Knights Without Parachutes
Quentin Roosevelt's Sneaky American Tactic
Better Known as Theodore Roosevelt's Son An American president is supposed to be just one of the American people, and even more so his son. Realistically, though, the son of a president doesn't get to grow up like other people, and even a hundred years ago life in the public view could be tough. Eddie Rickenbacker was impressed with how Quentin Roosevelt handled being a president's son in the middle of "the democratic style of living which is necessary in the intimate life of an aviation camp." Quentin was killed in combat, which according to Rickenbacker was no big surprise;"His commanding officers...
World War 1 Airpower and the Conduct of War
eddie rickenbacker logistics and maintenance
The Supply Chain Behind Fighter Pilots One of our readers - thank you! - sent us a very interesting article on what airpower did to the conduct of war. (Moved it into the third dimension, for one thing.) While many of the war's fascinating stories are from the fighter pilots, there was (and is!) much more to air power than that, and the numbers tell their own amazing stories. The fighter pilots were actually in a perfect position to see the importance of maintenance, logistics, and supply. Modern Warfare, Aviation, and Supply Interesting points from the article (The Genesis of Modern Warfare:...
How Eugene Bullard Learned to Fly Chicken Coops
French Flying Chicken Coops Our family is building a chicken coop. For chickens. One hundred years ago, when a much higher percentage of Americans lived on farms, chickens were a normal thing to have, rather than a suburban farming fad. Roosters then were not restricted by community covenants, non-laying chickens were probably dinner rather than pets, and coops would have been built out of whatever was lying around, not painted beautifully or constructed to look like hobbit holes. (Besides, nobody had heard of a hobbit, because Lieutenant J. R. R. Tolkien was still busy recovering from trench fever.) The purpose of a...
100th Anniversary of US Entry into World War 1
albert ball eddie rickenbacker eugene bullard james norman hall jimmy doolittle mick mannock raoul lufbery red baron
Did US Entry Help the Air War? Did the Air War Help US Entry? On April 6, 1917, the US entered the war. What effect did the air war have on US entry, and what effect did US entry have on the air war? We talked to Andy Parks about these questions, who pointed to the experience of his own extended family. Many whose views had started out isolationist were pushed toward patriotism and the war effort as German submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram made Germany feel like a real threat, even from across the Atlantic. Andy's grandfather Charles Parks...
Observations From a Fighter Pilot Without a Parachute
The Era of Airborne Warriors in Single Combat The book No Parachute: A Fighter Pilot in World War I by Arthur Gould Lee, has so many good quotes about aviation and war, it is tempting to just fill blog articles with quotes from that book for the rest of the year. But that would mean ignoring some other fascinating stories and upcoming hundredth anniversaries. So here are just a few of the interesting observations from the foreword, written by a man who was there (in the RFC) and was nobody special, at least in the sense of not being a...