- [Narrator] FedEx is a proud sponsor of the Lafayette Escadrille.

Funding for the Lafayette Escadrille was also made possible by the generous support of the following entities.

(gentle instrumental music) (airplane engine roaring) - [Narrator] Having lost two of their own flying for France and the end of the war nowhere in sight, the American volunteers of the Lafayette Escadrille wondered if the United States would ever join their cause.

After the death of Kiffin Rockwell, the squadron hunkered down for some bad weather with a group of British pilots still wondering why base commander Félix Happe held them all in limbo.

- Unbeknownst to them, they are going to be flying escort for a bomber raid in Germany.

And actually not just in the German-held parts of France, but actually in Germany proper.

They're going to bomb the Mauser works in Oberndorf Germany.

- This was a pretty innovative bombing mission where the Lafayette Escadrille was going to play support both going in and then coming back out when the bombers were returning.

- And we have no reason to suspect that the mission would turn out the way it did turn out.

But it doesn't go well.

- [Narrator] On October 12th at 1:00pm, the bombers slowly lifted from the Luxeuil airfield with Raoul Lufbery, Norman Prince, Alfred de Laage and Didier Masson escorting more than 60 French and British bombers toward Oberndorf.

Just past the Rhine River, the escorts turned back to refuel and wait for the returning bombers.

Limping home after dropping 9,000 pounds of explosives, the bombers crossed the border, harried by German fighters and ground fire.

The Escadrille pilots leapt into the melee.

De Laage quickly shot a Fokker off the tail of a French bomber.

Prince got another, his fourth.

Lufbery got a two-seater, his fifth, making him the first American to become an "ace."

- So Prince scores, Lufbery scores, and Masson scores.

And now they're heading back West, back into France, It's getting dark, by the way.

- It was almost night, two of them could fly to Luxeuil, where they came from, but Lufbery and Norman Prince, short of fuel, decided to divert to Corcieux, where we are.

Lufbery landed first, because he was a little bit a few minutes early.

And then when Norman Prince arrived, as he was not familiar, he circled above the airfield two or three times to see where the danger could be.

- God, I can't imagine landing at night in a mountain airstrip with no lights, no landing light, no lights on the strip.

Think of how incredibly dangerous that is.

- Norman decides to land.

He comes this way above the yellow house, we can still see.

Norman, in the dark, didn't notice the electric power line.

He hit it, flipped over, and crashed, just where we are.

During the crash, Norman was ejected from the plane.

He had two legs broken and was injured at his head, he was bleeding.

His friend, Lufbury, who had landed a few minutes earlier, saw everything about the crash.

He asked for an ambulance.

- [Lufbery Voice] I placed him in an ambulance, urging the driver to hurry him to the hospital at Gerardmer.

His endurance was remarkable and when the pain became so intense that he grew faint, he sang to keep from losing consciousness.

- At the military hospital in Gerardmer, which was at the Great Hotel of the Lake, the surgeon worked on his broken legs for a good part of the night.

- [Narrator] Capitaine Thenault arrived back from leave and rushed to Prince's bedside.

Prince had been made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

- [Thenault Voice] I gave it to him in his hospital cot, in the presence of Red Cross nurses, who were crying.

His condition was desperate, as a result of a clot of blood on the brain.

- [Narrator] Prince's brother Frederick had just finished his flight training, a cable reached him, telling him of the crash.

He raced across France by train, trying to get to his wounded brother.

- [Fredrick Voice] The more I traveled the more I felt I would find Nim better got very impatient on not arriving faster.

Got off the train before the station, I ran up met halfway by Michel who told me the sad news.

My only brother died at 2AM as gamely as he lived.

He fought to the end for France, may I do likewise.

- [Jim Voice] He was brought back to Luxeuil and given a funeral similar to Rockwell's.

It was hard to realize that poor old Norman had gone.

I do not think Prince minded going, he wanted to do his part before being killed, and he had more than done it.

- It's sad to see that that it all came to an end right there on that field in France, but clearly I think he knew the risk of flying those types of machines in combat.

- Young Americans died for France.

Norman Prince, Kiffin Rockwell, are said, Mort Pour la France.

Which is very important, it's not the case of everyone, I mean, French people who died during the war, they are not all said Mort Pour la France.

