Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 Read Online Free PDF

educated, socially responsible leaders with a sense of obligation to the nation and the Crown. Combining these attributes with the English ideal of extreme (perhaps even suicidal) courage produced the typical British officer. It was said that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” and there was truth in this. In 1914, nearly all of Britain’s 28,000 army officers fit this mold. On the Western Front they formed the British Expeditionary Force, which was deemed so insignificant by Kaiser Wilhelm that he called it “contemptible.” With perverse English pride, the BEF took on the nickname “The Old Contemptibles.”
    The original Royal Flying Corps pilots and observers were seconded from regular military and naval units. Initially, many of the pilots were sergeants and regarded as mere “drivers.” The officers took the role of observer and aircraft commander, as they had been trained to read maps, navigate, and spot for artillery.
    But a month after fighting began in France, it was apparent that the rapid military expansion required more officers, so commissions were offered to veteran sergeants of the prewar regular army and qualified volunteers within the ranks. Many of the soldiers who had answered the call to duty in August 1914 had been university or public school students before signing up. Because they all believed the war would be over by Christmas and didn’t want to incur the commitment of a commission, they’d simply enlisted as private soldiers. However, some 13,000 of them had been enrolled in their school’s Officers’ Training Corps (rather like the American ROTC system) and most of these men were directly commissioned—even those who didn’t apply.
    By contrast, the typical German officer of 1914 was a member of a caste, rather than a member of a social class. While social classes were present, of course, German society and government were much more autocratic than the English system. Industrialization had arrived somewhat later, and as a result, democratic thinking and liberalism had been slower to take root. When they did, these progressive ideas ran squarely into opposition from the landed gentry and the military-based aristocracy, who opposed any change that threatened their status.
    Germany was also intensely segregated; the north was generally Protestant, while the south was predominantly Catholic. Most of the industry lay in the west, as opposed to immense agrarian interests in the east. Only in 1871 had the four kingdoms of Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Wurttemberg been united into the Deutsches Reich by Otto von Bismarck. Also called the Zweites (Second) Reich, it was ruled by the noble Prussian House of Hohenzollern. *
    The Kaiser was subsequently more of a warlord than a sovereign monarch, with each of the four kingdoms maintaining its unique identity and a separate military. However, within the new German confederation, Prussia reigned supreme and was itself ruled by landowners, called Junkers (the word derives from Juncherre , “young lord”), who exerted tremendous influence on Prussian politics and Germany.
    As in England, younger sons who could not inherit frequently became career soldiers, and men from this background undoubtedly colored the German officer corps. However, things were changing, and by 1914 many officers hailed from the middle class. The Imperial German Air Service attracted many such bourgeois men, perhaps due to its technical nature or because it offered advancement in a new branch of the military. Family connections can’t help you fly and being a pilot is an unforgiving equalizer; either you can do it or you cannot.
    BOTH THE BRITISH and German militaries realized that just because a man could be an officer didn’t mean he could be a flying officer. What, officials wondered, were the traits that made the difference?
    “Guts,” “fitness,” and the ability to “make quick decisions” were the most frequently listed traits from a