Awesome Dudes

Hans-Ulrich Rudel (July 2, 1916 – December 18, 1982) was a Stuka dive-bomber pilot during World War II. Rudel is famous for being the most highly decorated German serviceman of the war (Hermann Göring was nominally more highly decorated, but he did not achieve his Grand Cross of the Iron Cross by combat action). Hans-Ulrich Rudel was the only person to be awarded the Knight’s Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds.

Rudel flew 2,530 combat missions and successfully attacked many tanks, trains, ships, and other ground targets, claiming a total of 2,000 targets destroyed - including 800 vehicles, 519 tanks, 150 artillery guns, a destroyer, two cruisers, and a battleship. Russian records however confirm neither cruiser sinking; smaller warships may have been the actual targets. He also shot down 9 aircraft.

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Harrison C. Summers  (July 12, 1918–August 3, 1983)was a paratrooper during World War II who fought with the 1st Battlallion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division on D-Day.

A staff sergeant at the time, he landed as part of the night drop during Operation Chicago early on D-Day. His unit took the town of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville, near Exit 4 off Utah Beach. He, along with about 15 men, was ordered to take a group of buildings nearby marked “WXYZ” on the map. The buildings turned out to be the barracks for 100 or more German troops.

Summers led the attack, charging inside with his Thompson submachine gun. He assumed the others would follow, but they did not. He proceeded on, almost single-handedly, through each of the buildings, cleaning them out. Five hours later, the position was clear, and he was credited with over 30 kills.

For his efforts that day, Summers was later nominated for the Medal of Honor, but was given the Distinguished Service Cross instead. He also received a field promotion to lieutenant.

WWII historian Stephen Ambrose described him this way: “Summers is a legend with American paratroopers …, the Sergeant York of World War II. His story has too much John Wayne/Hollywood in it to be believed, except that more than 10 men saw and reported his exploits.”

In civilian life, Summers worked in the coal mines in Rivesville, West Virginia.

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James Allan was the son of a British businessman, after his father’s death he quickly squandered his inheritance gambling and partying in France.
In his autobiographical book “Under the Dragon Flag: My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War” which you can read online in it’s entirety at the project Gutenberg website he describes how when he ran out of money he became a sailor through a chance encounter and joined up on a ship that was running guns to the Chinese forces in preparation with their conflict with the newly modernized Japanese empire.

After a skirmish with a patrolling japanese destroyer and witnessing the naval battle between the Chinese and Japanese forces from afar, Allan was accidentally stranded in Port Arthur when his ship left without him. Attempting to join his companions, he was captured by a Japanese warship, which detained him on suspicion of being a military instructor. After several weeks on board he took a chance and jumped overboard and managed to escape to Port Arthur which was by then under siege by the Japanese forces.

From his experience as a prisoner of the Japanese, Allan was sure the inevitable takeover of the city would be civilized and peaceful once the garrison had been defeated, but he underestimated the fury of the Japanese at the Chinese policy of torturing and executing all prisoners, and when the city quickly fell an indiscriminate massacre began to take place.

I directed my retreat towards the dockyards, with a view to getting round to the south part of the town, as far as possible from the quarter by which the Japanese were entering it. The idea of a general massacre never entered my mind, and I only thought of getting back to my inn, there to stay until things quieted down. My prevailing feeling was one of satisfaction that I should not after all have to face a long residence in a beleaguered town. I therefore paid little attention at first to the fact that people were flying on every hand, and I did not suppose that there could be any good reason for flight, beyond the desirability of getting out of the way of the conquering troops until the ardour of victory had cooled down. I was not long to be left undeceived. A deadly work of vengeance and slaughter had commenced Down the panic-crowded streets, louder and louder as I advanced, came ringing the volleys of the rifle-fire, the shouts of the infuriated soldiers, and the death-shrieks of their victims.

Escaping from the streets, he hid in a shop while being pursued by a soldier. Emerging from hiding a while later, he was surprised by the very same soldier that was pursuing him earlier. Grabbing a hatchet, Allan split the man’s head and stole his uniform, and in the waning light managed to pass for a Japanese soldier and returned to his lodgings, only to find that everyone there had been murdered with the exception of his interpreter Chung and a mandarin friend of his who was wounded.

They managed to sneak out of the city and spent several months at sea in a Junk that picked them up on the river.

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In a time when innocent people were brutally murdered only for their nationality and religion, one soldier stands out among the rest.

