On a wing and a prayer

Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion that was not lost on the Western imagination.

Robert Wohl charts in fascinating detail the manifold reverberations of flight, literary, political, artistic, intellectual. Much more than a plane-spotter’s feast, this is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, meticulous (as befits a history professor) analysis of arguably the most salient new fact of the time. A brilliant idea, stimulating, packed with incident. This is his second volume on the theme; the first, from the earliest wing-flappings to the end of the first world war, was reviewed here in 1994, and again Yale have done him proud with a beautifully designed and illustrated book that makes it clear they take the subject seriously.

How right they are, because the impact of aviation on every aspect of the Western imagination was profound. How could it have been otherwise? Here was a vast new world to explore, bigger than any America, an infinite canvas, intoxicating, often heroic, following over this period an aerobatic curve up to ethereal heights and down to the depths of horror.

In 1920, Western imagination sorely needed a lift, after trench warfare and epidemic, and aviation provided it, hard as that is for us, paralysed by the boredom of jet-travel and calloused by remote, computerised air warfare, to conceive. It raised eyes metaphorically as well as literally, and hopes, of nation meeting nation, universal brotherhood, etc. It was ‘a sort of social religion’.

The fervour started with the first long-distance flights, such as Alcock and Brown crossing the Atlantic in their Vimy, heroes even if they ended nose-down in an Irish bog.