there,

and guess I'll have to do it again soon.

Lots of love, Dave.

To a man, their first solo flight

was an extraordinary event in their lives.

Kenney MacLeish wrote a letter to his parents.

I made my first landing alone,

a thing I will never forget in all my life.

I didn't realize how very dependent

I had been on the instructor until I was about to level off

above the water.

Then something seemed to say, here's

where you show yourself you can fly,

or here's where you bust something.

I chose the former and made the most perfect landing ever made.

And by the time they

left Palm Beach as the weather got too hot down there

and moved back up to their next official training base,

a mansion up in Huntington on the Long Island Sound,

they had all except for one soloed.

One washed out, but they were really moving forward.

Back on the North Shore,

the unit quickly got settled in their new base.

The Navy supplied three Curtiss training planes.

There were now enough machines that all the flyers could get

some time in the air each day.

They also resumed courting the North Shore girls.

One of them, Priscilla Murdoch, attended boarding school

with Kenney MacLeish's younger sister,

and her family had a summer cottage on Peacock Point.

Kenney had many occasions to see Priscilla that summer,

and their relationship soon blossomed into a romance.

By mid-July, after racking up flying times

on a variety of aircraft, the young men had bonded as a unit.

A bond born of friendship, and trust,

and commitment to a common cause.

A bond that seemed unbreakable.

But the First Yale Unit had one more hurdle

to jump before they could be naval aviators, the test

for their wings of gold.

For these young men

to get their wings to be designated naval aviators,

the final test was a flight test, and it was done solo.

This took place in Huntington

on the Long Island Sound with yachts out to observe them.

Trubee Davison's parents were out on one of the yachts.

Trubee Davison had been sick for a few days beforehand.

He even seemed to pass out at some point prior to his exam.

Trubee had worked relentlessly.

I think he had gotten maybe two or three hours of sleep

that night, and he was first up.

And they had to take off from the water

and climb to about 6,000 or 7,000 feet,

and they had to go through some maneuvers.

And then coming back down, they had to cut their engine

and come in and glide and land at a particular buoy

or close enough to this boy that it would show they

had control over the aircraft.

He was performing is required maneuvers,

but he overextended his glide.

He cut his engine

and was heading for this buoy and he

saw that he was going to fall short of it

and he lifted his nose of the plane.

And I think he tried to push

and just didn't feel in his-- literally-- in his hands

and in his mind, didn't feel the stall coming on.

And as Trubee came down,

the plane rolled a little bit and then yawed.

And the plane stalled and fell

into the water.

Trubee was hit in the back by the engine mount

and it broke his back.

His legs were entangled in the wires.

FREDERICK TRUBEE - All I knew

was I couldn't feel a thing from my hips down, and my back hurt.

I got tangled up in the mess.

I can remember so well looking up and seeing

the surface of the water above me, perfectly conscious.

He was really lucky to be alive.

He was lucky to be even pulled out of the boat

and not drowned.

Their leader was badly injured, and yet the rest of them,

they got in the airplanes, they went up,

and they did what they had to do, and they came back down.

And all of the First Yale Unit, except Trubee, got their wings.

His spinal cord was injured

and he was basically disabled for the rest of his life, which

was 60 years.

The person who brought together

this group of young men in such a life changing experience,

he was gone.

His classmates,

the members of the First Yale Unit,

they all went off to France right away.

But they didn't suffer as a result of his absence.

In fact, I would say that they blossomed.

They all stepped up to the plate in the absence of their leader

and they each became leaders themselves.

That, I think, is the greatest example of leadership in men.

Two weeks after witnessing Trubee's crash

and receiving their wings, Bob Lovett and Di Gates

shipped out aboard the SS St. Paul bound for Liverpool.

It was a nerve jangling voyage.

Passengers were on constant lookout for the German u-boats.

John Vorys left for England a month later with Al Sturtevant

and recorded his anxiety in his diary.

We looked on the trip as a glorious lark

before the real thing began.

Once aboard, Al and I paced the deck and thought

about not only how little chance there was to come back,

but also how little chance there was of getting over.

And about leaving home and all home ties and risking all this,

and about what we were risking it for.

Well, we went to bed exalted, but very, very mournful.

What the unit members found in London and Paris

when they reported for duty in the late summer of 1917

was not the stuff of romance on which they had fed

for the last year and a half.

Bob Lovett wrote to Trubee from Paris.

Dear Trubee, first, the condition of France.

You must have remembered it as you saw it two years ago.

You would be heartbroken now.

She's staggering with the weight of the war's toll.

Her people are fed up with war and its suffering.

They would never have been able to face the future

if we had not brought hope just in time.

And why, by all that's powerful, didn't we

come in a year earlier?

It's ironic that it was naval aviation that was the first US

military force to set foot in France because if you look

at what naval aviation compassed in April 1917,

it is not a very impressive force whatsoever.

The members of the First Yale Unit

had expected to go to the front and fly together

doing their bit, putting in the punch,

and winning honor and glory.

But being the reserve squadron with the most flying

experience, their services were needed everywhere.

Before there was to be glory in the air, a lot of groundwork

had to be laid.

If you're going

to build 15 flight facilities, you

need cadres of officers at every one.

If you're going to train thousands of men,

you need people to train every one.

Because the Yale Unit had started first,

they were literally the only available group

of young, qualified officers that the Navy could

plug into the various slots.

They were split up between different assignments.

Some were sent overseas to get the lay of the land

and train on the more sophisticated planes,

others stayed stateside, assigned

the mammoth task of getting US naval aviation on its feet.

They turned them into training officers.

They turned them into staff officers.

They turned them into Naval Air Station commanders.

Squadron commanders.

Every place you looked, if there wasn't a regular Navy officer,

you were going to find somebody from the Yale Unit.

A second wave of flyers

was sent overseas in September, including Dave Ingalls.

Kenney MacLeish actually missed the boat because of a date

with Priscilla.

Here's this guy so eager to get over there,

then he misses his ship.

Well, you know, that's an old kind of lovely.

Kenney was able to hop the next one over,

with the satisfaction that she was now his fiancee.

Eventually, all but four of the nine unit members

would make it overseas.

The young flyers made another shocking discovery

when they arrived.

And suddenly, these young men, almost as soon

as they walked out into the street,

were accosted by women offering them a good time.

And this, too, was an extraordinary experience.

And Paris.

Oh, it's far better than even the wildest tales picture it.

It's as much as your life is worth to go out to dinner here.

There are literally thousands of girls

who say they will show you around Paris,

and it's a two fisted fight to shake them off.

