Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War

In 1913, the idea of war in the sky seemed impossible to most. Yet within a year, the first aircraft would clash over the Western Front, and the age of aerial combat was born. Frederick A. Talbot, writing in the midst of this revolutionary moment, captures the extraordinary daring of the first military pilots: men who climbed into fragile, open-cockpit machines with no training, no tactics, and no idea what combat from above would entail. This book chronicles the first, terrifying experiments with air warfare, from reconnaissance missions that changed strategy to the first dogfights where pilots fired pistols at each other mid-flight. Talbot examines both the rigid, lumbering Zeppelins and the nimble biplanes that would define the war's air battles. For anyone fascinated by the raw, early days of military aviation, this is a front-row seat to when killing from the sky was still astonishing, still new, and still wildly, impossibly dangerous.