French Air Force

The French Air Force occupies two roles in Romain Gary’s memoir: it is a military organization in which he trains and fights, and the emblem of French belonging his mother has long imagined for her son. Its uniform represents the fulfillment of her hopes, but his experience also reveals a tension between service to France and rules that question whether a naturalized immigrant can fully belong. His path runs from flight training and gunnery instruction to combat missions, while the institution’s promise of recognition remains entangled with exclusion.

Identity and Aspirational Meaning

For Gary’s mother, the French Air Force is more than a career choice: its uniform and rank are signs that her son has become the Frenchman she has always believed he would be. She and Gary had chosen the Air Force, impressed by Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight, and she pictured him returning to the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts in the uniform of a second lieutenant. She even imagined accompanying him to the Buffa Market, Nice, where his blue-and-gold uniform would make visible the triumph she had anticipated for years.

The officer’s insignia acquires an intimate significance in this story. Gary recalls that when his mother was insulted as a foreigner in the market, she answered by presenting his future military status as a rebuttal: in her eyes, his coming service already established his place in France. She did not distinguish between his being an officer and his becoming one. Gary, who had once imagined more elevated forms of success, comes to find the modest dream of walking beside her in a second lieutenant’s uniform sufficient in itself.

Induction and Flight Training

Gary was inducted at Salon-de-Provence on November 4, 1938. At the station, his mother waved a tricolor flag and called for France while other recruits displayed little enthusiasm for military service. One recruit’s remark that she was not French provoked Gary into a fight; the brawl spread through the train as it began to move, allowing him to turn the distress of parting into action. The episode brings the institution’s public rituals together with the private cost of enlistment: his mother celebrates his military future, while he struggles with the emotional force of leaving her.

His route to flight training was delayed. Despite his military-preparation certificate and law degree, he remained at Salon-de-Provence for nearly six weeks without orders, then arrived at Avord a month late and having missed almost a third of the course. He worked to make up the lost time, including difficulty with compass theory, and earned average marks overall, with stronger results in flying and infantry leadership. The memoir recalls the physical and technical world of training through the Potez-25, its open cockpit and primitive instruments, and the cadets’ heavy leather flying suits. Gary valued the scope those aircraft left for individual initiative, even as he later judged the training’s methods a poor preparation for the modern war that followed.

Nationality and the Denied Commission

Gary’s performance did not secure the officer’s commission he expected. He was told that the decision turned on his birthplace and recent naturalization: under a rule described to him, a flying officer had to have French parents or have been naturalized for more than ten years. Although the rule had previously been challenged as discriminatory and was said not always to be applied, it was being invoked again in his case. The episode makes the difference between his felt identity and official eligibility concrete: Gary’s conviction that he was French could not itself satisfy the institution’s stated qualification.

The rejection changes how he understands both France and assimilation. He recalls that the painful blow of exclusion made him feel, unexpectedly, truly French—not because it confirmed the idealized country of his childhood, but because he recognized that the French, like other people, could be foolish and unjust. He describes France as made up of many different kinds of people and comes to judge the country by the individuals who carry its symbols rather than by the flag alone. The Air Force thus marks both a barrier to acceptance and a setting in which his attachment to France becomes less mythical and more politically discerning.

Wartime Service and Narrative Significance

After receiving a navigator’s diploma, Gary was appointed air gunnery instructor at Salon-de-Provence. When war was declared, he was serving in that role, with his machine guns pointed skyward. His mother came to say goodbye in an old Renault taxi, bringing food and provisions for the departing soldier. The farewell joins her private hopes for his career to the actual demands of wartime service: the uniform and victories she had imagined now belong to a conflict whose outcome he cannot control.

Gary later flew on a bombing mission in a Bloch-210 and was wounded in the leg when German aircraft attacked the airfield at Tours on June 13, 1940. He left the splinter in his thigh, imagining that his mother would take pride in it. Even as the French front collapsed, his confidence in France’s victory persisted, sustained in part by the belief that defeat could not be the conclusion of his mother’s life story. His account also recalls how cadets were assigned patriotic air patrols over working-class districts in Bordeaux under a misleading explanation that they were protecting Philippe Pétain and resisting a Communist threat. The episode shows military service operating amid confusion and political manipulation as France faced defeat.

Later, while serving with the Free French Forces in Britain, Gary was lent to the Royal Air Force for bombing missions in Wellingtons and Blenheims. The British Broadcasting Corporation announced that the French Air Force had bombed Germany from British bases, though Gary wryly notes that the force in that announcement amounted to himself and a fellow airman. His mother interpreted the broadcast as proof that her son had taken matters into his own hands and spread the news at the market. The contrast between the grand institutional announcement and its tiny operational reality is comic, but it also shows how service abroad kept her belief in his French military destiny alive.

The organization’s significance in the memoir therefore exceeds its training and combat functions. It gives Gary a real means to fight for France, yet its officer-eligibility rule exposes the limits placed on his belonging; its uniform becomes both his mother’s cherished image and a hard-won sign of recognition. His service also carries her expectations across separation, defeat, and the years when she continues to receive reports of French air operations from abroad. In the book’s account, the French Air Force is at once a military institution, a test of national identity, and one of the forms through which a mother’s imagined future sustains her son.