Who was Roland Garros?

Roland Garros is a name that has become synonymous with tennis, immediately evoking images of the red clay courts of Paris, grinding rallies and Rafael Nadal’s long-standing dominance. However, the stadium complex is not named after a masterful racquet wielder but a French aviation pioneer and fighter pilot.

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Eugène Adrien Roland Georges Garros began his career in aviation at the tender age of 21. After attending a public flying event in Sapicourt near Reims in 1909, he would soon take to the skies himself. In the same year, he first flew a Demoiselle monoplane, an aircraft navigable by lightweight pilots. Soon graduating to the Bleriot XI monoplanes, he would compete in many air races across Europe, including the 1911 Paris to Madrid air race and the Circuit of Europe, finishing second in the latter. Flying the speedier Moraine-Saulnier monoplanes, he would be the first to fly non-stop across the Mediterranean Sea on the 23rd of September, 1913. With the outbreak of World War I, Garros would join the French Army’s aerial unit.

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An astute thinker, throughout the war, he was tinkering with ideas to make fighter planes faster, efficient and most importantly, lethal to enemy eyes. Given the difficulty of finding targets mid-air using a hand-held carbine, he would visit Raymond Saulnier to discuss the solution: a machine gun propeller. However, Saulnier’s prototype was fitted with the Hotchkiss 09/13 portative machine gun. Highly inconsistent, Garros and his mechanic Jules Hue made certain adjustments to the design, making it better suited for combat. Achieving the first shooting down using a tractor propeller on the 1st of April, Roland Garros would immortalize himself in the pages of combat history. Two more defeats of German aircraft would follow, further establishing his credentials. His achievements earned him a medal from The Aero Club of America.

The war would provide further adventures for Garros. Taken prisoner by the German Army, he would escape the POW camp, fleeing to London via the Netherlands before rejoining the French Army. However, he would not survive the war. Scanning the skies on his Saulnier Type L parasol monoplane, he was shot down by a German fighter pilot, most likely ace pilot Hermann Habich. Killed near Vouziers, in the Ardennes region of France, his death would come a month before the war and a day before his 30th birthday.