No Parachute: No Parachute: A Fighter Pilot in World War I (1969) By Arthur Gould Lee (1969) By Arthur Gould Lee
 
Arthur Gould Lee served in the Royal Flying Corps (the air arm of the British Army) during the latter part of the First World War, and went on to a career in the Royal Air Force which lasted until 1946. After retirement, he wrote a number of memoirs describing his time in the air services during the period in which the concept and execution of “war in the air” were being invented, more or less from scratch. These two books cover his Royal Flying Corps years, and are complementary works.
 
No Parachute consists of a selection of long letters he wrote to his wife from France while serving with No. 46 Squadron during 1917-18. These are interspersed with diary entries and lightly edited to insert details of locations and operations that would not have been let pass by the censor at the time.
 
Descriptions of the author’s experiences in flying training, and as a flying instructor shortly before the war ended. Each chapter has a theme—dog-fights, offensive patrols, trench strafing, fear, the uses and dangers of clouds—and allows Lee to look back on the events described in No Parachute with the more analytic eye that comes from the passing of forty years.
 
Soft Cover
320 pages
In Good Condition