On 9/6/11, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote:
Actually it was General Galland who signed my logbook, but checking the list of WW2 aces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_flying_aces) I found he's way down the list. 104 to Colonel Hartmann's 362.
That's pretty cool, Patrick. Didn't Hartmann score most of his victories on the Russian front? I've heard a lot of US pilots play down his score, claiming he was essentially shooting fish in a barrel. I've never researched his career. Still, number one is number one, to my mind. I have autographs of 7 WWI pilots, including Rickenbacker (a signed copy of his bio), and Willy Coppens (another signed bio), Belgium's ace of aces. Some years ago, I found the grave site of the first American to have shot down an enemy aircraft in combat. He is buried in the Salt Lake City cemetery. James J. Bach, who served with French aviation near the start, some 3 years before the US officially entered the war. The Tribune wrote up an article about my researching his final resting place. I have to tell you, it was a humbling experience to stand before his headstone that sunny morning in May. He was a founding member of the squadron that eventually became known as the Lafayette Escadrille. That fact is etched on his headstone. In a strange twist, a family friend of ours had known Bach and his wife (French consul to Salt Lake at the time) in the '40's and '50's. Bach taught French and Italian at the U of U in those days, and he and his wife were part of Salt Lake "society". Funny that Salt Lake had such a link to WWI. Bach changed his name to the less Germanic-sounding "Buck", a response to anti-German sentiment rising in WW2 America. My high-school drafting instructor was a P-51 ace in WW2, with eleven kills to his credit. I ran into him again about 12 years ago, while having lunch in Bountiful. He was shot-down and spent the last year of the war in a German POW camp. As students, we could never get him to talk about it, other than to say "it's not like Hogan's Heros". He will always be a hero, in my mind. Thank you for your service, Colonel Alan Young.