Suffused with the romance of flight and the harsh realities of aerial combat, Rogers’s letters to his fiancée, Isabelle Young, vividly detail his wartime experiences against a lethal and elusive opponent exemplified by the likes of Baron von Richthofen’s Flying Circus.

Of the three hundred-plus Americans who joined the British air corps in 1917, only Rogers and two dozen other volunteers became “aces” by shooting down five or more German planes. He himself claimed six “kills” in fighting during the Second Battle of the Marne, the Somme Offensive, Cambrai, Ypres-Lys, and six other major engagements.