![]() “Raoul Lufbery flew, fought and died for revenge,” a fellow pilot once said. After flying Voisins with the Escadrille VB-106, he joined the American squadron to fly Nieuport fighters. Pourpe joined the French air force, and when he died in a crash, Lufbery immediately signed on to train in French bombers. During his travels, Lufbery had worked as a mechanic on the airplane flown by French exhibition pilot Marc Pourpe, and the two became best friends. There was Raoul Lufbery, an adventurer and world traveler who, born in France of an American father, joined the French foreign legion in 1914. In letters home, he wrote lyrical descriptions of the French countryside, but in the air he was so aggressive that his rash attacks on German aircraft sometimes endangered his squadron mates. There was the paradoxical Victor Chapman, a New Yorker who was attending l’École des Beaux Arts in Paris when the war started. ![]() So it attracted some weird and colorful people, which is true even today.”Ī century later, Hall’s great grandson Nick Rutgers flies Oregon Air National Guard F-15Cs, about 1,750 mph faster than the SPAD XIII his great grandfather flew. “The cast of characters is quite colorful-the good and the bad, the skilled and the unskilled, the lucky and the unlucky. “The Escadrille reminds me a lot of fighter squadrons I’ve been in,” says McPeak, who flew thousands of fighter sorties and commanded a squadron of Misty forward air controllers, a hard-charging group who flew hazardous missions in Vietnam. Last spring, the American Battle Monuments Commission, chaired by another former Air Force chief of staff, General Merrill “Tony” McPeak, signed an agreement with the French Ministry of Defense committing each side to raise $4 million to restore the memorial. Since then, he has made the restoration of the memorial a priority. When Moseley was the Air Force legislative liaison in 2001, he managed to secure a $2 million appropriation for repairs. and French air forces, little has been done to renovate the structure. Despite annual Memorial Day ceremonies jointly conducted at the site by the U.S. Today the monument is crumbling from water seeping in. Forty-nine who died in the war are buried in the memorial crypt. ![]() Built in 1928 with private donations, the monument commemorates not only the original 38 but the 200 or so who succeeded them as volunteers in various French squadrons, together known as the Lafayette Flying Corps. Moseley is helping to lead a fundraising effort to restore the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial outside Paris. “Having thought about this a lot and having lived inside that world for 40 years, I would say goes right back to those guys who decided in the spring of ’16 that this would be a good idea.” “All the way up to the Army Air Forces and the U.S. Army Air Service when it was formed in 1918. The 38 pilots of the Lafayette Escadrille, who flew for France beginning in 1916, before the United States entered World War I, created a culture that influences combat pilots today, Moseley says. Michael “Buzz” Moseley calls them “the founding fathers of American combat aviation,” yet few Americans know their names. Former Air Force Chief of Staff General T. ![]()
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