The first record of the man known as Captain Tempest shows him enlisting with the French Foreign Legion in 1914. Apparently American by birth, Tempest would earn a field commission in 1916 under mysterious circumstances, along with a transfer to the Aeronautique Militaire. He was shot down four times by the Red Baron, and in favoring missions across enemy lines where his victories couldn’t be formally confirmed, earned the nickname L’as Fantôme. By the end of the war, he had forty-nine confirmed victories.
After the Armistice, Tempest’s history becomes once more obscure. Accounts exist of adventures as far ranging as the Philippines and the Yukon. The best documented is an altercation in the Metropolitan Museum, immortalized in the headline “Masked Maniac Mangles Mummy.”
