PARIS — The Roland Garros tennis complex in Paris was named in 1928 to honor French aviator Roland Garros, a World War I fighter pilot who died in combat in 1918. Emile Lesueur, president of the Stade Français rugby club and a former business school classmate of Garros, proposed the name for the new venue a decade after Garros’ death.

Roland Garros was born in 1885 on Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean. He graduated from business school and founded a car dealership before attending the first major international air show in France’s Champagne region in August 1909, an event that inspired him to become a pilot. He earned his pilot’s license after teaching himself to fly a plane he had purchased.

Garros quickly established himself as a pioneering aviator. In September 1911, he broke an altitude record by reaching nearly 13,000 feet, and in 1912 he set another by ascending to 19,000 feet. In 1913, he became the first person to fly across the Mediterranean Sea, traveling from the French Riviera to Tunisia in nearly eight hours. He declined a French government offer of a naval escort for the flight, though French naval authorities deployed torpedo boats along his route.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Garros enlisted in the French army. He worked with engineer Raymond Saulnier to develop a system using deflector wedges on propeller blades, enabling forward-firing machine guns without damaging the propeller. On April 1, 1915, Garros shot down his first German aircraft using this system, and he downed two more within two weeks. He is considered the first person to shoot down another aircraft with a forward-firing gun synchronized to fire through the propeller arc.

Garros’ plane crashed in April 1915 due to engine trouble, and he was captured by German forces. He spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp, during which his health and eyesight deteriorated. The Germans studied his deflector system and later developed a synchronizer mechanism for machine guns. Garros escaped the camp with another soldier by disguising themselves as German officers.

He returned to combat despite the French government urging him to stay home as an advisor. “Remember, I have a big score against them to pay for the last three years,” Garros told The New York Times in March 1918. He was killed in action on October 5, 1918, the day before his 30th birthday and one month before the war ended.

“He's an important figure in early aviation, both as a record-setter before the war and as a wartime pilot,” says Christopher Moore, the curator for World War I aircraft at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. Moore added, “He's considered the first person to shoot down another aircraft with a gun firing forward between the propeller.” Moore also said, “I guess he was a national hero, and that kind of tells you how people thought about him.”