Fighter aces from the First World War generally have a glamorous and heroic reputation. However, a close examination of their wartime lives can often challenge this positive view. This presentation will examine the meaning of the term ‘authentic hero’ and whether these stories truly challenge any notion of authenticity in wartime. It will also consider the extent to which the popular mythology surrounding First World War aces is guilty of trying to sanitise their war and hold them to a moral standard that was hard for anyone to match.

Michael Terry is currently working on his PhD thesis for the Open University on the Representation of First World War Aerial Combat in Literature. His work examines how this body of work confounds our general expectations of what First World War literature should be like and how it helped form a mythology about early aerial combat that persists to this day. Michael won the 2023 RAF Museum Doctoral Bursary and the RAF Historical Society’s Henry Probert Bursary in 2024. He delivered the 2024 GWAS Leaman Lecture and has previously spoken at the Institut Historique Allemand, The RAF Museum and the British Commission for Military History.