Fly Girls

Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied the Odds and Made Aviation History
© 2018 Keith O'Brien
352 pages

"Women must try to do things as men have tried. Where they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others." - Amelia Earhart, 1937

The subtitle is a bit of an oversell, but Fly Girls  honors five pioneers of aviation,  most of whom died while trying to push the envelope.  Amelia Earhart is the only one of their number who has any name recognition today,  disappearing as she did while trying to accomplish the first trans-pacific solo flight.  She'd previously been the first to fly solo from the United States to Hawaii, as well as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.  Judging by her accomplishments, Earhart is in a class by herself here, but I'm tempted to agree with one of the other featured fliers here, Louise Thaden, who responded to someone asking her how she won the 5th National Air Race by stating it was 25% skill, 25% the airplane, and 50% luck.      Early aviation was a lethal enthusiasm, practiced with evolving tools and planes composed with canvas wings.  When things went wrong -- and flying planes for hours at a time meant something was bound to --  survival came down to circumstance. Sometimes a catastrophe could be survived, but sometimes there was nothing but to accept rapidly-hurtling fate. No one in this book is ever far from death; Earhart, for instance,  was nearly sucked out of her aircraft during the same race that Thaden won. 

Earhart's triumphs could have belonged to other women, like Ruth Nichols:  she refused to give up trying to cross the Atlantic, even after she crashed two planes within a span of four months.  A broken back aside, she was determined to try it again -- only to have Earhart beat her to it.  Another accomplishment of the women here -- who were friends and competitors simultaneously -- was organizing the International Organization of Women Pilots, more popularly known as "The Ninety-Nines" because 99 women attended the first full meeting thereof.  The Ninety-Nines organized in response to the discriminatory policies adopted by air race organizations to keep women out of the racing. The exact kinds of accidents that downed fantastically gifted fliers like Florence Klingensmith occurred to male fliers, but no one demeaned the talent of the male deceased or questioned their mental state at the time. Flying was inherently dangerous, but women, the Ninety-Nines protested, should have the right to accept that danger, and to try for the glory that would be theirs if they were successful.

As much as I enjoyed this look into aviation history,  it does not live up to its title. The subjects were all outstandingly courageous and talented, moreso for continuing to seek their passion despite little support from outside, save for businessmen interested in gaining advertising value by sponsoring the odd attempt to across the Atlantic or set a new endurance record. But if this is a book about early women aviation pioneers, why is someone like Bessie Coleman completely absent, not so much as mentioned?  Unable to take pilot training in the US because of her race, Coleman learned French and traveled to Paris to learn to fly, an incredible demonstration of doggedness that surely belongs here. I think Fly Girls is  therefore more accurately regarded as a book about the women who formed the Ninety-Nines, culminating in their successful re-entry into national air races and Thaden's victory.   They were an impressive group of women who refused to quit, and I'm glad their story is being shared decades after the last of them has left us.

Earhart and the Autogyro prototype, which she used to demonstrate across the country before her Atlantic solo flight. I would have loved to learn more about this!

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am
© 2011 Robert Gandt
351 pages

How does a world-class airline fall so quickly from the heights that its pilots are accidentally locked in the building when it closes its doors for the last time, forced to jump from a fire-exit door onto shrubbery below?   The decline and crash of Pan-American Airlines wasn’t as abrupt as memory has it, as Skygods narrative history demonstrates, but a drift toward failure that was nearly corrected a time or two but never long enough.   Skygods' history of Pan-Am uses the stories of its captains, executive, and crew to make personal a proud airline’s fall from glory.

Pan-Am isn’t an airline I ever flew on,  closing as it did when I was six, but as a  brand name I heard about it often enough growing up -- and I witnessed the airline’s complete self-confidence in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey.   That complete self-confidence was part of its early pilot culture,  when a airline created by a Navy buff adopted aspects of navy lingo and dress.  The planes were “Clippers”, and their crews wore smart uniforms, answering to their lord and commander in the air --  the Master of Ocean Flying Boats.  It wasn’t just a name:  Pan-Am specialized in overseas destinations, beginning with a Key West to Havana run, and to serve the undeveloped world by air, it used floatplanes or flying boats.  Pan-Am captains were alpha males later running jet engines, often wrong but never in doubt.    Juan Trippe, the effective creator of Pan-Am and its chief for decades, was certainly confident in his own vision and the airline. He  pushed commercial aviation into the jet age against its reservations, twisting elbows and manipulating one company against another, forcing them to do his bidding.  Trippe got what he wanted -- jet airlines that could go faster and over greater distances -- but  at a price. The brutal deal-making  clouded Pan-Am’s  reputation,  making it political enemies, and Trippe’s greatest dream, the 747, would bleed the rest of Pan-Am’s life.

Pan-Am had taken on enormous obligations in creating that fleet, but it had enormous assets, too: it wasn’t just an airline, it owned a pricey chain of hotels.   It was an international corporation with an antiquated culture, however; even in the sixties it operated like a small transport firm from the thirties, with such lax accounting measures that no one could tell what lines were profitable or not. When Trippe was dreaming of doubling his capacity with 747s,   flights to Europe on 727s (another Trippe coup) were flying half-empty.   And those “Skygods”, the captains who ruled their ships with an iron hand? They were getting old, with an easy arrogance made more volatile by forgetfulness.  In this period,  eleven new jets, their crews and passengers, were destroyed in spectacular crashes abroad.     Although Pan-Am would reform its approach to command and develop a stellar safety record,, it couldn’t win back political favor: its old monopoly on international routes was slowly pried away, while the old bar on domestic routes was retained.

Although Pan-Am’s profits dwindled into losses year after year, the  downward spiral seemed to be arrested by another CEO, who closed a lot of low-performing lines and put employees on furlough.  The airline began making money again, only to blow it all  in a bidding war  for a southern airline with domestic routes.  The integration of the two airlines was not handled well,  and from then on Pan-Am’s successive directors kept repeating the other’s mistakes:  they’d sell off a performing asset, use the money badly, and come out worse for the wear.    Pan-Am just couldn’t adapt to slug it out in the domestic markets,   and in gutting its international flights to finance the domestic fight, it essentially consumed itself to death.  Outside matters didn't help, from an oil crunch to an act of very public terrorism that saw Pan-Am Flight 103 smeared across the Scottish countyside. 

I don’t know that any extinct airline enjoys the reputation in death that Pan-Am does, receiving adulation in modern films like Catch Me if You Can and the series Pan-Am.  And then there’s the case of a man who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate a first-class cabin and lounge from a Pan-Am 747 in his garage, then expanded it in a separate building.   Those who remember it -- or those who are simply curious about it -- will find in Skygods an easy but sad  narrative of the airline’s return to Earth.

