The pathless sky: violence and culture in First World War air services

The First World War has almost always been the impetus behind new developments in critical studies of violence, in fields as diverse as psychology, strategic studies, and cultural history. Western Front infantry soldiers remain central to cross-disciplinary interpretations of combatant experience, identity, and community. This thesis reframes these fundamental relationships between war violence and community by considering an under-explored First World War battlefield: the air. It explores French, British, and American fighter pilots as a transnational combat culture emerging in dialogue with a distinctive, new type of warfare. Though still largely relegated to popular history and one-dimensional stereotypes, First World War flyers vividly expose the wartime processes of navigating ‘unprecedented’ violence. Air services began the war affiliated with older military services and without a clear picture of what an aerial conflict entailed. As such, pilots themselves were disproportionately important to shaping the practices, rules, language, and uses of military aviation. The thesis follows fighter pilots through the process of learning to fly into informally organised combat, establishing their under-explored reliance on peacetime transnational aviation networks and elite flying ‘aces’ to share information and create communal practices. Pilots who flew in the three-dimensional battle space above the Western Front relied upon complex embodied relationships with their rapidly militarising aircraft to survive, a process that directly informed the ways in which they did, suffered, and survived aerial violence. The thesis explores the impact of these shared experiences, demonstrating First World War aerial violence’s profound disruption of military and class hierarchies and its post-war commodification as a cultural tool. Allied aviators’ transnational combat culture was shaped by what this thesis terms ‘violent flight’, or the embodied experience of flying in a dangerous combat zone. As pilots considered this to be work, the thesis establishes a materially informed, geographically specific interpretation of pilots as gendered labourers to elucidate the development of their wartime communities into a unified combat culture. This deliberately transnational, multi-disciplinary approach urges new, post-centenary conversations about the place of violence in First World War historiography and establishes a specific, complex symbiosis between violence and war cultures.