Starting in the May 1932 issue of Flying Aces and running almost 4 years, Eugene Frandzen’s “Lives of the Aces in Pictures” was a staple of the magazine. Each month Frandzen would feature a different Ace that rose to fame during the Great War. This time around we American Ace—Capitain Hamilton Coolidge!

Hamilton Coolidge was born on September 1st, 1895, in Brookline, Massachusetts. He enlisted in the Aviation Section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps in July 1916, and began flight training at the School of Military Aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June the following year.

Sailing to France in July 1917, Coolidge was commissioned a 1st Lt on the 29th of September, 1917 and was assigned to the Third Aviation Instruction Center at Issoudun, France, from October 1917 to June 1918 when he then joined the 94th Aero Squadron of the 1st Pursuit Group. He is credited with 8 victories over enemy aircraft in aerial combat and awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Coolidge was killed in action on October 27, 1918 when his SPAD S.XIII took a direct hit from a German anti-aircraft shell near Grandpré, Ardennes.

His letters home were collected and privately published in 1919 as Letters of An American Airman: Being The War Record of Capt. Hamilton Coolidge, U.S.A. 1917-1918 by The Plimpton Press. Google Books has digitized it and it can be read or downloaded in various formats from the Internet Archive. This book has also been published by several Print On Demand Publishers.

• Download “Lives of the Aces in Pictures – Part 17: Captain Coolidge” (October 1933, Flying Aces)

(Editor’s Note: These early installments of Frandzen’s “Lives of the Aces in Pictures” that were published in the pulp-sized issues have been reformatted from a two page spread into a one page feature.)