The First Great Air War

By Richard Townsend Bickers

1914, and the war in the skies was just beginning. Just eleven years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the Royal Flying Corps set off for France, and every aspect of air-fighting had to be discovered for the first time. At the start of the First World War, the flying machine was hardly taken seriously; it was an odd, accident-prone diversion for the rich and the obsessed. Four years later when the war had ended, such had been the pace of development that almost the entire range of modern aircraft types had evolved: from fighters to bombers, from ground attack to reconnaissance. ‘The First Great Air War’ is the full, fascinating account of how a handful of men, British, French, German and Italian, young, with a love of flying and adventure, went to war. It is the story of air aces and individual courage, of technical innovation and the coming of age of air power.