Today, the last vestige of fictional war. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
November 9, 1918, two days
before the WW-I Armistice. The place, a tiny
American airstrip near Verdun -- some sheds and
three pilots playing cards. One of those pilots
later became Governor of Maine, another, Vice
President of Eastman Kodak. Now they hear a
sputtering engine. A Fokker D-VII drops out of the
low gray clouds and lands. They run out with
pistols drawn and capture the German pilot. He's
Heinz von Beaulieu-Marconnay, a Huguenot
aristocrat. They invite him in for a collegial shot
of cognac before they send him off to be processed.
It remains unclear why he'd landed there.
The Fokker D-VII was eventually boxed up and sent
to America. It wound up in the Smithsonian
Institution. In the 1970s the museum restored it to
its 1918 condition -- including a mysterious
marking on its side: the letters U-10 painted three
feet tall.
I was studying in the Smithsonian back in 1970 and
was given the task of writing a museum label for
the plane. I knew the Fokker D-VII was the best
German fighter plane of the war. But what on earth
did U-10 stand for? As I looked, the plot
thickened. Two weeks before the Armistice, the
pilot's brother, a German ace named Oliver von
Beaulieu-Marconnay, died of wounds after he was
shot down. His plane had carried the equally
mysterious letters, 4-D.
And why had Heinz landed? Was he broken by his
brother's death -- saving himself by surrendering?
That was current Smithsonian thinking. I went
looking for the meaning of the insignia and for the
circumstances that'd brought Heinz's plane to an
Allied airstrip on that overcast day late in the
war.
I located the now-aging American interrogator who'd
talked with the pilot just after he'd landed. It
turns out they'd become close friends. After th e
war he'd been godparent to the flyer's children. As
to defection? Not a chance. The pilot was lost, his
engine was dying and the Allied planes were in
their hangars. After the war Heinz became an
important figure in the Luftwaffe. He was captured
again in WW-II and died in a Russian concentration
camp.
I also found the pilot's children. His daughter was
living on Long Island. His son did drafting for
Messerschmitt. Neither could say what Heinz's U-10
or Oliver's 4-D stood for. Finally the daughter
wrote to her aunt who said both boys had joined the
cavalry when war broke out. Oliver went to the
Fourth Dragoons, hence the 4-D. Heinz had ridden
with the Tenth Uhlans. When they had the chance to
fly, they took their cavalry insignias with them.
So my quest had taken me into a twilight zone, a
last vestige of 19th-century views of war, the thin
tissue of a chivalrous war, a gentleman's war, a
war that never was. Soon after the Armistice my
father, also a pilot, flew over the empty trenches
of Verdun. He wrote home about terrible
destruction, far as the eye could see. He saw no
chivalry, no shots of cognac, down there. This war,
like all wars, had really been about killing
people. I'd only caught a glimpse of a few decent
people -- trying to make it otherwise.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
At the time I write this, most of the information in
this episode comes from unpublished files -- in my
office and in the Smithsonian Institution.
(Photo courtesy of Karl Heinz v.
Beaulieu-Marconnay, the pilot's son)
The pilot's brother Oliver, with his Fokker D-VII
and the insignia 4D, for Fourth Dragoons
Photo by Judy Myers, with
permission
The pilot's Fokker D-VII as it is now displayed in
the Smithsonian Institution
Stereopticon image courtesy of Sims
McCutchan
And this was the ground below them
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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