WINGED WARRIORS

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23191, 30 November 1940, Page 11

WINGED WARRIORS

Up and at 'Em. By Lieut.-Col. Harold E. Hartney, D.S.C. Cassell. 318 pp. (7/6 net.) A Canadian by birth, Colonel Hartney commanded the First Pursuit Group of the American air force in the Great War. Afterwards, he was ceaselessly and successfully active in building up the "air consciousness" which he judged to be essential to American safety and prosperity. In this book he writes a lively account of war experience in France, full of exciting episode, notable for its swift and vivid sketches of the character and deeds of flying men like Frank Luke, Joe Wehner, and Eddie Rickenbacker, and at the same time soberly informative on many aspects of air warfare, as it was and as it is. In his last chapter, for instance, readers will learn why the discovery of a mountain of high-grade Beryl would revolutionise aircraft construction; and they will ponder over the significance of the estimate that, on an active war front in modern conditions, the average life .of a fighter aeroplane can be only 10 flying hours.

Colonel Hartney describes many fewer of his own exploits in the air than those of his companions; but one of the best concerns his encounter with Germany’s greatest airman, Baron Richthofen, who sent him down to a pancake landing with one blade shot away from his* propeller. The rarity of first-class German airmen leads him to an interesting discussion of their “terrific psychological handicap” in a kind of warfare where “individuality comes into its supreme importance”—the handicap of “hundreds of years of blind following of leaders.” On the other hand, he found that "the most natural mental companions” were the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, and the New Zealanders —“all products of the newest in civilisations,” all individualists born. Colonel Hartney’s doubts of the invincibility of the Germans’ “terrifying air power” are summed up in the short sentence, “No machine is bigger than the man behind it”; and these are encouraging words to remember, i