This is the story of an air force that did not exist, except in the American imagination.

This is the story of how war-as-imagined gave birth to the dream that America could design, build, and fly the largest aerial armada in the world and use it to become the arbiter of war and peace.

This is the story of how a war-as-imagined was shaped by the forces of the mass media and state-sponsored propaganda, offering a promise that has shaped the American vision of air power as the foundation for America’s emergence as the premier military force into the twenty-first century.

Telling the story of the seductive vision of American air power requires a different kind of attention than is usual for telling the story of the actual development of American air power, which came during World War II. As a cultural and political force, this vision took shape at the time the United States entered World War I. This study is an argument for the significance of that vision, although it was intangible and the American participation in World War I was too short to allow for the dream to be realized.

When the United States entered World War I, two things were true. It did not have an air force, and there was a deep aversion to the prospect of sacrificing American lives to the slaughter of the ground war in Europe. Within four months of the declaration of war, the Wilson administration, key corporate interests, high-ranking members of the military, and the overwhelming majority of members of both houses of Congress were proclaiming that the United States would break the stalemate on the ground and turn the tide of war with a vast aerial armada of American-built planes—exceeding in number the total of all combatant air forces along the Western Front—flown by American pilots.

The United States did not have suitable planes, the designs to build them, or men trained to fly them. The absence of an air force was coupled with a nearly complete ignorance of the various uses of aircraft in combat developed by the European combatants during the war, and an overweening confidence in American technological know-how and production capacity. In other words, it was a plan unencumbered by facts and fueled by both fear of the potential losses in the trenches and hope that they could be averted by waging war from the air. By the end of the war, America was relying upon planes built by our allies, and Congress began conducting hearings into the failure of the vision.

The fantasy of a vast American aerial armada was fed in the public’s imagination not only by the vague and exaggerated claims of elected officials and military leaders, but also by the images of the “knights of the air,” the celebrated heroes of the sunlit skies flying for Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations, Germany, France, and Americans flying for the Lafayette Escadrille.

The influence of this publicity cannot be overestimated. Whatever Americans knew about air combat at the time the United States entered the war derived entirely from the mass media. An airplane was still a rare sight in the United States before the war, something one was more likely to see in the pictorial sections of the newspapers than actually flying through the skies. Air combat was invented during World War I, and the public’s understanding of it derived from controlled sources of information, both in the form of overt propaganda and in the less obviously controlled accounts in the press, in newsreel footage, in ephemera bearing photographs of the great aces, and in their biographies and autobiographies.

To study the appeal of air combat takes us to the heart of the mechanisms for influencing the imagination, for shaping desire according the wishes of the state, and for the lasting impact these influences had not only on how war is recalled, but on how the expectations about future warfare reflected the engineered vision of warfare in the sky. My tracing the emergence of the dream of American air power during World War I follows two major lines of inquiry. The first considers how political and military leaders persuaded themselves and the American public that the United States could quickly build the largest aerial armada in the world and train the men to fly them, and that this would break the stalemate along the Western Front. The second considers how the cultural values assigned to the European aces were translated into an American idiom, resulting by the end of the war in a vision of the American ace as especially symbolic of American national values and character.

Part I. America Looks to the Skies
The declaration of war in April 1917 was quickly followed by the passage of the aviation appropriation bill of July 1917. It was the largest single appropriation bill passed to that date in the history of Congress, and it was passed without significant debate. Indeed, the press pilloried as near traitors those few congressmen who wished to raise what turned out to be very important questions about how the appropriations were to be spent. Its quick passage was accomplished by a combination of political hoopla about an American air force winning the war coupled with a nearly complete obfuscation of how the money would be spent. This celerity was justified as essential to saving American lives on the ground, making a virtue not only of necessity, but of the complete lack of information about the kinds of planes the United States would build, and who would profit from those decisions.

Rep. James R. Mann (R.-Ill.) gave one of the most significant speeches relevant to the war effort when he urged his colleagues to pass the bill quickly, comparing it favorably (and one must say, rather oddly) to “buying a pig in a poke.” The Washington Post enthusiastically seconded the appeal to ignorance: “The American people don’t care a rap about the defects of the airplane bill, if there are any defects.”