CBS apparently did a short clip on the anniversary of Pan-Am's closure:

Conquest of the Skies

Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America
© 1979 Carl Solberg
441 pages

If ever you wanted a history of commercial aviation in the United States, Conquest of the Skies is it. Beginning with the origins of flight and culminating in the 747, Conquest artfully combines business, social, and technical history. That distinguishes it from other books in this vein, like the tech-focused Turbulent Skies. Written for lay readers, Solberg brackets his history with reflections on how the romance of flight became – through persistent tinkering, reckless adventurism, war, and ambition– a perfectly ordinary form of transportation that shrunk the world, opening global vistas to the multitude.

In the beginning, there was the Post Office. Solberg’s first chapter, of course, is about the Wright brothers’ achievement and the rise of airplane manufacturing in the Great War. The story of commercial aviation picks up in earnest, however, after the war, when the US Postal Service began using the US Army airplanes created for the war to deliver mail. Delivering mail sounds tame and routine, but the early airmail service was anything but. These pilots were still flying by sight, looking for landmarks. In fog they were helpless; in turbulent weather, their canvas-and-wood frames were torn apart. (In 1934, a particularly bad winter caused nearly a crash a day.) Yet the Post Office saw the potential in this sort of delivery, and from this service grew the first commercial air companies. As infrastructure and technology for flying improved – as artificially –lighted “lanes” were created across countrysides, and the problem of aerial radio communication nailed down – a growing number of companies bid for airmail contracts and began creating their own fleets.

Modern readers may recognize the names of companies formed in those days: United and American Airlines are two survivors, and most adults can remember TWA and Pan-Am. Although the airmail contracts allowed for a commercial air company to get started, other opportunities for revenue – like passengers – were required for real expansion. In these days, a flight might carry only a handful of people. Even the larger planes of the pre-jet perio were carrying only 35 at most. In the 1920s, the appeal of air travel was largely in its novelty and speed. No one did it for comfort: in those days, passengers had to suck oxygen from tubes throughout the flight, and were constantly jostled amid turbulence. (The first stewardesses were required to have nurses’ licenses.) As the technology improved, however, the airlines strove to imitate the quality of service aboard Pullman coaches, with meals served on actual plates, and liquor on the house.

World War 2 propelled planes to greater heights, concentrating fifty years of advancement into five. The second world war was an air war, beginning with Stukas and ending with the Enola Gay. From the war came radar, legions of pilots, improved navigation, and steadily-improving aircraft design. More important, however, were the airstrips. In the 1920s, Pan-Am could only cover as much of Latin America as it did through flying boats – “clippers” in a more literal sense than its later landplanes with that name. Boats didn’t need airstrips, just a stable body of water and a dock. But the war had freckled the globe with airstrips, saw airlines other than Pan-Am work the overseas routes, and created interest in what lay beyond the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. When jets entered the picture and airlines began experimenting with an “air coach” model -- carrying a lot of lower fares instead of a few expensive ones -- air travel descended from the clouds of fancy into the real world, a miracle rendered mundane…like automobiles, electricity, radio, and trains before it.

Conquest of the Skies is outstanding popular history, uniting three areas of interest; the birth, growth, and evolution of various airline companies, including their involvement with the government; technical advancement; and the actual experience of flying, from the cramped quarters and head injuries of the 1920s to the cozy comforts of the fifties and sixties. I only wish it went beyond 1963, so Solberg could have documented the flight of the Concorde. While Solberg doesn’t footnote his text, the book concludes with an extensive bibliography.

Lockout

Lockout
© 2016 John J. Nance
412 pages

Something very strange is happening at 35,000 feet. A lost and unresponsive Airbus is feeding false data to its pilots, assuring them that they're halfway over the Atlantic and nearing New York, but any glance out the window tells the crew they're headed across France and seemingly towards Tel Aviv. The Airbus is carrying an ousted Israeli prime minister, who did everything he could to push Israel and Iran over the brink of war while in office. In DC, three intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense are scrambling over one another's toes and endangering innocent lives trying to figure out what's going on and what to do next. If the Airbus continues on its present course, it could very well pass over the border of Iran and trigger a nuclear war between the mullahs and the Israelis. Such is the story of Lockout, in which a couple of pilots and their passengers become the unwitting collateral damage of one or more black ops projects.

Confession: I didn't realize aviation thrillers were a genre. I've seen plenty of crisis-on-an-airplane movies course -- Air Force One, Taken, Flightplan, Nonstop, etc -- but didn't imagine that kind of drama could be rendered in books. Well, John Nance has certainly proven me wrong. Lockout's narrative takes readers through diplomatic intrigue, technical puzzles, street chases, counterespionage schemes, jet combat, and ordinary "whodunit" questions. The author, a Vietnam pilot turned airline pilot, doesn't shy away from putting his technical knowledge about jet aircraft to work; the key problem of the story is that computer controls over the Airbus have ceased to function, and manual control systems...well, those are soooooo 1980s. Restoring control of the plane to the pilots involves descending into the pit of the electronics bay and figuring out the power and wiring relays down there enough to interrupt the automatics without reducing the plane to a falling airframe. Admittedly, characters working through circuit logic with one another might not reach a large audience, so these scenes are only part of the ensemble of mystery. The main plot takes place over a matter of four hours, as several on-the-ground mysteries converge into the one -- a plane that delivered where it shouldn't have been, whose electrical work doesn't match Airbus specs, who had intelligence agencies looking for it before they even knew it was in trouble, and which might provoke World War 3. For fans of thrillers and airflight, this is a fun one.

Infrastructure: A Field Guide

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
© 1999, 2014 Brian Hayes
544 pages

Here at last is a book for those of us who constantly gaze out the car window at the fixtures on utility poles, or drums mounted in the sky above the telephone building, and wonder: what are those and what do they do?  Chris Hayes offers in his introduction that there are many books for understanding the various kinds of trees and birds we see around us; his hope is to help readers understand the built environment which can be beautiful in own right. Hayes'  field guide is not a dry catalog of pipes and antennae, organized alphabetically. Instead, he offers a narrative laced with humor that explores the built world, system by system -- beginning with mining raw resources and ending with waste disposal.  In between are covered farming, waterworks, power production, the power grid, telecommunications, roads, bridges, railroads,  aviation, and shipping.  Hayes' writing combines history and description,  allowing the reader to understand not only how things work,  but how they got that way. Photographs abound, most of which were taken by the author himself and include unusual shots.

