The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh Read Free Page B

next day Rickenbacker did not hesitate, for they would have discovered the preparations for the attack. He had just begun to push his stick over to engage when a sudden glimpse of a piece of sky revealed some sinister company. Five Fokker machines were flying escort above the photographic planes.
    The Fokkers were a menacing presence: top-of-the-line German triwinged fighters, highly maneuverable and deadly, favored by the so-called Flying Circus of the late Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, which continued to operate opposite the American lines despite the death of its leader. Its new leader, Lieutenant Hermann Göring, would become infamous two decades later.
    Immediately Rickenbacker reversed himself and climbed for the sun to put himself out of view. As luck would have it, neither the Fokkers nor the German photo planes noticed until he got in the rear of them, a black, batlike object, angling in, and backlit by the sun—a perfect position from which to attack—above and behind. It did not seem to register on Rickenbacker that he was taking on seven enemy combat planes completely alone. He made a beeline for the nearest Fokker.
    By the time the Germans spotted him it was too late. Rickenbacker tore into the formation, pressed his thumbs on the triggers, and a blast of bullets from the Spad ripped through the enemy fuselage front to rear. Simultaneously the pilot tried to pull away but he must have been killed almost instantly, Rickenbacker thought, since his plane burst into flames and crashed just south of Étain.
    Rickenbacker had first intended to zoom upward and protect himself against the four remaining Fokkers, but their pilots were so dumbfounded at the sudden appearance of the fierce little Spad that, instead of rounding up for an attack, they continued in their tight formation just long enough for Rickenbacker to plummet straight through it to get at the photographing planes just ahead. This tactic so horrified the Fokkers that they immediately peeled off and turned tail in all directions “to save their own skins,” as Rickenbacker put it later.
    That gave him enough airspace to dive on the LVGs, whose pilots had already seen his attack on the Fokkers and were diving to escape.
    The Spad plunged after the nearest two-seater, taking him in the gun sights as the two German planes began to split up. The gunners in the rear seats began firing on Rickenbacker as he glanced over his shoulder to see the four Fokkers circling above in an effort to get back into a new formation in order to attack.
    Rickenbacker dived his Spad full out and plunged below the rear LVG, zooming up on the other side ready to turn in for the kill. The German pilot, however, “kicked his tail around, giving his gunner another shot at me,” Rickenbacker said. “I had to postpone shooting … and in the meantime I saw tracer bullets go whizzing and streaking past my face.” The second two-seater, it seemed, had somehow sneaked up in Rickenbacker’s rear and was trying to blow him apart.
    Rickenbacker peeled off out of range and performed a renversement * —a change of direction—that put him back directly on his original target. But the German copycatted the maneuver, and Rickenbacker was compelled to perform another renversement , at the same time keeping a weather eye on the four Fokker fighters that were wrangling themselves into formation. He also took ominous note that all the while they were all drifting deeper into Germany.
    This was a dogfight, one man now against six, with renversements, piques, zooms, chandelles, Immelmanns —all the maneuvers that Rickenbacker had learned at his first French flying school. Push the stick—dive; pull up—zoom; working feet correcting ailerons, elevators, rudder, and hands on the triggers like a one-man band—kill or be killed—and all of it dainty as a French minuet. Below, men in the trenches were looking up, cheering, cursing. Both sides knew the difference between friendly and