On his first evening in Paris,

young Dave Ingalls, all of 18, got a surprise.

While waiting for a ride,

observing not in my innocence, a sweet

faced little girl passed by, but stopped and returned to say,

will sleep with me?

Probably all she knew.

I had learned something in London

but realized I would learn more in Paris.

For many of them, it was a real shock.

These were young men who had never really been

exposed to this sort of thing, and there it was.

And reading their diaries and letters, some of them

got what David Ingalls called a Parisian education.

And others of them learned to, as Kenney MacLeish did,

who was engaged to his beloved back home,

learned to fight off the temptations.

The first members of the Yale Unit

departed for Europe in August of 1917.

They were sent to existing French flying schools.

They were trained for very specific set of missions.

And those missions were to conduct offshore patrol

searching for submarines.

As the unit members reached their assignments

and began to get settled, they reported back

to command central, Trubee Davison's hospital bed.

St. Rafael.

October 1, 1970.

Dear Trubee, this spending part of one winter at Palm Beach

and starting off another on the Riviera

is quite an unusual way of going to war.

When the real thing does come, I probably won't know how to act.

After I finish here, I'm not sure where I will be ordered.

Of all the bases, Dunkirk is, of course,

the most preferable and exciting place

to be because there one comes in constant contact with the Huns.

Yours, Di.

September 24, 1917.

Paris, France.

Dear old Trubs, I'm to see the real stuff in one month.

And so we come to the purpose of this letter

since I may not have a chance to see you again.

You yourself know how hard it is to express

real feeling in a letter, but make allowances and hear me.

I had hoped to come over here under your leadership

and inspiration, for I have never

ceased to admire the splendid manner in which you managed us.

But fate stepped in and kept you at home,

and sent me as a pretty rotten substitute.

Bob Lovett was still

a young man who was noted for his wit, his charm.

But this was not somebody that you would have necessarily

said, this is a future leader of men in service to their nation.

Time and time again, I

have thought of the manly way you have met your big trial.

And I only pray I can look any misfortune in the face

in the same way you have done.

He was somebody who

had grasped through his experience of working

with Trubee the idea that you could serve by leading.

And he made sure to tell Trubee--

I take off my hat to you.

As ever, Bob Lovett.

Bob Lovett was sent

to Moutchic in southern France to build the first US Naval Air

Station on the French coast.

And he literally helped to build it by hand.

He literally pulled the first US aircraft overseas out

of a crate, bolted it together himself, and flew it himself.

These were the FBA, Franco-British aviation

flying boats, that were commonly used for training at that time.

Lovett put the plane together.

And in late September of 1917, made the first flight

at Moutchic.

The training for the unit at the French bases

was piecemeal and sporadic, held up

by faulty equipment and a regular delivery of parts.

Not having bought their own machines,

the Americans had to make do with the leftovers.

The training that developed in World War I was not very safety

conscious.

They want to get the pilots out.

If it took losing a lot of young men

to get a well-qualified pilot, that was an acceptable trade

off at that point.

The casualty rate

of World War I flyers was much higher in training

than it was in combat.

The pilots had very low time.

There were young guys with maybe three

or four hours in an airplane.

Probably very limited ground school.

The British approach to training

in the first few years of the war had been pathetic.

Through 1916, the life expectancy of British pilots

was three weeks.

Of the 14,000 deaths in British aviation during the Great War,

8,000 deaths occurred during training.

By late fall, the Navy moved to operate a patrol in a bombing

station at Dunkirk, coveted by flyers

as the most exciting assignment because it

was close to the German lines.

The station would test any pilot's skill,

and the British Navy offered three of the unit's most

promising pilots, Robert Lovett, Di Gates, and Dave Ingalls.

Advanced training in single-seater fighters.

A big jump from the Curtiss flying boats.

But Lovett was promoted to a staff position,

and Di Gates too big to fit into the cockpit

of the available French Hanriot scouts,

was sent to Dunkirk as chief pilot.

Kenney MacLeish and Ken Smith's brother, Edward Shorty Smith,

from the Second Yale Unit took their places.

In December, the three flyers were

sent to the Experimental School of Special Flying

at Gosport, England.

If there were any two flyers that

were twinned together throughout their wartime experience,

it was David Ingalls and Kenneth MacLeish.

You couldn't have picked two people more different

in outlook and personalities.

David Ingalls was only 18 years old when he enlisted.

He was a schoolboy athlete star.

He had remarkable hand-eye coordination.

He had a bright, effervescent personality.

He liked a good time.

He liked the girls.

He liked fun.

The war was the greatest adventure of his life.

Ken MacLeish was much older.

He was 23.

He was much more serious.

He was not an athlete.

He saw the war, in many ways, as a higher calling.

He was much more deliberate in his activities.

And yet, the two of them were paired together almost

from the first day that they met in the Yale Unit.

Dave Ingalls, always a sharp observer,

described the realistic training at Gosport,

which focused on building confidence, aerial acrobatics,

and forced landings.

Here the finishing touches are put on.

Every stunt is taught.

Side slip landings, perfectly balanced turns, et cetera.

There are no rules or regulations, only

an unwritten law to do your flying and do it well.

A paradise for a flyer.

The top pilots in the First Yale Unit

were finally getting what they trained for.

MacLeish estimated he learned to fly

12 different types of planes.

They all agreed, flying land machines

was the best idea ever invented, and they would never

fly a water machine in preference to land.

Kenney was elated.

As he wrote home to Priscilla--

I'm getting to feel quite at home now.

I used to get lost in vertical banks and spins,

but I know just where I am all the time now.

Lord, there is no game like this in all the world.

You're always taking such wonderful chances,

and it's a grand feeling to get away with them because you

gain self confidence.

But their enthusiasm reached delirious heights

after they were introduced to the Sopwith Camel.

Cam

Ken MacLeish and David Ingalls first

met the Camel in early January of 1918

while they were training at the British flying

school at Gosport, England.

They were absolutely overjoyed.

Whether dangerous or not, they loved this thing.

I finally took a ride in the Camel.

A scout, single-seater fighting machine.

It's so touchy, it just seems to jump

if you shiver, and goes into a spin

every time you take a turn unless you do it perfectly.

I was full of pride that I got back into the same world a

when I started.

It is a very aggressive airplane

with a huge amount of power.

The difficulty was the engine.

The whole engine spins with the propeller

and you have a tremendous amount of gyroscopic force, which

means that that rotating mass forces the airplane to dive

when you're turning to the right and climb when

you're turning to the left because of that rotating mass.

They wrote home to their parents

describing the antics they engaged in in these aircraft.

