Book Review: NHHT: Above the Trenches by Nathan Hale

Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales: Above the Trenches by Nathan Hale

Returning to World War I, Nathan Hale (the American Revolutionary patriot) tells the tales of the flying aces. The time was the infancy of flight (the Wright Brothers had flown at Kittyhawk little more than ten years before), so the techniques and technology were developed during the war. The story starts with American pilots joining the French Foreign Legion so they could fight. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was not interested in joining the war, so they had to go somewhere. Eventually, they convinced the French to switch them from the trenches to the newly-formed air units. Pilots' work initially was gathering intelligence or dropping hand-held bombs on the enemy. If planes shot at each other, the pilots used handguns. As the war dragged on, pilots and mechanics started mounting guns on the planes, eventually getting to front-mounted ones that would time their shots to go in between the propellers! The people and the technological developments are interesting and keep the story moving.

As in the previous World War I tale, Hale has the characters as anthropomorphic animals to keep the nationalities straight (Russians are bears, British are bulldogs, Germans are eagles, Americans are rabbits (since the Germans had eagles first), etc.). It works well and fits the comic-book style. As usual, the book ends with a bibliography and some other historic tidbits.

Recommended.