When he made his final sortie, on Bastille Day, Roosevelt was flying a Nieuport 28, known as an aircraft that was suitable for aerobatics but hard to handle. He had often expressed his concern about the the French planes. “We have been using Nieuports, which have the disadvantage of not being particularly reliable and inclined to catch fire,” he said in one letter.

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Some of Quentin Roosevelt’s colleagues described him as reckless, always looking for a fight. Whether he veered away from the rest of his squadron that last day by design or accident isn’t clear. Fog prevented the other 95th Squadron pilots from seeing exactly what happened to him. One minute he was with them, then suddenly he had disappeared. One report, that five Germans attacked him, later turned out to have been manufactured by Roosevelt’s mechanic, who was on the ground at the time and couldn’t possibly have known what happened.

It seems clear that Roosevelt flew over enemy lines and took on at least three enemy planes by himself. Eyewitness Lieutenant Edward Buford Jr. recorded the details of that engagement in a letter:

Four of us were out on an early patrol and we had just crossed the lines looking for Boche observation machines, when we ran into seven Fokker Chasse planes. They had the altitude and the advantage of the sun on us. It was very cloudy and there was a strong wind blowing us farther across the lines all the time. The leader of our formation turned and tried to get back out, but they attacked before we reached the lines, and in a few seconds had completely broken up our formation and the fight developed in a general free-for-all. I tried to keep an eye on all of our fellows but we were hopelessly separated and out-numbered nearly two to one. About a half a mile away I saw one of our planes with three Boche on him, and he seemed to be having a pretty hard time with them, so I shook the two I was maneuvering with and tried to get over to him, but before I could reach them, [his] machine turned over on its back and plunged down out of control. I realized it was too late to be of any assistance….

I waited around about ten minutes to see if I could pick up any of our fellows, but they had disappeared, so I came on home, dodging from one cloud to another for fear of running into another Boche formation. Of course, at the time of the fight I did not know who the pilot was I had seen go down, but as Quentin did not come back, it must have been him. His loss was one of the severest blows we have ever had in the squadron, but he certainly died fighting.

Three pilots took credit for downing Roosevelt, but the man most often credited for his loss is a Sergeant Carl-Emil Gräper of Jasta 50. Roosevelt, who Gräper said fought courageously, was the German sergeant’s first and only victory of the war.

When the Germans discovered Quentin was the president’s son, they buried him with honors at the spot where he crashed. Some say he was identified by the love letter he carried in his pocket—from his fiancée Flora Payne Whitney, Cornelius Van­derbilt’s granddaughter. A German photographer who snapped a shot of the crashed plane and pilot’s body just 10 minutes after the crash was later chastised for his lack of respect.

An honor guard of about a thousand Germans paid their respects at Roosevelt’s crash site, where his Nieuport’s wheels and propeller were used to mark his grave, along with a wooden cross with the words: “Lieutenant Roosevelt, buried by the Germans.” His plane later became a mecca for Allied soldiers in the area, who ripped off bits of canvas as souvenirs.

Theodore Roosevelt and his wife Edith were at Sagamore Hill on Long Island when an Associated Press reporter sought them out on July 17 and asked for a statement on their son’s death. TR said only, “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the front and had a chance to render some service to his country and show the stuff that was in him before his fate befell him.” The grief-stricken former president died in his sleep less than six months later.

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