Thread by @LookNoFurther4

Last week's newsletter.
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1/ from our first story in last week's newsletter:

"Construction of the Issoudun Aerodrome in rural France began in July 1917, and although the air base was still under construction, the first American flight students and instructors arrived for flight training in November.

2/ Among them was Harry Wingate, the 22-yr-old son of a GA tobacco farmer and an expert pilot. He was assigned to Training Field #8, one of 11 separate airfields, where he would teach advanced combat flight tactics-what laymen would call stunt flying- in a French Nieuport biplane

3/ Wingate’s Field #8 was considered one of the most difficult.
The commander of Issoudun Aerodrome explains:
'He should be able to do aerial acrobacy with skill and confidence, it was also essential that he should not have acquired any bad habits...

4/The good combat pilot must be able to fly in any direction &in any attitude w/ supreme confidence in his machine & in his ability to put it in any desired position. He must have formed the habit of seeing every visible plane in the sky& knowing by instinct its approx location.

5/ Issoudun Aerodrome was a great success. It became the largest flight school in the world, training 1,800 men, 627 of whom served in combat. Another 202 became flight instructors.

Issoudun’s first graduate was Eddie Rickenbacker, the most famous American flying ace of the war.

6/ Wingate had hoped to rotate out of his flight instructor role and join the ranks of combat pilots, but his orders to do so came as the war ended.

He never ‘flew against the Huns,’ but he told his family that he had trained 3/4 of the Americans that had done so.

7/ After the war, Wingate stayed on at Issoudun for a year, directing the dismantling of the air base.

Wingate returned to Georgia, married and had a family, and three of his sons flew during World War II.

One of them, a captain, perished in the crash of his B-17.

8/ We tend to trace the arc of American history through the acts and decisions of leaders, but it is the irrevocable, personal sacrifices that men and women make to implement those decisions that constitute the nation’s legacy and inspire national pride.

9/ Now, at a time of corrosive self-absorption, old heroes like Harry Wingate remind us of who we once were as a people.

/fin

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