"The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the WW1 " Topic

"The Unsubstantial Air tells the story of the Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War One. They told their own stories in letters, diaries, and memoirs. Five key words feature in their writing: honor, duty, country, chivalry, and romance. These have been discussed earlier by Hynes in his The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (1997) and A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990). In this book, American aviators express surprise, and describe their success, delight, disappointment, and their determination to carry on, even when the big words do not match the reality of their experience. The volunteer fighters were often privileged. Hynes, himself a pilot in World War Two, describes how East Coast aristocrats like Teddy Roosevelt's son Quentin dreamed of chivalric single combat in the sky; they came to know both the beauty of flight and the omnipresence of death. Romantic ideals blend with a harsh but often exciting reality in the written records of the pilots who came of age in World War One.

The pilots were also, Hynes explains, tourists. Many had not been abroad before and reveled in the strangeness and beauty of England and France, delighted in invitations to local chateaux, in breaking rules and overindulging in drink. But they were also very serious and single-minded. Their main goal was to fly, to be pursuit pilots rather than bomber or observation plane pilots. There was indeed a strong sense of urgency in their flying that is reminiscent of a Harvard-Yale match…"

Full review here
link

Amicalement
Armand