Harold Bartlett

Harold Bartlett shot three individual rifle events at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Bartlett attended the US Naval Academy, class of 1911. He served as an aide to President Woodrow Wilson after qualifying as a naval aviator in the first class at Pensacola Naval Air Station, in 1915. In 1917 Bartlett was assigned to the British and French air forces in Europe, where he completed their Aerial Gunnery and Bombing School before building and leading the Navy’s Aviation Advance Training School at Moutchie, France. In August 1918 he joined the Northern Bombing Group, which carried out strategic bombing missions when targeted German U-boat bases on the Belgian coast during the last months of World War I.

For his work in World War I Bartlett received a Navy Cross and was assigned to the Office of Naval Operations. There he organized the Torpedo-Plane Squadron One and its Yorktown field in July 1920. Bartlett also wrote an influential memorandum convincing the Navy to stage a groundbreaking trial examining the impact of aerial bombing on a battleship. This project started in October 1920 over the obsolete USS Indiana anchored in the Chesapeake Bay off Tangier Island, and went on for several years. According to aviation historian Thomas Wildenberg, “Bartlett was a pioneer — and an important one. He recognized the potential of aviation early on and was on the cutting edge of its development.”