Diary of Pvt. Charles Altman
It was a group of American flyers, the Escadrille Lafayette, who saved Verdun. The attack on Verdun came so suddenly and so unexpectedly that for three or four days the French thought it a feint, designed to force the withdrawal of their men from about Ypres, so that the Germans might break through to Calais. When the French found that it was a genuine attack they faced, the Germans had already sent their airmen scudding over Verdun and its environs. Petain sent an urgent call for aviators to drive off the German flyers and to confound their artillery men by depriving them of their flying “spotters.”
And they sent him the Escadrille Lafayette, the American flyers who had already made a name for themselves by their daring and hardihood. The Americans went aloft over Verdun and gave battle to the Germans. They drove them back and kept them back so that no man might direct a gun against that road to Buey—”La Voie Sacr e, or the Sacred Road, as the French now call it. And over that road rolled the trains of motors bringing the munitions and supplies that made Verdun a turning point in the war. So much the Escadrille Lafayette accomplished.
— Pvt. Charles Altman
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