The Arizona Dragon Slayer by Keona Smith Strickland. A simple telegram plunged America into the

Great War. The Zimmerman telegram, intercepted by American intelligence in April 1917,

revealed Germany's efforts to encourage Mexico to invade the United States.

For a tow-headed kid from Arizona named Frank Luke Jr. and other citizens of the states along the Mexican border,

the threat of invasion was real and personal.

Anti-German sentiment swept the nation that spring.

Sourkraut became victory cabbage, the precursor to Freedom Fries,

and suspicion fell on families of German descent, such as the Luke's.

The immigrant son, Frank Luke Jr., had a lot to prove when he joined the army a few months later.

By the time Luke completed flight training, received his commission, and joined the 27th

Aeros Squadron in France in July 1918, the surge of American forces onto the Western

Front promised a swift end of the war, and the life expectancy of a pursuit pilot at the

front was just three weeks. If Frank Luke was going to prove anything, he needed to work fast.

In just a few months, he would demonstrate how well he could work under pressure, becoming one of the

most decorated flyers of the First World War.

Friends and family in Phoenix, Arizona, remember Frank Luke Jr. as a fast-talking, confident, impulsive young man.

The army experienced this side of Frank early on. Swamped with volunteers, they did not immediately respond

to his enlistment application. So Frank wrote to the adjutant's office to pester them for a report

date. He received his reply and reported for duty on the 29th of September 1917. In those early days of aviation, pilots took to the air in boxes of thin wood and lacquered canvas.

Seated behind an engine, belching smoke and splattering oil, pilots flew with a gas tank wedged under one arm,

hand-pumping fuel as they kept a wary eye on their gauges. Even a small vibration could cause the fragile aircraft to shake itself apart in mid-air.

The new SPAD-13 pursuit planes were so unreliable that they posed a serious hazard to their

...