Fighting the Flying Circus

My grandfather, Alden Sherry was an aviator in WWI, flying SPAD-13 bi-planes with the 94th Aero Squadron of Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, flying daily sorties against the "Flying Circus" of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, also known as the Red Baron.

He had to drive before he could fly. When he told his mother at 17 that he wanted to leave Cornell and join the Marines, she refused. So he volunteered to be an ambulance driver for the Red Cross instead. By February 1916, he was driving an ammunition truck at the Battle of Verdun.

He may have joined the ranks of US volunteer pilots in the "Lafayette Escadrille," which was officially part of the French military until the US entered the war in April 1917. At that point, it became the 94th U.S. Army Aero Squadron, known as the "Hat-in-the-Ring Squadron" for its distinctive insignia.

The squadron was located across the lines from the Flying Circus, and engaged the brightly-colored tri-plan Fokkers regularly, during sorties often aimed to do reconnaissance or shoot down or protect observation balloons. During one of these missions, on Sept. 26, 1918, Sherry and his wingman were attacked by eight Fokkers. The wingman died in the air, but Sherry crashed into no-man's-land and survived.

During the war, Sherry developed a lifetime friendship with Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, the top American ace who became head of the Army Air Corps in WWII, and called Sherry back into service. As a staff officer and Rickenbacker's personal pilot, he traveled everywhere from North Africa to Moscow on high-level missions, experiencing a very different war from his eldest son, who was an Army infantryman.

Between the wars, he would occasionally host German aviators when they came through Syracuse,NY on business, an indication that even as the troops in the trenches were chewed up by the first industrialized war, the knights of the air clung to the last vestiges of the chivalric code.

I'd like to do more research on this someday. Materials available include:

1. A typewritten account by Sherry of his getting shot down and surviving, written shortly after the incident  Download Alden Sherry at War

2. Fighting the Flying Circus, Rickenbacker's WWI memoirs, which recount the same incident 

3. 1st Pursuit Group Records, the daily battle logs

4. Sherry's Silver Star Citation, for gallantry in action when downing a German bi-plane on October 18, 1918. (And a box of other medals, including the French Croix de Guerre and the British Burma Star)

5. A photo, purportedly taken from Sherry's cockpit, showing a dogfight under way

6. Numerous original photos and recreated images of SPAD-13s with 94th insignia