A Different Perspective (?): Air Warfare in Derek Robinson’s Post-Memory Aviation Fiction

Authors

  • Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland, Poland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2018.31.10

Keywords:

The Great War, Aerial combat, Aviation fiction, Derek Robinson, War mythology, Aces High, Journey's End

Abstract

The canonical literary epitome of the Great War is, beyond doubt, the infantry soldier trapped in what Paul Fussell called the “troglodyte world” of the notorious trenches. There exists, however, a considerable number of literary accounts devoted to a different ‘space’—and thus allegedly also a different experience—of the conflict. The autobiography by Manfred von Richthofen, and memoirs by Billy Bishop and Cecil Lewis contributed to the fame of the Great War pilots as ‘knights of the air.’ Post-memory literary depictions of air warfare tend to be more ideologically ambivalent. The focus of this paper will be Derek Robinson’s novel War Story (1987), constituting in terms of the chosen historical time of its action the first part of his acclaimed Great War aviation trilogy, including also Goshawk Squadron and Hornet's Sting, to be analyzed within the wider context of the cultural representations of the Royal Flying Corps in 1914–1918. Derek Robinson served in the RAF after the Second World War. He is also the author of the revisionist Invasion, 1940 and, thus, his literary ‘return’ to the Great War, within the context of air warfare, must raise important questions concerning the extent to which he perpetuates or challenges the prevailing myths of the first global conflict of the twentieth-century.

References

Aces High (1976): Dir. Jack Gold. Prod. EMI Elstree Studios.

Bishop. William A. (1978): Winged Warfare. London and Sydney: Pan Books.

Brosman, Catharine Savage (1999): Visions of War in France: Fiction, Art, Ideology. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Brown, Malcolm (2002): The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme. London: Pan Books.

Cecil, Hugh (1996): The Flower of Battle: How Britain Wrote the Great War. South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press.

Fussell, Paul (2000): The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hart, Peter (2001): Somme Success: The Royal Flying Corps and the Battle of the Somme, 1916. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Leo Cooper.

Haythornthwaite, Philip J. (1992): The World War One Source Book. London: Arms and Armour Press.

Hynes, Samuel (1990): A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: The Bodley Head.

Hynes, Samuel (2000): “Personal Narratives and Commemoration”. In J. Winter and E. Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205–220.

Keegan, John (1999): The First World War. London: Pimlico.

Leed, Eric J. (1979): No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lewis, Cecil (2006): Sagittarius Rising. London: Greenhill Books [1936, New Foreword 1993].

Mackenzie, S. P. (2007): The Battle of Britain on Screen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623891.001.0001

Owen, Wilfred (1965): The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Edited by C. Day Lewis. New York: A New Directions Book.

Paris, Michael (1995): From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Remarque, Erich Maria (2005): All Quiet on the Western Front. Trans. Brian Murdoch. London: Vintage.

Richthofen, Manfred von (2005): The Red Baron. Edited by Norman Franks and N. H. Hauprich. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Military Classis.

Roberts, David (2002): We Are the Dead: Poems and Paintings from the Great War 1914-1918. The Red Horse Press UK.

Robinson, Derek (2001): War Story. London: Cassell Military Paperbacks.

Robinson, Derek (2005): Goshawk Squadron. London: Constable and Robinson.

Robinson, Derek (2006): Invasion, 1940: The Truth About the Battle of Britain and What Stopped Hitler. London: Constable & Robinson.

Romain, Jules (2000): Verdun. Trans. Gerard Hopkins. London: Prion.

Sheffield, Gary (2002): Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities. London: Review.

Sherriff, R. C. (2000): Journey’s End. London: Penguin Books.

Steele, Nigel and Peter Hart (1997): Tumult in the Clouds: The British Experience of the War in the Air, 1914-1918. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Statistics

Statistics RUA

Published

15-12-2018

How to Cite

Sokolowska-Paryz, Marzena. 2018. “A Different Perspective (?): Air Warfare in Derek Robinson’s Post-Memory Aviation Fiction”. Alicante Journal of English Studies / Revista Alicantina De Estudios Ingleses, no. 31 (December):165-76. https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2018.31.10.