Raoul Lufbery
“Always remember -- it may be a trap.”
Raoul Lufbery was a world traveler who visited every continent on earth in just 33 years of life, an early aviation pioneer, the first American Fighter Ace in history, and the most feared killer in the famed Lafayette Escadrille -- a unit of American pilots flying for the French Air Force back before the U.S. officially joined the war. From working a crappy job in a chocolate factory, to fighting against the Moro in the Philippines, to bayonet-charging Austrian infantry alongside the French Foreign Legion, “Luf” went from being a globe-trotting adventurer working weird customer service jobs to one of the first true heroes of the United States Air Service. He trained America’s first fighter pilots, shot dozens of enemy planes into fiery shrapnel across the skies above France, completed the first Air Mail flight in the history of Egypt (?!), died heroically and spectacularly in battle 103 years ago this month, and then had his death immediately avenged by a fleet of pissed-off fighter pilots who were so upset about his passing that they showed their grief by blowing holes in every enemy aircraft in a ten-mile radius.
He also had two pet lions named Whiskey and Soda that served as squadron mascots and followed him around like puppy dogs. Whiskey was pretty chill, but Soda tried to bite anyone who wasn’t Luf or good friends of Luf.
Gervais Raoul Lufbery was born March 21, 1885, in Clermont, France. His Dad was American and his Mom was French, but he was raised by his Mother’s family near Bourges, which I have it on good authority is somewhere in France. He grew up working at some little chocolate factory, but when eating candy all day got too boring this guy left home and went to travel the world getting fired from a series of weird random jobs. His adventures brought him to Tunisia, Egypt, Germany, Croatia, Turkey, and South America, then to see his father’s family in Connecticut, and by 1907 he somehow ended up in New Orleans, where he decided to enlist in the U.S. Army for reasons that remain pretty unclear but probably involve the fact that the only part of his work he really liked were the parts where he fantasized about killing his customers. Luf deployed to Asia with the 20th Infantry, where he earned recognition as the top marksman in his regiment, and turing his Tour he spent time deployed in Japan, China, and even saw some combat in the jungles of the Philippines while serving under Black Jack Pershing.
After completing his service, Lufberry just continued hanging out in Asia, where he got fired from being a ticket collector on a railroad in Bombay because he punched the richest merchant in India when that dude was being a dick to him. Then, by 1912, Luf was in Saigon of all places, where he met a French aviator named Marc Pourpe who was doing all that badass barnstorming stuff you see in the early days of flight where psychos would go around the world trying to make money flying their single-seater wood biplanes under a bridge or landing it on a train or crashing it into a horse or whatever. When Lufberry saw that shit, his mind was so blown that he immediately went up to Pourpe and offered his services to be the guy’s personal aircraft mechanic. Pourpe was like, “do you have any experience?”, and Lufbery was like, “this is the first airplane I’ve ever seen, but I’ll learn how it works.”
So he did.
Of course during the course of his air mail trip, Pourpe made a point of buzzing every notable landmark in Egypt. Because, why not? Otherwise, you’re just delivering fucking mail, right?
So Raoul Lufbery learned how to build and repair airplanes, became one of the most skilled aircraft mechanics in the world, and then traveled around the world doing barnstorming shows with his new bud Marc Pourpe. In addition to performing stunt shows across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Lufbery was also on the team that completed the first Air Mail flight in Egyptian history, when they took a couple Amazon packages and three tons of Williams-Sonoma catalogs from Cairo to Luxor in January of 1914, by way of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. So, that’s a weird “first-ever” to have on your resume. Good work, Raoul.
Anyway, later in 1914 some serious shit started going down in Europe, and Marc Pourpe unhesitatingly and patriotically responded to the desperate call for talented and experienced pilots to come home to France and start machinegunning Austrians. Lufbery signed up with him, hoping to get to work on Pourpe’s brand-new Nieuport fighter aircraft, but there was a little problem with that -- Lufbery had served in the United States Army, so, as far as the French were concerned, this fucker was an American. And if he wanted to fight, he needed to join the French Foreign Legion.
Well.. sure, what the hell.
The Foreign Legion in WW1.
