<text id=00he0211><title>New Aircraft for the 1st</title>
<history>US Air Force: Events History</history>
<article><hdr>New Aircraft for the 1st</hdr><body>
<p>On 31 March Congress enacted legislation to correct some urgent deficiencies in military materiel, and part of the $500,000 allotted to the Aviation Section was used to buy some new equipment for the 1st. On 20 April the squadron was ordered back to Columbus to take charge of their new aircraft. By then, they were down to two JN-3s in commission, and those were flown to Columbus and junked. To replace them, the 1st received four Curtiss N-8 machines, which turned out to be equally unsuited to the Mexican theater of operations. Hardly a year later, the four Curtiss aircraft were condemned as unfit. Seven pilots had evaluated them officially, and reported that they would not fly them except in an extreme military emergency .
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<p>The 1st stayed on duty with Pershing until 15 August 1916, and then moved back to Columbus, where they were stationed when the unit was called to France in August 1917.
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<p>The squadron's experiences in Mexico had been as wild and turbulent as the weather conditions they flew in, but the lessons that were learned paid off in an appreciation that aircraft had to be designed to meet the requirements of military forces in the field. The campaign is often viewed as a comic-opera war, with daredevil fliers, hair-raising flights and splintering crashes that killed nobody. But Villa was never captured, and it was in reality a guerrilla war that the US lost, a history that was destined to be repeated a half-century later.
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<p>General Pershing, the cavalryman with some disdain for airplanes, praised the men by saying that they had "...too often risked their lives in old and often useless machines which they have patched up and worked over in an effort to do their share of the duty this expedition has been called upon to perform." He called the officers devoted and fearless, and when Christmas 1916 rolled around 'Black Jack' Pershing sent a message to Captain Dodd, then commanding the 1st: "...kindly extend my warmest thanks to your command for the faithful and efficient service it has performed as a part of this expedition."
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<p>It must have been a source of some official embarrassment that the Mexican air effort was so pathetic.
