Dear Duderank,
First off,
EVR didn't write his first autobiography-- but not to worry, had Rick lived to 100, he eventually would've have taken credit for everything, including the invention of the flying machine-- it was ghost-written by Laurence LaTourette Driggs. Sorry to hear that you think it excellent-- because it's really an awful lot of tripe, something akin my often cited (but never written) "Boys' Book on War in the Air"...
There was a Captain Cooper-- his photo appears in Wooley's "The Hat-in-the-Ring Gang"-- and, for all I know, he did make the film alluded to by EVR...
(And you should be reading Wooley and not Driggs!)
As for Merian C. Cooper, this guy was the True Gen!
For what he did on the morning of 26 September 1918, he deserves the MoH: his plane afire and thinking his observer dead, he prepares to jump-- the observer, however, was just knocked unconscious, and now comes to-- Cooper gets back down into the cockpit and flies it so as to put out the fire (sideslipping)-- his arms were so badly burnt that he actually landed the plane using his knees to move the joystick-- both men live, were made POWs, and Cooper wounds were never properly looked after...
He later tells of Oscar Gude, the well-known coward, getting his lights punched out by a British RAF officer when he (Gude) bragged of having downed one (or was it two? I really must check my Driggs!) Fokker before he landed on that German field and was made a prisoner...
Oh, yeah, if memory serves-- didn't Rick win some races before the war?
As for Franks, the man is a true gentleman, does his homework, and is worthy of our respect, even if he still gets some matters wrong (especially
Frank Luke)...
Yours truly,
Captain Lewis