The Hat in the Ring Squadron
If you’re a serious aviation buff, or perhaps a WWI buff, you may already know all this, but it was new to me.
The “Hat in the Ring”* Squadron was the nickname for the 94th Aero Squadron of the United States Army Air Service (USAAS) during World War I. Formed at Kelly Field in Texas, it was the first American pursuit squadron to fly in combat in the war, and the most famous thanks in large part to the exploits of highly decorated flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker and his fellow flying aces.**
Aviators from the Hat in the Ring Squadron
I must admit, I am not a serious aviation buff, though I am aviation-buff adjacent thanks to My Own True Love. The things that caught my attention about the squadron were
1) the nickname, which referred to the fact that the United States had finally tossed its hat in the ring of the war, and
2) the insignia painted on the nose of each of the squadron’s aircraft, a literal representation of Uncle Sam’s red, white and blue top hat going through a ring.
Together they make a powerful statement about the role played by a small group of volunteers.
Image courtesy of the Air and Space Museum
If you look closely at this version of the insignia, which is from the plane flown by flying ace H. Weir Cook, you will see seven representations of the German Iron Cross on the inside of the hat band, signifying the three aircraft and four observation balloons that Cook shot down. How cool is that?
*My Own True Love tells me that though most readers know what the phrase “hat in the ring” means, you may not know where the phrase comes from. It’s a boxing term from the early nineteenth century. Anyone who wanted to take his chances in a bout would literal throw his hat in the ring, which was not the roped-off square of modern boxing but simply a circle of spectators around the combatants.
**It’s worth noting that “flying ace” or “air ace” is the technical term for a military aviator who shot down five or more enemy aircraft. It is unclear to me if Snoopy qualified.
Before the GI Bill: The American Expeditionary Forces University
As far as I’m concerned one of the joys of poking about in the historical record is stumbling across tidbits that don’t make it into big picture accounts of historical events. Sometimes they don’t even make it into the smaller-scale stories that I am working on. This is one of those tidbits. It caught my imagination. I hope it catches yours, too.
American doughboys looking at Paris from the Pavillon de Bellevue
In 1918, as World War I drew to a close, the YMCA and the United States Army joined forces, so to speak, to provide educational opportunities for members of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF).
The program had come together quickly. The YMCA began exploring the “needs and opportunities for educational work among men in the military service in connection with the American forces—not only using the war but during the period of mobilization” at the end of 1917. The Army approved the program in February, 1918. Six months later, the first stage of the program went into effect. [Rather than making a judgmental comment, I will simply suggest you insert your own experience with government or other complex bureaucracy here.]
The initial stages of the program were the military’s version of a junior year abroad. Doughboys with an academic bent and a few college credits in hand were able take classes at Oxford, Cambridge, the London Fellowship of Medicine, and the Sorbonne. Several thousand soldiers received vocational training in fourteen trades in French technical schools. (I am curious how language barriers were overcome. )
But the most ambitious element of the project was the creation of the American Expeditionary Force’s own university at Beaune, on the site of a former Red Cross hospital twenty miles south of Dijon,* and of 1,000 army post schools scattered across France and the occupied portions of Germany. The program provided a wide range of courses, 200 in all, including a full high school program, a agricultural college, a fine arts school with departments in interior design, painting, sculpture and city planning,** a medical school, and classes to prepare a few soldiers for admission to West Point. (It also had a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.)
The program was short-lived. The university opened its doors on March 17, 1919, and closed three months later thanks to the rapid demobilization of the AEF. But while it lasted, ten thousand soldiers attended the university at Beaune and more than 200,000 took classes at the post schools.
One student in the painting program told his instructor that his three months in the program “had made up for the loss of two years’ work while in the Army.” Sounds like a successful experiment in public education to me.
*The heart of the hospital was the Pavillon de Bellevue, which Isadora Duncan had used for her dance school before the war. I think it makes for a nice symmetry: from training one kind of corps to educating another.
**I have no idea why city planning was part of the arts school. And I am ashamed to admit that the thought of war-hardened soldiers who had fought in the trenches of Normandy taking classes in interior design gives me the giggles.
The Lost Generation, the Paris Edition, and James Thurber
As I dig into the story of American journalism in Europe after the Great War,* there are several themes/topics that are unavoidable: Paris, the Lost Generation, and the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune among them.**
One of the things that became clear early on is that the popular image of the Lost Generation is too narrow: not limited to Paris, not limited to the usual suspects, and in many cases not lost.
France in particular drew writers because as Ernest Hemingway put it in an article in the Toronto Star, Paris “in the winter is rainy, cold, beautiful and cheap. It is also noisy, jostling, crowded and cheap. It is anything you want—and cheap.” Not only was the franc depressed, but Paris promised sexual and other freedoms and plentiful, good, and yes, cheap wine. The latter was a draw in the time of Prohibition.
Once there, many writers ended up working for a time at the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, dubbed “the world’s zaniest newspaper” by William Shirer.*** (A jibe at the Chicago Tribune’s sub-head: the World’s Greatest Newspaper.”) To my surprise, James Thurber was one of them.
I’ve been a Thurber fan since my freshman year in high school, when I fell in love with My Life and Hard Times. (I still think is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. In fact, I blame it for the fact that this blog post did not appear on Friday. I pulled it off the shelf to see if my copy had a biographical introduction and was immediately sucked into Thurber’s world. Again.) But in my internal and often faulty timeline, he was solidly placed first in Columbus, Ohio, as a young man and then in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. Which is not incorrect, just incomplete.
It turns out that Thurber was definitely a contemporary of the Lost Generation, though he didn’t make it into World War I because his eye sight was so bad. He was working as a newspaperman in Columbus in 1921 when he got the bug to move to France and write. (It appears to have been contagious.) It took him several years to get the trip organized, and when he got there things didn’t work out as planned. He ensconced himself and his wife in a farmhouse in Normandy, where he planned to support himself as a freelance writer while working on a novel. Writing the novel didn’t work out: “because I got tired the characters at the end of five thousand words, and bade them and novel-writing farewell forever.” And it turned out there was a lot more competition for freelance work than he thought. And it was a lot of work. (Both of these circumstances will sound familiar to my writing friends.)
When he applied to the Tribune’s Paris Edition for a job, the editor told him “I got thirty men ahead of you who want jobs.” Then he asked, “What are you, by the way, a poet or a painter or a novelist?” Thurber wisely didn’t mention the abandoned novel and answered that he was a newspaperman with five years of experience on the job. He started work the next day.
Working at the Paris edition was very different than working for the Columbus Dispatch, and Thurber earned a reputation for inventing parody news features (one of which almost went to print), phony column fillers, and mythical and eccentric guests who had recently arrived in Nice for the season, for the society page.
Even at a favorable exchange rate, the Thurbers’ francs ran out after a year. They moved to New York, and Thurber began to build a career as an important humorist and cartoonist, whose work always had an edge below the surface affability. Sounds like a member of the Lost Generation to me.
* Which is absolutely essential to understanding American journalism and the rise of Nazi Germany.
**Not to mention the Versailles treaty, the Russian civil war, and what I think of as Romantic Reds. None of which I intended to talk about today. Though they could creep in. The Russian civil war, in particular, has been tracking me down for almost a year now and might decide that today is its day.
***Later the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer used his time the Paris Edition as a springboard to working as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune’s foreign bureau, which was not the same thing.