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[[preprinted]]
THEODORE ELLIOT BOYD
BOX 113, ROUTE 1
ASHLAND CITY, TENNESSEE 37015
615-746-5450
[[/preprinted]]

February 21, 1983

Dear Pat:

I am sure you have seen movies about the aviation in World War 1. The general public seems to accept those movies as history. Maybe you have done so. But the movies I have seen obviously were not designed to teach history. They were designed to entertain. Therefore they dwell on the doings of one branch of the air service It employed what the British called "pursuit" planes. I like better the French word "chasse", hunters. They were specially designed to shoot down or at least chase away, enemy planes of another type/the two-seater "observation" planes. Each of the latter carried a pilot and an "observer". The observer occupied the rear cockpit and was in command when the plane was in the air. The pilot was in effect his chauffeur. Their job was to fly over enemy territory, to spy out what was going on there, and sometimes to bring back photographs of the terrain. The observer operated the camera. It was a clumsy affair weighing forty pounds or so, suspended over a window in the floor of the plane. It held a magazine of 12 glass photographic plates. Each plate was exposed by working a hand lever. During a run the observer kept one hand on the lever, holding a stopwatch in the other to time the interval between exposures. He could not comminicate [[sic]] by voice with anyone in the worlf [[sic]] outside. He could semd, [[sic]] but not receive, radio messages by Morse code. The only kinf ot [[sic]] message he could [[/strikethrough]] trvrive [[/strikethrough]] [[insert]] receive [[/insert]] was visual signals from the ground. 
   That was our only war in which officers of the ground forces often became involved in air fighting. In 1918 in the AEF we had hundred of junior officers, officially belonging to regiments of infantry or field artillery, who were flying on "detached duty" with observation squadrons.