Fighting each other in mock battles.

They also carried out an activity

they called bush bouncing, which was to take your airplane down

to about 25 or 50 feet off the ground, race at full speed,

approach a house, a tree, a herd of cows, a farmer,

and then jump up in the air over him

and then come right back down to earth.

They absolutely were in love with this machine.

The Camel, I think,

probably was more or less the same

as all other fighters at that time accepting

that it was the slowest of the better fighters,

and without a doubt, the most maneuverable of the fighters

that the Allies had.

It, as I recall, landed perhaps 45 or 50 miles an hour

with a top speed of about 120 miles.

Of course, most people

know it got its name for that hump

over the guns, hence a camel.

But that area is where all the weight is concentrated.

The pilot, the fuel tank, guns, and engine

are all very compact.

It makes it quite maneuverable.

The byproduct of that

is that the airplane gets extremely difficult to fly.

Especially for a novice when the airplane

is trying to divert from what you want it to do.

All that instability, you use it for your own benefit,

and then you become invincible in the sky.

Dave Ingalls, at one point,

takes it up and forces it into a spin.

Something, of course, they were warned not to do.

He then corkscrewed practically to the ground,

pulled out, went up, and did it again.

And did it over, and over, and over, and then

wrote home about how sick to his stomach

he was for the next several hours.

And the machine guns were one of our greatest difficulties

because either due to the timing mechanism or something,

they would shoot only at the most seven or eight times

before there would be a misfire.

And the pilot would have to hit the handle of the loading

apparatus and reload, and then his gun

would shoot again for five to seven times.

Flying these planes was a good deal simpler

in combat.

An actual fight was usually developed into a dogfight

between two planes.

One on each side in a number of different groups.

And they would fly around and around

trying to get on the other man's tail and shoot him down.

Even when you start with a large squadron,

as soon as the fighting starts, it isolates immediately.

So people concentrate on one enemy, they chase that enemy.

That was where the Camel had the decided advantage

because it would turn inside of any airplane that I ever saw.

Couldn't run away from a fight, so once you

were actively involved, you stayed until something

happened one way or the other.

But at least you had an aircraft that

would turn inside the other plane

and give you a chance that I thought was better

than simply speed, which would enable you to dive safely away.

Not only were the top American flyers getting

to know the aircraft, they were also

getting to know each other as pilots, as brothers in arms,

as brash young man full of gusto in a foreign land.

Dave is almost surely off somewhere.

He has a girl in every port.

He drives me and Shorty crazy.

You know what a spoiled kid he is anyway.

Well, on top of that, he's lost all the manners he ever had,

and now he makes the most disgusting noises

you ever heard.

He's so darn nervous and fidgety that we're gradually

going crazy.

Shorty cabled his girl

that he was well and lonesome.

Ken asks almost nightly for some message from Priscilla.

And I, this old bachelor, am again

stuck to a bunch of foreign lovers.

I foresee a hell of a time in one respect.

These two are going to waste a lot of our time writing

and talking about their fiancees.

Sometimes I thank God I am still unshackled.

But during their advanced training at Gosport,

the two pilots also gained a mutual respect for each other.

Ingalls weighed his flying skills

against MacLeish's in his diary.

Ken generally puts it all over me.

He has acquired a damn fine reputation here

and is considered one of the best

pupils the schools has had.

However, I can still hold my own with Shorty,

and there's time to practice before we get to the front.

After MacLeish and Ingalls

were ordered to Dunkirk, Ken wrote a letter to Priscilla

on the eve of their first flight to the front.

Crock and I are in the same flight, which

is perfectly wonderful for both of us

as I have absolute confidence in his flying,

and he feels somewhat the same way about mine.

We've done nothing but fight each other

in the air for months.

Consequently, I know exactly what tactics he uses

and just what he'll do in every possible position

so that I can plan my tactics accordingly.

He knows mine from A to Z, and he also

knows just what I'll do if a Hun gets

a dangerous advantage over me.

We're both full out for it, and we only

pray that we get the chances we want.

Hey, Fritz, we're going to give you fits.

With a million Yankee hits, we'll blow you into bits.

Hey, Fritz--

Already on assignment at their new base and soon

to be under fire, John Vorys and Al Sturtevant

were among the first American fighters

to be mixed in with foreign units.

John Vorys and Albert Sturtevant

were sent over to be sort of ambassadors of United States

Naval Air Service.

And they were immediately attached,

after some additional training, to the British submarine patrol

fleet flying out of Felixstowe.

The missions out of Felixstowe

were the baptism of fire for the unit.

Planes from the base hunted for the German u-boats

over the North Sea and near the English Channel.

John Vorys described the situation.

A system of search was

devised called the spider web.

It swept an area 4,000 square miles.

The tables were turned on Fritz, the hunter,

for here he was the hunted, the quarry,

the fly that had to pass through one or more sectors of the web.

The flying boat was the spider.

The two Americans were popular at the British base

and the local hotel where they attended dances.

So popular, in fact, that it became

necessary to give them a polite warning regarding

the fascinating Mrs. Dowson.

Her father was an Irishman

and her mother came from the Argentine.

She had an ivory skin and dark blue eyes

and was very, very lovely.

A lady with a past, but still a lady.

Al and I both took a shine to her.

In short, we were smitten.

Arriving for their next rendezvous with her

at the hotel bar, the Yankee flyboys

were approached by a polite district official who

informed them that Mrs. Dowson was

suspected by British intelligence of being

a German spy.

Though the flyers remained cordial,

Mrs. Dowson now intrigued them, noted Vorys, about as much

as a case of smallpox.

She was clever enough to be a spy.

She could certainly find out everything you knew.

And with a little persuasion, you

would tell her a great many things you didn't know.

The other mission for the Felixstowe flyers,

besides hunting for subs, was escorting the Beef

Trip, a convoy of merchant ships sailing two or three times

a month between England and the Hook of Holland

carrying Dutch beef to England and English beer to the Dutch.

Escort planes flew great loops some five to ten miles

in front of the convoy, searching for u-boats

before they could submerge and fire on their prey.

Vorys and Sturtevant were each supposed to fly three times

a week, but in February, the rain and wind of the cold North

Sea kept the pilots at bay.

Albert Sturtevant missed several patrols

because of bad weather.

He insisted to John Vorys that Vorys allow him

to take his place on patrol.

And when this particular flight came up,

apparently Al turned to Vorys and said,

how about switching places with me?

You know, you, you've got, you've got the chance to go,

but I, I haven't had as many chances because it's

been in such bad weather.

