Winning His Wings: A Story of the R.a.f.

1919: the Great War has just ended, but the sky still burns with the memory of young men who flew and didn't come back. Percy F. Westerman, writing while the wounds were still fresh, gives us Derek Daventry, a flight cadet arriving at Averleigh Training and Disciplinary School with nothing but nerve and the desperate hope that flight might make a man of him. This is adventure fiction at its most immediate, capturing the raw energy of youths hungry for aerial adventure, their banter about uniforms and their silence about the dangers ahead. Westerman knew his audience young and impressionable, and he delivers exactly what they craved: the thrum of aircraft engines, the terror and transcendence of leaving the earth, the unbreakable bonds formed in the pressure of training. But beneath the patriotism and adventure lies something quieter and more affecting: a portrait of youth confronting mortality, of boys becoming pilots becoming ghosts or heroes. The era's authentic aviation details ground the romance in real peril. This is for readers who want to feel what it meant to climb into a wooden crate with canvas wings and go to war in the sky.