He defied the Germans, repeatedly risking his life to save the lives of thousands. Dr. Eugene Lazowski is considered a hero to many, but for him, saving others was his only option—it was simply the right thing to do.

Dr. Lazowski was a soldier and doctor in the Polish Army, Polish Underground Army and Red Cross during World War II. Based on a medical discovery by his friend, Stanislaw Matulewicz, he created a fake epidemic of a dangerous infectious disease, Epidemic Typhus, in the town Rozwadow, as well as surrounding villages.

The doctors discovered if they injected a healthy person with a “vaccine” of killed bacteria, that person would test positive to Epidemic Typhus. In secrecy, Dr. Matulewicz tested it on a friend who was on special leave from a work camp in Germany. He desperately needed a way to avoid going back to face death in the work camp—and becoming just another number. He injected the man with the bacteria and sent a blood sample to the German laboratory. About a week later, the young doctors received a telegraph informing them their patient had Epidemic Typhus, which prohibited the man’s return to the work camp. It worked.

He repeated this process on anyone who was sick, creating an “epidemic.” The Germans were terrified of the disease, not to mention very susceptible to it–they hadn’t been infected with it in many years. With each case of “Typhus,” the Germans would send a red telegram—a few more lives were saved. When the “disease” reached epidemic proportions, the Germans quarantined the area. No additional people were sent to concentration or work camps. Also, no Germans entered the area.

It looked promising for the young doctor until the Germans sent a medical inspection team into the region to verify the “disease.” The team, comprised of a few doctors and several armed soldiers, met Dr. Lazowski just outside the city, where a hot meal awaited the team. They started eating and drinking with the young doctor. The lead doctor was having fun drinking, and thereby sent the younger two doctors to the hospital. Fearing for their own safety, they only drew blood samples and left. Dr. Lazowski knew he had succeeded.

He saved 8,000 people from certain death in Nazi concentration camps. It was his private war—a war of intellect, not weapons. Dr. Lazowski followed in his parents’ footsteps, who helped save the lives of Jewish people during the holocaust. His parents, later named Righteous Gentiles, hid two Jewish families in their home. While Dr. Lazowski didn’t hide families, he did help many Jews medically against German orders.

He lived next to a Jewish ghetto in Rozwadow; his back fence bordered the neighborhood. The Jews needed medical attention, so he arranged a system with them. Since it was punishable by death to help any Jewish person, he had to be secretive. If any Jews needed his help, they were to hang a white piece of cloth on his back fence, where he would help them in the safety of the night. Every night the white cloth would fly; lines formed waiting for his help—they trusted him. He aided anyone who needed help, creating a system of faking his medicinal inventory to conceal his help of Jews.

Dr. Lazowski also faced death several other times in the war. He was working on a Polish Red Cross train, caring for injured soldiers. With the train stopped, he left to find food for the wounded, only to return to total chaos—the Germans used the red crosses as bombing targets. The injured on their way home would never see their families again.

Dr. Lazowski also spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp prior to his arrival in Rozwadow. Determined to find a way out, he started to size up the security. A 3 meter wall with barbed wire surrounded the camp. He noticed a break in the barbed wire and took off. With a “thieves leap,” whereby he took a running start and two steps on the face of the wall, he was over. Sure the guard heard him, he ran to a nearby horse and cart, whose driver was missing. Dr. Lazowski started to pet the horse and adjust the bridle, as if it were his own animal. The guard looked over and Dr. Lazowski simply smiled and said a kind word to him. The guard thought nothing of it, and Dr. Lazowski was off to safety.

Towards the end of the war, Dr. Lazowski left Rozwadow when a German soldier, whom he had helped several months earlier, warned him that the Germans were going to kill him. They were on to his scheme. His wife and young daughter at his side, Dr. Lazowski ran out through their back fence for Warsaw. As he looked down the street, he saw that same soldier killing Jewish children. It sent chills down his spine. Dr. Lazowski left the town he personally saved for ever—until now.

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Insane climbing and jumping stunts were Dan Osman’s life pursuits. This fearless climber specialized in speed climbing sheer rock faces and jumping off bridges and cliffs with rope harnesses

You can see some of his feats on youtube

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Alvin Cullum York (December 13, 1887 – September 2, 1964) was a United States soldier, famous for his heroism in World War I. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German machine gun nest, killing 20 German soldiers and capturing 132 others.

