"War Birds" by Elliot White Springs was based on a diary kept by John McGavock Grider during WWI. The diary was a source of a lawsuit with Elliot White Springs and the subject of papers, documentaries and of great interest to historians.

The following passages come from the book War Bird: The Life and Times of Elliot White Springs by Burke Davis. Published in 1987.

Page 36

At Mineola, Sergeant Springs met two older student pilots who arrived from the training school at Champaign, Illinois - John McGavock Grider, twnety -five of Arkansas and Laurence Callahan of Chicago, twenty-three years old, both hard-drinking lively companions, eager for adventure. Grider, a powerful stocky man who had been reared on a Mississippi River plantation, had married at the age of seventeen without attending college, was the father of two sons and was estranged from his wife....The trio became fast friends at once and were known as "The Three Musketeers."

Page 43

After meeting Miss Carlton, Elliot wrote, "Oh, la la, what a knockout!" Billie and Mac Grider, he noted, "got on like Antony and Cleopatra. How that woman can dance!...She is about twenty -three and has been on the stage since she was eighteen. She sure is witty. She kept us laughing all evening." After the party Grider took Billie home to her luxurious flat where supper was served by a maid. Billie "slipped into a negligee and looked like a million dollars." Grider found her irresistible. Within a few weeks they were engaged and planned an April wedding. Springs and Callahan persuaded Mac to postpone marriage until he returned on leave. "Billie is lousy with money and you have nothing but your pay as a shavetail." Reluctantly, the love-struck couple agreed to wait.

Pages 109-112

In the midst of fanfare of success, Elliott had an unsettling letter from Mrs. Jacobs, who claimed that Mac's diary had been the major source of the book. In the first installment of War Birds in Liberty she recognized the entries she knew "almost by heart" from reading the little diary and wrote to Elliott demanding an explanation.

"It was not Mac's diary," he replied, and added without further explanation, "When it is finished, you may not want to claim it is Mac's diary…with this response, and although they did not openly accuse him on plagiarism, Josephine Jacobs charged that Elliott's explanation of the facts amounted to now more than "mysticism."

In later episodes of the Liberty serial, Mrs. Jacobs claimed, she also recognized "many incidents familiar to me" from letters Max had sent from France. "I felt McGavock's personality her and there [in War Birds]…I hoped and believed that the diary to which referred in a dozen letters was still extant and that is formed the basis for some of the story." Through an intermediary Mrs. Jacobs asked Springs for a fuller explanation. He responded tersely, declaring that the two complaining women were "certainly not Mac's sisters" in spirit.
About this time a Memphis newspaper interviewed one of the Grider sisters, who claimed that Mac was the diarist and also confirmed the date of his death on June 18, 1918 - enough to convince attentive readers that the final highly dramatic pages of War Birds (dated in late August) could not have been attributed to Grider. Perhaps because this report was partial and inconclusive, it did not receive wide circulation - but letters from the Grider family (and allegedly from others) did give editors at both Liberty and George Doran & Company pause. They threatened to withdraw War Birds from publication "as a literary hoax" if Springs did not clarify the matter.

Elliott placated the editors and publishers by making a full explanation of the complex matter and agreed to write an introduction, signing his name and acknowledging his editorship. Still he refused to reveal his own role in writing the narrative and insisted upon leaving the impression that War Birds was indeed the work of a single diarist who had been killed in action. Elliott wrote in his introduction that Grider deserved the right to anonymity: "Would you dig up the Unknown Soldier and identify him to satisfy curiosity?"

That partial and oblique explanation seemed to satisfy both publishers and public. Silencing the Grider sisters was another matter. Springs had offered to turn over some proceeds from the book to Grider's family. He had sent Mac's widow $500 and promised to send more and said he say "no reason why" he shouldn't provide some support - $50 per month - for the Grider boys. When Josephine Jacobs continued to protest and threatened suit, Elliott was tempted to tell the whole story of the book's genesis, whatever its effect. "If the sisters keep up their trouble," he wrote to his friend Preston Boyden, a Chicago attorney,

I am prepared to prove that Mac gave me the diary. If that is not sufficient, I am prepared to prove that I wrote War Birds in 1919…for an anthology of the Air Service, which was never published.

I rewrote it again in 1925 in the third person as a series of short stories which were never published in their original form.

I then rewrote it in the first person again and for the sake of sentiment, attributed it to Mac. It is based largely on my letters, my diary and my combat reports. I also used Barksdale's diary and supplementary matter given me by Kelly and Callahan. To further favor Mac, I used a part of his actual diary. Both Liberty and Doran objected to the use of this as they said it was far below the other in standard and would give it a bad introduction. I insisted on using it and made some changes to satisfy them. However, I managed to keep the spirit of it so that it fooled Callahan and has now fooled the sisters into believing that he wrote the whole thing and I merely tacked on the end. I can readily prove who wrote what but I don't want to …I have my letters which were copied verbatim into it.

