Reviews & Previews: Soldier of Fortune
The life and mysterious death of an American ace in the Spanish Civil War
- By The Editors
- Air & Space magazine, March 2012
(Page 2 of 5)
Except for a few omissions, this is a splendid biography.
Daniel Ford wrote about another band of mercenary pilots, Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941–1942 (Harper Collins-Smithsonian Books, 2007).
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
by Neil deGrasse Tyson. W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 384 pp., $24.95.
in the exploration of space, America is at a crossroads. NASA retired the space shuttle last year, and a restructuring of our national priorities is under way. In his new collection of essays, letters, speeches, Tweets, and even a poem, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a compelling appeal, at just the right time, for continuing to look up.
Not only is our economic health dependent on space exploration, he argues, but our very survival as a species may be as well. For example, without further exploration, we might miss spotting an incoming asteroid in time to deflect it from wiping us out.
Tyson says that the spinoff benefits of space exploration aren’t enough to drive the massive expenditures of a program on the scale, say, of Apollo. The best driver for the government programs he says we need to get us back into space in a big way is a war, like the cold one that got us to the moon. Space travel, he says, is too expensive and too hard for mere garage tinkerers.
While this might have been true 40 years ago, I would argue that the recent successes of Scaled Composites and SpaceX, which designed, built, and flew craft into space for a combined outlay of less than a single space shuttle flight, tell a different story. Fortunately, NASA is no longer the only game in town.
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Comments (1)
The biography of teniente Frank Tinker is overdue and joins "Airmen Without Portfolio" in examining the unique contributions and quirky personalities of the American pilots who flew for the Spanish Republic in the first year of that country’s civil war. I am a big fan of Daniel Ford’s research and writing and am glad he reviewed this book. However, one point need to be made: under Tinker’s contract with the Spanish government, he earned a bonus of $1000 each only for confirmed kills. The government was careful not to waste its dollars and demanded verification for each and every downed plane. In all probability, Tinker’s 8 confirmed kills were probably an undercount and he should have been paid for some of his 11 “probables”. The post-Franco release of Fascist records certainly confirms that the planes in question were downed. By the way, the same goes for Maj. A. J. “Ajax” Baumler who had 4.5 confirmed kills while flying for the FARE (the Republic’s air force). In 1942, when flying alongside the Flying Tigers (Ford’s particular interest), Baumler’s first kill in China earned him both ace status and the distinction of being the first American to have downed planes of the 3 Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan.)
Posted by William L. Rukeyser on January 26,2012 | 06:20 PM