Defects there were, and in such abundance that within a year the press was calling for hearings into the question of why the United States had failed to produce the promised armada. The sorry history of that initiative is summed up by a historian writing in 1940. The chapter title “196 Planes for 1 Billion Dollars” states the case succinctly. The chicanery, greed, and arrogance born of ignorance associated especially with the automotive industry is so patently a factor in the failure of the United States to live up to its promise that this moment in American history might be categorized as merely one in a string of scandals involving the government and monied interests on the way to constructing the military-industrial complex. But to do so would perpetuate the misperception that America’s rise to the greatest air power the world has ever seen should be traced from the advent of American air power in World War II. This understanding misses the larger point, which is that the dream of dominance through air power, of exerting American will throughout the world without having to risk the lives of ground soldiers, and of relying on bombing to achieve that end, began at the time of America’s entry into World War I.

In 1917 the United States did not have an air force and had no idea how to build one. This vacuum was filled by dreams and fantasy, or by what Secretary of War Newton Baker termed the belief in a “miracle.” It was precisely because the vacuum was so complete that the dream could take on the dimensions that it did.

What filled the vacuum were promises that married the vision of air combat with the most powerful symbols of American exceptionalism, a message that stressed how ideally air combat suited the American character and inventive ingenuity. America would rescue Europe, mired in the mud, from the skies. All that was necessary, the military leader most responsible for promoting air power argued to the public and Congress, was to put the “Yankee punch into the air.”

The search for inspiring symbolism for American warfare came at a time of profound changes in how the nation went to war. Two changes especially undermined the vision of the officer as charismatic leader and the soldier as individualist. The first was the advent of Selective Service; the second was the decision to no longer accept voluntary officers who had traditionally received an automatic commission. These shifts and what they portended were particularly evident in the dispute that arose between Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted to lead a voluntary militia to Europe, and Woodrow Wilson, who had no intention of allowing his political archrival to steal the symbolism of the war. Ultimately, the romance formerly associated with the volunteer and the officer—and epitomized in Roosevelt’s leading an all-voluntary force in the charge up San Juan Hill—was transferred to the combat pilot, and along with it came an idealized image of both American values and masculinity.

Massive forces were brought into play to achieve this tectonic shift in the idealized American war-as-imagined. How America first dreamed the dream of air superiority fascinates as a study of historical forces because the image was fashioned from such flimsy threads of reality. This makes the ephemeral influences so obviously substantial. A synergy of state-sponsored propaganda, press reports, industrial public relations hoopla, political speeches, and political rivalry wove for the American public a magical vision of wars won from above, on the wings of eagles, without the need to shed American blood on foreign soil—or at least not as much of it as the public had reason to fear from the reports of the war along the Western Front.

The triumph of image over reality is made more obviously the greater achievement when considered in light of the yawning gap that existed between the vision and the reality of America’s knowledge of and capacity for producing the largest aerial armada in the world. To tell the story in all its richness required excursions into various cubbyholes of history, far from the Western Front.

The first mise-en-scène is set in the inner sanctum of the military and the hushed offices of the secretary of defense. It was in these corridors of power that the request from the French for the largest air armada in the world electrified American military, industrial, and political leaders into committing themselves to a vision that would ultimately shape the future of the United States as the world’s dominant air power.

The scene then shifts to the floor of Congress, and to the influence of the press and the Committee for Public Information—the propaganda ministry established by Wilson—on its deliberations, as first the House and then the Senate were subjected to arguments for the quick passage of the largest military appropriation bill in the nation’s history without the information necessary for an informed opinion.

The final scene seems at first consideration far removed from the examination of how Americans became mesmerized with air power. It reveals the fight between the traditional elites and the growing power of organized labor to claim the potent imagery associated with the voluntary commissioned officer. This struggle for control over the symbols of leadership was made all the more imperative by the resort to Selective Service, which some congressmen had reacted violently against as a breach of the most fundamental principles of American individualism, a breach that in their minds reduced American men to little more than slaves. The struggle over who would lead and whether there would be voluntary forces was played out most visibly in the clash of the two titans of the era, Roosevelt and Wilson. But the struggle also involved organized labor, who demanded that the officer class not be given over to an American aristocracy and members of the eastern seaboard elite, who prior to America’s entry into World War I had organized summer businessman’s training camps as a kind of propaganda of the deed in favor of the traditional elite assuming leadership over any army assembled to confront the Germans.

Ultimately, World War I brought with it the end to both the direct commission and all-voluntary, privately funded units. The symbolic potency of the volunteer warrior, and the individualism he embodied, was transferred to the pilot who flew alone into the skies.

