Charles D'Olive on Frank Luke

“I found the little farm, Murvaux Farm, over which Frank Luke flew from one balloon to another when he saw these troops in the street. When he burned the second balloon he came back across that farm shooting up these Heinies. One of the ground troops shot him. He landed four or five hundred yards down in a little slope.

“I found the farm and talked to the old French lady there who had seen the whole thing from her upstairs window. The farm houses are built like a U. The pigs, chickens, and the family all live in the round and the manure pile is in the middle. The house has a little sloped roof. She was upstairs and saw all this.

“When he landed the tail of his ship was pointed slightly toward the farm. He got out on the other side, sitting on the trailing edged of the wing, leaning up against the fuselage. He had been shot through the lung. When these German soldiers ran down there they went around the tail of the ship and he killed seven of them with his two forty-fives. He was an excellent forty-five hand gun shooter.

“Of course they killed him and the old lady buried him there. She showed me where she had buried him.
“He was quite a boy. I saw that devil one day get on a motorcycle without the sidecar and go down one of those straight roads like a bat out of hell. He turned loose of the handle bars and took two forty-fives and emptied them in those great elm trees that grow along these roads. As he’d go by on his motorcycle, Bam! Bam! Bam!, and the loads would be in each tree. That’s pretty good.

“If he had returned from his last flight he would have been court martialed for leaving his flight and going shooting a balloon. Instead they couldn’t quite figure out how they could court martial a guy after he was dead, so they gave him a Congressional Medal of Honor.

“If a man can be brave, he was the bravest man I ever saw. He’d burn a balloon and then turn around and chase the gunners away from the guns on the ground just for the hell of it. If the rest of us got a good crack at a balloon, it was in and then gone because the bullets were kind of thick. I never could burn one...”

--from AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES D’OLIVE (Cross & Cockade Journal, vol. 1, #1, Spring 1960; page 6)

Below: an aerial photo of Murvaux today, taken from approximately 1000' (330 meters), looking south-southwest.