Ian Sumner

Published by Pen and Sword in their Images of War series, January 2018, and available where all good books are sold. The French air force of the First World War developed as fast as the British and German air forces, yet its history, and the enormous contribution it made to the eventual French victory, is often forgotten. So Ian Sumner's photographic history, which features almost 200 images, most of which have not been published before, is a fascinating and timely introduction to the subject. The fighter pilots, who usually dominate perceptions of the war in the air, play a leading role in the story, in particular the French aces, the small group of outstanding airmen whose exploits captured the publics imagination. Their fame, though, tends to distract attention from the ordinary unremembered airmen who formed the body of the air force throughout the war years. Ian Sumner tells their story too, as well as describing in a sequence of memorable photographs the ...

The happy author brandishing a copy of his new book on Verdun, posed in front of a small part of the book collection. Just visible over his left shoulder are the spines of two of his previous books, They Shall Not Pass: the French Army of the Great War  and Kings of the Air: French Aces and Airmen of the Great War , both published by Pen & Sword, not only as hardbacks, but also in Kindle and ePub format (links to the P&S website). The hypnotoad says, 'Buy, Buy, Buy'!!

I'm happy to announce that my book Kings of the Air: French aces and airmen of the Great War has just been published by Pen & Sword today. So get yourself down to your bookseller of choice, and buy, buy, buy :-) My thanks go to everyone who has helped in the production - Maggie Sumner, Katherine Bracewell, Christina Holstein, Rupert Harding of Pen & Sword, the staffs of libraries and museums in the UK and in France, not mention friends on Twitter and Facebook who have Liked, Retweeted, Favourited, and otherwise encouraged me through what was at times a very hard slog.

Amongst the newly digitized archival material in the Great War is a collection of some thousands of photographs in the collection of the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine at the University of Paris X at Nanterre. Their blog that contains the announcement of the first release is here .  The basis of the collection are the Albums Valois, the photographs taken by the the French Army's photographic service (Section photographique de l'Armée), which was set up in 1915. Those familiar with the photographic archives at the Imperial War Museum will recognise the style - the albums in which each photo is mounted contain a photo per page with a brief hand-written caption. The albums currently available are arranged by département: Aisne, Ardennes, Marne, Meurthe et Moselle, Meuse, Moselle, Nord, Oise, Paris, Pas-de-Calais, Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, Seine et Marne, Territoire de Belfort and Vosges. There is a taster of what is available on Flickr here . ...

I'm happy to report that the Kings of the Air is available for pre-order on the Pen & Sword website at http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Kings-of-the-Air-Hardback/p/10243 for a projected release date in April. Ignore the slight error in the title ( Kings of the Air , not The Kings ...), just go and buy, buy, buy :-)

As Kings of the Air winds down to a conclusion (page proof checking and indexing going on as we speak ... er, type ... er, wotevva), a new project appears on the horizon, once again with those nice people at Pen & Sword . My new project is the first translation into English of the Great War memoirs of Charles Delvert, Carnets d'un fantassin ( An Infantryman's Diary ). Over the next weeks and months, rather than publish extracts hot from the translations face, I'll use the blog to explore Delvert's world, that of his regiment (the 101st Infantry), and the battles in which it took part, using war diaries and other contemporary material. Although I might use the occasional translation, just as a taster! All this and a new look for the blog pages. It's all go here at Sumner Towers!

The third of three posts on Paris under attack during the Great War. 'Berthas by day, Gothas by night,' proclaimed l'Illustration , 'the dull rumble of the guns at the front, the uhlans just " five marches" from the boulevards … things should be pretty grim in Paris right now! [But no.] Everyday life continues, no airs, no graces and no faint hearts. This is our Paris in wartime: no fuss, no panic, no bravado. A model of steadiness and self-control.' Under the bombardment in Paris was the American Mildred Aldrich : 'We were hardly on the balcony, when, in an instant, all the lights of the city went out, and a strange blackness settled down and hugged the housetops and the very sidewalk. At the same instant the guns of the outer barrage began to fire, and as the night was cold, we went inside to listen, and to talk. I wonder if I can tell you – who are never likely to have such an experience – how it feels to sit inside four wall...

