David Bashow
Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) David L. Bashow (born 1946) is a Canadian author. Bashow served 36 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Career. Bashow was born in Calgary, Alberta. He moved to Fredericton with his family in 1958, and attended high school and then the University of New Brunswick (UNB). He joined the Canadian Air Force after graduating from UNB, serving as a fighter pilot; he has written books on air-force related topics, and has taught both in the United States and in Canada. Bashow, who lives in Canada with his wife Heather, is an associate professor  of history at the Royal Military College of Canada, and editor of Canadian Military Journal, a bilingual, peer-reviewed academic journal. Bashow's book "Knights of the Air," about Canadian fighter pilots in the First World War, revisited an aspect of history covered as heroic and chivalrous by earlier writers, including Norman Harris in "Knights of the Air" (1958), and Arch Whitehouse's "The Years of the Sky Kings" (1959). Bashow sees the air war as "a dirty piece of business," in which the flying aces "were a rather ruthless bunch, who often travelled alone, looked for the weak or  wounded, snuck up behind them and shot them in the back." He weighs in on longstanding disputes, arguing that Billy Bishop did carry out a solo attack on a German aerodrome at dawn and that Roy Brown was not the pilot who shot down the "Red Baron," Manfred von Richthofen. Bashow's book "All the Fine Young Eagles," about the Canadian fighter pilots in the Second World War. Bashow had a "Starfighter" poster on his wall as a teenager, and flew them as a peacetime Air force pilot.