Valor Friday

The Swarm, November 6, 1918, by renowned aviation artist James Dietz, captures the pivotal moment when Bill confronted his nine adversaries, alone. (The Soft Mud of France)

David forwarded this story of heroism in the skies over Europe during the Great War. I’d never heard of William Vail, and agree that this is a great tale to share.

From Military.com;

Gregory Vail grew up listening to his father’s war stories, watching him struggle with a prosthetic leg and agonizing phantom pain, hearing his anguished screams in the dark of sleepless nights. For 64 years after World War I, 1st Lt. William H. Vail lived with the consequences of 15 minutes of aerial combat over France.

On Nov. 6, 1918, the 95th Aero Squadron pilot voluntarily engaged nine German Fokker D.VII fighters alone and saved the life of a fellow aviator. Vail’s adversaries peppered his Spad XIII No. 7 with upwards of 150 rounds of machine gun bullets, one or more striking his left leg below the knee, shattering it. He crashed into a farm field and survived only because the soft mud cushioned his impact and enveloped him in an earthen scab that kept him from bleeding to death.

His commanders recommended him for both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor. He received the DSC and later the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. The Medal of Honor recommendation vanished into Army bureaucracy and was never seen by Gen. John J. Pershing for adjudication.

Now, 108 years later, William Vail’s only son is working to finally secure the nation’s highest military honor for his father’s actions.

“I always felt I needed to redeem him,” Greg, 75, told Military.com. “He sacrificed over and over again for other people, and me. All these extraordinary things he did, I need to redeem him and thank him.”

Gregory Vail

Greg is likely one of the youngest of the handful of surviving direct offspring of a World War I veteran. His father was 53 when Greg was born in 1950.

“When I tell people I’m the son of a World War I fighter pilot, they say, ‘You mean the grandson?’ I say no, I’m the son,” Greg said.

Greg graduated with honors in history from Stanford University in 1973, where he studied under renowned historian Gordon A. Craig. He wanted to write his senior thesis about his father’s pursuit pilot days, but Craig dissuaded him, saying many others had written such chronicles.

Instead, Greg became an unintended expert on German zeppelins bombing London during the Great War. He later earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture and spent four decades in land planning and community development before turning to his father’s story.

“I was a witness to and lived for over 30 years with a veteran of that long-ago era, who did one thing that affected everything else, still reverberating today.” Vail said. “Because I was a first-hand witness to my father’s life and his history, recording and getting the story out there is important for posterity.”

William “Bill” Vail

William Henry Heegaard Vail, born in 1897, first saw an airplane in 1911 at a Chicago air show and became fascinated with aviation. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, he knew he would be drafted and saw what was happening in the trenches of France. Attrition and mud and horrendous death, or the worse purgatory of mutilation from wounds, mustard gas and disease.

“He wanted to serve his country, but he pondered whether there was something that would avoid the horrendous likely consequences of the trenches,” Greg said. “He landed on the fledgling Air Service, a subdivision of the Army Signal Corps, which was then a small part of the military.”

William Vail understood the average lifespan of a pursuit pilot after arriving at the front was six weeks. The planes were wooden crates covered in cloth that ripped off in flight. Engines failed constantly. No parachutes. No radios. Few instruments.

“His calculation was he would come out of the war in one piece or not at all,” Greg said. “He was dead wrong. He came out alive and broken.”

Before reaching the front, William Vail reportedly accumulated approximately 1,000 flying hours ferrying aircraft from factories to airfields. He hated the relative safety of ferry duty and fought constantly to get into combat.

He finally arrived at the 95th Aero Squadron at Rembercourt Aerodrome in late September 1918, just as the Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives kicked off.

The weather was terrible in October. Pilots spent more time in tents and barracks than flying. When they did go up, most sorties were inconsequential. Numerous engine failures forced landings that William Vail wrote about “almost lightheartedly.”

By Nov. 6, he had logged 17 hours and 15 minutes of flying time in 21 sorties with the 95th. It was a short period that would have significant consequences.

