[5] During the Mexican Revolution, according to a Lamb newspaper interview, he was hired as a mercenary pilot to fly for General Benjamín G. Hill's forces.
Phil Rader, a mercenary pilot for opposing General Victoriano Huerta, had supposedly several times bombed the town of Naco, Sonora, Mexico, held by Hill's forces.
[6][7] Lamb purportedly joined the British military in World War I and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as a sergeant pilot, supposedly becoming an ace with either five or eight victories.
[2] Lamb was interviewed by Arthur Howden Smith of the New York Evening Post about his claimed downing of a German Gotha bomber over Hainault Forest, in which his gunner was killed and he himself was shot.
The two got together, rounded up unemployed World War I veteran pilots in the city, and split them up, with Lamb first choosing two, then Mazzolini one (as the rebels had only six aircraft).
The non-flying colonel was impressed when the rebel plane went into a spin and "disappeared over the skyline", with federalist mercenary "Stewart on its tail, firing steadily."
[18] A declassified memo dated April 15, 1949, from "John Edgar Hoover" to the Director of Intelligence, General Staff, Department of the Army, The Pentagon, reports that "Colonel Dean Ivan Lamb" was "recently interviewed" at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office.
The memo requests any records of this notification and the "present whereabouts of Colonel Thiele in order that he may be interviewed in connection with these allegations.