Georges Guynemer: France’s World War I Ace Pilot

By Jon Guttman | Aviation History  | one comment  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

On the afternoon of March 16, French President Raymond Poincaré arrived to present Guynemer with the Russian Order of St. George 4th Class, but the award ceremony came as an anticlimax at 1430, when he witnessed the ace send another Albatros two-seater down burning over Regnéville-en-Haye, not far from the aerodrome. The next day Guynemer and Captain Kiyotake Shigeno, a Japanese volunteer in N.26, teamed up to destroy another two-seater in flames near Attancourt.

April 1917 saw the start of a series of costly Allied offensives that kept GC.12 in action. Guynemer downed Albatroses on April 14, May 2 and May 4, and then took leave to test-fly the new Spad XII. Upon his return, he made history again on May 25, by shooting down four two-seaters in a single day. That afternoon, however, Pére Dorme, then second only to Guynemer with 23 confirmed and 29 probable victories to his credit, was killed near Reims by Reserve 2nd Lt. Heinrich Kroll of Jasta 9.

Guynemer scored another double victory on June 5, but during that period of intense combat, an incident occurred that somewhat contradicted his relentlessly deadly image. In his book, Mein Fliegerleben, Ernst Udet described his dogfight with a lone Spad near Lierval:

“Sometimes we pass so closely I can clearly recognize a narrow, pale face under the leather helmet,” Udet wrote. “On the fuselage, between the wings, there is a word in black letters. As he passes me for the fifth time, so close that his propwash shakes me back and forth, I can make it out: ‘Vieux’ it says there — vieux — the old one. That’s Guynemer’s sign. Yes, only one man flies like this on our front, Guynemer, one who had brought down thirty Germans. Guynemer, who always hunts alone, like all dangerous predators, who swoops out of the sun, downs his opponents in seconds, and disappears….I know it will be a fight where life and death hang in the balance.”

Udet, though a consummate flier in his own right, was unable to outmaneuver Guynemer. “I try anything I can, tightest banks, turns, side slips, but with lightning speed he anticipates all my moves and reacts at once,” he wrote. “Slowly I realize his superiority. His aircraft is better, he can do more than I, but I continue to fight. Another curve. For a moment he comes into my sights. I push the button on the stick…the machine gun remains silent…stoppage!”

For what Udet described as the longest eight minutes of his life, he struggled on while trying to clear his jammed weapons. At one point he was pounding on the receiver with both fists when the Spad flew over his Albatros. “Then it happens,” Udet wrote. “He sticks out his hand and waves to me, waves lightly, and dives to the west in the direction of his lines.”

Udet remained convinced ever since that Guynemer, seeing his plight, had spared him in an act of knightly chivalry. With the benefit of hindsight, however, a later, less idealistic breed of fighter pilot might have thought the French ace’s noble compassion somewhat misplaced, given the total of 62 Allied planes credited to Udet by the end of the war.

At the start of July, Guynemer received the first operational Spad XII, S382. During its first frontline sortie on July 5, he attacked a DFW C.V two-seater, but the enemy gunner inflicted such damage that he had to disengage and return the cannon Spad for nearly three weeks of repairs. Reverting to his Spad VII, he downed a DFW C.V the next day and scored another double victory on July 7.

On July 11, GC.12 was ordered north to the Dunkirk area, to support General François Anthoine’s First Army, fighting alongside the British in the Third Battle of Ypres. Shortly after the group’s arrival in the sector, British Sopwith Camel pilots arrived to familiarize its personnel with GC.12’s aircraft. “There was a Canadian I remember, one of their aces, I cannot remember his name,” recalled Louis Risacher, a Parisian-born flying instructor who obtained a transfer to N.3 on June 27. “He offered to have a mock dogfight….It was decided by Guynemer and the Canadian ace that they would cross in the air and the ‘combat’ would begin at once. Immediately, Guynemer was on his tail and he could not get him off….Guynemer had outmaneuvered a Camel in a Spad — absolutely!”

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Tags: Aces, Aerial Combat, Aviation History, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War I