Sturtevant went out on that patrol.

They came under attack by a squadron of German fighter

planes.

His plane was shot down.

Appeared to survive on the water, but later

on when the Germans came back to look for them, they were gone.

Albert Sturtevant became the first US

naval aviator killed in combat.

The lead pilot and commander of the German air station

at Zeebrugge was Oberleutnant Friedrich Christiansen,

the only seaplane pilot to receive the coveted Blue Max.

Christiansen was contacted by Sturtevant's distraught father

after the war for news of the last sighting of his son.

Christiansen reported that he had

returned to the downed aircraft and seen three of the four

aviators clinging to the wreckage in heavy seas,

but the danger was too great to land in the water

and save them.

A month after his son's death, Sturtevant's father

wrote a letter to his daughter.

I don't think I will ever

get over Albert's death.

I was so proud of him.

Of his looks, his ability, his earnestness, his athletics,

and I am proud of his death, only it is so hard.

And suddenly, the members of the First Yale Unit

realized that for the first time,

they had lost one of their own, and everything came home.

They understood that this was war and this was real.

Dear folks, old Al's gone.

He went out on patrol and the last we knew about him,

he was seen being attacked by Huns.

We hoped against hope for a week that he

had been interned or made prisoner,

but Hun reports confirmed our apprehensions, that he'd

been shot down, and along with the others in the machine,

had gone to swell that awesome, awful role of honor.

It's all right to say you don't hate your enemies when you're

just getting ready to begin, but when you've lost your nearest

and dearest, you, well, at least would like an eye for an eye.

Love, John.

The news of Sturtevant's death

quickly made the rounds to the unit members stateside.

John Vorys carried the tragic news home

as he was reassigned to instruct at Hampton Roads.

Erl Gould had been transferred to Key West where he would soon

become the youngest commander of a Naval Air Station

in charge of all operations and 1,300 men

at the tender age of 22.

On February 27, two weeks after Sturtevant's death,

Gould was writing a letter to Trubee Davison.

Dear old Trub, come on down here to Key West.

We really have a fine little station.

I try to run things just as much like you did as I possibly can.

You don't know how much every man in the unit

admires you, Trub, nor how grateful they all are to you.

Then, in the middle of the letter,

more tragic news arrived.

Gould broke off writing.

My god, Trub, your telegram has just arrived.

My heart is too full and I feel too sick to tell you any more.

Dear old Curt.

Curt Read was a well-loved classmate

who played Yale baseball and could trace his roots

to the Puritans at Plymouth.

His father, a prominent banker, had died in 1916,

and Curt's mother kept him out of the unit that first summer.

But Curt joined when the unit was enlarged.

He became everyone's preferred comrade

in arms for his dependability, generosity, and enthusiasm.

Everybody liked him.

There was no reason not to be a pal of Curt Read's.

On February 25, having arrived at his assigned base,

Dunkirk, he wrote a reassuring letter

to his mother who had given four of her sons to naval aviation,

including young Bart, who was also with the unit.

Dearest mother, everything

is going finely here, and Bart was very well when I left him.

And I never felt better in my life.

Don't, for goodness sake, worry about us, for we

are both as safe as can be.

Lots of love to you, Curt.

But Curt had never taken very well to flying.

Unit member and friend John Farwell

said, he never got the hang of it.

Read had started a diary while he was training overseas,

in which he recorded his anxiety in a kind of shorthand.

General nervous tension.

Wish I were off, even if I'm not thoroughly trained.

Can learn at the front.

Feeling of fatalism about April.

Odd.

Feel that it could really be a climax

now if I were to have the privilege giving the greatest

sacrifice.

Feeling that there is absolutely no other way.

Di Gates was chief pilot soon

to be in command at Dunkirk, and the day after Curt's arrival,

he took his friend up for a quick hop

to get the lay of the tricky harbor.

Dunkirk was a very difficult place

to operate from.

It is a very congested harbor.

It contains numerous channels, numerous bends and turns.

The actual open water is relatively narrow,

and that's usually filled with warships and merchant ships

that were coming and going.

Gates gave the flying boat

over to Curt, who took off with his observer,

circled over the city, and headed out to sea.

He had been flying around for 15 or 20 minutes

and was making a normal glide, evidently

with the intention of practicing a landing.

It was very tight.

And to land there, you had to come out of the sky pretty fast

and then hit the water in the right place.

All of a sudden, the plane

pitched forward and dove nose first 120 feet into the water

and flipped over.

Curt was picked up by a patrol boat.

He had a fractured skull and died within the hour.

His observer could not be found.

There is no need of telling you

what a blow we have had in the last two

weeks with the news of Al's loss and Curt's terrible accident

soon after.

It really seems impossible and unbelievable.

As was his mother's wish,

Curt Read was buried at Dunkirk among, as she said,

the fellowship of the war's heroic dead.

He was the first US naval aviation officer

to be killed in France.

His body now rests in the American Somme Cemetery

on a gentle slope in the rolling countryside of Picardy.

Erl Gould had been Read's roommate at Yale.

They served on the yearbook committee

together, were members of Scroll and Key, and were best friends.

Dear Trubee, thank you

for your telegram and letter.

You know that Curt was the truest friend and noblest

influence of my life, so you can understand

why I feel as though a knife were sticking in my heart.

Curt loved you truly and admired you more

than any young man I know.

Because you reciprocated his feelings,

I understand what a blow it was to you

and sympathize with you and all our unit for the loss.

With love and sympathy to you all, Erl.

Late that spring, Trubee Davison

served as best man for Erl Gould at his wedding,

making his way to the altar without crutches or assistance

for the first time.

For God, for country, and for Yale.

After the deaths of two of their own, the rest the unit

went about their business.

As Alphie Ames described it, behind the smile and carry on,

everyone is tightening his jaw.

Bob Lovett kept a stiff upper lip

in the face of the unit's losses as he ended a letter

to his beloved Adele.

Our number is slowly dwindling,

but our spirit is still the same.

And I believe that, in the end, is what counts.

In Bob Lovett, the Navy

realized early on that they had an extraordinary young officer.

He was intelligent, energetic, organized, insightful, detail

oriented.

He could write reports and draft plans.

And based on these qualities, which

would make any senior Naval officer giddy with delight,

he was put to work as one of the chief troubleshooters

for naval aviation in Europe.

His most exciting assignment

came in February, to which he hinted in an ecstatic letter

to Adele.

Dearest Little Professor, my colossal luck

took a turn yesterday that has left

me gasping in astonishment.

It's a deep secret, of course, but it is really

what I was called over here for.

