Aircraft and Submarines Part 10

This was not done of course without considerable savage fighting in mid-air. The Germans had no idea of allowing their defences and the works of their submarine bases to be pictured for the guidance of their foes. Their anti-aircraft guns barked from dawn to dark whenever a British plane was seen within range. Their own aerial fighters were continually busy, and along that desolate wave-washed coast many a lost lad in leather clothing and goggles, crumpled up in the ruins of his machine after a fall of thousands of feet, lay as a memorial to the prowess of the defenders of the coast and the audacity of those who sought to invade it. But during the long weeks of this extended reconnaissance hardly a spadeful of dirt could be moved, a square yard of concrete placed in position, or a submarine or torpedo boat manoeuvred without its record being entered upon the detailed charts the British were so painstakingly preparing against the day of a.s.sault. When peace shall finally permit the publication of the records of the war, now held secret for military reasons, such maps as those prepared by the British air service on the Belgian coast will prove most convincing evidence of the military value of the aerial scouts.

What the lads engaged in making these records had to brave in the way of physical danger is strikingly shown by the description of a combat included in one of the coldly matter-of-fact official reports. The battle was fought at about twelve thousand feet above mother earth. We quote the official description accompanied by some explanatory comments added by one who was an eye-witness and who conversed with the triumphant young airman on his return to the safety of the soil.

"While exposing six plates," says the official report of this youthful recording angel, "I observed five H. A.'s cruising."

"H. A." stands for "hostile aeroplane."

"Not having seen the escort since returning inland, the pilot prepared to return. The enemy separated, one taking up a position above the tail and one ahead. The other three glided toward us on the port side, firing as they came. The two diving machines fired over 100 rounds, hitting the pilot in the shoulder."

As a matter of fact, the bullet entered his shoulder from above, behind, breaking his left collarbone, and emerged just above his heart, tearing a jagged rent down his breast. Both his feet, furthermore, were pierced by bullets; but the observer is not concerned with petty detail.

The observer held his fire until H. A., diving on tail, was within five yards.

Here it might be mentioned that the machines were hurtling through s.p.a.ce at a speed in the region of one hundred miles an hour.

The pilot of H. A., having swooped to within speaking distance, pushed up his goggles, and laughed triumphantly as he took sight for the shot that was to end the fight. But the observer, had his own idea how the fight should end.

"I then shot one tray into the enemy pilot's face," he says, with curt relish, "and watched him sideslip and go spinning earthward in a train of smoke."

He then turned his attention to his own pilot. The British machine was barely under control, but as the observer rose in his seat to investigate the foremost gun was fired, and the aggressor ahead went out of control and dived nose first in helpless spirals.

Suspecting that his mate was badly wounded in spite of this achievement, the observer swung one leg over the side of the fusillage and climbed on to the wing--figure for a minute the air pressure on his body during this gymnastic feat--until he was beside the pilot, faint and drenched with blood, who had nevertheless got his machine back into complete control.

"Get back, you a.s.s!" he said through white lips in response to inquiries how he felt. So the a.s.s got back the way he came, and looked around for the remainder of the H. A.'s. These, however, appeared to have lost stomach for further fighting and fled.

The riddled machine returned home at one hundred knots while the observer, having nothing better to do, continued to take photographs.

"The pilot, though wounded, made a perfect landing"--thus the report concludes.

