Striking the Hornets' Nest provides the first extensive analysis of the Northern Bombing Group (NBG), the Navy's most innovative aviation initiative of World War I and one of the world's first dedicated strategic bombing programs. Very little has been written about the Navy's aviation activities in World War I and even less on the NBG. Standard studies of strategic bombing tend to focus on developments in the Royal Air Force or the U.S. Army Air Service. This work concentrates on the origins of strategic bombing in World War I, and the influence this phenomenon had on the Navy's future use of the airplane. The NBG program faced enormous logistical and personnel challenges. Demands for aircraft, facilities, and personnel were daunting, and shipping shortages added to the seemingly endless delays in implementing the program. Despite the impediments, the Navy (and Marine Corps) triumphed over organizational hurdles and established a series of bases and depots in northern France and southern England in the late summer and early fall of 1918. Ironically, by the time the Navy was ready to commence bombing missions, the German retreat had caused abandonment of the submarine bases the NBG had been created to attack. The men involved in this program were pioneers, overcoming major obstacles only to find they were no longer needed. Though the Navy rapidly abandoned its use of strategic bombing after World War I, their brief experimentation directed the future use of aircraft in other branches of the armed forces. It is no coincidence that Robert Lovett, the young Navy reserve officer who developed much of the NBG program in 1918, spent the entire period of World War II as Assistant Secretary of War for Air where he played a crucial role organizing and equipping the strategic bombing campaign unleashed against Germany and Japan. Rossano and Wildenberg have provided a definitive study of the NBG, a subject that has been overlooked for too long.

Stalking the U-Boat is the first and only comprehensive study of U.S. naval aviation operations in Europe during WWI. The navy's experiences in this conflict laid the foundations for the later emergence of aviation as a crucial--sometimes dominant--element of fleet operations, yet those origins have been previously poorly understood and documented. Begun as antisubmarine operations, naval aviation posed enormous logistical, administrative, personnel, and operational problems. How the USN developed this capability--on foreign soil in the midst of desperate conflict--makes a fascinating tale sure to appeal to all military and naval historians.

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 \u201cace\u201d 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.