The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War, by Samuel Hynes
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The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War, by Samuel Hynes
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The vivid story of the young Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War IThe Unsubstantial Air is a chronicle of war that is more than a military history; it traces the lives and deaths of the young Americans who fought in the skies over Europe in World War I. Using letters, journals, and memoirs, it speaks in their voices and answers primal questions: What was it like to be there? What was it like to fly those planes, to fight, to kill? The volunteer fliers were often privileged young men―the sort of college athletes and Ivy League students who might appear in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and sometimes did. For them, a war in the air would be like a college reunion. Others were roughnecks from farms and ranches, for whom it would all be strange. Together they would make one Air Service and fight one bitter, costly war. A wartime pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes tells these young men's saga as the story of a generation. He shows how they dreamed of adventure and glory, and how they learned the realities of a pilot's life, the hardships and the danger, and how they came to know both the beauty of flight and the constant presence of death. They gasp in wonder at the world seen from a plane, struggle to keep their hands from freezing in open-air cockpits, party with actresses and aristocrats, and search for their friends' bodies on the battlefield. Their romantic war becomes more than that―it becomes a harsh but often thrilling new reality.
The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War, by Samuel Hynes - Amazon Sales Rank: #661467 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-13
- Released on: 2015-10-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.22" h x .89" w x 5.47" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War, by Samuel Hynes Review
“The Unsubstantial Air is written with personal knowledge of what it is to be young and learning to fly, and of the gains and losses that combat flying brings to those who engage in it . . . those young men rose to the challenge, and Hynes has paid them handsome tribute. A terrific book.” ―Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
“This history of American airmen in the First World War conveys the fervor with which young men rushed to take part in a new form of combat. Many of them were acquainted thanks to boarding schools or the Ivy League, and illusions of glory lingered among the corps, even as pilots crashed carrying out ill-defined missions in untested machines and without parachutes. Hynes relies on contemporary letters and diaries . . . [and] captures the flyers' perspective and the rackety, exhilarating experience of flight.” ―New Yorker
“[The Unsubstantial Air], both thrilling and poignant, often employs a graceful present tense, and incorporates numerous first-person accounts, many of them newly discovered by Mr. Hynes's assistant on the project, Suzanne McNatt (a retired Princeton librarian to whom the book is dedicated). And from its pilot's-eye view it presents a somewhat different World War I from the muddy, poison-gassed charnel house described in so many of the books published to commemorate the war's 100th anniversary.” ―Charles McGrath, The New York Times
“This year we saw a lot of books about World War I, and Samuel Hynes' The Unsubstantial Air is one of the best . . . [Hynes] writes in such a beautiful way, so the experiences of these men are so moving, and they were so brave . . . He does a wonderful job honoring them.” ―Nancy Pearl, NPR's "Morning Edition"
“A beautifully written evocation of the Ivy Leaguers, farm boys and wild men who flew avions de chasse from (mainly) French airfields, based on their letters, flight diaries and memories.” ―Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement
“A beautifully written evocation of the Ivy Leaguers, farm boys and wild men who flew avions de chasse from (mainly) French airfields, based on their letters, flight diaries and memories.” ―Roy Foster, Times Literary Supplement
“Samuel Hynes is simultaneously a great gift to his complicated country and to our English language. He vividly brings to life our earliest air warriors and does so with a seemingly effortless but exhilarating prose that soars in much the same way his aviators do. Masterful.” ―Ken Burns
“A must-read for anyone interested in military history, The Unsubstantial Air is also Hynes' illuminating, heartfelt tribute to his pilot comrades of another conflict.” ―Chris Patsilelis, Tampa Bay Times
“A deeply empathetic account of the first gentlemen pilots feeling their ways in uncharted territory . . . Intimate and memorable portraits of these idealistic, daredevil young men are contained in a marvelously fluid narrative.” ―Kirkus (starred review)
“[Hynes] vividly recreates the experience of flying in WWI . . . A must read for anyone interested in aviation history, military history, and the American experience in the Great War.” ―Publishers Weekly
“This is a magical book. With the deft wizardry we've come to expect from him, Samuel Hynes manages to take us simultaneously up into the air and back in time. No one who encounters his knowing but empathetic portraits of America's first wartime flyers will ever forget them.” ―Geoffrey C . Ward , author of The Roosevelts: An Intimate History
“A remarkable achievement. Drawing on his own experience as a marine combat pilot in World War II and a treasure trove of little known letters and journals, Samuel Hynes tells the story of American pilots during the Great War. He shows who these men were, what drew them to aviation, and how and when they learned to fly and fight in the air--what one of them called 'this killing business'-- and does it in understated yet moving prose that reads like an extended elegy for a bygone and unrecoverable time. The result is mesmerizing from its lighthearted beginning to its often deadly end.” ―Robert Wohl, author of The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950
