eyesight, hand-eye coordination, strength, agility, and endurance. An instinctive, confident flier, Ingalls learned quickly and loved the aerial environment. With a head for detail, he easily mastered the many technical facets of his craft. He was also an excellent shot and unforgiving hunter. Finally, Ingalls possessed the heart of a youthful daredevil, a hell-raiser who gloried in the excitement and challenge of aerial combat. He seemed fearless and quickly put one day’s activities behind him even as he prepared for the next mission. He went to war a schoolboy athlete and came home a national hero. And he was still only nineteen years old when the guns fell silent.
Although Ingalls’s wartime experiences are compelling at a personal level, they also illuminate the larger but still relatively unexplored realm of early U.S. naval aviation. According to military historians R. D. Layman and John Abbatiello, naval aviation carried out a wide variety of missions in World War I and exercised far greater influence on the conduct of military affairs than heretofore acknowledged. Aircraft protected convoys from attack and played an increasingly vital role in the campaign against the U-boat. Aviators aided the efforts of naval units and ground troops in military theaters extending from the North Sea and English Channel to Flanders, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Iraq. Fleet commands, most notably in Great Britain, worked to integrate the new technology into ongoing operations and develop innovative applications.3
As the United States developed its own aviation priorities, missions, and doctrines during 1917 and 1918, it aspired to similar success. Despite his extreme youth, David Ingalls was repeatedly selected by the navy to play a pathbreaking role in this process. He began as one of the very first pilots dispatched to Europe for active duty “over there.” Once ashore, he became one of only three aviators chosen to receive advanced training at Britain’s School of Special Flying at Gosport, preparatory to assuming the role of flight commander at beleaguered NAS Dunkirk. During the terrifying German advance of March–April 1918, he and three other American pilots joined a Royal Air Force fighting squadron operating over Flanders. Later that year, he became one of the initial members of the navy’s most significant offensive program of the entire war, the Northern Bombing Group (NBG), and then flew several bombing missions with the RAF. After just a few weeks’ ground duty with the NBG, Ingalls returned to British service for two months, becoming the only navy pilot to fly over the front lines for such an extended period. While with the RAF, he served as acting flight commander ahead of many longtime members of his squadron. In recognition of this work, he became the first American naval aviator to receive Britain’s Distinguished Flying Cross. He finished his service as chief flight officer at the navy’s sprawling assembly and repair depot at Eastleigh, England.
Ingalls’s wartime correspondence offers a rare personal view of the evolution of naval aviation during the war, both at home and abroad. There are no published biographies of navy combat fliers from this period, and just a handful of diaries and letters are in print, the last appearing in the early 1990s.4 Ingalls kept a detailed record of his wartime service in several forms, and his extensive and enthusiastic letters and diaries add significantly to historians’ store of available material. Shortly after enlisting in the navy in March 1917, he began corresponding with his parents in Cleveland, Ohio, a practice he continued until late November 1918. Someone in his father’s offices at the New York Central Railroad transcribed the handwritten letters and pasted them into a scrapbook containing materials documenting his military career.5
Ingalls’s letters reveal a lighthearted and affectionate relationship with his parents, and they are often filled with valuable insights into the tasks he performed, though he shielded his folks from the true dangers he faced. He limned his most hair-raising experiences with the glow of a sportswriter discussing a star athlete’s exploits. Though the letters contain much information about his social life in Europe, the teenage flier did not tell his mother about the “short arm” inspections he performed on enlisted men, searching for signs of venereal disease.
Upon sailing to Europe in September 1917, the recently commissioned junior officer commenced keeping a detailed diary, eventually filling two compact notebooks. Ingalls also compiled an informal record of his flight activities by jotting down spare notations throughout his diary, listing hours and types of aircraft flown. Surprisingly, no official logbook survives. These daily entries have a very different texture from that of his letters, being more matter-of-fact and more cryptic yet still recording the major and lesser activities that structured his days and the days of those around him. He expressed frustration with endless training, occasional boredom, dislike of army fliers, and hints of fear and nerves, an altogether less sugarcoated version of reality. While training in Scotland, the neophyte aviator transcribed lengthy notes during various lectures and from technical publications. He also produced a formal analysis of instruction at Ayr and Turnberry. Both are reproduced here.
Shortly after the war but likely no later than 1924, a more mature Ingalls prepared a hundred-page typescript memoir, incorporating much of the language of his diary and letters verbatim, interspersed with material reporting additional events, descriptions drawn from memory where no letters or diary entries survived, or editorial comments about his experiences. The memoir offers yet another interpretation of Ingalls’s activities, the tone by turns analytical and dramatic, with something of the flavor of a pulp novel. Wartime terror and boredom are gone, replaced by the occasional smirk or wink. His descriptions of social life and visits to nightclubs seem wiser, more knowing, as he speaks with the voice of a grown man recounting the escapades of a teenage boy.
Despite his officer status, Ingalls provided a distinctly civilian view of military life in his writings, albeit a rather privileged version of that existence. For him, this was all a great adventure, not a career. The navy’s decision to keep its regular young officers with the fleet and not train any as aviators meant volunteer reservists such as Ingalls filled the ranks of combat units.6 And like him, many came from affluent, socially prominent families. The young Ohioan thus had much to say about the social scene in London and Paris, and his experiences differed greatly from the hardships suffered by enlisted bluejackets at sea or doughboy infantrymen in the mud and trenches.
Ingalls’s story also, in the words of author Henry Berry in Make the Kaiser Dance, partakes of the persistent aura of glamour attached to the young Americans who flew their fragile, dangerous machines above the Western Front. Anyone who has ever raced across the sky in an open-cockpit biplane knows something of that feeling. Of Ingalls and his peers, Berry remarked, “Their names seem to conjure up the list of the romantic aspects of war—if shooting down another plane in flames, or suffering the same fate, is glamorous.” In a world of mud, horror, anonymity, and mass death, they became celebrities. The less-than-unbiased Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell proclaimed, “The only interest and romance in this war was in the air,” and historian Edward Coffman observed, “No other aspect of World War I so captured the public imagination.”7
Concerning his aviation duties, Ingalls offered insight into the lengthy, varied, sometimes contradictory, and often ad hoc instruction received by the first wave of navy fliers preparing for wartime service. He bemoaned the fact that training never seemed to end. Reassignment from flying boat–patrol training, to land-based combat instruction, to seaplane escort duty, and to cross-lines bombing raids, followed by more escort duty, then training in large bombers, and finally assignment to a British combat squadron reflected the navy’s continually shifting plans and priorities. The fleet entered the war with no aviation doctrine, precious few men, and little matériel, and it took many months to get the program headed on a winning course. As Capt. Thomas Craven, commander of naval aviation in France in the final months of the conflict, noted, his bases and squadrons, like John Paul Jones, “had not yet begun to fight,” even as Germany prepared to surrender.8
Among the first collegiate fliers to jump into the game, David Ingalls began training even before Congress declared war. In the months that followed, he mastered command of flying boats, seaplanes, pursuit aircraft, and bombers, more than a dozen machines in all. Ingalls’s work took him from Florida to New York and then to England, Scotland, and France. He became a trailblazer for the many that followed, and his duties included antisubmarine patrols, bombing