I am so blamed excited, I can hardly breathe.

I get all cold at night thinking about it

because it is rather scary, and then I get my nerve back

and revel in dreams.

Five months into naval aviation's overseas operation,

Lovett was taking a hard look at the Navy's commitment

to the seaplane.

The spider web patrols were proving a deterrent

to the u-boats, but searching for subs over the North Sea

was tedious work akin to looking for a needle in a haystack,

with little chance of finding, not to mention,

bombing or hitting a u-boat.

Bob Lovett would

look at the logs of the aviators as they went out on patrol

and realized that they were spending

a lot of hours in the air without finding anything.

And he began to think

that this was a very inefficient way

to try to stop the u-boat risk.

Seaplanes really were the bread and butter

of naval aviation, really, from the beginning.

But as the war progresses, there is an effort

to integrate land planes into naval operations

and take advantage of land aircraft

and really hit the German submarines at their source.

And that was the genesis behind the Northern Bombing Group

was really to carry out raids against some

of the submarine bases in northern Europe

and really strike the u-boat before they even

went out to sea.

In one of his detailed memos

to the commander of the US Naval Aviation Forces,

Lovett recorded the lessons learned

from British naval aviators.

He was now convinced that the key

to defeating the submarine menace

was to fly heavy land bombers against their bases.

And Lovett got himself assigned to a squadron

of Handley-Page bombers, behemoth four passenger planes

with twin Rolls-Royce engines and great, floppy wings.

The objectives of the Northern Bombing Group

was the combination of German submarine bases in Belgium.

These consisted of Ostend and Zeebrugge, which

are located on the coast, and Bruges,

which is located inland but is connected to the coast

by canals.

This was one of the most heavily fortified spots

on the western front.

These submarines were protected by concrete submarine

pens in Bruges.

They were ringed with all sorts of anti-aircraft artillery.

Robert Lovett, as part of his general exposure

to air operations, decided that he

needed to learn how heavy bombers flew and experienced

flying over enemy lines.

Dearest Little Partner, I'm

going to the front in 10 days on a wonderful stunt

upon the success of which hangs our future program.

The importance of it truly makes me

burst with pride and happiness.

Have you ever had your wildest dreams come true?

Lovett left Paris by motorcycle

to report for duty at Dunkirk on March 21, 1918.

The next night, he served as a gunner

with Canadian Captain John Roy Allan of the Royal Naval Air

Service in a Handley-Page bomber named The Evening Star.

They attacked the submarine pens in Bruges harbor.

As Lovett recorded in a letter to Adele,

the experience of flying through arching and flaming phosphorus

was both alarming and revelatory.

My Dearest Little Partner,

I have just returned from the front where

I have been attached to the seven squadron,

fifth wing of the Royal Naval Air Service.

It has been the most gratifying and greatest experience

I have ever had.

Exciting?

Ye gods!

No sooner had we crossed the lines

and the Huns started to strafe us.

Archie bursts were seen to the right and left,

but Roy held us straight.

Presently, the motors were throttled

and we were gliding in for our mark.

It was curiously quiet.

I had the three guns ready and then, good god,

the earth seemed to open.

17 searchlights sprang out and swept about.

The ack-ack made a wall and floor ahead of us.

The deadly high explosions crumped

about and the green balls swayed and spiraled

as they sought to get us on fire.

Roy kept straight on, never a waver or turn.

There was a sudden crash and I thought we were hit,

but we kept on straight into the intense wall of bursting

shells ahead and below us.

Suddenly, one light got us and the whole 17

hit us with a slap.

We felt like little kids caught stealing jam.

Then I got the guns going.

The tracers darted down the beams toward the gun crews

and two lights went out.

The tip of the gun got red and the glow crept up the barrel,

and we were hit time and again.

Why we weren't literally blown out of the air, I don't know.

I saw a tear in the fuselage side and holes in the wings,

and Roy's face grinning at me in front, and I could have cried.

I felt so lucky to have been through it all

and come out safely.

Lovett ended his letter to the woman

he planned to marry--

I wonder if you know the dreams I dream,

the thoughts I think, and the hopes I cherish.

Someday you will, my dearest one,

and I'm telling you now, though I can't see you,

as I gain in experience, as I see life with the primal laws

still reigning, I hold you more and more closely in my heart

and long for the days that I will be with you again.

It is a strange thought to consider that the more one has

to live for, the more readily one is willing to die for it.

With his new friend Captain Allan,

Robert Lovett flew a series of successive, sustained night

bombing missions over three weeks.

Kenney MacLeish saw Lovett one morning

and said he has the wind up so badly

that he can't stand still.

Lovett's idea was

that the force should be employed solely

to attack the submarine bases.

That it should operate day and night

using at least two different types of aircraft.

That it should carry out missions consecutively

and continuously on one target.

As each night progressed, he would find that the artillery

fire was abating.

As they ran low on ammunition,

the airborne bombers could then come

in lower, and lower, and lower, and thus bomb

more and more accurately.

And he realized there that strategic bombing

was going to be the future.

It is no stretch of the imagination

to see the raids over German cities in 1943 and 1944

see their origins in this analysis.

Lovett's experience was

the confirmation he needed to write his report for the Navy.

He was called to headquarters for a conference.

And as he packed his bags on April 11,

word arrived that the big stunt over Zeebrugge

was to be flown that night.

Roy Allan asked his friend to fly one more

mission in The Evening Star.

John Roy Allen thought of Lovett

as kind of a good luck charm.

When he flew with Lovett, Allan said, we always came through.

Well, Lovett was called back to headquarters.

Allan pleaded for him to stay, but he couldn't.

He had to leave.

That night, on the only mission

of Allan's on which Lovett did not fly,

The Evening Star was shot down over the North Sea

and Roy Allan was drowned.

Lovett wrote to Adele--

Isn't it ghastly?

What luck and what misfortune on my part.

I wish to God I'd been along.

Maybe I could have saved him, or at least tried.

Well, the best of us go first, again proved.

By the winter of 1918,

German headquarters realized that they had backed themselves

into quite a corner.

The United States was pouring manpower into Europe at a rate

that they had believed to be impossible.

In addition, the submarine offensive,

which had begun with such promise in the spring of 1917,

while still sinking a large number of ships,

had been completely unable to stem the flow of men,

munitions, and supplies.

Germany threw all they had into Operation

Michael in late March 1918.

The attack was directed at the British

and it took them by surprise.

Immediately, all the British flying units

along the front jumped into action

and began to sustain high casualties.

A shortage of combat pilots very quickly emerged.

