This is the story of New Zealand's military aviation from its modest beginnings in 1914 to the formation of the Royal New Zealand Air Force in 1936, the struggles of the Second World War and then the gyrations of the Cold War, wrapping up with the transition to the very different post-Cold War world of the 1990s. It is a story of politics, of aircraft, and especially of people - of the everyday New Zealanders who fought the Second World War, who served with the RNZAF and the RAF, then and later; and who found strengths in themselves that, perhaps, they did not know they had.