Document Created: 23 August 2007
Air & Space Power
Journal Fall 2007
The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920–1950 by Robert Wohl. Yale University Press (http://www.yale.edu/yup), P.O. Box 209040, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-9040, 2005, 376 pages, $39.95 (hardcover).
Air travel—and air warfare—are commonplace today. Military airpower has moved beyond the widespread devastation that marked its use in the Second World War, civil air travel long ago lost much of the excitement and glamour once associated with it, and millions trudge through sprawling airport/shopping complexes as part of their normal routine. It is therefore quite easy to overlook the fascination aviation once inspired in Europe and the United States as well as the great changes wrought across the world by powered flight. In his superb book Spectacle of Flight, Robert Wohl reminds us of that time when airplanes and aviation represented the dawning of a new age in human civilization: “No other machine seemed to represent as fully humankind’s determination to escape from age-old limitations, to defy the power of gravity, and to obliterate the tyranny of time and space” (pp. 1–2).
Spectacle of Flight is an engaging and richly illustrated cultural history of powered flight during three critical decades in the development of both civil and military aviation. Wohl is well qualified to write on the subject. Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles, he also served as Lindbergh Professor at the National Air and Space Museum and currently teaches European intellectual and cultural history. Wohl set out to write a one-volume cultural history of aviation. The subject proved so rich that what he originally conceived as an introduction became his first book on the subject—A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). In the volume under review, Wohl considers the cultural history of flight during a period when, in his words, the airplane was “a magical contrivance that had little to do with most people’s everyday lives” (p. 4).
Readers should not consider this book a history of airpower, and Wohl also notes that his work is not a soup-to-nuts survey of the cultural history of aviation. He builds his narrative around key themes and personalities, however, and in so doing, provides a comprehensive account of aviation throughout the period from 1920 to 1950. Readers will recognize many of the historical figures whom Wohl weaves into his narrative, while other characters are likely known only to historians of the period. The author mentions Billy Mitchell, for example, just in passing while the Italian nationalist, poet, and adventurer—and Fascist icon—Gabriele D’Annunzio receives a rather thorough treatment.
Wohl masterfully synthesizes cultural and political history with the history of technology in providing a fascinating and insightful account of Benito Mussolini’s harnessing of the “spectacle of flight” to the Italian brand of Fascism. Mussolini sought to reclaim Rome’s imperial heritage for Italy and place that nation among the ranks of the world’s great powers. In light of the Italian Air Force’s lackluster military performance in the Second World War, the reader will find Wohl’s engaging and detailed account of Italian air marshal Italo Balbo’s record-setting transatlantic flights to Brazil and the United States, for example, especially surprising and illuminating. Though the Italian aviation industry could not keep pace with that of other major powers when war eventually broke out, Italy’s Fascist ideology nevertheless embraced the traits and ideals perceived in aviation and aviators. Thus, Mussolini, himself a pilot (though not an exceptionally good one), more than any other leader of the period, made aviation “both an indispensable instrument and a resplendent manifestation” (p. 106) of the “glory” of his regime and nation. This was aviation’s ultimate cultural impact.
Many of the studies of aviation during this period focus on the technical aspects of aircraft development or on the broad debate over the proper role of aircraft and air forces in warfare. Spectacle of Flight takes its place alongside works such as Joseph J. Corn’s The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) and The Airplane in American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), edited by Dominick Pisano. Wohl moves his narrative beyond the more well-known accounts of military events and technological progress, convincingly demonstrating that the spectacle of flight became firmly ingrained in the popular cultures of America and Western Europe by the eve of the Second World War. In doing so, he moves seamlessly from one element of his narrative to the next. For example, Wohl thoughtfully analyzes the relationship between cinema and literature on the one hand and aviation on the other. Indeed, in Wohl’s view, filmmaking and flying “both aimed at nothing less than the liberation of humankind from the constraints of everyday reality, and both were forms of escape” (p. 112).
Yet, the West’s fascination with aviation also produced some unwelcome results. Wohl demonstrates that the awe with which Western publics viewed aviation in the 1930s allowed Hitler’s regime to coerce its opponents with the mere threat of aerial attack. While Giulio Douhet’s predictions of civil collapse under air attack never materialized, the massive destruction of the air campaigns of the Second World War and the technological advances that made those campaigns possible transformed warfare and human civilizations forever. Wohl concludes that in the aftermath of the war and the decades that have passed since then, “aviation may not have lost its appeal and meaning as a form of adventure for a privileged few [but it has lost the] ability to transform men and women and raise them above themselves” (p. 322).
To say as well that the book is lavishly illustrated might mislead the reader into thinking that this is not a serious work of scholarship; nothing could be further from the truth. The photographs and illustrations complement the author’s discussion of aviation’s impact on movies, literature, art, and popular culture. Crafted in a style and manner that will attract the casual reader, Spectacle of Flight is also the product of extensive research. This fine book will appeal to cultural, intellectual, and social historians as well as those who study military and aviation history. Spectacle of Flight belongs on every Airman’s reading list.
Dr. Mark J. Conversino
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Disclaimer
[ Home Page| Feedback? Contact the Editor ]