The commander at Dunkirk

volunteered the station's top pilots, Ingalls, MacLeish,

and Shorty Smith, to fill the vacancies

in number 213 squadron RAF patrolling the coast of France

and Belgium.

For the unit members, this was their moment at last.

The moment for which they'd left school,

for which they had trained, and for which they had said

goodbye to their friends and families.

The young Yale flyers had been waiting

for a year for exactly this opportunity.

They couldn't wait to get at the Germans.

They couldn't wait to get out over lines.

In their diaries and their letters home,

they talked about the excitement,

they talked about the danger, they

talked about the fear, the nerves of meeting

the enemy for the first time.

An American pilot in the spring of 1918 would be joining

a well-developed air force, a well-developed fighter

technique, and he would be, unfortunately,

fighting some of the very best pilots that the Germans had

in their best airplanes.

Though none of the Yale flyers

shot a plane out of the sky that April, all of them

were under fire.

Dave Ingalls told me

that the way that you identified somebody on your tail

was the fact that you suddenly saw tracers coming out

on either side of the airplane.

And that's got to be, get your attention

in a fairly significant way.

Tracers also got Kenney MacLeish's attention

in his Sopwith Camel during an attack on Zeebrugge.

It was MacLeish's first major sortie.

I'm so happy I can't even see straight.

I'm actually on fighting patrols,

and I actually fly over Hun land.

You should have seen me on my first patrol.

I'll never forget it.

I never knew what excitement was until I

got into some hot Archie fire the other day

and then had to scrap with some Huns.

It gives one a real thrill to realize

that they're shooting honest to goodness bullets at you.

But it's simply glorious, and I wouldn't

have it changed for any job on earth,

in spite of the torture from cold on high patrol.

I'll write more when I thaw out.

As the plans for the Northern Bombing Group

began to come together, the US decided

that it wasn't going to devote resources

that were going to Dunkirk, a very exposed spot

where it was very difficult to carry out operations.

The US decided that it was going to devote

all means it could to create the strategic bomber

force under Bob Lovett.

In the meanwhile, it was quite clear

that Di Gates was going to lose his command at Dunkirk.

But Bob Lovett, fellow Bonesman, classmate, friend,

Yale unit member, but also a rival.

There was always this tension between them.

Bob Lovett the savvy one, the fashionable one,

the socially suave man.

Di Gates the football player, the quiet one,

withdrawn, a little bit shy.

So Di Gates wrote a letter home saying that Bob Lovett,

he's conceited.

He makes his plans and then he just carries them out

and leaves us out of them.

Dear Trubee, I wish you could see Bob

under these conditions.

He is absolutely incomprehensible.

He almost refuses to associate with us.

And when he does, he is so aloof that it makes me very sick.

He is about 10 times worse than he ever was in college.

Lovett was faced with bigger problems than hurt

feelings over his secrecy.

If he was going to help mount the largest

aerial mission in history, he needed

to find planes and pilots now.

The delivery, as promised, of American

built Liberty engines and DH-4 and H-16 bombers

was months behind schedule, and the British Handley-Pages

were overtaxed.

Lovett would have to look further afield.

As the Germans spring offensive was slowly beaten back,

he traveled to Italy where he met manufacturer Gianni

Caproni.

Lovett was impressed with his Caproni Ca.3.

The original model of the aircraft were excellent.

They were very effective heavy bombers.

Signor Caproni quickly built a larger model, the Ca.5,

with almost double the horsepower

and double the bomb carrying capacity.

The US Army and Navy send a number of pilots,

including members of the First Yale Unit,

to ferry them over the Alps to France.

It was the Northern Bombing Group's first aerial operation

with its own personnel, and it would

be the closest the unit would come to uniting for a mission.

Harry Davison, Trubee's brother, Reg Coombe,

Sam Walker all went to begin this process of ferrying

the Capronis.

Even before they managed to take off, a number of those planes

broke down.

After weeks of delays, they made their first hop

from Milan to Turin, and every one of the motors

had serious trouble.

Enough so, sabotage was suspected.

In truth, the engines had been rushed through production

and not up to wartime demands.

After many aborted take-offs, Sam Walker

reached the mountains only to crash his Caproni

in an alpine pass.

And they weren't really

set up for high altitude.

They had to get across the Alps.

And just getting up to 18,000 feet,

it would have been freezing cold.

The engines would have been misbehaving terribly.

Reg Coombe saw two pilots fall to their deaths,

and he tried to rescue two more when

their plane tipped over and caught on fire,

and they burned alive.

Coombe finally managed to get his plane through the mountain

passes, barely limping into France.

Of 17 Capronis, only eight made it to the Northern Bombing

Group base.

I think there were two bombing missions in total

that they were able to carry out.

I think one or both of the aircraft

crashed on their return.

The Caproni program was, in short, a fiasco.

But despite all the setbacks, Lovett's spirit

was still buoyed by his old friends and he plowed ahead.

I confess, I have never

had to face so many problems or troubles.

But the satisfaction of winning through and of seeing

the loyalty of your men is the greatest satisfaction

in the world.

In spite of lack of essentials, in spite

of the failure of machines, the whole crowd

are magnificent in their energy and spirit.

We have not reached our strength yet,

but the goal is within sight and the labor, thought,

and planning will someday bear fruit.

Lovett had particular praise for Di Gates,

as he told Trubee--

Di has always played the man's part,

and all his friends over here accord him

every honor and all esteem, and no one

deserves it more than he.

Before the end of his tour at Dunkirk,

Gates proved himself in the face of battle.

A report came in that a Handley-Page bomber had

gone down offshore and within range

of German gun emplacements.

Without waiting for an escort, Gates

jumped in a Donnet-Denhaut flying boat and took off.

He found the downed aircraft with the flyers hanging

on either wing, landed his plane in heavy seas,

and managed to rescue both men and take off again.

For his heroism, Gates was awarded

the Distinguished Service Medal and the Distinguished Flying

Cross.

That same month, a second Distinguished Flying Cross

was awarded to another Yale unit member.

Between early August and the first week

of October 1918, David Ingalls spent

56 or 58 days with the RAF flying Camel missions.

He flew bombing missions, he flew escort missions,

he flew ground strafing missions,

he flew air to air combat.

And on September 15, returning home

after a daring raid on a German airbase,

he flew to his third kill.

I could see four or five Camels far ahead.

One turned back and joined me.

Smith.

So we tooted along easily at 7,000 feet.

Just then I saw five Huns over Zeebrugge,

but didn't think that they could see us.

