Hero of the Angry Sky

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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pp. iii-iv

Contents

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pp. v-vi

Illustrations

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pp. vii-ix

Foreword

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pp. xi-xii

Curiously, given the scale and drama of the U.S. Navy’s World War I aviation effort, there are no published biographies of navy combat aviators. Now, thanks to Geoffrey Rossano, a skilled and knowledgeable historian whose recent works include a comprehensive study of the navy’s ...

Series Editors’ Preface

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pp. xiii-xiv

Wars have been the engines of North American history. They have shaped the United States and Canada, their governments, and their societies from the colonial era to the present. The volumes in our War and Society in North America book series investigate the effects of military ...

Acknowledgments

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pp. xv-xvi

To edit someone’s private diary and correspondence is, in a way, to become part of that person’s life, family, and social circle and share his or her time and place, no matter how far removed. Working with David Ingalls’s papers was just such an experience. During many months poring over ...

A Note on the Text

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pp. xvii-xviii

Abbreviations

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pp. xix-xx

Introduction

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pp. 1-19

In 1925, Rear Admiral William S. Sims, commander of U.S. naval forces operating in Europe during World War I, declared, “Lieutenant David S. Ingalls may rightly be called the ‘Naval Ace’ of the war.”¹ Of the twenty thousand pilots, observers, ground officers, mechanics, and construction workers who ...

1: Training with the First Yale Unit

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pp. 21-41

David Ingalls spent his initial months in the navy training with the First Yale Unit in Florida and on Long Island, New York, a process directed by Lt. Edward McDonnell, a 1912 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA), where he became a champion boxer. McDonnell ...

2: Early Days in Europe

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pp. 43-86

During the summer and early fall of 1917, several members of the Yale Unit received orders to proceed overseas, where the navy had begun creating an extensive system of patrol stations, flight schools, and supply bases from scratch. With aviation officers in very short supply, the Yale ...

3: With the RCF at Gosport, Turnberry, and Ayr

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pp. 87-140

Of the American naval air stations established in France in 1917, only Dunkirk on the English Channel coast near the Belgian border exposed aviators to encounters with enemy aircraft. Lumbering flying boats conducting antisubmarine patrols proved easy prey for German warplanes and thus ...

4: On Patrol--At NAS Dunkirk and with the RAF in Flanders

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pp. 141-182

With months of instruction behind them and a massive German attack on the Western Front about to erupt, Ingalls, MacLeish, and Smith hurried down from Scotland, crossed over to France, and made their way to NAS Dunkirk, the navy’s lonely outpost on the shore of the English Channel, just a ...

5: The Navy's Big Show-- The Northern Bombing Group

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pp. 183-213

For many months, the navy had been analyzing the failure of its aerial patrols to intercept enemy submarines entering and exiting their lairs in Zeebrugge, Ostend, and Bruges. Patrolling was tedious, sporadic, and ineffective. Military planners had the same reservations and endured the same frustrations ...

6: Hero of the Angry Sky-- Serving with No. 213 Squadron

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pp. 215-284

Between early August and the beginning of October 1918, David Ingalls served with his old mates at No.213 Squadron, flying Sopwith Camels over Flanders. His stay coincided with the final Allied push of the war. During a fifty-six-day period, he compiled a combat record unequaled by ...

7: Eastleigh and Home

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pp. 285-312

In early October, an exhausted David Ingalls departed No.213 Squadron to take up duties as flight officer and head of the Flight Department at Eastleigh, the Northern Bombing Group’s massive supply, assembly, and repair facility situated a few miles from Southampton on the southern coast of ...

8: A Glance Back

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pp. 313-326

During the 1920s and 1930s, surviving members of the First Yale Unit and their friends gathered for a series of reunion dinners— opportunities to renew friendships, toast lost comrades, cement social and business relationships, and reminisce about events that now seemed to reside in a surprisingly ...

Afterword

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pp. 327-335

David Ingalls reached New York in early December 1918 after nearly fifteen months overseas and twenty-one tumultuous months since he and the rest of the Yale gang traveled to New London to enlist in the navy. The voyage home proceeded more joyously than the one heading into the war zone in ...

Appendix 1. David Ingalls’s Victories with No.213 Squadron, RAF

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p. 337-337

Appendix 2. David Ingalls’s Technical Notes, Turnberry, Scotland

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pp. 339-362

Bibliography

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pp. 363-367

Index

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pp. 369-377