Recalling an American hero

The Great War had been over nine days when Hobey Baker took off in his Spad airplane to explore some of the territory the Allies had seized back from the Germans. “On the way home my engine suddenly went dead, and I had to land on the side of a hill only ten kilometers from Metz,” he wrote in a letter to his father. “Had my engine stopped the same way any time during my work over the lines when…