Some people would

have a kind of sixth sense for how to hunt,

and I think he had that sixth sense.

Stay behind the clouds.

Stay high at important times.

And dive down on your target as quickly and efficiently as

you can, and not to spend a lot of time

down low where it's sort of fun, but maybe a little more

dangerous.

Anyway, I started to climb

and just then saw apparently a scout climbing out of Ostend,

perhaps to pick off the last Camel which was visible.

I waved at Smithy and headed in a bit, climbing.

In about four minutes, he saw us and turned east toward Ostend,

gliding.

We dived, firing at long range, but I got to about 100

yards before he hit the clouds at 2,000 feet

and got into good burst.

So did Smith.

He went through clouds at Ostend pier, sort of wallowing.

I dived through and came out just behind him.

He was driving steeply, so I opened at 50 yards

and saw flames and smoke come out.

Then I saw a lot of tracers from shore and beat it like hell,

meeting Smith above the clouds.

And then we went home.

And along the way,

David Ingalls managed to shoot down

at least four German airplanes and a couple of kite balloons,

earning the title of the Navy's only Ace

from the First World War.

For fighter pilots, the title of Ace

is just one of the most coveted titles

you can get because it means you've

shot down five or more enemy aircraft in air to air combat.

And so David S. Ingalls holds a place in naval aviation history

forever because he was the first naval aviator

to become an Ace in combat over the western front.

In awarding Ingalls the Distinguished Flying Cross,

a major of the British air staff wrote,

has helped to destroy two enemy airplanes

and once, single-handed, attacked six enemy machines,

driving one down damaged.

His keenness, courage, and utter disregard of danger

are exceptional and are an example to all.

He is one of the finest men this squadron ever had.

Finally, in early October 1918,

he was called back from the British

and he was assigned to be the chief flight

officer at Eastleigh.

MacLeish was then sent to take Ingalls' spot with 213

squadron.

But before the exchange of assignments

could take place, the unit received unsettling news.

In the very short period

that the members of the First Yale Unit who reached the front

were there, three members were killed very quickly.

Al Sturtevant, Curtis Read, and there was to be one more.

Di Gates and several others managed

to get themselves assigned to a French Escadrille that

was operating right nearby.

And it was flying with this Escadrille, the Escadrille St.

Pol, that he was out on a mission,

I believe on the 4th of October.

Got involved with superior numbers of German aircraft.

He suffered engine failure and was

forced to land in a field in occupied Belgium.

Telegrams and letters quickly

made the rounds of the unit members

with updates by the day.

Dear Trubs, I cannot believe that one so full

of life as Di could have lost it,

so we are stretching every effort to get word of him

in the prison camps.

Kenney MacLeish thought

of Di Gates, as he said, the one man I love other than Archie.

Di was somebody he'd grown up with.

Di was the one who had brought him into the First Yale

Unit where he really discovered both his manhood as a pilot

and the woman he loved.

Dearest old pal,

I haven't dared write for the last few days

because I've just been hoping against hope

that poor old Di would show up, but I guess

that the chances are slim.

Oh, pal, of all the men on earth that it's hard to lose,

I'm just crushed.

I've never, never taken anything so badly.

So much of who he was was tied to Di Gates,

and he went to the front intent on revenge.

On October 9, he wrote a letter to Trubee.

I still feel sure he's all right,

although I'm weakening as time passes.

He's too dear a friend to lose.

Some of those dirty bastards will pay me.

I'm going out to the front in a day or so,

and I'll get even with somebody.

Underneath his roiling emotions,

MacLeish was philosophical, and he'd often

shared his thoughts in his letters

to his family and friends back home.

I'm going to the front tomorrow.

I don't think anything will happen to me.

If it should be my lot to make the supreme sacrifice,

you'll know that I did it gladly and that I

bought life's most marvelous reward,

honor at a dirt cheap price.

And that I was happy, ever so happy,

that it was granted to me, unworthy

as I am, to give up my life for my friends who, fundamentally,

are my ideals.

His very first day there, he

went out for a mission in the morning,

shot down a German plane, got his first taste of revenge.

It was his first kill.

He came back to the base, refueled,

went out on another mission.

He promptly found himself caught up in a dogfight.

He was flying with several others of his squadron.

And they were going along and all of a sudden off to one

side, a group of several German fighters showed up.

And Ken peeled off and went after them.

This has always been a mystery.

Why would he have done that?

He was outgunned, no question about it,

and he just took off after them.

Maybe he was mad that morning.

I don't know.

Maybe he just did figured, this is my time

to knock down a couple of these things.

Obviously, he was not thinking about his own safety.

He was last seen facing off

one man against seven Germans.

When Kenney MacLeish

went missing on the 14th of October,

there was a great deal of mystery

surrounding his ultimate fate.

There were reports coming back from the front

that American Navy pilots had been captured.

There was the possibility that he had been taken prisoner.

Letters and telegrams passed back and forth

in which everyone tried to reassure

each other that hope remained.

But weeks passed and then months passed, and there was no news.

But unbeknownst to the devastated unit,

Di Gates was still alive.

His engine had been shot up by three Fokker DVIIs

and he found an open field in which

to land after pushing his Spad into what

he called a screaming dive.

The Spad, nose down, bounced hard

on the starboard wheel and then flipped over on its back.

The next thing I remember was the smell of gasoline

and a moist feeling on my shirt and back.

A shot rang out and brought me back to the present.

A flood of enemy soldiers appeared

from the corner of the field, so I

reached into my pocket for a box of matches

that I kept to light a favorite cigar.

I touched the flame to the canvas,

and the flame quickly became engulfed in flames.

I turned my back on the bonfire and walked away slowly.

Gates was captured and wined

and dined by German intelligence at a house in Ghent, Belgium.

But after three days of not giving up any information,

he was loaded onto a train car bound for a prison camp.

He was being transported back

to a prisoner of war camp and he found himself

in the lavatory of the train.

And he found that on the wall was a train map with all

the stations that the train was going

to and the different railroad lines,

and he managed to get that off the wall.

And he determined that at that particular moment in time,

he might be closest to the Swiss border.

So he made an escape.

Going through a tunnel, escaped out

of the toilet window which, somehow,

he managed to squeeze through.

He jumped out of the train

with the scrap of the map with him

and made his way towards the border, traveling at night

so he wouldn't be seen.

I made 20 miles the first night,

but I didn't have enough food or water

and I could only manage half that distance

the following night.

I would hide during the day, but it was cold

and I was only able to sleep sporadically.

I would wait until night to check my progress by climbing

the signposts along the roadway and feel

the impression of the letters with my fingertips

as if I was reading Braille.

