A thread for history buffs: Eddie Rickenbacker remembered

Interesting story:

There used to be an old German lady who worked here, and her dad was a fighter pilot in WWI. She said he got shot down some un-godly number of times (double figures), but the worst that ever happened to him is he broke his leg once.

His biggest piece of luck came in WWII. He was a Luftwaffe colonel and got orders to take command of some base in Poland or somewhere. When he arrived, another colonel was already there with orders to be in command as well.

The lady's father said, "you want it, you got it" and high tailed it back to Germany. The Russians overran the place in a matter of weeks and wiped all the krauts off the face of the earth.

 

Oh, the Luftwaffe...the Washington Generals of The History Channel. [/Homer]

 

It's amazing how much of modern-day military tactics were inspired by WWI, too:
• The horrors of trench warfare led to the development of Germany's blitzkrieg, which is still the basis for most armies today. Similarly, tanks were developed because of the stalemate.
• The world's disdain for chemical weapons (for practical and moral reasons) came out of both sides' use of gas attacks. Even Hitler wouldn't use the stuff on the battlefield.
• Submarine and air warfare saw widespread use for the first time. Tactics, especially in the air, were developed that are still used today
• Even modern infantry tactics were born here. The slaughter of WWI finally made generals realize the massed, Napoleonic charges didn't work anymore

 

And we sowed the seeds for a new era of clusterfuck in the Middle East thanks to the ill-conceived partitionings of former Ottoman territories.

 

In college I got to interview a WWI vet. Dude was 103 at the time of the interview. He never made it overseas in WWI (I think he became a drill instructor in Arkansas), but had a great line:
"I graduated and the next day I got a letter from President Wilson. He said he had a job for me."

 

Nice work, B-Dub.

 

Rickenbacker was also a flaming conservative.

Nobody's perfect.

 

And because, well, I couldn't start a thread without adding a tidbit like this (hi playthrough! ):

If Eddie Rickenbacker was America's first great aviation hero, Christy Mathewson was America's first great sporting hero. It was a mustard gas accident in France -- in a training exercise by the Allies' Chemical Service division -- that permanently weakened Mathewson's lungs. When he developed tuberculosis, his body couldn't fight off the disease and he died young (age 45), right before Game 1 of the 1925 World Series.

 

Interesting story on the forgotten Great War and the last remaining American veteran, Frank Buckles:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/109681

 

I've read some about those World War I pilots.

Those slow, balsa-wood airplanes don't look so dangerous, but if they lived six months flying those contraptions, they were lucky.

 

I've done plenty of reading about this and studied the topic extensively, since it's fascinated me from the time I was in about third grade and read a Scholastic book on "Fighter Pilots of WW I."

The average life expectancy of a British fighter pilot during the spring and summer of 1917 was three weeks. That's because the RFC (the precursor to the RAF) were flying outdated planes against the souped-up, Albatroses and Fokkers flown by the Germans.

On top of that, the Germans employed tactics that are used today (always above/seldom on the same level/never below, it's better to attack out of the sun, etc) that Oswald Boelcke -- the guy who taught Manfred von Richthofen (a.k.a. "the Red Baron") -- perfected.

Another reason that this was the most dangerous duty during the war that was the nature of WW I aviation. It was one of those things that you either adapted to it out of the gate -- or you died trying.

In otherwords, survive past the first month or so flying sorties on the front and your odds of surviving increased exponentially.

And yes, Eddie Rickenbacker was a bad-ass: 26 kills in barely a year of action is damn impressive, especially flying against some of Germany's best pilots. Some of his action was against Richthofen's squadron, which -- after the Red Baron's death in April 1918 -- was commanded by none other than Hermann Goering.

There were only two U.S. aviators in WW I to rack up 20 confirmed kills, with Frank Luke (the namesake of Luke AFB outside Phoenix) being the other. Luke was forced down during one memorable mission trying to take down a German observation balloon, then killed resisting a German platoon that came to take him prisoner.

 

Swear to god, I thought this thread was about guitars.