If you've been reading these posts and thinking, 'He's taking an inordinate amount of time to finish this so-called book', well, you'll be glad to know that the time for last-minute alterations is over, the final debate about commas versus semi-colons has been resolved without bloodshed (just), so for everyone who has said - - worry no more, the manuscript has finally (finally!) gone off to the publishers, Pen and Sword . So I can only say, Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy ! (yes, it's a Christmas carol - work with me here) Only the proof-reading and indexing to come ...

Welcome to my 100th post! At 7.15 am, 23 March 1918, there was an explosion in the Place de la République; a second, fifteen minutes later in the Rue Charles V; and a third, in the Boulevard de Strasbourg. No warning had been given by the listening posts to the north of Paris, and civilians and airmen alike scanned the skies in vain for German bombers. Only by reassembling the fragments did the French work out that they were dealing with artillery and not aircraft. Over the next twenty-four hours, a total of twenty-one shells landed in the city itself, and one in Châtillon. Yet such a solution seemed incredible. René Fonck (SPA103) was at the front that day. 'We received a telephone message during the afternoon telling us they were shelling Paris,' he recalled. 'The news seemed so implausible that everyone burst out laughing. I preferred to keep my own counsel. How could a gun sited more than 120 kilometres away drop a shell close to the Gare de l'Est? ...

The first German air raid on Paris was at 12.45pm on 30 August 1914, when a Taube overflew the city at a height of 1,000 metres and dropped five bombs, killing one civilian and wounding four others, before flying off untouched by the guns of the Camp Retranché de Paris (CRP). Four armed Farmans operating as HF28 were immediately allocated to the CRP, but they too proved ineffective and the raids continued over the next three months, killing eleven and wounding fifty. On 2 September one Farman managed to get within range, but its machine gun jammed on the tenth round and the intruder escaped unscathed.   Better defences were required. Lack of available chassis made the mobile motorized AA units favoured by General Gallieni (the commander of the Paris garrison) unviable; instead an outer ring of listening posts was set up about a hundred kilometres from the city, with an inner ring of fifteen fixed batteries – each deploying two 75mm field guns, four machine guns...

Since the French Open Tennis Championship is being played at the Stade Roland Garros at the moment, it provides the perfect cue to talk about the man after whom the stadium is named (not about tennis, which is dull. Dulldulldulldull. Ohgodhowdull. Not altogether that keen, to be frank.). Eugène Adrien Roland Georges Garros, to give him his full name, was born in Saint-Denis on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion on 6 October 1888, but went to school in Paris. He began his aviation career in 1909 flying Alberto Santos-Dumont's Demoiselle monoplane, an tiny aircraft that only flew well with a small lightweight pilot like Garros. He gained his pilot's licence in July 1910. In 1911 he changed to Blériot monoplanes and entered a number of European air races, including the 1911 Paris to Madrid air race and the Circuit of Europe (Paris-London-Paris), in which he came second. In September 1912, he established a new world altitude record of 5,610 m (18,410 ft) in the skie...

The company of Michelin is well-known for tyres, and has been since the nineteenth century. But André and Edouard Michelin, who ran the company were aviation enthusiasts as well; in particular, they were bombing enthusiasts. 'You should decide whether aeroplanes were just a reconnaissance tool, or if they could become a terrible weapon of war,' they wrote to the president of the Aéro-Club de France in August 1911. 'Perhaps they could cut a country's mobilisation in two ... and more - destroying arsenals, supply centres, enemy powder works. ... We are making available to you the sum of 150,000 francs, to be used in four prizes to be called the Michelin Air Aiming Prize [ prix de l'aéro-cible Michelin ].' They followed this up by issuing a series of postcards showing how the Michelin competition would improve the nation's defences. 'It could,' André thundered in the pages of Le Matin , 'be as indispensable to a country's defences as ...

In a recent post , I mentioned Charles de Rose, who was a member of the pre-war aviation research team at Vincennes. The team was under the command of Eugène Estienne (1860-1936), a man who deserves a post of his own (his first name was actually Jean-Baptiste, but he preferred his middle name Eugène). In that post, I also used the term 'the snake pit of French military aviation'. In Estienne's case, I might expand this to 'the snake pit of French defence procurement'. Estienne entered the Artillery, and was commissioned into the 35e Artillery in 1884. By 1909, with plenty of regimental and staff experience under his belt, he was a major and commander of the Artillery school in Grenoble. From here, he went to the main Artillery depot at Vincennes just outside Paris. In March 1910, he was made a lieutenant colonel and give charge of the Artillery's aviation establishment in the same location. With the introduction of the first flying machines to th...