You have to do something special to get this.

And that's what they did, Norman, Kiffin, Victor.

All of those Americans, they gave their lives for France.

That's the way we feel it.

I mean, we owe you, you know, a lot.

- [Narrator] Two days after Prince's funeral, the dismal Oberndorf raid over, the Escadrille received orders to move to Cachy, a level patch of mud near the raging Battle of the Somme.

Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan, "he kept us out of war."

- [Edmond Voice] There's another four years ahead of us with Wilson at the helm.

Oh, its a bitter, bitter subject for every one of us Americans over here.

- [Narrator] Over 200 American pilots were already flying with French Escadrilles, but the war was at a stalemate, and the members of the Escadrille Américaine wondered when President Wilson and the United States would finally change their minds.

Since the deaths of Rockwell and Prince, several new members joined the squadron while others departed.

Lawrence Rumsey was a bad drunk who'd lose his nerve the closer he got to the front.

In a drunken rage, he clubbed Whiskey on the head with a cane after the cub chewed up his cap, blinding the beloved mascot in one eye.

Rumsey broke out in boils over the incident and left for the hospital.

He never returned.

He'd only flown six missions.

Bert Hall left N.124 to join a French squadron on the other side of the field.

- There's a number of photographs of Bert where you'll see the members of the Escadrille then three feet away is Bert kind of off to the side.

In many respects, he just doesn't fit the normal mold.

He cheated at cards and he was accused of this by several members of the Escadrille.

And I think in Bert's perspective, well, they're rich kids, they could afford it.

He transferred to another unit on the same airfield as the Escadrille and three days later, scored another victory.

- [Narrator] Several new pilots replaced the squadron's departed comrades, among them the youthful and passionate Legionnaire Edmond Genet who had, against all odds, survived sixteen months of the fiercest fighting from the trenches.

- [Edmond Voice] My dear little mother, This is the most dangerous branch of the service, mother, but it is the best as far as the future is concerned and if anything does happen to me, the glory is well worth the loss.

I'd far rather die as an aviator over the enemy's lines than find a nameless shallow grave in the infantry.

- [Narrator] The 20-year-old would prove an adept pilot, but he was a haunted young man, and not just from his trial with the Legion.

Genet was increasingly concerned about his record of desertion from the U.S. Navy.

He also longed for his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude, but she left his impassioned letters unanswered.

- [Edmond Voice] I'm getting mighty well disheartened over it all, mother.

There's something mysteriously wrong, I am certain.

- [Narrator] Arriving in Cachy just after Genet was a gregarious and unruly Yankee named Edwin C. Parsons, known as Ted, who had learned to fly in Los Angeles in 1912 and worked for Pancho Villa training pilots during the Mexican Revolution.

Whereas Genet was serious, deeply religious, and resigned to his possible fate, Parsons had an irreverent, devil-may-care attitude that belied his nervousness.

- [Ted Voice] I have no hesitation in confessing I got into this scrap through the pure desire for adventure and without any clear idea of what I was letting myself in for.

None of us had any real idea of what we were getting into.

We had hold of the bear's tail and no one to help us let go.

With few exceptions, I believe most of us would have welcomed an opportunity to bow out gracefully.

- [Narrator] The Escadrille was grounded by weather at Cachy for all but a dozen days.

Then, suddenly, it seemed the Escadrille Américaine might be grounded permanently.

- The Germans gave a claim to the French government, what does it mean?

What does it mean the Americans are fighting with French?

It's not possible.

And the government told the boss of the Escadrille, "you have to change the name of the Escadrille".

- [Thenault Voice] 6th December, 1916, the Minister of War announces that the Volunteer Escadrille will henceforth be called the 'Lafayette Escadrille.'

- [Narrator] Satisfied with the new name, the pilots also gave themselves an official insignia.

The Escadrille was forbidden to use the American flag, but the pilots still wanted allies and adversaries alike to know they were American.

William Thaw declared an Indian warrior quintessentially American.

The crippling cold continued unabated as the escadrille moved yet again.

While Genet was flying patrol his oil froze and the engine burned up.

The ink in his pen froze while writing to his mother.

Ted Parsons had his own methods of keeping warm.

- [Ted Voice] In desperation, many nights I slept with Whiskey, taking him to bed with me to try to keep me warm.

