Hero of the Angry Sky: The World War I Diary and Letters of David S. Ingalls, America’s First Naval Ace (War and Society in North America)

Hero of the Angry Sky draws on the unpublished diaries, correspondence, informal memoir, and other personal documents of the U.S. Navy’s only flying “ace” of World War I to tell his unique story. David S. Ingalls was a prolific writer, and virtually all of his World War I aviation career is covered, from the teenager’s early, informal training in Palm Beach, Florida, to his exhilarating and terrifying missions over the Western Front. This edited collection of Ingalls’s writing details the career of the U.S. Navy’s most successful combat flyer from that conflict.

While Ingalls’s wartime experiences are compelling at a personal level, they also illuminate the larger, but still relatively unexplored, realm of early U.S. naval aviation. Ingalls’s engaging correspondence offers a rare personal view of the evolution of naval aviation during the war, both at home and abroad. There are no published biographies of navy combat flyers from this period, and just a handful of diaries and letters in print, the last appearing more than twenty years ago. Ingalls’s extensive letters and diaries add significantly to historians’ store of available material.

David S. Ingalls (1899–1985) was the son of railroad magnate Albert S. Ingalls and Jane Taft, niece of President William Howard Taft. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, he began his studies at Yale in 1916, only to leave to join the First Yale Unit, becoming a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve Flying Corps. After the War, he returned to Yale and then received an LLD from Harvard. During his long and illustrious career, he worked as a lawyer, a member of the Ohio House of Representatives, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Air) in 1929.

A graduate of Tufts University and the University of North Carolina, Geoffrey L. Rossano is an instructor of history at the Salisbury School in Salisbury, Connecticut. He is the author/editor of The Price of Honor: The World War One Letters of Naval Aviator Kenneth MacLeish; Stalking the U-Boat: U.S. Naval Aviation in Europe during World War I (winner of the 2010 Roosevelt Prize in Naval History); and Built to Serve: Connecticut’s National Guard Armories, 1865–1940, as well as numerous articles and papers in the fields of maritime, military, and aviation history. He is also the winner of the 2013 Arthur Radford Award for Excellence in Naval Aviation History and Literature, an award given for a body of work that includes Hero of the Angry Sky.