Peter Hart is the Oral Historian with the IWM Sound Archive and will be familiar to us as the co-author, with Nigel Steel, of Tumult in the Clouds. This book takes us through most of the year 1916 on one battle field, covering the preliminary photo reconnaissance, the struggle for air supremacy and then the role played by the RFC during the actual battle from 1 July to November. The format is that made familiar by Lyn Macdonald, a series of first hand accounts by the participants on both sides taking the story along in chronological order. In this case, many of the accounts are from the archives of the Imperial War Museum, rather than verbatim. They are accompanied by many splendid photographs of the narrators, their aircraft and the battlefield itself. Well laid out, with the pictures and maps in the right place in the text, it is a joy to read.

Whilst I didn't find anything particularly new historically, I did find the whole book very worthwhile and helpful, in encapsulating an aspect of the Battle of the Somme in a way I had not envisaged before. Also, this narrative style does flesh out the story in a most human way; read what the Martinsydes of 27 Squadron dropped on the Germans as well as bombs! Some of the pictures are especially good. How the Observer in an FE ever had the nerve to stand up with the cockpit rim beneath his knees and turn round to shoot backwards over his pilot's head, is beyond me. And the plane was on the ground when the picture was taken! The first section is full of intriguing details of aerial photography and the subsequent interpretation of those photos. Later on, the difficulty in observing the fall of shot of a specific battery in the general mayhem of the opening of the battle, is graphically described, as is the danger from the shells of one's own artillery when flying low to do such observing. The author also deals with the battle for air supremacy, won, he says, by the RFC after the shooting down of Immelmann on 18 June, which knocked the stuffing out of the German pilots. 

It seems surprising that the Battle was not a decisive victory, but, as the author says 'the British had harvested the fruits of the RFC aerial supremacy, but they could not counter-balance the miscalculations and tactical naivety that was fully exposed on the ground. They could fly freely over ground that unsilenced German gun batteries and machine guns made impossible to cross on foot'.

This book is a worthy addition to the history of World War I.