But as soon as the war broke out the governments of the world began to appreciate what could be accomplished by these little toys of sportsmen, and to realize that the side which built and equipped the largest and fastest fleet of scouts and fighters could put out the eyes of his opponent and win the gigantic struggle; for an army or a navy cannot feel its way forward like a worm without being destroyed! This precipitated an enormous economic and manufacturing race to make enough aircraft and to train enough skilful aviators to drive the enemy from the air and get control of the third dimension. The fighting and bombing possibilities of the aeroplane were not then fully appreciated; that came afterward. Consequently the two objectives first sought in the actual designing and building of the aeroplanes were manœuvring ability and speed, and later bombing capacity. Inherent stability and sufficient factors of safety, the two chief considerations in peace construction of aircraft, were only secondary or entirely neglected.
For nearly four years this war of tools and this war in the air went on with fluctuating vicissitudes for Hun and Ally. First came the German scouting and fighting Fokkers equipped with motors which owing to their superior horse-power made them faster and more easy to manœuvre than anything the Allies had until the famous French Baby Nieuports with 110 horse-power Le Rhone engines appeared in 1916 and began to equal the Boche in those two prime requisites. Then, owing to the number of machines shot down or forced to land through engine trouble, neither side could long keep any secret of aeromotor construction or aeroplane design from an opponent. Therefore the struggle for quantity production began. In the meantime the huge bimotored Caudrons, Voisins, Breguets, Handley Pages, and Capronis began to be built in large numbers by the French, British, and Italians, and the Gothas by the Germans. Each year saw an increase in the horse-power of the motors and in the size of the aeroplanes; and still, owing to the infinite area of the skies to manœuvre in and the lack of large aerial fleets flying as a unit, neither side could prevent the scouting-machines or the bombing raiders from spying out or bombing any objective within a flying radius of two hundred miles of their aerodromes.
With the advent of the United States into the struggle it became more and more apparent to the German military leaders that they must win the war before the tremendous manufacturing and aviator resources of this country could be felt on the West Front. That, of course, was one of the cardinal reasons for the series of great German drives beginning with March 21, 1918.
The Allies, too, now fully realized that the Great War would be won in the air, so they expended every effort and resource to build aeroplanes to clear the German machines from the skies and to bomb Germany from the air. How much these raids behind the Boche lines had to do with the breaking down of the morale of the German people and Teuton soldier cannot yet be properly estimated. However, to give an idea of the severity of this war in the air and destruction wrought by bombing-machines in Germany we know that the British Independent Air Force sent out over the enemy territory squadrons of five to one hundred aeroplanes, which dumped daily, rain or shine, sixty to one hundred tons of high explosives on military objectives and manufacturing plants scattered over a belt a hundred miles wide all along the Rhine Valley. These raids penetrated as far as Essen and Heidelberg. They destroyed ammunition-dumps, railroad-yards, chemical and gas works. By blowing up railroad communications with the rear they virtually cut the arteries of the German army. Moreover, by their repeated excursions into Holland they disrupted the sleep, the rest, and the working capacity of the people in the manufacturing towns and cities in southern Germany.
In the battles in the air, too, the Allies were rapidly becoming supreme. On October 18, 1918, the British air force alone destroyed sixty-seven Hun machines and brought down fifteen more out of control, losing only fifteen machines themselves. Thus these fliers blinded the German artillery, and in contact patrol swept the Teuton trenches, bombed their motor and rail transports, and dispersed concentrations of their troops. Indeed, the only place to escape these relentless dragons of the air was actually under ground.
Meanwhile, after much delay and many mistakes, American-built aeroplanes were beginning to appear in quantity on the West Front. Here is the record of what the Americans accomplished during the short time in which they had machines: 926 German aeroplanes and 73 balloons were destroyed. The Americans lost 265 aeroplanes and 38 balloons.
Finally, in October, 1918, 350 American-built aeroplanes in one single formation dropped thirty-two tons of high explosives on Wavrille. When the armistice was signed, there were actually engaged on the West Front 740 American aeroplanes, 744 pilots, 457 observers, and 23 aerial gunners. Of these, 329 were pursuit machines, 296 observation machines, and 115 were bombers.
How much damage the French and Italians did to German aerial supremacy and manufacturing efficiency is difficult to summarize. It was very considerable and, taken in conjunction with the others, sufficient to convince the German military leaders that the Allied production of aircraft was so rapid that within less than a year at most the Allies would sweep the Huns from the skies and not even Berlin would escape the fate the Huns had so often visited upon London, Paris, and Bucharest. Finally the plea issued by the German Government to the Allies, about a month before the end, to confine air raids to within a fifty-mile zone of the fighting-line was a complete confession that the Allied supremacy of the air was one of the most deciding factors in causing Germany to surrender.
But though the primary uses of the aeroplanes during the last four years were polemic, nevertheless, several of the startling new feats demonstrate clearly what may be expected when the same aircraft manufacturers design and construct machines for the avowed purpose of commercial aerial transportation. Here are only a few of the most startling world’s records that suggest these possibilities:
On August 29, 1917, Captain Marquis Giulio Laureati flew in an S. I. A. from Turin to Naples and return, a distance of 920 miles, establishing a new non-stop flight world’s record, and a month later he and his mechanic flew from Turin to London, crossing the Alps at an altitude of 12,000 feet and negotiating a distance of 656 miles at an average speed of 89 miles an hour. The speed, however, was not remarkable, for 100 miles an hour is the average speed for big machines, and 150 miles was made by scouting-machines on the West Front during the war. On April 19 Captain E. F. White, U. S. A., in a DH-4, flew from Chicago to New York, 727 miles, without stopping, in six hours and fifty minutes.