The War in the Air Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922-1937. Complete set of nine volumes, comprising six octavo text volumes, two bookform map cases and final volume of appendices. Numerous maps, plans and charts bound into the text volumes, in addition to the loose maps in the bookform boxes. The first two volumes have their dust-jackets. Overall an attractive near-fine set with a little usual wear and occasional light flecking. The inner hinge of the sixth volume is split but not detached, and the binding for this volume remains sound. internally all volumes fresh and maps nicely preserved. Complete set of the definitive history of the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force in the First World War.
The ambitious project of documenting and recording the entire history of British military aviation to 1919 was initiated by Professor Walter Alexander Raleigh, a humanist scholar appointed to the Chair of English Literature at Oxford in 1904. At the outset of the war Raleigh devoted his personal and scholarly energies to the cause, and began compiling this history at the close of the War. As noted in the preface of the second volume, this effort was marred by tragedy: 'Sir Walter Raleigh, after he had finished correcting the proofs of the first volume, set out on a flying tour of the Middle East. At Mosul he fell sick of a fever and came home to die. The late Dr. D.G. Hogarth was appointed to the task of carrying on the history, but he was compelled, through ill-health and pressure of other work, to give it up.'
And so the monumental task fell upon Henry Albert Jones, who laboured until 1937 when the final volume (with attendant appendices) was published.
Throughout the series, aviation activity is closely overlaid upon strategic army and naval operations, providing a holistic historiographic approach. Fidelity to original sources is maintained throughout, aided by access to official German records in the national Reichsarchiv and Berlin Marinearchiv. The scale and complexity of the cartographic printing that accompanies the set is impressive.
The role of military aviation in peripheral theatres of war is extensively treated in the later volumes, including Italy, Greece and Macedonia, Iraq and the Levant, Palestine, India and Persia. Likewise, naval air operations in the Mediterranean and North Sea are well treated, as is the deployment of aircraft against the U-Boat and submarine menace.
A full collation of all volumes and map cases, along with a detailed condition report, is available upon request. The first set of maps in its bookform box (accompanying the third volume), is complete with all 42 maps. The second set of maps, likewise accompanying the fifth volume, is complete with all 28 maps. Noffsinger 2210; not in Myron Smith. Item #2445
Price (AUD): $2,500.00