Once a Knight: A Novel of Aerial Combat and Romance in World War I
World War I: Air combat is invented in the blue skies above the muddy battlefield.
May 1917: America is gearing up to enter the brutal conflict, and the Sopwith Camel is entering combat service.Many individual Americans, however, have long since signed on to fight the war.
In 1916, Everett Ross quit the Texas Rangers and traveled to England to join the Royal Flying Corps, trading his horse for a Nieuport pursuit biplane. No stranger to violence and death, now-Lieutenant Ross duels with German pilots in the pristine skies above the grimy trenches where foot soldiers fight for victory foot by bloody foot.
Between dogfights, Ross loses his heart to a young French beauty whose domineering mother fights her own battle to protect Geneviève from this American cowboy wearing a British uniform. Ross soon must decide between love and duty, between orders and necessity.
This fast-moving story combines romance and combat action in a land knocked out of kilter by a deadly war often seemingly without objectives. The combat sequences are told as only an experienced military pilot and historian can. Walt Shiel, long fascinated by the rapid evolution of aerial warfare in the First World War, has studied innumerable books and articles written by the men who flew and fought in the Great War. His understanding of aviation, combat tactics and their development brings the aerial scenes to vivid life. His knowledge of how those knights of the air lived, loved and died puts the reader in their flying boots and cockpits, complete with the emotions that drove them, the doubts that haunted them, the death that stalked them.
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