Anyone who has never tried sleeping on a folding canvas camp bed with a half-grown lion has a neat thrill in prospect.

- They flew up to altitudes of up to 20,000 feet.

The men suffered bone-chilling cold, below-zero cold with a 100 mile-an-hour slipstream slapping them in the face.

And then from the mental and emotional side, it was even worse because the idea of going up into the sky, flying over a war zone and facing an enemy airman who was superbly trained and who was flying excellent airplanes, it was a very, very scary thing to do.

- [Ted Voice] I was scared all the time, but I stuck.

I guess it was because I was more afraid of being called yellow than I was of just plain being scared.

By any measure, I was far from being a hero.

- [Narrator] The Escadrille began flying a new aeroplane, the SPAD VII.

- The men did not really like the SPAD VII at first, it was heavy, it landed really fast, it was clunky, it was not nearly as maneuverable as the little Nieuport.

- The SPAD was very rugged.

It could take a tremendous amount of punishment without falling apart.

It could dive faster, and above all, it was significantly faster in flat out flight than the Nieuport 17.

On top of that, the SPAD VII had a Vickers gun mounted to the nose.

- It was a very, very stable gun platform and it did have a machine gun, which would fire through the propeller.

- [Narrator] Of the original American fliers, only Thaw and McConnell were left.

McConnell had not recovered from a back injury, sustained when he overshot the airfield while landing in the dark, and he couldn't get into his airplane without help.

Still, he insisted on flying.

- He hated being out of the conflict.

I don't think that leaving the unit was an option.

- [Ted Voice] On March 19th, a lowering, gray day with storm driven scud, Jim McConnell, Genet and myself were named for the regular ten-o'clock patrol.

I had hardly left the field when my oil line plugged up with sluggish castor oil, burning my motor completely out.

I had to make a forced landing two kilometers away.

- [Edmond Voice] Mac headed north toward St. Quinten and I followed to the rear end above him.

I discovered two German machines much higher than we coming towards us to attack.

I opened fire with my incendiary bullets and headed directly for them.

The German's first few shots cut one main wing support in half and an explosive bullet hit the guiding rod of the left aileron and cut open a nice hole in my left cheek.

I scarcely noticed it and kept on firing until we were scarcely 25 yards apart.

We passed close and I peaked down, the German didn't follow.

At 1,000 meters I stopped and circled around for 15 minutes in search of Mac and the second Boche but I saw nothing.

I headed for St. Juste, hoping all the way back that Mac had preceded me there.

- [Narrator] McConnell had not arrived.

Lufbery and de Laage went out looking for him but found nothing.

Hours and then days passed with no word.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Edmond Voice] Captain went over to see Mac's body today and found he had been terribly mangled with the wreckage.

He will be buried tomorrow in a coffin and placed in a grave beside the road where he fell.

All honor to gallant Mac.

- [Narrator] McConnell had written to Paul Rockwell that he felt his time was up.

- [James Voice] I'm worse off than when I went to the hospital and feel damned discouraged.

Don't know what to do about it, seems hopeless.

- I think that McConnell's sense of responsibility for himself and for others was the reason he went back up in the air at the end.

I think there was no choice but to go back and to finish what he started, and I think he knew he was gonna die.

He must've known he was gonna die.

- [Narrator] McConnell left instructions to his comrades for just such an event.

- [James Voice] My burial is of no import, make it as easy as possible for yourselves.

I have no religion and do not care for any service.

If the omission would embarrass you, I presume I could stand the performance.

Good luck to the rest of you.

God damn Germany and vive la France.

- [Narrator] Three days after the discovery of McConnell's body, Genet received another demoralizing blow.

- [Edmond Voice] Mother enclosed a letter from Mrs. Curry Bigelow to her telling her that Gertrude is very much in love and engaged to some fellow in Vermont.

It seems to me that Gerty could have at least written to me about her engagement and not kept me utterly miserable with no news from her or about her at all.

It won't make much difference after all, though.

I don't expect to live through the end of the war.

I've already been told I was reckless in the air over the lines, but after this I vow I'll be more than reckless, come what may.

- [Narrator] Genet's reply to his mother was not all pessimism, however.

- [Edmond Voice] We have a little sweetheart for our "Whiskey-Man," the lion cub, mascot of the Escadrille.

