Lieutenant Paul Baer . . . Will Help Poland Win Liberty

LIEUTENANT PAUL BAER, FORT WAYNE BOY, FIRST AMERICAN ACE, WILL HELP POLAND WIN LIBERTY

   Lieut. Paul Baer, Fort Wayne boy, son of Mrs. Emma Dyer, first of American flyers to be designated as an "ace" in the late world war, has decided to form an air squadron for service with the Polish army in that country's fight against the Russian bolsheviki.
   Last spring the American flyer visited his mother in this city and was tendered a warm reception by the people of Fort Wayne, He left shortly afterward for the east, and has spent much of the time in New York, where he is prominent as a member of the American Flying club.
   The following is an advertisement which Lieutenant Baer has inserted in New York newspapers:

   WANTED—For service somewhere in Poland and along the Russian frontier, fifteen American flyers who will leave at once to help fight the world's battle against the bolsheviki. Address Lieut. Paul Baer, American Flying club, No. 11 East Thirty-eighth street, New York city.

   Noting the decision of the Fort Wayne flyer to organize a squadron of flyers to go to the assistance of Poland's army, Jane Dixon, New York newspaper woman, writes as follows in the New York Telegram:

   Lieut. Paul Baer, born and bred in America, and brought to fruition on those battlefields of Europe where the blood of the brave surged and spilled in a crimson tide that should wipe out for all time the trail of the spiked helmet.
   Major Paul Baer, of the Polish Flying corps, traveling the trackless waste of the skies, plane singing the siren song of who knows what strange adventure, heart singing the matchless melody of youth and the conquests thereof.
   Paul Baer, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U. S. A., watchful, waiting, poised to strike where the shaggy head of anarchism bares its hunger pointed fangs and the red tongue of bolshevism licks its parched lips in anticipation of crime and chaos to be.
   Here we have, in that matchless setting of modern warfare, beside which all trappings of the past fade from insignificance—the battle plane—a real present day soldier of fortune.

Challenger of Chance.

   And, by calling Paul Baer a modern soldier of fortune, I am paying him the very highest compliment a mere workaday worker can give to a challenger of chance.
   A soldier of fortune is not what the name might falsely imply—a cloven hoofed creature crawling on the ground looking to connect with a few miserable, unearned dollars.
   A soldier of fortune, as we know him to-day, is of quite another cast. He is a man who dares and does to the limit of human possibilities, counting his life but a pawn in the gigantic chess game of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
   Once upon a time I asked a man by name Sam Dreben, sometimes called "The Fighting Jew," and one of the most picturesque "bayonet busters" the Texas border ever knew, to give me the definition of a soldier of fortune.
   "A soldier of fortune," opined Sam, gazing through the amber of his Three Roses and rubbing his close-cropped head with fingers trained to the feel of a thousand triggers, "a soldier of fortune is a bird who fights where he is paid to fight, or where the fighting is good."
   Sam ought to know. He is a veteran of all of the nine hundred and nine Mexican revolutions, not to mention a few dozen jams in South America and a little fracas of Boxer fame over in China. Moreover, he belongs strictly to the second class of his definition—the bird who fights wherever the fighting is goo.

Fight Where Fighting Is Good.

   And that, gentle reader, is exactly the class which our brilliant d'Artagnan of the air, Lieut. Paul Baer, has elected to join.
   "What gave me the notion to go over and help out Poland?" he asked. Smiling his quiet smile and strumming his fingers to the tune of "The Long, Long Trail," a boy with the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip and the silver of wings embroidered on his chest, was drumming softly on the club piano.
   "Oh, I don't know. I guess because they need us so deucedly bad over there. Some one has to help out, you know, or we'll be overrun by that ragamuffin outfit, the bolsheviki.
   "I think, as Americans, we pretty well owe it to Poland to do our bit. They are fighting the world's battle to-day, those brave people. And they're fighting on empty stomachs, too, without food, clothes or any of the things that help keep up a soldier's morale.
   "They are brave fellows, those Poles. A Polish soldier knows if he is wounded there is not one chance in a million for him unless he happens to fall near a line of transportation. Medical supplies are so scarce they are practically nil. A wounded man must die of gangrene for want of a dash of good old iodine.
   "Transportation facilities from the Polish front to some place where the men can get medical attention are almost entirely lacking. There are only a few ambulances, a few hospitals, a pitiable shortage of Red Cross supplies and workers."
   "And the remedy?" I questioned.
   "Credit," came the concise answer. "What the Polish army needs is credit from America. They will pay it back richly. Poland is a country of vast undeveloped wealth. It embraces within its borders 200,000 square acres.
   "All the Polish people need is freedom and an opportunity to develop their country without interference."

Will Do His "Bit."