Unfortunately, in climbing these poles,

he got a lot of splinters in his inside leg

and he got a blood infection and got quite sick.

I took a wrong turn at a fork in the tracks.

At first, light was breaking over the roofs

of the houses in the next town.

I was unsure I could withstand another night out in the cold.

I decided to take a chance that no one would be awake

this early and made my way through the center of town

rather than circling around it.

Hurrying past the station, I found a burst of energy

as I rounded a corner and ran into the path of a sentry who

had just come on duty.

He just came around the corner at the wrong time

that a sentry had just come on duty,

also was coming around the corner.

He could then see that there was actually

a break in the barbed wire fence only three yards away,

and the other side was Switzerland.

Gates was taken to the American officers POW

camp at Villingen on November 7th and sentenced to 21 days

solitary confinement.

He would not have to stay that long.

On the morning of November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed.

After four long years, Germany and Austria-Hungary

were defeated.

A virtual surrender that ended hostilities

between the warring nations.

Fairly quickly, the unit received word

that, indeed, Di Gates had been a prisoner of war.

Di Gates, shortly after the armistice,

one of the first things he did was

send off a postcard to Trubee Davison saying, I'm fine.

Will you be my roommate in New Haven?

So finally, they knew he was alive.

The word went out among all the members.

There was elation among them.

No word came from Kenney.

The longer they waited, the gloomier the outlook became.

They went searching for his aircraft.

No sign of it still.

At some point early in 1919,

after the armistice, a Belgian farmer

decided it was now safe to get back to his farm.

Walked back and there, lying in the barnyard, was uncle Kenny.

Not a very pretty sight.

The rats had taken his face.

But his papers were with him and it was perfectly clear

that he was who he was.

Because of the irregularity of the mails,

word of MacLeish's remains did not reach the states

until late January.

Di Gates learned of the discovery while in London

waiting for passage home.

He sent a telegram to Priscilla.

30 January, 1919.

Archie just told me a very sad, definite news

concerning Kenney.

My own grief helps me to appreciate yours

to some extent.

Will return to New York in morning Friday

and am looking forward to seeing you.

My deepest sympathies.

When I heard my grandfather speak

about World War I, which wasn't frequently,

but it would always be in the presence of another survivor

usually, they often spoke about Kenney MacLeish.

Somehow, he was an idol, a star.

And his loss in World War I, they all took very hard.

He was able to channel the anger and the disappointment,

the loss, into something that would propel them forward

in a positive way.

A year after MacLeish's disappearance,

Lovett wrote a letter to Ken's brother, Archibald,

describing Kenney's reaction to Lovett's offer of a plum

position as squadron commander.

Dear Archie, he said he was tickled stiff

and that he would, of course, come over and do

the best he could but, honest, Bob, it won't fit me.

He said that he appreciated the honor and all that sort

of thing, and that removal from active flying duty

looked pretty good when he thought of the end of the war.

But unless I asked it as a very special favor,

he'd rather not take it.

He wanted to fight.

Couldn't stand not being in it every minute.

Would curl up and blow away if they kept him behind the lines.

And that a single-seater was his idea of a holiday,

and all he wanted.

I believe he was the best we had in the line of a pilot,

and I don't want a finer pal than a man who

can give up everything for his ideal of service and honor.

Over 19 months in Europe,

US naval aviation flew 22,000 sorties patrolling

over a million nautical miles, dropping over

100 tons of high explosives on enemy targets.

Though the full weight of the Northern Bombing Group

was not brought to bear by the time of the armistice,

its pilots were busy serving with Navy, Marine, and RAF

units while its code and tactics would live on

through the century.

Among the Yale Unit members were a medal of honor nominee,

two recipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross,

three recipients of the Distinguished Service Medal,

and 11 recipients of the Navy Cross.

And really, the legacy of the Yale Unit

is not only in that performance in combat, the flying aces,

and the ones that sacrificed their lives for their nation,

it's the ones that returned from World War I

and just really maintain that commitment to their nation

because they serve at the highest levels of government

and in the war department, in the Navy department,

and then, eventually, in the Department of Defense.

So they are the ones that really drive US naval aviation, really

US military policy.

I mean, from the lowest level when they are junior pilots

all the way to the highest levels of command

into the Cold War era.

So it's really an amazing journey of a truly unique group

of individuals.

David Ingalls became assistant secretary of the Navy

for Air.

During World War II, he surveyed the Pacific Islands

for possible bases and supply routes and commanded Pearl

Harbor NAS, achieving the rank of Rear Admiral.

Trubee Davison became the first assistant secretary of War

for Air, went on to serve as president

of the Museum of Natural History for two decades,

and was the first personnel director for the CIA.

John Vorys became a 10 term congressman

from Ohio, and during World War II, again,

flew submarine patrols, this time over the Gulf of Mexico.

Erl Gould was re-activated into the Navy for World War II,

and during the Battle of Tarawa established a fully operational

airfield for which he was awarded the Legion of Merit.

Di Gates became president of New York Trust.

Gates served as under secretary of the Navy

for Air during the Second War, dividing his time

between Washington and the Pacific.

Robert Lovett was made assistant secretary of War

for Air, becoming one of the architects of strategic bombing

in World War II.

He went on to serve as President Harry Truman's acting secretary

of state during the Berlin airlift

and secretary of defense during the Korean War.

As one of the so-called wise men of governmental advisors,

Lovett would influence military and foreign policy

for most of the 20th century.

The men of the Yale Flying Club had

a sense of duty, honor, country, and they, they,

they felt they were privileged and had an obligation

to lead and take on the dangers inherent particularly

in a new technology and going to war.

They wanted to go fight for their country

because they felt, an their cultural background was,

there was a duty of service to, to one's country.

And those who were given much in privilege, much more

was expected.

50 years after the formation of the First Yale

Unit, in a ceremony at Peacock Point in 1966,

Trubee Davidson was finally honored with his Navy wings.

That was wonderful.

See, the Navy took us in as a group of younger brothers.

We weren't soldiers, or sailors, or airmen.

We had plenty of things to fight for.

And you could have the satisfaction of loyalty,

service, and doing something that you

believed in with a group of people

that you loved and respected.

That's what kept us going.

There's not a question about it.

The unit members left an inspirational legacy

as well.

Defined by their notion of service, their response

to the call to arms, dedication to their cause,

and undying loyalty to one another.

As Robert Lovett said of Kenneth MacLeish,

for sheer singleness of purpose, for real idealism

and for rare spirit, nothing I have ever heard can equal it.