AIR: Twelve Men With Wings

When Franklin Roosevelt last week appointed a new Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air, a few settled matrons, now going on 45, were able to turn back to their memory books and heave a historical sigh. They were women who in July 1916, were young belles at Long Island's fashionable Locust Valley.

There, in that summer month 25 years ago, word went around the beaches, the yachts, the tennis courts, the polo fields that twelve handsome, eligible young men —ten of them from Yale—were coming to Peacock Point, to spend their summer in the most hazardous, heroic, romantic way possible: learning to fly in the hope of becoming wartime aviators—if the U.S. should ever by any chance become involved in the worst war that the world had ever known.

The dozen were members of the Yale Unit, a little band of athletic youngsters who wanted to enter aviation. The time was ripe. In 1917 the U.S. ranked 14th in air power in the world and the U.S. Naval Air Force consisted of 38 pilots and 54 airplanes (none of the 54 really suitable for service even in the war of 25 years ago).

In the nucleus of the Yale Unit were Frederick Trubee Davison, who had driven an ambulance in France in the summer of 1915 and had seen the Lafayette Escadrille in action; his brother, young Henry P. Jr.; Robert Abercrombie Lovett; John Martin Vorys;* Artemus L. Gates.†

The unit might never have got started had not F. Trubee Davison persuaded his reluctant father, able Harry Davison, a Morgan partner, soon to do a classic job organizing the American Red Cross for the war. Young Davison went to Washington, got a vague "God bless you!" from Josephus Daniels, got a practical letter of encouragement from Assistant Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt. The First Yale Unit went ahead, while their fathers and friends put up the money for training (flying lessons then cost $1 a minute), bought them planes to train in.

Two years later, at Dunkirk in 1918, Lieut. Artemus Gates was station commander of the U.S. naval air station, worked with Lieut. Bob Lovett. In Flanders the baby of the outfit, David Sinton Ingalls, Yale '20, became the Navy's No. 1 Ace, in six blazing weeks won the British Distinguished Flying Cross, the U.S. Distinguished Service Medal. To death in battle with eight German fighters flew another Yale Unit man, Kenneth MacLeish (since memorialized in verse by his elder brother, Poet Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, and immortalized when the Navy's Destroyer No. 220 was named MacLeish).

And Gates, forced down near Courtrai, burned his bullet-riddled plane under his captors' noses; later escaped by jumping from a prison-train window in a German tunnel. Living on nothing but some crackers and a can of bully beef, he made his way 50 miles in four torturing days and nights to within exactly three paces of the Swiss border, where he was recaptured. But the Armistice came three days later.

All this and more befell the boys who trained with the Yale Unit at Locust Valley in 1916. Under Calvin Coolidge two new sub-Cabinet posts were set up: Assistant Secretaries of War and of Navy for Aeronautics. To the first Trubee Davison was appointed. To the second, three years later, David Ingalls.