When the time came for the a.s.sault upon Zeebrugge the value of these painstaking preparations was made evident. The attack was made from sea and air alike. Out in the North Sea the great British battleships steamed in as near the coast as the shallowness of the water would permit. From the forward deck of each rose grandly a seaplane until the air was darkened by their wings, and they looked like a monstrous flock of the gulls which pa.s.sengers on ocean-going liners watch wheeling and soaring around the ship as it ploughs its way through the ocean. These gulls though were birds of prey. They were planes of the larger type, biplanes or triplanes carrying two men, usually equipped with two motors and heavily laden with high explosive bombs. As they made their way toward the land they were accompanied by a fleet of light draft monitors especially built for this service, each mounting two heavy guns and able to manoeuvre in shallow water. With them advanced a swarm of swift, low-lying, dark-painted destroyers ready to watch out for enemy torpedo boats or submarines. They mounted anti-aircraft guns too and were prepared to defend the monitors against a.s.saults from the heavens above as well as from the sinister attack of the underwater boats. Up from the land base at Nieuport came a great fleet of airplanes to co-operate with their naval brethren. Soon upon the German works, sheltering squadrons of the sinister undersea boats, there rained a h.e.l.l of exploding projectiles from sea and sky. Every gunner had absolute knowledge of the precise position and range of the target to which he was a.s.signed. The great guns of the monitors roared steadily and their twelve and fourteen-inch projectiles rent in pieces the bomb proofs of the Germans, driving the Boches to cover and reducing their works to mere heaps of battered concrete. Back and forth above flew seaplanes and airplanes, giving battle to the aircraft which the Germans sent up in the forlorn hope of heading off that attack and dropping their bombs on points carefully mapped long in advance. It is true that the aim of the aviators was necessarily inaccurate. That is the chief weakness of a bombardment from the sky. But what was lacking in individual accuracy was made up by the numbers of the bombing craft. One might miss a lock or a shelter, but twenty concentrating their fire on the same target could not all fail. This has become the accepted principle of aerial offensive warfare. The inaccuracy of the individual must be corrected by the multiplication of the number of the a.s.sailants.

The attack on Zeebrugge was wholly successful. Though the Germans a.s.siduously strove to conceal the damage done, the later observations of the ruined port by British airmen left no doubt that as a submarine base it had been put out of commission for months to come. The success of the attack led to serious discussion, in which a determination has not yet been reached, of the feasibility of a similar a.s.sault upon Heligoland, Kiel, or Cuxhaven, the three great naval bases in which the German fleet has lurked in avoidance of battle with the British fleet. Many able naval strategists declared that it was time for the British to abandon the policy of a mere blockade and carry out the somewhat rash promise made by Winston Churchill when First Lord of the Admiralty, to "dig the rats out of their holes." Such an attack it was urged should be made mainly from the air, as the land batteries and sunken mines made the waters adjacent to these harbours almost impa.s.sable to attacking ships.

Rear-Admiral Fiske, of the United States Navy, strongly urging such an attack, wrote in an open letter:

The German Naval General Staff realizes the value of concentration of power and mobility in as large units as possible. The torpedo plane embodies a greater concentration of power and mobility than does any other mechanism. For its cost, the torpedo plane is the most powerful and mobile weapon which exists at the present day.

An attack by allied torpedo planes, armed with guns to defend themselves from fighting airplanes, would be a powerful menace to the German fleet and, if made in sufficient numbers, would give the Allies such unrestricted command of the North Sea, even of the shallow parts near the German coast, that German submarines would be prevented from coming from a German port, the submarine menace abolished, and all chance of German success wiped out.

I beg also to point out that an inspection of the map of Europe shows that in the air raids over land the strategical advantage lies with Germany, because her most important towns, like Berlin, are farther inland than the most important towns of the Allies, like London, so that aeroplanes of the Allies, in order to reach Berlin, would have to fly over greater distances, while exposed to the fire of other aeroplanes, than do aeroplanes of the Germans in going to London for raids on naval vessels.

However, the strategical advantage over water lies with the British, because their control of the deep parts of the North Sea enables them to establish a temporary aeronautical base of mother ships sufficiently close to the German fleet to enable the British to launch a torpedo-plane attack from it on the German fleets in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, while the Germans could not possibly establish an aeronautical base sufficiently close to the British fleet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Press Ill.u.s.trating Service.

