Teaching military history at the Greek School of Air Force in Athens gave us the opportunity to have access to the archives of aviation, in which we had often refered to in order to extract historical data. Primary documents, so authentic, have provided a fairly complete but also a quite captivating image of the heroic action of aviators during the two World Wars. Could national values, sources of patriotic inspiration such as heroism, courage, self-sacrifice, selflessness, solidarity, scrupulousness and national pride associated with qualities of efficiency, means of patriotic power, such as competence, composure and ingenuity, provide, within a military and dramatic historical context, marked by war, direct evidence of patriotism?Based on a "semantic" method we searched in the primary sources for those significant elements which were considered essential to the representation of what really motivated these officers.In all cases, the result is that both the national values as well as the qualities of efficiency, available to the Greek aviators during the two world wars, regardless of the organization of the evolution of the new army forces and conditions, provided direct examples of patriotism.After extensive research in the archives of the Greek Air Force, a large number of historical documents on the Asia Minor Catastrophe was found which could be studied and analyzed in future research.
