Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I - Net Assessment - Book Review

Air & Space Power Journal, Fall, 2002 by Eric Ash

Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I by Herbert A. Johnson. University of North Carolina Press (http://uncpress.unc.edu), 116 South Boundary Street, P.O. Box 2288, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2288, 2001, 320 pages, $34.95.

Despite the groundbreaking flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903, US military aviation started with a cough and a stutter. Orville and Wilbur Wright had heroically launched the adventure into flight, but their subsequent legal battles over claims to the patent on heaver-than-air craft seriously delayed future development, particularly on the part of potential competitors. The understandable public and congressional reaction to numerous crashes and fatalities involving early flying created further obstacles to military aviation. In addition, military aviators' concerns about careerism as well as their lack of professionalism and personality clashes added to the friction against progress. Consequently, after years of ample warning in terms of wide publicity in books and the media, after the embarrassing aerial fiasco during the punitive expedition against Pancho Villa across the Mexican border, and after years of observing aerial combat in war-torn Europe, America still found itself woefully unprepared to fly or fight in the air in April 1918, a year after declaring war.

Herbert A. Johnson's Wingless Eagle is an important study of these and many other struggles during the birth of military aviation. Through extensive research of primary sources, he analyzes the culture of early flying to determine why the United States trailed the rest of the modern world in aerial progress. The answer lies in personalities, technology, politics, and organization. It involves a lack of vision, misperception, and parochial bickering. But as Johnson points out, some of the traditional story about the Army General Staffs inertia is unsound. More accurately, fickle public perception leading to lagging presidential and congressional support, along with organizational inefficiencies and unprofessional attitudes within the Signal Corps, stunted the growth of military aviation.

Johnson's efforts reflect an impressive amount of research, but its packaging suffers slightly due to the organizational challenges of trying to mix themes and chronology. Parts of the resulting product are disjointed and potentially confusing. For example, his coverage of the air war in Europe, mostly a recap of British official history, is so shallow that it misleads readers and detracts from his thesis. But minor organizational problems do not negate the book's strength of research and analysis of often-overlooked aspects of the infancy of air-power. Wingless Eagle adds to the scholarship of studies on early American aviation and should be a part of professional and personal libraries.