When Germans, Americans, Italians or Belgians think of World War I aviation, the first names that come to their minds are usually their highest-scoring fighter pilots -- Manfred von Richthofen, Eddie Rickenbacker, Francesco Baracca and Willy Coppens. However, while the French acknowledge René Fonck as their ace of aces, it is for their second-ranking ace, Georges Guynemer, that they reserve the greater fame and affection. The difference is largely a matter of personal impression. Fonck, though the higher scorer, with 75 confirmed victories, was a self-serving braggart who rubbed his comrades the wrong way. He further tarnished his image postwar by failing in a 1926 transatlantic attempt and being suspected of collaboration with France’s German occupiers during World War II. Guynemer, in contrast, eschewed fame while devoting all his energy to fighting for his country from the earliest days of air-to-air combat. Perhaps just as important, he died in battle, achieving national martyrdom and an immortality that Fonck was denied -- partly because he had survived.

Born in Paris on December 24, 1894, Georges Marie Ludovic Jules Guynemer was a sickly child who studied at home until age 14, when he attended the Lycée de Compiègne. This was followed by Stanislas College, where his headmaster’s first report said he had “a willful character but is not particularly good at sports but shows promise at the College’s small bore rifle shooting competition.”

During a visit to the Panhard automobile factory, Guynemer acquired a lifelong interest in mechanics. In 1911 a friend of his father’s took him up for a 20-minute flight in a Farman airplane, and from then on Georges’ ambition was to fly. Focusing on his studies, he passed all his examinations in 1912 with highest honors, but his health failed again, and his parents took him to southern France. By the time he regained his strength, war had broken out in Europe.

Guynemer promptly applied for the air service, or Aviation Militaire, on August 3, 1914, but he did not pass the medical examination until the fourth attempt. Assigned to Pau aerodrome as a mechanic on November 23, Guynemer continued to press for flight training and finally succeeded. He earned his flying license on March 10, 1915, was promoted to corporal on May 8 and was assigned to Escadrille MS.3 at Vauciennes, near Villers-Cotteret, on June 8. He flew his first mission over the front two days later, and his observer, Private Jean Guerder, reported that the new pilot displayed no fear from either groundfire or the occasional rifle fire they encountered from passing German reconnaissance planes.

Equipped with Morane-Saulnier L two-seater parasol monoplanes when Guynemer joined it, MS.3 was in the process of transitioning from a reconnaissance to a fighter unit, under the aggressive leadership of Captain Antonin Félix Gabriel Brocard. On July 3, 1915, Brocard, armed with only a carbine, attacked an Albatros two-seater over Dreslincourt, killed its observer and brought it down. Among the many pilots inspired by that feat was Guynemer, who installed a machine gun mount behind the observer’s cockpit of his Morane-Saulnier L.

On July 19, Guynemer and Guerder encountered an Aviatik two-seater, and Guynemer promptly attacked, while Guerder blazed away as opportunity permitted. Ultimately the duo succeeded in shooting down the enemy plane between the lines, killing its crew. Both Guynemer and Guerder were awarded the Médaille Militaire for scoring MS.3’s second air-to-air victory.

A few day later, MS.3 began receiving more potent aircraft for aerial combat. Designed by Gustave Delage, the Nieuport 10 was a two-seater sesquiplane, with a single-spar lower wing of much narrower chord than the upper, braced by V-shaped interplane struts and powered by an 80-hp Clerget or Le Rhône 9B rotary engine. Nieuport pilots began installing a lightweight Lewis machine gun above the upper wing, on a mounting that allowed the weapon to be pulled down so the pilot could change its ammunition drum. Some aggressive units had the observer’s cockpit faired over, turning the reconnaissance plane into a single-seat fighter. In the summer of 1915, Nieuport tested a smaller single-seat version of the 10. Designated the Nieuport 11, it came to be popularly known as the Bébé (baby).

On August 28, Brocard shot down an enemy plane north of Senlis. His escadrille was fully reequipped with Nieuports on September 20 and officially redesignated N.3. On December 5, Sergeant Guynemer, flying a single-seat Nieuport 10, shot down an Aviatik over Bois de Carré. He downed an LVG five days later, and on the 14th he teamed with a two-seater Nieuport 10, crewed by Adjutant André Bucquet and Lieutenant Louis Pandevant, to bring down a Fokker monoplane over Hervilly.

Early in 1916, Guynemer received Nieuport 11 N836. On its fuselage he applied the legend Le Vieux Charles, a reference to Sergeant Charles Bonnard, a well-liked member of old MS.3 who had transferred to the Macedonian front. Guynemer was flying that Bébé on February 3, 1916, when he encountered an LVG near Roye. “I did not open fire until I was at 20 meters,” he later wrote. “Almost at once my adversary tumbled into a tailspin. I dived after him, continuing to fire my weapon. I plainly saw him fall in his own lines. That was all right. No doubt about him. I had my fifth. I was really in luck, for less than ten minutes later another plane, sharing the same lot, spun downward with the same grace, taking fire as it fell through the clouds.”

Guynemer drove down an LVG at Herbecourt on February 5, and one more on March 12. While engaging another LVG the next day, however, he was hit twice in the arm and wounded in the face and scalp by fragments from his windscreen. While recovering he received a permanent commission as sub-lieutenant on April 12.

By the time Guynemer rejoined N.3 in mid-1916, the escadrille was mainly equipped with the Nieuport 17, a somewhat enlarged version of the Bébé with a 110-hp Le Rhône engine and a synchronized .30-caliber Vickers machine gun firing through the propeller. On June 22, he teamed with Sergeant André Chainat to destroy an LVG for his 10th victory. On July 16, he took on three LVGs and seven Roland and Halberstadt fighters, surviving 86 hits on his Nieuport to emerge with credit for one of the two-seaters. He downed another LVG on the 28th, helped Lieutenant Alfred Heurteaux to down an enemy plane on August 4, added an Aviatik to his tally on August 17 and a Rumpler the next day.

On September 2, Guynemer received another new fighter, one in which he would become personally involved in more ways than one. In 1915 Swiss designer Marc Birkigt had designed a remarkably lightweight, water-cooled eight-cylinder engine, the 150-hp Hispano-Suiza 8A. One of the first airplane builders to take an interest in the new power plant was the Societé Anonyme Pour l’Aviation et ses Dérivés, or Spad. Early in the war, Spad’s chief designer, Louis Béchereau, had tried to solve the problem of firing a machine gun past the propeller arc by placing a gunner in a pulpit held by means of struts in front of the propeller and its 80-hp Le Rhône rotary engine. The Spad A2 proved to be a failure, but its basic airframe was sound. Its single-bay wing cellule, which featured intermediate struts to which the bracing wires were attached at midpoint, added strength and, by reducing vibration in the wires, reduced drag as well. Adapting that arrangement to the Hispano-Suiza 8A engine and a synchronized Vickers machine gun, Béchereau created the Spad 7.C1, or VII, which was ordered into production on May 10, 1916.

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