[legendsport]

September 26, 1918 - Rembercourt aux Pots, France:

"You know something? Most of the great ones - they're gone."

"Shut up, Eddie," Merlon growled.

Jimmy Barrell shook his head and took a drink of his wine. Eddie Grimes, who had just that day become an ace with his fifth kill, was feeling maudlin - again. And among men who went up in rickety aircraft to deal in death every day (and usually more than once per day), the last thing they wanted to talk about back on terra firma was death.

"You know it's true, Bill. The early heroes - Ball & Boelcke. Dead. McCudden & Mannock, too. Heck, even the Red Baron," Grimes persisted.

"I'm not telling you again, Eddie. Shut it." Jimmy reached out and put a hand on Merlon's arm. Through his jacket, Jimmy could feel the bunched muscles of Bill's forearm as he clenched his fist.

Jimmy looked at Grimes and said, "Eddie, you need to go sleep it off. This talk does no one any good, you know?"

Eddie frowned and shook his head. "We're all a bunch of morons," he said he as he wobbily got to his feet and stumbled out the door and into the night. He'd be up in the morning, same as the rest, climbing into their SPAD XIIIs for another busy day of flying and fighting.

Jimmy sighed. He was all too aware of the dangerous game they were all playing. He'd heard that something like a quarter of all pilots were eventually killed - a rate higher than that of the poor sods in the infantry. The reasons varied - if not by enemy fliers, then ground fire, or their own aircraft's idiosyncrasies, the end result always the same. And the aces were just as likely (some said more likely) to die. But he knew that dwelling on it did no one any good.

He looked around the room the pilots had claimed as their de facto clubhouse; at the propellers of downed German aircraft hanging on the walls beside the nudie pictures. The pilots of the 1st Pursuit Group were no different from any other group of young men who faced death every day - though they were to a man thankful they weren't down in the trenches, or worse, going "over the top" in the recent Allied offensives. So they drank, chased (and frequently caught) women (his mother would kill him if she ever found out what he'd been up to) and did any and everything else that might provide a distraction from the deadly business of war.

Still, the news - overall - was good. The Germans were falling back behind the consistent pressure of the British, French and the newly arrived American armies.

"I'm off, Bill," Jimmy said as he stood, focusing hard on not stumbling. He wasn't much of a drinker, but it was impossible not to imbibe in these surroundings.

Bill was staring at the empty wine bottle in his hand and merely grunted in reply, but when Jimmy reached the door, his friend's voice suddenly had genuine warmth and amusement in it when he shouted, "Give my regards to Marie!"

Jimmy paused with his hand on the door, sighed and then chuckled - he could never put one past ol' Bill.

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The next morning Jimmy got out to the field early and had begun arming his SPAD. It wasn't so much that he didn't trust the armorers - he did - but as a former mechanic, he trusted himself more than he did anyone else, with the possible (but only possible) exception of Bill Merlon.

Eddie Grimes sauntered past, on the way to his own plane, which sat beside Jimmy's. "Sorry about last night, Jim," he said with a sheepish grin. "I get blue when I drink, always have," he continued as he walked past, tapping Jimmy's propeller on the way. Jimmy wondered how Grimes, who was all of 22 years old, had enough drinking experience to say he had "always" been that way when drinking. That got him thinking about how young the pilots were. Sure, they were mostly college guys, but the only one he could think of who was on the other side of 25 was Merlon. Jimmy frowned at this thought and got back to arming his Vickers.

The SPAD S.XIII was a big improvement over the Nieuport 28s the Americans had been flying. For one thing, it had two Vickers machine guns, each holding 400 rounds. That gave them a lot of punch. Jimmy finished arming his guns, then did a quick check with his mechanic on the Hispano-Suiza engine.

The mission that day was to be infantry support. The doughboys and their French allies had launched the "Grand Offensive" the day before and the 94th had flown all day long, a series of missions supporting the infantry with a couple of dust-ups with German fliers thrown in for good measure (this was how Grimes had gotten his fifth kill). Jimmy wasn't sure how much ground had been gained, but he'd done a fair amount of shooting at German soldiers scurrying eastwards. Today would be more of the same.

Jimmy, and the rest of the 94th, took off into the cool French morning and headed north. The area of the front occupied by the Americans curved from east to north, wedged between French armies. The offensive was pushing north, trying to push the Germans there back behind the Meuse River. There was a big forest there too - Merlon had told him it was called the Argonne.

