Gregory Vail grew up listening to his father's war stories, watching him struggle with a prosthetic leg and agonizing phantom pain, hearing his anguished screams in the dark of sleepless nights. For 64 years after World War I, 1st Lt. William H. Vail lived with the consequences of 15 minutes of aerial combat over France.
On Nov. 6, 1918, the 95th Aero Squadron pilot voluntarily engaged nine German Fokker D.VII fighters alone and saved the life of a fellow aviator. Vail’s adversaries peppered his Spad XIII No. 7 with upwards of 150 rounds of machine gun bullets, one or more striking his left leg below the knee, shattering it. He crashed into a farm field and survived only because the soft mud cushioned his impact and enveloped him in an earthen scab that kept him from bleeding to death.
His commanders recommended him for both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor. He received the DSC and later the Silver Star and the Purple Heart. The Medal of Honor recommendation vanished into Army bureaucracy and was never seen by Gen. John J. Pershing for adjudication.
Now, 108 years later, William Vail's only son is working to finally secure the nation's highest military honor for his father's actions.
"I always felt I needed to redeem him," Greg, 75, told Military.com. "He sacrificed over and over again for other people, and me. All these extraordinary things he did, I need to redeem him and thank him."
Gregory Vail
Greg is likely one of the youngest of the handful of surviving direct offspring of a World War I veteran. His father was 53 when Greg was born in 1950.
"When I tell people I'm the son of a World War I fighter pilot, they say, 'You mean the grandson?' I say no, I'm the son," Greg said.
Greg graduated with honors in history from Stanford University in 1973, where he studied under renowned historian Gordon A. Craig. He wanted to write his senior thesis about his father's pursuit pilot days, but Craig dissuaded him, saying many others had written such chronicles.
Instead, Greg became an unintended expert on German zeppelins bombing London during the Great War. He later earned a master's degree in landscape architecture and spent four decades in land planning and community development before turning to his father's story.
"I was a witness to and lived for over 30 years with a veteran of that long-ago era, who did one thing that affected everything else, still reverberating today.” Vail said. “Because I was a first-hand witness to my father’s life and his history, recording and getting the story out there is important for posterity.”
William “Bill” Vail
William Henry Heegaard Vail, born in 1897, first saw an airplane in 1911 at a Chicago air show and became fascinated with aviation. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, he knew he would be drafted and saw what was happening in the trenches of France. Attrition and mud and horrendous death, or the worse purgatory of mutilation from wounds, mustard gas and disease.
"He wanted to serve his country, but he pondered whether there was something that would avoid the horrendous likely consequences of the trenches," Greg said. "He landed on the fledgling Air Service, a subdivision of the Army Signal Corps, which was then a small part of the military."
William Vail understood the average lifespan of a pursuit pilot after arriving at the front was six weeks. The planes were wooden crates covered in cloth that ripped off in flight. Engines failed constantly. No parachutes. No radios. Few instruments.
"His calculation was he would come out of the war in one piece or not at all," Greg said. "He was dead wrong. He came out alive and broken."
Before reaching the front, William Vail reportedly accumulated approximately 1,000 flying hours ferrying aircraft from factories to airfields. He hated the relative safety of ferry duty and fought constantly to get into combat.
He finally arrived at the 95th Aero Squadron at Rembercourt Aerodrome in late September 1918, just as the Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives kicked off.
The weather was terrible in October. Pilots spent more time in tents and barracks than flying. When they did go up, most sorties were inconsequential. Numerous engine failures forced landings that William Vail wrote about "almost lightheartedly."
By Nov. 6, he had logged 17 hours and 15 minutes of flying time in 21 sorties with the 95th. It was a short period that would have significant consequences.
15 Minutes of Terror
The afternoon of Nov. 6, 1918, William Vail and 1st Lt. Josiah Pegues volunteered for a patrol over enemy lines near Stenay and Martincourt to locate German positions. Vail's assigned Spad XIII No. 8 was out of commission, so he borrowed another aircraft, Spad No. 7. He did not have to put himself in harm's way that day. But he did.
As they flew north along the Meuse River, the two pilots spotted a German Hannover observation plane and dove after it. Focused on their target, neither initially saw the nine Fokker D.VII fighters from Jasta 19 lurking in the clouds above, flying in two formations of four and five aircraft.