Legionnaire Lufbery fought with distinction as a rifleman in the Legion, seeing action in the early days of the war, but eventually Pourpe (being a celebrity and all) was able to pull some strings and get Lufbery transferred over to the Air Service. Lufbery packed up his wrenches, met up with his old friend, and started working on fighter planes. That went great, for a short while — Pourpe once wrote that Luf knew more about airplanes than any of the “so-called experts in Paris who build them” — but then one day disaster struck: Marc Pourpe was killed in action with the enemy, shot down over Verdun.
His chief mechanic, Raoul Lufbery, swore vengeance.
Lufbery learned to fly an airplane in record time, and then took to the sky in search of revenge. At first he flew bomber aircraft in raids on German positions along the Western Front, but then, a few months later, a new opportunity emerged to test his skill in battle against the enemy — there was a new squadron was being raised by the French Air Force. Similarly to the Legion, it had French officers, but the pilots of this unit were all American volunteers — the United States didn’t officially join World War One until 1917, but even as early as 1914 there were groups of talented and experienced American airmen who were eager to fight, and they were coming to France to offer their services against the Kaiser. France signed them up into the French Air Force, assembled them in an airbase outside Verdun, and assigned them to a new unit known as the Lafayette Escadrille, in honor of the Marquis who had come from France to save America back in 1776.
Raoul Lufberry, already a 31 year-old Sergeant with plenty of combat experience, would become the unit’s de facto leader, and it’s highest-scoring fighter Ace.
Lufbery bought the lions in Paris, from some guy who had brought them back from Africa with him. He named the boy Whiskey, because he liked drinking whiskey, and he named the girl Soda because she got along well with Whiskey. He raised them from pups, and they followed him around anywhere he went. They appear in pretty much any images or art depicting the Escadrille, and were beloved by most of the men in the unit. After the war they went to live in the Paris Zoo.
Lufbery was, by most accounts, not a great natural pilot, but he was also coming at this from a unique perspective -- he’d built and repaired these machines , so he knew how they worked, and he knew how to get every last drop of power and maneuverability out of them. He worked tirelessly on his own plane, going so far as to hand-polish every single bullet that went into his machine guns as extra precaution against the gun jamming mid-battle like some kind of Type-A OCD maniac. As one of his comrades once wrote, “Lufbery was a wonderful mechanic and his plane was always the best in the Escadrille. Anyone would rather have a secondhand Lufbery machine than a new one, anytime.”
So, taking the the skies in an open-top airplane made from canvas and wood, with no parachutes, no ejection seats, and no windshield, armed only with a pair of flight goggles, a badass scarf, a machine gun that wasn’t really designed to be fired in the extreme cold and moisture of high-altitude flying, and a pistol you carried to shoot yourself in the head when your plane catches on fire and starts burning you alive, Raoul Lufbery and the men of the Lafayette Escadrille hurtled full-throttle into combat against the forces of Imperial Germany. Screaming through the skies at 120 miles an hour, diving and hurtling through clouds of AA cannons in a plane so vulnerable that it could literally be shot out of the sky by a guy on the ground with a bolt-action rifle, the Escadrille engaged the Germans everywhere they could find them, dogfighting the enemy at ranges so close that you could literally see the expression on the enemy pilots’ face as you aimed at him down the iron fucking sights of your machine gun — which, by the way, was fired from a standing position while you are also trying to fly the damn plane with your other arm.
Lufbery’s first kill came on July 30, 1916, when he was supporting a bombing run against ammo factories in Karlsrube and ended up taking out a massive three-seater Aviatic that sounds like something you’d only see in a top-down arcade-style shoot-em-up game or used as concept art for some Steampunk RPG. A few weeks later, he scored another, and by the time the Escadrille was transferred to support the attack on the Somme he was already the unit’s top-scoring ace, notching sixteen confirmed air-to-air kills (plus one that wasn’t confirmed, but listed as “probable”). A hardened vet, Lufbery had already had a couple airplanes shot out from under him, including one particularly tough fight against an enemy Albatross fighter that left Lufbery’s Nieuport limping home with a broken gas tank, three bullets in the engine, and with a strut and an aileron blown off by machine gun fire (Lufbery somehow managed to shoot down the Albatross and still land his busted-up fighter without incident). Another time he engaged a formation of four enemy fighters by himself, shot down two of them, then when he landed and took off his flight jacket he discovered that it had three bullet holes from goddamn aircraft-mounted machine guns passing within inches of his flesh.
