The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power
April 3, 2006
Nostalgia permeates this romantic account of how U.S. air power was established in WWI by a privileged, patriotic group of undergraduates known as the Yale Flying Club. The book was developed from an article published in the Yale Alumni Magazine, and it shows: Wortman harkens back to a bygone era when campus regattas were the place to be seen, Harvard-Yale football games drew crowds 80,000 strong and, perhaps most jarringly, American isolationism placed the country's air command not just behind Germany's fearsome air service, but behind British and French forces as well. Preparing themselves for fire fights and bombing missions that generated harrowing casualty figures, these wealthy, elite Yale students saw it as their responsibility to fight on the front lines, and in the first wave. In a brief but important epilogue, Wortman spells out just how profoundly the times, and in particular the Yale campus, has changed in the past 90 years. Though times have indeed changed, and not entirely for the better, Wortman's creeping nostalgia serves to make attractive a history littered with inconvenient details; how readers react to this viewpoint-especially with regard to the compare-and-contrast epilogue-will largely determine their opinion of the book.
May 1, 2006
Freelance writer and Yale alumnus Wortman tells the story of the Yale Flying Club, a group of wealthy young Yale students whose interest in flying became the basis for one of the first air corps units of World War I. Using the diaries and letters of these flyers, Wortman shows how their wealth and social connections aided them in their efforts to form the First Yale Unit, which proved the importance of and need for air support in a war. Many of the unit -s surviving members contributed their insights and expertise to the development of America -s Army Air Corps, the predecessor of today -s air force. This well-written and engaging account of America -s initial wartime deployment of airplanes would make a nice addition to the collections of academic or large public libraries." -Diane Fulkerson, Univ. of West Georgia Lib., Carrollton"
Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 1, 2006
This entirely readable history of the First Yale Air Unit describes a flying club of well-off undergraduates whose money helped buy flying lessons and planes, enabling them to transform themselves into a group of trained military pilots who actually served with distinction in World War I in both the navy and the air service. First, however, they had to survive their instructors (including Frenchmen), their training planes, and the weather in the U.S and then Europe, all before getting within sight of the Germans. Among those who didn't return was Kenneth MacLeish, brother of the poet Archibald; among those who survived was Robert Lovett, eventually President Truman's secretary of defense. Others served further in World War II, and even those who never again climbed into a cockpit became an influential constituency for air power in business, the professions, politics, and academia. Wortman has researched thoroughly and written clearly, thereby enhancing our knowledge of aviation history, Yale, and World War I.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)