author
V. M.
Best known for the remarkable novel Winged Victory, this British writer drew on his own First World War flying experience to create one of the starkest portraits of air combat in modern literature. His work is admired for its honesty, emotional force, and refusal to romanticize war.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Born in 1897, Victor Maslin Yeates served as a fighter pilot in the First World War. He flew Sopwith Camels with the Royal Flying Corps and was later taken prisoner after being shot down, experiences that deeply shaped his writing.
Yeates is remembered above all for Winged Victory, published in 1934. The novel is often described as a powerful and unusually realistic account of aerial warfare, combining vivid action with a strong sense of exhaustion, fear, and the human cost of combat.
He died in 1934, the same year the book appeared, but Winged Victory has endured as his lasting achievement. Readers continue to return to it not just as a war story, but as a deeply personal novel about survival, disillusionment, and the realities behind heroic legend.