A History of Army Aviation: From Its Beginnings to the War on Terror

The definitive history of Army Aviation from the beginning to present operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you like aviation history this is a wonderful resource. Should be in every library collection. A great gift for anyone interested in aviation.

Book gives you the history of the US Army aviation to the current date.covering the US Army fight againstterrorism.

This is a history of one part of Army aviation, the part played by the senior officers and as viewed from the Pentagon rather than the cockpit. The author seems more interested in the perspective of the commanders and the senior officers in the Department of Defense and Department of the Army. Of course there are lots of "there I was" combat war story books out there, and this title tells a different story in a very academic way, from a distance, and that could be a good thing. Regretfully, Dr. Williams omits some extremely important events from this book. One of those is the arrival of two H-21 helicopter companies in Viet Nam in November of 1961, the 8th and 57th, and these two companies were soon conducting air assault missions quite like those of today. The important part of that story is that, so far as I can tell, the men of these units invented the air mobility mission, the air assault mission, and they cobbled together ways to put machineguns on their aircraft...without any published doctrine I have yet discovered. The story of these two units and the others that joined them conducting combat air assaults in RVN from 1961 to 1965 is missing from this book, along with so much more. The author seems to have done his research with field-grade commissioned officers; they have one part of the story to tell but a fairly small part of what interests me.And for such a detailed book, the lack of an index is quite unfortunate.

This book covers a lot of ground, but suffers a bit from the sheer amount of detail. The organizational changes in Army Aviation are highlighted, and it is useful to know what organizational structures have been implemented at various times, but the cohesiveness of the story is often sidetracked. It is always a struggle to produce an exhaustive history while explaining how these details relate to the bigger picture, so I sympathize with the author.Unfortunately, it felt as though a large portion of the book was spent slogging through minutiae, and chronological progression was interspersed with thematic progression. I would give the content 4 stars, principally because the applications of aviation in particular engagements was given limited treatment, as were the advances in technology.I think that the best insight that I found in the book was the discussion of the particular difficulties encountered by the Army in providing for equivalent career development for soldiers in Aviation. In this regard, the author recounted the events as a continuing theme, and developed it into a cohesive story.I don't think that I could reconcile the desire to document all of the events covered in this book with a cohesive and engaging story without adding at least 50% to its length, so maybe that is the constraint that prevailed.The readability of the book makes it overall 3 stars in my opinion. As a reference, this book could be useful, but the astounding detail of the book makes the whole volume a giant index, and finding particular discussions requires knowing a priori where to look chronologically and thematically.

Good gift for my father, a retired Army pilot

This book is a must read for ALL Army aviators. All you Warrant Officers will be surprised to find out that the Commissioned Officers did most of the flying in Vietnam.