The republic

February 17th, 1914, was an unremarkable day to the world-and a quietly momentous one to history. On that single winter morning, three lives began paths that would one day intersect in ways no strategist, politician, or prophet could have predicted.

In South Dakota, James Johnson Greenebaum was born into a world already sliding toward catastrophe, unaware that he would grow into a blunt-spoken prodigy whose grasp of modern warfare would reshape an army. Across the Atlantic, a young Johan Fuchs took his first step into the German Navy's fledgling aviation corps, standing at the edge of a new kind of warfare that few yet understood. That same day, Alfred Smith-already hardened by discipline and British stubbornness in equal measure-signed on with the aviation arm of the British Army, trading comfort for altitude and certainty for clouds.

Separated by oceans, loyalties, and flags, the three men could not have known that the choices made on that single date would ripple forward through decades of war, politics, and innovation. This book traces their parallel beginnings, their divergent roads through the chaos of the early twentieth century, and the unseen threads pulling them toward a shared destiny.

How would a brash American, a meticulous German aviator, and an irascible British officer come together to form a military powerhouse-one that would quietly, decisively aid the Allies in the greatest war the world had ever known?