Description
Book SynopsisOver and Above is Gurdon’s first and best book, repeatedly reprinted for two decades, variously titled Winged Warriors or Wings of Death. Billed as a novel, it is not so much that as a fictionalised account of his own service flying career, with names changed, incidents rearranged. True, it tells of ‘exciting raids over enemy lines and towns, desperate fights against fearful odds, chivalry shown to an unchivalrous foe...’ but the narrative turns darker as men become wearier, new comrades arrive and are killed, and those who remain try to hold onto meaning in increasingly unintelligible circumstances, a mirror to Gurdon’s own experiences.
Written in the style of the era and by and for a class which put great store in maintaining a slangy, backslapping cheerfulness, no matter how grim things were, with chums wishing each other ‘beaucoup Huns’ before embarking on a ‘show’ in ‘beastly’ weather, this book is a classic to rank with Winged Victory by V M Yeates, and which should never have been out of print.
This new edition retains exactly the original script but has been updated with an introduction by John Gurdon’s granddaughter Camilla Jane Gurdon Blakeley and an extended illustrated appendix by renowned historian Norman Franks.
Trade ReviewGrub Street has re-issued a number of Great War aviator books and this one is up there with the best of them. Gurdon, as Warton, is heroic and tragic. He was just a kid. Imagine the youth of today climbing into a fighter and shooting down twenty-eight enemy aeroplanes in the length of a summer madness?
This book is well worth reading to appreciate the author for the brave and flawed young man he was. In later life, Gurdon lived in straitened circumstances, the consequences of the decisions he made as a younger man.
-- Mark Barnes * War History Online *
