From the moment the Wright brothers successfully launched their 21-foot Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, aviation advocates began promoting the airplane as a weapon.
The 10 years before World War I were a decade of experimentation and innovation. It took the war to make the airplane a lethal force.
The Europeans were the leaders -- they were performing combat flying before the United States entered the war in April 1917. But a few Americans intoxicated with flight did not wait to discover whether Uncle Sam would join the conflict. In the days after the shooting began in the summer of 1914, they were off to fly for France in the Lafayette Escadrille.
"The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War" by Samuel Hynes (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) is their story -- and the story of those who followed them into the fray above Europe.
"Lafayette Escadrille" sounds so aristocratic -- pairing the famed marquis' name with the French for squadron -- and the Americans who joined early were something of aristocrats, almost exclusively privileged college men from the Ivy League or southern bastions of entitlement like the University of Virginia or Washington and Lee. Why? Who else could afford flying other than the rare young mechanic who built his own airplane. Most Americans of 1914 had never seen an airplane and certainly could not buy one. By World War I, the automobile had become a democratic form of technology, increasingly made for the masses. The airplane that first attracted a mass audience, the Piper Cub J-3, went into production almost 20 years after World War I.
Hynes, 90, is emeritus professor of literature at Princeton. His clear, sharp prose befits a man who has spent a career studying nuance, articulating complexity. But he is also a former combat pilot who fought his own air battles during World War II. He remembers when his career as a pilot started among "... small boys ... who wore helmets and goggles to school in the winter, (running) around the school yard at recess, their arms stuck out like wings, uttering what they hoped was the sound of machine guns and shouting 'Look at me! I'm Eddie Rickenbacker!' or 'I'm the Red Baron.' "
Fantasy. And that's what air warfare remained for the young Americans of the Lafayette Escadrille until, after months of training, they finally were sent into combat -- some as pursuit pilots, others as spotters, yet others at the controls of bombers. The pursuit pilots, as Hynes explains in detail, had by far the most status. They were knights of the air, cavaliers of combat, who did battle high above mere mortals locked in trench warfare below.
Until the day they did not return to their home field.
Apparently more young men -- they referred to themselves as boys -- were killed in accidents than in combat. Flying was inherently dangerous in early machines that were technically limited. Yet the romance of aviation persisted. Poets didn't go flying in this war, or, more precisely, they didn't go flying because they were poets. It was up to trained pilots with poetic instincts to capture the feelings and create the imagery of flight.
Hynes quotes 20 year-old Alan Nichols, who said the view from the air "is absolutely unique, and different from anything else, even a view from a cliff or a mountain, because it is all around and even straight below you. There is absolutely none of the sensation one gets from a high building, a cliff in Yosemite or a bridge. There is a feeling of absolute security, as if it were an absurd thing to think of falling. You have no idea how high you are, and there is no way of seeing that you are suspended there on apparently nothing. It seems natural."
"Apparently nothing" is the unsubstantial air -- a phrase Hynes took from Shakespeare's King Lear.
Pilots had never seen cloud banks up close. Nor had they been shot at while at 10,000 feet. Or joined a giant bombing raid involving 100 or more aircraft, some bombers with a wing span of 100 feet. Everything was new, and when pilots wrote home they were often explaining their experiences for the first time.
Hynes introduces us to pilots whom we have never heard of, like Nichols. Absent from his pages are fliers who became legends in Alaska after the war, Carl Ben Eielson for one. Eielson, born in 1897, was in training when the war ended in November 1918. (The nation's most celebrated flier ever, Charles Lindbergh, born in 1902, did not begin flying until after the war, and like Eielson was shaped by the results of the conflict, not combat.)
There was an American in France, however, who seems almost like Lindbergh's twin in the discipline and attention to detail he brought to flying -- Fletcher McCordic of Winnetka, Illinois. McCordic, older than most of his fellow pilots, "had an engineer's mind," Hynes writes, "practical and exact; he saw his flying duties as technical procedures, to be performed thoroughly and correctly, and as often as possible." He had a pilot's license before he joined the military, unlike virtually everyone else around him. His awed messmates called him "General" or "Gen." He was pilot, mechanic, navigator and engineer all in one -- the prototype of the ideal American flier.
Pilots at the controls of open cockpit aircraft not only fought the enemy, they struggled with the weather, including winter cold. My friend Jerome Lardy asked the bush pilot Sam White how cold was too cold to fly open cockpit in Alaska.
"After 40 below." Sam replied.
Jerome shivered -- a gesture that moved Sam to remark, "Ah Jerome, you're just a steam-heated sourdough."
World War I has been called the great war. It was -- for the development of aviation, for the young Americans who took to the exhilarating if unsubstantial air.
Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.