Author: Coulthard-Clark, Chris
Publisher: Air Power Development Cen
Year: 1997
ISBN: 0642265003
Binding: Soft Cover
Book Condition: As New
Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall
Description:
New book, 128 pages. In March 1917 aircraft of No.1 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, carried out a bombing mission against a Turkish railway in Palestine. During the attack, 23 year old Lieutenant Frank McNamara, although himself badly wounded, landed to pick up a fellow pilot who had been downed near a force of enemy cavalry. It was this exploit, described by the official as 'a brilliant escape in the very nick of time and under hot fire', which won McNamara the first and only Victoria Cross awarded to an Australian airman during the First World War. Joining the post-war Royal Australian Air Force, McNamara went on to attain the rank of air vice-marshal and serve in senior commands with both the RAAF and the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. But his career was a classic illustration of the dilemma of a basically ordinary man plucked from obscurity and accorded the status of national hero. Here is recounted the difficulties of living with the expectations placed on someone in his unenviable position, being both constantly lauded by admirers or belittled by jealous detractors. Ungratiously retired in 1946, the only non-posthumous VC winner ever to serve in the RAAF lived out the rest of his years as an angry exile in England.