Dinsmore Ely

Your letter containing clippings and cartoons was very entertaining. I believe cartoons serve the purpose of keeping alive the trend of public thought without being filled up with unreliable censored facts and rumors.

Love to you all.

    Your son,
    Dinsmore.

    November 29, 1917.

Dear Family:

Today was Thanksgiving, and we all had the very pleasant surprise of a day of repos given us by the captain that we might be present at a banquet given us by the American colony at Pau. It was held at one of the good hotels and had all the proper characteristics of a regular Thanksgiving dinner. There were forty-two of us there. After the meal we had some songs from local talent, which were of no mean variety, and then we went to a moving picture show which was rather a failure except as a place to digest an excellent and more than hearty meal.

My, but the machines we have now are a joy to run. They climb, they turn, they dive, and recover as you think. You have but to wish in the third dimension and you are there. It is beyond description. You sit comfortably behind a little windshield without glasses and watch the country far below. You forget the motor and space, and speed until suddenly something of interest causes you to lean out and you are struck in the face by a gust of wind which bends your head back and pumps your breath back into your lungs. Then you know what speed means. Soon your motor begins to miss, and you become worried and look for a place to land. You find the fields not more than one hundred feet square. You glance at the altimeter and find that you have unconsciously climbed to an altitude where the air is light, and your motor pants, so you make a readjustment, glance back at the school fifteen miles behind, which you left eight minutes ago, and go on your way.

Tomorrow I do spirals in fifteen-meter machines, and then go to vol de group. There we learn to fly in group formation and keep relative positions. They play “follow the leader” and “stump” in that class – some class! Then come acrobatics.

    Dins.

Dear Family:

This is a country of beautiful views, wonderful colorings of distant hills and the snow-capped mountains as changeable as the sea. We fly among the foothills and look down upon the beautiful estates and castle ruins nestling among them. There has been little sun, but the fact that one catches but passing glimpses of the mountains among the clouds does not detract from their charm, and the moisture in the air makes the coloring richer. I am in no hurry to leave.

Erich Fowler, one who has been with us from the beginning, and one of our best liked and most congenial fellow-sportsmen, was the first among our crowd to be killed. He fell five hundred meters with full motor and did not regain consciousness. It is believed he fainted in the air, as the controls were found intact and no parts of the machine missing. He was buried today at Pau. When the fellows find no way to express their feelings it is taken laconically, and the subject has been dropped already. No one is unnerved or frightened by the experience. Fortunately the ego is strong enough in every man to make him feel the fault would not have been his in such a case, and he believes in his own good fortune enough to be confident nothing will happen to his machine.

This is the school where the poor aviators are weeded out. The men who have dissipated relentlessly have lost their nerve and dropped out. The poorer drivers have voluntarily gone to bombing planes. The physically unfit have dropped off in the hospitals, and here those who have not the head to fly come to grief. Four out of five of the Russians who enter this school leave in a hearse. Some national characteristic makes it almost impossible for them to complete the course.

Out of twenty-five machines broken in a fall, one man is killed. Out of ten men killed, nine deaths are caused by inefficiency on the part of the pilot. They say I have more than the ordinary allotment of requirements of a good pilot. My assets are perfect health and a clear mind to offset the chance of misfortune which may stand against me. Knowing me, realize that all the statements I have made are conservative.

In a letter I received from Viscountess Duval the other day she said: “As you are interested in art, it will be a pleasure to show you through our galleries when you come to Paris. They are as fine as any in the city.” Her husband is evidently a writer of some distinction. They are coming to Pau and I hope will arrive before I leave.

I shall be quite busy for the next week and not have a great deal of time to write. No letters have reached me from home for over three weeks.

Yours with love and wishes for a very Merry Christmas.

    Your son,
    Dinsmore.

Not till the last line did I realize that Christmas was so near. Naturally, the war Christmas will be more conservative than ever, but I hope that real festivities will continue. America is far enough from the Front to keep the sound of battle from breaking the rhythm of the dance. I should like to be back there for three or four days of the Christmas vacation, with a fair round of dancing and turkey and calling on old friends. I shall make every effort to spend Christmas at my marraine’s.

My present to mother is a silver frame containing a picture of her son in war array of leathers and furs, helmet and goggles, standing by the propeller of France’s fastest war plane. To father I give my croix de guerre representing the first Boche I brought down, and to Bob goes a penholder shaped like a propeller and made from a splinter of the propeller of my first Boche plane – all imaginary gifts, but true.

    Your son,
    Dinsmore.

    December 1, 1917.

Dear Bob:

Your letter written November 10 came yesterday with a lot of other letters and about five packages. Gee! it was just like Christmas. We all sat about the stove and ate nuts and dates, figs and candy, till our stomachs ached. You can’t appreciate what wonderful and necessary things figs and prunes are till you go without sweet things by the month. Take a prune, for instance. If I could have a candied prune for every mile I walked, I would use up a pair of shoes every week. Myrtle sent me three cans of salted nuts; and a girl in Boston sent me a surprise package.

Well, Bob, I am a real pilot now. I can play “stump the leader” with anybody. Turning loops and somersaults and corkscrew turns are nothing any more. The hardest things to do are the “roundversments,” “barrel roll” and “vertical bank.”

