Who Was Roland Garros? The Fighter Pilot Behind the French Open

The French Open comes to a conclusion this weekend — and virtually every story about the tournament has referred to a man who had little to do with tennis.

He is Roland Garros, the French war hero after whom the Paris tournament’s main stadium is named.

In 1913, he became the first person to fly across the Mediterranean. During World War I, he was a pioneer of air warfare, shooting down four enemy planes with the help of his own invention: wedge-shaped steel plates attached to the propeller blades, which allowed for a forward-firing machine gun.

“The rate of fire was that most of the bullets would miss the propeller, but every so often one would strike it,” Peter Jakab, chief curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told CNN. “So this was a way to deflect the bullets from the propeller.”

According to Mr. Jakab, the technique was not very efficient, but it nonetheless rendered Garros’s plane more lethal than any other aircraft flying during the early stages of the war.

“Over a very short period of time, he shot down a number of German airplanes and created quite some terror among the German pilots,” Mr. Jakab said.

Mr. Garros was captured by Germany in 1915 and spent three years as a prisoner of war. He escaped after sending coded messages to France arranging for a map of Germany to be delivered in the hollow handle of a tennis racket.

According to Michaël Guittard, head of collections at the French Tennis Federation, the escape, undertaken with another captured French pilot, “was nothing short of an adventure movie.”

“They slept in a cemetery, spent an afternoon in a cinema, blended into the crowd and finally, after numerous attempts, made it through the Netherlands, on to London, and finally back to Paris, where they were treated to a hero’s welcome,” Mr. Guittard told the television network France 24.

In a 1918 interview with The New York Times after he returned to France, Mr. Garros said, “Of course I am going back to the front.” He expressed confidence in the chances of the Allied Powers.

“What if Russia has fallen down?” Mr. Garros said. “You Americans are worth ten Russias.”

The Allied Powers did win the war, of course, but not before Mr. Garros was killed: His plane was shot down by a German pilot flying a Fokker D-VII plane on Oct. 5, 1918, a day before his 30th birthday.

It was the technology that Mr. Garros helped envision that led to his demise: By the time he returned to the air, a Dutch engineer named Anthony Fokker had developed propeller-synchronized machine guns that stopped bullets from hitting the propeller blades altogether.

“He was surpassed by the war and by this technique that he had pioneered,” Mr. Jakab said.

Mr. Garros himself, perhaps, may have foreseen this end. In the interview with The Times, he said he needed some time to “get abreast of the new developments.”

“You know it is like coming back from the grave,” he said. “One has to learn over again.”

A decade later, a tennis stadium was constructed in Paris by Emile Lesieur, who insisted it be named after Mr. Garros, his wartime friend.

This article has been adapted from the Back Story of our Morning Briefing. You can sign up to receive the briefing weekdays.

We have briefings timed for the Americas, Australia, Asia and Europe.