The Millionaires' Unit

We made a sort of compact

that if war came, we should go into aviation.

That was the life.

It is certainly great up there,

and you own the world when you get up alone

and can do whatever you want.

Have you ever had your wildest dreams come true?

In the summer of 1916, two college juniors from Yale

started an air militia in preparation

for America and entering World War I.

They were there first.

They were there in the beginning and everything that follows

flows from their early efforts.

As sons of some of the wealthiest and most prominent

families in the country, their exploits

were noticed by the press who dubbed them The Millionaires

Unit.

This was a group well-educated,

affluent young men who voluntarily took up

the challenge.

They didn't have to.

The men of the Yale Flying Club

had a sense of duty, honor, country.

They felt they were privileged and had an obligation to lead.

They determined to learn

to fly when aviation was still in its infancy,

and they aimed to convince the Navy of their fortitude

and resolve.

Through their initiative, these daring young aviators

became the first to fly for the United States in World War I.

Some of them making the ultimate sacrifice.

The gates of honor

opened to us, those lucky ones of us who are over here.

We need not fear that we're not prepared to die for no matter

what we have been in the last glorious moments,

we can die not as the ordinary man,

but fighting for the ideals we hold so sacred.

We were still pretty young

as I was 18, my brother, 16.

We went to Alaska and had some very good mountain

sheep and caribou hunting.

When we went into the interior by pack train,

the world was at peace.

We met on the trail one day a prospector,

and he told us the world was at war.

He was a little mixed up about who was fighting who,

but he knew there was a war on.

When we heard about that, we decided

to cut short our trip short and go home, which we did.

It was quite a shocking experience

to have it come at you that way.

There was just peace and then war, as far as we knew.

Frederick Trubee Davison.

Most of America was as unawares as Trubee Davison

of the tensions that threw Europe

into the most cataclysmic event yet known to mankind.

Trickling across the Atlantic came

news of the horrors of the first war of the Industrial Age,

fought with new technologies.

The machine gun, the tank, the airplane.

World War I would mark the end of the Age of Empire

and the destruction of decades of peaceful productivity

and cultural exchange.

The United States would eventually

be drawn in to the great war across the ocean, spearheaded

by the new field of naval aviation.

The courage and enterprise shown by these pioneer pilots

forever changed the character of the Navy

and the ways in which wars would be fought

and peace would be won.

A small group of college students

affected a large part of that change.

They were known as the First Yale Unit.

They formed the founding squadron of the Naval Air

Reserve, and in the years that followed

they helped lead military aviation through two world

wars, the Cold War, and played major roles in America's

ascendancy as the dominant power on the world

stage in the 20th century.

The sinking of the British liner Lusitania by a German u-boat,

taking the lives of 128 Americans,

was a shocking reminder to the United States

of the war on the other side of the Atlantic.

For young Frederick Trubee Davison,

it was a harbinger of what would consume his life

for the next four years--

stopping the German u-boat.

In the summer of 1915, after his freshman year

at Yale University, he accompanied

his father, Henry P. Davison, on an eye opening trip to Europe.

H.P. Davidson was the senior partner

of JP Morgan and Company.

As the most powerful bank in America,

Morgan and Company was in the unique position

to lead the sales of securities that

helped finance the British and French war effort.

This business trip entails some high stakes bargaining

as America was officially neutral when the war started,

and President Woodrow Wilson was up for re-election.

That was, indeed, in 1916.

He ran on a platform of, with the slogan,

he kept us out of war.

And he intended to continue to keep the US out of war.

So Trubee joined his father

on one of those trips, in part to see how his father was

working and to learn the ropes.

The young man accompanied his father

on a whirlwind of meetings and dinners

with the British prime minister and other senior officials.

He couldn't help but start thinking

that there was no way that Americans

would be able to ride it out.

That they would get involved and be drawn into the war.

Trubee saw an opportunity

where a young man could help with the war effort

and gain some experience.

He spent the rest of the summer driving ambulances

from the Paris train stations to the American hospital

and got a good hard look at the effects of war.

When Trubee Davidson

was returning after that summer of ambulance driving,

he was on a ship with Robert Bacon, one of the organizers

and financiers of the squadron of the aviators called

the Escadrille Lafayette.

And he discussed that effort to create an all-American Air

Force with the French.

And that implanted the idea in Trubee's mind

that maybe what he'd like to do is create his own little Air

Force in the event that the US should get into the war.

FREDERICK TRUBEE In 1915, I

at least saw enough of the fellows over there

to know that if we ever got into the war, where I personally

wanted to be was in the air service.

That put the bug in my Bonnet.

When I was back to college in the fall,

I picked up Bob Lovett and poured it in his ear.

We made a sort of compact that if war came,

we should go into aviation.

That was the life.

Perhaps the epitome of the Yale gentleman

was Trubee's classmate, Robert Lovett.

Composed and aloof, Lovett was voted

as the most brilliant, hardest working, and most thorough

gentleman at Yale.

But while Trubee had been driving ambulances

near the front, Bob had spent the summer

driving sports cars and motorcycles in the Swiss Alps.

When I look back

and I read about my grandfather and his Yale years,

it paints a picture of a very different man than I knew.

To read that he was the head of the prom,

that he was involved in the acting program at Yale,

these were surprising to me because these would indicate

to me that my grandfather was an extrovert and charming,

lively fellow who went out for a good time,

and this was not the grandfather I knew.

After their eventful summers,

both Trubee and Bob returned to Yale for their sophomore year,

and each set about to prove they had sand, grit, and spirit that

made them popular on campus.

I think there's

a certain amount of truth to the statement

that Yale was heavily social before the First World War.

Everybody at Yale wanted to be in a club,

wanted to be in a team, wanted to be

in one kind of organization or another.

And Trubee Davidson was one of the kind of people that

thrived at a place like Yale.

While still reflecting on his experience

with the victims of trench warfare,

Trubee found it difficult to focus on school,

and his thoughts turned repeatedly to aviation.

At the beginning of the war, airplanes

were still seen as the dominion of aristocrats

and wealthy sportsmen looking for adventure.

As aerial combat evolved, there was

romance in the idea of warrior knights of the air.

Jousting one on one.

A romance completely lacking in the trenches

of mechanized warfare.

But Trubee and his generation of friends

were also motivated by a sense of duty.

The idea that of those to whom much is given, much

is expected.

If the United States was going to war, they want to take part

and they wanted to fly.

They were highfalutin.

They aimed beyond their human capacity

to fulfill as any good rule should.

And they were based a lot on ethics and religion.

What a man did and did not do.

And it formed a kind of a behavioral code,

far more than it does now.

Yale had a obligatorily chapel attendance

every day of the week except Saturday.

This is a time when what has become almost

the Yale anthem became popular.

It's called "Bright College Years."

And the final lines in that are, so

let us strive that ever we may let