| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 264 words from this article are provided below; about 567 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Linda R. Robertson. The Dream of Civilized Warfare: World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2004. Pp. xx, 481. $35.95.

By 1917, the war in the trenches was beginning to be viewed with increasing despair as machine-age weapons systematically slaughtered a whole generation of young men in the mud of the Flanders Plain. Only in the heroic duels in the skies above the squalor of the Western Front was there to be found any trace of honor or romance. Here, it was believed, noble young warriors fought their single combats according to the rules of chivalric engagement. In reality, of course, the war in the air was just as vicious and just as bloody as the war on the ground, but in the last years of the war, the image of the air fighter, the heroic lone eagle, was seized upon by the propagandists as a last desperate attempt to ennoble a brutal war and preserve the mythos of the warrior hero in spite of a technology of mass destruction. Manfred von Richthofen, Albert Ball, Eddie Rickenbacker, and the other air fighter "aces" became public figures, powerful symbols that embodied the spirit of their nations. After the Armistice, these notions became embedded in the popular memory of the war, widely disseminated through memoirs, pulp fiction, and Hollywood movies, misleadingly suggesting that even in an industrial age, chivalric forms of warfare could survive, that fighting in the air was different—a better and more civilized way of waging war.

. . .

There are about 567 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.