Eddie Rickenbacker

Eddie Rickenbacker came to the war from the race track, not from a military academy. He drove cars for a living in Columbus and then learned to fly. By the end of 1918 he commanded the 94th Aero Squadron with twenty-six credited aerial victories — the top American ace of the war by the Army's count.

The work was patrols over the Western Front, balloons, and the short, ugly fights that decided who came home. He took the Medal of Honor for an action against enemy aircraft. The citation sits in the official MoH record rather than in newspaper invention. This page will use that citation and the Air Service score. It will not add kills a later memoir rounded up.

He survived the war and lived a long public life afterward — airlines, a later Pacific ordeal, a name that outgrew the squadron. Those years belong to other records. This register lists him for the AEF file: a squadron commander who flew, fought, and left a documented score the Air Service put in its books. He died in Zürich on July 23, 1973. He is not missing. This page will not invent an MIA line to make an ace look unfinished.

He was born in Columbus, Ohio, on October 8, 1890. The photograph is a wartime likeness. The register keeps a race driver who learned the front the hard way and a medal the Army wrote down — not a cartoon of the hat and the scarf. A later public life is not a second citation. The 94th's score and the medal text are the file this page will keep.