Aerial combat during the First World War is often romanticized as aristocratic aces dueling each other in biplanes high above the trenches, a sort of chivalrous gentleman's sport as glamorous as it was dangerous. This image is accurate but vastly oversimplified--it ignores the air war's steep toll in lives and psychological damage, and the very unglamorous dangers involved in every aspect of early aviation. Samuel Hynes (Flights of Passage; The Soldiers' Tale), a World War II marine pilot, explores the full scope of the World War I air war as experienced by American pilots in The Unsubstantial Air.
The industrial carnage of the Great War largely destroyed the notion of individual honor earned on the battlefield. Mass infantry attacks, artillery barrages and static trench warfare were unappealing to the young American men who joined the Air Service in 1917. Often wealthy Ivy League students (including Quentin Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt), many had followed the published exploits of French pilots and earlier American volunteers. They saw fighter pilots as a continuation of the old cavalry, the last opportunity for individual heroism on the modern battlefield.
Hynes uses personal correspondence, journals and unit records to track the transformative journeys of these privileged college students turned airmen. They faced tedious (but still dangerous) training, a monotonous wait for planes, undesirable assignments to less-prestigious bombing and observation squadrons and the horrors of actual combat. Hynes deftly interweaves these individual stories and the larger war effort, making The Unsubstantial Air a joy for both history and biography readers. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer