Pioneering Air-Sea Engagement - September ‘98 Aviation History Feature

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Pioneering Air-Sea Engagement

Didier Masson’s 1913 attack on a Federalist gunboat at the behest of Mexican rebels was one of the earliest airstrikes carried out against a naval vessel.

By David H. Grover

Didier Masson sat in the pilot’s seat and warmed up his open biplane on a primitive runway in the hills of the Mexican state of Sonora. He was apprehensive over what was about to take place. A French citizen who had entered Mexico illegally from the United States, he was not concerned that he was about to become a participant in a revolution of a country in which he had no stake. Ideologies were no problem to a mercenary, and it was clearly Masson’s passion for flying, not his passion for the revolutionary cause, that had taken him to Mexico. His concern, instead, was that he knew very little about what his new flying assignment would demand of him in terms of skill, and even less about how much danger was involved.

Masson was probably unaware that, in this unlikely setting, he was about to write aviation history by launching one of the earliest strikes ever carried out against a naval vessel. He knew only that his new employers had directed him to fly his American-built plane the 40 miles to the port of Guaymas on the Gulf of California, to seek out and attack the enemy ship that was anchored in the harbor. Adding to his uneasiness was his awareness that since the United States had stayed well clear of the revolution and had encouraged American citizens to come home from the war-torn land, his temporary homeland north of the border would probably not be very supportive if things were to go badly for him in Mexico.

American newspapers and wire services had followed the movement of the Martin pusher biplane into Mexico and had correctly speculated about how it might be used, but no one seemed to have any real sense of the significant events that this early flying machine could set in motion. Even today, viewed in retrospect, the events that Masson triggered seem so far out of the mainstream of aviation and military history that any examination of the circumstances surrounding them seems like a venture into some far-off time and place, more fictional than real.

To understand those circumstances, one must first appreciate that the Mexican Revolution produced a number of warring political and military factions. The de facto leader of Mexico in 1913 was Vittoriano Huerta, who, in February of that year, had wrested control of the revolution from the idealistic but ineffective Francisco Madero. Madero had been in power only 1 1/2 years following his successful coup against the old established regime of Porfirio Díaz, the longtime president of Mexico. Leaders of several revolutionary factions were unhappy that Huerta seemed to be steering the country back toward the days of Díaz. These military men, who would later fight among themselves, were at that point united against Huerta. They called themselves the Constitutionalists.

Warfare in Mexico was traditionally the realm of the cavalry, and most leaders on both sides of the revolution thought only in terms of land warfare. A few Mexican military men, however, had become interested in using the airplane as a weapon. The first use of the airplane for military purposes in the Western Hemisphere had taken place in February 1911, when Díaz was still president. Several barnstorming French aviators touring the southwestern United States were hired by the Mexican Federal army to scout the positions of the rebel troops of Generals Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Pascual Orozco in the state of Chihuahua, across the border from El Paso, Texas. In May 1912, the Madero government had bought three Blériot-type monoplanes to be used in future campaigns, but it is not clear when those planes first went into service.

The revolutionary forces set in motion the events in January 1913 that would bring Didier Masson to Mexico. The leader of those forces in northwest Mexico, Colonel Alvaro Obregon, a former schoolteacher and inventor, dispatched several officers to Southern California to check out the state-of-the-art in military aviation. Through introductions provided by important Los Angeles businessmen interested in aviation, the officers were steered to the Glenn L. Martin facility at nearby Balboa. That company was primarily engaged in developing flying boats, but it also built other types of aircraft and operated a pioneer flying school. As a result of that visit and what they learned, the Mexican officers decided to hire one of the company’s instructor pilots, a small, quiet 27-year-old Frenchman named Didier Masson.

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