mail: Bill Thayer

Help

Up

Home

The United States in the Air

by
Mason M. Patrick
Major General U. S. Army, retired

introduction by
F. Trubee Davison
Assistant Secretary of War
in charge of Aviation

Aircraft of the Army Air Corps — (top row) Pursuit, or fighting planes, (second row, left) Training plane, (right) Amphibian plane, (third row, left) Observation plane, (right) Tri-motor cargo plane, (fourth row, left) Twin engine bombing plane, (right) An airship, the R. S. 1

The Author

Mason Mathews Patrick graduated to the Corps of Engineers from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in the Class of 1886 — good details are given of his Army career in Cullum's Register — and like most Army engineers started somewhat blandly if success­fully in river and harbor work, only to find himself suddenly thrust into military aviation in France in World War I, as he himself tells us early in this book, becoming the Chief of the U. S. Army Air Service (the predecessor of the Air Corps and ultimately of the United States Air Force). He was a quick learner and military aviation became what he is most remembered for today. The United States in the Air tells the intertwined stories of the early days of American army aviation and the author's career and is thus a primary source for its rôle in World War I and the development of aviation in the United States.

 (p. vii)  Contents

[The page numbers of the print edition, given in the right-hand column, are the links to the corresponding webpages.]

 (p. viii)  List of Illustrations

Technical Details

Edition and Copyright

Very unusually, I decided to put this book onsite not from a hard copy in my possession, but from a copy that can be found online on GoogleBooks (nicely done there, which isn't a given); as of writing, the only time I've done that. The transcription before you though makes the book easier to find online, easy to link to and from, and for those so inclined, easy to copy snippets from — at the cost of less than a week of work.

The book itself was published in the United States by Doubleday, Doran & Company in 1928, and is therefore out of copyright, having entered the public domain on January 1, 2024: details here on the copyright law involved.

Proofreading

As almost always, and in this case despite my source, 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.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. I run a first proofreading pass immediately after entering each section; then a second proofreading, detailed and meant to be final: in the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe them to be completely errorfree; red backgrounds would mean that the section had not received that second final proofreading. The header bar at the top of each webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition was very well proofread. The few errors I found, I fixed, marking the correction each time with one of these: º. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles. Very occasionally, also, I use this blue circle to make some brief comment.

Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, apparently duplicated citations, 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 the printed edition in front of you.

Pagination and Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ): it's hardly fair to give you "pp53‑56" as a reference and not tell you where p56 ends. 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.)

---

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is the device found on the cover of the book, somewhat brightened and color-adjusted. It is a roundel in the national colors of the United States — yet one which does not seem ever to have been used as an official roundel by any American air unit — further decked out with a stylized propeller. (The roundel used by the United States in Europe in World War I was similar, but with the white in the center, the blue next, and the red outermost.)

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:			American & Military History	Home
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility