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| | Robertson excerpt |
 | | Air combat was invented during World War I, and the public’s understanding of it derived from controlled sources of information, both in the form of overt propaganda and in the less obviously controlled accounts in the press, in newsreel footage, in ephemera bearing photographs of the great aces, and in their biographies and autobiographies. |
 | | The air war came to symbolize the older, chivalric conception of the warrior as the embodiment of all that was best in civilization—constraint under pressure, fairness to one’s enemies, skilled combat, and a willingness to sacrifice one’s life on behalf of king and country. |
 | | As a consequence, the role of the combat pilot wedded air wars with the image of civilized violence undertaken in the name of civilization, a connection between the mode of warfare and its purpose which was lost with the advent of brutal, mechanized warfare on the ground. |
| www.upress.umn.edu /excerpts/Robertson.html (3493 words) |
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