TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 379 The First Air War, 1914—1918. By Lee Kennett. New York: Free Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 275; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95. During the Great War, the exploits of the early fighter “aces” excited popular imagination in a way the dismal trench slaughter never could. Immediately after the Armistice, former pilots discov ered a lucrative market for their memoirs, and a stream of popular writing of the “blazing skies” variety has flowed steadily since. Lee Kennett’s admirable survey of the Great War in the air is a deliberate and stylish rejection of this kind of sensationalism. In a series of coolly analytical chapters, sensibly organized around major themes, he shoots down in flames one obsolete myth after another. Basing his conclusions on a wide variety of published sources— English, French, Italian, German, and Russian (summarized in a useful bibliographical essay)—Kennett shows that reconnaissance remained the prime purpose of all air services during the war. Fighters were used mainly to protect friendly observation airplanes (and balloons) and to deny airspace to those of the enemy. Kennett lucidly discusses the emergence of aerial interdiction, and he carefully measures the small-scale strategic bombing offensives, which usually occupy a place in the literature out of all proportion to their contemporary effect. Kennett supplies some tantalizing details about the social history of the new technology. He shows that most aircrew were not upper-class former cavalry officers, whom trench stalemate had thrown out of work, but were from a variety of social and military backgrounds. This, combined with the close-knit life of the squadron, encouraged an informality in dress and speech that would have been unthinkable in a cavalry regiment—the use by French ranks of the tu form to address their pilot officers being only one telling example. Kennett is at his sensitive best when he examines attitudes to the emergent technology of destruction, whether the periodic zeppelin scares that swept the British press, or the way in which airmen came to see themselves as a breed quite apart from their earthbound comrades. He also takes pains to exonerate the various high com mands from the charge of obstructive “blimpery” so often leveled at them by frustrated airmen; instead, he shows that the military leadership in most European states was only too willing to exploit the airplane but was merely more realistic about its possibilities than were the air fanatics. The book might have contained more on the processes of aircraft production and their effects on the course of the war and on social relations at home. Richard Overy’s volume on the Second World War is a possible model in this respect. Although Kennett has a chapter on maritime aviation, he does not refer in the bibliography or footnotes to Arthur Marder’s magisterial work on the Royal Navy in the Fisher era, to Geoffrey Till’s survey Air Power and the Royal Navy, or to the 380 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE collection of contemporary documents published in Britain by the Navy Records Society. These omissions do not much detract from this eloquent, useful, and most welcome survey. It is likely to become a favored textbook, and a point of departure for further research. Kennett never forgets that the first duty of a historian is to be interesting, and he peppers his analysis with lively detail. On the shortcomings of aerial reconnais sance by untrained observers, for example, he mentions the inexpe rienced German aircrew who reported that the men in a British post “were thoroughly disorganized and running about in blind panic” (p. 30). The Germans had flown over a group of Tommies playing soccer. David Omissi Dr. Omissi read history at the University of Lancaster, then moved to the Department of War Studies at King’s College, University of London, where he gained an M.A. and a Ph.D. Formerly a lecturer in history at the University of Edinburgh, he is now a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, working on a social and political history of the Indian Army. He is the author of Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919...