Vail saw them first. He desperately tried to alert Pegues, wiggling his wings, doing everything possible to warn him as there were no radios in those primitive aircraft. Pegues, intent on the observation plane, didn't see the danger.
"I even fired a few bursts as near as I dared toward Pegues' ship, but to no avail in those few seconds," William Vail wrote in a September 1970 letter to historian Charles Woolley, the namesake only son of William Vail’s fellow aviator.
William Vail realized his options. He could accompany Pegues and let the Germans strike them both from above; put his nose down and retreat with every ounce of speed in his Spad; or pull up and meet nine down-diving enemy planes head on.
"This latter I did," he wrote.
"He made a last-second decision to take them on solo," Greg said. "He realized later it was foolish. As historian Woolley later wrote, “Odds of nine to one were not odds. They were a death sentence.”
The battle was a frenzy. One after another, the German aviators pulled alongside William Vail's Spad as if it were standing still. He could see his adversaries close up. He shot at anything that passed in front of his machine gun ring sight and was credited with downing one Fokker.
The remaining eight turned their collective fire on him. Approximately 150 rounds of explosive bullets shredded his aircraft. The rounds cut his control wires. He expected the wings to drop off any second. One round hit a vital part of his motor, and it stopped with a jerk.
One or more of the bullets tore through his leg.
"The foot simply dropped off the rudder bar as the burst of machine gun fire tore out the bones in my leg below the left knee," William Vail wrote to Woolley.
Still conscious, he tried to control his disintegrating aircraft with his remaining right while remaining intently focused on evading the Germans firing at him.
"Oh, what a terrible crash due to my unawareness of the earth's closeness until the last second," he wrote. "I pulled up but it was too late, and I went into the earth in practically a vertical dive."
The impact slammed his face into the leather-covered wooden dashboard, crushing his forehead into shards. The wooden propeller clipped the ground, splintered and flipped the plane onto its back, collapsing the wings and wrapping support wires around his neck.
Trapped upside down, his shattered skull pressed into the mud, he was suffocating. With enormous effort, he managed to turn his head just enough to breathe. He dislocated both shoulders trying to free himself.
"Having no engine power and the soft mud of France there in the Argonne saved me from death," William Vail wrote.
The mud that he had tried to avoid by joining the Air Service had become an "earthen scab" that kept him from bleeding out.
American soldiers from the 89th Division's 355th Infantry had witnessed the aerial battle from below. Major Dana Wright and several soldiers approached the crumpled wreck while still under German artillery fire and strafing.
They turned the ruined aircraft upright, found a piece of the broken wooden propeller to use as a splint for Vail's destroyed leg, wrapped him in a torn cockpit blanket and carried him across the cratered, muddy field to a first aid station in Luzy-St. Martin. The trek of 530 meters took an hour and a half as they stopped repeatedly to take cover from enemy fire.
Pegues returned to Rembercourt unaware of what had happened.
Almost Pulseless on Admission
William Vail's field medical card, which he somehow saved for the rest of his life, recorded his condition upon arrival at a mobile hospital near Esnes-en-Argonne.
It read, "almost pulseless on admission." He lay in the shadow of the infamous Dead Man's Hill, where tens of thousands had perished in the Battle of Verdun two years earlier.
Army doctors amputated his left leg below the knee the following day. He was evacuated through a series of hospitals to Nantes, suffering and surviving a train derailment en route, then four months later, shipped across the Atlantic to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he would spend more than a year recovering.
On Nov. 12, 1918, 95th Aero Squadron commander Capt. John Mitchell recommended Vail for the Distinguished Service Cross. On Nov. 20, Mitchell and First Pursuit Group commander Major Harold Hartney separately recommended him for the Medal of Honor. The DSC recommendation cited his shooting down a German aircraft.
However, the Medal of Honor recommendation Greg later found in a 1919 newspaper article in family archives focused on Vail voluntarily putting himself in mortal danger to save another man's life. The recommendation even noted that Vail occasionally pulled his disintegrating aircraft upward to continue firing at his pursuers even as the plane fell to the ground.
