'No call from the Army must ever find the RFC wanting'

This was Trenchard's dictum, and he saw only one way of realising it: a policy of aggression, even in adversity, perhaps especially in adversity, which would enable the routine tasks demanded of his pilots and observers to be discharged to the Army's advantage. If this meant casualties, then so be it. They were nothing compared to the slaughter on the ground.

When the quality of his hardware was inferior to that of the enemy, as it often was, Trenchard relied on the resilience of his pilots to bridge the gap. They never let him down.

Many of the more sensitive and articulate of these young men committed their hopes, their doubts and their fears to memoirs, diaries and letters. It is largely from this moving human material, much of it hitherto unpublished and unpublicised, that the author has fashioned his story.

The role of the RFC is shown for the first time in the perspective of the ground campaigns it supported. It did not operate in a vacuum. The aggression of the scout pilots was directed specifically to clearing the skies for the vital work of the routine patrols. And although the contrasts in the method and temperament of the 'aces' provide some of the most fascinating passages in the book, it is the unsung heroes, the pilots and observers and air mechanics who flew daily over the lines in slow and vulnerable machines, at the mercy of the enemy, of mechanical breakdown, of the weather, and of their own apprehensions, who have captured the author's imagination.

The result is a book which sets a truer scene and peoples it with a galaxy of flyers whose contribution to victory has hitherto been monstrously neglected.