This replica of a 1911 Curtiss Triad in the Lone Star Flight Museum is rigged for water takeoffs and landings. It is otherwise very similar to the Curtiss airplanes that were being used in Mexico by 1913.

The airplane came of age as a weapon of war during the later years of World War I. But just a few years earlier in the skies over Mexico, a group of daredevil mercenary pilots helped pioneer some of the now standard concepts of air warfare: aerial reconnaissance, bombing and dogfighting.

 

In 1912 Mexico was in the throes of civil war, this time between the government (federal) forces of Victoriano Huerta and a collection of rebel factions led by Venustian Carranza, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Flying machines were still something of a novelty and the foreign aviators who demonstrated their craft in air shows greatly impressed Mexican officers. Farsighted leaders on both sides saw the military potential of the still-frail craft and sought out American pilots.

 

Among the gringo pilots to fly for the federals was John Hector Warden. The Moisant company originally sent him to Mexico City as an exhibition pilot to demonstrate their aircraft. Once there, he quickly impressed the officers of Huerta’s army, some of whom recruited him as a pilot with the rank of captain. Throughout 1912, Warden flew patrols and reconnaissance missions against the rebels.

 

He returned to the US an expert in anti-guerrilla air war who strongly advocated the use of airplanes for military reconnaissance and counterinsurgency operations. He noted the problems Mexican federal forces had with railroad sabotage and rebel ambushes of their trains, and described how planes could “start out ahead of a train, fly over the track, and reconnoiter the threatened district and report in time for the train to turn back,” thus foiling any planned ambushes by the rebels. He also commented on the role of aerial bombing, though he also realized pilots untrained in the particulars of such work could not be depended on to drop explosives with any accuracy.

 

The rebel forces also recognized the advantages of aircraft, and in 1913 sent two officers across the border into California on a recruiting mission. They met a French-born American, Didier Masson, then an instructor at the Glenn Martin Flying School near Los Angeles. The adventurous pilot signed on for $300 a month plus $50 for each recon mission and $250 for each bomb run. The rebels also purchased a $5,000 Martin pusher plane for his use.

Glenn L. Martin pusher

Getting the plane into Mexico posed a problem when, in trying to smuggle it across the Arizona border in a truck, Masson’s mechanic was detained by a suspicious local sheriff. They got the man out of that fix by bribing and then recruiting the sheriff’s deputy (who eventually rose to the rank of major in the rebel army). Once in Mexico, Masson’s pusher was christened the “Sonora,” and rigged with a primitive bomb rack. With its 75 horsepower engine, it could carry a pilot, a bombardier and three 30 lb. bombs to a range of 100 miles. Masson and his bombardier/ observer, Capt. Jouquin Alcalde, became the pioneers of aerial bombardment.

 

The rebel forces were moving on the federal base at Guayamas on the Gulf of California. The port was protected by three gunboats, the Guerrero, Morelos and Tampico, the fire from which had repulsed every rebel assault to that time. Masson’s and Alcalde’s job was to bomb the gunboats.

 

On 30 May 1913, the two men took off to make history’s first aerial bomb attack on warships. The Sonora came in at 2,500 feet over the Guerrero, flying through a hail of ineffective gunfire from the gunboat. But the bombs were equally ineffective; all missed, only splashing water on the boat’s deck. A second try the following day also failed, but that time the frightened boat crew jumped overboard. On the third try the Sonora crashed on takeoff and was put out of action for several weeks while spare parts were smuggled in from the States.

 

After making the repairs, another bombing attempt was made. This time Masson achieved a near miss on the Guerrero. Then, on 4 August, the pilot revised his tactics, going in lower at 2,000 feet with his mechanic substituting as bombardier. In the middle of the bomb run the engine quit. Masson jettisoned the bombs and glided his stricken plane across the bay to a landing behind friendly lines. There they discovered one unexploded bomb, caught on its arming cord, had trailed behind the plane all the way in.

 

After that close call, and finding the engine damaged beyond repair, Masson turned in his resignation and went home. Clearly, aerial bombing techniques had a long way still to go.

 

At about the same time another American aviator joined the rebel cause and soon participated in what was probably history’s first aerial dogfight. Dean Evan Lamb, a 27-yearold, had made his way south in 1913, where he was hired on personally by Pancho Villa. Legend has it he punched the famous bandito in the mouth to prove he had the guts to fly for him.

 

Meanwhile a federal Christofferson biplane, flown by American mercenary, Phil Rader, had been harassing rebel forces for two months. Lamb, armed with a revolver, was sent up after him in a Curtiss pusher plane. Above the rebel town of Naco, though, it was Rader who first spotted Lamb. Coming in from above, he opened fire with his revolver, scoring a hit in Lamb’s wing. Lamb pulled up and got off a shot just missing Rader’s propeller. The two then flew closely side by side, exchanging pistol shots without effect.

 

They pulled apart to reload, then exchanged more shots. After another reload and ineffectual exchange of fire, they disengaged, their ammunition exhausted. Lamb returned to a hero’s welcome from the rebel populace who’d witnessed the historic encounter from below. Rader never reappeared there, choosing thereafter to fly only in unopposed skies. Thus Lamb won something of a strategic victory in history’s first aerial dogfight.

 

Early in 1914 the rebel air forces achieved another first in aviation history when they were joined by an American engineer, Lester Barlow. He created what he called a “tactical war airplane unit.” It was actually a portable airbase on rails, consisting of a locomotive, boxcars, sleeping cars and flatcars, etc. Together they housed American pilots, a machine shop, a bomb magazine, and a number of aircraft and automobiles. Villa designated it the “Aviation Division of the Army of the North.”

 

The rebels used the Aviation Division to good effect, as it campaigned its way along the railroads of northern Mexico. For the American mercenaries it proved a harrowing, but surprisingly bloodless, adventure. Only one pilot, Frank Fish, actually suffered so much as a flesh wound in the leg from a federal bullet during one mission.

 

Those Americans also eventually drifted homeward, many fed up with the hazards of both friendly and enemy fire, generally lousy conditions and arrears in pay. But the rebel forces prevailed without them. Carranza captured Mexico City in 1914; Pancho Villa went on to even greater notoriety, and some of the American pilots went on to fight deadlier foes in the skies over war torn Europe. Still, for all their frustrations, those mercenaries opened the history of aerial warfare.

 

SOURCES Seagrave, Sterling. Soldiers of Fortune. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1981. Dupey, R. Ernest and Trevor M. The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, 4th ed. New York: Harper Collins Pubs., 1993.