THE LAFAYETTE SQUADRON: [Translated]

Americans love a good fight, and if the cause is just, all the better. When the Kaiser tried to bring authoritarian rule to the west of the Rhine, American expatriates in France stepped up to stop him. Men who knew how to fly offered their services to the young French Air Force - as did men who did not know how to fly, but insisted that they could with hilariously disastrous results. The great Ace Lufbery, along with his comrades Thaw, Hall, Rockwell, and others more or less invented the "dogfight" over the bloody fields of Verdun and Flanders, and when they were not on the attack they soothed their restlessness with drinking, fighting, shooting, and adopting a couple of pet lions to serve as their mascots. Soon these men came together in a single unit under Captain George Thenault, a french officer charged with molding what would become the legendary Lafayette Squadron. This is his personal account of their courageous work. Insanely brave, committed, and often rash, the men of the Lafayette faced off with the formidable German "Flying Circus" and showed their mettle time and again. Now they rest beneath a great monument in the still green countryside of France, the land for which they gave their lives and so inspired that great American intervention in the First World War.Read more