American Pilots Research Articles

Trait emotional intelligence in American pilots

There is a dearth of trait emotional intelligence (trait EI) research within an aviation context. Using the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue), the present study investigated potential trait EI differences between pilots and general population controls in the United States. The forty-four pilots who volunteered to participate were primarily male (93%) and between 24 and 67 years with a wide range of flight experience (150–5000 + hrs.) They were matched with controls based on age, gender, and ethnicity. Comparisons on global trait EI and the four trait EI factors revealed significant differences, with pilots scoring consistently lower than their matched counterparts in global trait EI, Well-being, Emotionality, and Sociability, but not Self-control. Overall, the findings indicated that pilots felt less connected to their emotional world than controls. Though limited by sample size and participant diversity, the results provide a basis for future studies into the trait EI profile of pilots, which had not been previously investigated.

Comparing and Contrasting Two White Leaders of the Tuskegee Airmen: Colonels Noel Parrish and Robert Selway

Comparing and Contrasting Two White Leaders of the Tuskegee Airmen: Colonels Noel Parrish and Robert Selway Daniel Haulman (bio) The tuskegee airmen included the first african american pilots in American military service, but the group also included others who served alongside them, in their units or at their bases, between 1941 and 1949. Some of those personnel, including the commanders of some of the Tuskegee Airmen bases and units, were white. The most important of these were Colonel Noel F. Parrish and Colonel Robert R. Selway. During most of World War II, Parrish commanded the Tuskegee Army Air Field, located in Tuskegee, Alabama, where the first Black pilots in the United States Army trained to fly. Selway once commanded both of the only two Tuskegee Airmen flying groups, the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group. In the scholarly literature focused on the Tuskegee Airmen, Colonel Parrish has generally been considered a hero, while Selway has assumed the role of a villain.1 While there are good reasons for such an assessment, it is an oversimplification of the character and career of each man. The hero was not without [End Page 225] flaws, nor the villain without virtues, and what they had in common cannot be forgotten. Black military personnel served in the armed forces of the United States since the Revolutionary War, but despite playing important roles, their positions were typically in the lowest ranks, and they were usually placed under the leadership of white officers. Before World War II, the War Department did not allow African Americans to train or serve as pilots. Army leadership believed that Black recruits were inferior and lacked the ability to fly advanced military aircraft in combat, a sentiment expressed most notably in a 1925 Army War College report.2 When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a third term for president in 1940, he promised to train Black pilots in the Army Air Corps, and he fulfilled his promise.3 In March 1941, the War Department activated the first African American flying unit, the 99th Pursuit Squadron (later the 99th Fighter Squadron) at Chanute Field, Illinois, under a white commander.4 The Army had already announced that the unit’s pilots would be trained at Tuskegee. Just as the conflict opened possibilities for Black pilots, World War II also marked a change in opportunities for Black leadership within the military; in fact, because of the Tuskegee Airmen, Black officers came to command not only groups and squadrons, but also bases. There had been few Black officers in the Army, and only a handful had attended the United States Military Academy at West Point. Training Black military pilots would vastly increase the number of Black officers, since pilots were typically officers, receiving their commissions as they graduated from advanced flight training. The Army did [End Page 226] not want Black officers in command of white enlisted men and therefore insisted that the training of the Black military pilots, and the unit to which they would be assigned, would be segregated. The 99th Fighter Squadron would eventually have Black commanders, but the squadron itself would have no white personnel. And more generally, many military leaders were skeptical of the abilities of Tuskegee pilots; Army leaders did not envision that Black flying units, groups or squadrons, would ever be sent into combat overseas. Tuskegee was chosen as the flight training area for a number of reasons. The Tuskegee Institute was already training African American pilots in the Civilian Pilot Training Program, and it had a reputation as one of the most famous and prestigious of Black institutions of higher learning. Tuskegee was also in an area in the South that had more days of good flying weather than potential sites farther north. And, because Alabama and Tuskegee were strictly segregated, the segregated nature of the training program would fit the climate with little danger of resistance; certainly, Tuskegee was not close to an urban area like Chicago or Detroit that leaders felt to be racially volatile.5 The African American flight training, like that for white pilots elsewhere, was divided into three phases: primary, basic, and advanced. The...

