May 19th is the birthday of Frank Luke Jr. (born, 1897, died September 29, 1918). He was an Army Air Service fighter pilot of World War I, who was second only to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker in aerial victory scores. (18 versus Rickenbacker's 26.) Frank Luke was the first aviator to receive the Medal of Honor. Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, is named after him. (Luke AFB is one of the locales in my novel "Survivors".) My grandfather, Ernest E. Rawles (also born in 1897) was a friend and mountain climbing partner of Frank Luke in Arizona, before he left for France.
An observation: The generation that fought the Second World War is now often called The Greatest Generation. These were mostly men who were born between 1910 and 1924. But I believe that an even a greater generation was of those men who were born between 1880 and 1905. They were born in the days of the horse and buggy and the telegraph. But many of them lived long enough to die in the era of jet aircraft, television, sturmgewehr, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, early computers, and moon landings. Some of these men fought in both World Wars--often serving as junior officers in WWI and then as senior officers in WWII. In my estimation it is the capacity to adapt to rapid change that in part defines truly great men. This generation included both visionaries and men of action like Arthur Pink, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Joseph Schumpeter, Jimmy Doolittle, George Patton, William J. Donovan, Raymond Spruance, Charles Lockwood, Hyman G. Rickover (America's longest-serving military man,) Harry Day, Jimmy Buckley, and Ernest Hemingway. Sadly, a few of them like Frank Luke died too young too reach their full potential.