Fictional Novels of the Great War in the Air (a list)

[Breguet]

Originally Posted by Peter Dron

I cannot find C&C International on the web. Does anyone have a link?

Ask and you shall receive:

Cross & Cockade International

[Royalla]

I have one more for the list. "Die Stunde des roten Drachen" (the hour of the red dragon) by Dieter Winkler (1999). As far as I know, it has only been published in Germany and there is no English translation. It is actually a fantasy novel so it may be a bit off-topic but still, I find it worth mentioning. And I’ve read Kim Newman’s name here somewhere so it should be ok ;-)
A young man from our time named Kevin finds himself at a medieval fortress after a hypnosis session. Though he has travelled in time, people there strangely seem to know him and he finds out that he has been leading parallel lives- one in the 20th century and one back then. He is a “changer” who must go back and forth in time to fulfill a special task, in this case prevent the assassination of a young king that will change the course of history.
OK- how does WW1 aviation fit in this story?
Well, Kev meets two other “changers” at the fortress and one of them is Manfred von Richthofen. He did not die on 21 April 1918 but instead found himself in the same strange place as Kevin- and he brought his plane with him (you guessed it: the red dragon). The challenge of keeping the Fokker more or less fit to fly in the Middle Ages without any modern supplies is described in detail. Yes, it can fly without fuel. I’m not sure if everything would work the way the author imagines but still, he comes up with some great ideas.
As the title suggests, it is not a small part MvR himself plays in this story. He is one of the main characters and the author manages to weave in a lot of information about his life. He did his research quite well, too, and makes MvR a dark, broken but very appealing character. Kevin hates him in the beginning but then comes to respect him for his courage and determination. The book is depressing and twisted throughout but MvR’s story is by far the saddest. The changers do not cope well with what is happening to them, some mentally, some physically. MvR has escaped a quick death in battle only to fade away slowly in the other world. In the end, he tries to sacrifice himself, strafing a group of enemy knights even though the synchronization of his Spandaus doesn’t work anymore. But it is still not over…
If you speak a little Deutsch, get it! It is out of print but you can always get a used copy from Amazon or ebay Germany.




And this is also highly recommended, a fantastic read and a great work based on thourough research by one of the best biographers of Manfred von Richthofen. It allows deep insights into his personality, showing a side of him that not even the man himself ever knew about ...
(noooooooooooooooooooooot)

[Gregvan]

Hi Royalla,

Now, THAT's some interesting cover art!!

Is that a Luger in your holster, or are you just glad to see me?

I'm afraid these examples pale by comparison, but I still like 'em:


Again, these aren't fiction, but since Pete already posted one of these "Air Combat Classics" covers from Ace books, I couldn't resist. These were paperback versions of the Air Combat Classic series of reprints of memoirs by famous fighter aces of WWI from Doubleday. These paperbacks all came out in the late '60's, just when I was an impressionable teenager. They were affordable and available in most books stores (even in small Iowa cities) and I snatched them all up. The covers by Ed Valigursky had a huge influence on me, and these books were my first experiences with first-hand accounts by WWI airmen.

Yeah, I love the fact that McCudden's D.H.2 is somehow shooting down a red Pfalz D.III with mixed cross styles (dating it to circa April 1918!). The wonderful view of Fonck in his SPAD XIII is obviously inspired by the famous photo of Rickenbacker perched in his cockpit. At least Valigursky did a decent job of reproducing the 13th Aero Squadron's Grim Reaper insignia on Biddle's SPAD. I still treasure these little books, even though I have since acquired the hardback versions of all of them. The covers were well designed -with those tricolor stripes around them, the set of books looked great on a shelf. They even had little scale plans and specs of various WWI airplanes in the back, and all the other appendices the hardback versions had.

["Junior"]

Nothing new to add, merely some personal opinions...

I enjoyed Robinson's RFC novels but certain things such as the WWII era RAF slang in them is grating.

But as stated by others the be-all-and-end-all is "Winged Victory". Beautifully written and as authentic as it gets. Fact written as fiction. Yeates gets my nod.

[dpolglaze]

Perhaps this thread has gone on a tangent - maybe move it to art? I pulled those pics I had here at work - there's more books I don't have pics of - perhaps a weekend project.

One non-fiction to supplement Greg's "Air Combat Classics"


And a few fiction:



More to come if people want them.

Dan

[rainbase]

FICTION: I just got a copy of Ernest Gann's "Gentlemen Of Adventure". This one span 50 years of flying, including characters serving in the Lafayette Escadrille. I'm looking forward to this read; Gann's a good writer.

I also juast won a book called "Red Flight Two", by Milton Dank. It hasn't arrived yet but is described as "A brave young officer of the Royal Flying Corp witnesses the devastating effects of World War I while serving with a group flying the newly developed Sopwith Camels."

Anyone read either of these yet?

