The Dream of Civilized Warfare: World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination (review)

The argument that the novelty of the airplane and the glamour of the air aces stood in stark contrast to the anonymous war of the trenches is certainly not new. Nor is the argument that the combat ace reflected a constructed vision of how wars should be fought based on presumptive notions of class and gender. Linda Robertson reiterates the major elements of these now standard arguments, but provides a fuller analysis, recasting them as a function of the relationship between the technology of the fighter airplane and American society's hopes for it. The result is a work that is strong when it stays close to its central thesis, but somewhat weaker during its many digressions.

Upon United States entry into the world war in 1917, most air-minded senior officers recognized the need to develop a strike force based on bombers. Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell had already learned from Royal Flying Corps commander Sir Hugh Trenchard the value of a large armada of bombers flying over the western front to strike targets behind enemy lines. By June 1918 the United States Army had requested 161 bomber squadrons. The problem with bombers, however, was that they brought death and destruction to civilian populations, leaving the Allies open to the same charges of fighting "uncivilized" warfare that they laid on the Germans. Therefore, the bomber, with its own anonymous way of fighting wars, had to take a back seat to the fighter in American imagination and propaganda despite the fighter's secondary role in winning the war.

The image of one-to-one combat by "lone wolf" fighter aces ultimately proved to be a more useful way to pitch the purchase of airplanes than that of the bomber. Robertson's second chapter includes a solid and original discussion of the astonishing corruption in the aircraft purchasing process and the ways that images of aces in fighters were appropriated to serve the goal of funneling public money into the hands of a select few companies that dominated the acquisition system. Enthusiastic about an image of warfare fought by knights in the sky rather than by men on the ground, the American people easily committed themselves to an unrealistic and ultimately self-defeating aircraft production program.

The fighter, Robertson argues, also allowed Americans to believe that the mechanization of war would not destroy the romance of war. Unlike the tank or the bomber, fighter airplanes theoretically allowed a man to be master of his own fate. Propaganda and journalistic accounts (often indistinguishable from one another) depicted the fighter pilot's survival as a matter of his skill in the air and his ability to master the new technology—and, above all, to employ essentially individualistic solutions to the problems of air warfare. Hence the media's fascination with pilots in single-seat aircraft.

Well written and carefully thought out, Robertson's book, especially its first chapters, presents a convincing overview of the constructions involved in introducing a radically new weapon system to modern warfare. In places, however, she digresses and moves away from her central argument, most notably in the rather disconnected epilogue. The book is also plagued by numerous minor historical errors and several overstatements. The latter include a description of airmen as "young, well-bred scions of the rich and established families in America" (p. 119). Such men there surely were, but the book's overemphasis on class clouds the reality that so many American aces were not from privileged backgrounds; as Robertson notes almost in passing, the Lafayette Escadrille's Raoul Lufbery was not, nor was America's ace of aces, Eddie Rickenbacker. Eight of America's top aces, together accounting for seventy-two kills, had no formal education. A discussion of how these men used the new technology of the fighter plane to compensate for their more modest social origins might have provided a useful...