She's a 2 ½ months old lioness whom we call "Soda."

Whiskey is now about a year old and just as gentle and nice a lion as ever existed.

Soda is rather snappy and not half as nice as her man, We still feed her on warmed milk.

- [Narrator] Genets mood brightened ten days later when, on April 6th, 1917, the United States finally declared war on Germany.

He wrote from Paris.

- [Edmond Voice] American flags were flying everywhere among those of the allies, and everybody was feeling far brighter and far more cheerful than I've ever seen them before.

It was fine seeing Old Glory waving everywhere, mother.

We've waited so long for it to fly over here.

- [Narrator] President Wilson felt that Germany had finally forced his hand.

The American pilots would now fly and fight for their own country, if nominally still under the French flag.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Narayan] And one of the places that the French retook was this town of Ham, spelled H-A-M. And there, the Germans had an airfield that was actually in pretty good shape.

(speaking in foreign language) - And there, the Lafayette Escadrille, somehow, encountered a pretty good streak of bad luck.

- [Narrator] Survival in the air was often aided by luck or chance.

Many aviators were superstitious, and after three years of German occupation, the town of Ham carried the shadow of a place cursed.

- [Ted Voice] Bearing out our belief in hexes, Monday became a real Jonah day.

The hex started the Monday we arrived, when, early on a foggy morning, a Farman, flaming like a torch, appeared like a ghost ship out of the mist and crashed on the field.

Burning its occupants to a crisp, we never knew who was in it, whence it came or why it was in flames.

- [Narrator] There was one day where, in a period of several hours, the men of the Lafayette Escadrille managed to wreck five of their airplanes.

Thenault was really frustrated.

- [Narrator] On Sunday, April 15th, Genet's patrol was forced to return to the airfield under poor weather.

Anxious and blue, Genet went to Ham's church and cemetery, and wrote in his diary.

- [Edmond Voice] Somehow I've given away completely this afternoon.

I'm sure there is something serious going to happen to me very soon.

It doesn't seem any less than death itself.

- [Narrator] The next day, Monday, Genet was in the air again.

- [Ted Voice] Half sick from his wound and fatigued with constant flying, Genet went up for his second patrol of the day in the company of Lufbery.

He had already done a two-hour early-morning show, and he seemed so tired that the boys tried to get him to lay off, but he stubbornly refused to listen to reason.

Genet insisted he was all right.

- [Lufbery Voice] I was leading and everything seemed to be all right.

At about 3 o'clock somewhere around Moy, the German anti-aircrafts started to shell us.

I saw very plainly three shells bursting right behind Genet's machine.

I don't know if he got hit or not, but he suddenly turned around and went toward the French lines.

I followed him about three or four minutes to make sure he was taking the right direction.

After that I went back to the lines to finish my patrol duty.

Soldiers who saw him fall say that the machine got in a corkscrew dive at about 1,400 yards high.

Finally, a wing came off and the whole thing crashed on the ground.

I do not know exactly what happened, but might suppose that, being ill, he fainted.

He also might have got wounded by a piece of the shell.

- [Ted Voice] He fell with motor going full speed.

I have never seen a more complete wreck.

Every bone in his body was broken, and his features were completely gone.

- [Narrator] Genet had also left instructions for his burial.

- [Edmond Voice] If I die, wrap me in the French flag, but place the two colors upon my grave to show that I died for two countries.

- [Narrator] As his corpse was prepared for burial it was discovered Genet had an American flag wrapped around his body.

He was buried in the midst of a driving snowstorm in the cemetery he'd visited the day before his death.

The following Monday after Genet's death, Ronald Hoskier, an erudite Harvard man and veteran of the Ambulance Corps took up the Escadrille's only two seater, a Morane-Saulnier.

Hoskier often flew the slow machine with Jean Dressy, the beloved orderly of Lt. de Laage, as his gunner.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] De Laage described what happened next in a letter to his sister.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] Hoskier's parents were in France serving with the American Ambulance Corps and the Red Cross.

They attended their son's funeral.

- [Ted Voice] Three Mondays later, our gallant, courageous and well-beloved officer, Alfred de Laage, met his own death in one of those stupid accidents which take the bravest and most skillful of pilots.

(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) - [Thenault Voice] Our grief was very great for me, de Laage was a true friend.