From York’s Medal of Honor citation:

Early life

York was born in Pall Mall, Tennessee in the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf, the third of eleven children born to William York and Mary Elizabeth York, née Brooks. As was typical of the area and times, his family subsisted by farming and hunting. As a result, young Alvin became an expert marksman in the area woods. When Alvin’s father died in 1911, he rejected Christianity. As he stated in his diary “I got in bad company and I broke off from my mother’s and father’s advice and got to drinking and gambling and playing up right smart…I used to drink a lot of Moonshine. I used to gamble my wages away week after week. I used to stay out late at nights. I had a powerful lot of fistfights.”

In 1914, a friend of Alvin’s was caught in a bar fight where he was killed. He then devoted his time to change his ways. On 1 January 1915, Alvin attended a revival meeting conducted by Reverend H.H. Russell. During the sermon, York felt as if lightning hit his soul and was moved to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. From this point his life was forever changed and he immediately abandoned “smoking, drinking, gambling, cussing and brawling.” York took this commitment seriously, grew in his faith, taught Sunday school, led the choir and eventually became an elder in his church. York’s old friends tried to persuade him to go drinking, but he continually refused.

According to popular folklore,York filed as a conscientious objector at the start of World War I. However, according to York’s diary, his mother and his pastor filed the application for conscientious objector status on his behalf, but he refused to sign them. As York states in his diary, “I never asked for exemption from service on any grounds at all. I never was a conscientious objector. I am not today. I didn’t want to go and fight and kill. But I had to answer the call of my country, and I did. And I believed it was right.” ^[1] However, on his World War I draft registration card — which was signed — the answer to whether or not he claiimed any exemption was “Yes. Don’t want to fight.”^[2]

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Joseph Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was an Italian Cardinal who spoke more than 38 languages fluently. He never left Italy and yet managed to learn how to speak languages without accent. People from all over the world came to challenge him in their native tongue. They all reported their amazement at this man’s fluency.

Italian Catholic cardinal and famed linguist and hyperpolyglot. Born and educated in Bologna, he completed his theological studies before he had reached the minimum age for ordination as a priest; he was ordained in 1797. In the same year, he became professor of Arabic at the University of Bologna. He later lost this position for refusing to take the oath of allegiance required by the Cisalpine Republic, which governed Bologna at the time.

In 1803 he was appointed assistant librarian of the institute of Bologna, and soon afterwards was reinstated as professor of Oriental languages and of Greek. The chair was suppressed by the viceroy in 1808, but again rehabilitated on the restoration of Pope Pius VII in 1814. Mezzofanti held this post until he left Bologna to go to Rome in 1831, as a member of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide), the Catholic Church’s governing body for missionary activities. In 1833, he succeeded Angelo Mai as Custodian-in-Chief of the Vatican Library, and in 1838 was made cardinal under the titular see of St. Onofrio al Gianicolo and director of studies in the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

Mezzofanti is well-known for being a hyperpolyglot and it is believed that he spoke thirty-eight languages and fifty dialects fluently, while also having proficiency in many other languages with a lesser fluency.

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(December 14, 1932 – June 8, 1989), nicknamed Bert by his friends, was a French criminal chiefly known as the organizer of a break-in into a Société Générale bank in Nice, France in 1976. He was involved with the pro French Algeria movement OAS and also worked for the Chilean DINA, participating in operation Condor.

Earlier life

Spaggiari was born in Laragne-Montéglin in the Hautes-Alpes département. He grew up in Hyères, where his mother had a lingerie store.

Spaggiari is reported to have committed his first robbery in order to offer a diamond to a girlfriend. He would later enter the French Foreign Legion (maybe in order to escape justice) and fought as a paratrooper during the Indochina War.

During the Algerian War he worked for the OAS, a clandestine anti-de Gaulle and anti-decolonisation organization. Despite the fact that he was probably more a sympathizer than a real activist, Spaggiari was later sentenced to some years in prison for his OAS activities. During his imprisonment Spaggiari wrote his first autobiographic book Faut pas rire avec les barbares (”One needn’t laugh with the barbarians”).

In 1976 he was the owner of a photographic studio in Nice, living in a house in the hills over Nice named Les Oies Sauvages. But he apparently quickly became bored with his law-abiding middle-class life. Later accounts described him as cavalier and stylish. When living in Nice he used to wear sunglasses most of the time and smoke large cigars, a style that made him resemble the singer Jacques Dutronc.