_Downed in the Enemy's Country._]

This gives the Allies the greatest advantage of the offensive. It would seem possible, provided a distinct effort is made, for the Allies to send a large number of aeroplane mother ships to a point, say, fifty miles west of Heligoland, and for a large force of fighting aeroplanes and torpedo planes to start from this place about two hours before dawn, reach Kiel Bay and Wilhelmshaven about dawn, attack the German fleets there and sink the German ships.

The distance from Heligoland to Kiel is about ninety land miles, and to Wilhelmshaven about forty-five.

The torpedo planes referred to are an invention of Admiral Fiske's which, in accordance with what seems to be a fixed and fatal precedent in the United States, has been ignored by our own authorities but eagerly adopted by the naval services of practically all the belligerents. One weakness of the aerial attack upon ships of war is that the bombs dropped from the air, even if they strike the target, strike upon the protective deck which in most warships above the gunboat cla.s.s is strong enough to resist, or at least to minimize, the effect of any bomb capable of being carried by an airplane. The real vulnerable part of a ship of war is the thin skin of its hull below water and below the armor belt. This is the point at which the torpedo strikes. Admiral Fiske's device permits an airplane to carry two torpedoes of the regular Whitehead cla.s.s and to launch them with such an impetus and at such an angle that they will take the water and continue their course thereunder exactly as though launched from a naval torpedo tube. His idea was adopted both by Great Britain and Germany. British torpedo planes thus equipped sank four Turkish ships in the Sea of Marmora, a field of action which no British ship could have reached after the disastrous failure to force the Dardanelles. The Germans by employment of the same device sank at least two Russian ships in the Baltic and one British vessel in the North Sea. The blindness of the United States naval authorities to the merits of this invention was a matter arousing at once curiosity and indignation among observers during the early days of our entrance upon the war.

CHAPTER VIII

INCIDENTS OF THE WAR IN THE AIR

In time, no doubt, volumes will be written on the work of the airmen in the Great War. Except the submarine, no such novel and effective device was introduced into the conduct of this colossal struggle as the scouting airplane. The development of the service was steady from the first day when the Belgian flyers proved their worth at Liege. From mere observation trips there sprang up the air duels, from the duels developed skirmishes, and from these in time pitched battles in which several hundred machines would be engaged on each side. To this extent of development aerial tactics had proceeded by midsummer of 1917. Their further development must be left to some future chronicler to record. It must be noted, however, that at that early day the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, pleading for a larger measure of preparation for the perils of war, a.s.serted that the time was not far distant when this country would have to prepare to repel invading fleets of aircraft from European sh.o.r.es. This may have been an exaggeration. At that moment no aircraft had crossed the Atlantic and no effort to make the pa.s.sage had been made save those of Wellman and Vanniman. When the guns began to roar on the Belgian frontier there was floating on Keuka Lake, New York, a huge hydro-airplane with which it was planned to make the trans-Atlantic voyage. The project had been financed by Mr.

Rodman Wanamaker, of Philadelphia, and the tests of the ship under the supervision of a young British army officer who was to make the voyage were progressing most promisingly. But the event that plunged the world into war put a sudden end to experiments like this for the commercial development of the airplane. There is every reason to believe, however, that such a flight is practicable and that it will ultimately be made not long after the world shall have returned to peace and sanity.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photo by Kadel & Herbert.

_Later Type of French Scout._

_The gun mounted on the upper wing is aimed by pointing the machine and is fired by the pilot._]

Airmen are not, as a rule, of a romantic or a literary temperament.

Pursuing what seems to the onlooker to be the most adventurous and exhilarating of all forms of military service, they have been chary of telling their experiences and singularly set upon treating them as all in the day's work and eliminating all that is picturesque from their narratives. Sergeant James R. McConnell, one of the Americans in the French flying corps, afterwards killed, tells of a day's service in his most readable book, _Flying for France_, in a way that gives some idea of the daily routine of an operator of an _avion de cha.s.se_. He is starting just as the sky at dawn is showing a faint pink toward the eastern horizon, for the aviator's work is best done in early morning when, as a rule, the sky is clear and the wind light:

[Ill.u.s.tration: U. & U.

