Several times I answered the telephone to receive the scathing denunciation that “the Hun was over shooting up some of our Posts of Command and that none of our d—d airplanes had been seen in the air all day.” Whereupon we tried to explain that we did not control the pursuit planes; that it should have been reported to the Army Headquarters and that we, of course, would report it immediately. The ground units considered this rather poor tactics and a very unsatisfactory answer, for to their minds all planes were offensive fighters. Had the line units realized the actual number of planes we had on the front and the area they were patrolling they might have realized why our planes were not seen oftener. We did not have them to be seen. One of the greatest difficulties we had was in teaching the doughboy to recognize the American insignia. Our publications were responsible for this, for every magazine published in the United States pictured the American airplane with a big star painted on its wings, while the insignia actually adopted was a cocarde—three circles of red, white and blue, within one another, the center circle being white, the British center circle being red, and the French center circle being blue. As a matter of fact, the star in the air, at a reasonably long distance, looks exactly like the German Maltese Cross. In fact, a French airman once remarked that if the American had gone into combat with that much advertised star and the Germans failed to get him, a friendly airman, misjudging the star for a cross, certainly would have given a real battle. Our doughboys actually thought that the American insignia was a huge star, for all the magazines had firmly implanted that on their minds. They didn’t care about the insignia of any other nation outside of the American and German. To them one was a star and the other a cross, anything else was either friendly or enemy; and they would take a chance on it being enemy and fire at it.