Frank would have sat quietly and sullenly. Clapp or Grant would have challenged him, perhaps. Joe would have observed it quietly with that cocked-head, under-the-brow expression of his. My best guess is that Frank on that night would have wanted to fight his accusers. And maybe he did. And maybe he won. And maybe all that did was make matters worse.

The next day, Frank took his usual approach to solving his problems. He did something. He went into the squadron office and commandeered the typewriter in the corner, pecking out confirmation blanks letter by letter. And he worked the hangars, fine- tuning his Spad. He concentrated more of his time on his gunnery, practicing whenever and wherever possible. For recreation he would take a squadron motorcycle out and race it up and down the airfield, a Colt .45-automatic in each hand. As he neared a tree- mounted target, Luke would raise both simultaneously and fire, practicing his concentration on the move.

Luke spent long hours going over his plane, taking up a half-turn on this turnbuckle, easing off a quarter of an inch on that wire. From other hangars and other planes he purloined sundry attachments, small parts and gadgets he believed would add to the fighting and manoeuvering ability of his Spad...In this respect he became a squadron pest. As one pilot complained to Grant: "It's got so you have to sleep in your ship if you want to keep the damn thing in one piece!"

Action around the 27th slowed to a crawl after Luke's first kill. Despite good weather on the 17th, the squadron put up only one eight-plane patrol all day. Luke wasn't on it. Same thing on the 18th - no patrols, only seven sorties, and Luke stayed on the ground. The slow pace continued through the first week in September, when the squadron made its stealthy move to Rembercourt. Frank Jr. didn't fly until the 22nd, but neither did most of the squadron. Frank and Joe flew on the 23rd, and Joe made a forced landing on the 25th. Both flew trial flights and target practice each day from Aug. 27-31, sometimes on days when no other pilot took off.

Things may have been quiet in the air, but events on the ground moved quickly. On Aug. 21, orders arrived promoting Hartney to Group commander. The suprise was his replacement: 1st Lt. Alfred "Ack" Grant. Headquarters could not have picked a more ironic successor to the quirky, easy-going Hartney.

Hartney was a wiry little Canadian with plenty of air combat experience and little formal military training, Grant was a serious, big-boned, over-bearing Texan who led the corps of cadets at Kansas State Agricultural College before dropping out as a junior to train as a pilot. Hartney believed that pilots were a special kind of soldier, and required freedom so that the spirit of enterprise - which Hartney deemed a pilot's most valuable attribute - could flourish.

Grant, a Toronto-trained pilot, "had always more or less had the West Point attitude," believing in soldierly discipline, chain of command, and the trappings of tradition.

The morning after taking command Grant set the tone for his tenure by rousting the 27th at reveille. He put the squadron in formation - mechanics and ground crews in their platoons, pilots arrayed in ranks and files by flight section.The sun rose slowly as Grant surveyed his new kingdom.

He needed to separate himself from his peers, the pilots he had flown with since Kelly Field in November. He introduced roll calls at night, at-arms drill for the enlisted men, and "many other small procedures so dear to the martinet."

Frank, of course, was not pleased with these developments. He hated his new commander, and the feeling was mutual. The one person is a position of authority who had believed in Frank's ability and character had moved on, leaving him in an extremely awkward position: there were German enemies to the east, and American enemies all around the officers' mess. Frank and Ack had already tangled, and now Ack was in a position to make Frank's life miserable. He started by naming Frank the engineering officer - a glorified name for the officer in charge of work details.

The 27th would spend another nine days tooling around skies of Saints, running into nothing. The sector had gone silent. On the 29th the squadron received orders to move, and on Sunday, Sept. 1, the 27th hit the road for a tiny grass field ringed by trees and not far from banks of the Marne, about 18 kilometers north of Bar le Duc. The maps called it Rembercourt.

Rembercourt
The orders sending the 1st Pursuit Group to Rembercourt on Sept. 1 (the move wasn't completed until Friday, Sept. 6) came directly from Col. Billy Mitchell. Mitchell's dream of a systematic, unified aerial command had finally received the tentative approval of the allied generals, and its first test would begin in 12 days when the allied guns opened the assault on the St. Mihiel salient, a sector extending from Watronville on the west to Pont-A-Mousson on the east, and in depth to the town of St. Mihiel.

Forty-nine squadrons comprising more than 1,500 American, British and French aircraft of all types would be under his direction - the largest number of fighting planes ever assembled under one command structure. For Mitchell, who had argued for his concept since the early days of American involvement, it was put-up or shut-up time.

Mitchell's concept meant moving pursuit squadrons like the 27th closer to the battlefront. But it also meant moving them quietly, without detection by the Germans. He issued orders that kept the 27th from flying in formations larger than three planes and forbid any flights across the German lines until Sept. 12. All its planes were camouflauged and kept off the field except when taking off or landing.

Mitchell delivered the orders to Hartney at 1st Army Headquarters on Sept. 1, pointing to a position on a large sand table. His job would be to move all four squadrons to Rembercourt, a tiny field rimmed with trees and measuring no more than 40 acres, the next day. The pilots would ferry their planes first, with the ground crews and headquarters moving in by convoy. It would be their home until the Armistice.

On Sept. 1, a cloudy day, Vasconcells led Hudson, Wehner, Clapp and Donaldson on a cross-country flight to Rembercourt ("this airdrome" in official reports). Jerry returned to Saints that afternoon. Everything stayed grounded on Sept. 2, but the movement continued under clear skies on Sept. 3. Grant, Vasconcells, Stout and Hewitt flew over first, followed by Luke, who flew alone, and Rucker.

