July 14, 1918 - Quentin Roosevelt Shot Down

Lex Anteinternet: Transportation disasters and milestones, and a dra...

Lex Anteinternet: Transportation disasters and milestones, and a dra...: 101, officially, (it may have been 121) people were killed and 175 injured in  a train collision of two trains belonging to the Nashville...

Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks

Denver Airport A Train Station

The other side of big commercial air travel. United Cargo, Denver Colorado

Lex Anteinternet: Airmail! Lt. Torrey Webb gets a watch and New York and Philadelphia get air mail service (and meanwhile on the Western Front). May 15, 1918.

Airmail! Lt. Torrey Webb gets a watch and New York and Philadelphia get air mail service (and meanwhile on the Western Front). May 15, 1918.

Lt. Torrey Webb on the day of the inauguration of air mail between New York City and Philadelphia.  They gave him a Hamilton watch.  Dignitaries showed up. . . including ones from France.

The plane was a Curtis JN-4, a "Jenny".  The Jenny had, fwiw, just been commemorated by way of a postage stamp a few days prior.

Torrey Webb was was in the Army 's air service during the war, but he was studying engineering prior to it and would return to it.  He ended up the vice president of Texas Oil Company (Texaco).

Meanwhile, on the Western Front, these two RAF crewmen were were taking off in their RE8.

All of these air missions, we would note, were incredibly dangerous.

View from the New Belgium Hub. . . a dreary day at DIA. United and Icelandair.

Lex Anteinternet: The Dense Fog

The Dense Fog

An actual recent conversation, when I was in Denver.



By way of background, I'd caught the early United Flight to Denver. . .

Casper to Denver

and then the A Train from DIA downtown. . .

Denver RTD University of Colorado A Line

which puts a person right about where they need in downtown Denver about 9:00.



Yep.



So, the comments.



Big Firm Denver Lawyer:  So did you drive down last night?



Me:  No, I flew in this morning.



Big Firm Denver Lawyer:  Oh?  They have planes in Wyoming?



And no, she wasn't kidding.



And this firm used to have an outlet in my own town, when the carpetbagging was good during the last boom.



Sigh.

Lex Anteinternet: Poster Saturday: Albatros. Union for Aircraft

Lex Anteinternet: Poster Saturday: Albatros. Union for Aircraft:Poster Saturday: Albatros. Union for Aircraft

For probably only the second or third time here, I'm putting up a poster
from the Great War's Central Powers, this one for the Albatros
aircraft.

My German is rusty, but I think this says some something like "Union for
Aircraft", with the locations for the same.  It's likely a labor union
poster.

This poster may say more than we might know. For one thing, Germany was
heavily industrialized by World War One, even though big sectors of its
economy remained nearly Medieval in other ways.  Anyhow, labor was a
major, and fairly radical, sector of the German demographic at the time
and the government worried about it continually.  Fears were constant
that Socialist workers would reject the war or even overthrow the
government.  And, in fact, there was something behind those fears.

Socialist Germans, like every sector of the German population, rallied
to the crown in 1914 when the war came and by and large the Social
Democratic Party remained loyal to the German government and war
effort.  The SDP, while Germany's largest political party at the time,
saw itself begin to fracture during the war, however, and by 1917 really
radical elements had started to split into Communist parties as the SDP
pulled back from a pre war heavy leaning towards Communism.  The SDP
would in fact end up being the party that tried to bring Germany into
being a true parliamentary democracy without a crown in 1918, something
that would taint it with some voters thereafter, although those voters
were likely not in the SDP crowd to start with.  Nonetheless, there
would be no post war reunion with Communist who went on to try to foment
rebellion prior to the end of the war and who went into a civil war
with the SDP government immediately after the war, a rebellion that was
only put down through the aid of the very conservative German Army which
never supported the republic itself. 

