Former Flying Ace Honored in Paris

Former Flying Ace Honored In Paris

   CINCINNATI (AP) - Robert Todd, a 84-year-old, World War I flying ace, says today's astronauts have it easy compared with dangers he and other early pilots faced.
   "Those astronaut fellows are in clover. The planes we had were nothing but kites. No heat, no brakes, no parachutes," the author of "Sopwith Camel Fighter Ace," published in 1978, said this week.
   He was to be among a group heroes honored in Paris, France, today as the world's first air war was commemorated.
   Todd, a native of Cincinnati who has lived in San Diego, Calif., since 1952, spent time in Germany as a prisoner of war after he crashed in France.
   He was an engineering student at the University of Cincinnati when President Woodrow Wilson visited the campus in 1917 and he enlisted in the service shortly after the United States declared war.
   He was assigned to the Signal Reserve Corps, later learned to fly and was credited with shooting down five German airplanes before crashing near Baupaume.
   German soldiers broke his foot pulling him out of his up-side-down craft.
   He said German pilots taunted the captured American pilots, "But the worst treatment was from German women. They would crowd past the guards, spit on us and try to kick and punch us. The soldiers themselves had their bellyful of war."
   "They were just like us — a bunch of kids trying to fight a war we didn't know anything about," he said.
   Todd was one of seven other American aces along with their counterparts from Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy and Hungary gathered together by a coalition of aviation groups for Armistice ceremonies.
   Todd went back to Europe in World War II to command a 5,000-man air-depot group but didn't fly because of his eyesight.
   He said that after the war he supervised disposal of "combat material" overseas, but resigned in disgust.
   "They were even disposing of typewriters and filing cabinets as 'combat material."' he said. "U.S. manufacturers had lobbied so those goods wouldn't be dumped on the market back home."

The Journal Tribune - Wednesday, November 11, 1981