He fought his SPAD into the air - the big V-8 engine gave the fighter a nice top speed of 138 mph but it was a dog until you got it up to speed. Jimmy had seen several green pilots crash on landing because of the poor handling of the SPAD at low-speeds. It was a match for the excellent Fokker D-VII the Germans were flying, but only after it got up to speed.

The flight to the front was not a long one. The pilots climbed slowly and then stayed at about 10,000 feet, each scanning the area for enemy activity. Just a few minutes later, they found it.

Some of the fliers called it a bee-hive, others a furball, or a knife fight. It was a mass of aircraft, twisting and turning as the individual pilots tried to a) avoid a midair collision and b) get a shot on an enemy without allowing one of them to get a shot on you. And the 94th got into a big, nasty one that morning.

Jimmy, as he usually did, avoided getting tangled up in the 'hive by passing through the spiraling mass at high speed, shooting if he had a shot (he'd become an expert at 'deflection' shots, leading an enemy and shooting him up without having to get right on his tail) and otherwise flashing through the furball, emerging on the other side and then climbing.

Jimmy had turned out to be an instinctive flier, and had quickly acclimated to "three-dimensional thinking" as Merlon called it. Jimmy would climb, and then turn in a move he called "egging" which he once explained to Merlon at breakfast while holding a hard-boiled egg and saying, "if the enemy is here," pointing to the bottom of the egg, "his turn radius is wide. But if I'm here," and he pointed to the narrow 'top' of the egg, "I can use gravity to pull my aero into a tighter turn, get inside him and fall on him." Merlon had nodded with approval. And Jimmy's "egging" method worked well in a furball situation where many of the pilots were so caught up in turning and twisting along the horizontal axis that they quite forgot the three-dimensional nature of flight.

Jimmy put his favorite maneuver into action as he climbed, flipped into a tight, gravity-assisted falling turn and swooped down on an unsuspecting D-VII, triggering both Vickers and sending the other plane down in a fiery plunge to earth. Assuming one of his fellow pilots witnessed this, he'd just earned his 17th kill - only Merlon had more among American pilots.

Unfortunately for Jimmy, he had picked up a tail. Glancing back, as he frequently did to make sure no one got on his tail, he saw the Fokker before the German pilot started firing. He quickly flicked into a left-bank and attempted an Immelmann turn. The German pilot immediately followed suit as if he had anticipated the move. Jimmy now knew he was up against a good one.

Jimmy was now flying north and over German-held territory. Despite twisting, climbing, diving and generally using every trick in his bag, Jimmy was not able to shake the Fokker from his tail. He opened up his throttle to the limits, knowing his plane was faster than the Fokker, if the big V-8 didn't shake the airframe to bits. He slowly began pulling away and started to make small, gradual turns to the west, wanting to cross over into French-held territory before his fuel ran out.

That ended up being a mistake. The fight had gradually brought both aircraft down in altitude, and they were now in range of the "archie" or anti-aircraft guns, on the ground. And the Germans had been well stirred up by the offensive and had plenty of gunners scanning the skies.

Jimmy didn't see the shot that got him which was, by any measure, a "lucky" one. It neatly sheared off a large chunk of both his upper and lower right wings. The resulting loss of lift, not to mention the instability that made Jimmy fight his control stick, caused him to drop even closer to the earth. It also - thankfully in this case - made him harder to hit for the gunners on the ground.

The Fokker behind him was now closing and it was just a matter of seconds before he'd be in range. Jimmy swore quietly and pushed the nose over, both earning a bit of extra speed and hopefully enabling him to put the plane down. He now knew he wouldn't reach the French lines, so he was going to ditch and hope to avoid capture.

He fought the stick, and even managed to flare a bit despite the engine sputtering out, and then hit the ground with a jarring crash that snapped the wheels off and sent him into a skid. He worked the rudder as the plane scraped along the ground, trying to avoid the trees that were rapidly approaching. He hit one a glancing blow, which spun the plane around and violently slammed it into a second tree which stopped the skid with a resounding crash. Jimmy's world went black.

Moments later a trio of German soldiers approached the wreck, finding the pilot slumped over and motionless. A brief conversation ensued, largely an argument about who would get to strip the Vickers off the wreck and who would confirm that the pilot was, in fact, dead. While they were more than used to death, a rumor had gone through the trenches of an American pilot who had feigned death and subsequently shot the soldier who came to strip his plane. One of them pointed a rifle at the cockpit, noting that maybe it would be better to be certain.