His Attestation Paper, filled out for his entry at Saskatoon, gives his height as 5 feet 9½ inches, his complexion as fair, and hair and eyes as brown.

Harold Hartney claimed three years prior service as a lieutenant in the Harbord Cadets and as a trumpeter bandsman in the 48th Highlanders.

[2] After he shipped out to England with the 28th Battalion C.E.F.in May 1915,[3] he visited an aerodrome at Folkestone while training nearby on Dibgate Plains and crossed paths with fellow Canadian Billy Bishop.

[1] By the beginning of the Somme Offensive, Hartney had been assigned to 20 Squadron as a Royal Aircraft Factory FE.2d pilot.

Hartney smacked his gunner alert, sideslipped from danger, and racked his Royal Aircraft Factory FE.2d into an Immelmann turn.

[5] On the way home, Hartney and his gunner got into eleven more skirmishes, clearing three incidental machine gun jams.

On 2 February, flying his ninth assigned aircraft in eight months duty, Hartney destroyed a Halberstadt D.II over Lille.

With observer W. T. Jourdan aboard, and escorted by another FE.2, Hartney found himself under attack by seven German Albatros D.III fighter planes.

The poor brave kid just kept on going, for all the world like a mortally wounded bird plummeting to his death near a river bend below us."

The escort then broke up under fire from a single Albatros; the British observer was killed in action, and the pilot wounded.

Hartney attempted to battle the attacker, only to discover that his own FE.2 suffered from a snapped-off propeller blade and broken flying wires and was incapable of fighting.

The Canadian ace had to shut down the engine and dead-stick to a crashlanding in a Belgian field picketed with hop poles.

REPORT TO COLONEL ROSCOE AT TORONTO, CANADA, TO COMMAND 27TH AMERICAN AERO SQUADRON WITH RANK FROM THIS DATE OF MAJOR, SIGNAL CORPS, UNITED STATES ARMY.

[9] Harold Hartney ended the war as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Service, leading to some confusion as to his nationality.