Just at this time General Birdwood, who had been sent by Lord Kitchener to the Dardanelles to report on the possibilities of a landing, and Admiral de Robeck, who was in command of the naval forces there, telegraphed to the War Office and the Admiralty that a man-lifting kite or a captive balloon would be of great use to the navy for spotting long-range fire and detecting concealed batteries. The Admiralty at once appropriated a tramp steamer, S.S. Manica, which was lying at Manchester, fitted her with a rough and ready apparatus, and on the 27th of March dispatched her with a kite-balloon section under Flight Commander J. D. Mackworth to the Dardanelles. This was the first kite balloon used by us in the war, and, it is believed, the first kite-balloon ship fitted out by any navy. The observation work done from the Manica was good and useful, especially during the earlier phase of the operations, and the difficulties encountered suggested many improvements in the balloon and in the ship. Orders were given for six balloon ships to be fitted out.
Admiral Beatty, in August 1915, recommended that the work of aerial observation for the fleet should be done by kite balloons, towed by vessels accompanying the Battle Cruiser Squadron, and some trials were made which demonstrated the value of this suggestion. But here again very elaborate experiments were necessary before authorizing any large programme of construction, and in the meantime production on a considerable scale had become difficult, for the kite balloon, which was first manufactured in this country to the order of the navy, was already in great demand by the army for use on the western front. As early as April 1915 the Army Council had asked the Admiralty to supply kite balloons for aerial observation with the expeditionary force in France, and by August of that year five kite-balloon sections had gone overseas and were doing invaluable work on the western front. At this point the kite-balloon sections working with the army were taken over by the War Office, but the Admiralty continued to provide the necessary material and equipment. Great Britain was involved in the greatest land war she had ever known, and the navy, with all the wealth of its inventive resources, stood by to help the army.
The two other forms of aircraft which were invented or adapted by the navy for the needs of the war, that is to say, the submarine scout airship and the flying boat, must here be mentioned and their origin described; but their great achievement belongs to the later period of the war, when the defeat of the German submarine campaign had become a matter of life or death for the British Commonwealth.
The small airship called the 'S.S.', or Submarine Scout, was an invention of the first year of the war. On the 28th of February 1915 Admiral Fisher sent for Commander E. A. D. Masterman and Wing Commander N. F. Usborne, and told them that he wanted some small, fairly fast airships to operate against the German submarines, and that he wanted them at once. There was no time for experiment or the elaboration of new designs; speed in production was essential, and speed could not be attained except by the adaptation of existing types and the use of standard parts. The navy is seen at its best when it has to rise to an unforeseen occasion; within three weeks the first of the now famous S.S.'s was ready for service. For the design of this airship it is as difficult to apportion credit among the small band of naval officers who had a hand in it as it is to divide the praise for the first flying machine between the brotherhood of the Wrights. The idea seems to have been struck out during a conversation in the mess at Farnborough at which there were present the late Wing Commander N. F. Usborne, Flight Lieutenant T. R. Cave-Browne-Cave, and Mr. F. M. Green of the Royal Aircraft Factory. In the result the body, or fuselage, of a B.E. 2c aeroplane was slung on to the envelope of a Willows airship, and the job was done. The success of this airship was as great as its design was simple. It fairly fulfilled the main requirements—to remain aloft for eight hours in all ordinary kinds of weather, with a speed of from forty to fifty miles an hour, and carrying a load which should include a wireless telegraphy installation for the purposes of report and a hundred and sixty pounds' weight of bombs for more immediate use. The first twenty-five of these ships to be produced were fitted with the 70 horse-power Renault engine. Variations and improvements of the design followed in steady succession, providing greater endurance, and more comfortable cars for the crew. One of these variants, the C. 1 or coastal type, used an Astra-Torres envelope and a car made from two Avro fuselages with the tails cut off; a later and larger design, the N.S. 1, or North Sea type, in use at the end of the war, had an endurance, on occasion, of from two to three days.