“Drawing on meticulous research as well as the author's own experience as a combat aviator in World War II, The Unsubstantial Air is Samuel Hynes's intimate human history of the dawn of American aerial warfare during the Great War. Following the young pilots, many well-born gentlemen and many others not, Hynes paints a fascinating group portrait of American aviators as they are initiated into the deadly new game of aerial combat. No one I know of writes about flying, and fighting in the air, as gracefully as Hynes.” ―Roger J. Spiller, author of An Instinct for War: Scenes from the Battlefields of History
“Samuel Hynes, who gave us the finest memoir of aerial combat in World War II, has journeyed back to the earlier global conflict and returned with the finest history of the first air war. He retrieves that long ago struggle from the quaint half-remembered movies of faintly comical looking planes made of cloth and wood, to put us among a generation of young Americans being fiercely tested as they learn to wage war with the most modern machines in the world. At once rich and restrained, sparkling with calm humor, full of weather and peril and wisdom and rue, and wholly engrossing from the very first page, The Unsubstantial Air is a monument worthy of the fliers it brings to intimate life. It is also a narrative that could only have been written by one who, under very different yet also very similar circumstances, has been there himself.” ―Richard Snow , former editor in chief of American Heritage
“A marvelous book, which nobody but Samuel Hynes could have written. Of course he gives us the battles, the development of tactics and technique, the expansion of operations as the war goes on. But the heart of this book lies in his brilliant recovery of ‘the pilot's world,' with its sense of romance and wildness, its mixture of valor and fatalism, its reticence and pride.” ―Patrick Wright, author of Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine
About the Author
Samuel Hynes is the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of a celebrated memoir of serving as a marine pilot in World War II, Flights of Passage. His book on soldiers' accounts of twentieth-century wars, The Soldiers' Tale, won a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He was a featured commentator on Ken Burns's documentary The War. He is also the author of several works of literary criticism, including The Auden Generation and The Edwardian Turn of Mind, and a memoir, The Growing Seasons. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful. A deeply personal kind of history at its very best. Excellent! By Timothy J. Bazzett Back in 1997 Samuel Hynes published a book called The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to a Modern War, a ground-breaking study of the lot of the men who fought in the two World Wars and Vietnam and how war lastingly affected them. His method was to closely examine the letters and journals as well as the poetry, memoirs and other literature produced by combatants and veterans of those wars. New York Times reviewer Gardner Botsford called it " A first-rate piece of work in every way," an assessment I agreed with wholeheartedly.But I think this one is even better, and I hope I can explain why. With his latest book, THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR, Hynes turns once again to a study of war, but this time with a much narrower and more personal focus. This time he examines the aviators of World War I, those "daring young men in their flying machines." Aviation was barely out of its infancy when the hostilities began in Europe in 1914. France had a kind of primitive air force, but the United States (which did not enter the war until 1917) had no such thing. But young men in the States had already begun a love affair with flying, and many of them could not wait to get into the adventure and 'romance' of flying in a war. So they enlisted in the air services with France, England, or Canada. The earliest members of the legendary Lafayette Escadrille are featured prominently here, as well as the wealthy, thrill-seeking Ivy League pilots who were among the first to volunteer their services and later figured prominently in the US Air Service.Sam Hynes spent several years researching this book, reading unit histories and immersing himself in the letters, diaries, journals and published and unpublished memoirs of the pilots who flew those flimsy, still evolving machines. Most of them were very young, still in their teens and early twenties, confident not only in their skills, but of their own immortality. Sadly, if predictably, many of them did not survive the war. The letters he shares are often filled with the kind of innocence, excitement and wonderment found only in those whose experiences have been very limited. An early example is one from Stuart Walcott who describes the assortment of American volunteers he is training with at a field in France -"... more than a hundred at this one school, and the oddest combination I've ever been thrown with: chauffeurs, second-story men, ex-college athletes, racing drivers, salesmen, young bums of leisure, a colored prizefighter, ex-Foreign Legionnaires, ball players, millionaires and tramps."Hynes, a young Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific during WWII, `gets' this, and throws in his own assessment -"That's what big wars do: they bring together young men who would not never meet in ordinary civilian life, dump them together in barracks and tents, and in foxholes and airplanes, set them marching to the same drum, fighting in the same war. It was like that in my war too; until I went to flight school, I had never met anyone who went to Yale, or came from Texas, or pitched in the International League, or drove an MG. Or a girl who drank Southern Comfort. I met them all before I was done. War is a broadening experience."And THIS is the kind of commentary that makes THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR such an intensely personal and eminently readable kind of history. Hynes succeeds in making himself a kind of contemporary of these fliers from a hundred years ago. In reading their