Salinas’ luck or skill deserted him during that flight, and he crashed Sonora during the attack on the gunboat. More than 20 years later Masson recalled those events: “I taught Gustavo Salinas the handling of the Sonora. He made, I think, two flights in Mazatlan and wrecked the machine completely. I understand that Jimmy Dean repaired it later on, but that was the end of the Sonora as nothing was heard of it afterwards.”

Pancho Villa also became interested in aviation and put together a squadron of five planes to support his armies. Among his fliers was Ted Parsons, who would later fly with Masson in N.124. However, Villa lost most of his planes in 1915 in combat with the Federal forces of Venustiano Carranza, the general who had displaced Huerta as head of the Mexican government. Carranza’s nephew Salinas, Masson’s protégé, also headed up a small aviation detachment in the Federalist army in 1915, which produced its own biplane, apparently a disastrous model.

Although he had been one of the strongmen of the revolution, Villa was then squeezed out of the new government. He returned to his bandit ways and in 1916 achieved true infamy through his attack on the town of Columbus, N.M. That raid precipitated a long and frustrating punitive expedition into Mexico, led by American Brig. Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing.

In pursuing Villa across Chihuahua, it was natural that Pershing would try airplanes as a means of reconnaissance and attack, but his planes, ill-chosen and poorly supported, fared no better than had Villa’s (see “1st Aero Squadron in Mexico,” by Gary Glynn, in the November 1997 issue of Aviation History). Thus, for several years the further attempts to utilize military aviation in Mexico were no more successful than the early aerial attacks in the Gulf of California had been.

And what of Didier Masson? After World War I he returned to Mexico, where he met and married a young woman named Modesta Escalante, subsequently drifting on to British Honduras and becoming involved in a number of nonflying and apparently not too successful activities. He ran a commission firm in the export-import business, became the French consular officer in 1935, and later served as airport manager for Pan American before budget constraints closed that operation.

In the mid-1930s, Masson tried to interest publishers in a book he had written about his flying experiences during the Mexican Revolution, but he apparently found no takers. Unfortunately, the whereabouts of that manuscript is unknown.

When France surrendered to the invading Germans on June 16, 1940, Masson resigned from his consular post. He left British Honduras in 1942 to work as the manager of the Hotel Iris in Chetumel, Mexico. He died in Merida, Yucatan, on June 2, 1950.

In spite of being the first in a series of largely unsuccessful military aviation episodes in Mexico, the attack at Guaymas by Didier Masson should be given proper recognition because of the historical precedents it set. Masson’s efforts contributed to the emergence of aerial bombing through development of the concept of the bombing run, as well as the use of a bombsight and bomb rack, the fins to guide the bomb, and the impact plunger and detonator. For better or worse, aerial bombing had begun its long history.

After Sonora’s final bombing runs at Mazatlan in 1914, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet protested to the rebel leaders against the use of airplanes in warfare. It was a hollow protest, however, since for several years the U.S. Navy had already been busily engaged in improving its own aviation capabilities, including aerial attacks against ships by airplanes that could operate from naval vessels, which would one day become today’s aircraft carriers.

Maybe naval aviation officials had seen in Masson’s comic-opera attacks the prospect of Brig. Gen. “Billy” Mitchell’s bombers sinking ships in the not-too-distant future. Perhaps they had wanted to ensure that land-based aircraft would not be the only planes capable of sinking ships.

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David H. Grover has written several books and articles on maritime history. For additional reading: A History of Air Power, by Basil Collier; Aviation: An Historical Survey from its Origins to the End of World War II, by Charles Harvard Gibbs-Smith; The Great Pursuit, by Herbert Molloy Mason, Jr.; and I Flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, by Edwin C. Parsons.

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