WWI: French Flying Service

A total of twenty-nine Americans enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in the first month of WWI. Jimmy Bach was the first of them to transfer to the French Flying Service, but was followed by William Thaw, of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Bill Thaw helped form the Lafayette Flying Corps, and was the only one of its seven original members still on active duty when the war ended.
Thaw was a large man with black hair, black eyes, and a walrus mustache. He learned to fly in a Curtiss hydroplane in the United States and was flying through Europe when WWI started. …