letters and diaries and reflecting on them and then remembering his own days as a combat pilot, he has entered their company, become one of them. With passages like the one above I was taken back to my own military experiences during the Cold War and early years of Vietnam. Brought up in a small town in Michigan, I was suddenly thrust into the company of young men - boys, really - from New York, Missouri, Texas, Wyoming, California, Oklahoma, and other states. We trained together, lived together in cramped close quarters, and traveled together to faraway foreign places - Turkey and Germany, in my case. And yes, we met girls who drank liquor and beer, girls quite unlike the `nice' girls we'd grown up with. Such things are covered in Hynes's chapters: "Abroad I: First Impressions"; "Abroad II: Getting Acquainted"; and "Abroad III: End Games".This history-cum-memoir aspect of THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR manifests itself repeatedly. At the end of the chapter, "Looking at the War," which looks at the various kinds of work and planes that the pilots were involved with, Hynes agrees that the fighter pilots were the best, the most `romantic,' and says -"A generation later, small boys like me, who wore helmets and goggles to school in the winter, would run around the school yard at recess, their arms stuck out like wings, uttering what they hoped was the sound of machine guns and shouting, `Look at me! I'm Eddie Rickenbacker!' or `I'm the Red Baron!' And when our war came along, we'd know that we had to be pilots - not just any pilots, fighter pilots, because they were the heroes, they were the solitary knights of the air who fought their war personally, one plane against the other."And again, when Hynes discusses how, when a pilot dies, he is honored in two ways. One is the official military funeral. The other is more personal -"... someone - a friend, a tent mate - assumed the task of sorting the dead man's possessions, dismantling his life as a flier, now that it was over. There won't be many personal items - a few photographs, a watch or a fountain pen, some letters from home, perhaps - for the folks at home to cherish ... And the sorting, like the military funeral, will be a reassurance that a man you lived with and flew with has been treated with due respect, which is all you can do."These deeply felt personal touches in this unique history of these pioneer military aviators occur repeatedly - in the way Hynes often uses the present tense, and even the future tense, a stylistic method that puts you in the moment, a kind of "you are there" feeling; and also when he uses a first person and second person viewpoint, versus a constant objective and omniscient third person. Here's a sample -"... many pilots become casualty statistics: dead or wounded, or missing, or shot down and captured and made prisoners of war. If you read their letters and journals, you're bound to take some of those losses personally. You've followed these young men from college to flight school to a squadron at the front; you've felt their eagerness and witnessed their triumphs and mistakes. And now, suddenly, their war stories end, or are interrupted, and you feel their absence. Having come this far in the company of these pilots, I could make my own muster of the lost - the ones I'd like to have flown with."And he does, listing the names of just a few of the pilots featured throughout his book: Walter Avery, Ham Coolidge, Joe Eastman and Kenneth MacLeish, summarizing their brief flying careers, and - in some cases - too brief lives.And finally, in an even more personal summing up of his research and the writing of this book -"I come to the end of this story of the flying game with a feeling of admiration for the men I have met here, but also with a certain sadness. Like old Nestor in the ODYSSEY, I look back on the war and think, `So many good men gone. How young they were, how promising those young lives that would not be lived out ... And what good guys they were - funny, risk-taking, good friends and good fliers.' War is a cruel devourer of the young. And flying is a gamble that even the best pilots don't always win."I could feel Sam Hynes's sadness as he said good-bye to all these young men he'd come to know through their letters and diary entries; and as he no doubt said good-bye again to friends lost in his own war more than sixty years ago.THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR is history, a deeply personal history of the best kind. Yet another "first rate piece of work" from Samuel Hynes. And then some. Thank you, Sam. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful. was pretty skeptical. Was it one more book about Rickenbacker ... By Steve Suddaby My initial impression of The Unsubstantial Air, from judging this book by its cover, was pretty skeptical. Was it one more book about Rickenbacker and Luke and Lufbery, rehashing the stories that have been told many times before? Was it one of the flood of books written quickly to cash in on the WWI centennial? After reading just a couple dozen pages, however, I was pleasantly surprised at how wrong I had been. This is an incredibly insightful overview of what it was like to be an American pilot in the First World War. It is not simply a repeat of war stories – using the writings of many individuals, he describes the pilots’ prewar lives, their civilian and military flight training, their reactions to living in foreign countries, their time in combat, and how their experiences affected their lives afterward if they survived.Samuel Hynes takes full advantage of his experience as a young pilot in WWII – the last conflict that abruptly pushed thousands of young men into military aviation – to describe what they went through and what they thought about it. He has clearly thought deeply about his military experiences and how they affected the rest of his life; this level of understanding allows him to share these insights with his readers.One example among many will suffice to illustrate this. Hynes comments (p.212) on the common phenomenon of pilots being disgusted by their hometown newspapers’ exaggerated accounts of events in which they participated: “Pilots know