“No Japanese in the Cockpit”

This article examines the techno-cultural process of accommodating, training, and qualifying the Japanese as pilots responsible for Pacific flights in the decade after the end of the allied occupation of Japan in 1952. There were two related modes of qualifying Japanese pilots, both of which created traffic of people, knowledge, and machines across the Pacific: One was the slow, politicized process of permitting Japanese pilots to fly again and training them with reference to American models of flying. Another mode of qualification consisted of measuring and recording the bodily differences between Japanese and American pilots, so that Japanese bodies could fit into American-designed cockpits and flying garments. Under the postwar technopolitical regime and given lingering racial perceptions, the terms and norms of the flying body and practice were mostly set by the American system, to which the Japanese worked hard to adapt. In this process, the cockpit and the Pacific served as crucial frames of reference for the Japanese. With its focus on pilot training and qualification, this article aims to bring together the histories of aviation, science, and U.S.-Japan relations and to situate them in the Pacific as a physical, imaginary, and technopolitical space.

From Alabama to the Skies of France, 1917–1918: Penrose Vass Stout’s Improbable Journey

From Alabama to the Skies of France, 1917–1918: Penrose Vass Stout’s Improbable Journey Robert J. Jakeman (bio) It was late afternoon, september 28, 1918. a lone aircraft appeared over an American airfield in France. Montgomery native Penrose Stout was at the controls. He had departed a few minutes earlier, and his ground crew did not expect him back so soon. After making a smooth landing, he climbed out of the cockpit. He took a few steps and then collapsed from wounds inflicted by five German aircraft that had surprised him shortly after takeoff. Stout was a member of the 27th Aero Squadron, one of four squadrons that made up the 1st Pursuit Group. As a combat pilot, Stout was part of a select cadre: approximately 50,000 American men applied to train as pilots in the Great War; only about 1,400 saw combat.1 In some ways Stout was typical of American pilots during the war. He was college–educated, white, and a professional, but he was unlike many of his comrades in several important ways. First, he was thirty–one [End Page 291] years old, substantially older than most other pilots, whose average age was about twenty. In fact, he was older than Eddie Rickenbacker, considered well advanced when he started flight training at twenty–eight.2 Second, he was a southerner who had migrated to the North for economic opportunity. Third, he left a well–established career to volunteer for the Air Service. Fourth, he was a talented artist who documented his service with his drawings. Finally, he flew with one of the most successful and elite American air units of the war, the 1st Pursuit Group. It included such famous pilots as Eddie Rickenbacker and Frank Luke, both recipients of the Medal of Honor.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Image 1. Penrose Vass Stout in his Air Service uniform (courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History, hereafter ADAH). Stout’s combat duty lasted scarcely a month and he did not down any enemy aircraft. Nevertheless, his story offers important insights into the experiences of America’s first combat pilots. His letters [End Page 292] home contain descriptions of daily routines, accounts of combat missions, and much more. But just as important as the words of his letters are the numerous sketches he scattered throughout his correspondence. In addition, he compiled a sketchbook that documents his military service. Recognizing the value of Stout’s wartime letters and artwork, his family preserved them over the decades and recently donated them to the Alabama Department of Archives and History. penrose stout was born february 28, 1887, the eldest son of Robert Platt and Zemula Vass Stout of Montgomery. Pen, as he was known to family and friends, was named for his maternal grandfather, Horatio Penrose Vass, who was born in Maryland and migrated to Mobile.4 Pen’s father was a cotton broker and earned a modest income.5 Despite the family’s modest circumstances, Stout completed high school and went on to college at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University). Perhaps the earliest surviving example of Stout’s artistic talent appears in the Auburn yearbook. Over a half–dozen of his sketches appear in the 1905 edition.6 He apparently entered Auburn in 1904 as a sophomore, majoring in civil engineering.7 Like all male Auburn students of that era, he was a member of the corps of cadets. He excelled and rose to the rank of cadet lieutenant. He was a brother in the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, president of the German club, and secretary of his senior class. The description with Stout’s senior photograph in the yearbook declared him “the best artist in the [End Page 293] school.”8 In 1907 or 1908 he completed a degree in civil engineering but remained at Auburn and to enter the newly launched architecture program .9 He was in the first class of five and also served as an architecture instructor. In 1909 he completed a second bachelor’s degree, this time in architecture.10 Click for larger view View full resolution Image 2. The “Biscuit Trust,” from the...

