Victor Maslin Yeates

Yeates was born at Dulwich, and educated at Colfe's School, where according to Henry Williamson he read Keats under the desk during Maths, explored woods, fields and ponds and kept a tame tawny owl.

The German Spring Offensive began just over a month later, and he flew intensively, many operational flights consisting of highly dangerous ground strafing and bombing.

During the conflict he had flown 110 sorties, 248 hours in Sopwith Camels, force landed four times, was shot down by ground fire and scored five victories (two enemy aircraft destroyed, a share in three others and with Capt.

"[6] Winged Victory is remarkable for its depictions of World War I aerial combat, such as the following excerpt: They flew over the ghastly remains of Villers-Bretonneux which were still being tortured by bursting shells upspurting in columns of smoke and debris that stood solid for a second and then floated fading away in the wind.

All along the line from Hamel to Hangard Wood the whiter puff-balls of shrapnel were appearing and fading multitudinously and incessantly...A flaming meteor fell out of a cloud close by them and plunged earthwards.

Where it fell the atmosphere was stained by a thanatognomonic black streak...Tom sitting there in the noise and the hard wind had the citied massy earth his servant tumbler, waiting upon his touch of stick or rudder for its guidance; instantly responding, ready to leap and frisk a lamb-planet amid the steady sun-bound sheep...Some of the cloud peaks thrust up to ten thousand feet; in the blue fields beyond there was an occasional flash of a tilting wing reflecting the sun.

Yeates is also interested in the management styles of the series of squadron commanders who pass through and their efforts to make the narrator a more aggressive fighter pilot.

The Camel role is unglamorous and very dangerous, machine gunning trenches and approach routes at 100 miles per hour (160 km/h) a few hundred feet up in un-armoured aircraft, with a constant threat from machine-gun fire from the soldiers beneath them.