Back in 1997 Samuel Hynes published a book called THE SOLDIERS' TALE, a ground-breaking study of the lot of the men who fought in the two World Wars and Vietnam and how war lastingly affected them. His method was to closely examine the letters and journals as well as the poetry, memoirs and other literature produced by combatants and veterans of those wars. New York Times reviewer Gardner Botsford called it " A first-rate piece of work in every way," an assessment I agreed with wholeheartedly.

But I think this one is even better, and I hope I can explain why. With his latest book, THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR, Hynes turns once again to a study of war, but this time with a much narrower and more personal focus. This time he examines the aviators of World War I, those "daring young men in their flying machines." Aviation was barely out of its infancy when the hostilities began in Europe in 1914. France had a kind of primitive air force, but the United States (which did not enter the war until 1917) had no such thing. But young men in the States had already begun a love affair with flying, and many of them could not wait to get into the adventure and 'romance' of flying in a war. So they enlisted in the air services with France, England, or Canada. The earliest members of the legendary Lafayette Escadrille are featured prominently here, as well as the wealthy, thrill-seeking Ivy League pilots who were among the first to volunteer their services and later figured prominently in the US Air Service.

Sam Hynes spent several years researching this book, reading unit histories and immersing himself in the letters, diaries, journals and published and unpublished memoirs of the pilots who flew those flimsy, still evolving machines. Most of them were very young, still in their teens and early twenties, confident not only in their skills, but of their own immortality. Sadly, if predictably, many of them did not survive the war. The letters he shares are often filled with the kind of innocence, excitement and wonderment found only in those whose experiences have been very limited. An early example is one from Stuart Walcott who describes the assortment of American volunteers he is training with at a field in France -

“… more than a hundred at this one school, and the oddest combination I’ve ever been thrown with: chauffeurs, second-story men, ex-college athletes, racing drivers, salesmen, young bums of leisure, a colored prizefighter, ex-Foreign Legionnaires, ball players, millionaires and tramps.”

Hynes, a young Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific during WWII, ‘gets’ this, and throws in his own assessment -

“That’s what big wars do: they bring together young men who would not never meet in ordinary civilian life, dump them together in barracks and tents, and in foxholes and airplanes, set them marching to the same drum, fighting in the same war. It was like that in my war too; until I went to flight school, I had never met anyone who went to Yale, or came from Texas, or pitched in the International League, or drove an MG. Or a girl who drank Southern Comfort. I met them all before I was done. War is a broadening experience.”

And THIS is the kind of commentary that makes THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR such an intensely personal and eminently readable kind of history. Hynes succeeds in making himself a kind of contemporary of these fliers from a hundred years ago. In reading their letters and diaries and reflecting on them and then remembering his own days as a combat pilot, he has entered their company, become one of them. With passages like the one above I was taken back to my own military experiences during the Cold War and early years of Vietnam. Brought up in a small town in Michigan, I was suddenly thrust into the company of young men - boys, really - from New York, Missouri, Texas, Wyoming, California, Oklahoma, and other states. We trained together, lived together in cramped close quarters, and traveled together to faraway foreign places - Turkey and Germany, in my case. And yes, we met girls who drank liquor and beer, girls quite unlike the ‘nice’ girls we’d grown up with. Such things are covered in Hynes’s chapters: “Abroad I: First Impressions”; “Abroad II: Getting Acquainted”; and “Abroad III: End Games”.

This history-cum-memoir aspect of THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR manifests itself repeatedly. At the end of the chapter, “Looking at the War,” which looks at the various kinds of work and planes that the pilots were involved with, Hynes agrees that the fighter pilots were the best, the most ‘romantic,’ and says -

“A generation later, small boys like me, who wore helmets and goggles to school in the winter, would run around the school yard at recess, their arms stuck out like wings, uttering what they hoped was the sound of machine guns and shouting, ‘Look at me! I’m Eddie Rickenbacker!’ or ‘I’m the Red Baron!’ And when our war came along, we’d know that we had to be pilots - not just any pilots, fighter pilots, because they were the heroes, they were the solitary knights of the air who fought their war personally, one plane against the other.”

And again, when Hynes discusses how, when a pilot dies, he is honored in two ways. One is the official military funeral. The other is more personal -

“… someone - a friend, a tent mate - assumed the task of sorting the dead man’s possessions, dismantling his life as a flier, now that it was over. There won’t be many personal items - a few photographs, a watch or a fountain pen, some letters from home, perhaps - for the folks at home to cherish … And the sorting, like the military funeral, will be a reassurance that a man you lived with and flew with has been treated with due respect, which is all you can do.”

These deeply felt personal touches in this unique history of these pioneer military aviators occur repeatedly - in the way Hynes often uses the present tense, and even the future tense, a stylistic method that puts you in the moment, a kind of “you are there” feeling; and also when he uses a first person and second person viewpoint, versus a constant objective and omniscient third person. Here’s a sample -

“… many pilots become casualty statistics: dead or wounded, or missing, or shot down and captured and made prisoners of war. If you read their letters and journals, you’re bound to take some of those losses personally. You’ve followed these young men from college to flight school to a squadron at the front; you’ve felt their eagerness and witnessed their triumphs and mistakes. And now, suddenly, their war stories end, or are interrupted, and you feel their absence. Having come this far in the company of these pilots, I could make my own muster of the lost - the ones I’d like to have flown with.”

And he does, listing the names of just a few of the pilots featured throughout his book: Walter Avery, Ham Coolidge, Joe Eastman and Kenneth MacLeish, summarizing their brief flying careers, and - in some cases - too brief lives.

And finally, in an even more personal summing up of his research and the writing of this book -

“I come to the end of this story of the flying game with a feeling of admiration for the men I have met here, but also with a certain sadness. Like old Nestor in the ODYSSEY, I look back on the war and think, ‘So many good men gone. How young they were, how promising those young lives that would not be lived out … And what good guys they were - funny, risk-taking, good friends and good fliers.’ War is a cruel devourer of the young. And flying is a gamble that even the best pilots don’t always win.”

I could feel Sam Hynes’s sadness as he said good-bye to all these young men he’d come to know through their letters and diary entries; and as he no doubt said good-bye again to friends lost in his own war more than sixty years ago.

THE UNSUBSTANTIAL AIR is history, a deeply personal history of the best kind. Yet another “first rate piece of work” from Samuel Hynes. And then some. Thank you, Sam. My highest recommendation. ( )