Eugene Bullard and the American who had to cross an ocean to earn his wings

Eugene Jacques Bullard was the first African American combat pilot in history, but he never flew for the United States. Born in Columbus, Georgia, on October 9, 1895, the son of a former slave, Bullard had to cross an ocean to find a country that would let him near an airplane. He earned his wings with the French Air Service in May 1917, a full month after America entered World War I, because the U.S. military refused to commission Black pilots.

How Did a Kid from Georgia End Up Flying for France?

Bullard’s father, who had been enslaved, told young Eugene stories he’d heard from a German merchant sailor about France, a country where a man was judged by what he did, not by the color of his skin. Growing up under Jim Crow in the Deep South, those stories took root.

Eugene ran away from home at roughly eleven years old. He worked his way north doing odd jobs, sleeping in barns and rail yards. He traveled with a family of Romani horse traders, stowed away on a freighter, and by around 1912, at sixteen or seventeen, arrived in Europe.

He moved from Scotland to London to Paris, and discovered his father had been right. In France, nobody cared about his skin color. He found work as a boxer, fighting in gymnasiums and music halls, and for the first time in his life felt genuinely free.

From the Trenches of Verdun to the Cockpit

When World War I broke out in August 1914, Bullard walked into a French recruiting office and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. He was an American civilian with no obligation to fight. He volunteered to defend the country that had given him dignity.

Assigned to the 170th Infantry Regiment, he saw combat almost immediately at some of the war’s worst battlefields: Verdun, the Somme, and Artois. At Verdun, shrapnel wounds sent him to the hospital for months. France awarded him the Croix de Guerre for valor.

While recovering, Bullard learned that France’s air service, the Aéronautique Militaire, was accepting volunteers. He made a bet with a fellow soldier that he could learn to fly. That wager changed aviation history.

He trained at the French military aviation schools at Tours and Avord, and on May 5, 1917, earned his military pilot’s brevet. He was now a combat pilot, flying for a nation that was not his own because his own nation would not have him.

What Did Bullard Fly?

Bullard was assigned to Escadrille Spa 93 and later Spa 85. He flew the SPAD S.VII, a French fighter powered by a Hispano-Suiza engine with a synchronized machine gun firing through the propeller arc. He flew patrol missions over the front lines, engaging German scouts and two-seaters while dodging antiaircraft fire the pilots called “Archie.”

He painted a heart on the side of his SPAD. His personal motto: “All Blood Runs Red.”

Why Didn’t Bullard Fly for the United States?

When the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in force by late 1917, the Lafayette Flying Corps began pulling American volunteers out of French squadrons to fly under the Stars and Stripes. Officers went down the roster transferring pilot after pilot. When they reached Eugene Bullard’s name, they stopped.

The U.S. military did not commission Black officers as pilots. No explanation was given. No appeal was offered. France kept him flying until a disagreement with a French officer removed him from flight duty late in the war. But he had already made history.

Nightclub Owner, Spy, and Refugee

After the armistice, Bullard stayed in Paris. He opened a nightclub in Montmartre called L’Escadrille (The Squadron), which became one of the hottest jazz venues in the city. Louis Armstrong played there. Josephine Baker was a regular. Langston Hughes stopped in.

When World War II broke out, Bullard, then in his mid-forties, joined the French Resistance. He used his nightclub as a listening post, feeding intelligence about German officers who talked too freely to French military intelligence. When Germany occupied Paris in 1940, he fled south, was wounded again fighting with a French infantry unit near Orléans, and eventually escaped through Spain to New York on a refugee ship.

An Elevator Operator Who Once Owned the Sky

Bullard arrived in New York City in 1940 with almost nothing. The country of his birth offered him the same thing it had given him as a boy: nothing.

He worked as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center for years. A man who had flown combat over Verdun, run one of the most famous nightclubs in Paris, and spied for the Resistance spent his days pushing buttons in an elevator shaft. He did it without complaint.

France did not forget. In 1954, Bullard was invited back to Paris to help relight the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier beneath the Arc de Triomphe. He received the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration. When a reporter asked why he was crying at the ceremony, he said it was because France had always been good to him.

When Did America Finally Recognize Bullard?

Bullard died on October 12, 1961, in New York at age sixty-six. He was buried in the French War Veterans section of Flushing Cemetery in Queens, because even in death, it was France that claimed him.

It took the United States another thirty-three years. In 1994, the U.S. Air Force posthumously commissioned Eugene Bullard as a Second Lieutenant. His story is now told at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton and at the Smithsonian. Phil Keith’s biography, All Blood Runs Red, remains the most comprehensive account of his life.

Key Takeaways

Eugene Bullard was the first Black combat pilot in history, earning his French military pilot’s brevet on May 5, 1917, and flying SPAD fighters over the Western Front.
The U.S. military refused to let him fly because it would not commission Black officers as pilots, so France gave him the cockpit his own country denied him.
After two world wars, service in the French Foreign Legion, the French Air Service, and the French Resistance, Bullard returned to America and worked as an elevator operator.
France awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur; the United States did not recognize him until a posthumous Air Force commission in 1994, thirty-three years after his death.
Every time a door closed, Bullard found a window. He flew combat because someone bet him he couldn’t, and he was the kind of man who always took that bet.