But why spoil one of the outstanding books of the war because two fool women want to bask in glory? I think the thing to do is to ignore them. Why help them tear down what I have built up? If they insist on going to court, that is another matter, but I won't unless I am forced to.

Elliott suggested that Boyden "put these facts" before Judge Jacob McGavock Dickinson, a Grider relative who was legal advisor to Mac's family. Springs offered to consult with Dickinson and to "do anything about it that you and he may decide is reasonable. My original intention was to do something for Mac's boys and it still is…If Judge Dickinson wants to know why I wrote War Birds as I did, you can tell him that Mac once asked me to tell the people at home about his triumphs in London Society. He was very proud of his success and outlined to me how he wanted the story to be told…I followed his instructions but had to make many changes to sell it."

Elliott was reluctant to reveal any of this:

My prime consideration is that Mac Grider should get all the credit for having written War Birds and for having performed the deeds therein described. If the sisters can figure out a way that this can be done publicly, I will be only too glad to shout it from the housetops. But all the critics are ready to tear it to pieced and should Doran or Liberty or myself state that Mac wrote it, or than any individual wrote it, we would have to withdraw it from sale as it could be proved a forgery. As The Diary of an Unknown Aviator no one can do more than sniff at it. The sisters are going to give the critics some straw for their bricks, and ruin it as a book, take away what glory I have given to Mac, and force me to admit its authorship, which I will be very loath to do and would only do it to defend my name against their slander. They have everything to gain by shutting up.

He appeared in Memphis a few days later, conferred with Judge Dickinson and made a settlement with him - Elliott paid $12,500 for the rights to Mac's diary, and the Grider family agreed to drop its challenges to War Birds.

It remained for Mac's son George to put the record straight in a letter of 1971 to a scholar then studying the Springs manuscripts: "I have my father's diary. It covers a period of ten [sic] days, beginning with the ship was in the harbor of Nova Scotia on September 1, 1917, and ending on October 1, the day before his ship arrived in port. I received the diary from my aunt, Mrs. Jacobs….

"In any event, every syllable of War Birds dated after October 1, 1917, was written by Colonel Springs."

Page 121

Elliott never publicly clarified the extent of his authorship of War Birds, his most powerful work. Even in the 1980s the book is frequently catalogued as the work of John M. Grider, as edited by Springs. It was only in 1951 the Springs revealed, in the foreword of a new edition of War Birds, that the diarist was in fact Mac Grider, whose "spirit still lives on in the pages" of War Birds. Even then Elliott did not explain that he had used only a few pages of Grider's brief diary, which ended before the cadets landed in England…Springs made no further public explanation of the genesis of War Birds, and it was only in self-defense, against the claims of Grider's sisters, that he made a guarded confession of his methods.

Page 246 - Notes to Chapters
Chapter III: "That Select Company of Ruffians"

A copy of the brief shipboard diary of Mac Grider, which was to become an object of controversy, is in the Springs Papers. Springs sent the original to the Grider family.

Page 247 - Notes to Chapters
Chapter V: "This War Isn't What It Used To Be"

Of several versions of Mac Grider's death in combat, the most significant is Elliott's letter to Lena of 20 June 1918, two days after his friend was shot down. War Birds offers no satisfactory account of Grider's death because Springs was forced to falsify the chronology of events in order to resent his full story (Grider actually died on 18 June 1918, though War Birds records the event at an indefinite date-but after 27 August). Elliott's letter to Lena of 12 September 1918 confirmed Grider's death and burial by the Germans.

Page 250 - Notes to Chapters
Chapter VIII: "The Unknown Writer"

The controversy over War Birds between Springs and Mac Grider's family (chiefly Josephine G. Jacobs) is clarified by substantial files of correspondence in the Springs Papers. Mrs. Jacobs put her complaints most forcefully to Elliott in a letter of 25 May 1927. Elliott's correspondents on this matter included, in addition to Josephine, Marguerite (Mrs. Mac) Grider; Mac's sons: John and George; Mac's father, mother and stepmother; Wilson J. Northcross, guardian of the Grider boys; and Emma Cox Smith, Mac's friend and banker.
Most important is Elliott's account of the genesis of War Birds to Preston Boyden, 25 March 1927 (as quoted in the present text). Elliott's letters to the editors of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, 19 October and 25 October 1927, are also revealing.

Though Springs conceded in his foreword to the 1951 edition of War Birds that Mac Grider was the diarist of the novel, he never made public his own role as author, de facto diarist, and hero.

Spring's not only gave his earning from Liberty's serialization of War Birds and more to the Grider family, but also helped Mac's sons, John and George, enter Annapolis and followed their careers with interest. George commanded the celebrated submarine Flasher, which sank a record tonnage of enemy shipping in World War II; John served aboard a cruiser in the fierce battles for the Solomon Islands. In his brief diary Mac Grider had written, "I hope my boys will grow up to be good strong upwright [sic] men…go to college and make good friends and be accepted by the right sort of people."