Heist

When Spaggiari heard that the sewers were close to the vault of the Société Générale bank, he began to plan a break-in into the bank. Eventually he decided to do it by digging into the bank vault from below. Spaggiari rented a box in the bank vault for himself and then put a loud alarm clock in the vault. He set the clock to ring at night in order to check the possible existence of any acoustic or seismic detection gear. In fact, there were no alarms protecting the vault because it was considered utterly impregnable; the door wall was extremely thick and there was no obvious way to access the other walls.

Spaggiari contacted professional gangsters from Marseille. Although it has never been verified, he probably got support from Gaëtano Zampa to build a team that was completed by some of his OAS friends, including would-be-assassin of Charles De Gaulle Gaby Anglade and con artist Jean Kay. His men made their way into the sewers and began a two-month effort to dig an eight meter long tunnel from the sewer to under the vault. Spaggiari had taken many precautions during this long dig. His men worked long hours continuously drilling. He told his men not to drink coffee nor alcohol and get at least 10 hours of sleep every shift to avoid any danger to the mission.

On July 16, 1976, during a long weekend due to Bastille Day festivities, Spaggiari’s gang broke into the vault itself. They opened 400 safe deposit boxes and stole an estimated 60 million francs worth of money, securities and valuables.

According to some accounts, Spaggiari brought his men a meal including wine and pâté some refreshments, and reportedly they sat down in the vault for a picnic lunch, spending hours picking through the various safety deposit boxes. Spaggiari and his men found nude photos of some wealthy and famous locals, which they attached to the walls of the vault to be seen by all who entered. Before they left on July 20, they left this message on the walls of the vault: “without hatred, without violence, without weapons”. This was Spaggiari’s message to the world, and he obviously considered himself to be something more than a common thief.

Capture and escape

At first the French police were baffled. However, by the end of October, they were closing in, and on a tip from a former girlfriend, they arrested one of the errant thieves. After a lengthy interrogation he turned over the entire gang, including Spaggiari. When Spaggiari, who had been accompanying the mayor of Nice Jacques Médecin in the Far East as a photographer, returned to Nice, he was arrested at the airport.

Spaggiari chose Jacques Peyrat, a veteran of the French Legion, as his defence attorney. Spaggiari first denied his involvement in the break-in, then acknowledged it but claimed that he was working to fund a secret political organization named the “Catena” (Italian for Chain) that seems to have existed only in his fantasy.

During his case hearings, Spaggiari devised an escape plan. He made a fictitious document which he claimed as evidence. He made the document coded so it had to be deciphered by the judge. He distracted judge Richard Bouaziz with this document and then jumped out of a window, landed safely on a parked car and escaped on a waiting motorcycle. Some reports claimed that the owner of the car later received a 5000 francs cheque in the mail for the damage to his hood.

Left-wing papers later claimed that Spaggiari had received help from his political friends, in particular from ex-OAS militants close to the mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin. The accusations forced Médecin to go through a second round of voting at the local elections of 1977.

Life in hiding

The escape of Spaggiari would last until the end of his life. He was sentenced in absentia to a life in prison. Reportedly he underwent plastic surgery and spent probably most of the rest of his life in Argentina. However, it is reported that Spaggiari came several times clandestinely to France, visiting his mother or his wife “Audi”. For the publishing of his ultimate book Le journal d’une truffe he gave an interview to Bernard Pivot for the TV program Apostrophes that was reportedly recorded in France.

According to a CIA document declassified in 2000 and publicized by the National Security Archive, Michael Townley, the DINA international agent responsible for the murder of Orlando Letelier, a member of Salvador Allende’s government, in Washington DC, 1976, was in contact with Spaggiari. Information contained in the document suggests that Spaggiari (code name “Daniel”) conducted operations on behalf of DINA. [1] [2] [3]

Spaggiari was said to have died under “mysterious circumstances”. The press reported that his body was found by his mother in front of her home on June 10, 1989, having been carried back to France by unknown friends. However it now seems well established that his wife “Audi” was with him when he died of throat cancer on June 8, 1989, in a country house in Piedmont. She drove the corpse from Piedmont to Hyères and lied to the police as it is a criminal offence to carry a cadaver.

Remains of the loot from the heist has never been found.

Spaggiari’s role as the brains behind the Société Générale break-in has also been questioned. Most members of the gang have declared that his influence has been over-estimated and that, far from having directed the “gang of the sewermen”, Spaggiari was simply one of its members.