The fact that this book has gone through three editions indicates it has been a success with readers, and I'm not surprised.  We live in the midst of and are sustained by systems built with human hands, but which few understand. There's enormous appeal in opening the hood on modernity  and gaining even a little knowledge as to how it all works, especially when systems link together. Although this is a guide to the 'industrial landscape',  Hayes' writing brings a strong humanistic touch. The book is about the world humans have created for ourselves, for our needs;  reading the built landscape  is an act not just of technical analysis, but of human interest.   Admittedly,  there are topics in the book harder to appreciate; mining, for instance, usually happens far from where we live.  The majority of this book, however, is the stuff of everyday: traffic lights, radio towers,  food, and highways.  Although I've  done a good bit of reading on infrastructure, Hayes' book was full of interesting facts and stories. For instance,  in the early 1980s a network of eight radio towers were set up to aide in global navigation: one of the stations was maintained by the US Coast Guard in the middle of Nevada. The system only lasted ten years before being supplanted  totally by GPS.

I referred to Kate Asher's The Works as a dream of a book, and I can only repeat the statement here:  it's a gorgeous and helpful piece of work.

Hey, look, it's the Very Large Array!

Related:
The Works: Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher
On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work, Scott Huler
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum
The Grid: A Journey to the Heart of Our Electrified World, Phillip Schewe
Divided Highways: Building the Interstates, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis

Turbulent Skies

Turbulent Skies: The History of Commercial Aviation
© 1995 T. H. Heppenheimer
408 pages

What a century was the 20th, which turned everyday life into the stuff of yesteryear's science fiction. Who would believe at its dawning that one day people would travel the world primarily through the air, soaring through it in great machines made of iron?  Turbulent Skies is a history of commercial aviation in the United States, Great Britain, and (occasionally) Europe. Part of the Sloan Technology Series, it mixes business and social history with extensive commentary on aviation engineering.  Between the generous expanses devoted to airframe and compressor problems to the play-by-play of mergers and expansion plans, Turbulent Skies is a through bit of reference reading.   The author includes as many diagrams of jet engines as he does of the planes themselves, which I found curious.

Turbulent Skies largely focuses on the United States, with occasional chapters on Britain and a few mentions of French and German development.  The chapter on World War 2 features Germany heavily, but this is not a book of aerial strategy; instead, Heppenheimer records the respective powers'  pursuit of jet technology.  (Germany was able to produce the Me-262, a potential fighter that was thankfully squandered as a light bomber.  Considerable resources were diverted from planes to the V2 bombing programs,  again mercifully.)   What leaps out in Turbulent Skies is how utterly the creature of government air travel is. Unlike trains, which had their origin in commercial mining, the first air-commerce companies in the United States  balanced their budgets on mail contracts.  The world wars were likewise a boon to aviation, producing technologies like radar that were put to use in the consumer market. The amount of airplanes produced for military service and then dumped onto the consumer market likewise produced a multitude of small companies buying planes for pennies and trying to build regional empires.  The government  also bankrolled municipal airports and then forbade city governments from making a fuss about the noise. (Mind your business, peasants...)

With such support behind it, little wonder the airplanes had a quick triumph over their transport rivals, the train companies. (The quickness of aerial ascent is made obvious in the life of Juan Trippe: he created Pan-Am in the early days of aviation, and was still its lord and master when the 747 was created.) Of course, air travel had honest advantages -- speed and novelty.  Passenger ships also lost out to the planes, but the industry as a whole survived by shifting its focus to cruises. The seagoing experience, rather than being a comfortable means of transportation, became instead a vacation in itself: the ship was the party.  (Heppenheimer doesn't mention this, but trains tried doubling-down on luxury, too; unfortunately, toodling along at 30 mph speed limits inside cities isn't quite as relaxing as cruising the Caribbean.)     The happy days didn't last forever, though; in the 1970s, oil crises and recession saw some of the mainstays begin to flounder and perish.  The most notable death, prolonged until 1991, was Pan-Am. It  achieved early success by focusing on connecting the United States to the outside world, snagging a government-granted monopoly of the  Central-South American routes.   The recession and energy spike caught Pan-Am at just the wrong time, when it was borrowing billions to launch a vast period of expansion with 747s.  Perhaps it will be revived when we begin passenger service to the Moon.

Though informative, casual readers should be aware this is more about technology and business contracts than the social/human side of air transport.

Related:
Getting There: The Epic Battle Between Road and Rail, Stephen Goddard
The Great Railroad Revolution, Christian Wolmar

Rescue Warriors

Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes
© 2009 David Helvarg
384 pages

When Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, the Coast Guard was the first on the scene, with helicopters in the air saving lives long before FEMA stirred. Though one of the United States’ military branches, the Coast Guard is an unusual institution;  best-known for its high profile search and rescue missions. Far and away the smallest military branch – and the most physically and academically rigorous in terms of its recruiting requirements --  the Coast Guard’s mission takes it far beyond safe and shallow coastal waters.   Rescue Warriors provides both a history of and a tribute to this oft-overlooked service, mixing history of its various missions and interviews with men and women working overtime to preserve lives and keep the coasts safe.

Although the Coast Guard was officially organized in 1915, it prefers to trace its history back to the revenue cutters of George Washington’s administration, which enforced and collected customs and tariff fees.  Another parent organization was that of the lighthouse and lightship service. The present Coast Guard has maintained that duel-purpose organization, simultaneously enforcing maritime law and rescuing those in danger.  Its mission portfolio is vast: in Rescue Warriors,  Helvarg interviews search-and-rescue teams,  drug-enforcement patrols,  counter-terrorism missions, environmental cleanup crews, science stations, and even more.  Helvarg spent time with servicemen and officers from around the United States’ territorial waters: the Gulf Coast,  New England,  California, Alaska, Hawaii, and even (with Canadian ‘permission’) in the Artic northwest passage.  Despite its ‘coast’ guard name,  Coasties may be found throughout the world: their boarding teams are especially relied upon in the Persian Gulf,  boarding local boats (with consent) to ask about  pirate concerns – and fishing for information on parties hostile toward the governments of Iraq and the United States.  (If the Coast Guard being a military branch simultaneously providing law enforcement seems constitutionally questionable, that isn’t surprising given that Wilson presided over their formal creation:  he never met a constitutional curb he wouldn’t drive over.)

