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^ttbui Servec^ w'th the American Wjs awaace Corps. The artillery fire
sent me down to the Riviera in
One
Hava//*16- earl‘est participants in the \:as r 1st‘tute’s oral history program I98lja‘e W' Darden, Jr., (1897- C0rD ’ Wll° Was a Navy and Marine later QViator during World War I. He as a "e'u 0,1 t0 a distinguished career senta'"em^er °f ,^le Douse of Repredeni ‘Jes’ Governor of Virginia, presi- V. g !"e University of Virginia, and The , e,e8ate to the United Nations. Gcern^0^ wbich follows is an edited of G ^ r°m an oral history interview Sen, °X efnor Darden conducted on 24 %So 1969’ h Dr. John T. c°nJ!’ Jr < °f the Naval Institute. The Dartfe'? 0ra^ bistory also includes the fj11 S rec°Hections of serving on 'be iQ)ne Daval Affairs Committee in J(U and 1940s.
Th
the Was tremendous enthusiasm in V^in1^ cause a’ t^e University of l9jg *a; where I was a student in the Sn J°tned the French Service in boysljrinier of 1916 with three other after' Was We went to Paris and Wg aVbe a week or ten days there, Pretlc|'re sbuffled off to the front. The fr°m th^re under terrific pressure Where je German armies at Verdun,
’*4$ iiiv nit
raked h heavy, and the roads were We (i y German artillery by day, so ^ithouM- 21 n'®ht- And the driving % , '8hts was just unbelievable. It
tspecj ,.°ne’ but it takes some doing, We ^ a y when you have to dodge, as artlrtiu ■ -*16 heavy trucks carrying ■tig r,l’*°n and troops that were mov- ■hey g anc* down the road as rapidly as ’he because the Germans kept
didn’t |S Under fire at night. They S'°Wed ° t0° much damage, but they H0civ haffic tremendously, because *new when they were going to I Serve .°n a Particular part of the road, '■'ere m 'here until the winter when we Pagne °Ved down for the great Cham- ^annin i 6nS'Ve 'hat ’he French were tye 8- which was disastrous. ^ran,,(Were stopped at Bois de la Hen j and stayed there until spring, a Was sent to the hospital because ’aken °nchial infection. After I was aUl ^or the bronchial trouble—I finely ery difficult time. The French
an effort to see if the sunshine would help me along. And it did. It was slow; it was a serious congestion.
Then, in a little while, we were in the war, so I came back to the United States and signed up in naval aviation.
That was in the spring of 1917.
There was a delay in calling us up. It wasn’t until early fall that I went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started in ground school. I think the ground school course lasted three or four months. I was in Company Nine, and, as I remember it, there must have been 30 or 35 of them. They permitted us to go home for Christmas, which was a bonus that none of us had expected. We came back in January and were graduated and sent off to various flying stations.
A small group of us was sent to Miami. Marc Mitscher was commanding there. He was then a young commander. They had a good naval station there at Coral Gables. After they got us to Miami, we stayed only a few days. Then we were picked up and sent to Pensacola, which was a more elaborate station, although very primitive. The number of students was much greater, as was the number of planes. We had large tents as hangars, and stowed our planes in them. We’d fly during the day. They got us up about daylight, and they would march us over to the mess hall, where they’d give us a pretty ample-looking breakfast. But I will never forget—it was my first introduction to powdered eggs. I think the Navy probably now has powdered eggs and waffles that are very good, but I never encountered a concoction that equaled the powdered eggs we had in 1918. I’m sure they were healthy and good, because none of us ever got sick, but they were terrible things to eat. They’d dish them out to us, and it was eat or starve. So we ate.
We marched everywhere. We never moved around on our own. We were all rookies, and as I remember, none of us had ever had any military training.
In my experience with the French, I had never been given any marching or discipline of that kind. We’d go down, and then we’d fly all day long except when we marched back for lunch and back to the beach. We had good in
structors. They were nice people. I think some of them were civilians employed by the Navy to instruct us. A few were naval officers. The Navy did not have many naval aviators then— just a handful. We used the old N-9, which was a single-pontoon plane. And then later on for more advanced flying, we had a double-pontoon called the R-6. The N-9 was a very reliable plane. It was quite safe. If it stalled, it would not stall into a spin, as so often happened with training planes back in those days. It would simply stall, poke its nose up in the air, and settle down until it gained enough flying speed to go along again.
We’d shut off for supper about five o’clock. Then we’d be marched back down to the hangars to wash off the planes. The salt water was very damaging to the fittings, and it had to be gotten off the plane, or the rust would give them difficulty. Then the dope used on the wings—the finishing used on the wings was a type of varnish that we called dope—had to be washed down; otherwise the salt would peel it off. So every night we spent an hour or a couple of hours washing planes, which was part of our service, and nobody objected to it. Then we’d go back to our barracks, and we’d turn in about nine or ten o’clock. We slept in a long loft.
There was one or two in our group who were thought not to have an aptitude for flying, and it was suggested that they move into some other work in aviation. But most of us qualified as pilots. I think that was due to the fact that the physical examinations leading up to ground school had been quite thorough. And the examinations at Pensacola had weeded the rest out. I never went further than that with the Navy, though, because I left and went over’to the Marine Corps along with some other fellows.