_Position of Gunner in Early French Machines._]

Drawing forward out of line, you put on full power, race across the gra.s.s, and take the air. The ground drops as the hood slants up before you and you seem to be going more and more slowly as you rise. At a great height you hardly realize you are moving.

You glance at the clock to note the time of your departure, and at the oil gauge to see its throb. The altimeter registers 650 feet. You turn and look back at the field below and see others leaving.

In three minutes you are at about four thousand feet. You have been making wide circles over the field and watching the other machines. At forty-five hundred feet you throttle down and wait on that level for your companions to catch up. Soon the escadrille is bunched and off for the lines. You begin climbing again, gulping to clear your ears in the changing pressure.

Surveying the other machines, you recognize the pilot of each by the marks on its side--or by the way he flies.

The country below has changed into a flat surface of varicoloured figures. Woods are irregular blocks of dark green, like daubs of ink spilled on a table; fields are geometrical designs of different shades of green and brown, forming in composite an ultra-cubist painting; roads are thin white lines, each with its distinctive windings and crossings--from which you determine your location. The higher you are the easier it is to read.

In about ten minutes you see the Meuse sparkling in the morning light, and on either side the long line of sausage-shaped observation balloons far below you. Red-roofed Verdun springs into view just beyond. There are spots in it where no red shows and you know what has happened there. In the green pasture land bordering the town, round flecks of brown indicate the sh.e.l.l holes. You cross the Meuse.

Immediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown band. From the Woevre plain it runs westward to the "S" bend in the Meuse, and on the left bank of that famous stream continues on into the Argonne Forest. Peaceful fields and farms and villages adorned that landscape a few months ago--when there was no Battle of Verdun. Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature. It seems to belong to another world.

Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages nothing remains but grey smears where stone walls have tumbled together. The great forts of Douaumont and Vaux are outlined faintly, like the tracings of a finger in wet sand. One cannot distinguish any one sh.e.l.l crater, as one can on the pockmarked fields on either side. On the brown band the indentations are so closely interlocked that they blend into a confused ma.s.s of troubled earth. Of the trenches only broken, half-obliterated links are visible.

Columns of muddy smoke spurt up continually as high explosives tear deeper into this ulcered area. During heavy bombardment and attacks I have seen sh.e.l.ls falling like rain. The countless towers of smoke remind one of Gustave Dore's picture of the fiery tombs of the arch-heretics in Dante's "h.e.l.l." A smoky pall covers the sector under fire, rising so high that at a height of one thousand feet one is enveloped in its mist-like fumes. Now and then monster projectiles hurtling through the air close by leave one's plane rocking violently in their wake. Airplanes have been cut in two by them.

For us the battle pa.s.ses in silence, the noise of one's motor deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting sh.e.l.ls, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and havoc, the Verdun conflict viewed from the sky.

Far below us, the observation and range-finding planes circle over the trenches like gliding gulls. At a feeble alt.i.tude they follow the attacking infantrymen and flash back wireless reports of the engagement. Only through them can communication be maintained when, under the barrier fire, wires from the front lines are cut. Sometimes it falls to our lot to guard these machines from Germans eager to swoop down on their backs. Sailing about high above a busy flock of them makes one feel like an old mother hen protecting her chicks.

The pilot of an _avion de cha.s.se_ must not concern himself with the ground, which to him is useful only for learning his whereabouts. The earth is all-important to the men in the observation, artillery-regulating, and bombardment machines, but the fighting aviator has an entirely different sphere. His domain is the blue heavens, the glistening rolls of clouds below the fleecy banks towering above the vague aerial horizon, and he must watch it as carefully as a navigator watches the storm-tossed sea.

On days when the clouds form almost a solid flooring, one feels very much at sea, and wonders if one is in the navy instead of aviation. The diminutive Nieuports skirt the white expanse like torpedo boats in an arctic sea, and sometimes, far across the cloud-waves, one sights an enemy escadrille, moving as a fleet.