Название: The Friendless Sky: The Great Saga of War in the Air, 1914-1918 Автор: Alexander McKee
Издательство: Endeavour Media
Год: 2016
Страниц: 272
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (conv), azw3, epub
Размер: 10.1 MB
In 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. It was to be their first major war since Waterloo. Having already won international wars with Denmark and France, Britain was ready. Or so they thought...
For the first time in history, the British Expeditionary Force set out to cross the Channel under the air cover.
With aviation still in its infancy when the war began, with it only being five years since the first flimsy French aeroplane cross the Channel at 45 mph, the air cover provided was rather primitive. Up above the mud-soaked soldiers who fought over the devastated, trench-scarred landscape that was northern France, a new kind of war was being born. Flimsy biplanes and triplanes wheeled and spun, engines roaring, wires screaming and guns chattering.
In the skies above the poppy-fields, men became aces and were cut down in their prime: Albert Ball, Jean Navarre. Max Immelmann and Manfred von Richtofen, the ‘Red Baron’. They were the legendary heroes of a whole new age.
The ‘golden age’ of air fighting lasted barely two years. Before 1914, only a few rash, logical spirits dared to contemplate combat in the clouds. After 1914, their energies were spent trying to devise ways and means to fight in the air with machines not designed for that purpose, and therefore totally unsuitable, so that, when enemy airmen did meet, they danced around each other like blind-folded boxers with broken thumbs. But by 1917, the machines were adequate and the methods had been found. The vicious, snarling dogfight — the sudden blaze of hectic action — the rocketing chaos of diving, climbing fighter planes chasing each others’ tails, never holding a straight course for more than a few seconds in case anyone else should get in a fatal burst — this legend was born in 1917, and has lasted ever since. Its salient attribute was its almost total inconsequence.
Except on a few — a very few — occasions, it hardly mattered who won. The influence of air power on ground operations was minimal. Air fighting could be — and often was — carried out as a sport, the supreme sport; a joust between knightly heroes in the unsullied lists of the upper air, in the public arena of the sky, with entire armies as their witness and, at one remove, whole nations to cheer on their champions. If a champion died, a nation might — and sometimes did — go into mourning for the fallen youth; but it never contemplated going into the air raid shelter. That was the difference.
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