15 Minutes of Terror

The afternoon of Nov. 6, 1918, William Vail and 1st Lt. Josiah Pegues volunteered for a patrol over enemy lines near Stenay and Martincourt to locate German positions. Vail’s assigned Spad XIII No. 8 was out of commission, so he borrowed another aircraft, Spad No. 7. He did not have to put himself in harm’s way that day. But he did.

As they flew north along the Meuse River, the two pilots spotted a German Hannover observation plane and dove after it. Focused on their target, neither initially saw the nine Fokker D.VII fighters from Jasta 19 lurking in the clouds above, flying in two formations of four and five aircraft.

Vail saw them first. He desperately tried to alert Pegues, wiggling his wings, doing everything possible to warn him as there were no radios in those primitive aircraft. Pegues, intent on the observation plane, didn’t see the danger.

“I even fired a few bursts as near as I dared toward Pegues’ ship, but to no avail in those few seconds,” William Vail wrote in a September 1970 letter to historian Charles Woolley, the namesake only son of William Vail’s fellow aviator.

William Vail realized his options. He could accompany Pegues and let the Germans strike them both from above; put his nose down and retreat with every ounce of speed in his Spad; or pull up and meet nine down-diving enemy planes head on.

“This latter I did,” he wrote.

“He made a last-second decision to take them on solo,” Greg said. “He realized later it was foolish. As historian Woolley later wrote, “Odds of nine to one were not odds. They were a death sentence.”

The battle was a frenzy. One after another, the German aviators pulled alongside William Vail’s Spad as if it were standing still. He could see his adversaries close up. He shot at anything that passed in front of his machine gun ring sight and was credited with downing one Fokker.

The remaining eight turned their collective fire on him. Approximately 150 rounds of explosive bullets shredded his aircraft. The rounds cut his control wires. He expected the wings to drop off any second. One round hit a vital part of his motor, and it stopped with a jerk.

One or more of the bullets tore through his leg.

“The foot simply dropped off the rudder bar as the burst of machine gun fire tore out the bones in my leg below the left knee,” William Vail wrote to Woolley.

Still conscious, he tried to control his disintegrating aircraft with his remaining right while remaining intently focused on evading the Germans firing at him.

“Oh, what a terrible crash due to my unawareness of the earth’s closeness until the last second,” he wrote. “I pulled up but it was too late, and I went into the earth in practically a vertical dive.”

The impact slammed his face into the leather-covered wooden dashboard, crushing his forehead into shards. The wooden propeller clipped the ground, splintered and flipped the plane onto its back, collapsing the wings and wrapping support wires around his neck.

Trapped upside down, his shattered skull pressed into the mud, he was suffocating. With enormous effort, he managed to turn his head just enough to breathe. He dislocated both shoulders trying to free himself.

“Having no engine power and the soft mud of France there in the Argonne saved me from death,” William Vail wrote.

The mud that he had tried to avoid by joining the Air Service had become an “earthen scab” that kept him from bleeding out.

American soldiers from the 89th Division’s 355th Infantry had witnessed the aerial battle from below. Major Dana Wright and several soldiers approached the crumpled wreck while still under German artillery fire and strafing.

They turned the ruined aircraft upright, found a piece of the broken wooden propeller to use as a splint for Vail’s destroyed leg, wrapped him in a torn cockpit blanket and carried him across the cratered, muddy field to a first aid station in Luzy-St. Martin. The trek of 530 meters took an hour and a half as they stopped repeatedly to take cover from enemy fire.

Pegues returned to Rembercourt unaware of what had happened.

There’s much more at the source, including how he was recommended by two separate officers for the MoH, but those requests got lost. Later in the article they note the similarities to Captain Royce Williams’ long delayed recognition for a very similar dogfight more than 30 years later. Williams got his MoH just last week.

William Vail receiving the DSC from General Pershing himself

While Pershing never got the MoH recommendations to review, he did get the DSC. Personally approving it, there were some delays in getting it to Vail. Pershing inquired repeatedly as to the reasons for the delay, and eventually pinned the award on Vail himself.

Category: Air Force, Distinguished Service Cross, Historical, Valor, We Remember, WWI