The demands placed on the Coast Guard only seem to be increasing: a global economy means more ships to monitor, and with the Artic now open for commercial traffic and industry,  there will be still more ground to cover. The Coast Guard is much smaller than even the closest other service, the US Marines, but the gulf between its responsibilities and resources has demanded a great deal of efficiency. The average age of a Coast Guard ship is thirty-five years, and its officers’ training vessel, the Eagle,  was built in 1936.   That’s resource conservation, though when a helicopter requires 40 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight time.... The reason for the Guard’s physical and mental demands becomes obvious in reading this:  they are operational every day, not simply training for the next big conflict, and they often go against nature at its hairiest – flying helicopters into punishing winds to seek out those in peril on the sea.  They’re also up against human nature: in the opening chapter on rescue operations in Hurricane Katrina,  the Guard’s Seahawk helicopters took ground fire from locals; another man threatened to shoot a helo crew if they didn’t rescue him, and when they dropped people off at a CG station, it was promptly looted –  though the ammunition locker refused to give up its contents.  At least against cartel gunmen, the Coast Guard  is authorized for “Airborne Use of Force”.

Rescue Warriors  makes for encouraging reading, filled with  tales of rescue, of men and women stretching themselves so that others might live.  Helvarg sees the Coast Guard’s historical legacy and current role as exemplary, highlighting the early employment of women in the lighthouse service, and urges that the Coast Guard be given more resources so that it might serve the United States’ expanding needs.   Ultimately, this is a fun read, a mix of history, present-day history stories, and a fair bit of editorializing by the author whenever there is an environmental connection.


Related:
The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens. The memoirs of a humanitarian-turned-Navy SEAL, another mix of service and force.

Miracle at Midway

Miracle at Midway
© 1983 Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein and,Katherine Dillon,
512 pages

Miracle at Midway is a thorough history of the June 4-7 effort of the Japanese to simultaneously seize the most likely U.S. approaches to the Empire and lure the US Pacific Fleet into a general engagement wherein it might be destroyed in total. Though colossally outnumbered in ships, the US Navy and Army Air Forces on Midway island had a slight advantage in planes which was used to enormous effect; in this David and Goliath battle, the Japanese carriers were the object of a surgical strike, though one of dive-bombers instead of stones. While there was definitely an element of luck on the American side -- one Japanese carrier's planes were caught pants down, trying to refuel and re-arm -- Midway was a victory of intelligence and courage more than fate. Although suffering from a paucity of maps, the authors bring extensive analysis and heavy research into the Japanese side to the table as well. Midway is one of the more important battles of the second World War, at least for Americans: just six months after the humiliating surprise of Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Fleet had utterly reversed its fortunes, destroying in a day the pride of the Japanese imperial fleet. Dai Nippon lost not only four carriers, but hundreds of planes and thousands of veteran men whose talents and experience could not be replaced. It's also an extraordinary moment in the history of naval warfare, the first battle in which the competing surface fleets never saw one another but through their air wings.

Dreamland

Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51
© 1998 Phil Patton
336 pages

"What would happen if the U.S. government opened its doors to us and let us see all that was going on? Depending on what is there, we'd either be vindicated or disappointed, but we would also rapidly lose interest. What would we focus our attentions on? Where would we go next?....the greatest thing about Area 51 is its mystery, otherwise nobody would care."

Dear readers, I have a confession. In middle school, I was way into alien conspiracy theories, specifically the Roswell Incident. I didn't believe anything had happened, but it was fun to pretend that it did. My bedroom walls were littered with three things: tiger photographs, glow-in-the-dark star stickers, and posters of green bobble-head aliens, sometimes dressed as hippies offering peace signs.   So, when I ran into Dreamland while looking for a similarly titled book on rural drug epidemics (Dreamland: the True Tale  of America's Opiate Epidemic), I had to try it out. Right?

It took me a few check-outs to actually read the book, because it's an odd kind of investigatory tourism that begins with the paranormal, shifts to completely sober and extensive discussion of military test aviation, and then swings back to more severe paranormal material towards the end. The author plays the part of reporter-tourist searching for the truth, presenting himself as neither credulous nor particularly skeptical. Like Herodotus, he simply reports what he is told, though there's an obvious personal interests in what 'Area 51' truly is.

Dreamland is not solely about 'the' Area 51, the conspiracy codename for Groom Lake, Nevada, where experimental jets are/were tested. 'Dreamland' as a place covers much of the southwest; it is not merely 'The Ranch' of Nevada, guarded by private paramilitary 'camo dudes', but the headspace world in which the subjects of this book live -- and while some of them believe devoutly in alien visitation and even in-progress takeover, others believe the alien talk is mere coverup for more ominous projects. One interviewee opined that the alien hype is being created by the military which will use a faux-alien invasion to effect a coup. The last quarter of the book is a bizarre mix of conspiracy theories, Christian and Islamic prophecies merging with alien obsession and political intrigue:  fear of a 'New World Order', so intense in Endtimes believers of the 1990s, is very strong here. My personal favorite, in part because it's the sort of thing I would do if I were in charge of a secret government project, is that Area 51 is cover, used to distract the public; the real base  is in Tonopah. (Of course, if I were in charge of the secret government project, I would put it underground and then stick a shopping complex on top of it.)

 Although the first and final fifths of Dreamland are very odd reading, fraught with true-believer syndrome ("Yes, the flying saucer we saw was a B2. But they're just  letting us see it so we won't freak out about the real flying saucers!"),  there's actually an enormous amount of information on military test aviation throughout the late 20th century, including on projects that were scrapped but which are now declassified.  Many of the aircraft mentioned bear little resemblance to conventional aircraft, at least to a public expecting to see something that looks like a commercial transport or fighters. The proposed A-12 Avenger is downright alien.   Dreamland features a chapter on the development of unmanned spy vehicles from spy planes like the U2, and speculates that soon these UAVs may be armed. (He was right: three years later after publication, a Predator drone blew up the outside  of a Taliban building, wrecking cars and sending the actual target running away instead of crossing the Styx.)

If you're interested in experimental aviation, this actually has a few chapters of interest. The actual subject of the book may distract from the fascinating bits inside, though, and considering the context of the source I'm not sure how seriously I'd take the information on CIA spy planes and the like.

Airframe

Airframe
© 1995 Michael Crichton
352 pages

What could happen on a plane to leave three people dead, fifty others seriously wounded, and the passenger cabin in ruins?   Why did its pilot only break radio silence shortly before he was due to land in Los Angeles? Thus begins Airframe, a technical mystery from the pen of Michael Crichton, in which one woman  has to scramble to find answers before either her company's life-saving contract with China falls through or before a union upset ripens into war on the plant floor.   This is the first book I've read by Crichton which is not science fiction, although it's still very much the technical thriller, with a nerd-thrilling abundance of information on aviation and the aeronautics business.   It's not merely dumped on the reader, but introduced through characters who stand in for the reader and need to have all of the tech-speak around them translated. Airframe isn't purely technical, as Crichton also develops a business conspiracy angle to make the reader wonder if the accident wasn't one at all. There's also a little bit of author-lecture, as Crichton delivers a rolling barrage at television 'news', condemned as vapid and sensationalistic. None of the characters are particularly compelling, but in a Crichton novel they rarely are.  It is the pursuit of the mystery, simultaneously learning a great deal about an important aspect of global 'civilization', that drives this one. I enjoyed it enormously.

