Hero of the Angry Sky: The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace edited by Geoffrey L. Rossano (review)

This diary is meant to fill a historio-graphical gap in the literature on Great War aviation fought by the United States in Europe. David Ingalls, son of a prominent Ohio family, was a volunteer in the First Yale Unit, aviators who had been training for war since 1916, and he was thus eager for assignment in Europe. He ended up driving mostly British seaplanes and hunting German submarines launched from Zeebrugge on the Belgian coast, shooting down six German planes along the way, thus earning a spot in aviation history as the most prolific naval ace of the Great War. Along the way, Ingalls indulged in many of the expected diversions that a nineteen-year-old American aristocrat might be expected to get up to in France and Britain—dating American and British girls, staying in the toniest hotels in Paris and London, eating at fine restaurants and taking in plays, playing bridge, and practicing, practicing, practicing his flying. The book is highly detailed, apparently including every diary entry and letter available from Ingalls during the war, as well as a few short entries from his memoirs.

Geoffrey Rossano has made a name for himself on the subject of American naval aviation, having already published one work on the general subject of submarine hunting during the Great War and another on one of Ingalls’s best friends in the First Yale Unit, Kenneth MacLeish, brother of Archibald MacLeish. Clearly, he knows his subject; the introductions to the chapters are informative summaries of Ingalls’s time in the unit and the various adventures he was a part of, both on the English Channel coast and in the entertainment sectors of Europe and the United States.

However, Rossano seems somewhat unwilling to leave his summaries as background: the text never lets Ingalls tell his own story through his letters and diary entries. Every page is loaded with annotation explaining what is in the text, even describing the actors and stage runs of the various plays Ingalls attended. The effect is distracting at times—for example, an incident when Ingalls’s plane malfunctioned and left him floating for hours in the channel is recounted once in the introduction to the chapter, once in the footnotes, and again in Ingalls’s letters. Despite the excessive annotation, the book is nothing if not thorough.

Still, Ingalls’s story provides an interesting perspective on the United States’ role in the war. His life is hardly typical of most military men involved in the war. His wealth, breeding, and education were on display constantly in Europe. His attitude toward the war seems largely to have been informed by his age; his letters home to his mother and father treat the dangers he faced like a vast adventure, and even his diary entries, while terse, contain enough sarcasm, pithiness, and amusement to make it clear that this was not a man who saw the brand-new world of wartime aviation as the death trap of doomed youth. As such, the book might not make for particularly representative reading in an undergraduate classroom, but it would be excellent reading in a specialist graduate course on the Great War, early aviation, or even perhaps American socioeconomics in the early twentieth century.