   "And you think you can help them win this precious immunity?" I asked.
   Lieut. Paul Baer broke into one of his quiet smiles. "I can do my bit," he parried. Then he confided to me something of his purpose.
   "I am going to take fifteen trained American flyers—pilots and observers—over as volunteers in the Polish army," he explained. "Our outfit will be known as the Pulaski squadron, after the famous Polish general who distinguished himself in Washington's army. Thus we will be paying back an old and honorable debt.
   "I am authorized by Paderewski to organize this unit. We will leave in about a month, go straight to headquarters, where we will be commissioned officers in the Polish army and will be sent immediately to the front.
   "It is the hope of Polish military authorities high in command that we will be able to bring their air service somewhere near the standard maintained by Germany. It might interest you to know that Germany is at least two years ahead of the world in her air service, in everything pertaining to a plane from production to improvements and usage.
   "Many of the bolshevist leaders are Bosches who have left their own army and are wearing the Russian uniform. We must put down this deadly menace to the glory of the victory we have so recently won. Our men will be used as instructors, and, of course, will do some flying on the front."

A Sporting Chance.

   "Isn't it a pretty dangerous business," I suggested, "arguing with the bolsheviki? It would be terrible to fall into the hands of that hateful mob."
   And herein speaks the soldier of fortune. Here throbs the heart of adventure. Here beats the blood of youth.
   "That," chuckled Lieut. Paul Baer, "is the sporting chance. It wouldn't be a game without a hazard."
"Your fifteen tried men and true understand the chance?" I persisted.
   "You bet they understand the chance. They know living is going to be mighty tough. That is why I am taking only fellows who have been up against the war game. They know all about what is in store for them if they are captured by the reds. It is common knowledge that the bolsheviki maintain a regular 'torture battalion,' which practices every kind of mediaeval [sic] cruelty upon prisoners. I believe it is made up largely of Chinese. Those quitters haven't the courage to do the dirty work themselves. It's a good gamble either you get away with it or you don't."
   And so they go, the fifteen tried and true, to help keep the torch in the hand of universal liberty, trimmed and burning.
   Lieut. Paul Baer, late of the A. E. F., will be in command of the Pulaski squadron, with the rank of major.
   Let me sketch this middle west d'Artagnan briefly for you. A sturdy lad, built close to the ground, right square as to feature, especially in the region of the jaw, blue of eyes as the arch of an Indiana sky on a balmy June morning, pink of cheek like an Indiana pippin, brown haired, strong handed, straight in limb and look.
   Quiet, too, he is retiring to the point of bashfulness. In the course of procuring the afore written facts of the expidition [sic] for freedom I asked some extra hundred questions. I learned that Lieutenant Baer was the first of the American aces, likewise the first American to receive the D. S. C.
   At the outbreak of war in Europe Paul Baer, a salesman in the employ of the Cadillac Motor Car company, Detroit, Michigan, donned his hat, slipped into his topcoat, and caught the first outgoing steamer for France.
   He was barely twenty-two. Soldiering, it seems, was born in the boy. He enlisted in the French aviation service, was transferred to the Lafayette Escadrille in January, 1918, and in May of the same year was shot down by a German plane in a battle over the Somme sector. Baer fell 12,000 feet, landing in a treetop behind the German lines. He was badly smashed, was taken prisoner, and spent the rest of the war days fretting and fuming in enemy prison camps.
   "I owe my life to that tree," he says. And that is as much as he will elaborate on the great adventure.
   It is a far call from Fort Wayne, Ind., the town of young Baer's birth, to a battle front somewhere on the Polish-Russian frontier. But youth will be served. A soldier of fortune is born, not made. Home and distance and danger are lost in the call to conquest.

Blot on Fair Fame.

   American flyers, American money, French and British planes. What a pity it cannot be American planes! What a blot on the fair fame of American production, American ingenuity, American patriotism, that the brave must go elsewhere for the wings on which they fly to glory!
   "I want the Pulaski squadron to be a free gift of the United States to Poland, the country which gave so many good fighters to the A. E. F. We are enlisting for the duration of the war. Some big men are behind us, but we hope to have the united support of every liberty loving American."
   "And if you are captured, if your plane comes down somewhere behind the lines of the bolsheviki?" I asked, wondering at the eager note in the young voice, the unquenchable fires of hope dancing in the deep blue eyes as they threw their search-lights out across far fields of adventure.
   "Well"—with the true middle west drawl—"I suppose if a fellow comes down on the wrong side of the game he is out of luck, that's all."
   An American automobile salesman from Indiana, with his fearless fifteen, flying the flag of right somewhere over the frontier of Red Russia.
   Fortune is, indeed, a whimsical jade.

Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette - Sunday, November 23, 1919