Quentin Roosevelt (1897-1918) « There’s one good...

Quentin Roosevelt (1897-1918)
« There’s one good thing about going to the front. I shall be so busy worrying about the safety of my own neck that I shan’t have time to worry about the way the war is going. …I owe it to the family – to father, and especially to Arch and Ted, who are out there already and facing the dangers of it. »

— Quentin to his mother, Edith Roosevelt, January 1918

Quentin was the youngest, and only one of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons to die in combat in World War I. He had attended a summer Plattsburg Training Camp with two of his brothers. Enthralled with airplanes since childhood, he left Harvard as a sophomore to join the Canadian Aviation Corps and then, three months after the U.S. entered the war, enlisted as a Private First Class in the Aviation Section, Signal Corps. He trained at a Long Island air field (later named Roosevelt Field in his honor) and then was promoted to First Lieutenant and sailed to France late July 1917. He was first assigned to headquarters of the Air Service in Paris, and then detailed to the Third Aviation Instruction Center at Issoudun to train pilots. To improve his skills he attended the Aerial Gunnery School at Cazaux in February, continued work as an instructor, and was assigned in June to set up a training base as a supply officer for the 95th Aero Squadron, First Pursuit Group. On Bastille Day, July 14, 1918, he was part of an aerial engagement, flying out of his base near Chateau-Thierry at the start of the Second Battle of the Marne – the drive by the Germans to break the stalemate and advance. Quentin’s group was on patrol and encountered a German formation out to strafe Allied troops in trenches and marching on the roads. The groups engaged in a dogfight and Quentin was shot down behind enemy lines and buried with full honors by the Germans who regarded him as “a gallant opponent.”

Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, credited with the most air kills in the war, characterized as “Indian warfare” to break up the German formations. Rickenbacker wrote of Quentin :

« He was reckless to such a degree that his commanding officers need to caution him repeatedly… His bravery was so notorious that we all knew he would either achieve some great spectacular success or be killed in the attempt… But Quentin would merely laugh away all serious advice. His very next flight over enemy lines would involve him in a fresh predicament from which pure luck on more than a few occasions extricated him. »

Surviving a direct hit was unlikely in these fragile machines. Indeed, while Congress had authorized funding for 5,000 American-built planes, few had been built and General Pershing purchased French machines, the Nieuport 28. Quentin had praised them in a letter home in December 1917 :

« These little fast machines are delightful. You feel so at home in them, for there is just room in the cockpit for you and your controls, and not an inch more. And they’re so quick to act. It’s not like piloting a lumbering Curtiss, for you could do two loops in a Nieuport in the time it takes a Curtiss to do one. »

His father learned officially of his son’s death on July 17. General Pershing wrote to him :
« Quentin died as he lived and served, nobly and unselfishly ; in the full strength and vigor of his youth, fighting the enemy in clean combat. You may well be proud of your gift to the nation in his supreme sacrifice. »
The former president grieved the loss of his youngest, writing to a friend, « Since Quentin’s death, the world seems to have shut down upon me. »

He tried to console himself with its larger meaning, writing to his son Kermit :
« Quentin’s death has had a most extraor-dinary effect on this nation ; it has served as text for the newspapers in literally every part of the land ; it seemed to visualize the war whereas before it had seemed misty or unreal. The gallant boy has taken his place with young Shaw and young Lowell of the Civil War.” But Roosevelt was devastated by his loss, as he wrote to daughter Ethel : “There is no use making believe that his death is other than a terrible and irretrievable calamity ; nothing atones for it. »
Teddy Roosevelt died six months later at age 60, the death of his youngest son too hard a burden for a heart weakened by disease, an arduous trip to the Amazon a few years earlier, and a lifetime of strenuous activity and strong emotions.