Gen. John J. Pershing signed the DSC citation on Dec. 6, 1918. But the Army then lost the citation in its mail system, and Vail didn't receive the medal until May 9, 1919, when the Walter Reed commandant pinned it on his chest at the hospital parade ground. By that time, Pershing had sent multiple cables inquiring why the wounded aviator hadn't received his award.
As for the Medal of Honor, no award was presented.
While still at Walter Reed in July 1919, Vail, or one of his fellow aviators attempted to find out what happened. A memorandum from the Chief of the Air Service, Major General Charles Menoher, and his executive, Colonel Oscar Westover, went to the Army's Decorations Section requesting the status of William Vail's Medal of Honor recommendation.
There was no reply. The recommendation had simply vanished into the post-war chaos at American Expeditionary Forces headquarters in Chaumont, France, overwhelmed by hundreds of awards recommendations and lacking coherent processes.
Only four aviators of the Great War received the Medal of Honor: Erwin Bleckley, Harold Goettler, Frank Luke and Eddie Rickenbacker. All but Rickenbacker died in the actions for which they were recognized.
"His entire life, he thought Pershing turned him down for the Medal of Honor," Greg said.
A Gimper Supreme
William Vail left Walter Reed and rebuilt his life. He married Mabel Virginia Holland, worked in various business ventures including a stint as Midwest marketing director for Sikorsky Aviation, and eventually settled in California. But he carried the horrors from WWI with him every day.
Vail suffered severe phantom pain from the moment of amputation until his last breath in 1982 at age 85. He was the next-to-last survivor of his 95th Aero Squadron comrades and every one of his German adversaries, who thought they had killed him.
"I asked him what phantom pain feels like," Greg said. "My father told me, ‘it feels like my absent toes are being rolled under the sole of my foot and crushed.’ He put up with that every day of his life. Somehow, he remained affable and optimistic, never exhibiting the slightest bit of PTSD. His character and fortitude were unbelievable."
Although Vail remained optimistic and friendly, even loudly singing “Mademoiselle” at the dinner table, much to Mabel’s annoyance, the pain he suffered haunted the entire family.
"If this hadn't happened, this son wouldn't have heard his father's anguished screams in the middle of the night," Vail said. "It really affected me. It impeded his life progress. He couldn't work and do things he was capable of."
Despite everything, William Vail remained modest, ethical and open about his experiences. He was what World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker called a "gimper," a term from auto racing meaning someone who stays with you more than he has to and does more than he has to. Historian James Wilberg, who wrote about 95th Aero Squadron aviator Sumner Sewall, called William Vail "a gimper supreme."
The November 1918 action wasn't the only time he proved it. In July 1919, while on leave from Walter Reed to visit family in Chicago, William Vail was driving through downtown when he unwittingly entered the middle of a race riot during the "Red Summer" of 1919.
"White rioters chasing Black people, about to lynch them," Greg said. "My father is driving, sees a one young Black man running for his life. He stopped the car, opened the door, signaled him to get in and cover himself. The man did. My father drove through the mob. For the second time in less a year, putting himself in danger, William Vail saved another man's life."
When William Vail died in 1982, a business colleague called to express condolences.
"He said, 'Bill Vail was the most ethical man I ever met in my life,'" Greg recalled. "His character, his integrity, his humanity, he was funny, he had all the characteristics that you really value in someone, seemingly so scarce today."
The Lost Recommendation
Greg first tried to secure the Medal of Honor for his father when he was 14 years old in 1965. He wrote to Eddie Rickenbacker, America's top World War I ace and a Medal of Honor recipient.
Rickenbacker wrote back and explained that the bureaucratic hurdle to fix the issue meant that Greg faced an “endless task.”
Rickenbacker further added that holding a Medal of Honor himself would likely impede the efforts. “Under those circumstances anything I did would probably be a liability and not an asset nor would it be helpful,” he said.
Vail ceased his efforts for decades. While researching his book, "The Soft Mud of France," and the Medal of Honor packet, he started digging through the National Archives. In November 2022, working with veteran Archives researcher Vicki Killian, he finally found the answer to a century-old mystery.
"I was looking for the commander's original Medal of Honor recommendation. I couldn't find it, although I found all the DSC records,” Vail said. "The Army said you've got to find it or the equivalent. I had a professional researcher. I thought maybe the commanders never wrote it, even though I already had two documents showing the recommendation had been made."
