Undarkened Skies

A comprehensive study of the American Aeroplane building programme of WW1, its promises, its performance, and its failure, together with a summary of what went wrong, and why, including a brief history of military aviation in America prior to the war and details of the Liberty engine and each aircraft type selected for production.

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Soon after entering the war in April 1917 American propaganda promised that she would `Darken the skies over Europe’ by sending over `the Greatest Aerial Armada ever seen’.
Encouraged by the French Government America promised to build no less than 22,000 aeroplanes within a year and to field, and to maintain, a force of 4,000 machines, all of the latest type, over the Western Front during 1918, not only to provide adequate air support for her own troops, but because she saw this as a way to use her industrial strength to bypass the squalor of the war in the trenches, and so bring an end to the stalemate of attrition into which the war had descended. However, by the time of the Armistice more than 18 months later just a few hundred American built aeroplanes had reached the war fronts and several investigations into the causes of the failure of the project were already in progress.