Ar buvo dingę S. Dariaus ir S. Girėno palaikai? Jų „atradimas“ ir laidojimas LKP bei KGB šešėlyje 1958–1964 metais

Straipsnyje nagrinėjamas LSSR partinių ir saugumo struktūrų vaidmuo plačiai pagarsėjusiame transatlantinių lakūnų S. Dariaus ir S. Girėno palaikų „atradime“. Rekonstruojama įvykių raida nuo pirmos viešos žinios apie aptiktą slaptavietę 1958 m. iki palaikų iškėlimo ir palaidojimo kapinėse 1964 m. Atskleidžiamas direktyvinis, politinis ir ideologinis proceso pobūdis, „planiniai“ koordinuoti veiksmai, kontrolės mechanizmai ir motyvai, istorinių faktų „adaptavimas“ ir panauda viešam propagandiniam SSRS diskursui, trumpalaikiai ir ilgalaikiai padariniai istorinei atminčiai, iš dalies – ir įtaka besitęsiančioms atminties kultūros bei politikos tendencijoms.

All My Sons

All My Sons

The risk of prostate cancer in pilots: a meta-analysis.

Aviation exposes pilots to various occupationally related hazards, including ionizing radiation and chemical combustion. The possible increased risk of prostate cancer among pilots in comparison to the general population is a subject of debate. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine the quality of supporting evidence and magnitude of this association. All studies pertaining to prostate cancer in pilots were retrieved from multiple databases and from a manual search. Any study that assessed the incidence of prostate cancer relative to the incidence in the general population was included regardless of language or size. A random effect model was used to pool relative risks (RR) across studies. Heterogeneity was assessed using the Q statistic and I². Eight studies with a low risk of bias were included in the meta-analysis. Pilots had an increased risk of developing prostate cancer compared to the general population [RR 2.0; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.5-2.7]. The analysis was associated with substantial heterogeneity (I² = 79%). Several subgroups had significantly increased risk, such as African American pilots (RR 10.00; 95% CI, 5.04-19.86) and military pilots (RR 3.30; 95% CI, 2.03-5.39). Pilots are at least twice as likely to develop prostate cancer compared to the general population. The implications of these findings are important considering the high prevalence of prostate cancer and the large number of pilots in the workforce.

Cabin Pressure: African American Pilots, Flight Attendants, and Emotional Labor

Cabin Pressure: African American Pilots, Flight Attendants, and Emotional Labor

The Jack Butcher Case: A Story of Courage, Commitment, and Concern

During the Vietnam War, American pilots were shot down by the North Vietnamese and became prisoners of war. This is the story of how one prisoner of war tried to escape and the futility that Americans felt in trying to rescue him. This article also illustrates the role that signals intelligence can play in search-and-rescue missions.

Potential DVI issues pertaining to Luftwaffe interception units toward the end of WWII

In this issue of the journal we have described scene examination and the process of assessment of a fragment of skeletal material taken from a WWII fighter plane crash site [1]. It is of interest that at that late stage in the war with significantly reduced Luftwaffe numbers, three German Sturmjager units, IV.(Sturm)/JG 3, II.(Sturm)/JG 300 and II.(Sturm) JG 4 had orders to ram any bombers as a last resort if they could not be shot down [2]. The pilots who volunteered to be part of these special units had to sign a contract/oath to this effect and the papers with their signatures were kept locked away. Hans Gotze’s commandant, Hauptmann Wilhelm Moritz, however, decided against his men carrying out these ramming missions and apparently tore up all signatures and told his pilots that, although they were expected to engage the enemy, they should only take them down in a conventional engagement [2]. Most of these pilots would have been Gotze’s age. We have tried to identify who shot down Gotze’s aircraft. We know from eyewitness reports that he was pursued in a dive and low-level flight—a maneuver only few fighter pilots would have attempted. We researched a list of American pilots who were reported to have taken down enemy planes on 23rd August 1944 and briefly had contact with one of the surviving American pilots. We were able to rule him out as Hans Gotze’s adversary on that day. There are reports of pilots who were more likely to have attempted a dangerous low-level pursuit and we believe whoever the pilot was showed particular bravery and determination to follow Gotze’s plane so close to the ground. According to our research only two or three of the pilots who were in the air that day would fit this description, but all of these were either killed before the end of the war or are still recorded as missing in action. It is likely that aircraft and personnel in other units who followed the ‘‘ramming mission’’ orders would be severely damaged and scattered following mid-air impacts/explosions, and that subsequent recovery of any identifiable remains would be far less likely than in single aircraft impacts.