In the spring of 1918, Major Alfred Cunningham came to Pensacola and called together a number of us and explained that the Marines were attempting to equip several squadrons of land planes that they wanted to use inland with the Marines who were in France. They did not want to set up their own school and attempt to train
"lin,
lRS / November 1984
On Santa Rosa Island one day a very interesting thing happen- 7 olif had a break for lunch. We carrlC|Ulid’ lunches with us, and during the period, we’d usually sweep off 1
them, because they didn’t have time.
The Marines had made arrangements with the Navy to get transfers for any of us who wanted to be transferred and fly land planes. They would then send us to their gunnery school and advanced plane school outside of Miami, not far from the station where we had first gone. A fair number of us decided that we would transfer to land planes. We had not been commissioned then. We were non-ensigns, but we were naval aviators. Major Cunningham said that didn’t make any difference; he’d take us on over to Miami and commission us in the Marine Corps.
The reason 1 went into the Marine Corps seemed like a very small thing, but it had a powerful influence. In the spring of 1918, the Navy introduced what they thought was their last word in a flying boat, the H-16, with two
giant motors that stuck up behind the pilots in the struts. The pilot was sitting out in the forward cockpit flying.
It was gigantic, and when we looked at that, we figured two things. One, that it would be cumbersome and difficult to fly; two, that in an accident, there wouldn't be anybody left living, because those engines would slide forward and kill anyone sitting in front of them—which proved to be generally the case with the few accidents they had. We would never divulge our reason to the Marine Corps, nor did we ever mention it to the Navy, but it was a very compelling argument as we sat around in the night talking amongst ourselves, or when we got together in little clusters around the beach to discuss what we were going to do. We had to move quickly.
The other thing was that the Marine
Corps gave us absolute assurance , would send us at once to France, ^ (0 that interested us and encouraged ^ join. The Navy was still undecide ^ to how it was going to use this 0 arm of the service. So we move Miami and to the Marine school ^ We used JN-4 land biplanes in °juate vanced flying there. It was a gjj1 school and a gunnery school. W ^y, some gunnery before we left the., but we were highly inaccurate- used to fire at a target and pract> dropping bombs a little—none 0 which ever came within hailing u ' tance of the target. There was no bombsight in the planes. j sa'v
We
Prociedings / Nov
Dg|
c°Upfnd d need be, paint it. This day a I tyas0 Allows—I was not included; siveen^Watc^'nS from a distance—were
behold nfi °ff the target when’ Io and
a p]a ’ down the gunnery range came We had f ■ Was one °f if16 planes that thou„L 'a',ed to take into account. We fellow WC them all down. These target comin§ r'ght down on the
scrapj' "e painters were down there With th^- and the pilots opened up oyer (,eir machine guns and ran right just sp 6 target—never touched a soul, Were hell out of them. We
rate .^tefid they weren’t very accu- kriecked day’ because they would have rate, wtllose fellows right out. At any We L- e Went back to Miami, where a »*> UP w'th the Marines. We did there dCal of training at the field available. The marshalling of equipment was difficult in France, and we waited a long time before we got planes. The war was moving toward its end before there were planes.
We had our field between Calais and Dunkirk up near the coast. We were up with the British. Some of our people— I never did this—went over with the British squadrons and flew with them. I think it was optional, but it might have been arranged by the commander— Major Roy Geiger commanded us and later commanded in the Pacific in World War II. But our part in the war was not great. We were never fully equipped. It was a small performance except in individual cases with a few pilots who were in combat. We got impatient sometimes. But it was an impatience that was understood. It was a failure to bring together the equip- let this fellow run us. And this fellow didn’t like us really, because he was an old-line Marine and we were reserves, and he didn’t think that we were any good as soldiers or much good for anything. He was against us in principle, and he figured out ways to make life a little tough for us to show us that we were no longer back in college, but in the Marine Corps, and he was a Marine. So he worked up a plan of getting us up at daylight for formation. We
didn’t have a thing in the world to do
nothing.
He would get us out to answer the roll at daylight, and if it was misty rain, so much the better. And in order to see that nobody could say they slept through it, he assembled two or three buglers and would have them march down to our tents—we had a row of tents, one on each side of a little cen-
k
"ated ,.at 0ne time. We were desig
ed to be able to fend off attack
5t|(j
P'lots did shoot down planes in
ueither planes nor bombs wet
(L — WC1C UCMg-
S bonfu ordlern Bombing Group— Ve fj , ers—in De Havillands, whi< b^au.se ^ t-bombers in those days, >p0se,they were unescorted and wei
the Ift,tach themselves. And several
L^at w 7:7 ^causPWc dld very little bombing,
ment, the pilots, and the planes. But there again, we understood what a gigantic effort this thing was.
