| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I. By Herbert A. Johnson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xviii, 298 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2627-8.)

In this insightful and well-researched monograph, Herbert A. Johnson, the Hollings Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and a retired U.S. Air Force reserve officer, addresses the question as to what went wrong with America's promising aviation industry for the period following the first successful 1903 manned flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, through the Great War. 1

Johnson's unique study goes well beyond a limited examination of army aviation during that time by considering the broader cultural, personal, technical, political, and organizational impediments that hampered the growth of aviation. His analysis includes a chronic lack of governmental funding for military aeronautics, a minuscule national tax base that made the question of adequate legislative allocations for military aviation a moot point, intraservice rivalry over control of the air service, public confusion over the army's vacillation between lighter-than-air and heavier-than-air weapons systems, tales of negligence and favoritism in the army's oversight of the aviation program, the frequently misdirected influence of a powerful civilian lobby both on military command discipline and on governmental and general attitudes toward army aviation, negative public opinion connected with barnstorming and daredevil exhibition flying, and the sorry performance of Gen. John J. Pershing's First Aero Squadron during the Mexican punitive expedition. . . .

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