Aircraft and Submarines / The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day Uses of War's Newest Weapons

by Willis J. Abbot

The French pinned their faith mainly to the Farman, the Caudron, the Voisin, and the Moraine-Saulnier machines. The Bleriot and the Nieuport, which were for some reason ruled out at the beginning of the war, were afterwards re-adopted and employed in great numbers.

It would be gratifying to an American author to be able to describe, or at least to mention, the favourite machine of the American aviators who flocked to France immediately upon the declaration of war, but the mortifying fact is that having no airplanes of our own, our gallant volunteer soldiers of the air had to be equipped throughout by the French with machines of their favourite types. After we entered the war we adopted a 'plane of American design to which was given the name "Liberty plane."

It may be worth while to revert for a moment to the distinction drawn in a preceding paragraph between the pusher propeller and the tractor which revolved in front of the aviator and of his machine gun. It would seem almost incredible that two heavy blades of hard wood revolving at a speed not less that twelve hundred times a minute, a speed so rapid that their passage in front of the eyes of the aviator interfered in no way with his vision, should not have blocked a stream of bullets falling from a gun at the rate of more than six hundred a minute. Nevertheless it was claimed during the earlier days of the war that these bullets were not appreciably diverted by the whirling propellers nor were the latter apparently injured by the missiles. The latter assertion, however, must have been to some extent disproved because it came about that the propellers of the later machines were rimmed with a thin coating of steel lest the blades be cut by the bullets. But the amazing ability of modern science to cope with what seemed to be an insoluble problem was demonstrated by the invention of a device light and compact enough to be carried in an airplane, which applied to the machine gun and timed in accordance with the revolutions of the propeller so synchronized the shots with those revolutions that the stream of lead passed between the whirling blades never once striking. The machine was entirely automatic, requiring no attention on the part of the operator after the gun was once started on its discharge. This device was originally used by the Germans who applied it to their Fokker machines. It was claimed for it that by doing away with the wastage caused by the diversion of the course of bullets, which struck the revolving propellers, it actually saved for effective use about thirty per cent. of the ammunition employed. As the amount of ammunition which can be carried by an airplane is rigidly limited this gave to the appliance a positive value.

The Terror that Flieth by Night.
Painting by William J. Wilson.

Reference has been made to the extraordinary immunity of flying airplanes to the attacks of anti-aircraft guns. The number of wounds they could sustain without being brought to earth was amazing. Grahame-White tells of a comparison made in one of the airdromes of the wounds sustained by the machines after a day's hard scouting and fighting. One was found to have been hit no less than thirty-seven times. Curiously enough the man who navigated it escaped unscathed. Wounds in the wings are harmless. But the puncture of the fuel tank almost certainly means an explosion and the death of the aviator in the flame thousands of feet in the air. During an air battle before Arras, a British aviator encountered this fate. When his tank was struck and the fusillage, or body, of his machine burst into flames, he knew that he was lost. By no possibility could he reach the ground before he should be burned to death. A neighbouring aviator flying not far from him told the story afterwards:

Jack was not in the thick of this fight [said he]. He was rather on the outskirts striving to get in when I suddenly saw his whole machine enveloped in a sheet of flame. Instantly he turned towards the nearest German and made at him with the obvious intention of running him down and carrying him to earth in the same cloud of fire. The man thus threatened, twisted and turned in a vain effort to escape the red terror bearing down upon him. But suffering acutely as he must have been, Jack followed his every move until the two machines crashed, and whirling over and over each other like two birds in an aërial combat fell to earth and to destruction. They landed inside the German lines so we heard no more about them. But we could see the smoke from the burning débris for some time.

As the range of anti-aircraft guns increased the flyers were driven higher and higher into the air to escape their missiles. At one time 4500 feet was looked upon as a reasonably safe height, but when the war had been under way about two years the weapons designed to combat aircraft were so improved that they could send their shots effectively 10,000 feet into the air. If the aircraft had been forced to operate at that height their usefulness would have been largely destroyed, for it is obvious that for observation purposes the atmospheric haze at such a height would obscure the view and make accurate mapping of the enemy's position impossible. For offensive purposes too the airplanes at so great an elevation would be heavily handicapped, if not indeed rendered impotent. As we shall see later, dropping a bomb from a swiftly moving airplane upon a target is no easy task. It never falls direct but partakes of the motion of the plane. It is estimated that for every thousand feet of elevation a bomb will advance four hundred feet in the direction that the aircraft is moving, provided its speed is not in excess of sixty miles an hour. As a result marksmanship at a height of more than five thousand feet is practically impossible.

In the main this situation is met, as all situations in war in which efficiency can only be attained at the expense of great personal danger are met, namely, by braving the danger. When the aviators have an attack in contemplation they fly low and snap their fingers at the puff balls of death as the shrapnel from their appearance when bursting may well be called. Naturally, efforts were made early in the war to lessen the danger by armouring the body of the machine sufficiently to protect the aviator and his engine—for if the aviator escaped a shot which found the engine, his plight would be almost as bad as if the missile had struck him.