num_pages: 458
description: Al though World War I was fought and won in the trenches, aviation emerged as the most advanced and innovative technological arm of battle, epitomizing the new total warfare as it meshed the front and the rear, the military and the civilian. The Great War in the Air is a comprehensive study of the development and significance of airpower during World War I. This history compares military, political, technological, industrial, and cultural aspects of airpower in the greater combatant powers (France, Germany, and England) and the lesser powers (Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the United States).Geared to both general readers and scholars, The Great War in the Air penetrates the heroic veneer of the fighter pilots' exploits, using autobiographical and biographical material to discuss the aviators' lives—the thrills, the risks, the stresses—and their attitudes toward aerial combat.Starting in 1909 with the beginnings of military aviation and the aviation industry and ending with their catastrophic postwar contraction, the book examines the totality of the air war, its heroism, romantic myths, politics, strategies, and cost in men and materiel. John H. Morrow, Jr. also elaborates on the advancements in aircraft and engine technology and production during airpower's development into a viable and threatening military weapon within a decade of its origins.
language: English
title: The Great War In The Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921
titlecomplete: The Great War In The Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921 (Smithsonian History of Aviation Series)
characters: David Henderson, Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen, Frederick Sykes, Anthony Fokker, Manfred von Richthofen, Louis Blériot, Giovanni Battista Caproni, Édouard Barès, Harold Balfour, 1st Baron Balfour of Inchrye, Hugo Junkers, Winston Churchill, Sefton Brancker, Joseph Joffre, William Weir, 1st Viscount Weir, Hugh Trenchard, 1st Viscount Trenchard, Louis Renault, Jacques-Louis Dumesnil, Oswald Boelcke, Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, Geoffrey de Havilland, Philippe Pétain, Glenn Curtiss
genres: Nonfiction, World War I, Military History, History, Aviation
ratings_count: 22
publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press