René Fonck - Ensemble déployant une stratégie d’aviation militaire après la Première Guerre mondiale - 1930

In-4, 48 plates and tracings (the tracings accompany the plates of which they are duplicates, some plates are alone and some tracings are still attached to their reproduction plate by an original paper clip), S.l., circa 1930

Provenance: Family of René Fonck

This set of plates representing various detailed attacks each in several planes is the work of René Fonck. Aptly nicknamed "the ace of aces" for his record number of 75 homologated victories, Fonck owed his survival to his cautious technique. Among the notable victories is that over the airmen who had shot down Guynemer and Roland Garros.
During the interwar period, he wanted to prevent disaster by proposing in detail attacks by phases.
Politically, he got closer to Pétain while practically he was closer to de Gaule who wanted an essential role for armored vehicles. He could not convince Pétain but wanted to deliver his techniques to the public through these unpublished plates to our knowledge. During the Occupation, opponent of Laval and arousing a certain mistrust of the Germans, his role was ambiguous since after serious troubles in 1944, he obtained Resistance certificates in 1948