Part II. The Images of the Ace
The desire to make America the supreme rescuer from the skies was fueled by the images of the European aces, which were well known to the American public by the time the United States entered the war. Georges Guynemer of France, Billy Bishop of Canada, and Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, and Victor Chapman, who flew for the Lafayette Escadrille, were the idols of many Americans, especially young men far from the battlefield who dreamed of the glory of single-handed duels in the sky. If the stalemated war on the ground meant, as Wilson declared, that “war had lost all of its glory,” the war in the air, the newest form of combat, was a powerful alternative. When the U.S. Air Service called for volunteers, the recruitment offices were so overwhelmed by the number of young men who presented themselves that many were turned away.

The glorious image of the ace originated in the dismal realities of the ground war. The Germans, French, and ultimately the British all found that concentrating attention on what many regarded as the least important aspect of the war—the role of the combat pilot—satisfied the public’s longing for heroes and heroism in a way impossible to sustain by recounting experiences in the trenches, especially as the war dragged on.

What aspects of national aspirations the flyers were taken to represent varied from country to country. The French and the British linked the role of the ace to the casus belli, the defense of civilization against the barbarian at the gate. Crucial to this explanation were the atrocity stories laid at the feet of the German invaders. These accounts were told and retold, and investigated by both French and British authorities. These accounts were also used to engage the sympathy of the United States. When the United States entered the war the role of the Allies as Europe’s rescuers from the barbarian was played out in the American idiom through lurid posters depicting the raping German beast, and in feature-length films that heightened the sense of melodrama and threat.

It was a small imaginative step from representing the Allies as defending civilization in a new crusade to representing the aces as a new order of knighthood. The appealing image of the new Galahads, of the boy-knights motivated solely by love of family and of country, gave birth to what remains the dominant trope for describing those who flew in World War I—the “knights of the sky.”

This trope supported an array of culturally conservative meanings associated with the ruling class. But another image emerged which stood in sharp contrast with the image of the selfless knight. Billy Bishop, the great Canadian ace, and Bert Hall, who made a living from his image as a hero of the Lafayette Escadrille, both represented the self-made man, the individual who flew for personal aggrandizement, and whose identity was formed from competitive aggression. Billy Bishop toured the United States to promote his autobiography in which he bragged about his single-handed attack on a German aerodrome, an account that inspired skepticism from his squadron mates. Bert Hall became a vaudeville star, recounting his exploits while wearing both medals he had earned and some he had not.

The representation of the British and French aces as popularized in the United States before America entered the war embraced without acknowledgment these contradictions, which points toward the larger contest of the era between the feudal elites and the emerging parvenu classes, between an identity based upon duty and one based upon skill and celebrity. Whether presented as a selfless knight or as a man in search of personal glory, the ace emphasized individualism, the capacity of the individual to motivate himself to seek the enemy in a duel to the death, and the ability to control his destiny by bending the newest weapon of mechanized warfare to his will.

The German fighter emerged as skilled, pitiless, and efficient, a man who subordinated his will to both the machine and the discipline of the unit. Outnumbered in terms of both planes and the men to fly them, the Germans inflicted devastating casualties on the Allies time after time. The Germans were the first to perfect squadron flying, which depended upon defensive combat and unit discipline rather than upon taking the war to the enemy in the desire to gain sufficient individual victories to be named an ace. Initially, the Germans were sneered at as “cowards” by the Allies; ultimately, the superiority of their approach became obvious.

By the end of the war, a specifically American version of the ace had been formed from these various elements. The American ace, epitomized in the top-scorer from the top unit, Eddie Rickenbacker, borrowed some elements from the British imagery of both the chivalric hero and the ambitious self-made man, and some from the German image of the “new man,” motivated by a machine-like efficiency and subordination to the unit.

The initial recruiting drives for American pilots were aimed at college men, and the dominant comparative imagery to their own experience was that of a football team. The imagery associated with squadron life also compared the life of a flyer to that of gentlemen game hunters gathered at an especially grand lodge, who flew out to the hunt twice a day. Sometimes the call to a patrol interrupted a tennis match, so the pilots flew in their tennis whites. But always, they returned to a three-course meal at a linen-covered table. And women were theirs for the asking. It was an especially civilized way for a gentleman to fight a war in defense of civilization.

Part III. Death and Transfiguration
The image of the aces was constructed initially by intelligence officers in their offices far from the front, who fed their accounts directly to reporters. Later in the war, the flyers themselves contributed to the publicity surrounding the imagery of the aces through the books and articles they wrote and even through the films in which they were the featured leads.

