The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War by Samuel Hynes (E

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The Unsubstantial Air is a chronicle of war that is more than a military history; it traces the lives and deaths of the young Americans who fought in the skies over Europe in World War I. Using letters, journals, and memoirs, it speaks in their voices and answers primal questions: What was it like to be there? What was it like to fly those planes?

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

The vivid story of the young Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War I The Unsubstantial Air is a chronicle of war that is more than a military history; it traces the lives and deaths of the young Americans who fought in the skies over Europe in World War I. Using letters, journals, and memoirs, it speaks in their voices and answers primal questions: What was it like to be there? What was it like to fly those planes, to fight, to kill? The volunteer fliers were often privileged young men--the sort of college athletes and Ivy League students who might appear in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and sometimes did. For them, a war in the air would be like a college reunion. Others were roughnecks from farms and ranches, for whom it would all be strange. Together they would make one Air Service and fight one bitter, costly war. A wartime pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes tells these young men's saga as the story of a generation. He shows how they dreamed of adventure and glory, and how they learned the realities of a pilot's life, the hardships and the danger, and how they came to know both the beauty of flight and the constant presence of death. They gasp in wonder at the world seen from a plane, struggle to keep their hands from freezing in open-air cockpits, party with actresses and aristocrats, and search for their friends' bodies on the battlefield. Their romantic war becomes more than that--it becomes a harsh but often thrilling new reality.

Author Biography

Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of several major works of literary criticism, including "The Auden Generation," "Edwardian Occasions," and "The Edwardian Turn of Mind," Hynes's wartime experiences as a Marine Corps pilot were the basis for his highly praised memoir, "Flights of Passage," "The Soldiers' Tale," his book about soldiers' narratives of the two world wars and Vietnam, won a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Table of Contents

Prologue: A Fire Beyond the Horizon 3 1. An Occupation for Gentlemen 7 2. The Ivy League Air Force 21 3. Going 36 4. Abroad I: First Impressions 55 5. Driving the Machine 64 6. The Pleas ur able Sensation of Flying 83 7. Waiting for the War 98 8. How to Fight 116 9. This Killing Business 128 10. Abroad II: Getting Acquainted 146 11. In Pursuit 156 12. Looking at the War 174 13. A Short History of Bombing 185 14. Summer: 1918 202 15. September: St. Mihiel 217 16. Abroad III: End Games 236 17. The Last Battle 246 18. November Eleventh 262 19. Afterwards 269 Notes 287 Bibliography 301 Acknowledgments 307 Index 309

Review Quote

This year we saw a lot of books about World War I, and Samuel Hynes' The Unsubstantial Air is one of the best . . . [Hynes] writes in such a beautiful way, so the experiences of these men are so moving, and they were so brave . . . He does a wonderful job honoring them.

