After reading some books related to the Falklands War about missions of the Vulcan and Harrier, I ended up via a number of books on war at Verdun and the Somme in the first world war, with this book about old aircraft flying at the Somme. Very old aircraft are not my favourite, but I must admit that if you pay a little bit attention to this world of the first world war, also this book is suddenly a very interesting one. After all it was close to the moment from where we had to speak German. I was curious about some background of the people who saved us for the Germans those days.
The booklet contains some maps and driving routes with all kinds of pictures of squadrons, pilots, logs, airports and aircraft and many backgrounds. I didn’t read all the details in the book that is very detailled from the beginning to the end, but if you read about the pilots and their colleagues who fought with great courage under very difficult circumstances in their planes against the Fokker-aircraft of the Germans, then this book is very interesting to mention!
The tours, which are outlined in the area around the Somme River above Paris, gide you -while riding- along pilot graves, cemeteries, farms and locations which where the ‘aerodromes’ of those days. The author combines this information with lot’s of background of the squadrons, pilots, how they were killed and other information. The book gives a good picture of the raw but also ‘romantic’ lives of the pilots at that time. There are also variants of this book for the area around Ypres, Arras and Cambrai.
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