The First Yale Unit
by
Ralph D. Paine

The Book and the Author

Bound in with Vol. I of the exemplar I transcribed, a holding of the University of Chicago Library, is the following little slip which states the situation well:

The First Yale Unit was a group of twenty-nine Yale college students, almost all of them jocks, who became fascinated by flying, and realizing that World War I would eventually be coming to America, decided to get a hop on everyone else, teach themselves to fly — at the time, a new and very dangerous sport — and thus be ready to serve their country as aviators when the call came. The socially homogeneous group had the advantages of privilege and money: the sport is also a very expensive one, and their patriotic families backed them with a very substantial outlay of funds and the influence of their connections, without which the venture would have been impossible.

Their story has recently been told again (by Marc Wortman, The Millionaires' Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys Who Fought the Great War and Invented American Air Power, Perseus Books Group, 2006) with the advantages of nearly a century of history since that allowed the author to track the members of the Unit thru their entire career, and to write it more neutrally:

Ralph Paine's earlier book though, by its nature, was able to draw on pretty much all the primary sources — the members of the Unit themselves, their letters, their families, Yale University, and official Navy records — and has preserved to posterity (and subsequent authors) the story of an amazing enterprise of youth and initiative and patriotism. Not only was the First Yale Unit the main seed from which American naval aviation would grow, but many of the members of the First Yale Unit, parlaying their own war record and of course the ever-present influence of their families, went on to become movers in the American government, one of them, Bob Lovett, serving as Secretary of Defense during the Korean War.

Col. Thompson was thus quite right: the book has much of historical value; not only in giving us a portrait of the Unit and its members and chronicling the early days of American naval aviation, but also in its account of some of the inner workings of the air war in 1917‑1918, and touching on the history of France, England, Italy, and Brazil. The author chosen to write the book, Ralph Delahaye Paine, a journalist, was a logical choice: he had written many other books for a popular audience, often on sports or naval matters, and wrote for the Navy during the War.

You may be coming here from the section of my site on French History; chapters more particularly relevant to France — in particular, the heroic resistance of the city of Dunkerque — are marked on this page by ✧ (a symbol you can copy and search for).

Contents

Volume I

Volume II

List of Illustrations

Volume I

Mr. Henry Pomeroy Davison

Volume II

F. Trubee Davison

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here was the first and I believe only edition, Cambridge, Printed at The Riverside Press, 1925. That year's copyright (by Kate T. Davison) was not renewed in 1952 or 1953 as required by the then law in order to be maintained, and the book is thus in the public domain: details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

In the print edition, the 132 illustrations, all photographs, are placed on their own high-quality glossy pages, often very near the text to which they relate. The placement was not optimal, however, and I've taken advantage of the flexibility offered by the Web to move some of them to what I feel are better places. Their original placement is given in the table above, but the links are of course to the new location. In one instance (the 'Biltmore' on p146 of Vol. I) the subject of the photo is never mentioned in the text; and 'Big Boots' (Vol. I, p120) is similarly unidentified.

It is also to be regretted in some cases that the source of the photographs was not given by the author.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was very well proofread, except for foreign words and names, which are frequently garbled. I marked the typographical errors, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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