Hobey Baker - Death

Death

On December 21, Baker received orders to return to the United States. Reluctant to leave France and return to his life in America, he decided to take a final flight at his squadron's airfield in Toul. As he went for his own plane, the mechanic brought out a recently repaired one instead, in need of a test flight. The other pilots remonstrated with Baker, but he maintained that as commanding officer he could not let anyone else test the aircraft.

In heavy rain, Baker took off and began to level off at 600 feet. A quarter of a mile into the flight, the engine failed. The plane was generally easy to crash-land if necessary, something he had done previously at the cost of a few broken ribs.

"Instead of running straight away to land he started to turn back toward the field. The wing slipped, the machine crashed and he was killed."

—Eyewitness account of Baker's death by Cpt. Edwin H. Cooper, 26th Division Photographic Officer, United States Signal Corps

A few hundred yards from the airfield, his plane crashed nose first into the ground. He was quickly freed from the aircraft by his men, but died in an ambulance minutes later; his orders to return home were found in his jacket pocket. Baker was buried in a small military cemetery near Toul, but in 1921 his mother had his remains moved to her family plot in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Though newspapers reported that Baker had died as a result of engine failure, unsubstantiated rumors began to circulate that his death was not accidental. Those who knew him were aware of his reluctance to return to civilian life and his feelings over the loss of Scott. He could have returned to America and played professional sport, where he could have earned far more money than from a job in finance, but his upbringing made that impossible for him. A career in business held no appeal; during a weekend vacation with a fellow Princeton graduate Baker revealed that he felt his life was over, and he would never again experience the thrills of football or hockey. In 1966 author John D. Davies published a biography of Baker, where he noted a relative of Baker's could not see a future for him in the post-war world. However Davies refused to elaborate on what he called the "suicide theory of enigmatic death," as he feared that "some of the old guard would be furious if they thought I was trying to prove it."