Tales of Two Air Wars

Ref: 4997

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sadly, flyingbooks is now closed.

{detailed description}Variety of wartime air adventure is the theme of this book, in which all the stories are new or different, and true-though in one the characters are disguised. The stories are of ordinary fighting men; men who could have been the reader's father, brother, or son. They are not about famous aces, whose lives and exploits are familiar, except on occasion to give a true account of what has often been inaccurately told.
In 1914, at the time of the first story, pilots began to fight, as birds fight-seeking without weapons to weaken their victim's nerve by superior flying skill, driving him down by repetitive vicious dives. Among the stories told here is the strange tale of the first R.F.C. airman to be wounded ; another (previously undiscovered by air historians) is of a pistol-armed pilot who drove down a two-seater Fokker single-handed; yet another tells the hitherto untold personal experience of one of the two still surviving pilots of the famous 1914 R.N.A.S. air raid on the Zeppelin factory at Friedrichshafen. All these (and many other) stories were obtained direct from original sources.
How far air war developed from those primitive days, when the non-repeating rifle was considered the best weapon, is seen in the story of Midway, the greatest air-sea battle of history, which, twenty-eight years later, was fought over vast distances in the Pacific to produce a turning point there as definitive as that made by the Battle of Britain in Europe.
In seeking material; the author avoided the fronts and periods which have been widely written about, to look elsewhere for stories not less thrilling and far less known; so adding much to the interest of his book and, indeed, making it unique. The task of tracking down the stories and verifying facts has been immense. Often the facts. have come from long-packed, half-forgotten papers or logbooks frequently stored in inaccessible places. Crosschecks have been made on British, French, German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, American and Japanese sources.
From his own experiences in both of the two great wars in the air, and by having travelled over most of the territories he writes about, Norman Macmillan succeeds in recapturing their authentic atmosphere. And, in addition to producing an absorbing series of stories, the new information he includes corrects and amplifies the hitherto recorded history of the two air wars, making this book one to be prized internationally by collectors of authentic and original material.

(This copy from the collection of and signed by the late John Blake, well known airshow commentator and aviation artist)
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Norman Macmillan
published by Bell 1963 1st edn. 272pp maps 15x22
{condition}corners bumped and rubbed otherwise fair, in worn d/j.
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