"The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in WW1" Topic

"The age of flight had barely begun in 1914 – the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903 – but it had developed swiftly. The Wrights' airplane – in the shape of a big box kite, made of spruce and muslin – flew at a speed of about seven miles an hour, not much faster than a man walking briskly beside it. By 1908 an improved version went forty miles an hour, and a year after that Blériot, in a plane of his own design, flew across the English Channel. When the war broke out airplanes were being used primarily for reconnaissance, but soon started firing at one another with small arms, and then progressively machine guns appeared. The planes were still just wood and fabric and were relatively fragile. Sometimes they came apart in the air. Parachutes were not yet in use; aviators lived and died with their plane. If it caught fire, which was a distinct danger in combat, the occupants either jumped or burned to death. Sometimes the fire could be put out by diving. These were the hazards, but there were soon heroes among the fighter pilots, pilotes de chasse. Georges Guynemer and Jean Navarre had their names in American headlines, having shot down 12 German planes apiece.

The Unsubstantial Air by Samuel Hynes is a chronicle of American pilots in the war, some who fought early on but the far greater numbers who joined the flying force, then called the Air Service. The first Americans to fly in the war had gone to France as volunteers in the American Ambulance Field Service or the Foreign Legion and from there some of them got into the French air service to train as pilots, flying for France in the Escadrille Américaine. Their written accounts were read eagerly by university men, among others. The idea of flying had caught the country's imagination. When America joined the war in April 1917 there were many who enlisted in the hope of becoming pilots, including young men from the eastern colleges, Princeton, Harvard, Yale. The Air Service was gearing up to train them but in complete unpreparedness had only 55 aircraft, most of them out of date. During that summer and autumn the men sailed for France on troopships and some who were luckier aboard liners, the Leviathan or the Adriatic, with dance bands and swimming pools, and Hynes in essence sails with them, going along as an older companion to tutor us, so that the book becomes a history written in three persons, they, I and you.

The Unsubstantial Air follows multiple lives into and through the war, relating their story in part through their own letters, diaries and other accounts which, together with Hynes's own voice, are woven into a history – he has previously used this form successfully in The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. As a former Marine combat pilot himself in the Second World War, he is able to bring knowledge and a dose of nostalgia to the task. ‘Being a pilot,' he writes of them, ‘was something like being a college athlete, something like being a fraternity man at a house party that never ended, a bit like being a young tourist in an interesting foreign country with a few of your friends. Flying was fun – it was the only kind of war making that was.'…"
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Amicalement
Armand

"Fun". Heh. For masochists, maybe flying was fun. On a good weather day, down low, in the summer, flying was fun. Otherwise, you battled constant cold. Mechanical failure was a real hazard throughout the entire War and beyond. It could easily kill you in countless ways. Earache. Does anybody talk about that mundane issue? Going repeatedly well above 10K feet and back down again caused many pilots acute discomfort, and some died from it: passing out from it, that is, and crashing. (Read Rickenbacker for one example of a pilot who suffered fainting spells in the air, fatally.) Yes, on a good day, flying was fun. But those were few and far between. Then the enemy was trying to kill you, on top of just battling with the weather, your own body and the machine….

And yet. Thousands of bright, healthy young men, and some women climb over one another for the thrill and privilege of becoming aviators, and realizing the dream of personal flight.