On my bookshelf: Stephen Woolford

As a boy, WE Johns’s Biggles books probably gave me my introduction to stories about flying in the first world war but they did not make a lasting impression. The book that did was Winged Victory by Victor Yeates.

Yeates dismissed Johns’s The Camels are Coming – it was published in 1932 and was the first of dozens of books in the hugely popular Biggles series – as “super-bunk”. 

Both had been pilots in the first world war but Johns’s books were adventure stories for boys, while Yeates set out to write a novel that was “an exact analysis and synthesis of a state of mind” of the book’s central character, the Sopwith Camel pilot Tom Cundall, set within an “accumulation of detail” on the Western Front in 1918. 

This makes the book long but it is at times beautifully written and it is through its depiction of everyday life in the Royal Flying Corps and the horrors of air combat, with its fear, fatigue and comradeship, that the book continues to fascinate.

Cundall survives the war but his friends do not. Yeates, also a Camel pilot, sadly succumbed to tuberculosis brought on by war-strain in 1934 shortly after his book’s publication. It did not sell well but it was highly sought after by RAF pilots in the second world war for its accurate account of military flying and it is because of this it became better known. 

The Imperial War Museums’ (IWM) Sopwith Camel will be in the newly transformed IWM London’s new first world war exhibition opening on 19 July. 

If you visit, think of Yeates and his comrades.