Aces over Ypres

Aces over Ypres
© 2016 John Stack
286 pages

Charlie Sexton didn't choose the RFC life, the RFC life chose him. Literally.  As the Great War opened in Europe, Charlie was a member of the 119th Artillery, the same unit his father had served in with distinction, but evidently the Army is in need of lunatics to go up in their airplanes as observers. It's like artillery spotting, but thousands of feet up and with only canvas protection from the rifles of two startled armies.   Aces over Ypres is an unexpected aerial thriller from a successful naval author,  one which is set in the skies of the Western Front, at a time when military aviation was still in its infancy. Stack combines aerial combat, espionage, and the personal feud between a German pilot and Sexton for an all-round pageturner.  

Charlie begins with the book without the slightest in going up in an airplane, and the experience doesn't too much grow on him.  He is instantly in the soup, branded a coward by an officer who wants to smear Sexton's reputation to save his own.  The work is difficult, to say the least:   ripping through the air and staring at a surreal landscape below, one with recognizable landmarks yet so far removed from everyday experience as to be unrecognizable,  and tasked with trying to make meaningful observations and scribble them down on an actual map.   Stack's experience with conveying the power and energy of the seas translates well here; despite its thinness, the air has a presence, one which can destroy a plane that isn't cared for by its pilot and mechanics. When the war begins, airplanes were merely used as recon tools, but Stack depicts the development of regular aerial warfare with Sexton as his text subject. Within a few weeks observers are toting rifles with them to take pot-shots at enemy scouts; later, they are given hand held machine guns to do more than scare the enemy away.   Stack doesn't hesitate to kill or maim recurring characters, and Charlie is shot down at least twice -- and by the same German plane, flown by a man with a score to settle. But Kurt, the man on the other side, isn't his bloodthirsty enemy: he's a talented pilot and a loving brother with a score to settle against the English airmen.

Although this is a decided break from Stack's forte, his bringing to life of both English and German pilots, engendering a reader's care about them, and then throwing them into combat against one another makes for a compelling story by itself...to say nothing of the constant aerial drama, the attempts to keep out of "Archie's" way, and a little spycraft on the side.  Considering that this only covers the first few months of the year, ending before the one-year mark, one hopes a sequel could be in the works.  It's certainly refreshing to see aerial fiction that doesn't jump into WW2-style dogfighting.


Related:
To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War, Jeff Shaara. Read this when it was released in 2004, and I still remember the story of the American airman.

Yamamoto

Yamamoto: The Man Who Planned Pearl Harbor
© 1990 Edwin Hoyt
271 pages

Isoroku Yamamoto was the indispensable man of the Japanese navy,  the author of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and an object of such interest to the United States that it nearly spoiled its ability to read Japanese codes in order to shoot him from the skies.  He is an intriguing character to study;  as a subject of the emperor, he was loathe to think of Japan at war with the United States. He knew America, had traveled and studied there, and regarded the thought of military contest with her a joke.  As a soldier, however, he strengthened Japan's ability to make war, guiding the strategic development of her fleet into the future, helping create a carrier-focused force that would outmatch the western powers' dreadnought mindset. When he was asked to use that weapon against the United States, he did his best to make it a killing blow.   Yamamoto takes readers through Japan's percolation as an imperial state, from its first tepid expansion in Asia at the turn of the 20th century, to its maturation as a major power who sought not just equality with, but triumph over, the west.   On the sea, Yamamoto develops quickly as an officer to be revered and reckoned with -- a strict, audacious, and strangely humble man who saw that the future of global war lay in aviation.  On land, Yamamoto is tugged reluctantly behind waves of militarism as Japan sees cabinet after cabinet fail. Every attempt to reconcile the military with the less bellicose intentions of the emperor fails and brings the nation as a whole closer to jingoism,  with one attempted coup and a rash of assassinations.  For most of the book, Japan seems mired in China,  its every martial action stressed by a fuel supply that requires constant attention.  Title aside, Pearl Harbor receives little attention here, as Yamamoto receives its results from afar. Hoyt gives generous consideration to the extended brawl for Guadacanal, however, the battle which draws Yamamoto closer to the front lines and eventually exposes him to an assassination by fighter plane soon thereafter.  Various military events are recorded here, Midway included, but none receive the treatment of Guadacanal, and for the most part military content is very general, and is included more to show the book's subject at war, frequently frustrated by his subordinates' timidity in pressing forward.  Although Yamamoto's talents as a commanding officer made him a fearful enemy to the United States, he is despite his ambush not villainous. Surprise was a meager advantage to be pressed; disarm the United States quickly and it might leave Japan to its new empire.  Instead he merely drew blood, incited wrath, and fell prey to it himself.   In Yamamoto we thus see the the death of man at the hand of a war he did not want -- but out of a sense of duty, he had to fight.

This week: yep, still at war

I don't know how most people spend Thanksgiving, but after a day with family eating sweet potatoes and admiring chickens and a late-fall collard garden, I've been reading nonstop about World War 2.  I'm moving closer to the end of 1941, and the war is shifting east, as Hitler's panzers and Hirohito's carriers are on the move.

I've read two more Time-Life histories of the war: The Rising Sun and Russia Besieged.  I picked up The Rising Sun in hopes that it would address Japan's rise as an industrial and colonial power, but that is mentioned as mere prologue. Time-Life's history is principally about the high point of Japanese power, from the December 7 attacks on the Allies in the Pacific,  to the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, where Japan was first stopped and then reversed.  Russia Besieged concerns Operation Barbarossa, in which Germany launched the largest land invasion ever witnessed into the heart of Russia. There's a lengthy section on the brutal siege of St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad,  and the book ends with German retreat at Moscow, driven back by "General Winter".  (Fickle, that one. Wasn't he just helping the Finns fight the Russians?!)   

