The Day a Rookie Shot Down an Ace

On 25 July 1918, 1st Lt. Walter Avery of the U.S. 95th Aero Squadron shot down veteran German ace Oberleutenant Carl Menckhoff (who had 39 victories) near Château-Thierry, France on his first combat mission.

He had previously flown with a French squadron charged with the defense of Paris, but had no dogfighting experience. His first dogfight marked Avery’s first aerial victory, forcing Menckhoff to crash-land and leading to his capture. Avery described the fight in his war diary:  “Both [my] guns jammed,” Mr. Avery wrote in his diary. “While clearing the jams he got on my tail and put two bullets in my left wing. . . I did a retournment and with the resulting speed was able to stand vertically on my tail and give him a good burst. He started to lose altitude and went down in a tight spiral. I followed him, shooting, and saw him crash in the woods.” Menckhoff had survived and been taken prisoner by French soldiers.

Aftermath

After Avery had landed,  he clipped a fabric letter “M” from the side of Menckhoff’s Fokker D.VII as a souvenir, though he sportingly left Menckhoff’s prestigious Pour le Mérite (“Blue Max”) medal with him. Carl Menckhoff subsequently escaped from the French prisoner of war camp—post Armistice—and made his way to Switzerland, before returning to Germany.  After some legal trouble with the Nazi regime, he returned to Switzerland permanently to raise a family, never mentioning the war. His son was never aware of his father’s wartime achievements.

After shooting down another opponent, Walter Avery was, himself, shot down and wounded in October. He also finished the war as a POW. Upon his return he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Besides his listing as a  Harvard graduate (1917), there is not much to be found about his later civilian activities.

In Another Century

The piece of fabric sat ignored in a trunk for 60 years until Avery died in 1978.  In May 2007, Avery’s daughter, Bette Avery Applegate, tracked down and met Menckhoff’s son, Gerhard Menckhoff.  During a poignant ceremony, she returned the fabric “M” piece cut from the WWI aircraft to the German pilot’s family.

⇒  Read the entire article on the Roads to the Great War website here:

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