WAR AGAINST AN AMBIGUOUS ENEMY

In the early months of the Korean War, close air support provided by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) fighter-bombers in the front-line areas significantly delayed the advance of the North Korean Army. This article shows, however, that U.S. pilots very quickly diverged from the original policy of precision bombing and began the indiscriminate and unrestricted bombing of villages, towns, and even refugees in the South Korean region. They did so for three reasons: (1) to deal with effective countermeasures being taken by the North Korean Army; (2) the short range of U.S. fighter-bombers taking off from bases in Japan; and (3) difficulties in finding clear targets. Civilian areas were not exempt because most USAF pilots regarded the people in civilian areas as enemy troops and villages were considered to be enemy shelters. In the early months of the Korean War, the Operations Analysis Office (OAO) of the USAF had already acknowledged that “in a certain number of cases the troops in question may have been civilians.” This article draws on mission reports written by U.S. pilots and on OAO reports to make the case that the conduct of American fighter-bomber pilots during the Korean War needs serious reconsideration.

Middle-Class African American Pilots

This article examines the experiences of African Americans employed in the historically white airline industry. We conducted in-depth interviews with African American pilots currently employed in our nation’s commercial aviation industry. In recent decades, a strong argument has been made that race has been declining in significance as African American professionals make great strides in levels of education and positions of power. As our research suggests, this perspective does not take into account the often racialized experiences or the marginalization African Americans face once they have entered various industries. Ultimately, our research suggests that an extensive theory of systemic racism remains necessary in order to understand the mechanisms by which middle-class African Americans maneuver and cope with racism in predominately white work spaces.

‘I Let the Language Lead the Dance’: Politics, Musicality, and Voyeurism

David Greig is one of Britain's most versatile and exciting playwrights, whose awardwinning work – commissioned by, among others, Suspect Culture, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre of Scotland, the Edinburgh International Festival, and the Traverse Theatre – has been performed all over the world. His personal voice is characterized by the sensitive musicality of his text, an individual sense of humour, and an acute awareness of the world around us. Whether his protagonists are Cambridge ornithologists, Scottish lords, or American pilots, Greig creates works of extreme visual beauty and emotional directness in lyrical soundscapes. In the interview which follows, completed in June 2010, he discusses the themes of politics and national identities; language, music, and experimental forms; directors, directing, and adaptations; and watching bodies on stage. Greig believes that theatre is a form of voyeurism, ‘a consensual exchange’ to ‘look at people and watch how they behave’. In his work, the act of watching thus acquires a new role surpassing the simple function of pleasure, and enabling the viewer to engage further with the theatre's mediation to comment, justify, explain, and promote a better understanding of the complexities of human nature – voyeurism in theatre being re-read as a new freedom of the gaze, and its fetishistic attributes re-evaluated as an emancipation of restrained energy, testing the boundaries of taboo. George Rodosthenous is Lecturer in Music Theatre at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries of the University of Leeds. He is Artistic Director of the Altitude North theatre company, and also works as a freelance composer for the theatre. He is currently working on the book Theatre as Voyeurism: the Pleasure(s) of Watching.

