Undarkened Skies: The American Aircraft Building Programme of the First World War

The full story of the American aeroplane building programme in book form for the first time Comprehensively illustrated, including some previously unpublished photographs Rich in detail, this will be of interest to aviation and military historians as well as modellers Soon after entering the war in April 1917, American propaganda promised that the country would ‘darken the skies over Europe’ by sending over ‘the greatest aerial armada ever seen’.Encouraged by the French Government, America promised to build no fewer than 22,000 aeroplanes within a year and to field and maintain a force of 4,000 machines, all of the latest type, over the Western Front during 1918.This was to provide adequate air support for her own troops, as well as a way of using her industrial strength to bypass the squalor of the war in the trenches, and so bring an end to the stalemate of attrition into which the war had descended. However, by the time of the Armistice more than eighteen months later, just a few