Excerpt from Book

ONE AN OCCUPATION FOR GENTLEMEN The First World War was more than half over when the United States entered it in April 1917 and well into its last year before American troops engaged enemy forces on the Western Front. By then the terrible battles of Ypres, Verdun, and the Somme had been fought, and German troops had launched their 1917 spring offensive. That belated commitment came far too late for many young American men; from the first day, August 4, 1914, they were eager to get into this war that was not theirs. Among those eager young men were seven who joined the French cause in the first months of the war, trained with the Service Aéronautique, and were the first to join what became the Lafayette Escadrille, the first squadron of American pilots to fly for France. They came from different places and from different lives. Their motives for joining that far-off, foreign war were various and complex. Kiffin Rockwell was the son of an old southern family and the grandson of Confederate officers who had fought in the War Between the States. He'd been a student at Virginia Military Institute and considered himself already a trained soldier who only needed the experience of battle to fulfill himself. The war in Europe was "a great opportunity," he wrote to his mother soon after he enlisted-an opportunity, perhaps, to follow his grandfathers' example in a great charge, like the rebel charge at Chancellorsville. To that motive he added another, in a letter from France: "If I should be killed in this war I will at least die as a man should … I think if anything will make a man of me, it is this giving as a volunteer one's best for an ideal." Rockwell had just turned twenty-two. At that age, manhood is not a condition but a goal, and war is a training ground, a test. And death? Death is a romantic dream. Victor Chapman, on holiday from his art studies in Paris, joined the French Foreign Legion, as Rockwell and many of the others did, but for reasons that seem quite opposite. Rockwell wanted romantic war, a war of ideals. Chapman didn't write about such abstractions; his letters home are about the hard life of a common legionnaire, and his aim seems to have been simply to submerge himself in that life. You can speculate about why he would want to do that-perhaps to escape from his father, John Jay Chapman, a well-known New York man of letters with a high opinion of himself and high expectations for his children-but you can't know. What you do know from his letters is that when he was in the Foreign Legion he was happy. James McConnell quit his job with a railroad company and headed for war. Like Rockwell, McConnell saw the war as an opportunity-the opportunity of a lifetime, he told a friend back home. "These Sand Hills," he said, gesturing toward the North Carolina landscape he lived in, "will be here forever, but the war won't, and so I'm going." That explanation seemed to worry him, for he added, "And I'll be of some use, too, not just a sight-seer looking on; that wouldn't be fair." But clearly his deep motive wasn't service; it was curiosity. War would be memorable, something huge and strange-like seeing Africa or the South Pole. It would be history happening, bigger than anything that could possibly happen to you back home. And he'd be right there in it. Curiosity like that is a young man's itch; whatever you're doing when you're eighteen or twenty or twenty-two, it's bound to be less exciting than the war that other young men just like you are fighting, somewhere else. Your idea of what that war is like will be far from the reality-nobody can imagine war who hasn't seen and heard and touched and smelled it-but that war in your head will have a powerful attraction nonetheless. And so you'll go where it is. So McConnell went. William Thaw and Norman Prince had both lived in France when they were children and felt a love for the country that was a motive-something like patriotism, as though they were partly French. They were also both already sportsman-pilots, and that gave them another motive. In the air above the Western Front the world's first flying war was being fought; up there they would use their flying skills in a new kind of sport, played for the highest possible stakes. Where else would you find a challenge like that? I don't know why Elliot Cowdin, a well-off young man of no visible employment, chose to go to war: he seems to have left no records, and there are gaps in his story. And then there was Bert Hall, a Paris taxi driver. In En l'Air! , the book he wrote toward the end of the war, he said he enlisted two days after the war began, because "if a country is good enough to live in it is good enough to fight for." But everyone who knew Hall agreed that you couldn't believe anything he said (for example, he didn't enlist on August sixth but on the twenty-first). Would an American drifter who happened to be driving a taxi in Paris love France enough to fight for it? If he had been driving a taxi in Berlin, would he have fought for the Germans? Maybe the French army looked like a better job than taxi driving-not as well-paying (a common soldier in the French army got a penny a day in 1914), but more interesting and more exciting. Give it a try. Here they are, all seven of them, with their two French officers. The date of the photograph is May 1916; by now they're all trained pilots and are wearing the uniform of the Service Aéronautique. Most of them didn't set out to be fliers. Only Prince enlisted directly in the French air service; Thaw tried to, but was turned down. Four-Chapman, Rockwell, Hall, and Thaw-first joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in the trenches; two-Cowdin and McConnell-first served as drivers in the American Ambulance Field Service. It may seem strange that six of the first seven Lafayette Escadrille pilots should have begun their war on the ground. There are practical explanations. The French flight-training program was crowded in those early days, and there were more would-be pilots than there were training planes. For foreigners, the only sure and immediate routes into the war were the Foreign Legion and the ambulance service. The Legion had always welcomed les étrangers , no questions asked; criminals, fugitives, and vagabonds could submerge their old selves in the anonymity of the Legion-all you had to do was remember the alias you made up. To some young men-romantic ones like Rockwell-the regiments of the Legion must have seemed to offer what they wanted, pure war, where the real soldiers were and the real battles were being fought, right now. The American Ambulance Field Service was almost the opposite: it was staffed and financed by Americans and recruited its drivers mainly on American college campuses, and its mission was not killing but saving lives. You can see how appealing that would be to some young men: you could be a sightseer at the war, as McConnell put it, while also being useful. You wouldn't hurt anybody, and you might even persuade your mother that in an ambulance you wouldn't get hurt. College students could sign up to drive during their summer vacation and be home again in time for the fall semester. It would be sort of like summer camp or a guided tour of the Continent. There was another explanation for the earthbound choices those future pilots made in 1914 and early 1915: in the first months of the war combat flying hadn't yet become romantic. The planes that flew above the Western Front weren't there to fight, because they couldn't: they weren't armed. They were observation planes-a superior means of looking around, nothing more. The heroic myth of the air war, in which single pilots fought each other as though they were chivalric knights, would come later. One more thing remains to be said about those seven pilots. I can say it best in the form of a table: One of the seven is missing from that table-Bert Hall. We'll come back to him. Those six young men were all from well-off families, the kind that can afford to educate their sons in expensive schools and colleges. They were "college men"-a phrase of the time that identified not only an educational level but a small elite class; if America had an aristocracy, they'd be in it. It's not surprising that men of that class and background were drawn to military flying; even before the war, flying, for such young men, was a dashing, dangerous sport, like ocean sailing, motor racing, and polo. The men they knew who flew were sportsmen, who did what they did for its own sake, and for the competitiveness of it, and for the danger. If you were a sportsman-flier you entered air races and air meets, or you tried to set records-altitude records, speed records, distance records, endurance records (which would then be broken by some other gentleman sportsman)-or you flew from somewhere to somewhere else-Philadelphia to New York, Boston to Albany, New York to Washington, it didn't much matter where-and dreamed of flying coast-to-coast or even across the Atlantic. This kind of sportsman flying was expensive; you'd have to be wealthy to afford it. Two of the first seven Lafayette fliers were rich men's sons. Norman Prince was the son of a Boston financier who expected his son to be a lawyer. Norman dutifully went to Harvard (class of 1908) and Harvard Law School (1911), passed the bar exam, and j

Details ISBN0374535582 Author Samuel Hynes Short Title UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR Pages 336 Language English ISBN-10 0374535582 ISBN-13 9780374535582 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 940.449 Illustrations Yes Residence Princeton, NJ, US Year 2015 Publication Date 2015-10-13 Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux Subtitle American Fliers in the First World War Audience General/Trade We've got this

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