Terror of the Autumn Skies
The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I
Pardoe, Blaine L.
Frank Luke, Jr., was an unlikely pilot. In the Great War, when fliers were still "knights of the air," Luke was an ungallant loner, a kid from Arizona who collected tarantulas, shot buzzards, and boxed miners. But during two torrid weeks in September 1918, he was the deadliest man on the Western Front. In only ten missions, he destroyed fourteen heavily-defended German balloons and four airplanes, a rampage unequalled even by the infamous Red Baron, and the second-highest American tally of the entire war. Cocksure and constantly reprimanded, Luke was actually under arrest on the day of bis final flight, but he stole a plane to join the fatal action that won him the first Congressional Medal of Honor awarded to a pilot. Blaine Pardoe retraces and refreshes Frank Luke's story through recently discovered correspondence. What emerges is a portrait of a life out of an "Old West" that was, by the late teens, colliding with modernity. Frantic, short, and splendid, the life of Frank Luke dramatizes the tragic intervention of an American spirit in the war that devastated Europe.
Luke Air Force Base in Phoenix, Arizona, home of the 56th Fighter Wing, is named after this pilot.
Softcover
301 Seiten / pages
photos
very good condition
New York - 2011 - Skyhorse Publishing
Art.Nr. 4648
