The War in the Air is the official history of the part played in the First World War by the Royal Air Force and its forerunners, the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service. This first volume was written by the literary scholar Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh, who was commissioned to chronicle the rapid and improvised birth of military aviation between 1914 and 1918.
Raleigh traces how flying machines, dismissed as toys only years earlier, were pressed into reconnaissance, bombing, and aerial combat over the Western Front. He blends technical detail with a literary sensibility, capturing the daring of early pilots and the institutional struggles of a service inventing itself under fire. A foundational source on the dawn of air warfare, available here as a free EPUB download.