A Yankee Ace in the Raf: The World War I Letters of Captain Bogart Rogers (Modern War Studies)

Above the dueling artillery and the raging battles of the front line trenches Captain Bogart Rogers and his fellow pilots fought the world's first air war in the skies over Europe. Suffused with the romance of flight and the harsh realities of aerial combat, Rogers' letters to his fiancee, Isabelle Young, vividly detail his wartime experiences against a lethal and elusive opponent exemplified by the pilots of Baron von Richthofen's Flying Circus.

The son of controversial Los Angeles attorney Earl Rogers ("the greatest jury lawyer of his time," claimed Clarence Darrow) and brother to pioneering Hearst journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, Bogart made his mark in the Great War. Of the 300 plus Americans who joined the British Royal Flying Corps in 1917, only Rogers and two dozen other volunteers became aces. Assigned to RAF No. 32 Squadron, he arrived in France at the end of April, 1918. From the middle of May to the Armistice on November 11 he flew 140 combat missions in one of the premier fighter planes of the time, the SE-5a. He was credited with six aerial victories in dogfights over St. Quentin, Cambrai and all along the Western Front during the Second Battle of the Marne, the Somme Offensive, Chateau Thierry, Ypres and a half dozen other major engagements. Even though he was barely out of his teens when he wrote the first of many letters, Rogers had a definite flair for writing, one that launched his postwar career as a journalist and Hollywood screen writer.