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Archie's War: Allied Anti-Aircraft Units of World War I: Guns, Gunners, Air Raids, and Collectibles, 1914-1918
Paperback
Series: Everyday Life in the Great War, Book 16
General World HistoryWeaponry & VehiclesWorld War I
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 3 2026
Pages: 470
Weight: 1.44
Height: 0.95 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
Allied Anti-Aircraft Units of World War I: Guns, Gunners, Air Raids, and Collectibles, 1914-1918
Before radar, before guided missiles, before the great anti-aircraft batteries of the Second World War, there was Archie.
In the First World War, aircraft changed battle forever. At first, soldiers looked up at aeroplanes with curiosity. Soon they learned to fear them. Enemy aircraft photographed trenches, directed artillery, attacked observation balloons, bombed cities, and brought war to roads, railways, ports, ammunition dumps, and civilian streets.
The armies of the Allies had to answer a new question:
How do you fight an enemy in the sky?
Archie's War tells the story of the first Allied anti-aircraft units of World War I, from early improvisation in 1914 to organised air defence by 1918. It follows British, French, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Italian, and other Allied efforts to defend armies and cities against aircraft, Zeppelins, Gotha bombers, and observation planes.
Inside this book, readers will discover:
- The first improvised guns and machine guns fired at aircraft
- The birth of French DCA and British Archie sections
- Zeppelin and Gotha raids over Britain
- The defence of London, Paris, railways, ports, balloons, and the Western Front
- Searchlights, sound locators, fuzes, shell bursts, and early air-warning systems
- American AEF anti-aircraft training and the first U.S. dedicated AA guns
- Dominion forces and forgotten theatres including Italy, Salonika, Egypt, and Palestine
- A detailed collector's guide to badges, photographs, shell cases, fuzes, trench art, manuals, maps, raid souvenirs, and paper ephemera
- Identification tips, display ideas, provenance forms, terminology, and collector warnings
Written for historians, collectors, military enthusiasts, reenactors, museum volunteers, and readers of forgotten wartime history, this book brings together the battlefield story and the surviving objects of the first air-defence war.
The men of Archie often missed their targets. But they changed modern warfare.
They taught armies to look up.
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