Writings by Albert Spaggiari

* (1977) Faut pas rire avec les barbares
* (1978) Les égouts du paradis
* (1983) Le journal d’une truffe

Popular culture

French authors René-Louis Maurice and Jean-Claude Simoën wrote the book Cinq Milliards au bout de l’égout (1977) about Spaggiari’s bank heist in Nice. Their work was translated in 1978 by the British author Ken Follett as The Heist of the Century (also published as The Gentleman of 16 July and Under the Streets of Nice). To the outrage of Ken Follett some publishers brought it out as a new Ken Follett book, while it was in fact little more than a rushed through translation.

In 1979, two movies were produced which were also based on the Nice bank heist:

* Les égouts du paradis, a French movie directed by José Giovanni.
* The Great Riviera Bank Robbery, a British movie directed by Francis Megahy.

There’s also a book about the Riviera bank robbery:
* Fric-frac: The great Riviera bank robbery

(Bio courtesy of Wikipedia)

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Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen (1887 - 1970) was a Polish-born adventurer who became a bodyguard for the Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen and a general in the Chinese army.

According to a biography written by Charles Drage with Cohen’s assistance, Morris Cohen was born in London to a family that just arrived from Poland.

Morris Abraham Cohen was actually born into a poor Polish-Jewish family in Radzanów, Poland. Soon after his birth in 1887, the Cohens escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and emigrated to East End.

Cohen loved the theaters, the streets, the markets and the boxing arenas of the English capital more than he did Jewish day school, and in April 1900 he was arrested for picking pockets. A judge sent him to the Hayes Industrial School for wayward Jewish lads. When he was released in 1905, the Cohens shipped young Morris off to western Canada with the hope that the fresh air and open plains of the New World would reform his ways.

Cohen initially worked on a farm near Whitewood, Saskatchewan. He tilled the land, tended the livestock and learned to shoot a gun and play cards. He did that for a year, and then started wandering through the Western provinces, making a living as a carnival talker, gambler, grifter and successful real estate broker. Some of his activitites landed him in jail.

Cohen also became friendly with the Chinese exiles who had come to work on the Canadian transcontinental railroads. In Saskatoon he came to the aid of a Chinese restaurant owner who was being robbed. Cohen knocked out the thief and tossed him out into the street. Such an act was unheard of the time. Few white men ever came to the aid of the Chinese.

The Chinese welcomed Cohen and eventually invited him to join the Tongmenghui, Sun Yat-sen’s anti-Manchu organization. Cohen begun to advocate for the Chinese.

Cohen fought with the Canadian Railway Troops in Europe during World War One where part of his job invovled supervising Chinese laborers. In 1922 he headed to China to help close a railway deal for Sun Yat-sen with Northern Construction and JW Stewart Ltd. Once there, he asked Sun for a job as a bodyguard.

In Shanghai and Canton Cohen trained Sun’s small armed forces to box and shoot, and told people that he was an aide-de-camp and an acting colonel in Sun Yat-sen’s army. His lack of Chinese — he spoke a pidgin form of Cantonese at best — was thankfully not a problem since Sun, his wife Soong Qingling and many of their associates were western educated and spoke English. Cohen’s colleagues started calling him Ma Kun, and he soon became one of Sun’s main protectors, shadowing the Chinese leader to conferences and war zones. After one battle where he was knicked by a bullet, Cohen started carrying a second gun. The western community began calling the gun-totting aide “Two-Gun Cohen.”

Sun died in 1925, and Cohen went to work for a series of Southern Chinese Kuomintang leaders, from Sun’s son, Sun Fo, and the banker TV Soong, to such warlords as Li Jishen and Chen Jitang. He was also acquainted with Chiang Kai-shek, whom he knew from when Chiang was commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy. His dealing with Chiang, though, were minimal since Cohen worked for leaders who were generally opposed to Chiang. Cohen ran security for his bosses and acquired weapons and gunboats. Eventually he earned the rank of acting general, though he never lead any troop.

When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Cohen eagerly joined the fight. He rounded up weapons for the Chinese and even did intelligence work for the British. Cohen was in Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked in December 1941. He placed Soong Qingling and her sister Ailing onto one of the last planes out of the British colonies.

Cohen stayed behind to fight, and when Hong Kong fell later that month, the Japanese tossed him into Stanley Prison Camp. There the Japanese badly beat him and he languished in Stanley until he was part of a rare prisoner exchange in late 1943.

