The Friendless Sky

In 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. It was to be their first major war since Waterloo. Having already won international wars with Denmark and France, Britain was ready. Or so they thought …

For the first time in history, the British Expeditionary Force set out to cross the Channel under the air cover.

With aviation still in its infancy when the war began, with it only being five years since the first flimsy French aeroplane cross the Channel at 45 mph, the air cover provided was rather primitive. Up above the mud-soaked soldiers who fought over the devastated, trench-scarred landscape that was northern France, a new kind of war was being born.

Flimsy biplanes and triplanes wheeled and spun, engines roaring, wires screaming and guns chattering.

In the skies above the poppy-fields, men became aces and were cut down in their prime: Albert Ball, Jean Navarre. Max Immelmann and Manfred von Richtofen, the ‘Red Baron’.

They were the legendary heroes of a whole new age.

Alexander McKee was selling aviation articles to flying magazines by the age of eighteen. During the Second World War he wrote for a succession of army newspapers and later became a writer/producer for the British Forces Network.
Since 1956 he has been researching and writing books on all branches of naval, military and aviation history. He instigated the excavation of the Tudor ship Mary Rose in the seabed off Portsmouth, which he describes in King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose. In all he has written nineteen books, two of his most recent successes being the books Into the Blue and Dresden 1945.

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