[Pete Hill]

Hi Jan,
no, I haven't read either of those. The only Ernst Gann one I have read is "In the Company of Eagles" and I haven't heard of the second one you mentioned, may have to track that one down.
Thanks for mentioning them, another 2 for the list. Pete

PS, sorry that Photobucket has deleted all the images I posted at the start of this thread. NOT my fault!
Pete

[Pete Hill]

Hi Dan,

thanks heaps for the great book covers, you must have some collection. I actually have the same edition of the 'Wind in the Wires' book you posted. When I read it a couple of months ago, I remember reading one passage and experiencing a sense of deja-vu. Then I realised why.
In the John Harris novel 'The Victors', published in the early 1980s, Harris had borrowed an incident from Grinnell-Milne's book.
Namely, the scene where the narrator and one of his chums are awaiting posting back to an operational unit in 1918 but find there is a long waiting list with rather a glut of pilots. Waiting at the administrative depot, they find an harassed clerk with the typed list of waiting pilots and witness him accidently set fire to it. The narrator 'kindly' offers to help the poor clerk out by re-typing the list. Which he does, only with a slight alteration, namely placing his own and his friend's names at the top of the list. Whereupon, for the next pair of vacancies that are listed for a frontline squadron, the two men are therefore the first to be called upon to fill them
In the novel 'The Victors', the hero Martin and his best friend and fellow veteran pilot Bull, having just returned to the Western front, are frustratedly waiting at a depot for transfer to a frontline unit in 1918. They use the exact same trick to jump to the front of the long queue.
John Harris is not the first writer to borrow an event from a non-fiction memoir of the air war for use in a novel. In Derek Robinson's fictional WW2 novel 'Piece of Cake', an Irish-born pilot named Moran is shot down in flames and dies an awful death during the Battle of Britain. When Moran's family arrive at the aerodrome to collect the body for burial back home, one of the relatives asks if he could open the coffin and have a quick look at the deceased, even producing a screwdriver that he had brought along specially. When the man won't take a polite 'no' for an answer, the adjutant has to bluntly inform the poor civilian that pilot officer Moran was shot down in flames ie 'burnt to death'. He then informs the relative that not much of the body was found and they simply added a couple of sandbags to the coffin to give it some more weight. The pale-faced relative leaves without further argument.
A powerful scene and one that was borrowed from a non-fiction work "Battle For Britain" by Wing-Commander 'Dizzy' R Allen, a memoir of his experiences flying with a Spitfire Squadron during the famous 1940 battle. He describes a very similar scene that took place for real during the battle.
Pete

[dpolglaze]

Pete,

We've started a book cover art thread in the Art forum (WWI Aviation books cover art). I haven't had the time to post much, but there's more there. I've got a stack of books to take pictures of, but haven't gotten to them.

Dan

[Pete Hill]

More on Winged Victory by V M Yeates

I think that of all the WW1 novels I have read (and there have been many), Victor M Yeates’ ‘Winged Victory’ still stands out as the best and perhaps the greatest.
Published in 1934, when memories of the war were still raw, fresh and, in many cases, very bitter, Winged Victory is a work about the air-war of WW1 that feels very real and authentic.
In many respects, Yeates has written the template of what many WW1 air-war novels would follow and indeed much of what he invented has been turned into cliché by later (and lesser) writers.
After reading the interplay and chatter between pilots in this novel, all-of-a-sudden Derek Robinson’s much-lauded novels don’t seem as original as they used to. The opening scene of the novel where a few of the pilots are enjoying a meal in a Café has that dry, wry humour and flippant banter about the war that Robinson loves. However Yeates manages to keep it to a naturalistic level whereas Robinson has a tendency to exaggerate it into caricature.
I also compare it to another classic novel of aerial warfare- Don Charlwood’s ‘No Moon Tonight’ as I was reminded of that work through the thoughts and experiences of Yeate’s central character- Tom Cundall.
Cundall is a good pilot in C Flight of the Sopwith Camel squadron that is based on the Western Front in March 1918 which is about to be engulfed by the Ludendorff Offensive and the unit is compelled to devote itself to low-level strafing and bombing, leaving the high-level scouting to the SE5 & F2B units. He is a good, sound airman who loves flying…

“…It got colder and colder, on the ground it had been fairly warm, but the climb to fifteen thousand, which took about twenty minutes, meant a drop in temperature…..but the purity and sparkle of the air were wonderful; Tom sang.”
And he wants to do his duty to his comrades and to the war. But Cundall is no glory-seeker and definitely does not want to indulge in heroics. He wants to survive this war and Cundall experiences a rising barrier of fear and trepidation that it becomes progressively harder to overcome as he faces sortie after low-level, archie and machine gun-filled sortie. Like the narrator in No Moon Tonight, Cundall has to fight his fear and occasional raw terror and there are many times when it comes close to getting the better of him.
Tom is not a shirker but he comes across as such a real, human character (sometime rare in a war novel) in the way he does not go out of his way to seek any further risk than necessary. On a couple of occasions, he makes forced landings and he does not hurry back to his unit, being content to wait idly until some-one else arranges transport for him. Tom experiences sleepless nights, nightmares, mood swings, brief spells of depression as he strives to endure his own human frailties and survive this conflict. In one particular low moment, he even contemplates desertion…

“…The way out was so easy. It was only necessary to pick a quiet spot in Hunland, away from where you’d been bombing, and land there, and your war was over. The immediate future might not be very comfortable but that was nothing. Who was to know?....”

