Torpedo aircraft. Experiments. Use of the torpedo seaplane at Gallipoli. Slowness of its practical development. Causes of this delay. Operational difficulties. The Cuckoo, a torpedo aeroplane, produced in 1917. The Argus built to carry torpedo aeroplanes, 1918. The value of torpedo aircraft. Dreaded by Dreadnoughts. Unpopular with pilots.
The navy and private firms. Need for fighting machines, and for powerful engines. Rivalry between military and naval air services. Demand for squadrons on western front. Two naval squadrons offered in 1914, and refused. Development of aerial fighting, and of bomb-dropping. The Fokker menace in 1916. Admiralty lend four Nieuport scouts to help No. 6 Squadron. Success of the experiment. A naval squadron on the western front near Amiens, October 1916. Four fighting naval squadrons on the western front in 1917. The achievements of these squadrons.
The problem of unity of control. The War Office and the Admiralty. Director of the Air Department responsible to each of the Sea Lords. The Central Air Office at Sheerness, under the Nore Command, abolished in February 1915, and the Royal Naval Air Service placed under the orders of the Director of the Air Department. Points of difficulty raised by Commander-in-Chief of the Nore. Verdict of the naval law branch. The question of discipline. Rapid growth of Naval Air Service. Small professional training of officers entered from civil life. The navy absorbs the Royal Naval Air Service into itself, August 1915. Consequences of this. Appointment of senior naval officers to air service commands. Discipline and science. Some advantages of the change—establishment of training depot at Cranwell, and of the famous Fifth Group at Dunkirk.
Naval plan for long-distance bombing raids over Essen and Berlin. No. 3 Wing at Luxeuil formed for this purpose. The army's needs; the Luxeuil Wing broken up. Probable effects of such raids. Believers in frightfulness are very susceptible to fright.
The emergence of the new air force. How the air will come into its own.
INTRODUCTION
When Great Britain declared war upon Germany in August 1914, she staked her very existence as a free nation upon an incalculable adventure. Two new means and modes of warfare, both of recent invention, enormously increased the difficulties of forecast and seemed to make precedents useless. Former wars had been waged on the land and on the sea; the development of submarines and aircraft opened up secret ways of travel for armed vessels under the sea and promised almost unlimited possibilities of observation and offence from the heights of the air.
Of these two new weapons the submarine was brought earlier to a state of war efficiency, and because it seemed to threaten the security of our island and the power of our navy, it excited the greater apprehension. But the navigation of the air, whether by airship or aeroplane, is now recognized for the more formidable novelty. The progress of the war has proved that within the narrow seas the submarine can be countered, and that the extension of its capabilities on the high seas is beset with difficulties. For aircraft the possibilities are immense. It is not extravagant to say that the 17th of December 1903, when the Wright brothers made the first free flight through the air in a power-driven machine, marks the beginning of a new era in the history of the world.
The differences to be looked for in this new era were both over-estimated and under-estimated, according to the temper of those who considered them. Imaginative people, and sentimental people, looked for the speedy fulfilment of Tennyson's vision:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the World.