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My record is headed "Lt. Boyd.  Carnet de Vols."  In French "vol" may mean either "flight" or "theft".  So the same heading might be used for the dossier of a shoplifter.  But the first entry reads

"Jeudi... 11/4... avec Sergt. Gaujour ... Reconnaissance."

To an American 11/4 means the 4th of November.  To the more logical French it means the 11th of April.  Sergeant Gaujour was short, dark and jovial.  I think he enjoyed breaking me in.  Our Salmson had barely crossed into German territory when I heard shells cracking near by.  They left swirls of black smoke.  I don't know how the arrangement began, but German anti-aircraft shells gave off black smoke while the Allied shells gave off white.  So when a plane was so far away as to appear only as a dot, you could identify it as Allied or German from the color of the smokepuffs around it.  That was a great help to the chasse of both sides, guiding them to their prey.  Gaujour gave no sign that he had noticed those first shellbursts at all.He kept serenely on a straight course toward the German hinterland.  The next anti-aircraft volley came closer, and the bursts were louder.  But again Gaujour seemed not to have noticed it.  He flew straight ahead until the next volley was almost due.  Then he turned the nose of the plane abruptly upward.  In our vertical climb the motor may have stalled or Gaujour shut it off, I don't know which.  But the plane began falling out of control, tumbling in the air like a dead leaf.  I had heard the shells bursting close by just as we started to fall, so I naturally thought we had been fatally hit.  Perhaps the German gunners thought so too.  But after we had fallen a few hundred feet Gaujour switched the motor on again and buzzed off in a changed direction.  The Archies had to start adjusting on us all over again.  That sort of performance went on during the hour or more that we spent on the German side of the lines.  Gaujour varied his evasive maneuvers.

After that I don't remember ever flying over German territory without being shot at.  On some missions we flew too low for the anti-aircraft artillery, but that brought us within range of machine guns or rifles from the ground.  We learned not to worry much about the Archies, though occasionally they brought down a plane.  (They got one of the 88th's after I had left it). Shell fragments or bullets hitting a plane most often did it no harm, since so much of the surface was simply canvas. Each time a plane returned from a mission it was inspected for holes.  Whenever any were found they were covered with