Airship work against submarines, an authority on the subject has remarked, partakes of the nature of research work. An airship is comparatively slow in manœuvring, and is an instrument of knowledge rather than of power. For swift assault on submarines, once they are located, the seaplane is better; but the seaplane was not seaworthy. The need for some kind of aircraft which should be able to search the North Sea far and wide for submarines, and, having found them, should be able to destroy them without calling for the assistance of surface craft, was met by the development of the flying boat. There was a flying boat in use by the navy before the war—the small pusher Sopwith Bat boat. It had a stepped hull, like a racing motor-boat, about twenty feet long and four feet in the beam. This was the only flying boat used by the Naval Air Service when the war began; when it ended they were flying the Felixstowe Fury, a giant boat triplane which, with its load, weighed fifteen tons, was driven by five 360 horse-power engines, and carried four guns in addition to a supply of heavy bombs. The development of this type of aircraft for the purposes of the war must be credited chiefly to the late Lieutenant-Colonel John Cyril Porte, who had been an officer of the Royal Navy and a pioneer of aviation. As early as 1909, when he was a naval lieutenant, he had experimented with a glider on Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth. Two years later he was invalided out of the service, and devoted his enforced leisure to aviation. He learned to fly at Rheims, on a Deperdussin monoplane, and in 1912 was appointed technical director and designer of the British Deperdussin Company. The first British-built monoplane of this type, with a 100 horse-power Anzani engine, was of his design, and was flown by him at the Military Aeroplane Trials on Salisbury Plain in 1912. After the trials he flew to Hendon, a distance of eighty-two miles, in one hour and five minutes. During the following summer he spent some time experimenting with a waterplane at Osea Island in Essex. When the British Deperdussin Company was broken up he went to America, and joined Mr. Glenn Curtiss at Hammondsport, New York, in the task of designing a flying boat to cross the Atlantic. Then the war came; on the day it was declared he sailed for England, re-entered the navy, and was at once made a squadron commander of the Royal Naval Air Service. For a time he was in command of the newly-formed naval air station at Hendon, where he trained pilots for the service; then, in September 1915, he was given the command of the Felixstowe Naval Air Station. This was his opportunity, and he did not let it slip. The Curtiss flying boats which were procured from America were of inferior workmanship and had many faults. He patiently went to work to improve and perfect them. 'There would probably not have been any big British flying boats', says one who worked with him, 'but for the vision, persistence, and energy, in the face of disbelief and discouragement, of Colonel J. C. Porte, C.M.G., who designed and built at Felixstowe Air Station the experimental machine of each type of British flying boat successfully used in the service. His boats were very large, the types used in the war weighing from four and a half to six and a half tons, and carried sufficient petrol for work far out from land, and big enough bombs to damage or destroy a submarine otherwise than by a direct hit.... The boats were very seaworthy, and no lives were lost in operations from England owing to unseaworthiness.'
The technical problems to be faced were very difficult; and powerful flying boats were not in action till the spring of 1917. But this was in the nick of time to meet the great German submarine effort. During the following year—the crucial year of the naval war—forty flying boats were put into commission; they sighted in all sixty-eight enemy submarines, and they bombed forty-four, some of which it was subsequently proved that they had sunk.
Through all his strenuous work for the navy, Colonel Porte had to do battle with ill health; he retired in 1919, and in October of that year died suddenly at Brighton, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. The shortest possible list of those who saved the country in its hour of need would have to include his name.
