Deflector

The story

Before the war, Roland Garros was already one of the best-known aviators in France. On September 23, 1913, he became the first to fly across the Mediterranean, from Saint-Raphaël in the south of France to Bizerte in Tunisia, in a Morane-Saulnier monoplane.

In 1915 a pilot who wanted to shoot forward faced a problem: the propeller was in the way. Working with the Morane-Saulnier company, Garros fitted steel wedges to the propeller blades of his Morane-Saulnier L, a parasol monoplane, so that the bullets that struck the blades were deflected instead of breaking them. With a machine gun firing straight through the propeller arc, the pilot could aim the whole aircraft at his target. On April 1, 1915 he scored the first kill with this system, and he won more victories in the days that followed.

On April 18, 1915 his engine failed and he came down behind German lines. He tried to set fire to the aircraft, but the Germans captured it with the deflector system intact, and it was shown to Anthony Fokker. Fokker's engineers went further and built a gear that synchronised the gun with the propeller, the system that armed the Fokker Eindecker.

Garros spent almost three years as a prisoner. In February 1918 he escaped with a fellow aviator, Anselme Marchal, disguised in German uniforms, and made his way back to France and to the front. He was killed in combat on October 5, 1918, near Vouziers in the Ardennes, flying a SPAD XIII, one day before turning 30. The Paris tennis stadium has borne his name since 1928.

The song follows that arc in the bright rhythm of ragtime and the one-step: the clever idea of two "little wedges of steel", the capture, the long wait "behind wire", and the stadium where his name lives on.