Peace Marshall, Signed (1 results)

WILSON, Eugene E. Air Power for Peace. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1945. First edition, first impression. Octavo, publisher's burgundy cloth, silver spine lettering and silver aircraft vignette to upper board, vii, 184 pp., diagrams. Signed by Eugene E. Wilson on the front free endpaper, "Washington, April 45." From the private collection of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal of Hungerford. Light rubbing and minor wear to extremities, internally clean, a strong aviation association copy. Wilson was one of the significant American air-power advocates of the first half of the twentieth century: a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, naval engineer, First World War veteran, Bureau of Aeronautics officer, later aviation industrialist, and president of the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America. In Air Power for Peace, written as victory approached, he argued for aviation not merely as a weapon of war but as a framework for post-war security, commerce and national policy. Lord Portal was Wilson's British counterpart at the highest strategic level: a decorated First World War flyer, commander of RAF Bomber Command in 1940, and Chief of the Air Staff from October 1940 through the end of the war. Portal helped shape the Allied strategic bombing offensive and became one of the central architects of British air strategy. The link between them is intellectual and historical rather than merely personal: Wilson wrote the American case for air power as the basis of peace, while Portal had just directed Britain's air war at the highest level. A signed Washington copy, dated April 1945 and preserved in Portal's library, is therefore a resonant transatlantic association - American aviation policy placed in the hands of Britain's wartime RAF chief at the moment air power was being recast for the post-war world.