Another purely naval use of aircraft, on which, during the war, much effort was spent, was their use for the carrying and launching of torpedoes. The torpedo has long been one of the chief weapons of naval warfare; it is commonly carried by surface or submarine craft to the place where it can be launched against the enemy. If it could be carried and launched by rapid aircraft, its value would be enormously increased, and the torpedo-carrying aeroplane or seaplane would outrival the submarine as a weapon of offence against enemy shipping. This was very early recognized by those who were concerned in developing naval aircraft. The first experiments are said to have been made in 1911 by an Italian, Captain Guidoni, who made use of a Farman machine, and released from it a torpedo weighing 352 pounds. In the same year the little group of naval officers who were superintending the construction of the Mayfly at Barrow-in-Furness had many discussions on the subject. One of them, Lieutenant Hyde-Thomson, subsequently drafted a paper on torpedo aircraft, with some rough sketches; in 1913 a design was got out at the Admiralty, and in the same year Mr. Sopwith constructed two sample machines. From this time onward the hope of using the torpedo, launched from the air, against ships which are sheltered and protected from naval attack, was never long absent from the minds of those who directed the activities of the Royal Naval Air Service. It was this hope, more than anything else, which inspired the production of larger seaplanes and higher powered engines. At the naval review of July 1914, a Short seaplane of 160 horse-power had been fitted, in a temporary fashion, to carry a 14-inch torpedo weighing 810 pounds. With the same end in view, after the war broke out, the principal manufacturers of motor-cars were encouraged to develop air engines of high power, especially the Sunbeam engine of 225 horse-power, and the Rolls-Royce engine, which played so distinguished a part in the war. When H.M.S. Engadine was fitted out as a carrier in the first month of the war, it was expressly stated by the Admiralty that her business was to carry torpedo seaplanes to the scene of action. Later on, at Gallipoli, seaplanes shipped in the Ben my Chree succeeded in flying across the Isthmus of Bulair and in torpedoing a merchant ship on the shore of the Sea of Marmara, an ammunition ship at Ak Bashi Liman, and a steam tug in the Straits.
All this seemed full of promise. The modern torpedo is a very efficient weapon, and the problem of designing an aeroplane or seaplane to carry it was a problem requiring adaptation rather than new invention. Yet the development of torpedo aircraft during the war was, in the words of an official memorandum, 'astonishingly slow'. After the Gallipoli exploits nothing of importance in this kind was achieved during the years that followed, until the very end of the war.
The causes of this disappointment were many. In the first place the seaplane, which seems almost as if it had been designed to carry a torpedo suspended between its floats, was itself a disappointment. It proved to be a fair-weather craft. Seaplanes were used, early in the war, to carry out reconnaissances in the neighbourhood of the Ems river; of those launched for this work more than half had their floats broken up, and sank before they could rise from the water. Moreover, in addition to this main objection, there were other obstacles to the development of torpedo-carrying aircraft. The chief of these were what are officially described as 'operational difficulties'. On the high seas, it must be remembered, and in other easily accessible waters, there were no enemy ships to be attacked. To use torpedoes against warships in their harbours or sheltered waters, specially designed aircraft must first make long and difficult flights. In the meantime, while the war was young, there was a distressing shortage of aircraft for other and more immediate purposes nearer home. The ships assigned as carriers for aircraft had to be employed at times in mine-seeking and other necessary operations. The machines themselves were much in demand for the purposes of reconnaissance. Experiment continued at Calshot; practice attacks were carried out with machines from Felixstowe, and convinced the naval authorities of the value of torpedo aircraft; a successful torpedo aeroplane, called the Cuckoo, was designed in 1916 by Messrs. Sopwith, and was produced in the following year by Messrs. Blackburn; finally, in 1917, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet asked for two hundred torpedo aeroplanes to be provided for the fleet at the earliest possible date. The bulk of these machines had to be made by inexperienced firms, so that the first squadron of torpedo aeroplanes for the fleet was not completed till October 1918, when it embarked in H.M.S. Argus. There had been earlier schemes for a torpedo seaplane school at Felixstowe and at Scapa in the Orkneys; but now, in the summer of 1918, a torpedo aeroplane school was established at East Fortune, and the 1918 programme arranged also for another torpedo aeroplane school and a torpedo aeroplane experimental squadron, both at Gosport.