The First of the Few: Fighter Pilots of the First World War

Existing studies of the Great War in the air fall for the most part into three categories -- technical descriptions of the machinery, narrative sketches of a few aces or chronological compilations built around accounts of spectacular action.In this new study, Denis Winter attempts to go beyond these limited approaches and to describe the war of the ordinary fighter pilot from enlistment to demobilization. Having consulted most of the published memoirs and read widely in the archives of the Public Record Office, the Imperial War Museum and the RAF Museum at Hendon, Denis Winter writes of the sort of men who became pilots, the stages by which they learnt their trade and their relationship with the machinery they manipulated. He describes the nature of their duties and analyses the technical qualities which were required for success in their execution. He studies too the mental dimension. How did the pilots think of their job? What did they think of their colleagues and their foe? What of their fears? In what way did they combat the strains of active service? He concludes by examining the unravelling after the war and the overall significance of the aerial war in which they had been participating. This new insight into the first great are combat in history suggests that it was of greater significance than has hitherto been thought, killing as many of the participants, proportionately, as the war on the ground and inflicting perhaps even more stress on those involved.