AustLit

'Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, there appeared a comparatively new genre of Australian war novel which sought to give readers some insight about the unique dangers of aerial combat and the intense pressures faced by Australian aircrews that fought in World War II and the Korean War. Yet few, if any, of these novels have ever been admitted into the canon of great Australian war literature.

A key reason for such exclusion, it will be argued, was that the mechanised nature of air warfare, coupled with the class-conscious hierarchy of the air force itself, placed these novels in direct opposition to the enduring appeal of the ANZAC 'legend', which was underpinned by the image of the egalitarian Australian soldier—the archetypal 'digger'.

Another equally telling reason for their diminished artistic status is that many of these novels emanated from the ranks of 'popular' paperbacks, which were routinely shunned by contemporary critics and remain almost continually overlooked by present-day scholars.

However, as this article will demonstrate, such critical disdain fails to acknowledge how systemic changes to Australia's post-war publishing landscape made it possible for a new generation of Australian war novelist, such as William R. Bennett, to reach a truly mass audience, for whom tales of aerial combat were not so much a celebration of an outmoded martial ideal of the Australian soldier, but an exciting harbinger of the technological age in which they lived.' (p. 216)