American Eagles
A History of the United States Air Force
Daniel Patterson and Clinton Terry, Lyons Press, Essex, Connecticut, 2024, 336 pages
Book Review published on: May 20, 2025
The second edition of American Eagles: A History of the United States Air Force with photography by Dan Patterson and written by Clinton Terry is a visually enthralling book. The authors take the reader on a journey from the first powered flight of the Wright brothers through U.S. military aviation history. This book's visuals are not only impactful due to the plentiful, high-quality images but also due to the captions and narrative. These two elements combine the pictures into an impressive chronicle of the United States Air Force, to commemorate the U.S. Air Force's seventy-fifth anniversary and the one hundredth anniversary of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.
Dan Patterson was the photographer for the first edition of this book twenty-five years ago, which celebrated the Air Force's fiftieth anniversary. The writer of the book's first edition, Ron Dick, published seventeen books with Patterson over the span of sixteen years. Additionally, Patterson has contributed to over forty books with his photography since 1989. In addition to his experience as a published photographer, Patterson is a private pilot. His passion for photography, storytelling, and aviation all shows through his work in American Eagles.
The writer of the second edition of American Eagles, Clinton Perry, is a history and liberal studies professor of twenty-two years at Mercer University in Georgia. His two fields of study, the history of warfare and the history of technology, make him uniquely qualified to write this book. According to Perry and the publisher, much of this edition's text is based on the text from the first edition written by Ron Dick. Dick was a retired air vice-admiral of the Royal Air Force and passed away in 2008.
Clinton Perry clearly expresses his goal for this book, "This book represents ... an updated tribute to the men and women who defend and fight for the United States of America on the 75th Anniversary of the founding of the USAF as a separate branch of the nation's military." In the preface, Dan Patterson expresses his desire to tell "[t]he stories of human achievement [which] surpass the hardware that is left behind."
The American Eagles has two substantial strengths and one weakness. The strengths are its organization and its appropriate amount of detail. Its weakness is a noticeable number of typos that distract from the text at times. Still, this weakness does not take away from the exceptional storytelling with the commingling of words and images. Over the 336 pages, there are 651 images. The book's impressive visuals with accompanying commentary create a narrative that goes beyond the words on the page. This book doesn't simply tell a story of a branch of the military or its equipment; it includes the people who made it possible and the world in which they lived.
American Eagles is organized chronologically. The two forewords, the introduction, and the preface provide a great insight into the original edition of this book and why a second edition was necessary. Once the authors established the outcomes of the book, they began with the dawn of powered flight with the Wright brothers. The authors quickly demonstrate how this heavier-than-air flight found a home with the military and how quickly technology evolved over the two world wars. They dedicated almost a quarter of the book's pages to World War II, with the period only covering about 5 percent of the years of the book's history. Despite this apparent incongruence of time-period discussed to pages used, this was an effective use of the space. It set the rest of the book up to display the rapid evolution of aerospace technology, airframe employment in warfare, and how political goals and policies leveraged these emerging technologies.
The post-World War II portion of the book does a great job covering where we are today in aerospace technology and how we generally got there in the post-WWII and post-Cold War eras. The final chapter does not discuss a technological, organizational, or political issue. Instead, it answers how the Air Force Museum can be older than the Air Force. This part was both informative and fascinating. It showed the interplay between a portion of the government and a nonprofit organization and how those two can cooperate to preserve a portion of our American heritage and culture to pass on to future generations.
Overall, American Eagles is a great book to understand how the Air Force arrived where it is today. It does an excellent job of illustrating the story of the service's origins and its maturation. The authors excel at integrating the machines, the people, and the organizations to make a coherent narrative while leveraging the imagery to engage the reader. I recommend this book to anyone interested in developing an initial but still deep understanding of the Air Force's history and lineage.
Book Review written by: Lt. Col. Stephen G. Redmon, U.S. Army, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas