Two North Carolinians with the RAF in World War I
By Henry E. Mattox
EDITOR’S NOTE: Henry E. Mattox retired front the U.S. Foreign Sendee in 1980 after a twenty-seven-
year career that included postings to Brazil, Egypt, England, France, Haiti, Nepal, and Portugal. He earned a
doctorate degree in American diplomatic history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986.
For the next fifteen years, he was a visiting professor at various colleges, including North Carolina Slate
University. Fie sewed as editor-in-chief of the online journal, American Diplomacy, from its creation in 1996
until 200 7. His publications include The Twilight of Amateur Diplomacy: The American Foreign
Service and its Senior Offices in the 1890s (1989); Army Football in 1945: Anatomy of a Championship
Season (1990); Chronology ofWorld Terrorism, 1901-2001 (2004); and A Chronology of United
States-Iraqi Relations, 1920-2006 (2007). He also contributed an article titled, " Chariots if Wrath': North
Carolinians Who Flew for France in World War I," to the North Carolina Historical Review in July 1 996.
By 1918 the carnage of four years of trench warfare on the Western Front in the Great
War had resulted in thin manpower reserves for most of the nations involved, Allies and
Central Powers alike. Notwithstanding the fact that the United States had entered the war
on the Allied side in 1917 and had set in motion mobilization and training efforts, by the
spring of 1918 Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF)1 depended heavily on personnel from its
colonies — and from the United States — to provide replacements for lost airmen. The fol¬
lowing account briefly sets forth the records of two aviators from North Carolina who fit
into that category: flying for the RAF although commissioned officers in the U.S. army,
and despite the fact that the U.S. Air Service had arrived and begun action in the air.
Before the United States entered the war, thousands of Americans made their way on
their own to Europe to serve the Allied cause. Several hundred of them entered the
French or British flying services, either directly as volunteers or, in the case of Americans
in the RAF, on detail. Additional thousands of American volunteers crossed the border
with Canada to sign up for military service. Approximately three hundred of these young
men received flight training in Canada, as well
as courses in the United States and in Great
Britain. Here we consider the all-too-short
careers of two of those aviators who hailed
from North Carolina, two young men who
fought in France on assignment to RAF squad¬
rons — not with either the American Air Service
or the French Lafayette Flying Corps.2
The two Tar Heels, who flew mainly dur¬
ing the closing months of the last year of the
war, were detailed to British squadrons even
though both held U.S. army commissions. One
of them, Lawrence Bennett Loughran of
Asheville, died in the summer of 1918 soon
after entering duty on the Western Front, shot
Dressed for aerial combat, Lt. Don R. Harris of
Charlotte poses beside his airplane in 1918. Image
courtesy of Dabney Johnson, Arden, N.C.
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