This verdict threw the organization of the Royal Naval Air Service once more into the melting-pot. The question of discipline was at the root of the whole matter. The navy were not willing to hand over the control of discipline to a body which, though it was called the Royal Naval Air Service, was much looser in discipline than the Royal Navy. The causes of this comparative laxity are easily intelligible. When the war came, the need for new pilots was pressing; the training accommodation at the Central Flying School and at Eastchurch was wholly inadequate; so the Admiralty had at once made arrangements for entering officers direct from civilian life, and for training them at civilian schools of aviation, such as the schools at Brooklands, Hendon, and Eastbourne. The important thing at the outbreak of war was to get officers who could fly a machine, and to get them quickly. Of professional training in naval knowledge and naval discipline there was perforce little. The spirit of adventure brought many youths at a very early age into the Naval Air Service; some of them were entered as commissioned officers, and were paid fourteen shillings a day at an age at which the regular sea service officer was being paid one shilling and ninepence a day, less threepence for the naval instructor. It is not to be wondered at that the high spirits of some of these untrained youths, and their festive behaviour, exposed them to the criticism of older officers who cared for the high traditions of the navy. The expansion of the Naval Air Service was too rapid to admit of that slow maturing process which makes a good sailor. When, at the end of May 1915, Mr. Winston Churchill vacated his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty, he remarked on the rapid expansion of the service during his period of office. 'At the beginning of hostilities', he says, 'there were under a hundred officers and six hundred men. Most of these were transferred from the Navy proper, a small percentage only being civilians. At present there are over fifteen hundred officers and eleven thousand men.... We had at the beginning of the war a total of sixty-four aeroplanes and seaplanes. This of course represents a very minute proportion of our present numbers, of which all that I can publicly say is that they total more than one thousand.'
During the first winter of the war a short course in gunnery was arranged for young officers at the naval gunnery school at Whale Island, Portsmouth, where they were instructed also in drill, discipline, and the handling of men. This was a beginning, but it was not enough. The pioneers of the Naval Air Service had had an uphill task; they had worked untiringly in the cause of naval aeronautics, to achieve progress in the new art, and to get recognition for it from the Sea Lords. The recognition, when it came at last, was overwhelming. The navy claimed the Royal Naval Air Service as its own, and absorbed it into itself. The immediate motive for this was disciplinary, but the thing was a compliment, none the less, to the work of the air service. In the summer of 1915 the German submarine menace in the Channel became serious, and the officer in command of the Dover Patrol, who was responsible for the Straits, knew that for the work to be done from his bases at Dover and Dunkirk aircraft were essential.
In July the whole question was brought before the Board of Admiralty, and regulations for the reorganization of the Royal Naval Air Service were approved, to take effect on the 1st of August. These regulations are explicit and clear. 'The Royal Naval Air Service' (so they begin) 'is to be regarded in all respects as an integral part of the Royal Navy, and in future the various air stations will be under the general orders of the Commander-in-Chief or Senior Naval Officers in whose district they are situated.
'The Commander-in-Chief or Senior Naval Officer will visit the stations within his command or district from time to time, or depute a suitable officer to visit them on his behalf, to ensure that the discipline of the station is maintained.... Copies of reports on operations are to be forwarded direct to the Admiralty. It will be the duty of the Director of the Air Department to visit the various air stations from time to time ... with a view to ensuring that the technical training of the personnel is being carried out as laid down by their Lordships, and that the station is efficiently organized and equipped in respect to works and materiel.'
These are the main provisions of the new orders. The grouping of the air stations (which by this time were more than fifty in number) under the various commands was given in detail. The detachments stationed at Dunkirk and elsewhere in France and Belgium were put, for disciplinary purposes, under the orders of the Rear-Admiral, Dover. The inland stations at Hendon, Chingford, Wormwood Scrubbs, and Roehampton were put immediately under the Admiralty. Sweeping changes followed in appointments. The post of Director of the Air Department was abolished, and Commodore Murray Sueter was placed in charge of the construction section of the remodelled department. An officer of flag rank, Rear-Admiral C. L. Vaughan-Lee, was given the newly created post of Director of Air Services. A senior Naval Air Service officer, Wing Commander C. L. Lambe, R.N., who had been captain of the Hermes, was appointed to command the air patrols at Dover and Dunkirk, under the orders of Vice-Admiral R. H. Bacon. Other changes which followed were so numerous that in effect a new service was formed. When the Air Department was reorganized in the spring of 1916, it was divided into two sections—Administration and Construction. Each of these sections included a considerable diversity of business, which was classified, and placed under the separate control of eight responsible officers. Of these eight only two—Squadron Commander Clark Hall, who was responsible for aeroplane and seaplane design, and Squadron Commander W. Briggs, who was responsible for engines—were officers of the original Royal Naval Air Service. Most of the newly appointed administrative officers had no previous knowledge of aircraft or aircraft operations; what they were chosen for was their power of organization, their strict sense of discipline, their untiring energy, and their pride in the ancient service to which they belonged. The senior naval officer who was inexperienced in the air was promoted over the heads of the pioneers of naval aviation who were junior in the navy.
