Victor Maslin Yeates Victor Maslin Yeates ( 30 September 1897 — 15 December 1934 ) , often abbreviated to VM Yeates , was a British fighter pilot in World War I who wrote what is widely regarded as one of the most realistic and moving accounts of aerial combat and the futility of war . Background . Yeates , who was born at Dulwich , and educated at Colfe ' s School where according to Henry Williamson he read Keats under the desk during Maths , explored woods , fields and ponds and kept a tame tawny owl . Yeates joined the Inns of Court Officer Training Corps in 1916 and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps ( later the Royal Air Force ) in May 1917 . Serving with No . 46 Squadron , to which he was posted in February 1918 , he flew 248 hours in Sopwith Camel s , crashed four times , was shot down twice and scored five victories thereby achieving " ace " status . After the war , he died of tuberculosis in Fairlight Sanatorium at Hastings in 1934 . He was survived by his wife Norah Phelps Yeates ( née Richards ) and his four children Mary , Joy Elinor ( later married Christopher David Vowles ) , Guy Maslin ( later married Binnie Yeates ) and Rosalind ( later married Edward Cullinan ) ; all of whom had lived with Yeates in a small house in Kent on the Sidcup by - pass of the Dover Road . " Winged Victory " . Yeates is now best known for his semi - autobiographical book " Winged Victory " , which remains well regarded as an authentic depiction of World War I aerial combat . Yeates ' s school friend Henry Williamson contributed a foreword to a republished edition of " Winged Victory " . There he supported a review in the " New York Saturday Review of Literature " that it was " one of the great books of our time . " Yeates wrote in the flyleaf of Williamson ' s copy of " Winged Victory " that : " I started [ writing the book ] in April 1933 in Colindale Hospital . I could not write there , so walked out one morning , the doctor threatening death . I wrote daily till the end of the year . My chief difficulty was to compromise between truth and art , for I was writing a novel that was to be an exact reproduction of the period and an exact analysis and synthesis of a state of mind . " Descriptions of aerial combat . " Winged Victory " is remarkable for its depictions of World War I aerial combat . The novel ' s discursiveness and realism make it one of the most intriguing descriptions of life on the Western Front : the interactions with French residents , the diet of the officer ' s mess , travel on home leave and recuperation at Army Medical facilities ; what officers talked about , the tunes on the gramophone , the food on offer , the narrator ' s heroic drinking . Yeates is also interested in the management styles of the series of squadron commanders who pass through , and their efforts to make the narrator a more aggressive fighter pilot . The narrator is tormented by his inability to match the out - and - out warriors and aces who constitute the ideal . He is deeply honest about the growing stress and debilitation as his friends die one by one , and he longs for his tour of duty to reach its end . Philosophy about war . In " Winged Victory " Yeates regularly expresses disillusionment with the war , with his senior officers , and with the causes of war , more typical of the 1930s than of the time he describes : But the novel , while occasionally over - written or unduly discursive , contains a realistic portrait of RFC and then RAF life and operations on the Western Front starting with the launch of the gigantic German Spring Offensive on March 21 , 1918 . The narrator and his squadron are ground steadily down by the pressure on the Camels to bear the lion ' s share of the ground attack role against the German army , as the Allied Armies fight for their lives , while faster scouts ( fighters ) such as the SE5 and the Bristol Fighter are given the high altitude air superiority roles . The Camels ' role is unglamorous and very dangerous , machine gunning trenches and approach routes at 100 mph a few hundred feet up in un - armoured aircraft , with constant threat of the machine guns of the soldiers beneath them .