that the newspaper version will miss the important details: the roles the other pilots on the patrol played, and what the Boche did, and the weather, and the way luck enters in, and fear, and nerves. Civilians won’t get it right… And so pilots at the front withdraw into their pilots’ world, where there are other young men like themselves who understand the contingencies of combat…”One of the other joys of this book is how Prof. Hynes puts the actions and attitudes of these young pilots into their historical, cultural, and socio-economic contexts. In reading it, you start to understand for the first time how their views were shaped by such factors as contemporary concepts of manhood; an upper-class, Ivy League background (for many); grandfathers who were Civil War veterans; etc. Hynes submerges you in the American life of the turn of the last century and the result is fascinating.The raw material for this excellent book consisted of the first-person writings of over 60 individual pilots. As I was reading, it occurred to me that a hundred writers could have started with the same raw material but that probably none of them would have interpreted it with the same insight and brilliance. Whether this will be your first exposure to World War I aviation or you’ve already read dozens of books on the subject, I can’t recommend this highly enough.--Steve SuddabyThe reviewer is a past president of the World War One Historical Association and this review was originally written for that organization. This is only the second time he has awarded a book five stars on an Amazon.com review.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful. Substantial heroism in the skies above France's blood-soaked battlefields during World War One By Robert Morris As Samuel Hynes explains, "There is a story to be told about those young men and the air war they fought. It's not military history; it's not about generals and their strategies and the movement of armies; rather, it's a story of the experience of becoming a pilot and then of flying in combat over the Western Front. It's about the men, and the planes; the French earth and sky; the flying, and killing, and dying, and surviving. That experience is new and strange, and unimaginable till you've had it. The closest a noncombatant can come to it is through the testimonies of [and about] the young men themselves, the pilots and observers and gunners who were there. We must listen to their voices as they recorded their war lives in letters and diaries and journals at the time and in the memoirs that some wrote, often long afterwards."Hynes focuses on seven "eager young men" who joined the French cause in the first months of the war. (Note: It was more than half over when the United States entered it in April 1917 and well into its last year before American troops engaged enemy forces on the Western front.) The young men trained in the Service Aéronautique, and were the first to join what became the Lafayette Escadrille, the first squadron of American pilots to fly for France. They came from different places and from different lives. Their names are Kiffin Rockwell (VMI and Washington and Lee), Victor Chapman (St. Paul's and Harvard), James McConnell (Haverford School and University of Virginia), William Thaw (Hill School and Yale), Norman Prince (Groton and Harvard), Elliot Cowdin (St. Paul's and Harvard), and Bert Hall (uneducated) who worked as a farm hand, a section hand on a railway, a chauffer, a circus performer (he was the "Human Cannonball") and a seaman before he reached Paris and took up taxi driving. Hynes characterizes Hall as a wanderer, jack-of-all-trades, and free spirit.These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Hynes's coverage:o Bert Hall (Pages 9-12 and 213-214)o U.S. entry into World War One (15-18)o Colonel Hiram Bingham (17-20 and 104-105)o U.S. Air Service (38-42, 103-105, and 281-282)o Lafayette Escadrille (41-42 and 214-215)o Richard Blodgett (57-58 and 138-145)o American Aviation: Center at Issoudun (60-71 and 109-112)o Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt (110-113)o Captain Albert Deullin (119-123)o German Air Services (128-144 and 206-215)o Waldo Heinrichs (152-154, 165-166, and 239-240)o General William ("Billy") Mitchell and his strategies (190-199)o Ninety-Sixth Bombing Squadron (197-202, 205-205, and 227-228)o Joe Eastman (220-221, 262-263, and 265-272)o Hobey Baker (274-277)Several times while reading this book for the first time, I felt as if Hynes was pushing pieces o0f a puzzle across a table so that I could eventually assemble them in proper order. Yes, his focus is on American flyers in the First World War but, demonstrating several of the skills of a world-class anthropologist, he examines cultural components that include the Ivy League universities, so-called "high society," private flying schools, unique challenges faced by those involved with American Ambulance Field Service, and differences of opinion about airplanes. The opinions of General officers ranged from a passion for using them to fight rather than to observe to an insistence that they not be used at all.What are Samuel Hynes's concluding thoughts? "Like old Nestor in the Odyssey, I look back on the war and think, 'So many good men gone.' How young they were, how promising those young lives that would not be lived out, what talents they had that their country might have used well in the years ahead. And what good guys they were -- funny, risk-taking, good friends and good fliers. War is a cruel devourer of the young. And flying is a gamble that even the best pilots don't always win."So many died while learning to fly. So many others died after surviving a dogfight against formidable opponents. And still others died in combat. It must be said that taking off in one of those planes was itself an act of faith, an act of courage. There have been countless warriors throughout military history who were indeed made of the "right stuff." The air above the battlefields in France during World War One may have been unsubstantial but that cannot be said of the courage of those who ascended to engage their enemy, often for the last time.
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