Without a doubt, the best book that I have ever read about flying in the Great War, was one called ‘Winged Victory’, by V.M.Yeats. It’s touted as fiction, but it’s a very, very thinly disguised autobiography from a man who lived through that awful carnage where so many perished soon after they arrived at the front. He knew first-hand from bitter experience, just how savage were it’s effects upon what were often nothing more than school-leavers.
Fate, in a cruel twist, decreed that Yeats would die with millions of others in the great Influenza epidemic just after the end of the Great War. In fact, few realise that it was so bad that it killed more people than the war itself…..
If you have any serious interest in what the experience was really like for the pilots, it’s essential reading. I was the same age as the pilots in the book when I first read it, and it really made me stop and think.
Cheery it is not, but it will take you closer to the reality than is comfortable.
Ditto the above.
‘Winged Victory’ is the book on First World War air fighting.
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