Publisher's Synopsis
Ever wish you could see a World War I Curtiss Jenny do a triple loop? How about a squadron of American-made DH-4 Liberty bombers taking off on a mission over the front? You can, in glorious black-and-white shot on location by the military's own movie makers, using state of the art (1918-style) wooden boxes with crude brass-encased glass lenses, metal hand cranks, and cumbersome tripods. Thousands of WWI-related motion picture reels sit in the vaults at the National Archives and Records Administration facility in College Park, Maryland but only 71 titles contain aviation footage. This amazing real-time visual history of the first ever air war could have been lost to time. Luckily, with the publication of WAR WINGS: Films of the First Air War, you can locate those needles in the giant haystack of the Archives, and know precisely what moving images are on each reel. Absolutely indispensable to a student of World War I aviation. I wish I had it when co-founding Wingspan, the Air & Space Channel Phil Stewart s succinct real by reel, scene by scene, analysis is complemented by a wonderful index. Walter J. Boyne, Author and National Aviation Hall of Fame Enshrinee. Allows the reader to almost watch the films themselves unroll the next best thing to seeing the films themselves. Leonard E. Opdycke, Author, Editor, and Publisher. WAR WINGS chronicles over 2,550 individual scenes of filmed action while hundreds more are summarized. Scenes of pilot training, airplane manufacturing, fighting in the skies over France, and the post-Armistice testing of enemy airplanes, were all captured on film during 1917-1919. This superbly-researched landmark work is a boon to scholars, librarians, museum curators, historians, students of film, and those interested in genealogy. The detailed information contained within the pages of this invaluable research tool provides an accurate and timeless word-picture record of the aviation-related moving images of the "War to End All Wars."