What he found instead was the July 1919 inquiry from Menoher and Westover and the absence of any reply or any record of adjudication. The recommendation was neither approved nor disapproved. It simply disappeared.
"I was shocked," Vail said. "It took some time to work my mind around it. The reason I couldn't find it was because the Medal recommendation never reached the file.”
Pershing never saw it. The paperwork glitch was now more than a century old.
The Congressional Effort
To activate the review process for a lost recommendation, a congressional referral is required. Greg, who now resides in Vermont, reached out to the state’s three-person congressional delegation.
"They meet, then the caucus decides which one of them will be the lead," Greg explained. "They decided on Sanders."
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who is former chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, sent a cover letter with Vail's documentation package to the Army. The case has been working through the Awards and Decorations branch for three years.
Vail assembled comprehensive evidence including his father's medals, field medical cards documenting every procedure performed on his shattered body, letters, photographs, the eyewitness account from Maj. Wright, squadron records and the paper trail showing the recommendation was made but never adjudicated.
"Thank God he saved everything," Vail said of his father's habit of keeping seemingly mundane scraps of paper. "I kidded my father about his propensity to conserve jars of screws, bolts, nuts and nails in our garage. 'Dad, why do you keep all this junk?' 'Son, you never know when you might need it.' Now I understand the wisdom of the aviator. I couldn't have done this without all of that."
The case differs from a standard upgrade request because the original recommendation was never decided. Vail argues his father's actions clearly meet the Medal of Honor standard rather than the DSC he received.
"The DSC talks about extraordinary heroism in combat, but there is a higher level of valor to the Medal of Honor,” Greg explained. “It requires voluntarily putting yourself in mortal danger for the benefit of another, going above the call of duty."
Greg went on to explain how a veteran cannot receive both awards for the same action. However, Vail earned the DSC for “extraordinary heroism in combat with an armed enemy” and shooting down one of the nine German planes he confronted single-handedly.
The Medal of Honor recommendation was for risking his life to save Pegues by engaging in the fight. Two different citations for the same action. Should William Vail receive the Medal of Honor, the DSC and Silver Star awards would be officially revoked, but the medals themselves would remain with the family.
"I am optimistic that the Awards and Decorations branch are comfortable with the potential for an upgrade," Greg said. "They are not the final say. It must go through the gauntlet including the Secretary of the Army, Secretary of Defense, the President.”
When asked if he believes that his father truly deserves the award, Greg said, “in terms of merit and valor, there's no doubt."
Redemption
At 75, Greg feels the urgency of time. Only two surviving children of any World War I pilots are known to still be alive.
"I find it extraordinary," he said. "I just celebrated my diamond jubilee of 75 years. I'm sensing I better get on with this. Justice delayed is justice denied… No one was preventing my father from getting the award. He didn't deal with prejudice, just bureaucracy.”
There is reason for hope. Just weeks ago, Congress cleared the path for Navy Capt. Royce Williams to receive the Medal of Honor for his actions on Nov. 18, 1952, when he single-handedly engaged seven Soviet MiG-15 fighters during the Korean War and shot down four of them.
The mission was classified for decades. Williams received the Silver Star, upgraded to the Navy Cross in 2023. He was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Donald Trump during the State of the Union Address on Feb. 24, 2026.
William Vail faced even tougher odds, nine enemy aircraft. After downing one, he was shot down and lost his leg, though he saved his comrade's life in the process. And he too was long denied proper recognition due to circumstances beyond his control.
If the Medal of Honor is awarded, Greg knows exactly what it would mean.
"I will have redeemed his sacrifices," he said. "Not only on the battlefield, but everything after."
The military moves slowly on historical award upgrades, and often for good reason. But William Vail's case isn't about reinterpreting the past. His commanders submitted the Medal of Honor recommendation. The Army lost it and Pershing never saw it.
If ever there was a case for the Army to correct the record, this is it.
When reflecting on his father, Greg simply said, "He was a great man."
Gregory Vail’s book, “The Soft Mud of France,” which details his father’s exploits and the history of the 95th Aero Squadron, can be purchased on Amazon.
