Lt. Pat O'Brien

The amazing true story of a nearly forgotten World War I flying ace from the United States who flew for the British before America joined the war is told in this significant historical novel by Kevin McNulty Sr. Fatherless at 15, Pat O’Brien left his home of Momence, IL seeking to learn to fly at a time when aeroplanes were mere kites.

He was among the very first pilots of the Army Signal Corps to test early Curtiss flying machines in 1916 on North Island at San Diego. North Island is now the U.S. Naval Base. Impatient with America’s slow acceptance of the aeroplane as a weapon of war, he left the Corps to join the Canadian Force being trained in Toronto to replace thousands of British pilots who were losing their lives in France at the hand of the advanced Hun flying machines.

Shot down over Belgium in 1917, he crashed from 8,000 feet and survived. German doctors removed a bullet from his throat in a  dilapidated field hospital. One month later he jumped from a moving prison train and escaped. He was the first British pilot to escape The Germans in World War I. He walked seventy-two days, over 250 miles behind enemy lines to freedom at the Holland border where he dug under a nine-foot electrified fence and escaped. Arriving in London one week later, he visited King George in a private audience that lasted nearly one hour.

During his six months recovering in London, he penned a best-selling book about his escape and spent all of 1918 speaking all over the United States, replacing William Jennings Bryant as the top speaker that year. He later crashed a second time from 2,000 feet in Dallas, Texas and survived again in a demonstration for new U.S. recruits. Unsatisfied with his contribution to the war, he returned to France one month before Armistice to join the U.S., British and French Legion but was denied. He, therefore, pursued Russia, going undercover to assist the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia in President Wilson’s effort to remove Czechoslovakian troops and other “pro-White” forces from the advancing Red Army during the Russian Revolution.

Home again in late 1919, his betrothed who had asked him to married her and not go to Russia, had become impatient with his constant pursuits and left him, sending the Lieutenant into the whirlwind of the Roaring ’20s where he starred in a Hollywood silent film as the leading man in Shadows of the West, an anti-Japanese film that warned of America’s next threat. This film was one of the first projects of the newly-formed American Legion in 1919. Pat was a natural choice as the leading man since he was already famous..