Those tensions would all lead to the German republic being very short
lived.  It functioned from 1918 to 1932, a mere fourteen years, before a
final election brought the Nazis to power.  Communist elements in
Germany were completely anti democratic.  German conservatives tended to
lean towards monarchy and there were a lot of them.  Only the SDP and
the collection of Christian parties, with the Catholic Center Party
being the biggest, supported the parliament.  By the 1932 election the
stress of the Depression and the near state of civil war between
Communist and Nazi elements had undermined the SDP sufficiently that it
wasn't able to hold on any longer as Germans turned to the Nazis and the
Communist and brought down their republic and sent into and Europe into
a thirteen year long nightmare.

Lex Anteinternet: The Death of Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen

The Death of Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen

Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, veteran German fighter pilot
with at least 80 victories to his credit, was shot down and killed on
this day in 1918, thereby becoming one of the hundreds of thousands of
German servicemen to die in the 1918 German Spring Offensive.



Von Richthofen is arguably the most famous German military figure of the
Great War for a variety of reasons all of which are tied to the
romantic myths attached to the war in the air, which in reality was an
exceedingly grim affair.  Suffering in later years from the effects of a
head injury sustained in an earlier crash, Von Richthofen was arguably
no longer really himself.  In recent years the impact of head injuries
on mental outlook has become a well developed field of medicine but it
was not at the time.



To some extent it's surprising that Von Richthofen's memory has
sustained itself in such a romantic fashion as he was truly a
representative of a dying age, most particularly in his own country. A
representative of the aristocratic class, Germany was already beginning
to be torn apart by the forces of modernity that burst forth post war
and ultimately deliver the country to the Nazis and the world to a
second world war.  But then many of the German officer class were
likewise representatives of that world, even into World War Two.



There's always been some dispute on who shot down the Red Baron.  It
came in aerial combat, but that's about the only thing that can be
definitely said.



Von Richthofen was pursuing the plane of Canadian fledgling pilot
Wilfred "Wop" May, who himself had just fired upon the plane of Wolfram
von Richthofen, a cousin of of Manfred's.   Brown dropped in on Von
Richthofen to aid May. But Von Richthofen also took ground fire at the
time and later forensic work, and some speculation, has lead many to
believe that it was likely ground fire that killed Von Richthofen, who
suffered a single fatal wound.  In that case, the shot could have come
from either Australian or British troops.

British funeral for Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen.  Scenes
like this were not uncommon during the Great War for airmen, oddly. 
Both the British and the Germans did this.  In this ceremony we see
officers of the RAF salute their former enemy and bear his coffin while
an honor guard of Australian infantrymen stand in armed salute.  A
person has to wonder what the Australian soldiers, notoriously salty in
their views, thought of this.  The clergyman is undoubtedly an Anglican
Priest of the Church of England, which itself is a bit of an oddity as
Von Richthofen was undoubtedly a Lutheran.

His death at a young age has preserved the romantic image he bore during
the war in a James Dean like way.  Wolfram, whom he acted to save, went
on serve in the Luftwaffe again and rose to the rank of Field Marshall
in Hitler's air force, dying of a brain tumor shortly after World War
Two.  He was 49 years of old, but appeared much older at the time.  Roy
Brown returned to Canada and tried, but failed, to enter politics.  He
became a farmer but died in 1944 at age 50.  Wop May died at age 56
while on vacation in the United States.  He had a varied post war
career, but much of it was as a flight instructor.  Cedric Popkin, an
Australian machinegunner whom some believe fired the fatal bullet went
on home to a career as a carpenter, living the longest to age 77.

CallAir Model A3

These are all photographs of a CallAir Model A-3 being towed down a highway.  

The Model 3 was designed by Wyoming's Call family, who were ranchers, which would explain the Steamboat symbol on the tail.  Their initial design, the Model A, was ready by 1940, but World War Two interrupted production of the aircraft and the company was accodordingly launched in 1946.  This example was built in 1947.

The Call Aircraft Company was sold at auction to Intermountain Manufacturing Company in 1962 and ultimately on to North American Rockwell.  A museum dedicated to the Call company is located in Afton, where Aviats and Pitts are still produced.