During his three-year tenure flying multiple combat missions per day, every day, resting only to refit, repair, upgrade his plane, drink whiskey, and chuck a hunk of steak to his hungry pet lions, Raoul Lufbery scored 17 enemy kills, survived three plane crashes, and received the French Legion of Honor, the Military Medal, ten Croix de Guerres (!) and had become the first American to ever receive the British Military Cross.
The Escadrille, with Luf, Whiskey, and lil’ Soda front-and-center.
The United States finally joined World War One in 1917, and when America joined they were in desperate need of trained pilots and experienced air-to-air killers. The Lafayette Escadrille was dispersed across the US Army Air Service (the branch that many years later would become the Air Force) to train and prep the next generation of American fighter pilots for action. Lufbery was promoted to Major, and sent to the 94th Aero Squadron to mentor the pilots, organize them, and get the unit combat ready. Despite suffering from rheumatism and a few other illnesses that kept him from fighting as much as he’d liked, Lufbery still managed to get up enough that he shot down two more German aircraft, much to the surprise of his men, who revered him as a living legend.
One such mission came on May 19, 1918. It was early afternoon, and Major Lufbery was just walking around the aerodrome surveying his troops and equipment to make sure everything was up to scratch when, suddenly, out of nowhere, a German reconnaissance aircraft came flying out from the treeline, buzzed the aerodrome, and fired a few bursts of machine gun fire at the mechanics, pilots, and aircraft on the ground.
Lufberry did what any good badass unit commander would do in that situation.
He jumped on a fuckin’ motorcycle, drove it full speed to the first fighter plane he could find, started that shit up, and took off to fuck up that German airplane.
He caught up to the enemy in his borrowed fighter (it bears mentioning of course that this was one of the few times Lufbery ever flew a plane he hadn’t personally worked on himself), caught up to the enemy, and… his gun jammed. He took return shots from the German, and with one quick burst of a belt-fed machine gun Raoul Lufbery’s engine caught fire. He slowed his speed, lowered his altitude, and tried to jump from his plane into a nearby lake (remember that pilots didn’t have parachutes at this time, the ripcord was just invented a few months earlier and hadn’t been employed in wartime yet), leaping from a plane going 120 miles an hour from a height of 200 feet. He missed the lake, hit a fence, and died instantly. It’s sad and tragic, but it probably looked pretty badass.
When Lufbery's men learned of his death, they flew into a psycho murder death-rage. Every able-bodied French and American pilot in the entire sector scrambled to their aircraft and took to the skies to avenge their fallen leader at maximum velocity. That afternoon, they shot down four German aircraft -- including the recon plan that had killed their commander -- and then returned home to bury Major Raoul Lufbery with the full military honors of both countries.
Raoul Lufbery was a founding pioneer of the USAF, and OG American Fighter Ace, and a badass who went from a shitty customer service job to the American Ace of Aces in World War One, died doing what he loved, and then had his death avenged within hours of its occurence. He is credited with 17 confirmed kills (though the real number is probably more in the 20-30 range), received a chest full of medals from every country on the Western Front. His top student, American pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, would go on to shoot down 26 enemy planes and become the highest-scoring American ace of the war.
Let’s raise a beer to him this Memorial Day. Or, I don’t know, a champagne or something, seeing as how he was half French and all.
“Model of address, of coolness and of courage. He has distinguished himself by numerous long-distance bombardments and by the daily combats he has had with enemy aeroplanes. On July 30th, he unhesitatingly attacked at close range a group of four enemy machines. He shot down one near our lines.”
Links:
Sources:
Boyne, Walter J. Air Warfare: an International Encyclopedia: A-L. United Kingdom: ABC-CLIO, 2002.
Driggs, Laurence La Tourette. Heroes of Aviation. United States: Little, Brown, 1918.
Murphy, T.B.. Kiffin Rockwell, the Lafayette Escadrille and the Birth of the United States Air Force. United States: McFarland, 2016.
Rickenbacker, Eddie. Fighting the Flying Circus. United States: Frederick A Stokes Company, 1919.
Tucker, Spencer. World War I: The Definitive Encyclopedia and Document Collection. United States: ABC-CLIO, 2014.