But he keeps going and enduring but his reserves of strength are slowly been peeled away, like layers of an onion, as the sorties become more frequent, the ground-fire heavier, his comrades vanish one by one, his own brushes with death more numerous.
Written in 1934, this novel echoes much of the strong anti-war bitterness that was apparent in other war books and films of the time, such as ‘All Quiet on the Western Front”. Appearing at a time when the anti-war movement was going strong in the UK and there was a strong push for appeasement, this book would have found many avid readers who agreed with the harsh comments on the conduct, manner and justification for the war uttered by some of the characters. When, on a low-level jaunt, Tom skims over a staff-car carrying a pair of high-ranking officers (Brass-hats), he thinks with a sneer….

“…..Into their barrack-square heads, Tom was certain, the doubt never entered whether, when you had killed off all the available fit young men, the residue of the nation was worth fighting for: the weak hearts, the elderly business-men making the profits, patriots with urgent jobs at home. There was reason in strafing brass-hats….”

In their intellectual musings about the war in between sorties, it soon becomes clear that some of the pilots have no time at all for the politicians, industrialists and money-makers whom they blame for starting and prolonging the war. In one mess-hut conversation where some of the pilots are arguing philosophically about the real motives and aims of the war, one pilot, Seddon, even launches into an anti-Semitic diatribe:-

“….You see this war is being financed for the Allies by an international gang that works London, Paris and New York. It was getting hold of Berlin as well…..Roughly, it ruled the roost in the whole of so-called Western Civilization…..and that is the fundamental cause of this war.”

Shortly, Seddon makes it clear what race of people he thinks makes up this ‘international gang’ that he speaks of. I can only hope that is just a fictional character, not the author himself, voicing that opinion. Sadly the latter could be true as there were many highly-educated, well-to-do English of that time who despised Jews. It was not only Germans who believed in the ‘Stabbed in the Back’ theory, there were numerous pro-Facists active in England at the time of this novel’s publication (1934) such as Mosley’s Black-Shirts who liked to believe that Jews sat comfortably in the rear and made fat profits out of the men dying in the trenches (conveniently ignoring the fact that thousands of English, German and French Jews died fighting in the war). I like to think that it is the character of Tom Cundall, and not Seddon, that is the voice of the author Yeate’s thoughts and feelings. I hope so.

Yeate’s descriptions of flying are brilliant, ranking amongst the best ever written. Not surprisingly, an extract from this novel was included in a compilation of selections of the best writings on flying recently published under the title “The Wild Blue Yonder” which also included extracts from other classics such as Cecil Lewis’ “Saggitarius Rising”, Charlwood’s ‘No Moon Tonight” and Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff”.
Reading his description of his first solo attempt in a Camel, the reader can almost feel he is in the cockpit. Once overcoming the Camel’s deadly vices, he soon learns to love its virtues….

“ …Huns preferred fighting SE5s which were stationary engined scouts more like themselves….They knew where they were with SEs, which obeyed the laws of flight and did as properly stabilised aeroplanes ought to do. If you shot at one, allowing correctly for its speed, you would hit it: it would be going the way it looked as if it were going, following its nose. But not so a Camel. A Camel might be going sideways or flat-spinning, or going in any direction except straight-backwards. A Camel in danger would do the most queer things, you never knew what next……And in the more legitimate matter of vertical turns, nothing in the skies could follow in so tight a circle…..”

Sometimes, when he is describing the joy and beauty of flying alone amongst billowing, spectacular cloud-formations, Yeates lets his writing get carried away on a waft of poetic, windy gush that is a bit hard for a present-day reader to swallow:-

“….This was the level-floating rain cloud….that makes the earth so dull a place it eclipses the sky and, concentrating all dullness there, leaves the region above it stainless, and very like conventional heaven. On these refulgent rocks should angels sit: like them insubstantial, glowing like them. Music should they make with golden wires, unheard; hymning the evident godhead of the sun, from whom the radiance flowed of those immaculable spaces; wings faintly shimmering with fain changing colour, and beholding eyes. In that passionless bright void joy abode, interfused among cold atoms of the air. Breath there was keen delight, all earthly grossness purged…”

Okay, Tom, I get it! You like clouds! Thankfully, such lapses of self-indulgence are rare in this otherwise wonderfully-written book.
I’ve got more to say on this book. Stay tuned for part two. Cheers, Pete.