Years of Combat

Ref: 4408

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{detailed description}Mounted on his charger and accompanied by his groom, Second Lieutenant Douglas rode across country on Boxing Day 1914 to take up his duties with the Royal Flying Corps. This bizarre entry was typical of the new Service. A few months earlier Douglas, the son of a famous art historian. had been an undergraduate at Oxford. Joining up as a gunner on the outbreak of war, he presently applied for posting to the R.F.C. as an observer, and later became a pilot. Apart from a tiny nucleus of regulars, it was young volunteers from the other arms like himself who, by daring trial and tragic error, first applied the flying machine to the uses of war. The reader is made vividly aware of what this meant in personal experience. They learned to use their eyes, and later their cameras, in order to penetrate beyond the few hundred yards of devastation which was all one could see from the trenches. They spotted for the artillery and machine-gunned troop concentrations, lobbing an occasional bomb on railways and bridges. Above all he tells the thrilling story of how they worked out and perfected the tactics of air combat, at first singly and then in groups, winning by the last year of the war complete control of the air over the Western Front. It was a form of fighting, chivalrous, individualistic and highly skilled, in striking contrast to the mass slaughter going on below. Many perished, including the most gifted of the fighters, for reasons made plain in the text; most of the remainder returned to their civilian callings; a select few stayed on to forge the mighty instrument of the Second World War—amongst them the young gunner subaltern who retired in 1948 as a Marshal of the Royal Air Force.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Sholto Douglas
published by Collins 1963 1st edn. 384pp illustrated, index. 16x23
{condition}bumped corners, slight foxing to edges otherwise good in torn d/j.
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