The 27th arrived on Sept. 3 and began operations on the morning of Sept. 4. Roberts and Wehner flew the first combat patrol out of Rembercourt - an uneventful alert in search of observation balloons. Jerry, Frank Jr. and Donaldson flew a subsequent alert, and the squadron instituted a series of airfield protection patrols (which, interestingly enough, neither Frank nor Joe were ever required to fly).

The pilots were not fond of their new airfield. "There were absolutely no quarters and it began to rain and once more, as in Epiez and Issoudun, the personnel donned boots and became used to mud, and lots of it.

"One of the most serious drawbacks at Rembercourt was the airdrome. A farmer might successfully contemplate driving a wagon over the airdrome, but even experienced pilots were not so optimistic about landing an aeroplane there, as all of it was bumpy and abundant rocks."

Rembercourt was where the 27th really got down to the business of war fighting. With Grant in command and Col. Mitchell taking an active interest in the group's operations, squadron life became more militarized. Group headquarters assumed control of all the squadron's ground transport, depriving the pilots of the cars they had enjoyed at Toul and Saints.

"From that time on it was either walk or use a two-ton truck as the rest of the cars was seemingly always unavailable," a squadron historian later wrote. "Another important thing which effected both officers and men was that there was no nearby city of interest except Bar-Le-Duc, which was 20 kilometers away, and as many American soldiers were located there, this place was absolutely spoiled."

Living out of tents (which Luke had to construct) in the woods at a muddy airfield with no nightlife, no mademoiselles and no free transportation must have been a miserable experience for the east coast Ivy League frat boys of 1st P.G. But it was no big deal for Luke, a man accustomed to weeks in the saddle.

Luke's reality in those early days at Rembercourt were nothing glamourous - a day- to-day drudgery of engineering officer's duties - seeing to it that things were fixed, that sheds were built, that engine stands worked, that the outhouses were limed.

The Yanks are coming
St. Mihiel was more than just a test for Mitchell. It was, in fact, the coming-out party for the United States military. In all its history before Sept. 12, 1918, the United States had little experience in international war fighting. With the exception of battles with the Tripoli pirates under Jefferson's administration, a dubious role in the Boxer Rebellion and the naval forays into the Phillipines during the Spanish-American adventure, America's war interests had always been within its own hemisphere. It had never taken its place in the crucible of modern warfare - Europe.

But St. Mihiel was change all of that. It was the place where America, for the first time in European history, took center-stage. The infant AEF was to form the heart of an allied army bent on breaking the German salient around St. Mihiel. Doughboys had been fighting in France for months, but had yet to take on a major offensive. Many questioned whether these citizen-soldiers were up to the task, and America's military leadership was certainly suspect.

But the moment was right. By September 1918 Germany's reserves on the Western Front were seriously depleted. Sensing the impending attack in the St. Mihiel area, the German high command decided to pull back and shorten their lines, a strategic withdrawal that was just getting started when the Allies struck.

The Germans had eight divisions and two brigades in the line and five divisions in reserve. First Army estimated German aircraft strength at 150 pursuit, 120 reconnaissance and 25 "battle" planes.

Some 550,000 Americans and 110,000 French took part in the offensive, supported by 3,000 artillery pieces and 400 French tanks (some of which were manned by American crews). Allied aircraft consisted of 297 pursuit planes (only 226 available), 259 observation planes (219 available) and 55 bombing planes (42 available) for a total of 627 (487 available) The French supplied 627 planes (430 available). In addition, there were 15 American balloons and six French balloons.

If all went as hoped, American forces would spearhead a drive to the center of the bulge in the German lines, collapsing the front and setting the stage for the final drive into the Fatherland - the anticipated Meuse-Argonne offensive.

Allied military planners believed the Argonne offensive would begin the slow dismantling of the German army, which they hoped to accomplish by the summer of 1919. Not even in their wildest, sweetest dreams did they imagine that the Kaiser's regime would collapse by Nov. 11. St. Mihiel was the first step, and Mitchell's plans were the 1st Army's ace in the hole.

The idea was to use the airplane - formerly a tactical weapon - for two strategic purposes: the allies would deny the Germans information about the offensive, and would attack along the front in depth, adding confusion to the Germans' retreat and disrupting the enemy's logistical operations.

Other aerial units would be important to Mitchell's concept, but the 27th was perhaps the most crucial squadron in the entire operation. The 1st Pursuit Group's forward location at Rembercourt made it a key tool, and a variety of factors would combine to turn the 27th into the fulcrum for the group's mission. Some of this was by design, but at least part of this grew directly out of Frank Jr.'s unprecedented success.

To the 27th fell the job of shutting down the German balloon corps. It was an assignment that would make Frank Luke a legend, but it's also something of a chicken-or- the-egg question: did Frank Luke shoot down balloons because the 27th drew balloon duty, or did the 27th draw balloon duty because Frank Luke shot down balloons so well?

Ironically, the written record of Luke's exploits typically ignores the context in which his balloon-busting career took place. Most writers have depicted Luke's balloon-busting as something he chose, as if it were a personal game and not an important group objective. In these accounts, Luke merely takes a Spad and flies off on his own in search of a balloon, which he finds and destroys. The implication is, of course, that bad-boy Luke did all of this on a whim. The truth is that somebody had to shoot down those balloons, and Frank was one of the few who was willing to try.

Balloon-busting was a specialty. It required a different ammunition load and, in the 27th's case, an entirely different machine gun. One didn't just take any old Spad off the flight line and go attack balloons. One planned for it. One equipped for it. One trained for it. Instead of the story of an impetuous boy full of crazy courage, Luke's success is the story of a man who would set himself against fate and the odds, gambling that his uncanny combination of mechanical insight, nimble reflexes, dead-eye marksmanship and neck- straining stunts could keep him airborne.

Of course, the first time at anything is always unique. So it was with Frank Luke's first balloon.