The Sino-Japanese war is a massive gap for me; I'm familiar with the outlines from a survey course, but otherwise, I know little. That's why I read  The Rape of Nanking, which exacted a psychological toll. In hopes of countering it, I read Flying Tiger: Chennault of China,  which is part-memoir, part-tribute. One of the few stories from the Chinese front that I'm familiar with is that of the Flying Tigers, a group of volunteer American pilots who flew old P-40s and harassed the Japanese as best they could.  I read a particularly fun book on these highs in high school, but this wasn't it.  The Tigers are touched on only briefly here, the book mostly being about the author's role in China's American air force (later America's air force in China), and his adulation of Chennault, the Tigers' leader who created the guerilla air tactics they used to counter the Japanese.

In the coming week or two, expect at least one book on the Eastern front, followed by our first forays into the Pacific!  It won't be exclusively war material, of course, as I'll throw other works just as a break. Cities, livestock, science,  Korean philosophy, murder mysteries -- you never know.  I'd like to be done with this WW2 series by the New Year, but it'll probably bleed over depending on how many books about the air war seduce me.

Battle of Britain

Battle of Britain
© 1980 Len Deighton
224 pages

"When I told them that Britain would fight on alone, whatever [the French] did, their generals told their  prime minister and his divided cabinet, 'In three weeks England will have its neck wrung like a chicken.'  Some chicken!  Some neck!" - Winston Chuchill,

In 1940,   the whole of Europe lay under the flags of brutal  tyrannies, fascist and Soviet alike. Having rolled over France with ease, Hitler bid the English to lay down their arms; acknowledge him as master of Europe, and the struggle would be over.   Hitler, it seems, skipped Napoleonic history altogether;  not only did he miss l'empereur's blunder in Russia, but the fact that Britain was no stranger to defying a continent arrayed against it.   Such defiance could be broken, however, through force of arms:  Britain's army had barely escaped the continent via Dunkirk and left much of its equipment behind. Its only hope lay in the Royal Air Force, protecting both the Isle and a Navy shielding convoys and guarding against invasion. Through a long summer, young men took to the air for the frantic defense of their home, fighting a battle so vicious that mere survival counted for victory. The Battle of Britain is justly called, however, for it summoned to action civilian and servicemen alike. As sons and brothers fought in the air, those unable to fight  stood their ground below, watching for the enemy and turning back the flames of war,  both parties enabling Britain to carry on. Len Deighton's Battle of Britain offers a day-by-day account of the summer and brims over with information valuable to  younger research students and casual readers alike.

Battle of Britain is nearly less narrative than reference material. There is a story here, not nearly as tightly told as With Wings as Eagles,  but delivered ably. What jumps out here is information -- orders of battle, tables of planes produced and destroyed,  schematics of Spitfires, Hurricanes, and ME-109s, illustrations of how radar worked on both sides of the Channel,  and gobs of photographs. There are photographs of letters and generous excerpts from after-action reports and diary entries from both sides of the conflict.   The layout is impressive, too; all these graphics are not cordoned off by themselves, or simply stuck in every now and again; Deighton integrates the two, so that a chapter on Operation Sealion begins set against a photograph of German troops practicing beach landings.  There are generous maps, and even full-spread illustrations of a typical RAF base. At times there's so much competing information that one loses track of the narrative - tables! Photographs! Sidebars! -- but only occasionally.

There is a story, however: after a brief history of military aviation during the Great War and afterward, Deighton leads into the months of constant struggle. He focuses more on tactics than strategy, but essentially Dowding's accomplishment was to prevent the RAF from perishing by attrition. British factories were humming with production, but Germany's war had been a long time in the making and its Luftwaffe out-gunned the competition. The RAF proved discretion the better part of valor; not by running, but by choosing the best ground and best time to fight. Earlier in the year, at Dunkirk,  British leadership had made the choice to use airmen only sparingly, knowing what lay ahead. Here, too, the RAF is used with caution. Had Fighter Command heeded the impulse to make an all-out defense of the nation, Britain may have very well been "bled white", its planes exposed and devoured:  instead,  the Germans were allowed to fly in force, and the fighters scrambled to make the best of opportunities, making quick stabs instead of prolonged duels. Deighton also gives generous space to the civilians and troops on the ground, who defended Britain in their own way -- spotting the enemy so the RAF could intercept them and restoring order to the chaos German bombs attempted to create.  As summer gave way to fall, the season for invasion passed, and the Germans increasingly distracted themselves by bombing cities. The darkest hour was not yet over, but the RAF had seen the nation through the worst of it.

"I have always loved England, but now I am in love with England. What a people! What a chance! ...we shall, by  our stubbornness, give victory to the world." - Harold Nicolson,  July 1940.

Related:
With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain,  Michael Korda

The Red Baron

The Red Baron
Manfred von Richthofen
© 1969 ed. Stanley Ulanoff
240 pages

The average man on the street may not know the first thing about the Great War, but he'll have heard of the Red Baron. Attribute that to a silly song, or a Peanuts comic trip, but in the Great War Germany had no hero like Baron Manfred von Richthofen, a true knight of the air.  Beginning as a cavalry captain, von Richthofen joined the air service and soon proved a frightful natural. The Red Baron constitutes his memoir through the war, and what cannot be told by his death is told by others, namely his brother and an English pilot.

Owing either to the author's military precision, German directness, or the consequences of translation, The Red Baron is short and to the point.  The memoirs open with reports from his time riding with the Uhlans in Russia before he announces that he is joining the air service.  His reports from time at the front are largely devoid of emotion, but they are aided by interspersed letters to friends at home in which the Baron reveals his joy at flying, his thoughts about his foes, and eventually  his fear about the inevitable. His record was exceptional; before his own death, the Baron was responsible for no less than eighty kills in the air. He expresses little pleasure in this, aside from a hunter's quiet pride in having gone out and gotten his quarry, and never rails against his foes. The French he regards with a little disdain because they prefer ambushes in the air, and experienced pilots are too wise for that approach to work long; the English are far more worthy opponents, even if they enjoy theatrics a little too much. (So says the man with a bright red 'crate').  But having dispatched so many opponents himself, and seeing Germany lose ground and his many friends dead, the Baron could feel death coming for him.   After expressing anxiety about what was to come -- and shoving it out of the way, knowing he must do his duty -- the memoirs end, followed by a narrative by his brother, the account of an English pilot, and an article about his burial.  The appendices are quite good, including diagrams of all the major fighter planes mentioned throughout.

The Red Baron takes a while to warm to a reader, being very staid for the most part and translated imperfectly, but it does have the virtue of being the thoughts of the man himself, and not just speculations and praises of him. That remains its chief selling point, though there are dashes of information that give interested readers a feel for what it might have been like to  fight in the air.