Ham gave him an imposing funeral and in the cemetery above his grave I repeated his last words, "since the formation of the American Escadrille, I have tried to exalt the beauty of the ideal which brought my American comrades to fight for France.

I thank them for the friendship and confidence they've always shown me.

And now, vive la France!"

(speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] Two newcomers, both poetic souls, helped fill the roster.

Ray Bridgman was a confirmed pacifist, yet he dropped out of Yale, his junior year believing it would be a high honor to fight for France.

His new friend, a published poet from Iowa, had already served as gunner in the Royal Fusiliers by posing as a Canadian.

- My father was James Norman Hall, he took his bicycle and sailed to London.

And while he was in London, World War I broke out.

So off he went to France, to fight in the deadliest, deadliest part of World War I.

- [Narrator] After publishing a book on his experiences fighting with the British, James Norman Hall was hired by The Atlantic Magazine to write an article on the dashing Lafayette Escadrille.

But no sooner did he arrive in Paris, he met Kiffin Rockwell, Raoul Lufbery, and William Thaw, and he changed his plans.

- It was just the most incredible decision of his life.

He went to write a story about them but ended up joining them.

- [Narrator] Soon after his arrival with the squadron, an exhibition patrol was sent up late in the day to impress some American officers.

Hall had difficulty starting his SPAD.

Hurrying to catch up to the patrol, he mistook a squadron of Germans as his own, only realizing his mistake when the lead plane began firing at him.

- [Jim Voice] As I banked to the right, I felt a smashing blow in my left shoulder accompanied by a peculiar sensation as though it had been thrust through by a white-hot iron.

My left arm seemed to be off, I realized that I was falling in a spinning nosedive with my motor going full speed.

- [Narrator] After falling several thousand feet, Hall was able to pull out of the spin and throttle back the engine, then he passed out.

- He snaps both wings off in a trench, lands miraculously on the French side of the lines, carted off, and, fortunately enough, heals within a few weeks, and then return back to service to fly again.

- [Ted Voice] In the middle of August, just when we were really enjoying the war, we were ordered back to Verdun.

There, based at the flying field of Senard, we went in for some really intensive air work, the most exhausting of all our campaigns.

- One thing that people today don't understand was how difficult it was to shoot an airplane down in World War I.

And as proof of that, Lafayette Escadrille, which I would call an average squadron and out of the 38 men who flew for the Lafayette Escadrille, there were 25 of the men who did not have a single kill.

- [Narrator] It was a disheartening period, Pilots Andrew Courtney Campbell and Douglas MacMonagle were both killed in combat.

Stephen Bigelow was severely wounded, and Harold Willis was shot down wearing only his pajamas and made a prisoner of war.

The others waited impatiently to be transferred to the American Air Service.

- There's another problem.

These extraordinary combat veterans that are part of the Lafayette Escadrille are all non-commissioned men.

Other than Thaw, none of them were officers.

So here were these incredible, seasoned veterans that were going to be junior in rank to the freshly minted pilots that were coming out of the United States who had zero experience.

- [Ted Voice] Just when we were on the point of despairing of ever hearing from the American brass hats the American army in October finally sent out a delegation of high-rankers to the front to make an examination of the Lafayette Escadrille pilot.

- The men of the Lafayette Escadrille, for the most part, hover around age 30.

They're not in the best of condition physically.

- [Ted Voice] We were put through a long series of rather ridiculous physical demonstrations.

Then the awful truth came out.

The board decided that not one of us, despite hundreds of hours in the air, all thoroughly trained war pilots with many victories to our credit, could ever be an aviator.

Their tests definitely showed that physically, mentally and morally we were unfit to be pilots.

It was truly pathetic.

Dud Hill's blind eye, Bill Thaw's bad vision and crippled arm, Lufbery's inability to walk a crack backwards, Dolan's tonsils, Hank Jones's flat feet, we were just a broken-down crew of crippled misfits.

- [Narrator] General Pershing had to grant them all waivers.

Adding to their disillusionment was an order to remove Whiskey and Soda from the squadron.

- You see photos of Whiskey standing on his hind legs, his paws on a person's shoulders standing face-to-face with him.

This is not a cub, this is a lion.

