Masson’s first combat mission was to attack the Mexican naval vessel General Guerrero, which was lying off Guaymas. Nobody in Obregon’s army had any idea of what kind of resistance to expect from such a bombing raid–the only precedent, unknown to the Mexicans, had occurred on February 6, 1913, when a Greek Maurice Farman had dropped grenades on ships and harbor installations in the Turkish port of Nagara in the Dardanelles, causing no significant damage.

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With their ship caught up in a revolution, the officers and men of Guerrero had been forced to change sides. A few months earlier, as the crew of a Federal ship, their loyalties had been to Madero, but now their loyalties were to Huerta, who was the new head of the Federalists. How that crew would react to aerial attack and what kind of resistance they might mount, no one knew.

General Guerrero was a fairly substantial ship, about 200 feet long and weighing 1,880 tons. Built in England in 1908, she was variously described as a cruiser, transport and gunboat. She mounted six 4-inch guns, two 3-pounders and probably some machine guns. She was somewhat underpowered for naval service, however, and her 1,200-hp reciprocating steam engine could produce only 12 knots of speed. The ship had spent the previous five years in routine patrols along the Mexican coast.

Sources differ as to the exact date of the first aerial attack, but newspaper accounts place it on or about May 29, 1913. The bombardier for this historic flight was probably Captain Joaquin Alcalde of the Mexican army, although some sources claim that it was Gustavo Salinas Camina, who was the nephew of General Venustiano Carranza. Masson himself was not explicit on that point, saying in later correspondence without specifying dates that Alcalde “was my co-pilot and observer” while acknowledging that his mechanic also flew with him once.

As he began his bombing run, Masson put his concerns to rest, bounced his little plane along the runway, and felt it lurch into the air for his first sortie against Guerrero, which was lying in the mountain-ringed harbor at Guaymas. To avoid the unpredictable air of midday, the takeoff was made in the morning. There are two versions of what happened next on the first flight. In one, during the bombing run over the target, the bombs were reportedly launched from 2,500 feet. Masson and his bombardier soon discovered that this was not a safe altitude, since Sonora encountered brisk gunfire from Guerrero. No hits were scored on the darting plane by the crew of the gunboat, for whom this was also a first experience, but neither was there any damage done to the ship, which took evasive action of her own.

The other version of the flight appeared in an Associated Press wire service story, which ran in The New York Times. In that account, the plane flew at 5,000 feet and made five passes on the gunboat without dropping bombs and without encountering hostile fire. Other reports indicated that on the first run the rebel aviators dropped propaganda leaflets but no bombs. In any case, Masson had to save enough gas for the plane to return to its landing field, so he could not stay more than a few minutes over Guaymas before heading back upcountry toward the landing strip. Thus, by all accounts, the first bombing attack on a naval vessel in the Western Hemisphere was brief and indecisive.

Accounts of this action generally do not record whether there were any other ships in Guerrero’s vicinity at the time of this and subsequent attacks. Guaymas was a busy port, both for naval and merchant vessels, and it is likely that at least several ships were there. A few versions indicate that the Federalist gunboats Tampico and Morales were also in the harbor at that time, but press reports do not mention them. If those ships were indeed in the harbor, there was an ironic twist to their presence, in that the former would soon become a rebel gunboat as the result of a mutiny and the latter would endure another bombing at the hands of the same plane a year later.

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