The problem with war heroes, obviously, is the danger that they will die, and indeed, the casualty rates among flyers, especially among the Allies, was very high. It is with regard to how death was configured, how it was used to represent the ultimate sacrifice of the hero, that the clearest index to the cultural values of the aces is found. The nature of the ground war gave rise to a number of what in retrospect can be regarded only as rather bizarre positive assertions about masculinity. Some argued that war had a genuinely therapeutic effect, rather like a high colonic, in purging the male spirit of the effeminacy, weakness, and lack of a sense of adventure brought about by a life made altogether too easy by the realities of middle-class life in the industrial age. Both the British and the American authorities found a benefit in the requirement that men revert to the “primitive,” casting off the veneer of civilization, confronting head-on the overmastering passions of fear and the desire to kill or be killed.

This argument, as it turned out, was rather more determined by the nature of the ground war than by the nature of the air war. The air war came to symbolize the older, chivalric conception of the warrior as the embodiment of all that was best in civilization—constraint under pressure, fairness to one’s enemies, skilled combat, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life on behalf of king and country. While the war-as-purgative argument placed the blame for both physical and moral degeneracy on civilization itself, the alternative version mated warfare with civilization. As a consequence, the role of the combat pilot wedded air wars with the image of civilized violence undertaken in the name of civilization, a connection between the mode of warfare and its purpose which was lost with the advent of brutal, mechanized warfare on the ground.

This meant, oddly enough, that how a pilot met his fate came to be invested with very significant meaning. An ace was supposed to be the master of his fate; if he was shot down, it was because by some momentary weakness or lapse he was defeated by an equally skilled enemy—rather the same mentality that is brought to Olympic sports events. For an ace to be shot down by groundfire, therefore, sent significant consternation through the ranks. This seems improbable to the uninitiated, but just how much it matters is revealed by the very serious competition between ground units and the Royal Air Force to claim credit for shooting down Baron von Richthofen. The dispute continues to this day and is the source of lively controversy.

The idea that an ace would be shot down only through his own recklessness emerged as a paramount principle for the American representation of the ace by the end of the war. The image of the ace is one of hypermasculinity, an individual who both embodies the highest national ideals and who cannot be defeated by death—an impossible image, yet one that captures the reason for the long-lived romance associated with the aces of World War I. They were men who rose to the skies to answer the seductive siren call, the tune of the dance of death. It is not the reality of the very high death rates and the toll on the human spirit, but the image of them engaged in that deadly dance that endures.

Epilogue: Democratizing War
At the end of World War I the elements of America’s emergence as the most powerful nation relying on the most powerful air force were in place, awaiting realization in the subsequent wars of the century. The death of the flower of manhood along the Western Front gave the theorists of air war the idea that in the future the war should be carried directly to the civilians at home, what America’s strongest advocate for a postwar air force, Billy Mitchell, called democratizing warfare. Certainly, Americans had a revulsion against bombing cities, but the plans for an American air force had from the outset of America’s involvement in World War I included the concept of strategic bombing as the way to break the stalemate on the ground. The average American could not be fully aware of this intention because the hoopla and bravura surrounding the passage of the military aviation bill was strong on the glory of air power and vague to obscure on the subject of exactly what kind of air power was envisioned. This, coupled with the heavy emphasis on single air-to-air combat, naturally led to imagining a vast cavalry of American combat planes piloted by the men who epitomized American strength and values, a hyperbolized masculinity defined as a rich mix of individualism, team spirit, and celebrity.

From the perspective of the most recent use of America’s air power—in the post-9/11 period—the realization of the original dream is complete. The use of American forces was persistently characterized as a defense of civilization; the use of precision weapons signals the restraint required for civilized violence. The reliance on nonprecision weapons is simply regrettable and not much discussed; the civilian casualties are equally to be lamented and are both unfortunate and unintended. What is absent is the glory assigned to the pilot who delivers the bombs, a product ultimately of the reality that America’s air wars are inevitably disproportionate, the launching of American advanced technology against those who cannot muster any defense. What legitimates it is the relief that because America can strike with impunity from the air, the nation is spared ground casualties.

The questions that motivate this book are uncomplicated: What is it we have ignored in a moral sense in how we have imagined not the worst kind of combat, but the kind we admire? What has shaped our tolerance—if not admiration—for war we conduct from the air? How have the romantic images of air wars infuenced the way we define for our boys what it means to be a man?

These questions are subsumed under the centrality of the focus on how a nation’s imagination was infuenced from 1914 to 1918, how America came to project itself ideally in terms of how it ought to conduct warfare. This self-image was shaped initially and primarily by messages composed for the purposes of state-sponsored propaganda, or to forward industrial interests, or for political ends. The failure to produce the imagined air force during World War I was far less significant to the growth of American air power than the lingering and seductive power of the original image of an American armada darkening the skies over Europe.