Mick Mannock, Fighter Pilot
Subtitle: Myth, Life and Politics (Studies in Military & Strategic History)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: March 9, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9780333778982
Subjects: Biography: general; British & Irish history: First World War; European history: First World War; First World War, 1914-1918; History; Biography / Autobiography; Military; United Kingdom, Great Britain; Western Continental Europe; General; Military - Strategy; History / Military / Strategy; Military - General; 1887-1918; Aerial operations, British; Biography; Fighter pilots; Fighter plane combat; Great Britain; Mannock, Edward,; Royal Air Force; World War, 1914-1918
First sentence: The borderland that stretches south of the Ypres salient is a grim and miserable place.
Description: "Mick Mannock, Fighter Pilot tells the exciting story of the staunch socialist who became Britain's most successful fighter pilot of the First World War. It traces the myth of the 'ace with one eye', examining how Mannock has been represented in biography and also in fiction. Why is he still commemorated today in Canterbury, where he grew up in poverty, and in Wellingborough, where he first became involved in the Labour movement?

Mannock's collaborative approach to aerial combat is traced back to his socialist beliefs, and his engineering background is seen as a crucial factor in his surviving seventeen months of deadly fighting high above the trenches. Had he lived, would Mannock have fitted into the interwar Labour Party, or been attracted to more extremist alternatives? This question prompts a wider discussion of the party's feelings towards socialists such as Attlee and Dalton who 'had a good war'."--BOOK JACKET.