- [Narrator] They were no longer playthings, Raoul Lufbery was the closest to the lions, the only one who could soothe the foul-tempered Soda.

It was arranged for their transfer to the Paris zoo, and Lufbery delivered them.

If he was bothered, it didn't affect his flying.

On October 24th, Lufbery shot down six planes in six hours.

- Raoul Lufbery at this point was at the top of his game.

And it was during this period that he raised his score to 16.

- You need to factor in how many of these kills he had that weren't confirmed.

How many did he bother not even to report because they were behind enemy lines?

- Had all of his kills been recognized by the army, he would have been our leading ace by far, far exceeding Eddie Rickenbacker, who is our official leading ace from World War I.

- [Ted Voice] On the 18th the Lafayette Escadrille passed out of existence as a French unit and lock, stock and barrel, became the 103rd Pursuit Squadron of the American Air Service.

The first American pursuit squadron on the front in the World War.

- [Narrator] William Thaw, who had first envisioned an American squadron while crouched in a trench, became the commander of the 103rd.

Ray Bridgman was put in command of the 22nd Aero Squadron.

Raoul Lufbery, after a mistaken assignment to a desk job, became flight commander of the 94th, the Hat in the Ring squadron.

He mentored the green American pilots who revered him.

James Norman Hall shared the duties as flight commander with Lufbery.

On a patrol in early May, Hall and Eddie Rickenbacker dove on five Albatros.

- This might be the most remarkable, lucky survival story that I've ever heard from World War I.

- [James Voice] The combat started at 14,000 feet.

- As he was closing at a relatively high rate of speed, he heard the ripping sound.

- [James Voice] The fabric covering the upper surface of my upper right wing, burst along the leading edge, throwing my machine completely out of balance.

- The leading edge folds up on his Nieuport 28, bad enough, right?

You're missing half of the fabric on your upper wing, airplane's very hard to control.

- [James Voice] I turned toward our lines, which I could see in the distance but oh so very far away.

Other strips ripped loose and flapped and fluttered out behind.

- Unfortunately, he wasn't able to sustain altitude.

- [James Voice] Enemy anti-aircraft fire was brisk and increasingly accurate.

I was unable to maneuver.

It was a moment of intense excitement.

- [Ted Voice] Suddenly the ship stopped as if it had hit a stone wall, shuddered, gave a great lurch and fell into a wicked tail spin.

- And a German anti-aircraft shell impacts the Nieuport that he's flying in the engine and doesn't go off, it just stops the engine.

- [James Voice] Down we went, plane and pilot, the suspense was not long drawn out.

I remember the elemental roughness of Mother Earth's welcoming embrace, a shock of pain in the legs and head, and then, despite my fear of German prison camps, a great surge of joy at the consciousness of being alive.

- [Nick] The aircraft was destroyed, he broke his ankle and his nose he was able to walk away from the accident and quickly carted off by Germans at that point.

- [Narrator] Hall remained in captivity for the rest of the war.

Nine days after Hall was shot down, tragedy jolted the entire American air service.

- So, it's early morning, Lufbery has already been out on one combat mission and his plane is down for servicing.

About this time, a German observation craft comes in low over their airfield.

Oscar Gude is sent after this plane.

And Oscar Gude has a reputation of not being an aggressive pilot.

- And Lufbery's obviously a very experienced pilot.

He watches in disgust as Gude fires off all of his ammunition from an impossible range.

He's never gonna bring the airplane down from this range.

And the German kind of flies along unperturbed by this.

Lufbery runs over, sees that his airplane, his personal airplane is in service.

He can't get the airplane out of the hangar.

He runs over to the next available airplane, and it's Phil Davis' airplane.

- Now, Lufbery is not a tall guy, He's about 5'5", 5'7" at the most.

The plane that he's sitting in is adjusted for somebody who's taller than he is.

So, at some point, he grabs a cushion, tucks it under his seat so that he's boosted up higher in the aircraft and can see properly.

He takes off after the plane.

- [Eddie Voice] In approximately five minutes after leaving the ground he had reached 2,000 feet and had arrived within range of the Albatro.

Luf fired several short bursts as he dived into the attack.

Then he swerved away and appeared to busy himself with his gun, which evidently had jammed.

- The Germans get some hits on his Nieuport 28, the airplane rolls over.

