Charles Nungesser

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Charles Nungesser with his fiancee at Orly Airport (1923)

Charles Nungesser (born March 15, 1892 in Paris , † lost on May 8, 1927 in the Atlantic or in North America ) was a French fighter pilot of the First World War .

Childhood and youth

Nungesser had emigrated to South America at the age of 15 , where he had numerous adventures as a cowboy, boxer and car racing driver and also took flight lessons.

First World War

Outbreak of war

Before the outbreak of war, Nungesser had returned to France . He reported to the 2 e régiment de hussards (2nd hussar regiment), where he was awarded the Médaille militaire on the tenth day of the battle . He had managed to pass the enemy lines, shoot down some Prussian officers and return to his divisional command post with their Mors car and the planning documents found. The division commander referred to him as "Hussar on the Mors" and approved his request to be transferred to the French Air Force .

Use as a military aviator

Nungesser came to the Escadrille VB 106 in Dunkirk , where he was piloting a Voisin X 53 bombing flight. He also attacked enemy aircraft that he encountered. On July 30, 1915, he shot down a German Albatross that was on a test flight. For this act, Nungesser was awarded the Croix de guerre and transferred to the Escadrille de chasse N 65 in Nancy , which was equipped with Nieuport 11 “Bébé” fighter aircraft . After he had repeatedly ended hunting missions with daredevil flying tricks, he was sentenced to eight days' arrest. However, his punishment was suspended after he shot down a second Albatross on November 28, 1915.

Nungesser and his Nieuport 17 fighter plane

In February 1916 he was seriously injured while testing the prototype of a new fighter aircraft of the "Ponnier" type when it crashed while taking off. After he was released from the hospital on March 28th, he did not go on convalescence leave, but returned to his escadrille. He let himself be lifted in and out of the plane for combat missions.

Nungesser took part in the Battle of Verdun and achieved ten aerial victories by July 22, 1916, when he was relocated to the Somme . Here he had his airplane, a Nieuport 17 , painted for the first time with his typical insignia: a black heart, on it a skull with crossed bones and two candlesticks. Over the Somme he achieved nine more aerial victories by the end of 1916, including a triple kill on September 26th. He fought several duels with the German pilot Josef Jacobs . When the latter had to make an emergency landing after a load jam, Nungesser is said to have flown over him at a height of three meters and waved friendly without shooting at the defenseless enemy.

After his serious aviation accident and further combat wounds, his constitution remained weakened. He had to go to the hospital again, but negotiated his conditional release with the doctors - after every flight he had to go back to the hospital for further treatment. In May 1917 he flew with his Nieuport escort for a bomber formation, the Escadrille VB 116, in Dunkirk, which was stationed next to a hospital. By the end of 1917, he achieved nine more aerial victories.

Eventually his condition had improved so much that he came back to his Escadrille N 65. No sooner had he returned than he was seriously injured in a car accident in October 1917 in which his mechanic Roger Pochon was killed at the wheel. Nungesser was taken to the hospital again.

Nevertheless, he continued to fly in 1918 and scored more kills.

On August 15, 1918, he attacked various tethered balloons, achieving his 43rd and final aerial victory.

post war period

On the advice of the Undersecretary of State for Aviation, Nungesser founded a flight school in Orly , where the well-known aviator Hélène Boucher made her maiden flight. However, the flight school went bankrupt. Nungesser then went on a tour to the USA , where he presented his aerial combat tactics at 55 exhibition locations.

Atlantic flight

In 1927, Charles Nungesser and François Coli came together on a daring project. The hotel entrepreneur Raymond Orteig had offered the enormous sum of 25,000 US dollars as the price for the first Atlantic crossing by plane. Nungesser therefore planned to cross the Atlantic non-stop from Paris to New York together with Coli . The designer Pierre Levasseur developed the prototype PL 8, a double-decker with a Lorraine-Dietrich-12-Eb engine with 450 hp. Nungesser named the aircraft “ L'Oiseau Blanc ” (“White Bird”). In order not to put even more weight on the five-ton machine, which needed a runway of more than a kilometer to take off, Nungesser and Coli did without a radio.

On May 8th, the French newspaper “La Presse” prematurely reprinted the record success for May 9th.

After the plane was sighted one last time in Normandy near Étretat , it was lost. The plane appears to have flown over Ireland as a British naval officer noted the plane in his log book. It is believed that the machine did reach the American continent, but drifted north of the route and did not have enough fuel to orient itself on the St. Lawrence River and to reach Québec . Your altimeter could have been misaligned after passing through a low pressure area and your plane crashed on the coastal mountains of the US state of Maine .

Commemoration

Plaque on the monument in Étretat

The two French pilots Dieudonné Costes and Joseph Le Brix named their Bréguet 19 GR, with which they circumnavigated the world in 39 stages and a flight distance of 57,000 km, “Nungesser et Coli”.

The 2012 torn soccer stadium of FC Valenciennes bore his name.

At Étretat in Normandy, where the aircraft of the two planes was last sighted, the Nungesser and Coli memorial and a museum preserve the memory of the two planes today .

A French postage stamp of 0.40F from 1967 "Nungesser et Coli, 8 mai 1927", drawn by Clément Serveau and engraved by Claude Durrens (Y&T n ° 1523)

On July 25, 2015, Lieutenant Nungesser was sponsored for the 2014-2016 class of the French Officer Candidate School (EMIA). This vintage bears his name and a song was created in his honor.

Awards

literature

  • Arch Whitehouse: Aviator Aces 1914-1918 . Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1970, pp. 341-344.

Web links

Commons : Charles Nungesser  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The life data of Charles Nungesser (French)
  2. ↑ Markus Kirschbaum: High commitment. In: Jahrbuch für Westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 41 (2015), p. 400
  3. ↑ cf. http://www.herodote.net/histoire05090.htm Hérodote (French)
personal data
SURNAME Nungesser, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French fighter pilot in the First World War
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1927
Place of death Atlantic or North America