“Well, what did you do when the airplane fired six rockets at you?” I questioned in a more tolerating tone of voice.
“What did I do?” he answered as if surprised at such a silly question. “What do you think I’d a done? Why, I fired right back at ’em. There ain’t nobody goin’ to fire at me and get off with it without me firing back.”
The other buddies backed him up absolutely and I spent a half hour explaining to them the real facts about the airplane game. They finally came to my way of thinking on every point except the courage of the American airman. They could not be dissuaded; they were convinced that most American flyers were cowards and “yellow.”
I, of course, reported this firing on friendly airplanes to Headquarters and an order was issued so as to acquaint the Infantry with the Allied insignia. However, it was not until late in the Argonne offensive that this misapprehension of the doughboy was entirely cleared away. Time and time again when I would ask infantrymen, even officers, if they knew the American airplane insignia, they would say it was a “Star,” but that they had never seen any American planes on the front. Perhaps it is for this reason that there are many doughboys who to-day declare they never saw an American airplane over the front. They undoubtedly saw many American planes, but they never saw any with the much-advertised star in the cocarde.
We had a great lot of trouble with wireless equipment in our artillery adjustments. When anything went wrong it was always blamed on the radio attached to the airplanes and we, of course, always attributed the fault to the artillery station on the ground because our wireless sets were always tested from the air to our own squadron station before starting on any mission. If the radio was not working, we always came down and fixed it. But this continual, unsatisfactory coöperation on radio communication was a serious affair all the way through and it was a bone of contention between the Air Service and the Artillery in many instances. Finally radio officers were appointed to inspect the equipment on the airplane and the equipment on the ground and to determine where the fault lay. This helped some, but the trouble was never actually overcome. If the trouble was with the airmen, it was perhaps due to failure to throw in their switch. An experience I had, led me to believe that the trouble was more with the personnel than the material. In each artillery regiment in trench warfare, there was one battery designated to fire upon a sudden call from the airplane. This battery was known as the fugitive target battery and the wireless crew was supposed to be constantly on duty from daybreak until nightfall so that when an airplane called, the designated battery could be immediately notified and the adjustment of artillery fire undertaken at once.