- And two things fall out, Lufbery and the cushion.

The plane goes on to crash, Lufbery comes down into the village behind a house and is impaled on a picket fence.

- The homeowner in the area came over to try to save his life but by that time he did not survive from his injuries.

- Now, some people believe that the airplane was on fire and that he intentionally jumped.

Other people believe that he would never have done that.

And I don't think he jumped.

I think he fell from the airplane.

I think he was unsecured, and he did sustain a hit from the enemy bullet on his thumb and it may have caused him to jerk the stick and cause him to fall out of the airplane.

- [Narrator] Rickenbacker and his squadron mates raced to the little town of Maron where Lufbery fell.

- [Eddie Voice] But already loving hands had removed his body.

The townsfolk had carried all that remained of poor Raoul Lufbery to their little Town Hall and there we found him, his charred figure entirely covered with flowers from the nearby gardens.

- [Narrator] Lufbery was buried the next afternoon.

A bugler from the Army's 26th Division blew taps.

- [Eddie Voice] General Liggett, commanding the 26th Division, came with Colonel William Mitchell, commanding the Air Forces of America.

Hundreds of officers from all branches of the service came to pay their last act of respect to the memory of America's most famous aviator.

- [Narrator] Rickenbacker led the flight of aircraft that dropped flowers on Lufbery's grave.

The greatest pilot of the Lafayette Escadrille flew no more.

- Raoul Lufbery's famous quote is "there will be no end to the war for the fighter pilot".

He meant they're all gonna die, and he went up anyway, and he did die.

He didn't expect to survive.

He fully understood and accepted the fact that what he was doing was gonna kill him.

I don't have that kind of courage.

- So, by 1918, the air war had shifted, the French and the British were definitely producing far more machines than the Germans were.

And bit by bit, the Germans were running out of very experienced pilots.

Richthofen had been killed, many of the others had been killed or put out of the war.

- [Narrator] The squadrons led by the Escadrille pilots flew continuously as the Americans struggled forward on the ground.

Ray Bridgman, the pacifist, added four kills to his credit while commanding the 22nd Aero.

Ted Parsons ended the war with eight.

On November 11th, 1918, at 11:00 in the morning, the Armistice was signed, a virtual surrender by the Central Powers.

When the war ended, William Thaw was group commander of the 3rd Pursuit Group in charge of four squadrons and a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur.

The young socialite in search of a good time in 1914 had survived the longest and risen the highest of any of the men of the Lafayette Escadrille.

The day after the Armistice was signed, Thaw was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

He was twenty-five years old, and he had officially shot down his five planes.

James Norman Hall and his fellow inmates were simply allowed to walk out of their German prison on November 12th and get on a train to Switzerland.

Hall made his way back to Paris and asked a favor of General Mason Patrick, chief of the air service.

He asked to borrow a SPAD to fly over the Western Front, alone.

Patrick granted the request.

- [James Voice] I followed the Marne until I came upon the inconceivable desolation of the old front.

I was conscious of a quickening of the pulses, and instinctively I began to look in all directions, overhead, behind, beneath, for the presence of enemies.

It was all but impossible to realize that one could now fly anywhere, in perfect safety.

I had not imagined finding such complete solitude so soon after the fighting had ceased.

Insofar as I could tell, not a sound broke the stillness of that grey winter world save that of my own motor.

I thought of those who had flown over this same country since the beginning of the war all of them young men, high-spirited, loving life, of reckless courage whatever their nationality, the best of them dead.

It seemed strange that the air above those desolate battlefields should not be scarred as they were, giving evidence of the events that had taken place there.

I caught fragments of music wafting upward, themes from Dvorak's New World Symphony.

I climbed into a cloud bank into the pure sunlight above it.

The grey earth vanished, and then, I knew loneliness at its best.

And there was nothing to mar the fullest enjoyment of that upper world no danger of ambush, no need to scrutinize the sunlit peaks of curling shifting vapor for the presence of enemies.

My only companions seemed to be bands of seraphim and cherubim hidden somewhere in the depths of the blue sky.

- [Narrator] James Norman Hall never piloted an airplane again.

The First World War has been called "the founding catastrophe of the modern age".

It shattered Europe; destroying the landscape where it was fought; collapsing the monarchies that caused it; and wiping out a generation of young men.

