America's Munitions 1917-1918

by Benedict Crowell; United States. War Department

In those ancient times—for they seem ancient to us now, although less than five years have elapsed—actual fighting in the air was unknown. The aviators had no equipment for battle; indeed, it was doubtful if the thought had occurred to either side to keep down the enemy's aircraft by the use of armed force borne upon wings. In the first months of aviation in the great war the fliers of both sides recognized a sort of noblesse oblige of the air, which, if it did not make for actual friendship or fraternizing between the rival air services, at least amounted to a respect for each other often evidenced by an innocuous waving of hands as hostile flying machines passed each other.

But now the wounds of war had begun to smart; and when the Russian saw the German flier going unhindered upon a work that might bring death to thousands of soldiers in the Czar's army, a sudden rage filled his heart, and he determined to bring down his adversary, even at the cost of his own life. Maneuvering his craft, presently he was flying directly beneath the German and in the same direction and was but a short distance below his enemy's plane. Then, with a pull on his control lever, the Russian shot his machine sharply upward, hoping to upset the German and to escape himself. The result was that the machines collided, and both crashed to the ground. This was probably the first aerial combat of the war.

It seems strange to us to-day that the highly complicated and standardized art of fighting with airplanes was developed entirely during the great war and, indeed, was only started after the war had been in progress for several months. Yet such was the case. At the beginning of the war there was no such thing as armament in aircraft, either of the offensive or defensive sort. It is true that a small amount of experimentation in this direction had occurred prior to the war and also in the early months of fighting, but it was not until the summer of 1915 that air fighting, as it is so well known to the entire world to-day, was begun.

In this country we had successfully fired a machine gun from an airplane in 1912, while at the beginning of the war the French had a few heavy airplanes equipped to carry machine guns. Yet in August, 1915, Maj. Eric T. Bradley, of the United States Air Service, but then a flight sublieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps, frequently flew over the lines hunting for Germans; and his offensive armament consisted of a Lee-Enfield rifle or sometimes a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun.

The aviators in those pioneer days usually carried automatic pistols, but the danger to one side or the other from such weapons was slight, owing to the great difficulty of hitting an object moving as swiftly as an airplane travels. The earlier planes also packed a supply of trench grenades for dropping upon bodies of troops. Another pioneer offensive weapon for the airplane was the steel dart, which was dropped in quantities upon the enemy's trenches. Great numbers of these darts were manufactured in the United States for the allies, but the weapon proved to be so ineffective that it had but a brief existence.

It is said that before the pilots carried any weapons at all the first war aviators used to shoot at each other with Very pistols, which projected Roman candle balls. The start of air fighting may be said to have come when the Lewis machine guns were brought out for use in the trenches. Presently these ground guns were taken into the planes and fired from the observers' shoulders. Then for the first time war flying began to be a hazardous occupation so far as the enemy's attentions were concerned.

It was soon discovered that the machine gun was the most effective weapon of all for use on an airplane, because only with rapid firers could one hope to hunt successfully such swiftly moving prey as airplanes. It had become patent to the strategists that it was of supreme importance to keep the enemy's aircraft on the ground. Hence invention began adapting the machine gun to airplane use.

The swiftest planes of all were those of the single-seater pursuit type. It was obviously impossible for the lone pilot of one of these to drop his controls and fire a machine gun from his shoulder. This necessitated a fixed gun that could be operated while the pilot maintained complete control of his machine, and such necessity was the mother of the invention known as the synchronizing gear.

This ingenious contrivance, however, did not come at once. Most of the war planes were of the tractor type; that is, that they had the engine and propeller in front, this arrangement giving them better maneuvering and defensive powers in the air than those possessed by planes with the rear, pushing propellers. The first fixed machine gun was carried on the upper plane of the biplane so as to shoot over the arc described by the propeller. With the gun thus attached parallel to the line of flight, the pilot needed only to point the airplane itself directly at the target to have the gun trained on its objective. But such an arrangement proved to be unsatisfactory. A single belt or magazine of cartridges could, indeed, be fired from the gun, but there was no more firing on that trip, because the pilot could not reach up to the upper plane to reload the weapon.