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The photo above is the first National Guard aircraft as shown in the
71st Regimental Armory in New York City.
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By Jim Dan Hill, 1964, The Stackpole Company, Harrisburg, PA, p 519
The Great Debate on military aeronautics did not begin that windy December day, 1903, that the Wright brothers’ first successful plane lifted from the beach at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Those flights were measured in feet and seconds. It was not until 1908, when the longer flights of the perfected planes and engines, in America by Orville Wright and in France by Wilbur Wright, startled a long-doubting World.
Meanwhile, a well-educated young Italian, age 20, and burning with enthusiasm for anything that might get off the ground, arrived in New York from Turin. For convenience he changed his name from Mario Terenzio Enrico Casalegno to Henry Woodhouse, and began grinding out articles on aeronautics. He and his writings were massively ignored by all except a few members of an embryonic association that styled itself the Aero Club of America, and a few New York City National Guardsmen who were habitués of the 71st New York Regiment’s Armory. Admittedly, some of the interest of the latter stemmed from the thought that an off-Broadway balloon ascension might stimulate recruiting.
But from all motives there was interest enough for the Aero Club members to get through the door and feel at home. Some Aero Club men became Guardsmen, particularly after May 1, 1908. That was the day the 1st Signal Company, New York National Guard, began receiving instruction, with a 35,000-cubic-foot balloon owned by A. Leo Stevens. "The lesson was the official beginning of the plan to make aeronautics a part of the study and work of the signal corps" of the National Guard of New York, according to the New York Herald of that date.
To that end an aeronautic unit of 25 men, commanded by Major Oscar Erlandson, had been organized as an integral part of the State’s Signal Corps. There was a growing and sustained interest. Hudson Maxim and a professor from Columbia University were among their instructors in 1911. Under modern bureaucratic centralization, with its outflow of directives and supervision, such initiative would be impossible.
Heavier-than-air craft soon captured their imagination. The 1st Signal Company financed, to the extent of $500, a do-it-yourself, home-constructed airplane. It was with the Company at the Pine Camp [now Fort Drum], summer of 1910, through the field instruction period. A copy of an early Farman type, it was built by Private Phillip W. Wilcox, an engineering student at Columbia University (see photo above). For reason of weather or facilities, it was not flown at Pine Camp. Wilcox later crashed it at Mineola and walked away from the debris to achieve the rank of Major in the burgeoning Air Corps of World War I.
Notwithstanding this initial reverse with an airplane, by August 1912, the unit definitely was flying missions in training maneuvers. But most missions were by a Curtiss-owned plane accompanied by a well-known early bird test pilot then carried on the Guard roster and so reported in the Press as being Private Beckwith Havens.
In that summer, the National Guard units of New England and New York concentrated on opposite sides of the lower stretches of the Housatonic River for a brief was between the Blues, West and defending, against the Reds, for the East and invading. The Regular Army participated and there was wide interest in the maneuvers. Most attention was attracted by a Lieutenant Benjamin D. Foulis, U.S. Army. The reporter misspelled his name, but since he was still some years short of two stars and Chief of the Air Corps, it is not likely that the editor made an issue of it. Foulois’s claim to fame through those maneuvers was a forenoon flight in which he rose to an altitude of no less than 3,080 feet, flew "all the way to Bridgeport," located every hostile troop camp or concentration, and was back on the ground within an hour and 15 minutes. Even so, Private Haven’ flying stunts were what most Guardsmen present remembered longest.
After 1912, the New York Guard began clamoring for planes, but the Army would give it nothing. Hat in hand, the Guardsmen went back to their old friends in the Aero Club. By this time, Henry Woodhouse was flourishing as editor of Aircraft and founder and publisher of Flying and Aerial Age. Through him they found vast sympathy, much publicity and some money. Forward-looking men were deciding that the airplane had come to stay.
Among them was Guardsman Raynauld (sp) Cawthorne Bolling, a native of Arkansas with a law degree from Harvard, who, at the age of 35, was doing quite well in the Big City. He was the General Solicitor for the U.S. Steel Co., and a Director and President of lessor corporations. At Pine Camp Summer training he flew missions that convinced General O’Ryan that New York’s Division (later the 27th) merited a separate Aeronautics unit.
 It was activated as the 1st Aero Company, National Guard, New York, November 1, 1915. The New York Aero Company was called into Federal Service in July, 1916, and stationed at Mineola Aviation Field, Long Island. They never went anywhere.
In truth, the Regular Army did not want them on any terms, even though they had taken into service as unit property their own personal planes, which, for the most part, were of the type most widely known later as "Jennies." The also had two Dehaviland (DH), open-cockpit bombers, a type already in production in America for export to the embattled Allies of World War I. Their only aid toward procurement of such flight equipment appears to have been the Woodhouse-inspired $12,500 from the Aero Club and $5,000 from the State of New York.
The Army particularly looked askance at such a small unit that had on its rolls a dozen or more officers and men of the position and caliber of U.S. Steel attorney Bolling and James E. Miller, Vice President of the Columbia Trust Company.
When America entered the War in April,1917, the War Department decision promptly was made that there would be no National Guard aviation units. The New York 1st Aero Company was disbanded and most of it personnel tendered their services as individuals. Almost without exception they at once were taken into the Officers Reserve Corps, authorized in the legislation of the preceeding year, and were given Reserve ranks higher than they held in the New York National Guard.
As a full Colonel, Bolling was killed in France, oddly enough, while on a ground reconnaissance. Miller's death was in one of the conventional plane duels that characterized early aerial combat. Bolling Field, Washington DC and Miller Field, Staten Island, New York, commemorate their voluntary service and sacrifice. |