The maps of Europe and the Middle East were redrawn.

In the ensuing disorder, Communism and Fascism took root and the United States, which for most of the war refused to take sides, emerged as the dominant power on the world stage.

The war left scars that still haven't healed, and the surviving Escadrille pilots carried them home.

While some Escadrille veterans were able to thrive, others never replaced the mission and purpose they found in the sky over the Western Front.

James Norman Hall never flew again, but retreated to the South Pacific to write with another veteran pilot, Charles Nordhoff.

They became renowned as the authors of the "Mutiny on the Bounty" trilogy.

- They were so sickened by the war, and, you know, the hatred they saw, the devastation they saw, they decided they just wanted to get away from it all.

This was where his heart was, and he died here a happy man.

- [Narrator] His pacifist friend Ray Bridgman suffered in silence for years.

- I knew that daddy had been in the war and flying and that it had been very, very difficult and tragic.

He was sort of a ghost a lot of the time.

- [Narrator] Bridgman finally committed suicide in 1951.

Ted Parsons' adventures never stopped.

He became an FBI agent, a private detective, a Hollywood screenwriter, radio personality and pulp fiction author.

He retired as a rear admiral in the United States Navy after World War II.

And William Thaw, the longest serving and most senior American in the Escadrille, returned home to Pittsburgh and worked for his father's insurance company.

He rarely flew and died in broken health at 40.

The memory of the Escadrille and its legacy faded.

A memorial to honor the Escadrille, and the other American pilots who flew with other French squadrons, was built between Paris and Versailles in the 1920s.

But it slowly fell into disrepair.

Beneath the memorial lies a crypt with 68 sarcophagi, only 51 of which hold pilots' remains.

Several of the Escadrille pilots are interred there, but not all.

Kiffin Rockwell remains in the Cemetery at Luxeuil-les-Bains.

Victor Chapman's body was never conclusively found.

He has a marker in the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery near Verdun.

And in a pitiable irony, the remains of William Thaw and Norman Prince, the founding members of the Lafayette Escadrille, lie elsewhere.

When Prince's father was rebuffed from dedicating the entire memorial to his son, he moved Norman's remains to an ornate tomb at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.

When Thaw died suddenly in 1934, his wife was undecided about returning him to France.

When she died only two years later, they were both buried in Pittsburgh.

World War One ended over 100 years ago, and the legacy of the Lafayette Escadrille can be seen with a century's perspective.

- I think their primary legacy is that they helped the US come in on the side of the allies during World War I.

And we think of it now as kind of a foregone conclusion, but at the time, again, it was not a foregone conclusion that the US would even enter the war.

- Americans today really need to understand the incredible things that those guys did 100 years ago.

I mean, obviously, you know, helping our ally, France, and do what they did, but also to invent something, and literally invent what we know today as our combat aviation.

- The foundations of the U.S. combat Air Force were established by the Lafayette Escadrille.

They were the beginning.

They were the seed of the modern combat Air Force, really, not just our World War I Air Force but the Air Force of today.

- It certainly established or re-established a rapport with the French that exists to this day.

The French have appreciated them for their material contribution to the war, but more for their spiritual contribution.

- The French have continued to honor the men of the Lafayette Escadrille.

They actually have the Groupe de Chasse II/4, it's known as the Groupe Lafayette, and its aircraft fly with the Sioux Indian head insignia, which is very nice.

- [Narrator] On April 20th, 2016, one hundred years after the Escadrille was formed, the restored memorial outside Paris was rededicated in grand style.

French and American military and diplomatic representatives, and the families of the Escadrille pilots gathered on a perfect Paris morning to pay tribute.

Speeches were made, salutes were fired, fighter jets from the American 94th and the French Escadron Lafayette flew over the ceremony.

The grandeur and the solemnity remind us all of the historic amity between France and America as embodied by America's first combat pilots.

- [Narrator] Their French captain, Georges Thenault, memorialized them best.

Their example, their readiness to die for the cause they espoused and, above all, the glorious deaths aroused their compatriots to a comprehension of the vital issues at stake, the safety of Liberty, the preservation of Democracy.

The sacrifice of their young lives stirred their countrymen beyond all argument of words theirs was a propaganda by deeds, and they won out.

(gentle instrumental music)