[4] He joined the Canadian Air Force after graduating from UNB, serving as a fighter pilot; he has written books on air-force related topics, and has taught both in the United States and in Canada.
[7] Bashow's book Knights of the Air, about Canadian fighter pilots in the First World War, revisited an aspect of history covered as heroic and chivalrous by earlier writers, including Norman Harris in Knights of the Air (1958), and Arch Whitehouse's The Years of the Sky Kings (1959).
[8] Bashow sees the air war as "a dirty piece of business," in which the flying aces "were a rather ruthless bunch, who often travelled alone, looked for the weak or wounded, snuck up behind them and shot them in the back.
"[8] He weighs in on longstanding disputes, arguing that Billy Bishop did carry out a solo attack on a German aerodrome at dawn and that Roy Brown was not the pilot who shot down the "Red Baron," Manfred von Richthofen.
[8] Bashow's book All the Fine Young Eagles, about the Canadian fighter pilots in the Second World War.