Page 133 - They Also Served

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Henry Segrave 1914.
Henry O’Neil de Hane Segrave was born
in 1896 in Baltimore to an American
mother and Irish father. He attended
Eton College and was destined for the
Irish Guards. At the outbreak of war,
the Sandhurst course was drastically
reduced from two years to three months,
and he was commissioned in November
1914. Anxious to immediately enter the
fray, he applied to join a unit that had
suffered heavy casualties and so joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Always in the thick of the fighting, his soldiers referred to the 18-year-old subaltern as ‘the Lion’s Cub’. Wounded in the wrist at Aubers, he was again wounded in hand-to-hand fighting on 16th May 1915. His revolver was clogged with mud, so he threw a belt of ammunition at the German he was fighting, resulting in the enemy’s shot going high and hitting him in the shoulder.
Whilst recuperating in England, he transferred to the RFC, joining the 29 Squadron flying the DH.2 fighter. On 1st May 1916, he shot down a German Aviatik two-seater but was hit by anti-aircraft fire over the Somme in early July and crashed, severely breaking an ankle. This effectively ended his combat flying and he served out the rest of the war in a variety of staff posts before being demobilised as a major in 1919. Segrave turned to motor racing and, in France, in 1923, became the first Briton to
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