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By Root 2409 0

He loved the city. ‘There never was any name-calling like “Nigger”,’ he wrote in his unpublished memoirs. ‘It seemed to me that the French democracy influenced the minds of both white and black Americans there and helped us all to act like brothers as nearly as possible.’ Two months after France went to war with Germany in 1914, on Bullard’s nineteenth birthday, he repaid the people who had treated him as an equal by joining the French Foreign Legion. Among the Americans in his unit was Bob Scanlon. They were posted to the Somme, where Bullard fought as a machine gunner. He was wounded and commended for bravery. So many Legionnaires were killed in 1914 and 1915 that the survivors were transferred to the 170th Infantry Regiment. For many months from late February 1916, the 170th resisted the German mass offensive that became the Battle of Verdun. In one engagement, Bullard sustained shrapnel wounds to his head. In another, a shell ripped open his leg. He won the Croix de Guerre and was invalided from the army. After six months’ recovery in Lyons, he returned to Paris and applied to the French Army’s air corps.

Bullard qualified as a pilot in May 1917, winning a bet with a Southern white friend that he could do it. He took advanced combat flight training along with other American volunteers at Avord. The Americans formed what became the Lafayette Escadrille. As each pilot qualified, he was sent into action. But some trainees who started school after Bullard left before he did. A friend confided to Bullard that an American in Paris was pressuring the French to prevent American blacks from flying in the war. Dr Edmund Gros, the director of the American Hospital of Paris, was responsible for the welfare of Americans in the Lafayette Escadrille and the American Ambulance Corps. Bullard had already noticed how Dr Gros distributed the cheques from a fund that wealthy Americans in Paris had established for the American pilots: ‘I was always the first in Dr. Gros’ office. But the dear doctor would never give me my check until after the whole crowd received theirs and the banks were closed for the day, so I could not cash mine.’ When Bullard threatened to write to the Inspector General of the Schools of Aviation about being passed over for a combat assignment, he was finally sent to the front. His comrades in the Escadrille gave him a party to celebrate, and someone confided that ‘a certain person in Paris in the Ambulance Corps … had done everything he could to keep me from becoming the first Negro military flyer for no reason except that he didn’t like my color’. The ‘certain person’, Dr Gros, had failed.

Bullard flew his first combat mission in September 1917 with the motto ‘All Blood Runs Red’ painted on his plane. He flew more than twenty missions, most over the Verdun front, and had one confirmed downing of a German plane. The squadrons in which he served, the N-93 and N-85, acknowledged his bravery. His plane took bullets from German ground fire and fighter planes, but he always made it back to base. When the American Army Air Corps arrived in France that autumn, the other 266 American pilots in French service became the US 103rd Pursuit Squadron. Bullard was the only pilot excluded. He was also the only black.

Dr Gros took matters further when, using a dispute that Bullard had with a white colonial officer who refused to return his salute, he influenced the French to dismiss him from their air corps. Bullard was reassigned to his old regiment, the 170th Infantry, as a non-combatant for the last ten months of the war. In May 1918, the French government issued scrolls of gratitude to all American pilots who had flown for France. Dr Gros, delegated to make the presentation, gave scrolls to every flyer except Bullard.

Dr Gros was not alone in his opinion that African-Americans should not be sent into battle against white soldiers. US Army commanders prevented troops of the all-black 15th Infantry Regiment from serving at the front with the American Army. The Harlem Hellfighters, as they were called, were put under the command