Our Mastery of the Air.
The story of the British air service in the days before the War is so characteristically English that I must give a few lines to it if only to make quite clear the realisation of what we have done to meet the new dangers which, as usual, caught us unprepared.
We exhibited as a nation a most regrettable reluctance to comprehend the value of the aeroplane and the airship as a means of making war.
We failed utterly to grasp the fact that with the coming of the aeroplane a new factor had entered into military science, just as, in the early days of the submarine, we neglected the new invention until we had lagged behind other nations to an extent that, under different circumstances, might well have proved disastrous. We made a few feeble and futile efforts in aeroplane construction; we dallied tentatively with airships of a microscopic pattern. The flying wing of the Army was half starved, and the advice and remonstrances of the men who had really studied and understood the subject were cold-shouldered by the authorities to whom everything new and revolutionary was—and too often is—anathema.
I have studied the progress of aviation from the time when I acted as a judge at the first Aviation Meeting held in this country—on Doncaster racecourse. It may perhaps be remembered that in the early days of flying, when the Daily Mail offered a prize of 10,000 pounds for the first flight from London to Manchester, a misguided evening journal derisively offered a prize of a million pounds for the first man who flew, I think, ten miles.
No doubt the sneer was inspired partly by professional jealousy of the Daily Mail, but it revealed, in very striking fashion, the mental attitude, shared unfortunately by our military authorities, of those who refused to see in the new arm anything more than a very complicated, useless, and dangerous toy.
Time has slipped along since Sommer, Le Blon, and Cody flew at Doncaster; the pioneers of aviation persisted in their efforts, and within three years of the Daily Mail’s offer being made the prize had been won. Tremendous progress was made in every department of flying, and the keener students of military affairs realised that in the aeroplane there had arrived a weapon, both of offence and defence, which would go far to revolutionise warfare as it had been understood in the past.
None the less, our Army lagged far behind the rest of the world. Either the War authorities were not sufficiently insistent, or the Treasury turned a deaf ear to their appeals for money for the development of the new science.
The result was that while our French friends and our German enemies—for they were our enemies even then, as we have now good reason to know—were pushing ahead with aerial investigation and securing a lead which might well have been fatal to us, the British air service languished in comparative neglect. It is certainly hardly too much to say that but for the assistance given by the Daily Mail flying in England would have been utterly and totally neglected. The result was what might have been expected, and the outcome was characteristically British.
When the War broke out we were in a condition of decided inferiority to the French fliers—that perhaps mattered little, as we were fighting on the same side—and very much behindhand in relation to Germany, which mattered a great deal. We had to make up in quality—and of the quality of our airmen there was happily no question—what we lacked in equipment. We were entirely without airships comparable in any way to the Zeppelins, and we had nothing like the number of the German “Tauben.” Most happily for us the quality of our airmen proved far beyond anything which Germany possesses, and in the matter of men we took at once, and have since held, a commanding lead.