An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(24)
Now America no longer had a choice. On April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, who a few months earlier had won an election by promising not to take part in the conflict, declared war on Germany. Six days later, Anson and Allene, together on the Empress of Russia, left from Vancouver, Canada, for China and Japan, for what was officially termed a three-month business trip.
Both the timing—precisely when international travel was more dangerous than ever—and the destination suggest that Anson was, in fact, on a reconnaissance mission for the American government. China had up to that point shown itself a solid partner to the Allies, but the traditionally anti-British Japanese empire was all too happy to be courted by the Germans. Later, the ambassador Anson and Allene stayed with in Tokyo would write in his memoirs that the atmosphere in Japan with regard to America “could be cut with a knife.”
At the end of July, Anson and Allene returned home, again via Canada, and found their country in an early, excited, and almost infatuated stage of war. The arms factories were running at full speed, and there were improvised encampments everywhere in which volunteers stood at the ready for the journey to France. The first American regiments had already landed in Europe on June 26, 1917, bursting with impatience to show the world what American heroism looked like.
Across the country, posters of Uncle Sam urged recruits to sign up: “I want YOU!”—and almost the entire Burchard family complied. Anson was drafted by the War Department in Washington to work for Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell. Allene and a few friends from Locust Valley set up a committee to raise money for Hospitality House in New York, a place for young officers on leave. The mother of Kitty Kimball, Teddy’s girlfriend, left for France to work as a nurse. Teddy himself signed up on August 19 as an aspiring pilot in the British air force, the Royal Flying Corps.
In the eight years that had gone by since Teddy had seen an airplane circle the Statue of Liberty for the first time from his father’s yacht, aviation had progressed at a great pace. If there was anything the protracted trench fighting in Europe had made clear to the governments concerned, it was that the future of modern warfare was not to be found down in the mud but up in the sky. Both the Germans and the Brits now had air fleets at their disposal containing a few thousand single-seater planes from which pilots could fire at each other with primitive machine guns far above the lines.
These sky fighters were the only ones in the world war who still radiated a certain glamour and heroism. The outcomes of the dogfights, man-against-man battles in the air, were decided by the individual courage and skill of the pilots—elements that barely counted in the mechanized massacres on the ground. What’s more, the parties treated each other with a kind of old-fashioned chivalry, such as dropping messages about deaths and captures on the opponent’s air bases. Flying aces like the audacious “Red Baron” Manfred von Richthofen, who managed to down as many as sixty planes, were treated as heroes by both friends and enemies.
In the fall of 1917, since America didn’t yet have its own air force in the war, thousands of young Americans signed up for the Royal Flying Corps. Most of them were young men like Teddy from rich upper-class families, fascinated by danger and speed, bored to death by the life their parents had set up for them and their fake studies at Ivy League universities—young men who spotted an opportunity to actually mean something by joining the war in the sky.
“The RFC attracted adventurous spirits, devil-may-care youth, fast livers, furious drivers and risk-takers, who invested the Corps with a certain style and mystique,” wrote pilot and writer Cecil Lewis in his aviation classic Sagittarius Rising. The admissions requirements were simple: the candidate should be a sporty—a euphemism for overconfident—type and be able to ride horses and drive a car. Rich, in other words, since these were expensive hobbies the average American couldn’t afford.
Teddy Hostetter was the perfect candidate. And now that he had finally found something he really felt passionate about, he became a model student for the first time in his life. He completed his training at record speed. The first part took place in the United States and consisted of six weeks of general military training followed by his first real flight training. For most of the cadets, flying overshadowed everything else. In the words of one of Teddy’s fellow students:
It’s a great life, mother, flying alone with nothing to worry about, the whole sky to fly in and not much work to do. I will really hate to see this old war stop, if it ever does. I am having such a fine time!
The second part of the training, the actual training to be a fighter pilot, took place in England. Teddy was just able to celebrate Christmas 1917 at Birchwood, where he wrote a will leaving everything to his mother and sister in equal parts. He also took the opportunity to get engaged to his girlfriend, Kitty. On January 6, 1918, he saw the three most important women in his life grow smaller and smaller on the shores of New York as he sailed away from his homeland, past the Statue of Liberty, on his way to a war he had made his mission.
Teddy, the “strange fish” at Harvard, turned out to be a born aviator. He was promoted to second lieutenant after just one month and moved to the RFC’s No. 67 Training Squadron. At the No. 2 (Auxiliary) School of Aerial Gunnery, on the southwestern coast of Scotland, he learned to use a machine gun and drop bombs from an aircraft onto a target on the ground. In the early morning of April 3, 1918, he left for France to join the No. 54 Squadron of what was by then called the Royal Air Force, stationed in Calais. That very same day he made his maiden combat flight.