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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
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No Empty Chairs - The Short and Heroic Lives of the Young Aviators Who Fought and Died in the First World War (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R494
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No Empty Chairs - The Short and Heroic Lives of the Young Aviators Who Fought and Died in the First World War (Hardcover)
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List price R530
Loot Price R494
Discovery Miles 4 940
You Save R36 (7%)
Expected to ship within 4 - 8 working days
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The empty chairs belonged, all too briefly, to the doomed young
First World War airmen who failed to return from the terrifying
daily aerial combats above the trenches of the Western Front. The
edict of their commander-in-chief was the missing aviators were to
be immediately replaced. Before the new faces could arrive, the
departed men's vacant seats at the squadron dinner table were
sometimes poignantly occupied by their caps and boots, placed there
in a sad ritual by their surviving colleagues as they drank to
their memory. Life for most of the pilots of the Royal Flying Corps
was appallingly short. If they graduated alive and unmaimed from
the flying training that killed more than half of them before they
reached the front line, only a few would for very long survive the
daily battles they fought over the ravaged moonscape of
no-man's-land. Their average life expectancy at the height of the
war was measured only in weeks. Parachutes that began to save their
German enemies were denied them. Fear of incarceration, and the
daily spectacle of watching close colleagues die in burning
aircraft, took a devastating toll on the nerves of the world's
first fighter pilots. Many became mentally ill. As they waited for
death, or with luck the survivable wound that would send them back
to 'Blighty', they poured their emotions into their diaries and
streams of letters to their loved ones at home. Drawing on these
remarkable testimonies and pilots' memoirs, Ian Mackersey has
brilliantly reconstructed the First Great Air War through the lives
of their participants. As they waited to die, they shared their
loneliness, their fears, triumphs - and squadron gossip - with the
families who lived in daily dread of the knock on the door that
would bring the War Office telegram in its fateful green envelope.
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