There was never any real moodiness or sulkiness in the squadrons. We were in tents then, sitting out in a farm field in the French rains during the fall in the mud inches deep. Geiger turned us over to a tough top sergeant who ran us. Geiger was a good commander, but he didn’t concern himself with us; he
Darden trained in N-9s at the Naval Aeronautic Station in Pensacola, Florida, opposite page, until, in 1918 he began flying JN-4 land biplanes for the Manne Corps at the Marine Flying Field, Miami, Florida, pictured above.
8s 1 November 1984
tral street (not long, I think about maybe a hundred yards was the length of our company street) and then have them march down one side and up the other bugling at the very top of their bugles. It was enough to wake the dead. Nobody could sleep through that. Then he would make us line up properly, and he would have a roll call. And that went on day after day. He never let up on us until the war was over and we got out.
While stationed in France during World War I, Darden, top, was flying with his friend, Second Lieutenant Ralph Talbot, bottom, in Talbot’s DH-4 when engine troubles caused the plane to crash on take-off. Talbot was killed instantly.
During the day, he turned us loose to do more or less what we pleased.
We used to kick around a football a great deal and play games of one kind or another. We couldn’t even practice gunnery, because we didn’t have any planes, and we couldn't practice on the ground. We were in a fairly well-populated area. It’s possible we might have seen greater service if we’d stayed with the Navy, although I think probably the Navy’s early pilots had filled the berths—the limited number that they had abroad—in the ports.
The German Air Force pilots were very good. They were apparently well- equipped. They used to fly over us going down the coast to bomb Calais. They had a curious motor that had a rhythm of rise and fall. It was unlike the motors we had. They had this hum in the motor that would grow in intensity and then drop away. And we could tell they were coming. We’d know they were coming before they left their lines, because we weren’t so far from their lines. The only time they gave us any trouble, I think, was maybe dropping some bombs that they hadn’t been able to get clear down at Calais, dropping near us on their way back home. But 1 don’t believe they were trying to hit us. Our tents were hard to make out at night. They were khaki tents flat down on the ground, and 1 don’t believe they could see us. We couldn’t see them. We could just hear their motors as they passed overhead.
We finally got equipment just toward the end of the war, and it was then that I was injured. So, I was swept out and left. I was over at Squadron Three with a friend of mine, Ralph Talbot. He and 1 went for a flight. Talbot had been in a fight a few days before, and he had gotten his plane shot up badly. He had had it in the shop and had gotten it out. We were friends, and he had asked me to come along and go for a flight with him. I got in the plane and got in the gunner’s seat. It was a DH-4. And for some reason I didn’t fasten my belt. I just sat down on the strap the gunner used as a seat, in the mount that revolved and carried the machine gun. The gun wasn't mounted at the time. We ran down the field, and there was trouble with the motor. I realized there was trouble right away.
It wasn’t tuned up well.
Ralph got the plane about six inches off the ground and ran straight into a heap of earth that had been thrown up for a bomb pit at the end of the field. I think he must have known it, but had forgotten about it. It was a bomb stor
age pit, dug at the end of the field’ with the earth thrown on the side as they dug. The DH-4 locked its lan ^' gear in the earth bank, and the I”allt went over into the pit. Talbot was ^ killed, but I was thrown clear. It Pj^ jected me straight out, just like as being thrown from a catapult. It1 me 125 feet into a wheat field.
When the plane went over on h® nose and turned over, she caught Well, it was an awful fire, and the squadron boys ran down there
to try10
bombs
out of the way, because they didn 1
get us out and also to pull the c
''Jnt
want them catching fire and exP, iw). They thought we both had been D They didn't see me taking off 011 flight, because the plane and the ^ interfered
I had been shot out at a^t.
most a dead level, like a missile - .
’ lg arou^
the field later on, they came across
ing at shoulder level. Walking
and put me in a car and took me
to th®
I
stayed for a week or ten days or s°
British hospital at Calais, where
s oi
It was the end of October, the
25th
:d
that I was injured. I was transferr from Calais to London. I had the side of my face broken in comp|e ^ My head had hit the escarpment o gun, and it crushed the side of my ^ face. It also dislocated the upper^ of my spine, and paralyzed me. ^ some time before I could move- j, turned over by attendants at the tal. They kept me on the bed an ^ moved me around. On my left we’ flesh had been opened down to ^iib1 bone. My leg must have hit som
but
;nd
object. It didn’t break the bone simply pressed aside the flesh ana ^ opened it two or three inches al° r bone.
I think Talbot was killed instJ1
ntiy
ivin?
by
the large 90-gallon fuel tank m° ^ng forward on the pilot’s seat and J® out of the plane. We were off 1(vV.e ground when we hit, and I expeur were going 100 or 115 miles ang(j and gaining headway. Had I 'aS that flying belt, I would have ^ 0$]i burned. There was no way they
have gotten me out.
This was the end of my war
car< tde !
1 don’t reckon anybody ever ma^ \vaf more modest contribution to W0 ^ 1
I than I made. But I went al°n^( 0f saw a lot, and I served with a
good and interesting people-
lot'
the
of whom I have kept up with 0 ^ ^6“ years. We went back to Miam' ' j jU for the 50th reunion and sat at"0 talked and lived over the old da)^^ Many of the men are dead no'V- startling how many are dead.
166
Proceedings / No'enl
,b»r‘