"We found Richthofen. His face, particularly peaceful, had an expression of gentleness, of refinement. Suddenly I felt miserable, desperately unhappy, as if I had committed an injustice. There could be no feeling of joy that there lay Richthofen, the greatest of all!   In my heart I cursed the force that is devoted to death. I gnashed my teeth. I cursed the war!  If he had been my dearest friend, I could not have felt greater sorrow". - Captain A. Roy Brown, RFC/RAF

A Higher Call

A Higher Call
© 2012 Adam Makos and Larry Alexander
400 pages

"You follow the rules of war for you -- not your enemy. You fight by rules to keep your humanity."

The Eighth Air Force operating over Germany in the early 1940s did not fly the friendly skies. They operated in skies black with clouds of flak, and buzzing with angry German fighters, intent on bringing down the bombers that were destroying Germany’s ability to make war and its cities in the process.  But at least on one occasion, the fury of war gave way to mercy – for on (date), the beyond-crippled bomber Ye Olde Pub was followed by a German fighter who not only spared it, but escorted it wingtip to wingtip over his own nation’s most formidable anti-aircraft installations and safely to the sea. Years later, as  aging veterans, each man pondered in his soul a question. Charlie Brown wondered why he had been spared, while Franz Stigler wondered if his attempt at chivalry had worth the risk of the Gestapo’s wrath. The work is based in part on pilot interviews before their deaths in 2008, and follows their journeys as airmen, from the time they were boys playing with models to their attempts in later years to find the man with whom they'd shared a moment of grace. A Higher Call is an encouraging story of humanity rising above war, one which offers readers a rare memoir of a German fighter pilot's experiences in Africa before the action moves to Europe.

Clash of Wings

Clash of Wings: World War II in the Sky
© 1994 Walter J. Boyne
415 pages

Although European powers employed aircraft during war early in the 20th century, and they saw widespread use during the Great War as tools supplementing armies, not until the Second World War did military aviation truly come into its own. Who can think of those years and miss the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, or the furious carrier battles in the Pacific like that of Midway? During World War II, aircraft were manufactured at a rate never before seen and the respective powers turned them into weapons in their own right, leveling cities with bombers and making command of the air as crucial as command of the ground. In Clash of Wings, aviator and military historian Walter J. Boyne explores every aspect of the war in which aircraft were involved, from the large battles in which they dominated to the smaller affairs where they only assisted. He examines not just the planes, tactics, and strategy of various European powers, but the organizational strengths of the contending air forces. The result is a thorough guide to World War II's skies, a gold mine for students of the period.

Boyne leaps into the action straightaway, focusing immediately on the outbreak of war in Europe, though he does explain how history influenced every nation to develop the air strategy it did. Necessity also shaped strategy: while Britain's air policy may have been influenced by the memory of Germany's bombing raids in the first world war, it focused on long-distance bombers because bombers were its primary means of fighting Germany until the Axis began stumbling around in northern Africa. Japan's small  but elite air arm evolved to destroy inferior opponents, like the Russians and Chinese, but  proved to be insufficient for long-term war with a fully industrialized power like that of the United States.  This is an incredibly busy history, as airplanes were ubiquitious during the conflict and were the main contendors in some campaigns:  it is hard to imagine any conflict out-doing WWII in putting airplanes to tactical and strategic use, winning both battles and destroying Hitler's means of fighting. Boyne even devotes chapters to airplanes' use in fighting submarines, or supplying Chinese nationalists in their fight against the Japanese.  As an aviator himself, he's always kind to the airmen of every country, saving his harshest criticism for those high in the organizational ranks who failed to provide just or competent leadership. He also evaluates the machines themselves from a technical point of view,  where his own piloting experience proves useful.

I have been reading books about military aviation for over a decade now, and the quality of this book astonishes me. The wealth of information should make it staggeringly valuable to someone writing a paper on the subject, for Boyne's history not only covers every conceivable aspect of the air war but also includes production and loss numbers throughout, in addition to several appendices. The book's organization keeps all this information nicely contained and quickly accessible, and Boyne's passion for the subject makes his tale an engaging one to read.  I must read more Boyne, and strongly recommend this work.

Bomber

Bomber
© 1970 Len Deighton
424 pages

June 1943. The world is at war. Hitler's armies have encompassed the bulk of Europe, and the Allies are not yet prepared for a land invasion of Europe. For now,  the United States and United Kingdom are engaged in an extensive strategic bombing campaign of Hitler's gains,  sometimes carpet-bombing whole cities in an effort to disrupt the production of arms, equipment, and munitions. One such raid has been planned for the town of Krefeld, in the Ruhr valley -- Germany's industrial heart. On the ground and in the air, Englishmen and Germans like struggle in combat against one another and against their consciences, debating the justice of their respective causes. When a pathfinder squadron jettisons its flares in a futile attempt to stay in the air,  waves of bombers assault the wrong target -- the small town of Altgarden, where all the paths of our German and English characters converge in disaster.

I first heard of Bomber as the most authentic fictional account of a bombing run ever written. It's certainly consistent with a nonfiction account of a bombing run I've read, and replete with small, technical details that provide for a gritty and realistic story, but  Deighton's unanticipated story of men at war with their consciences interested me more.  The two lead characters are Sergeant Lambert, a bombing pilot whose politics and increasing discomfort with the prospect of bombing civilians makes him a target for his superiors, and Oberleutnant Victor Löwenherz ("Lionheart"),  a German night fighter whose partner Himmel discovers chilling state secrets that force both of them to question their loyalties. Löwenherz and the other German characters who feature are written as real people. They see Hitler as a necessary evil, or as at least better than the Bolshevik alternative, but they're people -- and when reading of their efforts to resist a terrifying night attack and save their city from a firestorm,  I was hard-pressed not to root for them while at the same wishing the bomber crews a safe mission. Although this is a novel set during the 'good war', Deighton's portrayal is of decent people being forced to hurt and hate the other by circumstances beyond their control.  The villains of the novel are the petty politicians who attack Lambert and Himmel for following their consciences rather than blindly accepting  what they're "supposed" to.

It is thus a stirring and detailed account of conscience amid a bombing run gone badly, one with anti-war overtones.

