It was the first major conflict where animals (cavalry/pack animals) stopped being relevant with the advent of the battle tanks and trucks.WW1 was unique for a few very important reasons:
While humans have always since time immemorial, been perfecting the art of slaughtering each other, WWI was a major game changer when it came to art of warfare. (Biggles learns to fly, Biggles of the Camel Squadron, Biggles in France etc.) I used to pour over them when a kid and imagined piloting a Sopwith Camel over marine drive, Cochin back then. Please do check out those books if you are interested in the same. James about his famous character Bigglesworth who joins the RFC (Royal Flying Corps) at a tender age of 17 and becomes a flying ace during WW1 over the western front. Note: One of the reasons I fell in love with the topic was because I discovered (in my youth) the novels written by Capt. I am a big WW1 and WW2 plane aficionado and I hope (by writing this article) that more people get bitten by the same bug. But back in the heydays of fighter planes, the planes were more machines of “Dogfight” where the enemy plane was often 50 feet away from you and the fights highly personal. Today with the use of modern tech, radar and guided missiles fighter planes and drones have become more of instruments of “Aerial Combat” where the enemy remains unseen and the fight remains highly impersonal. We today talk about the fifth and sixth generation fighter planes but not many people are aware of the initial days of air warfare. The first flyers were pioneers, who often risked their lives and livelihood financially bootstrapping their own flights with flimsy rudimentary machines either for fame or the adrenalin rush.Īnother fascinating topic for me growing up was the evolution of fighter planes. I truly am amazed when I think of the initial batch of people who took to the skies chasing their Icarus-isque dreams. Today air transport is often called the safest way to travel but it was not the same a hundred years back. So much has changed over the last 100 years and we now take air transport for granted often not realizing the extent of technological changes over the years. It was a relatively short flight of 12 seconds but paraphrasing the famous words of Neil Armstrong, it was a “Giant leap for humankind”. What people dreamt about for centuries was made possible on December 17th, 1903 by the Wright Brothers. Right from a young age, I have always been fascinated by the human achievement of mastering flight. I will come back to that particular film sequence later in the article. It was cathartic in many ways since I had to sift through many childhood memories and forge my way down the rabbit role through endless google hyperlinks.
Anyways, after the film, I finally planted my firm bottom very firmly onto a seat like a leech and did the necessary research for writing this article. This theme had been at the back of my mind for a long-long time and being an expert at procrastination does not help. Last week, I watched Avatar: The Way of Water in a theatre near me and it was in that film during a certain fight sequence that I knew that I had to write this article immediately.
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