It was estimated early in the war that the life of an airplane in active service seldom exceeded three weeks. In passing it may be mentioned that by some misapprehension on the part of the public, this estimate of the duration of a machine was thought to cover also the average life of the aviators in service. Happily this was far from true. The mortality among the machines was not altogether due to wounds sustained in combat, but largely to general wear and tear, rough usage, and constant service. The slightest sign of weakness in a machine led to its instant condemnation and destruction, for if it should develop in mid-air into a serious fault it might cost the life of the aviator and even a serious disaster to the army which he was serving. As the war went on the period of service of a machine became even briefer, for with the growing demand for faster and more quickly controllable machines everything was sacrificed to lightness and speed. The factor of safety which early in the war was six to eight was reduced to three and a half, and instances were known in all services of machines simply collapsing and going to pieces under their own weight without wound or shock.
About the extent to which the belligerent governments developed their air forces after the outbreak of war there was during the continuance of that conflict great reticence maintained by all of them. At the outset there was little employment of the flyers except on scouting reconnaissance work, or in directing artillery fire. The raids of Zeppelins upon England, of seaplanes on Kiel and Cuxhaven, of airplanes on Friedrichshaven, Essen, and Venice came later. It has been noted by military authorities that, while Germany was provided at first with the largest aviation force of all the belligerents, she either underestimated its value at the outset, or did not know how to employ it, for she blundered into and through Belgium using her traditional Uhlans for scouts, to the virtual exclusion of airmen. The effectiveness of the Belgian fight for delay is ascribed largely to the intelligent and effective use its strategists made of the few aircraft they possessed.
Wellington was wont to say that the thing he yearned for most in battle was to "see the other side of that hill."
Napoleon wrote:
Nothing is more contradictory, nothing more bewildering than the multitude of reports of spies, or of officers sent out to reconnoitre. Some locate army corps where they have seen only detachments; others see only detachments where they ought to have seen army corps.
© U. & U.
The Lafayette Escadrille—First Americans to Fly in France.
(Lufbery on left, Thaw on right.)
So the two great protagonists of the opening years of the nineteenth century deplored their military blindness. In the opening years of the twentieth it was healed. All that Wellington strove to see, all that the cavalry failed to find for Napoleon is to-day brought to headquarters by airmen, neatly set forth in maps, supported by photographs of the enemy's positions taken from the sky.