Here they give us a machine and we go up and do what we like for two hours. One day I went ’way up over the mountain peaks and circled close around the highest one; then I went down in the valleys and played chicken hawk over the villages and followed the railroad train down the valley. You should see the cows and sheep run when my shadow crossed their fields. You can head right for the mountainside and then whirl around and skim along with the fir trees passing close by – twice as fast as an express train.

Inside the machine the seat is comfortable and you huddle down behind the windshield as comfortable as can be. The wind roars by so loudly that it drowns out the noise of the motor. Before long your ears are accustomed to the sound and you feel as if you were slipping along as silently as a fish.

Another day we went sixty-five miles to Biarritz. It is a bathing resort on the ocean. I went down over the ocean and circled around the lighthouse on the way back and then sped down the beach just over the water line. I didn’t see any submarines, but maybe they saw me first and beat it. I got back to the school just before dark and didn’t have gasoline enough left to go five miles. They gave it to me for being gone so long, but it was a great trip. The next day I tried for an altitude and made next to the highest in this school – 6,500 meters or 21,320 feet. It wasn’t much joy. I froze three finger tips and frosted my lungs I think, and had chills and headache till supper time. For an hour I pounded my hands together while steering with my knees. There were six strata of clouds. The last was above me and at the top. I didn’t see the ground for an hour and a half. When you realize that they do their fighting between five and six thousand feet, you see what endurance it will take. They are right to make the test high for aviators.

The most fortunate of us are being sent to Cazaux on the coast near Bordeaux. There they have all kinds of target practice from an aeroplane. You shoot at floats in a lake by diving at them, and at sausages dragged through the air by another plane. Well, we have done some of that here. We went up and dropped a parachute and then pretended it was a German plane and dived at it back and forth. Believe me, it was no easy matter to aim a gun into that machine while you are diving down at a speed of 250 miles an hour. Then we go in pairs for team work and dive at it turn about.

The last few days we have been having a great time. We divided into two groups and called one the French and the other the Boche, and we go out and hunt each other up and down the valley. We have sham combats and keep our squadron formation during the maneuvers. We do this for ten days before going to Cazaux. I am unusually lucky to get so much of this training, and am pleased about it, though I’m afraid I’ll not be in Paris for Christmas. (I hope you will write and tell me about your dance and your Christmas holidays, and I’ll tell you what I do Christmas.) As for this war, I’m not saying a word, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you and your children would get a chance to fight in it. There have been hundred-year wars before now, and our modern civilization is not so small that it can’t reproduce what has been done before. But if every American has to return to the United States and start producing, raising, and training soldiers for the next fifty years to beat them, we’ll thrash them, by God, if it leaves America a desert and Germany a hole in the ground.

The shoes the family sent me are a perfect fit and just what I wanted, and the socks were a surprise. As for that surprise box, I will continue to enjoy that for many a day. I ate a little and passed around a little each day.

Good night, Bob.

Don’t lose any sleep over studies.

    Your loving brother,
    Dins.

Merry Christmas – Happy New Year

    December 6, 1917.

Dear Family:

The past few days have been wonderful in weather and accomplishments. I have been seeing southern France at the rate of a hundred miles an hour – five hours a day. Yesterday morning I flew to Notre Dame de Lourdes. It is a place to which thousands pilgrimage each year to be healed by the flow of waters there. It is a beautiful little village at the base of the mountains, and is hidden in the shadow of steep cliffs. From there I wandered among the foothills and circled over the little mountain hamlets. In the afternoon I headed straight for Pic du Midi. It is the second highest mountain in this vicinity. In three-quarters of an hour I was a thousand meters above it. I swooped down around it and took pictures, with it in the foreground. Then I came back by way of another canyon, and arrived at the school at dusk. After a lot of foolish monkey business, I spent the last hour running at a height of two hundred feet with my motor throttled ’way down. Sitting low in my seat, hardly touching the controls, skimming the tree tops in the quiet hazy evening air, it made me think of how father used to love to see the old White throttle down to two miles an hour, the difference being that I had throttled down to ninety.

This morning four of us went down to Biarritz and out over the ocean. I went down and circled around the lighthouse. All these things are forbidden by the school, but as men are daily risking their lives in gaining proficiency in flight, it is difficult to waive a punishment, so they all do it.

    Dinsmore.

    Hôtel de l’Univers, Tours, December 8, 1917.

Dear Family:

I am too tired tonight to write a real letter, but all the stuff arrived, and it was great. The shoes and surprise package with the Christmas card, and letters from October 20 to November 10 arrived. If you knew how we gloat over those prunes and dates and figs and candies and nuts, you would – send some more. Thank you much.

I am now a real flyer in every sense of the word, and am working five hours every day. I’ll tell you all about it soon.

    Your Son.

    Pau, France, Saturday, December 15, 1917.

Dear Family:

We are having sham battles every day. They thought a few of us good enough to hold over for extra training ten days and send us to a special shooting school as Cazaux. This increases our efficiency some fifty per cent before going to the Front and gives us that much more chance. I have had more training than the average, due to more luck and interest. Today I shot a machine gun at a pointed aeroplane. Out of eighty shots, of which three bullets failed to leave the gun, sixty-seven hit the square target; of these sixty-seven, twenty-seven struck the plane and the man in it. It is the best score I have seen, and encourages me. This shooting is very vital.