Wings Over Iraq

This is Iraq in the turbulent 1920s--a cauldron of intrigue, violence and death in a new country created from disparate parts of the old Ottoman Empire after WWI. The British are attempting to establish a puppet monarchy and protect the vital flow of oil using obsolete bombers. Lawless, rebellious Arab tribes roam the vast deserts, preying on anything that moves on the ground or in the air.

Allan Chadwick is a slightly gauche, newly qualified RAF pilot posted to a bomber squadron near Baghdad. He is soon initiated into the brutality of war and the pleasures of romantic liaisons. Although they rarely meet, he has an accidental but profound influence on the life of Dr. Kurt Scharf, a respectable professor of archaeology. Scharf is a reluctant partner of German military intelligence, which funds his dig at Ur as a front for anti-British espionage.

Their stories play out against the historical background of Middle Eastern conflict, the rise of fascism in Europe and the slow build-up to another world war.

Eric Forsyth was born in England, served as an RAF pilot, and emigrated to Canada, where he obtained a commercial pilot's license but was unable to find good flying opportunities. After obtaining a degree in engineering, he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, and was eventually appointed chair of the department that developed the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, the most powerful nuclear physics research tool in the U.S. On Long Island, Eric took up sailing in local waters and soon advanced to ocean sailing on his 42-foot cutter, "Fiona," which he built himself from a bare fiberglass hull. His accomplishments with this boat, including global circumnavigations and cruises to polar waters and through the Northwest Passage, resulted in many awards and are recounted in his book, "An Inexplicable Attraction: My Fifty Years of Ocean Sailing," which was included in Kirkus Review's 100 Best Memoirs of 2018.