The Millionaire's Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys who Fought the Great War and Invented American Airpower [Hardcover]

Marc Wortman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2006

The Millionaires' Unit is the story of a gilded generation of young men from the zenith of privilege: a Rockefeller, the son of the head of the Union Pacific Railroad, several who counted friends and relatives among presidents and statesmen of the day. They had it all and, remarkably by modern standards, they were prepared to risk it all to fight a distant war in France. Driven by the belief that their membership in the American elite required certain sacrifice, schooled in heroism and the nature of leadership, they determined to be first into the conflict, leading the way ahead of America's declaration that it would join the war. At the heart of the group was the Yale flying club, six of whom are the heroes of this book. They would share rivalries over girlfriends, jealousies over membership in Skull and Bones, and fierce ambition to be the most daring young man over the battlefields of France, where the casualties among flyers were chillingly high. One of the six would go on to become the principal architect of the American Air Force's first strategic bomber force. Others would bring home decorations and tales of high life experiences in Paris. Some would not return, having made the greatest sacrifice of all in perhaps the last noble war. For readers of Flyboys, The Greatest Generation, or Flags Of Our Fathers, this patriotic, romantic, absorbing book is narrative military history of the best kind.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nostalgia permeates this romantic account of how U.S. air power was established in WWI by a privileged, patriotic group of undergraduates known as the Yale Flying Club. The book was developed from an article published in the Yale Alumni Magazine, and it shows: Wortman harkens back to a bygone era when campus regattas were the place to be seen, Harvard-Yale football games drew crowds 80,000 strong and, perhaps most jarringly, American isolationism placed the country's air command not just behind Germany's fearsome air service, but behind British and French forces as well. Preparing themselves for fire fights and bombing missions that generated harrowing casualty figures, these wealthy, elite Yale students saw it as their responsibility to fight on the front lines, and in the first wave. In a brief but important epilogue, Wortman spells out just how profoundly the times, and in particular the Yale campus, has changed in the past 90 years. Though times have indeed changed, and not entirely for the better, Wortman's creeping nostalgia serves to make attractive a history littered with inconvenient details; how readers react to this viewpoint-especially with regard to the compare-and-contrast epilogue-will largely determine their opinion of the book.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

This entirely readable history of the First Yale Air Unit describes a flying club of well-off undergraduates whose money helped buy flying lessons and planes, enabling them to transform themselves into a group of trained military pilots who actually served with distinction in World War I in both the navy and the air service. First, however, they had to survive their instructors (including Frenchmen), their training planes, and the weather in the U.S and then Europe, all before getting within sight of the Germans. Among those who didn't return was Kenneth MacLeish, brother of the poet Archibald; among those who survived was Robert Lovett, eventually President Truman's secretary of defense. Others served further in World War II, and even those who never again climbed into a cockpit became an influential constituency for air power in business, the professions, politics, and academia. Wortman has researched thoroughly and written clearly, thereby enhancing our knowledge of aviation history, Yale, and World War I. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; First Edition edition (May 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586483285
• ISBN-13: 978-1586483289
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #841,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lost spirit, September 15, 2006

By 

Michael Gruenbaum (Brookline, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Millionaire's Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys who Fought the Great War and Invented American Airpower (Hardcover)

This is a very unusual book about a group of students at Yale in 1916 who all came from very privileged backgrounds, but felt it their duty to do something worthwhile with their lives. Considering the world situation at that time, they decided to form the Yale flying club and its members would become well trained pilots and eventually ended up flying many and extremely dangerous missions in Europe on behalf of America and its Allies during World War I. Unfortunately, several of them did not return, having paid the ultimate sacrifice. This is a book about Yale students who had it all, but whose strong belief in a cause made them turn into a life full of life threatening experiences, but convinced that it was their duty to do so. Such wonderful spirits, unfortunately, do not seem to be much in evidence in today's times. This extremely well researched book is certainly of great interest to those of us who were not aware of such remarkable spirits, but also to those who want to learn more about the beginnings of military aviation and the World War I period in general.

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Inquiry into the Culture of Leadership, August 17, 2006

By 

LB Eisner (Bethany, CT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Millionaire's Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys who Fought the Great War and Invented American Airpower (Hardcover)

First off, this is a great book and I agree with the other reviewers that it is a great read. Yes, it does follow the Yale flyers from crew races in Connecticut to the skies over the English Channel and Belgium in World War I. And yes, there are great descriptions of courage, heroism and loss. But to me there are two things that set this book apart. One, Wortman is a great writer. It is the mark of any really good book of history when the author can put you there, in a wholly different time and place, and make you feel that you know it, know the people and know the mores of the period. Wortman does this well, even down to getting the slang of the young Yalies. One cannot soon forget the importance of having "sand" or the feeling of flying over the trenches in Flanders on a cold dawn patrol. With due deference to Charles Schulz and Snoopy, there was a bit more to it than climbing onto the roof of your doghouse. And two, by opening up to us the world of the early nineteen hundreds, Wortman illuminates how these privileged young men, and the entire society of which they were a part, understood the responsibilities of leadership. For better or worse than the culture of our own time, and without any romanticism a la Snoopy and the Red Baron, many of these very rich young men felt the personal responsibility to take part and to lead -- and to do it from the forward and dangerous position. One cannot read this book without clearly contrasting the Yale flyers' attitudes and actions from those of many of today's most important political leaders in their formative years. Again, without having to surrender to any of the Band of Brothers romanticism, "The Millionaire's Unit" reminds us that our present day's attitudes towards leadership are not the only ones that Americans have always held.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Good Read Indeed!, May 16, 2006

By 

Paul Aaron (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Millionaire's Unit: The Aristocratic Flyboys who Fought the Great War and Invented American Airpower (Hardcover)

This story as told by the author Marc Wortman is a very good read indeed! It is a narrative history that is a well-documented true tale about real people. The story is cinematic in the quality of it's telling. This book satisfied my curiousity about the history of early 20th Century American aviation, the US role in World War l/the Great War, and the role played by many Yale University graduates in the rise of American power in the 20th Century (as it still continues to in the 21st Century).

I have noticed that "The Millionaires' Unit" was in the news recently. In the process of researching this book Marc Wortman found a letter written to one of The Millionaires' Unit members that documents grave robbing the great Apache chief Geronimo's skull by members of the secretive Yale fraternity, Skull and Bones, back in the early 1900's. Geronimo's skull and other artifacts were placed on display inside the Skull and Bones frat house, the Tomb, in New Haven, CT. This is interesting since some of the contemporary members of the fraternity include George Bush Jr, George Bush Sr, and John Kerry, etc.

Anyway, that is a very minor side story - the major story is that The Millionaires' Unit is an excellent book and I recommend buying and reading it.