The Romance of the Air
A review of "The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War" by Samuel Hynes
Much of our collective imagination surrounding fighter pilots and aerial combat has its roots in the experience of the First World War: intrepid knights of the air squaring off against each other in the skies over the muddy trenches of the Western Front. That’s hardly a novel observation, but this romantic image has proven remarkably resilient over the past century. Advances in technology from jet engines and guided missiles to digital fly-by-wire flight control systems and drones failed to put a dent in this foundational myth of air warfare. The incredible success Top Gun: Maverick enjoyed at the box office this past summer testifies to the hold the figure of the fighter pilot still has on much of the world’s popular imagination.
This origin story get brought back down to earth in The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War, the late author and Second World War combat pilot Samuel Hynes’ 2014 account of the American experience of the war in the air. Neither a systematic history of the American contribution to the air war nor an intimate personal narrative, The Unsubstantial Air nevertheless paints a portrait of what flying and fighting in World War I was like for American pilots – and does so with remarkable success.
To weave his narrative, Hynes relies mainly on the voluminous contemporary diaries and letters pilots left behind, as well as later memoirs, reminiscences, and unit histories published years or even decades after the fact. He also brings his own experience as a Marine Corps pilot during World War II to bear on his account – and judiciously so, picking just the right spots to add his personal commentary. It’s not a purely impressionistic portrait, however; to truly give a feel for the personal experience of aerial warfare over the Western Front, Hynes recognizes the need to discuss of bigger-picture tactics and strategies. At the same time, though, the book doesn’t purport to be anything other than what it is: an attempt to give readers a vivid and realistic sense of what it was like for young Americans to fly in combat during the First World War.
Hynes makes perhaps too much of the collegiate origins of America’s embryonic air force; while the U.S. military certainly drew many of its first pilots from the ranks of “upper- and upper-middle-class American society,” the romantic idea of the combat pilot as a chivalrous knight of air was already embedded in the ways the U.S. government thought about the ideal military aviator. But Hynes is right to emphasize the way this primordial notion of aerial warfare as a sporting and gallant enterprise helped make combat aviation the most attractive option for so many young American elites headed off to war.
These fledgling pilots began to reach France late in the summer of 1917, a few months after the United States formally entered the war. There, they faced the monotony and misery of waiting for their flight training to begin; one novice pilot arrives at a training field and finds it “only partly built” and “a sea of mud.” Rather than flying, these impatient aviators had to get their hands dirty and help build their own airfields through manual labor – a far cry from the starry-eyed visions of aerial chivalry they’d entertained before they signed up. But once they’re finally up in the air, they find an exhilaration that Hynes identifies from personal experience as “composed of youthful high spirits, a joy in mastering a difficult skill, and a sense of life as an independent adventure.”
Above all, though, these new pilots faced incredible danger – both from German guns and their own aircraft. Hynes leaves no doubt that flying remained an inherently hazardous enterprise just a decade and a half after the Wright Brothers first skimmed the sands at Kitty Hawk. Pilots met their demise at alarming rates during training, some as a result of structural failures of one sort or another in their aircraft and others due to midair collisions and errors of inexperienced flyers. Others fell victim to German guns; one diary entry notes that a fellow fighter pilot survived his encounter with the enemy but later lost consciousness and crashed, breaking his neck and fracturing his skull.
Hynes dedicates separate chapters to the three main varieties of combat aviation experience during the First World War: fighters (then also known as pursuit planes), bombers, and observation aircraft. Of these, fighters were then and remain today the far most appealing and romantic option for young military aviators. Pursuit pilots didn’t just dogfight against their German counterparts, though; much of their war consisted of “low work,” or what’s today called close air support: “attacking at ground level whatever lay in front of your own troops.”
They also froze while flying patrols at altitudes ranging from five to ten and even twenty thousand feet, despite covering themselves in fur helmets and wool coveralls and leather coats. In one typically evocative passage, Hynes invites us to
Imagine what it was like, sitting up there at twenty thousand feet on a patrol, in an open cockpit the size of a barrel, with only a meager windshield to protect you from the slipstream that strikes your face at a hundred miles an hour, with no heating system what blows back from the engine.
For their part, observation pilots probably had the least glamorous role on the Western Front. Whether or not an aviator received one of these benighted slots rather than a cherished pursuit assignment depended more on luck of the draw than anything else. Still, Hynes notes that there were more American observation squadrons were flying missions at the end of spring 1918 than pursuit squadrons. They frequently flew low and suffered their share of losses, rarely if ever given the credit or recognition their courage deserved.
When it comes to bombers, however, Hynes pulls back and examines the bigger picture. Indeed, he’s as interested in how the notion of strategic bombing came to be in the minds of American flyers as he is in the individual experiences of bomber pilots and crew members. Already in 1917, airmen like Major Billy Mitchell had begun to fantasize about masses of aircraft delivering knock-out blows well behind enemy lines – long-distance raids against depots, barracks, and railroad yards that would paralyze the adversary and force it to surrender. These fantasies proved disastrous when first put into practice: one early attempt fails to drop a single bomb, while later sorties hemorrhaged planes and pilots to little apparent effect.
The narrative comes to a head in the final third of the book, as American aviators are thrown into the brutal, murderous combat of the war’s final months. Only in June 1918 did American squadrons and pilots begin to move to the front en masse, and the next month the war in the air would assume a punishing intensity that paralleled that of the war’s final ground offensives. Scores of aircraft filled the skies, with one pilot calling clashes between American and German fighters less dogfights than “violent mob riots of the air.” Casualty figures mount relentlessly amidst constant combat; wet and blustery fall weather only compounded the misery. Nerves began to fray and fatalism coursed through the ranks of American aviators as the fighting ground on, with pilots taken out of action to rest and recuperate before being returned to the front.
Soon enough, pilots we’ve followed throughout the book begin to fall – both in combat and in accidents. Hynes gives no hints along the way that these individuals will not make it to the end of the war, a narrative choice that lets readers feel the toll as it comes in. Getting shot down isn’t necessarily a death sentence, but for pilots who survive the ordeal “it’s a sudden shock, unimaginable and personal.” We also experience the nervous anticipation many aviators felt about the coming cease-fire; while they welcome the arrival of peace and join in the wider celebrations, some pilots feel “a vacancy: the sky is empty now, and so are their lives.”
The Unsubstantial Air ends with a brief overview of what these pilots did after the war, with Hynes giving particular attention to the ways they themselves recorded their own experiences over the months, years, and decades that followed. It’s a fitting conclusion to the book, one that epitomizes the light touch that lets the young aviators whose tales he’s told speak largely for themselves.
Hynes doesn’t give us the sort of comprehensive history that pulls together the personal experiences of individual pilots with sweeping accounts of military strategy; even a century after the last shots were fired in the skies over the Western Front, that variety of synthesis has yet to emerge. But The Unsubstantial Air does offer a visceral, you-are-there account of what it was like to be an American combat pilot during the First World War. It’s an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the varieties of American military aviation experience during that war to end all wars, from aviation buffs to the historian that eventually does write the definitive story of the first war in the air.