Cohen sailed back to Canada, settled in Montreal and married Judith Clark, who ran a successful women’s boutique. He made regular visits back to China with the hope of establishing work or business ties. Mostly, though, Cohen saw old friends, sat in hotel lobbies and spun out tales—many of them tall—of his exploits. It was his myth making and the desire of others to fabricate yarns about him, that has resulted in much of the misinformation about Cohen, from the claim that he had a hand in the making of modern China, to such outlandish ones like him having an affair with Soong Qingling and a wife in Canada back in the 1920s. After the 1949 Communist takeover, Cohen was one of the few people who was able to move between Taiwan and mainland China. His prolongued absences took a toll on his marriage, and he and Judith divorced in 1956.

Cohen then settled with one of his sisters in Salford, England. He maintained good relations with both Taiwanese and Communist Party of China leaders, and soon was able to arrange consulting jobs with Vickers (planes), Rolls Royce (engines) and Decca Radar. His last visit to China was during the start of the Cultural Revolution as an honored guest of Zhou Enlai.

Morris Cohen died 1970 in Salford. He is buried in Blakeley Jewish Cemetery in Manchester.

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Born Eugene Jacques Bullard in Columbus, Georgia, one of ten children. His father was known as “Big Chief Ox” and his mother was a Creek Indian. Bullard stowed away on a ship bound for Scotland to escape racial discrimination (he later claimed to have had witnessed his father’s narrow escape from lynching as a child). While in the UK he worked as a boxer and also worked in music hall. On a trip to Paris he decided to stay and joined the French Foreign Legion upon the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Wounded in the 1916 battles around Verdun, and already awarded the Croix de Guerre, Bullard transferred to the Lafayette Flying Corps in the French Aéronautique Militaire and was eventually assigned to 93 Spad Squadron on August 17, 1917, were he flew some twenty missions and is thought to have shot down two enemy aircraft.

quoted from Wikipedia

That’s right. You may have heard of the Tuskegee airmen, but this man beat them by more than 20 years. Not only was he the first black fighter pilot, he also fought in the ground war as a member of the french foreign legion, as a volunteer in some of the most deadly battles ever fought. When asked why he joined he replied “It must’ve been curiosity because it couldn’t have been sense”.

After the war, Bullard married a count’s daughter and opened a nightclub in Paris,
the marriage soon ended in divorce, with Bullard taking custody of their two daughters. His work in nightclubs brought him many famous friends, among them Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong and Langston Hughes. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Bullard, who spoke German, readily agreed to a request from the French to spy on German agents frequenting his club in Paris.

After the German invasion of the French Third Republic in 1940, Bullard took his daughters and fled south from Paris. In Orléans he joined a group of soldiers defending the city and suffered a spinal wound in the fighting. He was helped to flee to Spain by a French spy, and in July 1940 he returned to the United States.

Bullard spent some time in a hospital in New York for his spinal injury, but he never fully recovered. During and after World War II, when seeking work in the United States, he found that the fame he enjoyed in France had not followed him to New York. He worked in a variety of occupations, as a perfume salesman, a security guard, and as an interpreter for Louis Armstrong, but his back injury severely restricted his activities. For a time he attempted to regain his nightclub in Paris, but his property had been destroyed during the Nazi occupation, and he received a financial settlement from the French government which allowed him to purchase an apartment in New York’s Harlem district.

In the 1950s, Bullard was a relative stranger in his own homeland. His daughters had married, and he lived alone in his apartment, which was decorated with pictures of the famous people he had known, and with a framed case containing his 15 French war medals. His final job was as an elevator operator at the Rockefeller Center, where his fame as the “Black Swallow of Death” was unknown.

In 1954, the French government invited Bullard to Paris to rekindle (together with two Frenchmen) the everlasting flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe, and in 1959 he was made a chevalier (knight) of the Légion d’honneur. Even so, he spent the last years of his life in relative obscurity and poverty in New York City where he died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961. He was buried with military honors by French officers in the French War Veterans’ section of Flushing Cemetery in the New York City borough of Queens.

In 1972, his exploits as a pilot were published in the book The Black Swallow of Death: The Incredible Story of Eugene Jacques Bullard, The World’s First Black Combat Aviator by P.J. Carisella, James W. Ryan and Edward W. Brooke (Marlborough House, 1972). This book, with jacket art by famed WWI aviation illustrator George Evans, is part of the Bullard display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.

On 23 August 1994, 33 years after his death, and 77 years to the day after his rejection for U.S. military service in 1917, Eugene Bullard was posthumously commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

In 2006, the movie Flyboys loosely portrayed Bullard and his comrades from the Lafayette Flying Corps. The film features digital dogfights, and Abdul Salis portrays Eugene Skinner, the character based on Bullard.

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