Goodwin, George Waite

Born July 31, 1895, in Glen Falls, New York. Son of Scott DuMont and Sarah Waite Goodwin. Home, Albany, New York. Educated Phillips Academy, Andover; Yale University, Class of 1916; and Harvard Law School, Class of 1919. Plattsburg, 1916, Marksman. Joined American Field Service, June 25, 1917; attached Section Sixty-nine until October 24, 1917. Enlisted U. S. Aviation, November 5; trained Tours, Saint-Maixent, Gondrecourt, and Châteauroux. Commissioned Second Lieutenant, May 15, 1918. Killed in aeroplane accident, Châteauroux, July 15, 1918. Buried American, Cemetery, Châteauroux, Indre. Body transferred to Rural Cemetery, Albany, New York.

"FIRST or last the war will come very close to most of us, and we wouldn't have it otherwise. My greatest horror would be to have to occupy a place of safety. We who can take an active part are fortunate. If anything should happen to me I would call my family foolish if they were n't glad rather than sad that I had done so well."

George Waite Goodwin wrote this from France to cheer and comfort a girl friend who had lost her husband in the war ten days after her marriage, little thinking perhaps the solace it was to be to his family in the event of his own not-distant death. His attitude toward all the perplexing problems of life was like this,---simple, straightforward, and clear-seeing. "Certainly one could hunt through the histories from the beginning and never find a better time to live or better cause to die for." In the light of his own high-minded patriotism it was not difficult for his family to be courageous even when, a month later, there came the news that he had been killed. It happened on the morning of July 15, 1918, at Châteauroux. One of his friends of school and college days, Lieutenant Norman C. Fitts, who was in training with him at the time, describes the accident with the dramatic brevity of aviators: "There is not much to tell of it. A collision at one hundred meters height in which neither he nor the man who ran into him saw the other until too late." He was buried next day with full military honors in the beautiful American Cemetery of Châteauroux.

Goodwin graduated with honors from Andover in 1912, and, after four happy, conscientious years, from Yale. He spent a year at the Harvard Law School, but interrupted his course to enter the American Field Service on June 25, 1917. He was sent out to Section Sixty-nine and spent the summer near Verdun, evacuating wounded from the famous posts of Bras and Vacherauville. In October he enlisted in the American Air Service. Entering immediately upon his period of apprenticeship he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant on May 15, 1918, and had advanced so rapidly in training that in the words of Lieutenant Fitts, "he promised to be the first to get through." For his work at the French aviation school of Châteauroux, upon recommendation of the commander, he received the medal of the Ligue Aéronautique de France as one of the most meritorious pupils.

He had a keen, interested way of looking at events and persons, and was often picturesque in expressing what he saw. In one letter written in the Ambulance service he described how he watched the front line in action through holes in the cloth camouflage by the roadside, and compared himself to a small boy peering through a rip in the tent of "a circus of which I could see only enough to whet my curiosity." The charm of his frank, open personality won friends for him everywhere, one of whom wrote, "He could n't help but be popular with us and he was easily that one of us who was best liked by the French officers and instructors at the school." While at a camp near Tours, shortly after he had enlisted in aviation, he tells in his diary of walking home from Tours with the cool evening breeze blowing against his face and the countryside soft and mellow in the twilight, and of thinking out his duty in regard to the war. That night he wrote, "It is quite fixed now in my mind that if ever I return to the front I will go up against the Germans, no matter how many they may be." It was his tragedy, like that of many others, never to have had the opportunity of meeting the enemy face to face, but a circumstance so trivial cannot dim the luster of his courage, nor the glory of his death.

• Tribute from Memorial Volume of the American Field Service, 1921