Death from the Heavens: A History of Strategic Bombing

Reviewed by: Death from the Heavens: A History of Strategic Bombing Harold Dorn (bio) Death from the Heavens: A History of Strategic Bombing. By Kenneth P. Werrell. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2009. Pp. xv+332. $44.95. The history of military aviation is packed into the 105 years from the Wright brothers' wood-and-canvas contrivance to today's astonishing technological innovations—missiles fired from submarines, pilotless aircraft, and "smart" bombs. Kenneth Werrell has chosen to write an account of one dimension of this dismal history: strategic bombing. It is fraught with moral and political issues and controversies. Many millions of civilians have been killed or injured, sometimes accidentally ("collateral damage"), sometimes as victims of indiscriminate bombing, and sometimes as deliberate targets. Most of these civilian casualties were the result of American operations, a circumstance that muddies the moral and political waters. Werrell skirts these issues and devotes most of his text to the aircraft used to carry out the operations and to the strategic principles that guided them. Strategic bombing, which means the bombing of the enemy's rear areas, including cities, rather than auxiliary operations like the support of ground forces, was conducted extensively by the American, British, and German air forces during World War II. Werrell's knowledge of the technical specifications of the aircraft that carried out the attacks is impressive: "The manufacturer modified the aircraft by moving the fuel tanks from the nacelles into the fuselage, substituting props rotating in the same direction for opposite rotation, and using high power engines, which merited its redesignation as the O/400" (p. 17). He also gives clear accounts of the strategic bombing doctrines of its early advocates, who expected the bomber to bring about short wars, albeit with high civilian casualties. He quotes British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, who reported to Parliament in 1932 that "there is no power on earth that can protect [the civilian] from bombing.… The only defense is the offense, which means you have to kill more women and children than the enemy if you want to save yourselves" (p. 32). In his final chapter, Werrell offers a sober assessment of strategic bombing in the twentieth century, asking whether it has "delivered on the promises of its advocates." His provisional answer is negative—it did not break civilian morale, and while the attacks disrupted the enemy's war effort, they were not decisive: "The record during its first century reveals that strategic bombardment is a case study of promises unfulfilled" (p. 300). On the moral, political, and legal controversies surrounding strategic bombing, Werrell is disappointingly brief, in contrast to his extensive discussion of the technical and doctrinal dimensions of the subject. The ongoing controversy over the decision to use the atomic bomb is dismissed in a few sentences with the common opinion that it was justified by "the desire to win the war as quickly as possible, with the fewest American casualties" [End Page 1035] (p. 148). The book would have more to ponder and chew on if Werrell had at least referred to some of the political factors that may have influenced the decision to use the bomb (see e.g. Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb [1995]). And on the legality of strategic bombing, Werrell turns a blind eye. There are some grounds to believe that strategic bombing overlapped the doctrine of war crimes. Telford Taylor, who was chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, believed that American pilots shot down in North Vietnam should have been tried as war criminals because their actions violated the Geneva Conventions that forbid indiscriminate bombing. And Robert McNamara, secretary of defense at the time, later estimated that between 1965 and 1968 American bombardment of North Vietnam caused more than a million deaths and injuries each year (Robert Richter, "War Hero or War Criminal?" Counterpunch, 14 October 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/richter10142008.html [accessed 18 May 2010]). A few untidy facts such as these could have found their place in a historical study of aerial bombardment. They would have given the book the provocative quality that the subject calls for. As it stands, this book is long...

Conquistadors of the sky: a history of aviation in Latin America

More than two years before the Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont and his experimental dirigibles were celebrities above the boulevards of Paris. Today, Dumont's many contributions to powered flight are widely forgotten outside his native Brazil, where he is remembered as the father of aviation.Dumont's story is not unique. Aviation developed so quickly in Latin America that by the 1930s air travel was more common there than in the United States. The contributions of Latin American pilots and engineers have been astounding and numerous, ranging from military aircraft to hot-air balloons. Now, for the first time, the rich and diverse history of flight in Latin America is presented in one highly readable, well-illustrated volume.Coinciding with the opening of a new permanent exhibit, America by Air, at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, Conquistadors of the Sky celebrates the aviation achievements of twenty-one Latin American nations over the last 100 years - making this chronicle of heroic ventures and epic flights the best reference available on the subject. This is a primer on Latin Americans' contributions to aviation history.

