Luck on the Wing

1–26 June 1918

Battle of Belleau Wood

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There was only one time at Château-Thierry when the Boche did not have the complete supremacy of the air. This was on July first at the Battle of Vaux, at which place Johnny Miller and I did the preliminary adjustment and Brereton and I did the artillery control for the Americans during the battle. We had every American pursuit and observation plane we could get off of the ground. There were not less than ninety-six planes in that formation—their mission being to protect the Infantry plane and to protect Brereton and me, who were doing the artillery work. There was such a swarm of planes above us that we practically never looked into the sky, but kept our attention entirely on the work before us. This was my idea of real protection. It was the nearest we ever came to our big threat to literally blacken the skies by droves of American airplanes. However, none of these were American airplanes, although the aviators were Americans. This was the first time in the war that the doughboy was brought to realize that there were really other American aviators than those famous ground flyers who took off and landed so often at the famous Hotel Crillion Bar Airdrome in Paris and who were so accurately described by Irvin Cobb.

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The Vaux affair seemed to me just like the practice control of artillery fire that I once did on the blackboard in school exercises. It was really one of the easiest jobs I ever did and for which I probably received more credit. The previous day I had passed over the town and was happy for the poor peasants that it had been spared, for even though in the hands of the enemy it was practically intact. Now it was a shell-torn blot of destroyed homes, made more desolate by the scattered bodies of the German dead—and I had been one of the guiding masters of its ruin.