Echoes of Eagles: A Son, a Father and America's First Fighter Pilots - Hardcover

Woolley, Charles; Crawford, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525947574 ISBN 13: 9780525947578

Publisher: Dutton Adult/The Penguin Group, 2003

Synopsis

Documents the heroic achievements of the fighter pilots of World War I, profiling the author's father's harrowing military experiences as a member of the newly created U.S. Air Service as drawn from diaries, letters, and previously unpublished interviews. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Woolley (left) served in Air Force Intelligence during the Korean War. He was an editor of the Cross and Cockade Journal of World War I Aero Historians, is the current curator of the Vermont Veterans and Militia Museum, and serves on the committee of management of the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University. A member of the Company of Military Historians, he lives in Rochester, Vermont. Bill Crawford is a Harvard-educated author and frequent contributor to The Austin Chronicle and Texas Monthly, among other publications. He is the creator of The Dad Show, a talk radio program, and has appeared as a commentator on Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.

From Publishers Weekly:

The son of a WWI aviator and a freelance writer have produced an absorbing and readable biography of the senior author's father. A middle-class Bostonian, Charles H. Woolley entered the war as a volunteer ambulance driver, then transferred to the U.S. Air Service. There he went through the nerve-wracking training process, flew Nieuport 28s (which often shed wings) and Spad XIII's (which sometimes didn't fly at all) with the 95th and 49th Aero Squadrons. He ended the war as a major with two kills. He never got flying out of his blood, either, working with Amelia Earhart and serving in WWII, before his death in 1962. The narrative assembled from his diaries and by painstaking interviews and research by the younger Woolley brings out the triumphs and disasters, the tragedies, follies, primitive equipment and partying of that generation of pilots. It also paints vivid portraits of many of Woolley's comrades, including the gallant Quentin Roosevelt, the former president's youngest son who was killed in action, and the strait-laced Waldo Heinrichs, who became a POW. The account is all the more accessible because of the amount of background information given to orient the reader on WWI aviation in general (while avoiding extremes of gritty realism, romantic cliche or techno-babble overkill), making the book of value for this year's aviation centennial.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dutton Adult/The Penguin Group
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0525947574
• ISBN 13: 9780525947578
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320