Re-Imagining American Communities: Hollywood, Hawks, and Ford in 1939

Re-Imagining American Communities:Hollywood, Hawks, and Ford in 1939 John Belton Classical Hollywood cinema is a character-centered cinema; its narratives are driven by dramatic agents in pursuit of clearly defined goals; narrative progress is built around the central character encountering and overcoming a series of obstacles to those goals; and closure occurs with that character's unambiguous attainment or failure to attain those goals (Bordwell 18). For the most part, these struggles take place within specific social formations or communities. Implicit in this struggle is the illusory notion of individual agency—that characters, through hard work, industry, skill, and perseverance, can make things happen (or not). At the same time, the social context within which these struggles take place becomes the site for another sort of myth making: that of the notion of community itself. Against a reality of individual semi-anonymity and disempowerment within an industrialized, commodified mass society, classical Hollywood narratives frequently provide an ideological alternative to the dystopic reality of individual, community, and nation. This paper seeks to examine two specific instances of the utopic re-imagining of individual, community, and nation in 1930s Hollywood and to suggest some ways in which mass culture has been instrumentalized to accomplish certain ideological projects—specifically, works of mass culture function to "manage" social and political anxieties. As Fredric Jameson suggests, "Mass culture [is] not [an] empty distraction or 'mere' false consciousness, but rather a transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies [End Page 1166] which must then have some presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to be 'managed' or repressed" (Jameson 25). I want to begin with a basic observation made by Martin Rubin about the changing status of the individual within Hollywood narratives of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Rubin argues that the "rugged individualism" of the 1920s, as individualized in the heroic figure of Charles Lindbergh—the "Lone Eagle"—is problematized by cultural historians of the period, such as Parrington, Krutch, Dewey, and Lippman as "dangerous," associating it with the traits of laissez-faire capitalism that led to the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. Rubin notes the emergence of a new form of individualism (New Deal individualism) in which individual identity and agency is dependent on the regenerative powers of collective experience (Rubin 65–69). That is, through immersion in a Populist version of the collective, the individual discovers a new, non-dangerous form of individualism. A simple comparison of the basic narratives of early and late 1930s films directed by Howard Hawks and John Ford gives some sense of this transformation in the status of the individual. In Scarface (1932), the gangster hero pursues what Robert Warshow calls "an individual pre-eminence." "The gangster's whole life is an attempt to assert himself as an individual, to draw himself out of the crowd, and he always dies because he is an individual" (Warshow 133). Hawks's gangster hero becomes vulnerable because he has isolated himself from others by jealously killing his best friend and, simultaneously, turning his own sister against him. He dies alone, shot down in the street by an anonymous hail of police bullets. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939), on the other hand, the central character Geoff belongs to a group of ex-patriate American pilots who fly the mail in South America. The film is explicitly about the group and the sense of identity with a community that it provides. The film's dramatic conflict focuses on the attempts of various characters to integrate themselves into the group, culminating with the creation of an interdependent team of fliers who accomplish the narrative's final mission. For Ford, a somewhat similar trajectory can be charted from The Informer (1935), perhaps the director's most famous film of the early 1930s, to Stagecoach (1939), his signature, pre-war Western. In the former film, the central character informs on a friend (who is an IRA leader) to the British authorities, is found out, and killed by the IRA. The film documents his isolation from his fellow countrymen as he slowly realizes that he has betrayed his own community. The central characters in Stagecoach move through...

Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-1946) and Record Group 229

Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs (1940-1946) and Record Group 229

Winged Auxiliaries: Women Pilots in the UK and US during World War Two

During World War II women in the US and the UK were given the then unprecedented opportunity to fly military aircraft. Yet while the women flying in the UK soon gained the privileges and status enjoyed by their male colleagues, the American women pilots were expressly denied the same status, rank, pay, and benefits as USAAF pilots. In fact, after an ugly slander campaign against the women pilots' organisation, the US programme was discontinued and the women were sent home before their job was done. The American women pilots were not less dedicated or inherently less capable than the women flying in Britain. Rather, key environmental and organisational differences and above all a failure of leadership accounts for their fate. This paper summarises the differences and their impact. The complete findings of the comparative research on the experiences of women pilots in the US and the UK during WWII will be published by Pen & Sword Books Inc early in 2006 under the title Sisters in Arms.

The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa

Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country roughly the size of the state of Maryland. Humid, jungle covered, and rife with unpleasant diseases, natives call it Devil Island. Its president in 2004, Obiang Nguema, had been accused of cannibalism, belief in witchcraft, mass murder, billiondollar corruption, and general rule by terror. With so little to recommend it, why in March 2004 was Equatorial Guinea the target of a group of salty British, South African and Zimbabwean mercenaries, travelling on an American-registered ex-National Guard plane specially adapted for military purposes, that was originally flown to Africa by American pilots? The real motive lay deep below the ocean floor: oil. In The Dogs of War, Frederick Forsyth effectively described an attempt by mercenaries to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea -- in 1972. And the chain of events surrounding the night of March 7, 2004, is a rare case of life imitating art--or, at least, life imitating a 1970s thriller--in almost uncanny detail. With a cast of characters worthy of a remake of Wild Geese and a plot as mazy as it was unlikely, The Wonga Coup is a tale of venality, overarching vanity and greed whose example speaks to the problems of the entire African continent.

Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921

Book Review| October 01 2005 Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921 Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, Janusz Cisek. M. B. Biskupski M. B. Biskupski Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Polish American Studies (2005) 62 (2): 77–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/20148729 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation M. B. Biskupski; Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921. Polish American Studies 1 January 2005; 62 (2): 77–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/20148729 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressPolish American Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright Polish American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.