historian whose recent works include a comprehensive study of the navy’s air arm in Europe, we have a fine-grained, up close and personal glimpse into the wartime career of David Sinton Ingalls, as told in his own words. The navy’s first and only World War I “ace,” credited with six victories while attached to an RAF pursuit squadron, Ingalls was still a teenager when he dropped out of Yale and volunteered for aviation training and service as a naval reserve officer. Like many members of the famed First Yale Unit, Ingalls came from the country’s privileged elite, and like his comrades in arms, he dreamed of the excitement, honor, and glory that modern air warfare seemed to herald. Of course, as Ingalls himself related, the reality was often much different. He endured days and sometimes weeks of tedium on the ground, underwent seemingly endless training, and flew innumerable fruitless patrols over “Hunland” behind the front lines. What to the public appeared to be romantic, chivalrous aerial jousting was in fact a deadly industrial age war of attrition in which men and machines were consumed as appallingly as they were by the artillery and machine guns on the ground.
Using a veritable treasure trove of Ingalls’s letters and diaries, Rossano brings the air war to life with informative and unobtrusive editing skill. The result is that readers will have the rare opportunity to see World War I in the air firsthand. In Ingalls’s remarkably clear voice, we hear the range of emotions that often overwhelmed young men separated from their families and exposed to the dangers of flight and combat. We share Ingalls’s exhilaration in the sheer intoxicating sensation of flight and the satisfaction he experienced in successfully completing a mission. We see how he carefully worded his letters home to his mother and father to mask the dangers he faced. And we see how his nearly daily diary entries paint another, more realistic picture, vividly showing that sometimes only a combination of luck and skill kept him alive in the air and got him safely back to earth.
In this book, we meet some of the key players in early American naval aviation. Among them are Yale Unit chums F. Trubee Davison, Artemus “Di” Gates, and Robert “Bob” Lovett, all of whom went on to noteworthy careers in aviation and public service. A keen observer of the strengths and weaknesses of the navy’s effort in Europe, Ingalls had great respect for Ken Whiting and Hutch Cone, who oversaw the material and organizational aspects of the great enterprise. Like everyone else, Ingalls experienced loss in the merciless skies over France and Belgium. Gates went down and was held as a prisoner of war, and Kenneth MacLeish (brother of poet Archibald MacLeish) was killed only hours after joining the squadron when Ingalls, exhausted from combat, rotated back to England. Frederick Hough, Al Sturtevant, Curtis Read, Harry Velie, and Andrew Ortmeyer, to name only a few, had their lives cut short and will forever be reminders of the human cost of aerial warfare.
I feel certain that readers will agree with me that Rossano’s Hero of the Angry Sky provides a gripping first-person account that incorporates all of the tragedy, excitement, frustration, sacrifice, and ultimately human triumph that accompanied the navy’s Great War in the air.
William F. Trimble
Auburn University
Series Editors’ Preface
Wars have been the engines of North American history. They have shaped the United States and Canada, their governments, and their societies from the colonial era to the present. The volumes in our War and Society in North America book series investigate the effects of military conflict on the peoples in the United States and Canada. Other series are devoted to particular conflicts, types of conflicts, or periods of conflict; ours considers the history of North America over time through the lens of warfare and its effects on states, societies, and peoples. We conceive “war and society” broadly to include the military history of conflicts in or involving North America; responses to war, support as well as opposition opinion, peace movements, and pacifist attitudes; examinations of American citizens and Canadian citizens, colonists, settlers, and Native Americans fighting in or returning from wars; and studies of institutional, political, social, cultural, economic, or environmental factors specific to North America that affected wars. Our series explores the ties between regions and nations in times of extreme crisis. Ultimately, volumes in the War and Society in North America series should be a venue for authors of books that will appeal to a wide range of audiences in military history, social history, and national and transnational history.
In Hero of the Angry Sky, Geoffrey Rossano fulfills all the expectations for our series. He brings to light the experiences of one of America’s first flying aces, the naval aviator David Ingalls in the First World War. Ingalls, an Ohioan from Cleveland, shot down five German aircraft and became the only ace in the U.S. Navy during that conflict. Ingalls joined the preparedness movement in 1916 as an undergraduate student at Yale University and he went on to volunteer service in the war. This book is not merely a combat narrative, however, because Rossano effectively blends Ingalls’s diary entries and personal letters in a whole-life story with fascinating material on flight training, aviation technology, and even France’s wartime society. His book also serves to commemorate the early years of naval aviation and the upcoming one-hundredth anniversary of the formation of the First Yale Unit of volunteers for the Great War. After the war ended, Ingalls went on to careers in law, business, Ohio politics, and national politics. As an assistant secretary of the navy in President Herbert Hoover’s administration, Ingalls directed the expansion of naval aviation and the development of aircraft carrier–based air power that would bear fruit in the Second World War. There can be no doubt that Ingalls’s own experiences as an aviator in the Great War left lasting impressions on him and made him a strong advocate for naval air power for the rest of this life.
We are proud to have Geoffrey Rossano’s Hero of the Angry Sky as the inaugural volume in the series War and Society in North America. Throughout the review and editing phases, Rossano has been the consummate scholar. We could not have asked for a better author and partner in publishing. We would be remiss if we did not also thank Gillian Berchowitz, the editorial director at Ohio University Press. Gillian has been very supportive throughout the process of creating our series and in working with Geoffrey Rossano on Hero of the Angry Sky.
David J. Ulbrich
St. Robert, Missouri
Ingo Trauschweizer
Athens, Ohio
Acknowledgments
To edit someone’s private diary and correspondence is, in a way, to become part of that person’s life, family, and social circle and share his or her time and place, no matter how far removed. Working with David Ingalls’s papers was just such an experience. During many months poring over his writings, deciphering his tight penmanship, “meeting” his friends and acquaintances, and listening in on his thoughts, I came to know the teenage man-boy who became naval aviation’s first ace. Visiting several of the places where he trained and served, literally following in his footsteps, provided additional insight. It has been a fascinating and rewarding journey.
My greatest thanks go to members of the extended Ingalls family for making David Ingalls’s papers available to me and supporting this project right from the beginning. They opened both their homes and their archives. Especially helpful have been Jane Ingalls Davison, David Ingalls’s daughter; Dr. Bobbie Brown, his granddaughter; and Polly Hitchcock, his great-granddaughter. I would also like to thank the staff at the Louise H. and David S. Ingalls Foundation, particularly Jay Remec. All were enthusiastic about the project from start to finish.
A great variety of individuals, organizations, and repositories made completion of this work possible. The National Archives in Washington remains the central repository for documents relating to early things naval. The large and varied resources of the Naval History and Heritage Command located at the Washington Navy Yard proved very helpful, as did the staff in the library, the Photo Section, and especially the naval aviation unit of the archives, particularly Joe Gordon and Laura Waayers. The Naval Institute
