Carroll V. Glines, Jr.

A biography of the two brothers, unknown bicycle repairmen, who built and flew the first powered airplane in 1903.

"In 1945, four emaciated American airmen were released from a Japanese prison in Peking, China. Their release made immediate headlines around the world and their poignant story answered a riddle that had mystified the Air Force since their disappearance forty months before. These men were the surviving members of two B-25 crews that had followed the famous Jimmy Doolittle on his epic raid to Japan."--Page ix.

Explains the mapping and surveying of the moon in preparation for the lunar landing of the near future.

The stories of Jimmy Doolittle's Tokyo raiders: their bombing mission against Japan and their struggle to survive and escape their pursuers in China.

He set polar flight records, organized a series of daring wartime air operations, and became a leader in Arctic aviation. But despite these achievements, Norwegian-American aviator Bernt Balchen saw his public image and military career repeatedly undermined by his one-time mentor, the famous and influential Admiral Richard Byrd. In this new biography, Carroll Glines describes how Byrd's respect for Balchen's talents gradually eroded even as Balchen steadily gained a wider reputation for courage and technical skill. Glines contends that Byrd derailed Balchen's postwar promotion to brigadier general, forcing his retirement from the military in 1956. He also documents how Balchen's publisher bowed to pressure from Byrd's supporters to remove material from a 1958 autobiography. Balchen had argued that Byrd's claims to have been the first to fly across the North Pole in 1926 could not be supported by speed and distance calculations.