well regarded as an authentic depiction of World War I aerial combat. Yeates's school friend Henry Williamson helped him edit the manuscript, assisted in finding a publisher, and eventually contributed a foreword to a republished edition of Winged Victory. There he supported a review in the New York Saturday Review of Literature, that it was "one of the great books of our time." Yeates wrote in the flyleaf of Williamson's copy of Winged Victory that: "I started [writing the book] in April 1933 in Colindale Hospital. I could not write there, so walked out one morning, the doctor threatening death. I wrote daily till the end of the year. My chief difficulty was to compromise between truth and art, for I was writing a novel that was to be an exact reproduction of the period and an exact analysis and synthesis of a state of mind." Descriptions of aerial combat Winged Victory is remarkable for its depictions of World War I aerial combat, such as the following excerpt: The novel's discursiveness and realism make it one of the most intriguing descriptions of life on the Western Front: the interactions with French residents, the diet of the officer's mess, travel on home leave and recuperation at Army Medical facilities; what officers talked about, the tunes on the gramophone, the food on offer, the narrator's heroic drinking. 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 narrator is tormented by his inability to match the out-and-out warriors and aces who constitute the ideal. He is deeply honest about the growing stress and debilitation as his friends die one by one and he longs for his tour of duty to reach its end. Philosophy about war In Winged Victory Yeates regularly expressed disillusion with the war, with his senior officers and with the causes of war, more typical of the 1930s than of the time he describes: The novel is occasionally over-written or unduly discursive but contains a realistic portrait of RFC and then RAF life and operations on the Western Front, starting with the launch of Operation Michael, the gigantic German Spring Offensive on 21 March 1918. The narrator and his squadron are ground down by ground attack operations against the German army, as the Allied Armies fight for their lives,