Related:

• The Airman's War, Albert Marrin

The Forgotten 500

The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II
© 2007 Gregory A. Freeman
313 pages

Throughout the Second World War, Great Britain and the United States engaged in a strategic bombing campaign against Hitler's regime, hitting its industries and supplies. As the range of bombers and (more importantly) fighter escorts increased, Allied bombers began penetrating deep into the interior of Europe, striking at ball-bearing plants and oil refineries as far as Romania, determine to bring the Nazi war machine to its knees.  These far-ranging days rank as the bloodiest in the air war, as fierce resistance saw bomber after bomber drop from the skies. Many of the bombing crews assigned to the Ploesti raids bailed out over Yugoslavia, where -- rescued by sympathetic Serbian peasants -- they found shelter and open arms eager to hide them from their enemies. As their numbers increased (every abandoned bomber had a crew of at least ten), these men and their friends in the Serbian resistance contacted the Allies, who devised a daring plan: HALYARD,  in which a group of C-47 transport planes would steal into Europe, land at an improvised runway created by the grounded airmen, and take off into the night, rescuing the bomber crews under Hitler's very nose. 

This is a story worthy of being told, steeped in human interest: the compassion of the Serbians is stirring, as is the sheer audacity of the Operation of Strategic Services men who created HALYARD and the courage of the pilots who carries it out. As inspiring and dramatic as it is, though, it's not quite the story of the Forgotten 500. Their rescue, while tense, is over quickly. Instead, the tale of these airmen and their Balkgan guardians is used to frame a reappraisal of Draza Mihailovich, the leader of the loyalist Chetniks who opposed both the German occupation and the ambitions of another resistance group, Tito's Moscow-backed Partisans. Though history remembers Mihailovich as a man who eventually collaborated with the Nazis out of hatred for the Bolsheviks and engaged in ethnic cleansing,  to the airmen he is a friend, guardian, and saviour. Gregory Freeman's Mihailovich is an unassuming and noble saint, an egalitarian leader of men who refused to shed innocent blood and whose steadfast service to the Allies was ignored by history. Freeman attributes this to a Communist conspiracy within British intelligence,  the coup of a mole that was exacerbated by the "leftist, socialist" sympathies of OSS in its early years. After the war, the airmen are outraged by Mihailovich's treatment at the hands of the Allies and Tito, and protest against his trial and execution. They continue to work to redeem his reputation as the decades pass by, to little avail; their struggle is apparently adopted by Freeman, whose portrayal of the man is unabashedly charitable.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this. Freeman's writing bothered me, tending toward the superficial and reminding me more like sensational journalism than history.  It lacks nuance altogether, particularly in regards to politics, presenting Mihailovich as a forgotten hero. Perhaps he is. Since finishing this, I've been shifting through the evidence, trying to get a better handle on this man. The accounts of hundreds of airmen make one thing very plain: Mihailovich sheltered the grounded bomber crews and earned their affection and respect. This doesn't rule out cooperation with the Nazis in other regards: war makes strange bedfellows. People and groups who would otherwise be enemies may have slightly overlapping interests (in this case, destroying Tito) and work together to that end,  while at the same time pursuing their own private agendas. Mihailovich's kindnesses toward the Americans doesn't rule out hostility toward Croats, Bosnians, and Muslims, either -- for human beings are not storybook villains with simple, predictable characters.

Though Freeman presents a storybook hero in Mihailovich, and The Forgotten 500 seems a little amateurish because of it,  I'm glad I read it. The story of the 500 is worth knowing about, but without Freeman I don't know that I would have been exposed to the controversy surrounding Mihailovich's character. I'm still iffy about the integrity of the book itself, but it's possibly worth your while.  Caveat lector. 

With Wings Like Eagles

With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain
© 2009 Michael Korda
322  pages

"The odds were great: our margins small: the stakes infinite." - Vice Air Marshal Keith Park, No. 11 Group. RAF.

As far as drama goes, the Second World War is unmatched, for few conflicts in human history have lent themselves so well to stories of good and evil. Following the unexpectedly quick collapse of the French army in May 1940,  Great Britain found itself the lone democracy actively engaged in opposition against the monstrous ego of Adolf Hitler, set to make himself the master of Europe.  The other democracies had been conquered by the Blitzkrieg, Germany's potent combination of tanks and dive bombers, and the Soviet Union, the only continental power capable of curbing Hitler's ambitions, had become his accomplice in destroying Poland. Far across the Atlanatic, the United States looked on disinterestedly,  not keen on the idea of being engaged in another European war.  Throughout the summer of 1940,  Britain stood alone -- defended by her Navy and her airmen in the Royal Air Force. This is their story.

Though highly complimentary of the airmen -- whose character and fortitude stand out -- and the Spitfires and Hurricanes they flew,  Korda sees the RAF's triumph as being the product of sound leadership, both from forward thinking politicians like Neville Chamberlain and its own military leadership, particularly that of Air Marshall Hugh Dowding. Though reviled as an appeaser, Korda is kind to Chamberlaine and sees his leadership as responsible for the establishment of Britain's "Chain Home" range of radar stations. Dowding is the great hero of Korda's story, though. As the head of Fighter Command, his gifts for organization and grasp of air strategy allowed him to consistently turn back the Luftwaffe through the long summer, a time of generally clear weather and smooth seas that would pave the way for a German invasion in the event of failure.  Korda hails him for not only guiding the RAF's fighters through these perilous times, but standing up to the British government, particularly Winston Churchill, when their actions compromised his fighters' ability to do their work.

With Wings Like Eagles is an excellent narrative history of the Battle, remarkable for its thoroughness and detail. The story begins in the 1920s, covering the evolution of British and German air strategy and advances in airplane design. I had no idea that seaplanes were at one time regarded as the future of military aviation, or that the Spitfire was created from maritime designs. Like Albert Marrin, Korda's use of detail puts the the reader in the driver's seat along with the pilots, or inside Bentley Priory where all the information from the RAF's observation posts and RADAR stations  was channelled and interpreted by Dowding into squadron-by-squadron instructions. Rather than risk all his men in a set-piece battle with the Luftwaffe, he chose instead to force them to underestimate his strength and bleed themselves to death by rushing into apparent breaches again and again. This airborne chess match between Dowding and the Luftwaffe continues throughout the book, ending only in the fall of 1940, when weather conditions marginalized the prospect of German invasion.  Along with his reappraisal of Chamberlain, Korda is also skeptical of Operation Sealion's threat to British sovereignty. Hitler seemed to be less than enthusiastic about the operation and committed to it only after it became obvious that Churchhill was not about to be replaced by 'reasonable' men who were willing to admit to Britain's defeat. 

I'm quite impressed with With Wings as Eagles: I enjoyed it chiefly in one sitting and think it as appropriate for an undergraduate history paper as it is for a leisurely afternoon read. Korda is generous with book recommendations, another boon for students of the subject. Recommended. 

Related (and Recommended):

• The Airman's War, Albert Marrin.  Coverage of WW2's aerial campaigns from the American perspective.
• The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, James S. Corum. 
• The Influence of Air Power Upon History, Walter J. Boyne