There is no unmixed good on earth. The debate between discipline and progress can never be settled dogmatically one way or the other. Those who have to lead men into battle are agreed that without discipline progress is useless. A crowd of undrilled men of science could not stand the push of a platoon of common soldiers. On the other hand, it is all-important that the higher command in war shall be susceptible to science, and it has been maintained, not without evidence, that the life of discipline and loyalty which procures promotion in a public service does not usually increase susceptibility to science.
The immediate practical advantages which were aimed at by the reorganizers of the Naval Air Service were attained. In place of the old scattered training stations a central training depot was set up at Cranwell in Lincolnshire, and a complete system for the instruction and graduation of pupils was instituted. A designs department was set up at Whitehall; the airship service was taken in hand and developed for anti-submarine patrol work. What may be called the most important unit of the Royal Naval Air Service was created by the amalgamation under Wing Commander Lambe of the squadrons which had their bases at Dunkirk and Dover. This unit, later in the war, became the famous Fifth Group, under the same command. The arrangements made at the time of change continued in force up to the time of the union of the military and naval air services, and progress was continuous. In January 1916 the Admiralty approved that the overseas establishment of the Royal Naval Air Service should have three wings, each wing to have two squadrons, and each squadron two flights, with six machines to a flight. One of these wings was based at Dunkirk; for the others two new aerodromes were established, in the spring of 1916, at Coudekerque and Petite Synthe, and were occupied, the first by No. 5 Wing, under Squadron Commander Spenser Grey, the other by No. 4 Wing, under Wing Commander C. L. Courtney, R.N. No. 5 Wing was specially trained for the work of long-distance bombing.
From the very beginning the Naval Air Service had set their heart on the fitting out of big bombing raids against distant German centres—Essen, or Berlin. It was a grief to them, when the war ended, that Berlin had suffered no damage from the air. The success of their early raids on Düsseldorf and Friedrichshafen naturally strengthened their desire to carry out more destructive raids over more important centres. In this way, they believed, they could best help the army. This idea inspired some of the documents drawn up by Mr. Winston Churchill while he was First Lord of the Admiralty. When in February 1916 Rear-Admiral Vaughan-Lee submitted to the Admiralty his scheme for the employment of the reorganized Royal Naval Air Service the same idea dominated his advices. 'I consider', his report concludes, 'that we should develop long-distance offensive work as much as possible.' The preference shown by the navy, in their orders from the makers, for powerful bomb-carrying machines tells the same story. When the navy set about carrying out this policy by the formation of a special force, called No. 3 Wing, at Luxeuil, for the express purpose of making long-distance raids over German munition centres, the army, which was preparing its great effort on the Somme front, and which needed more and yet more machines for the immediate purposes of the campaign, protested against the use of British aircraft for what seemed to them a luxury in comparison with their own dire needs. So the Luxeuil Wing was, for the time, broken up; but the idea took shape again later when the Independent Force came into being.
The sound doctrine on this matter is laid down in General Trenchard's reports, which shall be given hereafter. Yet it may be admitted, without prejudice to that doctrine, that if bombing raids had been possible over Essen and Berlin their effect would have been very great. The Germans spent not a little effort on their raids over London, and hoped for the weakening or shattering of the British war temper as a consequence of those raids. Their belief in frightfulness was a belief in fright. They judged others by themselves. No people on earth, it may readily be admitted, can maintain the efficiency of its war activities under the regular intensive bombing of its centres of population; but the Germans, during the greater part of the war, knew nothing of this fierce trial, and their trust in their army would have been terribly weakened if that army had proved to be no sure shield for the quiet and security of civil life.
Such differences as arose between the British naval and military authorities concerning the use of aircraft in the war were, for the reasons that have been given, not easily avoidable. They were ultimately composed by the union of the military and naval air forces under a single control, and the emergence of a new air force.